YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Sisson

lines on the record: 99
first: 2024-03-11
most recent: 2024-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So by then, I was up to probably 20,000 regular to 30,000 regular readers a day and maybe a million to two million uniques a month.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely That led to my creating a life way, a template for living, that included dietary implications, but also addressed sleep and sun exposure and movement and play and using your brain. So I decided to write a book, which I called the Primal Blueprint, and that came out in 2009 and was an immediate big seller. Now, when I say immediate big seller, I couldn't find a publisher for it. So I self-published it.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I did, and it transformed my life. My IBS went away, my gastroesophageal reflux went away, and it was like a light bulb went on.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, after my 2005 experience with producing the TV show and being under incredible amount of stress and having horrible gastric issues, IBS, which had been with me since I was 14, but now I'm 47 and it's even getting worse or whatever age I was. I was writing a lot about grains, and I started to think maybe grains are kind of not good for your health. Maybe humans are not evolved to handle the tightly wound proteins that are ingrains, the gluten, the gliadins, the zynes, all of these proteins that are in corn and wheat, and so on. So my wife just one day she's like, Mark, you're writing about all this stuff about how bad grains are. Why don't you just do 30 days of not being on grains?”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I started writing about the Paleo diet, and I called my own particular version the primal blueprint. But I was writing about the Paleo diet as one of the first guys to do that. And there had been a book written a few years earlier by Lauren Cordain called The Paleo Diet. But I was really starting to write about the lifestyle. And apparently I wrote enough compelling content that people started saying, look, man, you should write a book about this. This is, you know, like, I love your blog post, but I don't want to have to go back and read every single one. Can you put it all in a book form?”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because I thought from day one, I thought, oh, you know, within a couple of months, I'll have 100,000 readers a day. And this will far surpass anything I did on television.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what happened was I took a step back and I'm like, I'm good at creating content. I think I will start a blog and I will write about something every day for a year. And by the end of the year, I will have written about everything I need to write about, and that'll be the end of it.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ads weren't working. It was one of the most stressful years of my life because of the amount of time it took to write, produce, and shoot these shows. And I had to take a step back and say at some point I got to pull the plug, otherwise I'm taking my family down with me.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, 80% of people are not watching TV. So that leaves 20% of people that are even able to watch TV. Of those 20%, 80% are watching ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox. By the time you get to travel channel, I guarantee you there were not 1,400 people. So a couple of months in, I'm like, I'm losing my ass. I thought it would work. Pretty much gone through all of my Savings at that time”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was the advertiser. Right. Now, understand that once you produce these shows, you have to air them. So I bought time on travel channel. So for several months, I was on at 8.30 in the morning on travel channel in 95 million homes. But here's where we have to look at the business model and you go, wow, 95 million homes. That's a lot. But if you think about What's going on on television at 8.30 in the morning?”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of it, part of it was just I thought I could recapture this same concept that I'd done with Doug Kaufman for the prior bunch of years. And so I poured Well, over a million dollars into this. I had guests on every time, so I would have a guest on my show, you know, physicians, anti-aging people, authors of books.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the first thing I did was I said, I'm pretty good at this content thing. I'm going to do my own TV show. So, I spent a year, 2005, writing, producing, starring in along with a guest host. I shot 50 half-hour episodes. Of a health talk show called Responsible Health.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And point two is I think there was some exhaustion on the number of infomercials on TV. Look, in the late 80s all the way through the 90s, infomercials were cool, man. Oh, look at this. There's this new gadget on the, let's look at, let's watch for 30 minutes. Now, by then, by the early 2000s, because of all these cable channels, there would be 10 infomercials on at the same time.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And it didn't even get up to seven until later on when we had a pivot on the marketing side of things. So what happened was in the early 2000s, as the internet was becoming a thing, the number of channels on television exploded with. Cable and dish and direct this idea that 40,000 or 50,000 eyeballs, people were watching you every day on a show kind of that receded into the past.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I was paying maybe $20,000 or $30,000 a month to start with, and it escalated up to $60,000 and $70,000 a month. But it was paying off in spades. I mean, it was incredible. And I would have to fly from Los Angeles to Dallas. Drive to Fort Worth to the studios. And I did this every two weeks for almost 10 years. Wow. But it works so well, and every time I'd get home, or I'd actually finish the show and I'd call my call center and kind of get an indication of how many calls we'd gotten. And it was really quite exciting. So we grew, I grew like five, six percent a month for a couple of years.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes I met somebody who had a TV show on a cobbled together network of faith and family religious type programming called FamilyNet. His show was called Know the Cause. So I went on his show one day and we talked about all the things I know about training for the average person and all of these things that resonated with his audience who were, you know, they were, if you wanted to use the term anti-aging back in those days, they were sort of leaning toward that anti-aging concept. And I sold like $20,000 worth of product at the end of the show. Wow. And what it was in those days, again, this is 99. It was an 800 number that you had to call. Operators are waiting. They're standing by for your call. Classic infomercial type pitch.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of like gym rats. No, so it was initially my peeps, triathletes are runners. And I quickly found out that those guys and girls don't like to buy product. They all want to be sponsored. So I wasn't selling much in the way of these products.