#119 - Mark Sisson - He Built A $200M Company By Reinventing Himself Again And Again

Mark Sisson spent a lifetime reinventing himself—from elite endurance athlete to entrepreneur, failed TV host, bestselling author, and founder of Primal Kitchen. This conversation explores identity, resilience, business failures, and why the people who create extraordinary lives are often the ones most willing to let go of who they used to be.

Timestamps: 
00:00 Having A Malleable Identity
03:09 What Mark's Father Taught Him About Work
06:27 Going From Running To Triathlons
11:56 How The Wildflower Triathlon Set Mark Free
13:49 How Running Prepared Mark For Business
16:58 Commitment Doesn't Always Lead To Results
23:18 A Setback Becomes A Stepping Stone
25:24 The Birth Of Primal Kitchen
33:17 The Dietary Changes That Transformed Mark's Life
37:32 How To Discover What Your Body Needs
40:23 The Power Of Minimum Effective Dose
49:05 The Identity Crisis Of Retirement
51:36 Reimagining Foot Health With Peluva
55:25 Using The Past To Inform The Present & Future
59:49 Learn More About Mark Sisson

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Transcript

Mark Sisson spent a lifetime reinventing himself—from elite endurance athlete to entrepreneur, failed TV host, bestselling author, and founder of Primal Kitchen. This conversation explores identity, resilience, business failures, and why the people who create extraordinary lives are often the ones most willing to let go of who they used to be.

Speaker-1

Mark Sisson, welcome to the show.

speaker-0 (02:55.96)

Thanks for having me, Tim.

speaker-1 (02:57.132)

A word that I've heard you use a lot to describe your journey through life is pivot, but I don't think that gets to the core of it. The word that comes to mind for me is malleable because I think to make pivots in life and change your direction, you h need to have a malleable sense of identity and you can't get attached to who you think you should be or what the world wants you to be. Yeah. Where does that sense of security come from?

speaker-0 (03:19.064)

Wow, that's a really interesting question because malleable is not a word that I've that I've used in describing my journey. But I have referred to myself as chameleon-like at times. So I guess there's a little bit of ability to adapt to the situation that's built into that. yeah, I mean I I grew up in a small fishing village in Maine in in the where winters are harsh and summers are the you know, the only time you can really make a living and

I was an entrepreneur from the age of twelve. I was mowing lawns forty hours a week as a twelve year old in the summer and then shoveling snow in the winter. And so I've always been able to kind of go with the flow and look for opportunities and adjust and adapt to those opportunities. And and then the malleable part, I guess, comes in where I've had

a lot of business failures. I mean, you know, I've had some successes, but I've had some business failures. And I think malleable just means, you know, resilient and being able to also withstand the pummeling of the universe and get back up and go, okay, that wasn't really a failure. That was a learning experience, you know, an opportunity, a teaching moment, as they say. So I guess I guess it's to a certain extent it's it's

It's part of my DNA, on the other hand. you know, where I grew up was was as I say, I was a small town, it was harsh, I was, you know, bullied in school, I was you know, all of the stories you you hear about adversity in the fifties, growing up in the fifties and sixties.

It was there and I y you know, you just you have to adapt or die. It's really got me toward my whole life philosophy about you know, evolution and natural selection and survival of the fittest.

speaker-1 (05:07.712)

It does feel like it was deeply ingrained with you from your childhood, like you were saying there with your last name, getting bullied for that. But also you being in college and not being known as Mark but Arnold because of a fictional pig from a TV show. But then also like in a paradoxical nature of like, okay, bullied, you're known for a pig. But then also being an elite athlete and with a paradoxical nature with there as well, like needing to be a blue-collar guy as a painter to

pursue that path as an elite athlete. Yeah. And I wanna dive deeper into the painting aspect a little in a different way. Like your dad, Lonnie, was also a painter. You painted houses, but he was a fine arts painter. I find that really fascinating. I believe his studio was like on the back of your house, correct? So like when you're growing up and like you can see your dad work like within the arts, like how do you think your dad and the way that he went about his craft informed the way that you've gone about your work?

speaker-0 (05:50.094)

Correct.

speaker-0 (05:54.882)

Yes, yes.

speaker-0 (06:07.222)

He was very disciplined, so he painted every single day. His story is that he learned how to paint when he was six years old, when he was quarantined with the measles. And they gave him a paint set just to sort of keep him, you know, keep him occupied while he was alone in a room. And he started painting. He sold his first painting when he was sixteen.

he was a a very well-known artist by the time he was in his early twenties. He was at the time the youngest inductee into inductee into the American Watercolor Society. But I watched I watched him go to work every single day. He didn't take a day off. He went to work every day, and he went to work with this notion that he's he has not yet painted the one. Like it's still there to be drawn out. And

Until his last breath in his mid eighties, he painted every single day and he loved it. And you know, it was people must would said, well, you know, y like you must be passionate about painting. He said, No, I'm not passionate, I'm obsessed. So from that mindset of a guy going to work every day, in the house, by the way, working out of the back of the house, which is what I did. My I like I never had an office in all of my years as an entrepreneur. I I always worked out of the house.

and he was he was a tinkerer as well. So as when I was growing up and before he got well known for his art, he would do arts and crafts and sell

jewelry that he made in his in his studio. And he was a painter, but he would make jewelry, find, you know, silver jewelry and my mother would sew neckties and they would have a gift shop and a gallery and they'd sell stuff in the middle of the summer to tourists who were coming into town. So they were they were malleable in this. He was he was you know intent on being a well known artist, but had to feed, you know, a a wife and four kids at the time. So he was malleable in that regard. And, you know, I I think I just picked up on that as well.

speaker-1 (08:07.938)

Yeah, I think the through line, obviously there for your dad, but for you as well. Like the mindset of seeing work as creation. Yeah. And that seems like that's been through all your entrepreneurial endeavors, like that is the mindset. And I actually I had read an interview of your dad and fascinating quote. He says, When he is asked to describe his style, he hesitates. I just try to come up with a great painting, he said. I don't know what the hell it is. I don't intentionally paint in any style. I just paint my way. And that last line.

