Chris Ashenden: Athletic Greens & The Beauty in Simplicity

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This episode is also brought to you by Morpheus, the world's first and only fitness intelligence platform built by coaches for coaches. Look, there is a ton of fitness and health data being collected on you and your clients, but are you leveraging it? And perhaps more importantly, are you saving yourself time and making more money because of it? Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can't until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's trainwithmorpheusmo r e-us.com. All right, we are live. Chris Ashenden. Welcome to the future of fitness, my friend. How are you doing?

Thank you, Eric. Thank you so much for having me, man. It's an honor and a privilege. Thank you for having me on your show.

Yeah, it's uh it's a great privilege. I've been, you know, like I was telling you pre-recording, I've been taking uh athletic greens daily uh for a while now. And uh I'm actually curious to educate myself a little bit more about what exactly is uh that I'm taking. I know it makes me feel good. I know it's a great habit, and we'll get into that. Um, and I also appreciate, I know you're coming from New Zealand and you've been traveling quite a bit lately. So uh making the time to come on the podcast uh is a uh is a great favor. So, all in all, thanks for coming on. And a great place to start, Chris, would just be like, man, give us your backstory, give us your origin story, how'd you get to be the founder of Athletic Greens and growing this uh monster company?

Well, Eric, thank you so much for having me. And thank you as well for being a customer. I I love the support and I'd love to hear your thoughts on on how we can do better. I really appreciate the support. And it's an honor to be on the show. I I'm a New Zealander. Um so I had the moniker kiwi for a long time um for being a native from New Zealand, and my whole life really has revolved around a passion around health and fitness or health and wellness and generally taking care of myself. And how did I come to be the founder and CEO of Athetic Greens? Is despite thinking I knew a hell of a lot about health, nutrition, and what constituted great nutrition and good supplementation and everything else, I was continually sick and sick with a degree of frequency of three or four upper respiratory tract infections a year that were kind of required antibiotics and just sort of trashed myself. So, long story short, um the reason I am the CM founder of this sort of product and company is ended up sick, um, had my sort of whole world shaken as related to how I thought I understand how all these pieces work. Um, when I went and did a ton of testing, hoping to get out of the whole uh the energy hole, the messed up GI hole, just generally feeling lackluster and not being as robust as I wanted to be. And um sort of ended up at a very, very expensive clinic man invested a staggering amount of money and time on trying to figure out what was going on. And what rapidly became clear was that I just wasn't absorbing nutrients properly, and there was all sorts of other stuff going on, but at its crux, uh that was the core of the problem, which was shocking to me because I thought I ate a great diet 90% of the time, and I was taking multivitamins left, right, and center, and yet I had um all sorts of micronutrient levels sort of in the eighth, twelfth, fifteenth percentile, um same for amino acid levels and all sorts of other things. And it took me back to square roots in terms of thinking back to sort of first principles or core principles around what is good nutrition, what is gut health. Back then, not many people were talking about it. Um, what would then constitute good supplementation if this is fun and good nutrition? These are the frameworks you want to apply. And the solution from this particular medical center was a hundred dollar a day customized to my blood biochemistry supplement regime, which I very quickly got sick of and went looking for a better way. And the better way was talking to a whole ton of really smart people and basically figuring out how do I just completely remove the friction from covering my nutritional bases every day in a way that makes sense and is insanely efficacious, insanely comprehensive, um, is simple and just makes my life easy. I I was customer number one. And so, how did I end up becoming CO and Founder Man? I went looking for a solution to my own problem. Um, the problem that ultimately sort of got birthed out of that, um sorry, the solution because I got birthed out of that is effectively Athletic Greens and being customer number one, I have a huge amount of passion. Uh, probably not surprisingly for for this product, this problem, and how we solve it. And it's been an honor and a privilege to build a business around baking in this key daily nutritional habit and helping powering the lives of of so many awesome people who like you. I get to enjoy meeting all over the world. It's really cool.

Yeah, man. That's a great story. When did you actually start Athletic Greens? When was the company founded?

