827 Mark Sisson: Building a $200 Million Dollar Personal Brand

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO CHANGE LANES. Pivoting isn’t a sign of failure, it’s a sign that you’re listening to feedback. You have to know when to jump ship. If you don’t, you might be missing out on some amazing new opportunities. So, how do you know which direction to take? See what people are responding to. Build relationships with your audience. And never think you’ve missed your chance to follow a dream. There’s no better time than now. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I talk about being able to pivot with an entrepreneur who is never afraid to change directions: Mark Sisson. Mark Sisson is a New York Times bestselling author and founder of Primal Nutrition, LLC, and Primal Kitchen, LLC. He is the publisher of MarksDailyApple.com, the #1-ranked blog for over a decade in its health and fitness category. Mark says that he figured out his famous product by first building a brand. It took a lot of groundwork but ultimately paid off in the end. So get ready to learn how to be a successful entrepreneur at any age on Episode 827. Some Questions I Ask: How do you know when you need to pivot? (15:15) How did you have the mindset to shift into running a large business? (30:00) What advice would you have for people building their personal brand? (34:30) What was your biggest fear when building a food business? (40:00) How do you deal with companies knocking off your product? (45:00) In This Episode You Will Learn: About Mark’s journey to where he is now (6:00) The greatest skill set an entrepreneur can have (13:00) The power of hiring a team to execute your vision (31:00) Why in retail you have to compete on brand not price (36:00) How to build a brand (38:00) If you enjoyed this episode, check out the video, show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/827 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  Episode number 827 with New York Times bestselling author Mark Sisson. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:32Lewis Howes?

  Albert Einstein said, "The measure of intelligence is the ability to change." Welcome to this episode with Mark Sisson, building a $200 million personal brand. So excited about this interview because I've known Mark for a long time and it's been amazing to watch him continue to change, adapt and change, adapt and change, and not get stuck or set in one way. If you don't know who he is, he's the author of many bestselling books, an entrepreneur, and founder of Primal Kitchen and Primal Nutrition.

• 1:12Lewis Howes?

  His bestselling book, The Primal Blueprint, is credited with turbocharging the growth of the primal and paleo movement back in 2009, before there was really a movement about this stuff. His book, The Keto Reset Diet, was a New York Times bestseller and reached the number one overall bestseller among all books on amazon.com for two days. Additionally, he's written popular primal-themed cookbooks and lifestyle books, and publisher over at marksdailyapple.com, the number one ranked blog for over a decade in its health and fitness category. Mark was a marathoner for a number of years, finishing in the top five in the 1980 U.S. National Marathon Championships for a qualifying spot.

• 1:55Lewis Howes?

  Of the 1980 U.S. Olympic trials and in this interview, we talk about how arriving at your superpower takes time. Now, Mark didn't find a superpower early on. He's, he's been a seasoned entrepreneur for a long time, since before I was born and has continually changed and adapted to find a superpower. Talk about the importance of being open to pivoting in life, how you cannot build a brand without authenticity, why always creating is a key to success, and the lesson Mark has learned from his varying jobs and how they have led him to build one of the biggest fitness movements in history. I think it's also really cool

• 2:34Lewis Howes?

  that we talk about how to build a personal brand and make it something that could exit 200 million plus dollars with just your personal brand and your own ideas, starting from a blog to 200 million dollar exit. I think it's really cool. And I am super excited about this interview with the one and only Mark Sisson.

• 3:02Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got Mark Sisson in the house. My man, good to see you, brother.

• 3:07Mark Sisson?

  Likewise. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

• 3:08Lewis Howes?

  You're here. You've been in the fitness nutrition space for 30 plus years.

• 3:13Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:14Lewis Howes?

  30 plus years, originally teaching people about health and nutrition. You wrote a book a year. You've got tons of books. You've got coaching and courses and supplements. And then when you hit 61.

• 3:27Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Lewis Howes?

  Something changed.

• 3:30Mark Sisson?

  I think in retrospect, it was the natural order of things. It was a natural evolution. But I started out, first of all, I started out as an entrepreneur in my youth, right? And I was always an entrepreneur. And in my 40s, I decided I want to get into supplements. So I started making a line of supplements that was quite successful for a while. In your forties? In my forties. I was forty. I tell my kids, I was forty-seven when I finally decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. Right, right. So, I start this line of supplements. It was doing, it's doing very well. And it was based on a model that was using television. My appearances on television as an expert, sort of driving traffic, right? We talk about exercise and diet and fitness and all the things that I know about.

• 4:13Mark Sisson?

  You know, by the way, I had these awesome supplements over here. You should try them. Very low-key sales approach, but it was quite effective and successful. Sure. A few years into this strategy, the model just died up. Just dried up and... Model, meaning like driving traffic from TV? Through TV, yeah. And so, I thought, well, what am I gonna do to resurrect my business? I had, I had grown this business four, five, six percent a year for several years. It was crazy. And then all of a sudden, you know, the television model of infomercials and, and, and sales based on TV appearances ceased to work. There were three hundred cable channels. There was Dish and Direct. The internet was starting to become a thing. People were buying on the internet.

• 4:54Mark Sisson?

  And fewer and fewer people were willing to pick up the phone and call now. You know, in the next thirty minutes and get this and this. So, I shifted. I pivoted in that first year that I realized things were going south. And I thought, well, I'll do my own TV show and I'll, I'll direct, because I was buying time on other people's shows. Yeah. I'll produce and direct my own show. I'll star in it. I'll buy time on, on TV and everything will be great. What year is this? Two thousand and five. So, two thousand and five, I did a TV show called Responsible Health. And I shot fifty-two half-hour episodes. Wow. Uh, each one unique. Each one had, you know, I had a, a very competent co-host, female co-host. We built a set. I had guests, three guests every show, guest experts.

• 5:39Mark Sisson?

  And I tried to use the advertising breaks to sell my products. It was what we call a self-liquidating program.

• 5:47Lewis Howes?

  So it's free content?

• 5:48Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 5:48Lewis Howes?

  And then selling something?

• 5:50Mark Sisson?

  Exactly, exactly. And I bought time on Travel Channel. So you could see me on Travel Channel every morning at 8:30 across the country.

• 5:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow, 52 half-hour slots.

• 6:00Mark Sisson?

  52 half-hour episodes.

• 6:01Lewis Howes?

  That's a lot of content.

• 6:02Mark Sisson?

  No, it's a lot of content, very expensive. And at the end of several months of doing this, I'd lost a million and a half bucks. And I thought, well, I better pull back. I have a wife and two kids that I have to feed. I can't be throwing more money into this. And so I started my blog in 2006, based on that failed experiment on television, knowing that I was good at creating content. I could produce this content on exercise and nutrition and health and medicine and diet and everything people wanted to know about. And I had a unique sort of perspective about it. So I started Mark's Daily Apple in 2006. And again, ostensibly to use as a platform to sell my supplements.

• 6:45Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 6:46Mark Sisson?

  And I did that for a number of years. And it was relatively successful. But over the years, the topics became more and more about food and about diet and less and less about the other tangential peripheral aspects of performance. So as I'm writing more and more about food and posting recipes and I'm writing cookbooks and I'm doing DIY recipes on how to make your own mayonnaise and your own ketchup, I realized I'm talking about food and I'm writing about food and I'm focused on food. And what I'm focused on most is the concept of clean eating, of getting rid of sugar and refined carbohydrates and getting rid of industrial seed oils like corn oil and canola oil and soybean oil

• 7:29Mark Sisson?

  and just incorporating healthy fats, clean sources of protein and minimal sugars and carbs. But when you distill that list down, it's not a lot of food. There's really not a lot of food you can eat. So what makes the difference is how you prepare it. Sauces, dressings, toppings, herbs, spices, and things like that. So I thought, well, there's an opportunity because no one and no company is making like a great mayonnaise or a great ketchup or a great salad dressing. There were a few that were trying to dabble in that area, but they didn't fit my criteria, my specifications for what was a really clean dressing that people would feel good about putting on their salad.