I just paint my way. I find that so fascinating because in one regard, you can understand as like, okay, my way, like the authentic way, being valuable, it's always changing. But then also like in your sense, like my way is like, okay, like being a trailblazer, like the way of being like the journey. And so like the path or you know, the part of the the way that I want to go to next, an elite athlete, you're an elite runner, and then you shift over to triathlons.

speaker-0 (08:59.682)

Your

speaker-1 (09:05.964)

And go into that malleability, like how did that reconfigure that your your identity?

speaker-0 (09:11.534)

well, my identity was formed as an endurance athlete, generic endurance athlete, in my teens and I was a runner for a while and then I got injured from all the training and and s some of the there were some dietary implications there as well, which which factored in.

And I qualified for the US Olympic Trials in 1980 and I couldn't go to the trials because I was s so badly injured I couldn't I c I couldn't train enough to even toe the line. So I just as an endurance athlete and as as that was my identity, it's it's kinda harsh to just be twenty-six, twenty-seven years old and have that be the end of your career.

A friend of mine who'd been I'd seen him out on the roads. He was a big wave surfer and a marathon runner. Not not a great one, but he he competed a fair amount. I saw him one day and he's like, I'm training for this event in Hawaii. It's called The Iron Man. You should do it. And I'm my first inclination was you're crazy. It's I have no interest in doing that. but I started riding a bike with him as part of the training. And as an endurance athlete, you know, you get into

a a psychology, a psychosis almost, of needing to hurt a little bit every day, needing to put yourself in an uncomfortable position for an extended period of time on a daily basis. And it's almost, it's almost a sickness at that level, and it almost defines, you know, your self-worth. So when I started riding a bike, because I couldn't run much, I could run 10 or tw 20 miles a week, but I'd been running up to 120 miles a week prior to that.

Started riding a bike and started getting good at it. And then he then he just said, I've got a, you know, I'm I'm gonna go to this event. It's coming up in a couple of months. And I need a roommate to share a condo with that I rented there. You wanna come over? And I'm like, Jesus, okay. So I taught myself how to swim in a public pool, not well, but I taught myself how to survive a two point four mile ocean swim.

speaker-0 (11:18.734)

next thing you know, I'm I'm in Hawaii and I'm in this race, the Iron Man. So my first triathlon ever was Iron Man in Hawaii. It's the first triathlon I ever did. I spent a couple of years just kicking around, doing other short course events and although there weren't many short course events still in those days, it was still sort of a long distance experience. the next year I went over and I finished fourth, and I was very pleased with the outcome. I had

I'd become a very good cyclist, and I was still probably the best runner that had ever sort of crossed over from pure running into triathlon, although it was in early, early days of that sport. And I hold a record at Iron Man that'll never be broken, which is the slowest swim time for a top five finisher. So had I learned how to swim w well, I probably would have been, I'm I'm g I guarantee I would have been one of the best in the world.

But at that point, I was already the veteran of about 300 endurance events. If you talk about the mile, two mile in high school and college and tr and so winter track, cross country, road racing, all that stuff. I was I was over it. And in those days, there was no money to be made in these sports. and as you noted earlier, I had been supporting myself painting houses. I put myself through the last year of prep school at Exeter, and then four years of Williams College by painting houses. and I I was good at it.

It was a physical job that allowed me to to be in shape through my work. And then I was painting. And so you know, if you if you look at the I don't know what Freud would say about that, about my dad being a fine, fine painter of little little things and me being a painter of big houses, but it was a

satisfying enough job and I was still so tied up in my athletic pursuit that it seemed like the best choice to be able to paint houses, make a lot of money. And I made a lot of money. I made a hundred thousand dollars a year in in the late, you know, in the in the mid eighties, just with a seventy-two Chevy and a forty foot ladder strapped at the top of it. But I could I could paint a house in a week that would take another a team of of people

speaker-0 (13:32.652)

A week just to scaffold it, you and then to get going. So it was it was, you know, I was it was an endurance sport and I treated it as such. I I would look at every project like, you know, how what's the least amount of time that I can complete this in? It was always on the clock, which was again part of my obsession with performance.

speaker-1 (13:36.982)

It's an endurance sport.

speaker-0 (13:53.024)

so if you talk about my athletic performance and looking to find a way in which to drop my times down for running or my performance as a as a painter and being able to complete a house that I bid twenty five hundred dollars to to paint, which was a lot of money in those days. It's nothing in these days, and to be able to complete it in, say, four days or five days, that was like, I mean, it was like finding Easter eggs. It was incredible. So all of that kind of, you know.

translated into this mindset of wanting to do hard stuff.

speaker-1 (14:27.064)

Yeah. I mean, so many elite accomplishments, but I think the biggest physical accomplishment you have is actually doing the wildfire triathlon, just grand scheme of things throughout your life and how everything's unfolded. How did that triathlon show you that you could set yourself free from, like you were saying, that psychosis and obsession of being competitive within the endurance space?

speaker-0 (14:50.36)

Wow, you've done your homework. So I haven't talked about the wildflower for a long time. But the wildflower triathlon was by then I was already I'd I'd retired once. I'd coached for a bunch of years. I had

maintain my fitness level to the point that I could travel around the world with a team that I was coaching. And by then the the teams were professional. so we would we would race in different countries and then as a as a 36 year old, 37 year old coach at the time, I'd sometimes get in the race just for shits and giggles.

and I I went to the wildflower triathlon and I brought my by then I had a wife and kids, brought my family, and I got into this event and I got through the swim okay and about halfway under the bike I literally thought to myself, that what am I doing? Like this is this is the most inane pursuit for somebody who's looking to build onto a life that that I've already in many regards left behind. Like what am I doing hanging

in here at this age, making myself hurt in a race. So about halfway into the bike race, I just said, this is I think this is it. And I rode I rode into the transition area and then racked my bike and that was the end of my that was the last time I ever competed.

speaker-1 (16:11.726)