I founded 2009. We had a lot of iterative stuff right through 2009. 2010 uh inventory was sort of on its way, landed in the US. There was soft launch through the course of 2010. I had a lot of learnings, a lot of pain, a lot of punches in the face, uh, entrepreneurially and sort of figuring things out, and a effective hard launch 2011. And from the time when we launched until now, um, it's been a heck of a journey and a lot of learnings, but I mean also on terms of people sort of talking like, ah, your product's not not new, and we're like, this is the 50-second iteration that we're running on right now of that um core product, and like we we continue to love the process of just getting better and better.

Would you um I I want to get back, I want to remember to circle back to some of the punches you took in the face because I think those are always learning experiences for our audience. But would would you classify this as a um supplement company? Or how how would you what's the classification of it?

Yeah, so I don't really, I mean, to the sense that uh the way supplement is used and sort of the stigma that there's so many cowboys, there's so many sort of what's the right way? There's a general lack of trust to a large extent of a lot of operators in the supplement space, and most of it for good reason. There are a lot of cowboys out there, um, there's a lot of absolute rubbish in the system. Most of the entire world is around optimizing dollars per square inch of a retailer shelf space, not a customer outcome, and there's all sorts of Mickey Mouse stuff that goes on. There's also some good high-quality companies that do what they say they're gonna do, and they tend to stand out as being exactly that over a period of time. So I consider myself to be um like the founder of a of a nutrition business, but it's really baked in around health ownership and it's tied to this key nutritional habit, which is really set up to help people succeed in life, and it's sort of that foundational nutrition approach as opposed to um sort of other dynamics that you could look at. So, how would I look at it, man? Um, health ownership business or an empowerment business is effectively what what lights me up and what I'm passionate about and the sphere where we play is this area of sort of foundational nutrition.

Yeah, I think it's great, man. So if you could you share, I mean, I'm I'm always curious, like in that period between 2009 and 2011, you say you took some punches in the face. What what what what were one of the big ones that you took and how did it kind of how did you get out of it?

So there there were a couple. So I I had a health challenge 2008 when and basically building ethletic rents was a huge part of how I came out of that. My former business disappeared in a global financial crisis. I ended up facing bankruptcy, litigation, um lost my parents' life savings, lost their house, uh, lost a whole bunch of investor money. So I promised I'd get it back, um, launched this business as sort of my life passion business, um, had that partnership sort of dissolve, you know, for logical reasons, not no bad blood now, but just sort of had that in. Um faced a lot of depression, um, really struggled to figure out how to get the business to work in the in the early phase, and dug myself out of both a psychological sort of black hole, um a financial black hole, um, and then a like how do I bid this, build this business sort of out of that. And that led in the early days to this sort of ethos and a mantra. Um, I I remember sitting down with my sisters in 2010 and them sitting me down and saying, look, you're you're a very gregarious guy and you love people and they tend to love you, and people who don't know you won't even notice, but we notice, and we we think you're depressed, you're just not the same, you're not the same talkative guy. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs and in particular um you know, founders who try to go this alone, which is a big mistake, um, in in many ways, to think you need to reinvent the wheel. But just I think a lot of people face um quite difficult psychological challenges at different parts of their lives. And I think to the extent that you know, as humans, we should experience struggle. There's a lot of sense of achievement and reward and growth that happens, it comes through uh struggle. But I do not believe we should experience suffering on a prolonged basis. You might have short-term suffering for the death of a loved one or something else, but I do not believe we should live in some dynamic of suffering. So one of the things I was very passionate about and still am is how you can apply a lot of the principles of taking ownership of your own health, which obviously the people who listen to this podcast who are working in um the health and fitness industry, they're all about that taking ownership of that dynamic. You can do that in other areas of your life as well. And to the extent that um you utilize that to drive yourself towards a life that is um rewarding, has purpose, uh, like makes you happy, uh yeah, I'm hugely passionate about that. And I kind of did it to myself. So a lot of that journey um was eating humble pie around how do you start a business and and grow it in a new industry and a new category and a new segment and a new business model. But also it was really identifying what are the things that truly make me happy in life, and how do I be very rigorous and how I invest towards those. And some of those do include struggle, like it was um pretty tough. Like it is always tough to launch a bit of business from scratch and figure out how to build it up and all the trials and tribulations. But a lot of that journey um led me to in the early days I had this mantra 100% focus on happiness, and that was on on the label for the product, on the website, on every email I sent, and it was born out of that desire to do exactly that. And it actually ended up getting a little bit confusing, I think, for some people. So we no longer have it um on our product packaging. But that was sort of the ethos that I lived by then, it's the ethos I live by now. And to the extent that I think um, you know, that I I'm definitely not the only entrepreneur who's gone through dark times, but I I I wish that I'd been more aware of how quickly you want to dig yourself out if you start to go into any kind of health or psychological spiral, and how a lot of sort of key daily habits and rituals can really help keep you um up and out of that if you do have a tendency to get in there, or times do get pretty tough. And also um, you know, seek help if you are in this world and you are struggling, and there are plenty of people you can chat to who can help you out. So long story short, man, I had punches in the face all over the place, was very excited to learn how to grow the business, and um ended up pushing me with an extreme clarity of focus around um you know, growing growing this business. And once I kind of came out of the psychological deep hole that I I kind of mentioned and was sort of had this sort of really, really laser-like clarity and focus around what I wanted to do, what I wanted to build, the the investment I wanted to make to build something special, and the desire I had to invest my time. Sort of I had these sort of three dynamics, which I I believe health, you got a ticket, like this is like the number one, and that that has the happiness component. Um two would be the key relationships and your connection with other humans that truly mattered to you, and then three would be investing your time with person, like sort of purpose and and meaning. So I'm very fortunate and I got to build a business the way I wanted to be built, which did all one, two, three of those things, and I feel very grateful for. But I will also be up front it was really hard at the beginning.