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, mid 40s. I left my well-paying job, but I had no money in the bank. I had no money saved up. I didn't have a retirement program. And at that time, I had a wife and two children. So that was the first dangerous step I took as an entrepreneur that had consequences if I failed. Some money from my mother's husband and then set off on creating this company to sell these sorts of formulations to athletes.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was called The Winning Combination TWC. It doesn't exist anymore, but my friend is a very good friend of mine who started it and ran it became one of the top vitamin guys in the world. But I left after five years, I didn't have any equity in the company, and there was none on the horizon. And so I. Decided at that point that I knew enough about supplementation, I knew enough about training, I knew enough about performance that I would start my own company. And so I left in 97 to start primal nutrition, a company that initially I looked at making preparations that athletes could take as opposed to resorting to banned substances.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making supplements and all over the place from multivitamin, multi mineral antioxidant supplements. We were some of the first people to make a carbohydrate powder that you would put into a bike water bottle.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My wife today, same wife. But after a couple of years there, felt like my work had been done and my wife hated Colorado Springs. She was an LA girl. So we came back to LA and I took a job as the chief operating officer of a supplement company. And because of my early investigations into the anti-doping movement and knowing a lot about the difference between steroids and pre-hormones and pro-hormones and caffeine and ergogenic AIDS and blood thinning, you know, I had a pretty deep knowledge of what was appropriate and what was not in terms of at least the rules governing sport. I wound up working for this company for five years.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was executive director of the U.S. Federation from 1989 through the end of 1991. I had asked my girlfriend to move to Colorado Springs with me, and her response was, okay, I'll do it if we get married. So we got married in Colorado Springs and we had our first child.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And eventually I parlayed that into becoming the coach of a professional Traslon team. By this time Triathlon was professional. You could actually make money, there was prize money. So I coached a professional team. And at some point in 1988, I got called up by a friend who was on the board of directors of the United States Triathlon Federation. And I was asked to participate in the creation of a drug testing document for the sport that prevented athletes from taking advantage of performance-enhancing drugs. So I got, I was on this committee. I was also asked to go to be the one to present the completed rules to the board of directors of the federation. And a few weeks later, I was asked, would I be willing to come to Colorado Springs and take over the running of the federation?”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so as I was living in Southern California, I started becoming a personal trainer and I found I could make a lot of money teaching other people or training other people as a personal trainer how to lift weights, how to train. A lot of people were trying to train for triathlon in those days. So my cred there was such that I got a lot of clients.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we got kind of nailed by the parking problem. We got hammered by the loan. And so after about a year and a half of struggling to make that place work, my partner and I came to an agreement that we would part ways and that he would take over the restaurant. I was happy to give it to him. And he would get the frozen yogurt shop, which was still very profitable, and the restaurant. And the painting company, and I would just, I was happy to just start over again.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which meant that we had to make like $15,000 a month profit out of the gate. Just to service the debt Just to service the debt and a bad series of events, if you will, while we were building out the location, the landlord put a gym next door that offered aerobics classes at noon. And so all the parking spaces would fill up. And so when people left Apple computer or any other business to come have lunch, they drive through the lot and all the space would be taken. So they just go on to the next location.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what it was. In fact, it was 18 and a half. So we were when I say we were thrilled to get it down to 17 and three quarters.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And put it all into one roof. And so we secured a location about a mile and a half down the road from Apple computer. We built this 60-foot long salad bar that was. Refrigerated from underneath, we put in eight frozen yogurt machines, we put in a soup bar, we hired one of Mrs. Field's top managers to oversee the cookie in the muffin operation, but it was 1983 and 84. And to open the place, we had to borrow money. And we were thrilled to get a loan rate of 17 and three quarters percent.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. So we thought, okay, if frozen yogurt is good, what if we had frozen yogurt, a 60-foot long salad bar, muffins, because brand muffins were the big thing? Fresh baked cookies because Mrs. Fields was just coming on the scene.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a great name, I think. Right, exactly. Okay. However, my partner had a girlfriend who lived in San Diego, and he would go down and visit her every. Other weekend, and there was a place emerging in San Diego called soup plantation.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Okay. So we open in early 83, I think, and it was a great success. We probably netted 175,000 dollars on that 550 square foot location the first year.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we did But we were also reinvesting into the painting business. And I have to tell you that one of the things that happens when, especially in that business in painting, I made so much money as a sole proprietor, as an individual, when I was doing the work myself, we started running two vans and nine employees and had to find work all the time to keep them. Busy and employed profit margins dropped.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Palo Alto, South Bay, yeah. Correct. And we did reasonably well, but we were kind of itching to get into other stuff, and we were both entrepreneurial. And so we saw this emerging market of frozen yogurt chops.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So this was February of 82. So a few months later, a friend of mine, a classmate of mine from Williams, who'd come to Northern California under the Merrill Lynch stockbrokerage training program. Had seen how much money I was making as a painting contractor and decided to become a painter.