I'm a big believer that like one of the biggest accomplishments you can make within a given space is feeling like, okay, I don't need to accomplish any more and be completely okay with that. Shifting into business, how did running inform your shift into business where it felt like, okay, kind of a similar game, just a different arena now?

speaker-0 (16:30.466)

Yeah, I mean I try to look for these parallels on a you know it like the idea that that sports involves discipline. You know, and I come back to this the idea sometimes that when people used to tell tell me how much they admired my discipline for being a runner,

particularly when I was not painting houses anymore, but I was just training and coaching and and doing what I was doing. I like had to I had to laugh. I'm like, dude, the discipline is getting up and going to work every day. I'm out, I mean, while I'm you know, I'm I'm managing discomfort, I'm out on the road, I'm riding, you know, 80 miles or 100 miles, I'm running 10 or 15, I'm doing what I'm doing. But it's that doesn't take discipline. So

Now, how do you translate that into business? I've had a lot of ex-athlete, ex-Olympian friends who tried to go into business and just could not draw the line. They couldn't they couldn't make the connection between the discipline it took to get to the pool at five o'clock in the morning and train and and then go to school and then come home after school and get in the pool again and train again and you know doing two days and three days for their entire lives. And then

To the point where when they stepped out of the pool after they won their gold medal or their silver or whatever it was, never to get back in the pool again, you know, that sort of that tarnished that that ability that they had, you know, it's when it's all channeled into this one effort, which is in this case, like say, say swimming or or track and field.

And there's a method behind it, and there's a there's there's a true carrot at the end of the stick, which is a gold medal or first place or whatever, that's different in some regards from starting a business and then going, you know, what is the what is my definition of success? And if you don't have a definition of success in business, even if you have a business plan, if you don't have a definition of what success looks like in a year, two years, five years, and you just sort of, I'm just gonna start this business, I'm gonna cross my fingers, I'm gonna work hard, it it doesn't really

speaker-0 (18:31.946)

work that way, I think. So I it doesn't translate equally the discipline as an athlete, because again, I I would joke when people say, you know, you're so disciplined. I'm like, I'm training two hours a day and I'm taking naps in the afternoon and I'm doing all this other stuff. I'm going shopping and I'm so I'm not that disciplined really. I just know how to

how to withstand discomfort. I know to have hurt myself a little bit, dig a hole for myself a little bit, and and make that be, by the way, the main win of the day. You know, if you're an athlete and you have a good workout, the rest of the day is gravy. You don't need to do anything the rest of the day. not so much if you're you know raising a family or you've got a business that you're starting. There are small wins throughout the day, but it it doesn't translate the same way that a good hard solid working effort which tires you and makes you want to take a nap does.

speaker-1 (19:24.27)

No, but I what I find fascinating, I want to dive deeper a little into, you know, you talking about discipline and finding the parallels. What I feel like was definitely a big difference for you is like, okay, like when you're an athlete, you kind of have the evidence, like, okay, if I commit myself, there's gonna be some type of positive result, like a lot of elite accomplishments that you're talking about. When you step into business and you're like, okay, I'm you know, continue with that commitment with that discipline. There wasn't necessarily a direct correlation though with that external result.

that you were getting, especially early in your life. So how did you go about navigating that? Like, okay, like I have a lot of intangibles that I can take from sports, but it's not necessarily with the same result.

speaker-0 (20:06.284)

Yeah. I mean so so painting houses, which I did I wouldn't say too long, I did it for ten years. that's a tangible result. You stand back, you look at this, and you go, holy smokes, look what I did. I just this is this this was a piece of crap. You know, I scraped it, I sanded it, I primed it, I painted it, I chose the colors. It's beautiful, it looks like new. The owners are thrilled, everybody's happy. I'm I feel like I've accomplished something.

You start a business sometimes, and especially in the first year or two when you're trying to get your feet under your ground underneath you, and there there is no tangible evidence of of success. You know, you're just grinding it out and grinding it out, and and I mean it's changed the last five or ten years with with the internet, but in the early days, you know, I was selling supplements in the eighties, and the only way to do that was through print ads and magazines.

or radio. And then if you had enough money, you could do it on TV. But it was a tough, a tough go. So even if you did a print ad, you had to wait like two months for it to even appear. You couldn't just like test 20 different seven second videos on TikTok or Instagram and go, yeah, this one works, this one It was it's it's so it was a a lot of delayed gratification, if there was any gratification there at all. So that's that's the that's the learning how to be discomf uncomfortable. That's

I th that's probably one of my superpowers is is being willing to be uncomfortable and manage that discomfort. Now that works in s in endurance sports, it works in all sports, but it certainly works in endurance sports.

and it works it works in business. Like it doesn't work so well in relationships, for example, you know, to be willing to endure discomfort without addressing, you know, the issue. So there there are certain aspects to that mindset that apply to business. And and so in my case, I've had failures. Like I say, I've had some wouldn't say epic failures, but I mean in 2005 I spent the entire year

speaker-0 (22:03.682)

filming a TV show called Responsible Health. And I f I shot 52 half out half-hour episodes of this show. I built a set, I had a co-host, a female co-host, we had a guest on for every segment, doctors and trainers and physician you know, all all manner of people. it was a very well-shot show, and I bought time on the Travel Channel.

And I lost like a million and half dollars doing it. I was trying to be I was trying to be my own sponsor, so the ad breaks were my supplement products. But and you know, while I was doing it, I it it was stressful because I was sometimes ganging six shows, seven shows in a day. I had this studio that I rented that was at Golden West Studios in California, part of the Cal State school system.

And so it would you know, it was maybe seven or eight thousand dollars a day to rent the studio. So I do as many shows as I could and I had my own director come in. Anyway, so you know, I invested an entire year in doing this thing. And it was it was a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of s you know, a lot of intense emotional input and then it bombed. those are the moments where you go, Jesus, what do I do now? You know, how do I how do I recover from this? Because I took money that I could have used to start a

retirement fund, you know, or or you know, paid off a house or whatever, and that's gone now. And and again, I had this supplement company. But that's what that's what that was a genesis of Mark Staley Apple, which became my main driver of all my success thereafter. I was I knew I was great at creating content. I'd done it with this TV show.

and I knew that I had interesting things to s to say and ideas that I wanted to disseminate. and with this new thing called blogging on this new thing called the internet, you know, I felt like, you know, I'll I'll this'll be great. I'll create content, I'll I'll do it daily. I'll call it Mark's Daily Apple. And I'll I'll create content every day. And within a year I'll have 150,000 followers, that'll be great. You know, within a year I had like 2,000 a day visiting my site.

speaker-0 (24:16.208)

But within f you know, and and then the next year it doubled or tripled and but I think three or four years in, it was we had three million unique visitors a month. So it was it was behind Joe Mercola. It was the second largest health yeah, real hockey stick stuff. Yeah. and again, part of that was timing. Part of that was

speaker-1 (24:30.062)

So real hockey stick.

speaker-0 (24:37.278)

there were no other blogs like mine at the time. Now there's 80,000. but being first to the game had its amazing benefits for me. And then over the then and then within 10 years, that is what cost me because everyone else was coming up with bigger and better and you know shinier ideas. But that's fine. I moved on to to other stuff.

speaker-1 (25:02.55)

You needed that failure with the T V show to be able to get to Mark's Daily Apple because

speaker-0 (25:06.478)

So this is I you know, people when you talk about pivoting and you talk about malleability, everything looks perfect in the rear view mirror. Everything in in retrospect, my God, those dots connect so perfectly. At the time, you're like, Jesus, what do I do next? Like, like, like I'm I'm at a loss. I'm I'll but with the TV show being the failure that it was,

You it's it's tough to to regroup and then go, I'm gonna put the same amount of effort into this blog and see if I can do that. And then again, a year in, it's like two thousand visitors a day. It was it was tough. But at the same time I was doing I then I found an outlet. you know, there was a there was a T V show that I'd been doing that came back on the air and I would sell some supplements doing that. But

Writing the blog for a number of years and not selling supplements, all of a sudden the supplement business w it was incongruous. It didn't make sense. I was talking about eating real food and you know and living a life of sunshine for vitamin D and and play and and sleep habits and and and movement patterns. And then by the way, I have these real high potency multivitamin supplements that I'm selling over here. You wanna buy some?

So it it was it didn't quite jive, and and that's when I realized I'm writing so much about food and how to make real food taste good. Like every Friday we had a recipe, or every Saturday we had a recipe. Every Friday it was a success story from people who'd lost a lot of weight doing my program. but I was writing so much about food that and I j I just published the primal blueprint, my first book, and it was a

Big success. We sold a a lot, a lot of copies. one day it was the number one book on Amazon worldwide of all books on Amazon. And I self-published it. So it was a real wow, real achievement there. So I'd sold several hundred thousand copies of Mark's of of Primal Blueprint. And because I'm writing about food and and and all this other stuff, I'm I'm thinking, you know what? My next book will be it'll be called The Primal Blueprint: Healthy Sauces, Dressings, and Toppings. And it'll crush.

speaker-0 (27:25.986)

You know, and so I'd sold several hundred thousand copies of the Primal Blueprint. a year and a half later I published fifty thousand copies, because I was self-published, of this cookbook, Healthy Sausage Dressings and Toppings. I think as of today we sold eight thousand copies of it. It was a frickin' bomb. And again, the aha moment was yeah, people

They want to make their their their healthy food taste great because they want to eat sustainably, but they don't want to make their own. They don't want to make their own, so I will make it for them. And that was another dot that connects perfectly in reverse. It's like, okay, I'm going start making the kind of sauces that I was telling people how to make in the recipe with only pure ingredients and no, you know, artificial anything.

speaker-1 (27:57.688)

Just give it a min.

speaker-0 (28:18.732)

Turns out it was pretty difficult to do that, which is why no one had done it yet. But we launched Primal Kitchen with mayonnaise in March of 2015. And by the end of 2018, I had a an offer from Kraft Heinz to buy it for $220 million.

speaker-1 (28:41.742)

Incredible. I mean, what I find so fascinating, like you were talking about, it's was such a natural unfolding. Yeah. Because when it came to your supplement business, when it came to, you know, being an athlete, it was like, okay, this is what I'm setting out to do. But it started as, like you were saying, content. Like, let me just put content out there. How did like being a writer and almost like getting

real market insight from consumers and people all over the world like really help you in a way that you really hadn't tapped into before where you were focused on like product or service, but this was really education, content. And then after that, I was like, okay, there's a market that's needed here for a product.

speaker-0 (29:28.046)

So because Mark's Daily Apple, the blog, started out as a vehicle to try and sell supplements, as a afterthought from the failed TV experience. I I spent a lot of time educating and realized that that was what I was good at. So I was educating people on how to how to eat right, how to I'd created this template called the Primal Blueprint.

And out of that grew a forum that at one point had a hundred and sixty thousand registered users in the forum. So for a couple of years, that was the best feedback I could get was the was the participants in the in the forum, on the Mark Staley Apple Forum. It got out of hand after a while, and I like like forums tend to do if you don't have enough moderators and we literally had to shut it down because of the haters that came in. You know, the

Not to pick on any one group, but he vegan the vegan haters would come in and you know accuse everybody of of being on the path to getting a heart attack and it was just it was it was a shit show after a while. But but over the over the period of years from 2006 when I launched Mark's Daily Apple into 2014 when I really started to think about Primal Kitchen as a food company, there were eight years of just gathering evidence of people who who understood

Like one example I would use is that if I'd launched again, timing, if I'd launched Primal Kitchen five years earlier, probably would have failed. Because I spent so much time educating people just on seed oils and a b and and this concept that oils exist on a spectrum of like really good oils to really horrible oils. And and and there's all manner of oils in between. So they're it's not like they're all good on one side and they're all bad on the other. There's a spectrum of oils.