• 8:07Lewis Howes?

  And that's why you just started making them from scratch on your own and showing people how to make them?

• 8:11Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, I'd been making them from scratch for 20 years because I didn't trust anything that I could find in the store. So that's always been my thing. And then there was a point at which I thought, well, just for my own comfort and ease and convenience, I would rather buy these in a store, pre-made, and not have to get the blender out every night and clean, you know, clean the blender out of the oily substance that was in there and all the stuff that went with it. So I put together an R and D team and we spent a year looking at different iterations of mayonnaise and ketchup and salad dressings and barbecue sauces. And, you know, the first thing we came up with that we could commercially make to scale was this mayonnaise, this Primal Kitchen mayonnaise.

• 8:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I've got a bunch of the products in my kitchen.

• 8:54Mark Sisson?

  Exactly. So, long-winded answer to your question, you know, I started in that company when I was 61 years old. So we launched our first product in 2015. It took off.

• 9:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow. But when did you start doing supplements, 47?

• 9:09Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, I was 47 years old, so, you know, I was in 95, I think, or whatever. Thereabouts, 1995 that I started doing supplements.

• 9:16Lewis Howes?

  Supplements. And before that, you were an entrepreneur doing just different things that were working, some weren't working, or the first 45 years?

• 9:23Mark Sisson?

  No, no, no. So, yeah, so there's a gap there. Louis, how did I get there? I mean, I worked 40 hours a week when I was 12 years old in the summers mowing lawns. I had a regular... Five day, a week, eight hour day lawn mowing job. Wow. Uh, twelve and thirteen years old. I, I shoveled snow in the wintertime because I grew up in Maine. When I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I worked double shifts at a restaurant in the summer. I painted houses. When I was sixteen through twenty-seven, I put myself through college painting houses and I was so, it was such a good job and that, that's during the phase of my life when I was a semi-pro athlete. I was a runner. I needed to, to support my running habit. Not making any money running.

• 10:05Mark Sisson?

  Was not making any money running. So I, and I wanted, I had races around the world, so I wanted to, you know, be able to, to travel to those races and compete at the highest level. So I was a contractor, a painting contractor for a number of years. Wow. Was this a triathlon or just? At first it was in my, uh, just, uh, marathon days. So I was just a marathoner in those days. What was your, your best time? Two eighteen. Two eighteen, that's pretty good. It qualifies for Olympic trials, right? Qualified for Olympic trials, yeah. And then I went into triathlons. But you know, then like I started a frozen yogurt shop in nineteen eighty-one in Palo Alto. Yeah, one of the first guys in. Before frozen yogurt was a thing. Before it was a big thing. You should have stuck with it, right? Could've, would've, should've, but here's, so, so many lessons in my life.

• 10:48Mark Sisson?

  I had a business partner and we, we opened this, we bought a barber shop. Because we couldn't find a small enough space to lease in Palo Alto in eighty-one. So we literally bought Gerardo's Barber Shop. You know, it was Gerardo the Barber. And he was thrilled because we bought out his lease and we paid him some money and then we turned it into a, a frozen yogurt emporium. And we crushed it. Really? It was huge. We absolutely crushed it. And we got so, I wouldn't say greedy, but we said, let's make, let's build a bigger one down near Apple Computer in San Jose. So on Saratoga Sunnyvale Road, we put a bigger, by the way, the name of the place was called Cool Licks. Cool Licks. Cool Licks, it was, you know. I like it.

• 11:32Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so we then, we, we built a larger one down there and it was a. You know, now all of a sudden it went from 535 square feet, you know, in a place that was doing $400,000 a year in gross and generating 175,000 in profit. Then we go to a 8,000 square foot emporium. We build it out. We borrow money.

• 11:53Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 11:54Mark Sisson?

  1983.

• 11:55Lewis Howes?

  That's the year I was born.

• 11:56Mark Sisson?

  17% interest.

• 11:58Lewis Howes?

  Ooh.

• 11:59Mark Sisson?

  For, to borrow money in those days.

• 12:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 12:01Mark Sisson?

  So it was automatically doomed.

• 12:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Mark Sisson?

  So that was a hu- huge failure on our part, on my part. So walked away from that, came to LA to get into sportscasting. I did a stint, not as a sportscaster, but as an actor. I got my SAG card and did that. And I did a little bit of sportscasting, covering triathlons for ESPN. You know, then got a job running the US Triathlon Federation in Colorado Springs for three years.

• 12:28Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 12:29Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Lewis Howes?

  USOC?

• 12:29Mark Sisson?

  Uh, part of the USOC, yeah. So I was the executive director of the US Triathlon Federation and ran that. And then didn't want to do nonprofits the rest of my...

• 12:39Lewis Howes?

  Poor.

• 12:39Mark Sisson?

  I didn't want to be poor, exactly. So I got a, you know, got a job as a COO of a, of a large, relatively large vitamin company in Santa Monica. Did that for five years and then started my own.

• 12:49Lewis Howes?

  So you learned the business.

• 12:50Mark Sisson?

  Learned the business, yeah.

• 12:51Lewis Howes?

  For five years.

• 12:52Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Lewis Howes?

  You saw what was working, what wasn't working, the gaps.

• 12:55Mark Sisson?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 12:56Lewis Howes?

  Started your own.

• 12:56Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Lewis Howes?

  Did the TV thing.

• 12:59Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Lewis Howes?

  Uh, then did the blog because the TV thing wasn't working.

• 13:02Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:02Lewis Howes?

  When did you start the blog, at 47 or?

• 13:04Mark Sisson?

  No, no, no, I started the blog now. No, now I'm, uh, 2006, I start, I started the blog. So I was 53 when I started the blog.

• 13:11Lewis Howes?

  53 you started the blog?

• 13:12Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Lewis Howes?

  And you started it early, like, in the blogging world, 2006.

• 13:15Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it felt like I was too late to the game in 2006. It really, it's like, I wonder if there's still time to rise above all the other blogs that I saw out there. Now it's, it's, now it's, maybe it's too late, I don't know, it's huge.

• 13:30Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 13:31Mark Sisson?

  You know, because when I started, they were like, in my space, in the ancestral health space, there were... I don't know, four blogs, you know, there was Lauren Cordain had one, Richard Nicolai had one called Free the Animal. Art Devaney had one, he was sort of my mentor. In fact, I started blogging by writing guest posts for his, for his site.

• 13:50Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 13:51Mark Sisson?

  And they got, they were so well received, that's how I started my blog.

• 13:54Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 13:55Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 13:55Lewis Howes?

  I think it's, it always seems like there's, after you wait five, 10 years after blogs, that you, it's too late, but then you see a blog that pops within a year. Same thing with podcasting. A lot of people feel like they're five years behind.

• 14:08Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Lewis Howes?

  My friend Jay Shetty just launched one of these in the top of the, the world right now.

• 14:12Mark Sisson?

  Wow.

• 14:13Lewis Howes?

  Able to drive traffic from Facebook and YouTube and Instagram to build his podcast quickly, and he does a unique spin on it. So I think there's always an angle to grow quickly if you've got leverage and if you're doing something different and unique. But you really, when you were 50 something when you launched your blog.

• 14:29Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Lewis Howes?

  And you were 61 when you launched the food business.

• 14:33Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Lewis Howes?

  And you sold the food business at 60.

• 14:36Mark Sisson?

  65, 60, 60, yeah, 65.

• 14:38Lewis Howes?

  65.

• 14:39Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Lewis Howes?

  So the cool story is, you know, you really didn't figure out what you're doing until you're 61.

• 14:44Mark Sisson?

  I might change my mind again at some point, you know what I mean? That's the beauty of it. It's, it's, I think that the ability to pivot and see opportunity is probably the single greatest skill set that an entrepreneur can have, to just not be so, and, and I can go back and I can say, that's a lesson I've learned so many times, that, that once I transitioned into the blogging thing, and I saw that my sales were not taking off commensurate with my traffic. I mean, I had one of the top blogs around. I had three, three million uniques a month, Mark's Daily Apple, within a few years.