Yeah.

Well, um, I I appreciate you sharing that because it's important. I think people need to hear. I mean, I've it's interesting to me that you know, some of the most heartfelt responses or things I've heard from releasing episodes, you know, people who I don't even think would be listening to the show, like a grammar school friend's wife, right? Just caught in uh an episode or something like that. And then, you know, I get these, it's always the Episodes that people pretend and reply to the most are the ones about you know struggles with depression, anxiety, because it's so, you know, it's so easy for you know people like like yourself, a successful CEO and founder, right? Like comes on a show and talks about all these wonderful things that have happened, how he built this company over, you know, 12 year span and all these things. Well, well, no, there's a darkness to these things. And, you know, I also think when people say, you know, well, I want to be an entrepreneur, I am an entrepreneur, I think there's a price to pay for this kind of fancy name tag that you get to wear. And I I always want people to hear the the challenges along the way. So it's powerful and I I appreciate you sharing that. So let's move on for that. Um tell me about the product, man. Like when I'm, I guess since I am a client, educate me. Like, what is what is it that I'm I'm doing every by taking this first thing in the morning, which I do, right, with a couple other supplements and a little bit, you know, vitamin D, C, and zinc. Uh, what what am I, what are the benefits that I'm getting every morning by taking this?

So it's a good question. So if you consider that, what are some of the nutritional dynamics and and fundamentals? And and I'm sure most of your listeners will understand the macronutrient dynamic, and you start to consider well, what starts to happen then around micronutrients, some of the other dynamics of nutrition. And to the extent that our modern lifestyle, let alone our modern food choices, um, let alone sort of a lot of the food quality that ends up coming in to sort of how we live. And most people these days, you'd sit there and say, are running with some degree of support required, either because they're not getting enough of the good nutrition like inside their mouth, or they're not absorbing it properly, or your body's not really using um the nutrition or ultimately functioning in any kind of capacity quite the way it should be. So, what athletic grains is, man, is a really staggering, comprehensive bolus of nutrition designed to address those one, two, three things. So, one, get the nutrition and in into your mouth. Two, make sure that you absorb it as much as possible, and that to the extent that you can support your gut, you're actually gonna move all sorts of needles in your life around health and happiness, but also improve your ability to sort of absorb other nutrients you eat as well. And then, okay, this is sort of this um dynamic of getting nutrition in. Now, where else can we provide support to the body and on a daily basis, knowing that this is a real foundational product where we're not looking to treat people who have some crazy medical condition that needs hyperdosing of this, that, or the other? This is designed to be a really core key nutritional habit that just like you do it and bake it into your sort of morning ritual or dynamic is a habit that people have in a place that it sits in their day. And it just gives them this beautiful tick that they have done something every day around ingesting a staggering sort of comprehensive array that things that are really good for you, making sure your body's absorbing them, and then give your body and many of your body's systems a gentle daily caress to keep things moving in in the right direction. And I think that habit, compounded over time, is a key nutritional habit, can be very, very powerful. And like most of the dynamics we mentioned before, like there are no kind of health hacks or or anything else. Um but the extent to which I love that it is both simple and effective and one and done. I I am a huge fan of simplicity. Yeah, so we drive at those three things basically. Um comprehensive, tick those one, two, three nutrition dynamics, and then simple, and that's the product. And because there's a lot in there, um, and that would sort of be 16 to 20 capsules, and I prefer the absorption dynamics of a drink. Um, it's it's in a drink. So it's uh it's a powdered beverage, you mix one scoop. That scoop has more than 75 ingredients, it has easily more than eight or nine different products if you wanted to carve them out in different products effectively in one, and it's had 52 iterations. Um, so you basically put it into a glass, mix it up, and and smash it, and you're off. Like that's that's that box ticked. And to the extent that you know a lot of people like um how comprehensive it is, a lot of people love how simple and efficacious it is. We've been very fortunate to get the support of people like yourself, man. Um huge support from the health and fitness community, and those really in touch with both their bodies and taking ownership of their own health. And I'm staggeringly grateful um for that support. But that's what the product is, that's what it does, that's kind of how it's designed to sort of bacon and sit in your day. And that's what we're about, man, that that health and nutritional empowerment.