and and I spent a lot of time educating people on on just healthy fats, the concept of healthy fats. So if you were to were to look at the landscape of salad dressings in those days, there were still some non-fat salad dressings because people were afraid of fats. You know, I was when we launched Primal Kitchen, I'm bragging about all the fats in our product. They're there they're they're fats, and the more you put on your

speaker-0 (31:47.586)

your salad or the more you put on your the more mayonnaise you put on your sandwich, the healthier that's going to be for you. Because these are good fats and and and wholesome ingredients and whole eggs and organic everything. So, you know, it was a it was the eight years of education that I was drilling into people that created the market and the demand for the product that I served up. So when I finally served up a product, and I was very concerned because

One of the things we did with Primal Kitchen is I said, I want to be demonstrably the best product in every category that we're in. So I want anyone who picks up a label in the mayonnaise aisle to look at my label and go, This is demonstrably the best product in this aisle. Well, in order to do that, you have to make y you've got to pick the best ingredients. And most mayonnaise, you know, they use a combination of soybean oil or canola oil, you know, different

Different types of oils and fats that could be 30 cents a pound when avocado oil was $3.30 a pound. So 11 times as expensive, and 56% of the product is avocado oil. So when I when I I told my team we're gonna build these products as the best in the category. And once we build the product.

Let's like peel back the sticker and see how much it costs to make and then price the product accordingly. So when I introduced primal kitchen mayonnaise in March of 20 15, at 995 for a twelve ounce jar.

all of the pundits around me, all of the food you know, advisors and and counselors and mentors, whatever that I had in the food business, you're crazy. This is this is never gonna go. And, you know, we famously sold out our ten thousand or twelve thousand unit run in a couple of weeks because the demand was there and and we'd proven that, you know, if we if we built if you build it, they'll come. And and that's what we did. So for the rest of the history of Primal Kitchen, which continues

speaker-0 (33:55.506)

very handsomely right now, it is about making what is demonstrably the best product in that sh in that aisle.

speaker-1 (34:04.088)

So I mean strong foundation is built with trust and brand before a product comes out. When the product does come out, like you were saying there, is it pretty instantaneous where you were like, We got something here?

speaker-0 (34:15.534)

Yeah, it was it was it was immediate. because, you know, at the same time I had I'd been the first person to write a check to invest in Thrive Market. So Thrive Market was getting started in 2014, and by the time they launched their platform and I launched the mayonnaise, we had this agreement that I would let them be the exclusive online seller of of this new mayonnaise.

and then they would use my mayonnaise as a premium so you sign up for the membership and you get a free jar of this brand new mayonnaise that no one's have had access to. And we moved, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of jars of of just mayonnaise through that little conduit there, that sort of co-promotion collaboration.

speaker-1 (35:02.392)

Something that predates you starting Primal Kitchen, I think it was about fourteen years, when you were forty seven years old, and it goes to this malleability and creating like a new version of yourself and almost feels like a rebirth of who you are. Can you talk more about the experience of your dietary issues and the work that went into that to heal your body?

speaker-0 (35:24.408)

Yeah. So as a person always chasing performance, that involved not just training methods, but also dietary methods and supplementation, going back to when I was in my teens. but chasing performance in in terms of diet, in for the longest time meant carbo loading, meant taking in a lot of carbohydrates. If you're an endurance athlete, you're gonna I was taking a thousand grams of carbs a day. Because I was burning them off and I'm you're gonna have to eat tonight.

To replenish those carbs so that you can go do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day add infinitum. So I and and also in those days there was no real

a pi appreciation of you know good carbs and bad carbs so everything was sugar at all the furnace would burn anything. So pizza and beer and you know loaves of bread and all that stuff were sort of on the menu. and so I'd been I'd been I spent most of my life talking about performance and and cleaning my diet up, but still thinking that whole grains were healthy. And s and that was my big, the big ultimately big issue for me.

So as eas e even as I'm writing about a healthy diet, I'm including whole grains, because hey, the government says five to eleven s servings every day. They can't be wrong. but it over the years I've been reading and researching a lot about food, and more and more I kept thinking and writing and finding out about these anti-nutrients in grains. these these little tightly folded proteins.

like gluten that don't digest well in the human body because humans didn't adapt, evolve to to do that on a with e with ease. Some can, but more more can't. So I I looked at I was looking at all the research and my wife one day she goes

speaker-0 (37:21.602)

so now just to preface all this, going back to the age of fourteen, I had IBS my whole life. So I I and I couldn't figure out why I had it. I thought it was I was nervous and I was always under a lot of stress from the running or whatever, but I had I had pretty s severe IBS. I had GERD, you know, gastroesophageal reflux disease or disorder. I mean I I had bad skin. I had

arthritis in my forties. I was already pretty arthritic. I couldn't couldn't hold a golf club the way I wanted to. It was it was getting kinda out of hand. And so my wife said, you know, you're writing about grains and you're why don't you just give up grains for 30 days and see what happens? So I did and it just it changed everything. The IBS that I had that had run my life for the prior thirty years went away.

the arthritis cleared up, the GERD cleared up, skin cleared up, and I'm like, Jesus, if this is this is me who was almost defending my right to eat grains, even in the face of all the research I've been doing, because I'd been I've been eating them my entire life and I was I was assuming that they were healthy whole grains.

If I'm someone who defended my right and and then I had this amazing reaction to it, then imagine how many tens of millions of people would be also impacted positively by at least getting this information. So that was one of the things that started the whole Mark Staley Apple process was me discovering things about how my body works and how I could be strong and lean and fit and and happy and healthy and productive.

with y by using the the right inputs, by by following a paleolithic type not just diet but lifestyle. Which included s sleep and sun exposure and play and everything else.

speaker-1 (39:16.802)

What advice would you give to people who are like, okay, like I have some physical issues, maybe this is dietary related. Like how do you go about experimenting or that process of trying to find that out, you think?

speaker-0 (39:30.806)

Well, I mean Melissa Urban did a she created a program called Whole Thirty, which has been around f since, I don't know, tw 2011 or something like that, twenty twelve. And it's basically a an elimination diet. You just give up a lot of the things that are known to be problematic for the widest range of people, and you see what happens over the course of thirty days. And it's not an easy task because a lot of stuff you cannot eat. but

If you show signs of improvement, which most people do, now you know that there's something problematic about your diet, and that's the easiest way to address your physical ailments and your maladies is through diet. I mean, people take pills and they want the shots and they want all the other stuff, but at the bottom

speaker-1 (40:17.87)

It's

speaker-0 (40:19.128)

root of it. And and you know, that so that was that was the biggest message that I got for myself and that I wanted to impart to the world was that diet. Diet is eighty percent of your journey on achieving good health. Because if you get the diet dialed in, then your energy level increases, then your muscle your muscle mass will will increase if you do the work. your body composition will will

Kind of you'll ach achieve what I would call ideal body composition. It's all based on diet. When you and when you do that, then you feel like working out. So then you don't really have to work out. And you can't work you can't exercise away a bad diet. But you can with with a good diet, it doesn't take much exercise to be fit, to get to 80% of where you of your genetic potential.

