Justin Mares - The US Health Crisis

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. Stretch your research budget with flexible expert calls you can trust. At a fraction of the cost of traditional expert networks, Tegus customers pay only what an expert charges with zero markups and no confusing call credits, netting an average of 70% savings. Don't want to conduct a full hour call? Tegus offers the ability to schedule 30-minute meetings an offer you won't find anywhere else. And they don't stop there, with white glove custom sourcing for every project and robust compliance measures, including a dedicated 50-plus person analyst team that vets every call transcript, Tegus ensures your privacy and protection. As the industry innovator for qualitative insights, Tegus helps you find the right experts you need at a quality and speed that can be matched. For a limited time as a listener, you can trial Tegus for free by visiting tegus.co/patrick. Before we transition to the episode, I want to highlight the Founders Podcast, which is part of our Colossus Network. David Senra, who hosts Founders, has devoted his life to learning from history's greatest entrepreneurs, and every week he distills the lessons of a different founder. If you want an entry point, I highly recommend starting with episode 136 on Estee Lauder or episode 288 on Ralph Lauren.
I hosted David on Invest Like the Best last summer, and it's hard not to walk away insanely energized after listening to any episode with him. You can find a link to Founders and those episodes in the show notes of this conversation. You can also search all past transcripts on our website, joincolossus.com.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:57)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:29)
My guest this week is Justin Mares. Justin has built three consumer health-focused brands over the past decade. Every time I speak with him, he makes me reflect on my own health and the state of our health more broadly. This conversation is no different. As Justin puts it, we're in a health crisis that could ultimately bankrupt our country. We talk about the inputs, incentives and potential solutions related to that crisis and then move into his experiences building and investing in consumer brands. We finish with a fascinating discussion on why it's more common to see repeat founders these days. Please enjoy my great conversation with Justin Mares.
I know we're gonna talk a lot about the US health system. Maybe the right thing is a framing because we all live in this system and probably haven't thought too much about it or take it for granted. And I think there's some huge underlying problems that trace back maybe 50, 60 years.
Could you begin by just giving what you think is the cleanest frame of the overall problem as you see it having built multiple businesses kind of in and around this space?

**Justin Mares** (3:28)
I think the core underlying thing that is a massive problem is just that if you look back 50, 60 years ago, chronic disease was basically like not a thing.
And it existed in small ways, but it was not 20% of GDP, kids 40 to 50% of them are diabetic or pre-diabetic. It was not like the explosion in chronic illness that we see today across cancer, obesity, infertility, mental depression, all this sort of thing. So to me, I think the biggest question I think exists in the US right now is what is going on with the health of our population and how over the last 50 years, has it taken such a nosedive and gotten to such a toxic place that I think is literally gonna threaten the competitiveness of the country?

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:10)
How would that last piece come to fruition like in a dystopian situation? What would it take for health outcomes or average health status of Americans to be so bad that it actually affected our competitiveness? That seems pretty intense.