AI is already better than doctors - The Next #64

Plus a plant opening, and a dangerous new bill

Hi there, and welcome to The Next - my take on health, wellness, and company building.

In the last few years I’ve founded 3 health brands (Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto, Surely non-alc wine). I’m now working on Truemed, which allows health and wellness brands to accept HSA/FSA funds. Previously, I worked in tech and had no experience in CPG, DTC, or any other 3-letter industries.

If you missed past episodes, I recommend checking out The Great American Poisoning, my manifesto on what’s going on with our chronic disease crisis. Otherwise, let’s dive in!

🆕 What’s new

Yesterday, Kettle & Fire opened our own production facility. This project has been in the works for 15 months, and is now the largest bone broth plant in the country.

Me + the team at yesterday’s ribbon cutting.

My brother and I started Kettle & Fire in 2015 to bring bone broth back into the American diet. I’d become obsessed with the idea that the American food system was poisonous, and believed there was a big opportunity to build a better food company. Nick had agreed to skip college to start a bone broth company together. Every few weeks, I would Venmo him $250 to cover food and gas money while we tried to figure this thing out.

When we started the company, our goal $10k/month in sales. For the first few months, I got a Shopify notification on my phone every single time Bone Broths Co sold one of our $16 cartons. Nick and I would excitedly text one another on days when sales were above $1000. Just yesterday, our revenue was more than 400x that.

To make our first batch of product, Nick and I cold-called 500+ manufacturers, begging them to make a product they’d never heard of, guaranteed by two brothers with no food experience. After striking out literally 500 times, Nick cold-emailed Mark Cuban asking for help. Mark Cuban then introduced us to the only company that agreed to work with us, a partner we worked with for many years as we scaled the business.

Americans are literally the sickest population of humans to ever walk the earth. In 100 years, people will look back and be shocked that people then got sick from the food they were eating. Our chronic disease crisis is the biggest problem in the country, and it all starts with our food system.

Fixing our food system requires building better food companies. Ones that make products that heal rather than harm, and that care about things like sourcing, nutrient density, and toxin load. Owning our own production facility gives us the ability to make better products and to do things just a bit differently than the rest of the food world. I’m so proud of the team and excited by this incredible milestone, and to further control our own destiny 🚀

💪 Health stuff

Let me tell you about a particularly insidious piece of legislation currently working its way through Georgia that should have every health-conscious person paying attention. Georgia lobbyists are pushing a law that would shield Bayer/Monsanto (the makers of glyphosate) from any harms that come from their products. The bill's argument is simple: companies should be able to trust the EPA's safety determinations and not face lawsuits for following federal guidelines.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable, right? If you follow the rules, you shouldn't get sued, say Bayer’s lobbyists.

There are a few reasons I don’t think this argument holds water.

First, we have regulatory capture. I think it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that our federal agencies are hugely captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate. We are living through The Great American Poisoning. We’ve seen time and time again how the federal government has failed to protect Americans’ health and has been captured by industry interests. Remember how long it took to admit cigarettes were killing people? Or trans fats: the FDA literally allowed companies to poison Americans for 50 years before doing anything about it. And don't even get me started on PFAS, which the EPA is *still* dragging its feet on despite overwhelming evidence of harm.

Second – and this is crucial – companies should be responsible for the damage their products cause, period.

If a company creates products that harm someone, they should have liability. Removing legal liability removes the fastest system of error correction we have in our environment. As David Deutsch has written about multiple times, a system of error correction is required for humanity to create knowledge. And in our current regulatory approach, lawsuits for harm (like the $10B+ ones that Bayer/Monsanto currently faces for glyphosate causing cancer) are the best tools we have to understand whether or not something is causing harm.

Without the threat of lawsuits, we'd still have doctors recommending cigarettes for stress relief. The tobacco master settlement agreement – which fundamentally changed how we think about smoking – only happened because companies faced massive liability. And here's the kicker: right up until that agreement was signed, regulators were still not aggressive about regulating cigarettes! It took the Attorney General (and threats of billions in lawsuits) for society to update its approach to tobacco regulation.