I look at the biohacking world right now and I just I cringe because it's full of these injections and transfusions and infusions and chambers and headbands and headsets and you know. And it's all bullshit because if you haven't covered the basics, if you ha if you haven't gotten the diet dialed in, if you don't have the mo movement patterns dialed in, if you don't have your sleep handled.

if you don't have your stress under control, then no amount of methylene blue is gonna is gonna make you a better person or a or a more lively specimen. So that's a real issue I have with with the anti-aging movement in general and biohacking in specific. It's just it's just all comes back to the primal blueprint, which is just

Give your body the inputs that it's expecting of you based on this recipe that's taken two and a half million years or more, a hundred million years to to arrive at the iteration that it's at right now.

speaker-1 (42:07.362)

I think an important phrase to use as well when it comes to your relationship with food, is minimum effective dose. Yeah and basically understanding, okay, what's the least that I need to feel nourished and like that I'm thriving and also appreciating that, okay, more doesn't always mean better. How is minimum effective dose and that mindset with food almost like channeled out into the other avenues of your life?

speaker-0 (42:32.512)

Everything. Everything. So you know, I use that philosophy with with almost everything I do, starting in college where I was a pre-med student and and as an athlete I needed to sleep as I you know, as a twenty year old athlete I needed to sleep, you know, ten hours a night, nine hours a night. So there wasn't a lot of time to study. There definitely wasn't a lot of time to party.

And at some point I just said, look, if it's gonna take ten hours a night of studying to get an to get an A and two hours to get a B plus, I'm gonna go for the B plus. I'm I'm just gonna the minimum effective dose of g to get the highest possible grade without without the diminishing returns to the inputs.

I do that with exercise. What's the, you know, what's the least amount of today was a leg day. What's the least amount of work I have to do to get the full impact of a leg day? With the danger being that if you do too much on a leg day, it's gonna cost you more than not even working out. So there is there's more utility to minimum effective dose than just how can I slack off here? It's really there's a there's a

An amount of of input that is kind of ideal, beyond which at the very least there's decreasing returns, and at the very worst, it falls off and and there's a loss of returns. Now, work. I don't think I ever worked more than

60 hours in a week. And it and probably when I worked 60 hours in a week, it was probably painting houses because I was I was on a roll and I was making a shitload of money and it was physical and every it was a cha-ching. Every every new you know window that got painted, every new cha-ching, cha-ching. So that was maybe a 60-hour week once in a while. But for the most part, I you know, I was most of my business life I had a family and at least when I was starting new businesses.

speaker-0 (44:30.4)

And I did not want to forego the opportunity to hang out with my kids. So I worked I probably worked 40 hour weeks building the big businesses that I built, not 80, not 90, nothing to brag about. No, 40 hour weeks, where I took the weekends and I would go ref, you know, soccer or coach little league or teach my kids how to boogie board at Zuma Beach or go to the mountains and we'd learn how to snowboard. And those are the moments that

I mean if you're an entrepreneur, I I think so. And if you're an entrepreneur, you you know, if you take a step back and go, why am I doing this? Like why am I here? Why am I why like why do I want to build this business? Is it just to make a giant pile of money and and show that off? Or is it to feed my family, or is it to have the opportunity to travel around the world with my family, do things? Well, you know, there's that famous

speaker-1 (45:03.662)

Probably made you more successful. I

speaker-0 (45:26.634)

story, I'm gonna botch it right now, but about the guy, the businessman that comes down that goes down to Mexico and he sees the fisherman there and you know, and he asks him what do you do at the end of you know, you catch three fish, you go home, what do you do? Well I go home and I, you know, I have tequila, I play some music, I dance around a little bit and I and I make love to my wife. And the b businessman goes, Well you know, if you could if you if you bought a boat, two more boats and got hired some people and you caught seventy five fish a day, you could build a business and you could you know and then you could grow it and grow it and grow it and make a lot of money.

And then and then the the fisherman goes, Well, you know, okay if I had a lot of money I'd go home and I'd I'd have a glass of tequila, I'd smoke a cigar, I'd play some music and I'd made love with my wife. So

speaker-1 (46:06.862)

He's like you you could sell the business and then you wouldn't have to work anymore and you could do whatever you want. He's like, So what I'm doing right now.

speaker-0 (46:12.354)

Yeah, exactly. So it's a you know, i th I mean I think ha having a reason to get out of bed in the morning beyond just

making more money is also to grow a family and to or if you don't have a family, it doesn't matter if you have some friends that you want to hang out with, but l live your life. I mean I t so many young people who are entrepreneurs who listen in the early days, I don't know, Gary Vee or whoever it is is going young, yeah, I gotta grind, you gotta grind, you gotta grind. No. You don't have to grind. And you have to yeah, you have to do the work, you have to be smart about it. But live your life. Jesus, I mean I mean, this notion of putting off

good times today because you're grinding it and it somehow somebody out there's gonna appreciate that. Nobody's gonna appreciate that you ground it out today, except you nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. And and you better care because if you're giving up

speaker-1 (47:08.578)

I think it becomes a coping mechanism in a way. Where it's like, I can't do that. I can't do that. And it's like, well, okay, are you just you like truly like there definitely are people who truly, you know, wanna be like the grinder, but it's like are you are you using your

speaker-0 (47:21.378)

Well, it's like the people who who aren't very good at running, who run a ton of marathons every year. What's the point? You know, why are you doing that? Why are you beating yourself up, hurting yourself, you know, undergoing a a tremendous amount of voluntary discomfort. I call it discomfort, they call it pain, but it's just discomfort. in service of what? Like like because you feel good when it stops?

