The Supplement Industry Is Broken, Sports Cheating Is Rational, and Influence Is Misunderstood

Taylor (0:00)

Taylor, is the supplement industry going to die at some point? I want your take on the state of supplements.

Andrew (0:05)

Did you see my back and forth with Bill yesterday?

Taylor (0:08)

No, was it his comment about science?

Andrew (0:11)

Yeah, which is such a bizarre thing. This idea that now all of a sudden, science is the thing that the culture cares about. We have 180 Science was the antichrist like 20 minutes ago, after the COVID era. So I think that it is incredibly difficult to build a durable supplement business.

Taylor (0:30)

What do you mean by durable?

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Andrew (1:29)

That is going to last for a very long time.

Taylor (1:31)

Yeah.

Andrew (1:31)

And I think what ends up happening is it is just endless product expansion into the next trend that you have to be really good at. And it comes down to your capacity to build the next product category that someone cares a lot about and to establish more distribution because it is not about science creating a defensible CAC. There is no defensible CAC because there is no barrier to making claims.

This is the same thing I tell you.

Taylor (1:57)

So that's actually one of my questions. Do you think that the no barrier to making claims will be the case for forever? Or do you think at some point the FDA is going to come and say like, I think these are ghosts. There's so much money here.

Andrew (2:08)

You can't find them, the people making the claims. The black cat affiliates are ghosts. You'll never find them.

You'll find some that will get large enough that you'll get made an example of. But there is no barrier to entry and there's no value in the FTC chasing down some dropshipper making outrageous outlandish claims. As it gets concentrated and large enough, then you draft enough attention for it to be worth trying to stop you. But it's whack-a-mole. It's like trying to eliminate knockoffs on Amazon. It's like one goes down, another one pops up. And so there is no barrier to making claims. This is the same thing I tell agency owners about the value proposition of their service can't be like a thing that somebody else can just write on their website too. That is like an unprovable, indefensible statement. And we can all say things like the greatest copywriter ever.

If it's something you can just write out an ad, that's not a defensible position. Even if you spent $10 million researching your line to be true, if I can write the same line, the customer doesn't know the difference.

Taylor (3:11)

But if your phrase is the greatest copywriter ever, I'm going to assume that's not true because it's not that good of a copywriter. What if it's the greatest weight loss drug ever? I'm just being an idiot. I'm kidding.

Andrew (3:21)

And look at the GOP mark.

Taylor (3:24)

What about?

Andrew (3:25)

If you go on to TikTok right now, it is flooded with fake doctors, AI saying fake things about drugs that are not real. There's endless accounts that you can go find of fake AI doctors that are intended to look real to deceive people into believing there's a benefit in the thing that they are selling on the other end of it.

Taylor (3:43)

Yeah.

Andrew (3:44)

Like, I don't know how a definitive claim. And also, like, did AG1 and All It Science defend it from Gruns altering the form factor of the market?

Taylor (3:55)

No.

Andrew (3:55)

Like, it just endlessly changes over and over and over again. I'm also very dubious about how much anybody cares about science.

Taylor (4:03)

I think there's a question there, too, that just, like, I don't know, people's Gatorade sold a lot of Gatorade for a really long time, it's basically a supplement, right?