• 15:19Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 15:19Mark Sisson?

  And so you would think that, that the traffic would generate enough sales in the vitamin world, in the supplement business, and yet, you know, I kept, instead of taking a step back and going, okay, what am I writing about? Who am I writing for? What do they want to hear? And then what do they want to buy? I'm more like. I'm gonna make this vitamin thing work. I had my blinders on rather than being open to the possibility that there's another thing that I could do that would be much more successful than just fixing what I thought was broken in that original concept.

• 15:51Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So when did you start to listen to your audience what they wanted the most?

• 15:55Mark Sisson?

  I mean, I was listening all along, but I wasn't hearing, I guess. I don't know. Or hearing, not listening. I don't know what the appropriate terminology is. But there was a point at which enough people had commented that, for instance, how frustrated they were when we'd post a make-your-own-mayonnaise recipe, and it would fail. Because ma-

• 16:16Lewis Howes?

  When they would make their own-

• 16:17Mark Sisson?

  When they would make their own mayonnaise.

• 16:19Lewis Howes?

  Like, this is that good shit.

• 16:20Mark Sisson?

  No, no. Here's a recipe, and it looks great. When we show the video of it and everything, and it's all frothy and whippy and everything else, and they make it, and it-

• 16:28Lewis Howes?

  Clumpy and gloopy.

• 16:29Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Lewis Howes?

  Runny.

• 16:31Mark Sisson?

  Exactly. And they throw it away. And it's like, and so a lot of people said, "I wish you could just make a product like that."

• 16:36Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 16:37Mark Sisson?

  You know, using those ingredients. Look, again, as an entrepreneur, you have to always be ready, willing, and able to get the feedback from your customers.

• 16:46Lewis Howes?

  How do you know when it's the right time to pivot? For instance, you'd been building a supplement business for over 10 years, it sounded like, and putting all this energy and time into these systems, and this team, and this vision. And then now, a few people, I don't know, maybe it's hundreds of people, are saying, "Hey, can you just make this food product that you have no clue what you're doing in?"

• 17:04Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Lewis Howes?

  "Can you just stop what you're doing in the supplements or shift and put all your time and attention to making me a mayonnaise that I like?"

• 17:11Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Lewis Howes?

  And what gives you the courage and the confidence to go launch something at 61 that you had no clue?

• 17:19Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Lewis Howes?

  Relatively no clue.

• 17:20Mark Sisson?

  No, I had no clue. I did not know the food business at all.

• 17:23Lewis Howes?

  You didn't have critical manufacturer, food packing, distribution.

• 17:26Mark Sisson?

  I had hubris. You know, I was like, "I'll show you guys how this is."

• 17:31Lewis Howes?

  I could do this.

• 17:31Mark Sisson?

  Do this. Another important lesson I learned was I didn't pivot away from what I was doing. I kept making the supplements. So I wasn't abandoning that as a bad idea as much as I was adding a new concept in the food space. So I didn't start a new company. I just added a new line of products to my existing company. So now I had this this one company that was doing quite well and had been doing quite well. I shouldn't put it down. It was certainly enough to retire on if I wanted to. But I wanted to, you know, experiment in this food business. And so I started creating products using pre, we talked about this a while back, pre-tax dollars.

• 18:14Mark Sisson?

  Right? So I would take profits from my supplement business and roll them over into into the creation of new products in that same company. Rather than take, you know, for every dollar I make in supplements, if I pay 50 cents in taxes, and it's at least that in California, and then I take the 50 cents out and I start a new company. I only have 50 cents to start the new company with. But if I keep the dollar and I just buy, you know, roll it over and make a new product, reinvest it back in the company, then I was able to experiment and see if there was a market for these products that I envisioned being being successful.

• 18:51Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. Would you recommend people starting new brands within their own company as opposed to launching new companies then?

• 18:59Mark Sisson?

  I think, you know, there's a there's a a good reason for trying that if it's related, for sure. You know, I had, I started a coaching business within my primal nutrition business. And it stayed within that company, same thing. I I spent two years building the product before it ever saw its first customer. Probably $300,000 on resources, keep people to to put it together and platforms and all the things that that were needed to make it a, you know, a robust learning experience. And it was all within the context of my original company. So I had the supplements, I had publishing, I published, you know, I had a publishing company within that. And they were all in the same.

• 19:44Mark Sisson?

  Company and then when I was, when I saw that there was an opportunity to succeed on its own, then I would spin it off. And then it was like I'd proven the business model, I'd proven the concept. I'd scaled it enough that I knew that now we could take it off and put it on to its own platform and own company.

• 20:03Lewis Howes?

  What were the biggest failures you had in the last 15 years, do you think, since you started the blog? What were the things that didn't work out? Because you have a lot of things that worked out. The supplement has worked to a certain level, the coaching, the course, the blogging, and all these other things worked well. And obviously, the food products did extremely well. But what were the things you tried within the brand that you were like, this is going to be a hit, that wasn't a hit?

• 20:26Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. Well, there's two things that come to mind. First of all, the publishing, which started out great. Publishing was awesome. So I couldn't find a publisher for my original book, The Primal Blueprint. So I self-published. And again, because I had

• 20:39Lewis Howes?

  Traffic in the blog.

• 20:40Mark Sisson?

  Traffic in the blog, the platform, I had a warehouse, I had credit card processing from the supplement business. All that stuff went very, very well together and it was easy for me to do that. And then I found a third-party independent distributor who would distribute it to all the books. And this is back when there still was like Barnes and Noble and

• 21:01Lewis Howes?

  Borders.

• 21:02Mark Sisson?

  Borders. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I could make, you know, that was a couple million dollars a year in sales.

• 21:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 21:10Mark Sisson?

  And it was all, you know, I controlled the price and I controlled the margins on it and I controlled the distribution and it was fantastic. Well, I don't need to tell you, publishing has changed

• 21:20Lewis Howes?

  A lot.

• 21:21Mark Sisson?

  A lot. And it's changed like from year to year. So now, all of a sudden, publishing is not an attractive, successful business for me. I used to be able to sell 50,000 books in the first, you know, three months of publication. Now you work a year to sell 5,000 books.

• 21:35Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 21:36Mark Sisson?

  It's just a different kind of thing.

• 21:37Lewis Howes?

  So you had to shift and pivot that.

• 21:39Mark Sisson?

  As a publisher, that was not my wheelhouse. Now, I have a great publisher that I work with. And so I continued to write books and I work with Harmony Books and they're fantastic. And we've had some amazing successes and it's all great. But for me, as a business person, when that was not my real wheelhouse, I took a step back and said, I need to focus my energy where Where it's best used to be successful in areas that I know about.

• 22:08Lewis Howes?

  Right, so that was the first thing.

• 22:10Mark Sisson?

  That was the first thing. The other thing, started a chain of restaurants. A franchise operation called Primal Kitchen Restaurants. And it was a great idea, great concept. We were extremely successful out of the block, sold

• 22:22Lewis Howes?

  Franchises.

• 22:23Mark Sisson?

  18 franchises without having an operating unit.

• 22:25Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 22:26Mark Sisson?

  And just didn't realize that my lack of experience in the restaurant business, some other issues with the partners that I was working with, sort of combined to make it be a less than successful operation. So we had to dismantle that in the last two years. You can't necessarily, unless you're Richard Branson, you can't have a success everywhere you go. I just sort of say that tongue in cheek, because he's had his

• 22:53Lewis Howes?

  Even his

• 22:54Mark Sisson?

  He's had his failures, but

• 22:55Lewis Howes?

  He has. Didn't he sell Virgin, the airplane?

• 22:57Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. But I mean, he's like one of my

• 23:00Lewis Howes?

  All successful, yeah.