Today, the FDA allows 40,000+ chemicals into our food system that the EU bans, but companies still have liability. Without even the ability to sue companies whose products may be harmful, companies would have even fewer incentives to ensure their products are safe. And we’d be left with the same FDA that took 50 years to say that trans fats were bad as our only tool to stop the poisoning. That’s not just bad policy, but a moral failure.

The governor of Georgia needs to veto this bill immediately. We cannot allow companies to play this game where they create harmful products, lobby the regulators to look the other way, and again lobby the legislators to absolve them of responsibility when people get sick.

The fact that we're even having this conversation shows how far we've strayed from common sense. We are the sickest country in the world, and I guarantee you it’s not because companies have too much liability for the novel chemicals they introduce to our food system. This is how The Great American Poisoning continues – one sneaky piece of legislation at a time.

🤑 Biz stuff

Health is not found in the doctor’s office.

This is true today, and will be increasingly more true in the future. The chronic disease crisis is the biggest health challenge in the country, accounting for nearly 90% of all healthcare spend. A fundamental assumption of our healthcare system was that the average American was healthy, and when they occasionally got sick, they’d go to the doctor to get better.

Chronic conditions (obesity, heart disease, etc) are different. Many of these chronic conditions have a lot to do with lifestyle, and many lifestyle conditions are better addressed via consistent, regular touchpoints rather than a 15 minute conversation with your doctor once or twice per year.

The above is why I think AI is going to be massive in improving health. For those of you who haven’t seen, OpenAI’s new healthbench release massively outperforms doctors without the ability to use the models. The model, on its own, also slightly outperforms doctors who have access to the model.

That’s right. Already, we have AI models that are giving better advice than doctors. And this is something that will only improve.

This will be incredibly disruptive for the medical profession. Doctors today spend little time with patients, are often low-context, and are not equipped with the tools to recommend workouts or nutrition programs that can best address the chronic conditions most of their patients are struggling with. I’m very bullish on AI’s ability to help individuals get back to health, and excited by the pace at which AI is progressing in health.

😌 Dope stuff on the internet

Some of my favorite things since the last newsletter (note: I don’t get paid to recommend anything here):

• 📰 Article - This post on the case against the placebo effect has lived in my head rent-free since reading it. A fascinating argument: I want to dig into the studies a bit more, but the placebo effect feels like one of science’s holy cows. Would be wild if it were in fact not a real phenomenon!
  

• 📚 Book rec - If you’re looking for a great sci-fi read, I recently re-read Nexus and enjoyed it as much as ever. It describes a really wild future where brain-computer interfaces are common, and some of the things it would enable.
  

• ⌚ Cool product - This Momentous + Maui Nui Fuel product is awesome. Both companies are doing epic things: Maui Nui is both feeding their local community and saving the Maui ecosystem from invasive axis deer, while Momentous is one of the cleanest supplement brands out there (and one of only 2 that sell creatine not sourced from China). The Fuel product is great, and supports the work that Maui Nui is doing when you buy it - please check it out!
  

• 🎵 Music - This mix by Two Lanes is really something special. Enjoy!
  

• 🏀 Random - Some of my best days last year were spent at Edge Esmeralda. I’ll be going again this year for the entire month, and running the health track the first week!
  Would love to see a bunch of you there: last year, I met a ton of good folks through this newsletter, and it really is quite a fun and special event. If you want to skip the application portion, you can use this link (and use “gohealthy30” for 30% off tickets as well). It’s going to be a blast, and the first week will be a banger.
  

• 🔥Hot take - I’ll do a longer exploration of this in the future, but I am increasingly convinced that sugar is likely good for you. Not all kinds of sugar, and not all the time. But I’ve been reading more into Ray Peat and his theories of metabolism, and think that having a fair bit of fruit sugar, honey, etc are likely better for one’s metabolism and energy than never indulging. More to come here.
  

• 🙋‍♂️ Ask - If you’re a health company interested in running a small experimental trial (or sponsoring a track) at Edge Esmeralda, let me know. I’m working to design some health interventions where we can see efficacy from the start of the month to the end!

***

That’s all I got this month. A new plant, a glyphosate bill, and AI doctors saving us all - we certainly do live in an interesting timeline.

Catch you in 30!

• Justin