Yeah, I do you you um you keep seeing this phrase that I absolutely adore uh owner taking ownership of your own health. It's it's like uh I don't know how it is in New Zealand or you know, all the places that you've lived and traveled, but here in the United States, it's a big problem, man. Like people just, you know, there's so many people who during this pandemic show would have rather just stayed inside, um you know, continue their normal habits and just waited for a vaccine, right? Meanwhile, there was very little conversation in the society as a whole about, well, how do we boost our immune systems? What can we be doing naturally? What, you know, what role does, I mean, gyms got shut down. It's horrible, right? Like this is the one place that people probably should be going um just to become more robust as a human. Uh what have you seen over, I mean, because you've been focusing on now for you know really 12 knot years, if not longer. Have you seen a positive trend in people taking more ownership of of their health? Or what where do you where do you see that going?

Yeah, and you you you hit the nail on the head, man. The dynamic, the ability to drive those daily habits, rituals, and other pieces that make you more robust. I mean, to the extent that what is fitness, it's more capacity to do what you want to do in life. And in a given sport that might be performance weighted, and someone might be longevity weighted or whatever. But the dynamic man, I have seen a huge lift in people um seeking to effectively take more ownership of their own health and and also their own happiness. And I think what are the silver linings around um this COVID experience, this lockdown experience is, and I know you're very positive about this too, man, and some of the great stuff I've seen you put out there in content is that people actually live with purpose. And what I think we've seen is not only people wanting to put in more towards taking ownership of their own health, I'm sure there is a staggering proportion of the population who I just love to see bite off this apple and and start chewing and go for it. But I I think a lot more people are already taking a lot more responsibility and ownership of their own of their own health and also thinking through hang on a minute. I just went and sat at home for this staggering period of time, and I had a lot of time thinking about what actually makes me happy in life. And I think what's been fascinating, particularly as we interview various um, you know, new hires and job people with you know, candidates for new jobs and other things, just how many people have had their own sort of thinking paradigm and what what makes them happy, what do they want to invest their time in, and how many people want to invest their time with purpose and meaning. And for many people, that means I want to be part of a business that's doing things to help people or leave an impact or not be selling a widget like in a cubicle. And I I think that's actually been very positive, man, in terms of that silver lining dynamic.

Yeah, that's cool. I love that, man. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the having been in the fitness industry for a while, too, it's like we we do tend to overcomplicate things as fitness professionals over times. Maybe that's just to uh I don't know, uh make our industry more important in the eye of the consumer. But really, like if it comes down to it, we can do so much if we can just help people install habits. Like, you know, if I can take my athletic greens in the morning, uh sleep eight eight solid hours or more every night, uh, move for 30 minutes a day, right? If I could just have those three habits, I'm gonna be doing pretty darn good, right? That's right. That's right. What I'm curious with your with for you personally, Chris, like what are some of the health habits that you've established in your life?