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, all of this informs the next 40 years of my life because there was a point at which after I finished fourth at the Iron Man in 1982, that's when I just realized, you know what, I think it's out of my system. I don't need to compete anymore. And because I'd been a business person most of my life, I had a lawn mowing business when I was 12. And then I would start painting houses when I was 14. So I needed to make a living.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like, you're crazy. I have no inclination. There's nothing in my Constitution that would suggest that that would be fun. And after a couple of rides with him, he kind of convinced me that this would be at least a worthy pursuit. So I signed up for the 1981 Ironman, which was the first year they had it in Kona. I finished like 21st or something like that. It wasn't bad at all. I mean, it still wasn't bad. It was horrible, but it was not a bad first time finish. By the way, that was my first triathlon ever. I'd never entered a triathlon prior to that. And I didn't know how to swim, so I had to teach myself how to swim.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So I had this, I was Jonesing for exertion and some form of activity. So I started riding a bike. And as I was riding more and more miles, I met a guy, a friend I'd known from across town, who said, hey, man, I'm training for this thing over in Hawaii. It's called the Iron Man. You should join me.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorry, by then, I lived in Williamstown through 1978. 78, I packed up everything and I drove across the country to Palo Alto and Menlo Park in that area of Northern California”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Physically, yeah, no, for sure. So in 1980, I was actually 27, and for a while I was quite down on myself because one of the things that happens as an endurance athlete is you sort of build up this. Tolerance to pain and discomfort And then you almost require it on a daily basis. And people talk about the runner's high, they talk about the endorphins and the addiction. And all of that is true, but I don't know, and they also call it a good addiction. I'm not sure it's a good addiction.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my 20s. Yeah And that was partly from my diet, partly from these overly cushioned shoes, which we'll get into later. And I had tendonitis in my hip, irritable bowel syndrome that dictated pretty much my every move throughout the day. I literally had to figure out where the nearest bathroom was just in case. Woke up every morning with severe gut pain. Now I find out later on that that was entirely a result of my diet and my dietary choices, but those choices were contemplated to give me enough calories and enough carbohydrates to be able to run the distances that I felt I needed to run to be competitive.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a wreck. I mean, you know, I sort of roll my eyes. I was on the cover of Runner's World magazine three times as exemplary of a really fit runner. And yet, I was falling apart on the inside. And as you said, I was developing arthritis in my feet. And your 20s.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, it's not. I am here to tell you it's not good for you It is something that humans can do, but it's not good for us”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, in fact, a couple things happened. First of all, the training was, and this is what literally created a new career path for me, I got so injured from both the amount of training, the amount of miles I was doing, and the diet that was required.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at that point, I kind of shifted my focus and I said, all right, I'll take a couple of years off. This running thing is going quite well. I'll take a couple of years off. Then I'll reconsider med school. So I graduated in 75. I stayed in Williamstown. I built up a painting contracting business that was quite lucrative, which allowed me to travel around the world racing. And I wasn't really, I didn't have this strong feeling that I was going to be one of the top three to go to the Olympic Games, but I had enough success that I thought, okay, if I continue on this track, I would certainly qualify for the Olympic trials. And who knows, maybe I'll have a good day.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. It's incredible. At any rate, I had. Transformed my dorm room, which is basically a cement box, into an elite bachelor pad. I had built a box within a box to remodel my dorm room with maple wood paneling and wall-to-wall carpeting. I built my own, built my own furniture. On alumni weekend, the occupant of the room the years prior came back to look at his dorm room and looked at what I'd done to the place and said, oh, I'm pretty handy and I'm a contractor, and I largely focus on painting. And he said, Well, what's your major? And I said, well, I'm pre-med. He said, why are you going to do that? Why don't you do this?”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. What happened was I had been a pre med candidate at Williams. I got a bachelor's degree in biology. And I was on a pre-med track until my senior year. I put myself through Williams as a painting contractor. So in summers, I would paint houses and make enough money to pay for my tuition, room and bo”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was a seminal moment for me that summer transformed me. It was amazing and I came back from that experience really, I would say, a changed man. I excelled at some of the tasks that they gave us on the island. Every year there's a seven mile marathon they call around the island. But it was all on the rock-bound coast of Maine. So it was really a very rocky kind of seven mile track. And I won that event and set a record that stood for a number of years after that. So when I got back to Exeter for my senior year, my grades picked up. I was captain of the track and the cross-country teams. and really came into myself and came into my confidence not just as a person but also as a, certainly as a runner. And then that confidence carried through. I went to Williams College. I spent four years at Williams.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess you would describe it as a survival course And it was a 28 day adventure that was really rigorous There was a four-day solo where you spent four days alone on an island with minimal gear. You were put in a boat with 12 other people that you'd never met before.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had great success with manufacturing the mayonnaise with our co packer, and we find out one day they can't ship the latest batch because it didn't turn into mayonnaise. It just turned into oil and goo. So we're scratching our heads. We're freaking out because this is the business. Maybe this is the end of it. And that was, I think, probably $7,000 worth of ingredients that, hmm. Literally went down the drain.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT