Jeff Byers
Full Transcript

Back to Episode

Kelly: [0:00:04] Hey everyone, I’m Dr. Kelly Starrett.

Juliet: [0:00:06] And I’m Juliet Starrett.

Kelly: [0:00:08] And you’re listening to The Ready State Podcast.

[music]

Juliet: [0:00:17] This episode of The Ready State Podcast is brought to you by Momentous, and today we want to talk about one of our favorite things ever, which is the Collagen Shot.

Kelly: [0:00:25] Yeah, look, back in university I ended up studying cultural geography. Don’t laugh. Stop laughing. But really, it’s looking at behavior and environment and it really shaped a lot of the way you and I think about how do we create bone crushing consistency for people. And that’s you have to reduce the barriers to entry. You have to make it so easy that you can do the same thing time after time for long periods of time to make huge gains. And that is why this works so well. This Collagen Shot is the bomb.

Juliet: [0:00:55] Didn’t I also hear you recently say you want to trade your tissue health for your cognitive health, which is another reason why Collagen Shots are so important to you?

Kelly: [0:01:05] It is. It’s not that I would trade my cognitive health.

Juliet: [0:01:06] If you had to choose.

Kelly: [0:01:08] But I really want, as I am now 49 and still like to do silly things.

Juliet: [0:01:12] Some things with your body.

Kelly: [0:01:15] I’m kind of crazy sometimes, my childhood boyhood self. I want to make sure that I have all the building blocks on hand so that I don’t have those strains that happen when you’re a little bit older trying to go fast.

Juliet: [0:01:25] Which is why collagen is such an important part of our routine.

Kelly: [0:01:26] And it’s not even about your connective tissue. It’s about your small intestine, it’s about your skin. I mean you are made of collagen. I don’t think you’re getting enough collagen. I don’t think you’re getting enough bone broth, I don’t think you’re getting enough offal, I don’t think you’re getting the chicken skin and gristle. This is an easy way to get it in. It’s portable. And you don’t have to mix it in with anything.

Juliet: [0:01:45] When you take a trip you can just throw some in your bag and you are good to go.

Kelly: [0:01:48] That’s the thing. It solved the problem.

Juliet: [0:01:49] Solves the problem. Go get some Collagen Shots. Go to thereadystate.com/momentous and use code TRS for 20 percent off your first purchase. 

Juliet: [0:02:00] This episode of The Ready State Podcast is brought to you by Sleepme.

Kelly: [0:02:03] What I want to get into is how disruptive my sleep used to be because I would wake up hot.

Juliet: [0:02:09] I mean you would wake up so hot, like 1,000 degrees.

Kelly: [0:02:11] It was ridiculous. Literally. And one of the things that happened, I have been through every iteration. So there’s three levels of cooling power here. The Cube is the original OG and it really changed my life. Then I upgraded to the OOLER when that came out and that gave me a lot of control and a lot more cold. And I don’t think everyone needs that. But I am a 235-pound supernova in bed.

Juliet: [0:02:36] You really are.

Kelly: [0:02:37] I’m not just talking about my love skills either here. We’re just talking about-

Juliet: [0:02:40] Oh my God.

Kelly: [0:02:40] Just my direct heat.

Juliet: [0:02:41] What I would also like to say though is that we tried every iteration of fans pointed at you and other cooling devices, but the problem is then I would be freezing in order to keep you cold.

Kelly: [0:02:53] And that was not a problem for me, especially since I started falling asleep and staying asleep. But since we both have been sleeping with our personal temperature ideals, there is harmony in the kingdom. I mean all is well in the kingdom. You go to your side, your ring, my side is like I’m like a White Walker and you sleep on the sun.

Juliet: [0:03:12] And we both fall asleep and stay asleep all night long.

Kelly: [0:03:14] It’s amazing. You can do this. If you struggle, one, to stay asleep because you wake up hot, or two, there are disputes in your family—I’m not saying it’s someone else’s fault, but it is—they don’t like the way you sleep with the temperature, this is a way to solve that problem in your marriage, in your relationship. Do it.

Juliet: [0:03:33] It’s miraculous. I’m serious. You should do it.