• 23:01Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, one of my guys that I would look up to and said, that's a guy that I want to emulate

• 23:06Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 23:06Mark Sisson?

  in my business life. So you can't always have a success. In fact, I would say that one of the, you know, key things, one of the key takeaways for me, from my life, and all of the failures that I've had, is that as long as you learn from them, as long as you don't go hugely into debt and ruin the rest of your life, as long as you live your life in real time and enjoy your friends and your family and your lovers or whatever it is that you're doing and living your life, then it doesn't matter if you have a couple of, you know, a string of failures, because it only takes one success of some reasonable magnitude to have made all the things you did in your life worth, you know, worth having pursued.

• 23:49Lewis Howes?

  And what do you say to the 25-year-olds who feel like they're behind? They haven't made it yet?

• 23:55Mark Sisson?

  I mean, I got socks in my drawer that I still wear that are 25 years old.

• 24:01Mark Sisson?

  25 and feeling like you haven't made it yet has got to be a horrible feeling. But it's the whole process of arriving at, you know, your secret power, your superpower, your secret sauce, takes time. You don't necessarily have to follow your passion. I mean, if we followed our passion, geez, we'd all own ice cream shops. Because when we were 12 years old, you know, I want to have an ice cream shop.

• 24:27Lewis Howes?

  Pizza shop.

• 24:28Mark Sisson?

  Whatever, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's more about finding out what you're good at and what you can serve other people and what they would benefit from your having served to them. And that takes time for a lot of people. And that takes this willingness to go down a path and commit, for sure, but then be okay with an outcome that's less than positive and just move on to the next thing. And my whole life is about pivots and it's about trying stuff. I mean, I had a, you know, I started a shoe company when I was, or a shoe repair company, I should say, when I was a runner. Because I was pissed off that my running shoes would only last 800 miles, which in those days was less than eight weeks because I was running 100 miles a week.

• 25:12Mark Sisson?

  And so I started a little running shoe repair kit business. And I advertised in Runner's World magazine. And, you know, I sold a bunch of the kits, but it was a horrible idea because, well, it was a great idea for one product, but it was not enough to start a business around, right? So I learned from that, that you might have a great idea, but if it's not a business, then it's not worth pursuing. Sometimes you have to be a little bit more realistic about your dreams and your creations and ask yourself, can this be a hundred million dollar business? If it's only going to be a million dollar business, then that's successful for a lot of people. But in my mind, it was like, no, not interested. I need to have a bigger pot of gold at the end of that rainbow

• 25:57Mark Sisson?

  if I put everything I have into this.

• 25:59Lewis Howes?

  Wow. How many things did you think were potentially a hundred million dollar businesses?

• 26:03Mark Sisson?

  I've had lots of them. I've had lots of ideas, yeah. I mean-

• 26:07Lewis Howes?

  That you took action on?

• 26:08Mark Sisson?

  That's the other thing. You've got to take action on these things, right? So I've had some amazing- Ideas that other people executed on before I, I mean, it wasn't like I was going to do it and they beat me to it. It was like, yeah, that was a great idea and I, and I thought at the time it would be an awesome kind of thing and somebody else beat me to it. TRX is a great example of that. TRX is a multi hundred million dollar company and it's The workout ropes? Yeah, it's workout ropes. It's like You hang them over and you just Every, every trainer I know, including myself, invented that in the eighties. Right. You know, when we were working with clients and clients say, I'm going on the road. I need something to, you know, work out in my hotel room. But TRX, those guys just, they identified

• 26:50Mark Sisson?

  exactly what needed to be done. They, they marketed it brilliantly. They put a whole series of videos behind it. They did everything. The execution was, I'm gonna say flawless, you know, on what was otherwise a fairly mundane kind of invention. Yeah. But you probably had a vision that this supplement business you launched has potentially be a hundred million. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, the supplement business, you know, always has a potential to be a billion dollar business if you do it right. But for whatever reason, I couldn't get those variables to work for me in this context. Part of that was I had a, I had a vision about the kite, the types of products I want to make and who I wanted to serve in the marketplace.

• 27:31Mark Sisson?

  And it was very sort of narrow. It was the highest end product possible. So that limited my, you know, my, my, my reach and my potential marketplace. God, it was like elite performers running a hundred miles a week. Yeah, exactly. No, pretty much. And that's how it started. It started just going after endurance athletes who I felt needed some assistance with their recovery and who didn't want to turn to illegal performance enhancing substances. So I started with that and it was, it was not a very good business because you were an athlete. I was, a lot of athletes are like, no, I work out plenty hard. I don't need this other stuff. Yeah. I don't need it. And I certainly don't need to be spending money doing it. You want to sponsor me? Right, right.

• 28:12Mark Sisson?

  So I got a lot of, you know, that. But then I found, again, I pivoted. I found when I was on television with these products, I found women who were 65, 68, 75 years old. We're reading all of the research on anti-aging and reading the reports in the headlines and we're focused on an anti-aging strategy. And my products addressed that because they were sort of, the name of the product was Damage Control. And the next thing I know, I have an amazing market with probably the least athletic people on the planet. You know, little old ladies who were, who just want to be healthy.

• 28:49Lewis Howes?

  Want to feel younger.

• 28:50Mark Sisson?

  Want to feel younger and don't want to, you know, they're not into exercise, but they're into eating right. So it was figuring out, I built the product for one marketplace, didn't work, and then I pivoted and

• 29:00Lewis Howes?

  You shifted, yeah.

• 29:01Mark Sisson?

  And I shifted, yeah.

• 29:03Lewis Howes?

  When you got into the mayonnaise and food business, did you think to yourself, this is a hundred million dollar business? Or more, right away, or did it take some time for you to see the potential?

• 29:12Mark Sisson?

  I did. I thought it was going to be a huge business because I, because food is, is a massive marketplace and massive business in the United States. And, and I think that food that's better for you, good for you food, is just trending very quickly. And we're not going back. We're not going back to the days of, of, you know, high sugar, high fructose corn syrup, processed.

• 29:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 29:38Mark Sisson?

  It's only going to trend forward.

• 29:40Lewis Howes?

  How did you have the confidence to launch it, you said, what did you say, hubris?

• 29:46Mark Sisson?

  Hubris, yeah.

• 29:47Lewis Howes?

  Hubris, yeah. How did you have the, I guess, the mindset though from, for 20, 30 years, you had been an employee, doing side jobs, started a company with five to 10, 12 maybe employees at one time. But then to switch and say, okay, I'm going to build something with 50 to 100 employees

• 30:05Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Lewis Howes?

  within a couple of years.

• 30:06Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Lewis Howes?

  Because that's a big change in the way you think and how you lead people and how you manage people. So how did you shift that late into building something with, what did you have, 70 employees?

• 30:17Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Mark Sisson?

  That's a challenge. It's a huge challenge and for me, it required me giving up this concept that I was the smartest guy in the room. So, you know, my whole business career, I've been successful, largely based on my own work, right? I'm doing the work, I'm in the trenches, I'm grinding it out, I know the contacts, I have the sensibilities here. And when I gave that up, partly because I was entering a space that I did not know anything about, I had to hire people from that industry who were not only knowledgeable about the industry, but were, who had bought into the lifestyle and the concept that I was espousing.

• 31:02Mark Sisson?

  Because it was a, it's a major stretch to launch a 12 ounce jar of mayonnaise for $9.95. How much does it usually cost? Oh, I mean, Costco, you get a gallon of mayonnaise for like eight bucks. Really? Whatever, it's a, yeah, so, but, you know, it's made with horrible ingredients. So that, you know, the larger, cheap versions that you can buy. So, we wanted to make demonstrably better, the best in category of every, of the one, of the products that we- Of all the sauces. Of all the dressings, all the sauces, all of the condiments. We wanted to be demonstrably the best in product. It has to have no artificial ingredients, little to no, and mostly no sugar, unsweetened, and it has to taste great. And those are tough boxes to check off all the time.

• 31:47Mark Sisson?

  Challenging. Very challenging. I hired a team that I just said, "I'm gonna let you guys, you know, I'll be the thought leader and I know where we're headed, and I'm a visionary, but you guys execute, because I just, I don't know what I'm doing here." Wow. And when I, when I gave that up and stopped micromanaging, it just took off. Really? Yeah. How'd you learn to give it up? I didn't learn to, I had to, I was forced to. Because you couldn't do it all yourself. I couldn't do it all myself. You couldn't manufacture and do the food. Yeah, and, and I gotta tell you, that- At some point, age drags a little bit of wisdom along with it. And there was a point at which I just go, you know what, I just don't have the energy to be pulling the all-nighters and doing all this stuff myself and being on the phone,

• 32:31Mark Sisson?

  second guessing my operations people on the choices they're making. I'll just, I'll just have faith and trust that I hired the right people. And that's the key. You gotta hire the right people. So I would say, like for most entrepreneurs, I would say the single most important part of your job is hiring the right people. And when you're really, when you're, when you're an entrepreneur and you have reasonable success, you wind up, especially if you're a CEO, you wind up managing resources. You wind up managing money and people. Yeah. And that's your job. And then they then take care of the actual business of business. So I think hiring the right people is key and it requires time.

• 33:13Mark Sisson?

  I mean, that's, you know, I talked to hundreds of people to come down to five that I really was convinced were the right, were the right people. Were you wrong about any of them? Yes, yeah. One early one that I thought was gonna be the magic that we needed in the marketing department and turned out not to be the case. You know, highly recommended, you know, very affable, gregarious, out of the, out of the blocks. Just didn't work out. Didn't work out. Yeah. And that's, you know, you, we, from day one, my minority interest partner in this, Morgan, who was my first hire, Morgan Buehler, she's now CEO of Primal Kitchen, a division of Kraft Heinz. You know, we basically had a sign, no assholes.

• 33:54Mark Sisson?

  That was, that was the big, important criteria in hiring for our company. No assholes. So we, no assholes, no assholes, no assholes either. But they, they go hand in hand. Yeah. And it was like we would bounce hires off each other and how do you feel about this? And is there, is there a problem, potential problem here? And once you put the team together and you work well with the time, with the team, it makes life so much easier. Wow. You're not doing it all alone. Right.

• 34:24Lewis Howes?

  Now, what advice would you have for people that want to, that are building their own personal brand, they've got some influence, they've got content, a following, and they see this $200 million exit that you had. They see the work you put in, and they want that one day.

• 34:40Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Lewis Howes?

  Maybe they're realistic, it's not gonna happen in two years or something. Maybe it takes a decade, or three decades, or whatever it is. Maybe they will never get to that point, but they wanna exit something big one day.

• 34:50Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Lewis Howes?

  And they have a personal brand now, or they're gonna build one. What suggestions would you have for them over the course of the next, you know, five, 10 years, knowing they wanna exit something someday?

• 35:02Mark Sisson?

  Well, so there are a lot of variables, a lot of criteria here. You know, authenticity is probably the key for any brand-building experience. You have to be able to back up what you're saying and what you're offering with credibility, with, you know, knowledge. So that's, that's an important part of it. I mean, brand building is...

• 35:27Mark Sisson?

  Because you have sort of two opportunities in retail, in selling people. You could compete on price in a commoditized world, and a lot of people do that, and do it quite well.

• 35:38Lewis Howes?

  Or you're just trying to create a product, and then you always have to have the cheapest price.

• 35:43Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. So, and in the space that you and I move in, there are a lot of influencers who will have their own personal brands in, say, vitamins, or supplements, or food products, or skincare, you know, consumer...

• 35:59Lewis Howes?

  Beauty products, or yeah.

• 36:00Mark Sisson?

  Consumer packaged goods. And a lot of those are quite commoditized. So you can't really, if you wanna compete on price, you're just gonna get taken by, you know, by... I mean, people go to, they go to the big-box stores, and they'll pay a lot less for them, if they're just gonna compete on price. So you have to compete on brand, and you have to compete on, you have to be a specialist in your area, and you have to be knowledgeable and provide a lot of other value-added services. You have to, like, I spent my whole life educating people, and that's why my products... Do so well. People understand what they're buying. I spent 10 years building a brand with Mark's Daily Apple before I launched my first product. Basically before, I mean, I had the supplements.

• 36:41Mark Sisson?

  But before the food came out, I had 10 years of brand building experience. So that when we launched it, I wasn't just setting up a table and giving out samples in front of a Whole Foods with an apron on.

• 36:53Lewis Howes?

  Hoping people figured out who you were, yeah.

• 36:55Mark Sisson?

  No, I had enough people who were willing to make the leap. Try it out, buy. And buy online, you know, being shipped mayonnaise in the mail. Because they couldn't get it anywhere yet. Because we hadn't secured the distribution yet. But it was all about the brand. It was all about spending time building the brand and building the authenticity and building the credibility and the loyalty. And that's, I think a lot of companies do that backwards now. They come up with a product first and then they go, okay, now we have to start an Instagram account. We have to start building credibility. We have to start. And that's a difficult way to do it, you know? I mean, you could do it that way, but it's.

• 37:36Lewis Howes?

  If you didn't have 10 years of writing a blog and building that relationship with an audience and you just had this idea to launch a food, you know, mayonnaise brand.

• 37:45Mark Sisson?

  Yep.

• 37:47Lewis Howes?

  How much harder would it be to get to where you are now?

• 37:48Mark Sisson?

  Infinitely harder.

• 37:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 37:50Mark Sisson?

  Infinitely harder. Sure. You know, I see people at the food shows, the expos, who do quite well. But almost all of them have some presence. They either wrote a book or they, or, you know, they hired, they brought on influencers as board members.

• 38:06Lewis Howes?

  To promote them.

• 38:06Mark Sisson?

  To promote them. They gave them, you know, shares in the company. So there's some involvement with people who have some reach and can get to, you know, new customers.

• 38:15Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 38:16Mark Sisson?

  So back to the question of like, what would, you know, what would I advise somebody who's building a brand? Understand what it is that you want to offer. Like, what are your product offerings? Are they intellectual property? Is it products? Is it a combination of the two? Who are you and what do you bring to this space that is absolutely definably unique? Like, how are you different from everyone else? And what do you, you know, what's your own personal, unique selling prospect? Coaching's tough. Coaching, you know, we know that our space is full of. Thousands of coaches, tens of thousands of coaches. It's a noble business. It's a great business for a lot of people. But it's not right for everyone. And if you really want to rise above in that world,

• 39:00Mark Sisson?

  you have to distinguish yourself. What is it that I bring to my clients that's unique and different from every other coach out there? You know, for instance.

• 39:10Lewis Howes?

  Right. So figure out what your uniqueness is.

• 39:13Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Lewis Howes?

  Building authenticity with people.

• 39:15Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. And in the interim, the beauty of the modern world and what we have with social media is you can keep your day job and you can be building these circles of followers, of influencer friends, and, you know, building your network while you're getting ready to launch your product.

• 39:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 39:37Mark Sisson?

  And I think you can try out new things.

• 39:41Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 39:41Mark Sisson?

  With your, you use Instagram or Facebook or whatever as a focus group.

• 39:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Mark Sisson?

  What do you think of this? And I'm thinking about doing this. What do you think? And at the end of the day, you can always change your mind.

• 39:54Lewis Howes?

  That's it. And you change your mind.

• 39:56Mark Sisson?

  A lot.

• 39:57Lewis Howes?

  Dozens of times.

• 39:58Mark Sisson?

  A lot, yeah.

• 39:59Lewis Howes?

  To get to where you're at.

• 39:59Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Lewis Howes?

  And what was the biggest fear in launching the brand?

• 40:04Mark Sisson?

  Uh, well.

• 40:05Lewis Howes?

  The food business?

• 40:06Mark Sisson?

  So I'll tell you the biggest fear in launching the original company was I left a well-paying job with a wife and two kids, no money in the bank and no salary, to start the supplement company.