Because that's kind of what it is. It's like to me, it's like cold plunging. You like why do people cold plunge? I'm sorry. I'm I cold plunged for 15 years. I was one of the leaders of the movement. I gave up two years ago. I'm like, I'm I've done this, I'm over it. the brown fat activation thing, that doesn't never that never worked for me. I don't need to burn off any more fat that way. you know, the the anti-inflammatory benefits, no, I never really got it.

That and now they show that cold plunging reduces the effects of a workout if you do it right afterwards. So now you you do a hard workout where you bust your ass, and then you do something very hard getting in the cold water, and the net effect is nothing, is you don't get any results from the workout. So this it's what I call digging a hole to put the ladder in to wash the basement windows. It's like So anyway, where was I going with coal plunging? it's it's it's similar to that, which is the reason people do it.

And one of the reasons I did it was it's a hard thing to do. And so when you stop doing it, you get out, you at least feel like, okay, I did something hard today. And there's there is value to that about in in doing something hard every day. I do I do say that to a lot of people. Do something hard every day, whether it's workout or if it's a cold plunge for you, or if it's writing for thirty minutes because you hate writing. I hate writing. That's I that's my confession. I hate writing. I've written, you know, twelve books and you know

speaker-1 (49:03.48)

Yeah.

speaker-0 (49:04.098)

6,000 blog articles. I mean I have a team now, but my you know, like my my early blog posts were they were frickin' like I think pieces of work. And I've w while my team has done most of my blog writing over the years, and we again, five or six thousand articles, the top eight or the first ones I did years ago just were like well it was me going deep and and and uncovering like the first one I ever wrote was called

A case against chronic cardio. And it was and it was 2005. I wrote it actually for somebody else that wrote it for Art Devaney, who was my mentor at the time. He had a he had a website. And it got such a great response. because I was telling people, why are you why are you beating yourself up on the roads doing all this training? Why are you why are you training for a marathon if you're not a runner? there's no good to come from it other than, again, maybe a a finisher's medal once. Okay, good. Twice you did a marathon, but

speaker-1 (49:59.896)

We have a romanticized nature with a lot of hard stuff rather than basically just going off of feel on our intuition.

speaker-0 (50:05.388)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, where was I going with that? Other than people choose to do y the you know, these hard things, that's great. but but live your life as well and enjoy, you know, get I mean, why are we here? I think we're here well, in a Darwinian sense, we're here to live long enough to pass the genetic material along to the next generation. Full stop, end of story, we're done.

That's legacy. by the way, true legacy is having grandchildren. So having children isn't enough. You have to see that you have to see that they have children. That's true legacy. just putting it out there. but where was I going with that? I forget what what what my train of thought was on that, but anyways.

speaker-1 (50:49.592)

Something that was challenging for you, and going back to this malleability and all these different identities that you've had, you know, elite athlete, painter, blog, entrepreneur. An identity that you really struggled with retired. Why was that such a struggle for you? And obviously, you know, you you sell Primal Kitchen for $200 million and you've you've shared that wasn't necessarily because of the the money, but you know, that was the best for the business. Yeah.

speaker-0 (51:05.002)

yeah.

speaker-1 (51:18.594)

Why was retirement such a challenge for you?

speaker-0 (51:20.522)

I mean I mean I the story I tell is I tried I tried it for two days and it just didn't work. So but you know, I've for me it's always I got I got one more day in me. You know, it's like I take it day a day at a time. Like I every morning I wake up and I'm like, you know, I've done a lot of cool things.

Yeah, I was the Secretary General of the International Triathlon Union for 15 years. I was an elected volunteer position. I wrote the anti-doping rules for the sport of triathlon. I administered all the drug tests in the sport of triathlon for twelve years. I oversaw every drug hearing. I had a so I had a career in that in sports administration.

and then I had a you know, I had a nice supplement business, and I had a food business. And so if I if I stopped today, I could I could sit back and, you know, rest on my laurels and go, yeah, it's pretty cool life, you know, it's all good. But I got one more day, you know, and that's how I I I I got I got more to do is what I say to myself. I have more to do. So when I sold Primal Kitchen, and I th you know, I I really didn't think I was gonna read Puluva, but always working toward, you know, with an idea that

I want to make a contribution. I I and that's really what it is. I mean I I think first and foremost I consider myself an educator. So I like to educate people on what I've discovered for myself works really well, whether it's dietary inputs or or workout philosophy or life philosophy.

You know, or business philosophy and when it comes to foot health, that's that's my new passion and I think foot health is the lowest hanging fruit in the world of of longevity and it's been overlooked for the longest longest time. And so I wanna really address this as a an international health problem that that is just gonna get worse and worse as we overlook the fact that our feet are a connection with the ground and everything we do, whether we walk or jump or dance or you know, set up for a slap shot or whatever it is,

speaker-0 (53:16.216)

We use our feet. We we are l anchored by our feet and if they're not healthy and they're not mobile and resilient and strong, then everything up the kinetic chain falls apart. So that's my new

speaker-1 (53:59.48)

From my perspecti from my perspective, I actually think the mental and emotional components of Pallova are even bigger than the physical because, you know, I don't know if you've heard the phrase before, but like, you know, be where your feet are. Yeah. And because of how, you know, we wear shoes, you're not really able to do that. And, you know, our society is built in a way we're just like mindless and numb. But like when you do wear shoes that connect you with the ground, you do become more mindful and you actually are like where your feet are and you're not

speaker-0 (54:17.354)

I if I understand the question correctly, I mean no, I I I knew a lot about shoes and I had friends in the footwear industry. Now I I I I got in I got in all the way pretty quickly. So starting a shoe company is not an easy thing to do. It takes a lot of money to start a shoe company.