Kelly: [0:03:34] Your partner will thank you.

Juliet: [0:03:35] Head over to sleep.me/trs to learn more and save off the purchase of any new Cube, OOLER, or Dock Pro sleep system. There’s an offer available exclusively for The Ready State Podcast listeners and only for a limited time. That’s sleep.me/trs to take advantage of our exclusive discount and wake up refreshed every day.

Kelly: [0:03:57] #itsnotmeitsyou 

Kelly: [0:03:59] On this episode of The Ready State Podcast we are thrilled to bring you Jeff Byers. Jeff is the cofounder and CEO of Momentous, which is a holistic wellness nutrition company based in Park City designed by the brightest minds in performance athletics—wait, is that us—but available for everyday wellness enthusiasts. Momentous is the first and only supplement brand to build formulas directly with experts from each of the four major American sports leagues. Launching in 2018, the line of products designed by performance directors and dieticians from the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB. Before his business career, Jeff attended the University of South Carolina. He was a two-time captain, multiple year starter, they won championships, team under Pete Carroll. He graduated with his undergraduate degree in three years and proceeded to earn his master’s degree in business before even entering the NFL where he had a four-year career playing with the Panthers. And the reason that’s important in his journey will become evident as we get into this conversation.

Juliet: [0:04:51] You know, one of the things that I love so much about hearing about Jeff and his journey was about his emphasis on his company value of democratizing human performance and by that he means taking the lessons that he learned and that other athletes get to learn in the locker room in high performance sports and bring them to regular people who just want to feel good.

Kelly: [0:05:10] You’ll see that we do mention this but we are Momentous partners. And one of the reasons is this company works in the military, has contracts with research and with the Department of Defense. And plus is the biggest supplier of sports teams working at the ground, like the pointy end of the stick. More professional teams and university teams than any other company. And that’s really remarkable because they understand what works and what doesn’t work.

Juliet: [0:05:35] He also just has a super bonkers athletic history and injury history, which of course is relevant for us at The Ready State, that we really had a great time talking about.

Kelly: [0:05:43] Yeah, and I’ll say that Jeff is always down for a good time. And what I mean is, want to do something crazy with your body, want to talk politics and art and science? I mean this guy is a great human being. We are thrilled to be part of the partners in this thing and I think you’re really going to enjoy this conversation. You may even learn something about why some supplement companies are not equal to the others.

Juliet: [0:06:04] Enjoy this episode with Jeff Byers. 

Juliet: [0:06:07] Hey Ready State listeners, if you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes to help others find our show.

Juliet: [0:06:14] Jeff, welcome to The Ready State Podcast.

Jeff Byers: [0:06:16] Howdy? How are you doing?

Juliet: [0:06:18] Good. How are you doing?

Kelly: [0:06:18] Always good to see you, my friend. Just so everyone knows up front, Juliet and I work with your company. So full transparency here for gushing or we get into the weeds, we are part of the Momentous family. I just wanted to give that disclaimer just in case you wonder why I’m so awesome.

Juliet: [0:06:38] Yeah, but I mean I would also like to disclaim that we don’t enter into partnerships with anybody except for people with whom we love, like Jeff.

Kelly: [0:06:45] Yeah, we’re hard users.

Juliet: [0:06:46] Hard users. 

Kelly: [0:06:47] Okay, so now we’re through the disclaimer so everyone knows. But you’re on this call with us because what you’re doing with this company is amazing, the people that you’re tricking to work with you like Andrew Huberman and Stacy Sims, like legends in their fields, it’s pretty profound. But your story about becoming the CEO of Momentous is awesome and your backstory I think is really compelling. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, and how did you end up here? Schoolwork. I think you had an earlier job, you might even say career.

Juliet: [0:07:21] Yeah, I mean maybe just sum up the first 20 years of your life.

Kelly: [0:07:25] Go. 

Juliet: [0:07:26] Thirty years. Go.

Jeff Byers: [0:07:27] Go. How much time do we got? Three hours?

Juliet: [0:07:29] Tons. We have tons. We have tons of time.

Jeff Byers: [0:07:31] So full disclosure for everybody listening, I’m really good at talking like Kelly is, so we could on for forever here. So my background: In another life I played professional sports. I was a professional football player. And you go way back, in high school I was one of the top rated football recruits in high school and had the luxury of picking really where I went to school.

Kelly: [0:07:50] What position did you play?

Jeff Byers: [0:07:52] I was an offensive lineman many, many pounds ago. Yeah, it’s like I ate myself when you look at pictures. When you Google me, Google lies. I actually am a decent looking human being. Not what Google shares.

Juliet: [0:08:05] So wait, not to cut off your story, but I mean how big were you when you were playing?

Kelly: [0:08:11] This is interesting.

Juliet: [0:08:12] And how big are you now?

Jeff Byers: [0:08:13] Yes, my playing weight in the NFL was around 300; 300 to 310 was really where I played most of my career at in the NFL. I don’t know. I haven’t gotten on a scale in a long time. It was my job to get on a scale, I felt like, and it’s probably been a year since I’ve gotten on a scale. But I’m probably someplace between 225 and 240 would be my guess.

Kelly: [0:08:32] And how tall are you?

Juliet: [0:08:32] And you’re tall.

Jeff Byers: [0:08:34] I’m 6’4.

Kelly: [0:08:34] Yeah. You’re an adult sized man. That’s my point.

Jeff Byers: [0:08:37] Adult sized man.

Juliet: [0:08:38] So were you a chunky 310 or like a jacked yoked 310?

Jeff Byers: [0:08:44] I’ll let Google answer that question but Google definitely made me look fatter than I really was.

Kelly: [0:08:49] The internet adds at least a dozen kilos.

Jeff Byers: [0:08:53] A hundred.

Juliet: [0:08:53] Okay, sorry, I don’t want to cut off and totally go deep on this line of questioning.

Kelly: [0:08:56] But I think that’s interesting because of the transformation.

Juliet: [0:09:00] Yeah. Was it just the act of stopping playing and not eating so much in order to maintain that weight? Did you just start functioning like a normal athlete?

Kelly: [0:09:10] You’re making all of us really uncomfortable about his weight.

Juliet: [0:09:13] Sorry, Jeff.

Kelly: [0:09:13] You weren’t that fat, Jeff. 

Jeff Byers: [0:09:15] I was. Long story short, when I knew I was done playing football and I chose to retire, I had a really bad injury, I had what’s called Lisfranc and was non weightbearing for 12 weeks and just started swimming. I knew I was done playing. When I had surgery and I had the conversation with doc, and there to me was life after ball just because there always is and I was really passionate about it. So I started swimming and I stopped eating a lot of calories. I counted just like, I don’t know, 4,000 calories a day. But I started swimming 30 minutes. And when I say I started swimming, I tried not to drown for 30 minutes when I started.

Kelly: [0:09:51] Yeah. Beginner gains when you’re inefficient, it’s a great workout.

Jeff Byers: [0:09:54] Thirty minutes of trying not to vomit and trying not to drown at the same time was my initial… And then I just got really good at swimming. Better at swimming, I’d say. I’m not good at swimming. I sink. But it was something I did and the weight just dropped off. I lost 60 pounds in two months or so.

Kelly: [0:10:10] Wow.

Juliet: [0:10:00] Wow. 

Jeff Byers: [0:10:00] And my wife was pregnant with our first boy and she’s going up and I’m just falling off a cliff weight wise. I still have a very healthy appetite. You two can attest to that. I was still eating like a horse. I just wasn’t eating like pizza and couple weight gainer shakes a day. I was eating what I consider a normal human being but which is still a lot of food. And it just shed off really quick. But to me, being 300, 310 is not good for you. And people always ask, “How do you feel now?” and I’ve had a bunch of surgeries and I’m beat to hell and my flexibility sucks and all of those things. But immediately losing weight, slept better. Stopped playing, slept better. My whole body feels incredibly better, just the load that I don’t have to carry is pretty impactful. And so losing that weight was pretty instrumental in me living the life and thinking about how do I optimize for this next chapter.

Juliet: [0:11:09] That’s so cool. See, aren’t you glad I asked that?

Kelly: [0:11:11] Go ahead, baby.