• 40:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 40:17Mark Sisson?

  So that was like, people would say that was inappropriate. But I had a plan. I lined up some consulting gigs. So I knew, you know, I knew that there was going to be some income while I was building my business. But it was pretty scary for the first year and a half.

• 40:33Lewis Howes?

  This is 2005 or no?

• 40:34Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, no, this is, this goes back to, this is actually 96.

• 40:37Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 40:37Mark Sisson?

  96, 97.

• 40:39Lewis Howes?

  When you started the supplement.

• 40:39Mark Sisson?

  When I started the supplement business, yeah.

• 40:41Lewis Howes?

  So you weren't really making much money those first few years.

• 40:43Mark Sisson?

  No, no.

• 40:44Lewis Howes?

  20 years ago, you were?

• 40:45Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. I mean, I was making enough to live on because I was designing products for other companies. I designed, Beachbody had a bunch of products that they, you know, P90X and all that stuff. I did all their stuff. And Sports Club LA down the street here, I did all their stuff.

• 40:59Lewis Howes?

  So you had some consulting.

• 41:00Mark Sisson?

  Had some consulting stuff, yeah. And I would not have left my well-paying job had I not had those lined up.

• 41:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:08Mark Sisson?

  But still, I was, the intent was to build a line of products.

• 41:12Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 41:12Mark Sisson?

  Right. There was really no fear by the time I started the food company because I had a business that was going fine, the supplement business. So now it was just an opportunity to try another.

• 41:24Lewis Howes?

  Take a swing.

• 41:25Mark Sisson?

  Take a swing.

• 41:25Lewis Howes?

  You got money coming in no matter what.

• 41:27Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 41:28Lewis Howes?

  And if you lost, you lost, you lose some money.

• 41:31Mark Sisson?

  Sure.

• 41:31Lewis Howes?

  Developing it and maybe.

• 41:33Mark Sisson?

  And we, look, I mean, we had some major hiccups. Business, if you're an entrepreneur, you know, business is wickedly high highs, like a roller coaster. It's amazing. And then the worst like lows, like, oh, my God, the world's falling apart. This is it. We're done. We had a bunch of those early on. We'd figured out how to make mayonnaise with avocado oil. We sold out the first couple of runs. This is, this is amazing. And then we started taking orders. And then the next two runs, my co-packer couldn't make mayonnaise. It would, we, 7,000 gallons of avocado oil wouldn't emulsify down the drain.

• 42:10Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 42:11Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, $15,000 of raw materials that.

• 42:15Lewis Howes?

  Gone.

• 42:16Mark Sisson?

  That we had to pay, that I had to pay for, gone. Like, when I say down the drain, like, literally down the drain. And we're like, two times in a row, we couldn't make mayonnaise. And we finally figured out what the problem was. It was, it was a chilling pipe. But until then, we thought, oh, my God, we've started this great business and now we're out of business. And that's the end of that. Wow, that was fast.

• 42:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 42:35Mark Sisson?

  You know? Yeah. So.

• 42:37Lewis Howes?

  That's scary.

• 42:38Mark Sisson?

  And there were, there were a bunch of those. You know, like avocado oil is a, is a very sort of rare commodity. There's not a lot of it in the world. And I wound up buying much of the avocado oil in the world.

• 42:51Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 42:51Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. And having to, to buy it months out. We have contracts a year out to buy avocado oil. And so to be sure that we could get enough to make the different products. I had to overpay, I mean not overpay, but I had to, I had to be.

• 43:05Lewis Howes?

  Pay a premium, yeah.

• 43:06Mark Sisson?

  Pay a premium and I had to store it for my manufacturers. So that was one of the costs of doing business was just having to keep avocado oil that my manufacturers would otherwise just be buying as they needed it just in time and using it. Now I've got this whole inventory that I'm storing it for them, yeah.

• 43:23Lewis Howes?

  How do you make avocado oil?

• 43:25Mark Sisson?

  It's, it's a unique process. They, basically it's pressed, it's not, it's the fruit that's pressed. It's not the seeds as some people think. It's pressed and, and spun out, the particulate matter spun out.

• 43:36Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 43:37Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:37Lewis Howes?

  That takes time to drain it and strain it or whatever, huh?

• 43:41Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Lewis Howes?

  Wow, so how much oil can you get from one?

• 43:44Mark Sisson?

  A significant amount.

• 43:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, okay. Like a half a cup or something, or?

• 43:49Mark Sisson?

  Maybe close to that, but the other thing that we need to know about avocados is the demand for table fruit is just still so high that most growers would much rather, you know, be selling it as table fruit than pressing it for oil.

• 44:01Lewis Howes?

  Make some guacamole or whatever they would make, yeah.

• 44:03Mark Sisson?

  Exactly.

• 44:04Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So you can, they can charge a premium on oil then?

• 44:07Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 44:08Lewis Howes?

  That's why your stuff is so premium?

• 44:10Mark Sisson?

  One of many reasons.

• 44:11Lewis Howes?

  One of many, yeah. But also the brand you've built, probably is how it makes it a more premium.

• 44:16Mark Sisson?

  Well, you know, we use organic, we, we use organic vinegar from non-GMO beets, cage-free eggs. I mean, the whole, you know, it's a, it's a great story.

• 44:23Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:24Mark Sisson?

  And it tastes great.

• 44:25Lewis Howes?

  Right. Is it, what about knockoffs of other brands tried to see the success you guys have?

• 44:29Mark Sisson?

  Oh, immediately, immediately.

• 44:30Lewis Howes?

  And they start making these very similar?

• 44:33Mark Sisson?

  Yes.

• 44:33Lewis Howes?

  Mayonnaise?

• 44:34Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, there's a company that, you know, copied not only our, our formula, but our, basically our packaging and everything else.

• 44:41Lewis Howes?

  Everything.

• 44:42Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:43Lewis Howes?

  So how do you, when you come up with a, a good idea, you launch it and the competitors start to copy it? How do you defend or yourself or?

• 44:54Lewis Howes?

  Just take care of yourself during that process.

• 44:56Mark Sisson?

  You just rise above it. You just literally, this is a metaphor for how we, comparison is the thief of joy and how we compare ourselves to how other people are doing. You just have to like forge ahead for yourself and not pay attention to, to what they're doing, other than this to maybe identify things that, you know they're doing wrong and differently and do what you do better. But otherwise, competition in many regards is a good thing. And I think we launched a whole category of condiments and dressings that there are now other players in. And so there's more variety for the consumer and, you know, my intention all along was for Primal Kitchen to be a billion dollars in sales. I couldn't do that myself, which is why I sold it.

• 45:39Mark Sisson?

  I wanted to leverage the resources of a much larger company to get there. But in many regards, a rising tide lifts all boats. And so the more companies that are doing what we're doing in the food space, the more ubiquitous it becomes, the more accepted it becomes by the buying population, the lower the pricing gets. And you wind up making better food available to a larger number of people. So everybody wins in the end.

• 46:10Lewis Howes?

  Same thing with blogging and podcasting, you know. I remember I launched my show six and a half years ago and then more and more people got in, in the similar space and I could have been angry and like, oh, they're competing with me. But really, they're attracting more of an audience to come and listen. And if they discover me and other people, it's great. Everyone's improving in a certain way.

• 46:30Mark Sisson?

  So my blog, Mark's Daily Apple, started out, it was.

• 46:34Lewis Howes?

  Three million dollars a month, or hits a mons, right?

• 46:36Mark Sisson?

  Three million at least. And it was probably a number, I think we got up to like thirty four hundred on Alexa. You know what that is? Yeah. So Alexa ranks every, every website in the world, you know, three hundred and fifty million websites and we were thirty, thirty four hundred, something like that. Over the years, as more and more people have started blogging about the ancestral health space, or low carb, or keto, or whatever, paleo, now we have thousands of blogs. And so my traffic isn't, isn't growing anymore, it stays about steady. But that, I'm fine because there are more, now there's tens, 10x more people, or 100x more people looking for the information. And if they don't come to my site, but they come to somebody else's site to get that

• 47:18Mark Sisson?

  information, then my original mission, which was to affect the lives of 100 million people, I get to leverage what I started, and maybe claim a little bit of credit for other blogs getting into the space and doing what they do well. That sort of psychic income, I'm not deriving income from it, but I know that, that we're changing the way the world eats.