Well, it's just like you, and and we discussed this earlier. Like, I I think most health uh is like running a great business. It's do the basics well and consistently. And to the extent that like you said, eight or nine hours sleep, get the movement in. Um you know, just make sure that these pieces are just sitting in someone's day as part of what they're doing. And I think you and I both know in the in the world of say personal trainers that the variance between a okay trainer and a great trainer is staggering, and there's far more that are in the okay realm than in the great. And mainly the difference is those who want to keep learning and getting better and understanding, and that's your audience, right? These are ones who are trying to improve. But even the mediocre trainers can actually really help change people's lives because they bake in the turn up and train habit for people, and I think that consistency piece is is huge. So, right, I'm obsessed with sleep. Uh, I am obsessed with movement and exercise. I recently in COVID, like I tend to live in the Americas most of the year and bounce around a lot, but always the time zone. And then in November I went back to New Zealand and ended up staying there for way longer than I had originally anticipated. And I just found the getting up and and sort of the loss of my daily habit of get up, move, get up, move is the first thing I did every day. Um, and sure, it's the same number of hours a day I'm really working, and then you sort of have this time at the end of your day. But I I really struggled with the fact that I hadn't had this great input for myself every day, which I'm so used to, like many, many, many years of my life, just used to the wake up, grab a bottle of water, go for a walk, or go train or something. And I found it uh quite a big psychological change, just wake up, sit down, not move for um eight to ten hours, depending on the day, and then go do something. I I felt very, very different psychologically, and I've realized actually you're better off to have the habit wherever you can put it if you don't have a choice. And but it also makes sure that wherever you can, uh you have these habits that can really help you and lift you in a place where like they do the most lifting for you, which for me is generally moving first thing in the morning and exposure to light. So, what are the big ones? I love the nutrition, um, the sleep, the movement. I I like um light and sun exposure, particularly early in the day, um a lot of outdoor light on my eyes and love getting the my skin in the sun for an incremental dose of um vitamin D for want of a better term, although there's a hell of a more to it than that. And then the community piece, man, the socializing the care relationships uh dynamic. So if I kind of do those main things every day and very consistently, you know, most of life is beautiful.

Yeah, that's great, man. I love it. So uh if we could relate this to business, right? What what when you look at it the same way because I know you do, what business habits uh have you established that you know have provided long-term success, right? I mean, we we talked about all the challenges you had early on, and even since you know your hard launch in 2011, it's been a decade, right? So that's a lot of days uh putting in the time, right? Consistently showing up. But how are you showing up and what are some of the better business habits that our audience can learn from?

Yeah, and and there's no magic. Um there's no secret, right? Well, come on, Chris. Give us some secrets. Come on, man. There's there's no sort of simple health hack or I mean, and you know, I aren't particular fans of the hack. We we know it's turning up the consistency and making sure those habits are being laid on top of each other. So for any given business model or any given business dynamic, you're gonna have a couple of things that are the really most important things that you have to get right to win with your customer as a business in your business model. And strategy really is figuring out at any given time, even for a much bigger business, what are those few things that we are going to focus really focus on so that allows us to say no to these thousand other things that we could do? And I'm an essentialist man, I love the essentialism dynamic. I've never read uh Greg McCowan's book, it's it's awesome. It is. And yeah, it is, and it's the same principle for business. So, in your business, what are the most important things? Now, what is the most control you have uh in your business to make sure you actually execute on that? And it is once you've identified what it is, guess where it goes in your calendar. Well, I'd actually actually get most people who I ever do an advisory work to to first put in their health, their key relationships and those inputs on their calendar. Um, lunch dates with the wife, knocking off earlier to go see your kids, um, play sport, um, the whatever time of day you want to do your your movement. Like if you want to meditate, that goes in there. Like put those in there first and stick to them. And then it's what I call the deep work. And that deep work dynamic is a very focused period of time where you have specifically turned off all possible distractions. And your job in that deep work time is to move the needle on that one or two things that you actually have to win, um, which, if you do well, will kind of render nearly everything else for your business largely irrelevant. And to the extent that someone's a trainer and they already have a full book, you might actually have that that that that um that one thing is the upskilling dynamic, man, the learning, the education, the getting better. Um for those who do not, it might actually be figuring out how do they get their their brand, their name, their relationships, whatever kind of dynamic they're looking to sort of effectively fill their client book or client roster up and moving. And that may be the thing that they have to do first. And it can vary hugely depending by what someone's business is and what that looks like, but it's that ability to eliminate focus and then put that as the priority that you're actually working towards in your day, and voila, um do the do the basics well for your business.