speaker-1 (54:29.424)

like having your mind race at all. with Puluva, like this was the first time where you pivoted, but it wasn't like from a place of starting from zero. Did that actually create more stress or fear for you than like starting the blog or starting the supplement company? Or like what were the biggest changes there?

speaker-0 (54:37.952)

So, but I I w I knew I wanted to do this. I know that I'm on the right track. I know, like what you said, the that every night I walk for 45 minutes at the end of the day, but usually between seven and eight. and it's my favorite time of the day. And I'm I'm out there alone and I'm feeling every step. And every step I'm I'm connecting with what's going on in my body, in my feet, and my mind, which I never got from wearing thick cushioned shoes, or certainly not from wearing

fashion footwear or any anything like that. So and then we have we're we're actually creating a website that is nothing but testimonials about about Pallova because it's so incredible how like life-changing commentary we have on people who thought they'd never really walk without pain again or you know had knee issues or lower back issues and they're being fixed because we're we're helping them reacquire their normal gait pattern, which re which in turn requires that they feel the ground underneath the brain has to sense what's going on

under the feet in order to orchestrate the kinetic chain properly for every person individually. And it's, you know, it's been a I mean very satisfying ride so far, and I think we're just gonna be I think we're gonna be a massive company. It's just gonna take time. It's education. Again, I spent eight years educating people on the benefits of healthy fats before I launched Primal Kitchen.

And I'm educating I wrote a book last year called Born to Walk. I don't care if I ever run another step. I'll sprint, but I won't, you know, run a mile for fun. but I but I'm a huge fan of walking and I think everybody should be walking. I wanna I wanna convince the world that that's the single best thing you can do as a human being.

speaker-1 (56:48.75)

Well, it does feel like a continued path for you where obviously Primal Kitchen and Pallover are separate brands within separate industries, but it feels like with everything that you do, it lives within one ecosystem. And I feel like the word that defines that ecosystem is reconnection. Like that is the North Star for you, it seems. Yeah.

speaker-0 (57:06.702)

Absolutely, a hundred percent.

speaker-1 (57:10.296)

Tying things into reconnection again and you know, using the past to inform our present selves in the future and bringing it back to your father. In his bio it says

Talking Lonnie, your father. Sisson thrived when most people in his position succumbed to age, illness, and the pressure of a long life. Sisson's work ethic was to get up every day and perfect his artistic craft that motivates the artist. In your own way, how does it feel like you're doing exactly that?

speaker-0 (57:41.346)

Yeah, I mean it's you it's this is a bit more of a esoteric situation where on a day to day basis I'm not, you know, building shoes or or designing stuff. But I am always thinking about education. I'm always thinking about what's the

I guess I guess how I would phrase that is I'm always looking at what what's the fifteen second elevator pitch that's really gonna strike somebody as my god, yeah, you're right. So I've got lots of you know, I have a Instagram site where I talk about all manner of health and fitness still, but a lot about footwear and shoes and things like that. you know, again we wrote the book I wrote the book with Brad Kearns last year called Born to Walk.

We've got a free eighty five page guide, the definitive guide to barefoot lifestyle that we give out free for just visiting our website. It's all based on education. But it's all in my mind, it's all me trying to identify the golden sentence, the golden communication that that is ultimately gonna ever have everybody go, you know, aha, that's the you know, that's the one.

It's so I'm always trying to like my dad was always trying to paint the perfect painting. And he n by the way, never never said this is the one. It's the next one. Yeah. And that's you know, that's part of the the joy in the journey is is knowing that it could be there tomorrow. I'm just gonna, you know, do it again. But I didn't today didn't suck because it didn't happen, but it could be there t tomorrow.

speaker-1 (59:06.936)

The next one.

speaker-1 (59:24.864)

It feels like the unknown and uncertainty energizes you more than scares you.

speaker-0 (59:31.74)

yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean I I a measured amount of of predictability, I think, is what I have. Uncertainty isn't something that I embrace, but I certainly I go into these things with a measured amount of optimism and a a predictive

mindset that if I do this right and if I I apply the right forces, this is a good idea. And I think going looking at young people starting businesses, the first thing I ever ask them is, is it a good idea? Like is the like I get that you're passionate, I get that you want to do this, I get that you're gonna have the time and resources to be able to put it all in. But if you do all that, is it still a good business? Is it still a good idea? Is it still, you know, does it have the potential to be to change the world or is it, you know, it does is

gonna max out at five million bucks a year, which is, you know, some people can live on that. But but no, you want to shoot for the moon if you're really trying to build a business that way. So I look at all the stuff I do as being very you know, willing to risk is being an entrepreneur is about is about risk. But I want to mitigate the risk as much as possible. And whether it's financial inputs or you know design choices or

statements made in the Ethernet that might come back to bite you in the ass, whatever. I want to I want to mitigate those kind of risks. But I'm still very willing to to go forth with this optimism.

speaker-1 (01:01:04.93)

Goes back to that malleability. Yeah. Being able to pivot in different ways and, you know, obviously being able to willingly change your direction, but also in those unwilling failures, you know, having the confidence or the ability to have yourself pulled apart a little but still look forward.

speaker-0 (01:01:22.306)

Yeah, I mean this is what again my mentor Art Devaney said. n what do you say, no failure, just data. You know.

speaker-1 (01:01:33.362)

Mark, I think that's a great place to stop. Yeah. Where can people go to learn more about you? Anything else you'd like to share?

speaker-0 (01:01:39.696)

on Instagram, I'm Mark Sisson Primal. That's my personal site. on the the shoe site is Wear Paluva, W-E-A-R-P-E-L-U-V A, Wear Peluva. if you want to buy shoes, we're online only right now at Peluva.com. And lots of freebies and and you know good information to be gathered just by visiting the site. So I encourage everybody to do that. Yeah. Likewise, thanks for having me. And we're out cool.

speaker-1 (01:02:03.214)

Awesome. Great talking with you today.