• 47:39Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:40Mark Sisson?

  And however we do it, however we can leverage that, I don't need to be the one guy who touched 100 million people, I just want to be responsible for having, you know, impacted enough people that it trickle down.

• 47:53Lewis Howes?

  When you have the big success, the big hit, 200 million at age 65, 65, 66, do you think to yourself, this is the biggest success I'll ever have, and my life is over? Essentially, like, do you have this high and then think, okay, now life is over, in a sense, or do you think to yourself, how can I make this bigger? Or do you say to yourself, I want to enjoy life now?

• 48:17Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, all of that. So I want to enjoy life now, and that's part of, you know, what we talked about earlier, is that even as an entrepreneur, you have to enjoy life.

• 48:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:26Mark Sisson?

  Like, people say, well, I'll enjoy life when I have, you know, when I'm successful in my business. I'm like, dude, that's the classic thing about working, burning the candle at both ends, foregoing your kids' little league games so you can get work done, or you're out of town, and then when you're like, you know, 20 years down the road, and you finally have your payday, your kids hate you, your wife left you, you're miserable, and now you spend the rest of your life trying to-

• 48:51Lewis Howes?

  To make up for your mistakes.

• 48:52Mark Sisson?

  To make up for that stuff. That's bullshit. I mean, the reason we do this is to live life now, and to have fun now, right? And so, the advice I give young people is just don't get yourself into debt, don't get into deep debt and trouble. Pay the bills. It doesn't matter today if you make forty thousand a year or a hundred and forty thousand a year. You're probably not going to save much, so just invest in yourself. You know, and invest in, if you're, if you're that entrepreneurial person. Invest in yourself, take the courses, get a coach. You know, figure out ways in which you can always be creating. That's one of my big things. You know, we talk about the mantra that people say, you know, always be selling, you know.

• 49:33Mark Sisson?

  But I'm saying always be creating, like always have something in your mind that you're working toward. Humans are by nature, we're, that is what separates us from most animals is that we're creative. And we're, you know, art is a thing that we invented, probably one of the first things we invented. Mm-hmm. Hey dude, I see you caught three fish and you, you know, we don't have refrigeration. I know you can only eat one of them. Um, how about you give me one of your fish and I will give you this beautiful beaded necklace that I made and you can wear it around and show. That was the start of commerce. It was about art and it was about creativity and it was about figuring out ways in which, you know, we take our superpower, whether it's, you know, making, making moccasins or making bows and arrows to sell to other people who would then hunt and give you the pelts.

• 50:15Mark Sisson?

  You know, all this stuff became creativity was the outlet that, that generated commerce and created what we have today. And so when Steve Jobs figures out, you know, the original computer with, with Wozniak, it's just art. It's just a form of art. They're making available to other people and you trade the efforts of your labor to have some of that art so you can play around with that. So when I say always be creating, it's like always be thinking of, of ways in which, not just to invent stuff, that's, that's only part of it. You know, be, be journaling, be blogging, be podcasting, be creative on Instagram. Do, you know, do all those things that are an expression of who you are and you'll find out what your superpower is. Yeah. Creating.

• 50:59Mark Sisson?

  Do you have a process for creating on a daily basis for yourself or is it just? It's freeing up your mind, man. Yeah. My, my best creating used to come when I was running. So I was, when I was a runner, I would do fifteen, twenty mile runs up in the hills here in the heat. A lot of time to think. Alone. And it was a lot of time to think, but I had my best ideas. The, the biggest frustration I had was I'd have these amazing ideas up there and then I couldn't remember half of them when I got back down because I didn't have a recorder or whatever with me. I do a lot of stand-up paddling alone. Same thing. I'm out there paddling and all of a sudden I'm in the water, nature, and my mind is a, you know, is an open book and then something comes in. And it's, and it's, I didn't force it, I didn't try it, but because I didn't have my mind

• 51:44Mark Sisson?

  filled with other crap that I had to, like, I gotta do this and I gotta do that and I, I just was open to it. I've had some of my best, my best creative moments doing that. Books, I've written books, literally, uh, running. I mean, I've come up with book concepts and then, and then really kind of fill them in with those sorts of moments.

• 52:04Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, powerful. Knowing everything you know now, would you change anything, you know, in the last thirty, forty years?

• 52:10Mark Sisson?

  I, I can't. I mean, it's perfect. Everything is perfect. You know, the heartbreak and the pain and the misery is all perfect. When I started my supplement company, I was, I, I said I was forty-seven, I think I was, um, I was forty, forty-one or forty-two. The forty-seven number is big in my mind because that's the year I gave up grains.

• 52:33Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 52:33Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. So, my main message about eating right and the whole concept behind the Primal Blueprint and emulating, you know, sort of an ancestral eating pattern and movement pattern, it all came to fruition in, in, when I was forty-seven years old because from fourteen to forty-seven, I was miserable. I was in pain most of my life with

• 52:56Lewis Howes?

  Inflammation.

• 52:57Mark Sisson?

  gastrointestinal pain. I had IBS. I had IBS, I had, I would wake up with, um, you know, horrible gut pain every morning of my life and I couldn't figure out what it was. And when I finally gave up grains, it was that easy. It just kinda went away, right? So, that revelation for me, that, that I didn't have to be miserable all the time and that I could be, you know, I could, I could actually wake up and feel Interested in what's going on in the world and focus on what I had to focus on was was a life-changing time for me. So, yeah.

• 53:34Lewis Howes?

  Powerful. I love this.

• 53:37Mark Sisson?

  My point being, I wouldn't change that.

• 53:39Lewis Howes?

  You want to change the misery?

• 53:41Mark Sisson?

  Because, because it was so, such a profound shift for me that it enabled me to write the Primal Blueprint, to do March Daily Apple, to do all these things. It became a much more user-friendly way of looking at accessing health. It became a much more universally applicable technology, if you will, on how to, how to live a healthy life. And until that time, I was writing about eating well and I was writing about cutting out fats and cutting out sugar and all the stuff that we wrote about for the longest time. But it wasn't until I got to that point, the whole veil lifted off and I, oh Jesus, this is,

• 54:24Mark Sisson?

  now I understand what my mission in life is. And that's, so when I say, tell all my kids, you know, I didn't know what I wanted to be until I was 47. That's the, that's the point at which that happened.

• 54:35Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 54:36Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Lewis Howes?

  And also you could, because you, you suffered so much with that pain, you could then, you realize you wanted to help a lot of people who are suffering.

• 54:44Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Lewis Howes?

  I don't want other people to feel this way. I've got the solutions now. I want to teach this to them.

• 54:49Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Lewis Howes?

  It's powerful. This is called the three truths. I think I asked you this last time. I think you were on like three years ago, probably.

• 54:55Mark Sisson?

  Wow.

• 54:56Lewis Howes?

  Do you think it was two, three years ago?

• 54:57Mark Sisson?

  Maybe three years ago, yeah.

• 54:58Lewis Howes?

  Maybe three years ago. So I'm not sure if you answered this question, but I'll ask it again. It's called the three truths. Imagine it's your last day on earth.

• 55:09Mark Sisson?

  Yep.

• 55:09Lewis Howes?

  You get to pick the day in the future. You can live as long as you want, but eventually you got to pick the day. All the anti-aging techniques and strategies you figured out, the eating healthy.

• 55:18Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Lewis Howes?

  At some point it fades.

• 55:20Mark Sisson?

  Yep.

• 55:20Lewis Howes?