Yeah, great, man. It's a great reminder. I mean, I think when we always think about business, we always think about well, you know, uh, am I creating the content? Am I uh making the sales calls? Am I, you know, all these things. But really, like I found that if I take care of all the other stuff first, the health, like you mentioned, the relationships, doing something that for me, it's always important to do something every day that reminds me of the freedom I've earned as a you know, a self-employed entrepreneur, business owner. Like I gotta do something that because otherwise I'm just I just bought myself a job, right? So I always have to remind myself of those things. And then everything else seems to take care of itself because your energy is better, you just have a better outlook. You just seem to be um more productive in your time. And uh, you know, I it's it's a it's an interesting mindset that we've had, we've earned, I don't know if it came from the industrial revolution of like, well, we have to work eight to five and we get an hour for lunch, right? It just doesn't really make sense anymore. And we can just discard that completely and look at like how can we set up our days for optimal, just positive output. Um, then what everything you said, if you look through that lens, makes an incredible amount of sense, man.

Um so and and and look, man, um it was the industrial revolution that set up, and to the extent that they're trying to control child labor dynamics at a 40-hour week got back then. And we're not living in that same world anymore. And you know, I I think uh different parts of your your life path and career, you may have different jobs that have very different dynamics on how you get to choose where and how you invest your time. And um, I don't think there's a world we people don't go through either different jobs working for someone else or and or, or more likely, and um when when or if they ever try to kick off something in a business or join a younger business where huge parts of their day uh they have no choice, they have to invest the time on shitty annoying things that are frustrating and don't light them up, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that daily input is to drive towards the outcome on the other side. Now, if that's your whole life, uh, I think that that's a very different story. But I agree with you, man. Um, productivity output over um sort of punching the clock in any kind of work dynamic that has a creative or a productivity bias, and which is nearly everything if someone's actually capable of working from home.

Chris, what drives you? Like what's the motivator? What's your what's your how do you know when you've when you've been successful? Well, what does that mean to you?

Right. So I'm I'm very fortunate that I get to um I like I I love Monday, right? I I love what I do, I love how we do it, I I love who we do it for, I love our customers, I love meeting people like you, I love bumping into people coming out of an elevator in a hotel in some random city, and they see my Fed at Greens cap and they go, Oh, hey man, I took that stuff and actually, you know, in that time in my life, I was going through this and that, and then this became this habit, and just sort of hear someone's story, that lights me up, gives me goosebumps. Um, did then, does now, does now talking about it. So I can say that because I get to choose um how I invest my time, that both ticks the box, the box of health, um, ticks the box of key relationships, because I I absolutely bake those in. I try to kidnap my parents and take them traveling every year. And if I kidnap, I I kidnap them from my sisters and their grandkids, and they always say give them back. Um, I've got amazing parents, I'm very grateful for them. And I get to invest my time with meaning and and purpose. I dude, I I'm already there. Um, like if I think that if people sit there and go, ah, if your success dynamic is gonna be, I will be happy when, I think the second someone puts that I will be happy when, they're gonna they're running into the likelihood of trouble. And I mean ultimately you can be quite unhappy with the struggle you have to overcome and yet have this huge sense of achievement on the other side and look back and go, that was extremely satisfying. I was actually surprisingly happy um that I had this clarity of focus and that I had to do this work and that I did the outcome. And I think that that's great, but not to be conflated with um, I'll be happy when I have achieved X. And typically that X is something material or some number, or um, I'm making 500 bucks a week, I'll be happy when I make a grand a week. And what do you know? That person typically, when they make a grand a week, they'll be going, I make a grand a week, I'll I'll be happy um when I make two grand a week. And I do believe that in any given part of the world there is sort of a a threshold where just actually having enough money to keep your head out of water and sort of a basic life, like sort of a basic ability to support sort of a reasonable quality of life. So sure, there is that dynamic, but I think most adults in the West go flying, particularly those listening to this podcast, will go flying past that very quickly. And I do not think um people will be happy when they get the bigger house, the bigger car, the bigger business, more income, or these other so-called trappings that I think some people can really mistake for for being success. And so to me, man, um that's my long-winded answer to what's basically a pretty simple question.