  And you gotta go. But if you could, and unfortunately you have to take all the information you've written and wrote about and spoken about and done videos on and courses and training. You gotta take it with you. So no one has access to your content anymore. But you could leave behind three ideas, three lessons for the world. That would be kind of your guide to humanity. What would you say are those three lessons or three truths?

• 55:45Mark Sisson?

  Wow, you didn't ask me this last time.

• 55:48Lewis Howes?

  Okay, good.

• 55:48Mark Sisson?

  The three truths. I want it to be simple, so I would say, you know, diet is huge in accessing not only good health, but energy and positive mood. So that's number one. I know that's a very generic sort of thing. Number two, I would say that everything is perfect. There are no, looking back on your life, there are no real mistakes because as long as you were willing to learn from everything to get to where you are today, everything ultimately winds up being perfect and happening at just the right time for you.

• 56:28Mark Sisson?

  Number three, and in that same light, everything will be okay. And that nothing, no thought that you have about the future today is benefiting you in any way if you don't appreciate the moment you're in right now.

• 56:48Lewis Howes?

  I like that one. What's one that causes anxiety and stress?

• 56:53Mark Sisson?

  We live our lives so either tied to regretting what we did in the past or fearing what's going to happen in the future that we miss out on the, you know, on the present.

• 57:05Lewis Howes?

  The only thing that matters is now. What is something we can do to support you? What's the thing you're most excited about? You sold this company, you're still working with the company to develop more products and make sure it continues to take off. How can we follow you right now?

• 57:19Mark Sisson?

  So you can still follow Mark's Daily Apple. I'm still writing something.

• 57:25Mark Sisson?

  I think fairly interesting and exploring exploring new avenues every day at marksdailyapple.com, primalkitchen.com for the food company. Find out about the food products. And then, you know, for me, where I'm at in my life right now, your supporting me is is more a factor of you supporting your people with discontinued great information. Like, I just want to see, we're in a tough spot in this country right now. You know, I would, I have a real soft spot in my heart for millennials. I remember being, you know, in those 20s and 30s and thinking, what, you know, what is my life gonna gonna look like?

• 58:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Mark Sisson?

  You know, and I think guys like you who are, you know, giving some some guideposts along the way, that's what I want to see. I want to see more people involved in other people's lives with support and encouragement and not putting people down and, you know, sort of like, you know, off on their own. Because we're all in this together.

• 58:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. I love it.

• 58:29Mark Sisson?

  Cool.

• 58:30Lewis Howes?

  I love it. Where do you hang out on social media the most?

• 58:33Mark Sisson?

  Marxist and Primal is Instagram, my Instagram account.

• 58:36Lewis Howes?

  You spend time on there a little bit every now and then?

• 58:37Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah. I try to edit myself more than I probably should. No more shirtless, you know, pictures on there. But I try to, whenever I have something.

• 58:46Lewis Howes?

  Paddle boarding?

• 58:46Mark Sisson?

  Paddle boarding, for sure.

• 58:47Lewis Howes?

  You used to have some great photos of you running down the beach and

• 58:50Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 58:50Lewis Howes?

  carrying big rocks and all these kind of things.

• 58:52Mark Sisson?

  I guess I'll have to start.

• 58:53Lewis Howes?

  You gotta get back in there.

• 58:54Mark Sisson?

  All right.

• 58:54Lewis Howes?

  People are like that.

• 58:55Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, cool.

• 58:55Lewis Howes?

  If you're inspired, how old are you right now?

• 58:57Mark Sisson?

  I'll be 66 in July.

• 58:59Lewis Howes?

  66. You gotta show people the six pack of what's possible.

• 59:01Mark Sisson?

  I know.

• 59:02Lewis Howes?

  Keep inspiring.

• 59:03Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 59:03Lewis Howes?

  So make sure we follow you there. Get your products, primalkitchen.com. Check out the blog, marksdailyapple.

• 59:09Mark Sisson?

  If you're a, you know, if you want to be a health coach, I mean, Primal Health Coach Institute, the Primal Health Coach Institute is where we, you can find out about this program that, basically, I took all my information in my head and I uploaded it to this website. And now you can do what I do in coaching people.

• 59:24Lewis Howes?

  To be a coach.

• 59:25Mark Sisson?

  Health coach.

• 59:26Lewis Howes?

  You teach people the principles of how to be a holistic health coach like you and then how to get clients from them as well.

• 59:33Mark Sisson?

  Exactly.

• 59:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And run your own business.

• 59:35Mark Sisson?

  Exactly.

• 59:35Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 59:35Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 59:36Lewis Howes?

  Primalhealthcoachinstitute.com.

• 59:38Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 59:39Lewis Howes?

  Perfect. I want to acknowledge you, Mark, for Being an inspiration to so many people because you continue to pivot and pivot and learn and have little success and then failure and a little more success and continue to evolve and you didn't get stuck in one zone. And that's what I think is really inspiring is that someone at 61 can launch something and then sell it for a couple hundred million dollars in your 60s.

• 1:00:04Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Lewis Howes?

  You're like the KFC of healthy, of healthy living.

• 1:00:07Mark Sisson?

  Okay.

• 1:00:08Lewis Howes?

  Right, right? Wasn't Colonel Sanders?

• 1:00:10Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, he was in his 60s, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:11Lewis Howes?

  So you're the healthier version of that.

• 1:00:13Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Lewis Howes?

  And you're showing us all what's possible at any age. And the thing I love about you is you're just getting started now.

• 1:00:20Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, I feel like that. I really feel like that.

• 1:00:22Lewis Howes?

  Okay, I did this thing, but now I really want to get started. Now that you have some resources.

• 1:00:26Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Lewis Howes?

  On a bigger scale.

• 1:00:27Mark Sisson?

  I think, I think that's important, that it's my obligation to keep going.

• 1:00:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you're not like, okay, I'm done, I can retire. You're like, now I can really invest in bigger ideas.

• 1:00:35Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Lewis Howes?

  To make more change.

• 1:00:37Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Lewis Howes?

  And that's what I love about you, so I'm really inspired by everything. My final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:00:43Mark Sisson?

  Oh, my definition of greatness? In my world, it's having people better off for your having touched their lives. Full stop.

• 1:00:53Lewis Howes?

  There you go, Mark Sisson. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you, man.

• 1:00:56Mark Sisson?

  Thank you.

• 1:01:01Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed this one. I hope it gave you insights, clarity, wisdom, strategies, skills, tools, everything you need to really help you gain more peace in your heart, to optimize your personal brand, to know that it's okay to pivot a dozen or two dozen times until you're in the right place to get that right thing. You might be in a place right now that you don't love, but it's generating a skill set for you for something five, 10, 20 years from now. And I learned that lesson from Mark in this interview today. Be a champion for a friend of yours today by just sending them this link, lewishouse.com/827

• 1:01:42Lewis Howes?

  or wherever you're listening to this podcast, go to your podcast app, copy and place the link and text a friend or two friends right now this link, who you think this could help them improve their life with this incredible resource. Posted on your social media would mean a world to me to help spread the message of greatness, to help impact more people's lives. Just take the link, LewisHowes.com/827 and post it on Twitter, on Facebook, on your Instagram stories. Make sure to tag me and tag Mark Sisson as well, as I'm sure he'd love to know that you're listening to this and what you think. And George Bernard Shaw said, "Those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything."

• 1:02:26Lewis Howes?

  Boom. We've got to be willing to adapt and change our thought, change the way we believe about things, change our belief system to see what is capable for us moving forward. If you feel stuck in something in your life right now, it's a matter of thought. Changing the thought first to know what is possible. If you don't think something is possible, then you definitely will not create it. You must think something you've never thought in order to create something you've never done. That is the truth. It's time to step up our thoughts. It's time to be willing to change at all times because the only constant is change. I love you so very much. I hope to see you at Summit of Greatness as well

• 1:03:11Lewis Howes?

  coming up in less than a month and a half. Get your tickets at SummitOfGreatness.com. Let me know. Let's hug it out. High five. I'm excited to see you. I love you so very much. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.