That was beautiful. I loved it. Uh, it motivated me. I mean, it's true. I uh, you know, we I think I was telling you we're building a home here in Montana. And, you know, I my wife is great. She keeps me grounded because the first thing I'm like, well, can we just why don't we just make the home bigger?

Right.

I'm like, hey, let's just make it a little, just a little bit bigger. And she's like, no. You know, she kept us to this discipline of having the small footprint. And I'm so glad now that's done because I realized, hey, we're just gonna have less shit, right? We're just gonna have less stuff. Um, because where would we put it? Uh, you know, our overall imprint is lower, you know, our expenditures are lower and everything. And it just gets us, you know, when you stay in trapments, I think that's what you you end up being owned by the things that you supposedly own. And that's yeah, I mean, then we're getting onto a philosophical tilt here that I probably wasn't intending on. But um I think what you said there was really powerful. I think people should maybe go back and and listen to it again because it's it really you you probably are happy. You have everything most likely to be you need to be happy right now. And uh that's that's kind of a cool thing. Um looking forward now, Chris, to to what you're doing, what what future plans? Do you have for athletic grains? I mean, how many employees? Where are you guys at now? How many employees? What is the size of the company?

Yeah, well, we don't really put out any. I mean, we're a private company, man. And we like being private and we we like sort of keeping that sort of dynamics close to our chests. But look, we to the extent that um I I love helping people. Um like I I love this world of empowering like what humans are capable of, um, helping people think through other parts of the life where they can take take ownership and drive towards a better outcome. I mean, these conversations light me up every time. And so what's the dynamic for me? Uh, mate, I love being in the role I am. If I like something collapses and my health disintegrates, or something causes me to lose um some element of I need to invest more time with my family because whatever. Um, you know, like I I would absolutely consider um doing something different, not sort of with the business as a whole, but my day-to-day role. But to the extent that right now I'm really let up by working with an amazing team, how I get to help people, um, building, building, building. You know, even the bad days are kind of good days, because even the days you sit there bang my head against the wall, which is almost always because I messed up about something. Um, like if I get far enough away, I look back and go, you know what, that time's great, man. Um yeah, that feeling in the moment was was not particularly great. So, anyway, the greater ambition exists, man, which is just to see what sort of dent can I put in the universe. Um, how can we really empower you know the lives of our existing customers and and other people and just keep trying to be sort of masters of our craft and the and the best at what we do and not sort of sit on our laurels by by any means, but continually work on innovating and growing. And I guess if you take it back to Maslov's hierarchy of needs, man, it's um if I tick the health box and I tick the relationship box, the key relationships, and then I have the ability to invest my time with purpose and meaning, I can also tick personal growth and contribution, then you have to argue that um I'm very much trying to build my own path towards self-realization. And to the extent that what I believe I'm doing now is exactly that, you got it. Um, if if that changes, um you know, I'll I'll let you know. I I I like simplicity and you know, the discussion that I think simple is beautiful. So where we go, man. Um gonna have as much fun growing this puppy and helping as many people as possible and just keep enjoying the process and and the journey, man. That's that's where we go.

Right on. I love it, man. Chris, if uh you know people listening to the show want to get in touch with you or learn more about athletic greens or learn about any kind of partnerships um that they could evolve with you guys uh at the consumer level, where where do you send them? Where do yeah, give us the goods, man?

Sure, man. Um so athleticgreens.com for all things athletic greens, and there's a contact piece there if anyone wants to get in touch with any of the the awesome people we have on our partnerships team, they can fire in through there. Uh I am on social, but very not active as yet in my own name at Chris Ashenden. Um, I sort of have this ambition to begin to push stuff out there and haven't decided exactly what that will look like, but there's some stuff coming there. So if someone goes to Twitter and like, wait a minute, there's there's nothing there yet. There's some stuff coming. But Chris Ashindon is where that is.

Right on. Uh thanks again, man. This has been an absolute pleasure. And uh yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Chris Ashington.

Thank you so much for having me, Eric. Pleasure was mine. Excuse me.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This was your host, Eric Malzone. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Futurist Minutes. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Catbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the featureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the feature of fitness. Have a great day.