Juliet: [0:11:12] Okay, so I do want to back up in time only because you told me a data point about your college recruiting that I thought was really interesting. So could you tell a little bit more about your high school to college transition and then where you ended up going?

Jeff Byers: [0:11:24] Yeah. I guess we never got there. In high school, I was one of the top high school recruited football players, really, really lucky, was up for an ESPY Award, which is crazy to think. And I was Gatorade Football Player of the Year and I got beat out for the Gatorade High School Athlete of the Year by this guy named Dwight Howard, if you’ve ever heard of him. Kind of good. I look back and I was like, man, somebody picked poorly if they put me against Dwight Howard to win Athlete of the Year in high school. Somebody was really confused. 

So I grew up in Colorado on the front range. Went to, it was called Loveland High, smaller school. But we’ve just produced a ton of really, really great athletes and students out of that school. There’s a guy named Jeremy Bloom who was an Olympic skier, played football for the CU Buffs and a handful of other great athletes that came out of school. And yeah, so went to USC, the real USC, Southern Cal, and played there from ‘04 to ‘09. Pete Carroll was my coach; he’s my guy. Think a lot of him and he really is pretty instrumental in how I think about running my business and leadership and people and team and talent, all those things. I spent a lot of formative years with him. But my college career was very different than I think what I would have expected. So I started a bunch of games as a true freshman. That was the year we won the National Championship. And the last game of the season before the National Championship I blew my hip out essentially and I had two hip surgeries post that injury.

Kelly: [0:12:54] At age 19?

Jeff Byers: [0:12:55] At 19, yeah. Super duper young. They did microfracture labeled debridement, kind of reshaped my femoral head and neck. And it was really bad. And there was like three surgeons in the world that basically I was told I could go to for my second surgery. And I went to one of them and he’s still around and still doing really innovative things. And he was like, “Most people don’t come back from this. You’re pretty new for this surgery and what we’re going to do. And I would have you not expect to play football again or never play at the level that you once were at.” So anyways.

Kelly: [0:13:31] Wow. That’s heavy. Nineteen.

Jeff Byers: [0:13:32] It was heavy. It was real heavy.

Juliet: [0:13:35] What year of college was that?

Kelly: [0:13:37] Freshman year.

Jeff Byers: [0:13:38] That was between my freshman and sophomore year. So I had my first surgery in January or February of my freshman year and then my second surgery was three or four months after that, basically after they realized that a quick fix didn’t solve the problem and had to have the real shebang done.

Kelly: [0:13:55] Let me ask you two things: One is your whole life is set out for you in that moment where you’re going to play college, you’re there now, you’re playing, you’re playing for Pete Carroll, you won a National Championship, and then this thing happens. That’s the first time probably you ever were confronted with a big existential crisis about, A, did that moment give you the opportunity to say, hey, I really do have to plan for something else and I have to have a different set of skills because this could be taken away in an instant?

Jeff Byers: [0:14:22] Yeah. It a hundred percent is a massively defining moment in my life on how I think about a lot. And I will say from how I prioritize my life, how I think about the people that I surround myself with, but also just knowing that there’s more to life than what you’re currently doing, and it’s this bigger picture. And it was really hard. I feel very fortunate and lucky to have pretty good support system around me and it was hard with that even around me. 

Kelly: [0:14:52] You are a true mutant. I mean your aerobic capacity, your ability to climb and hike. You just did this crazy event with your friends. You’re truly a mutant. I think people can forget because you’re just Jeff CEO, but you are a mutant. Obviously, you had salamander healing abilities. Someone cut your hip off and you regrew a hip very quickly at age 19. But do you think it was important that physician said to you, “You probably won’t be able to do this again?” Is that one of those things-

Juliet: [0:15:18] Is that a motivator?

Kelly: [0:15:19] We have a friend who’s a rock star, for example, and his stepdad said to him, “Yeah, you probably won’t stick with this guitar,” and he became a rock star. 

Jeff Byers: [0:15:25] I think it put things into perspective. I’m not a rock star. I’m way too cool for that. Not. It really put things in perspective, right? So when you’re a 17, 18, 19-year-old kid and football is your life, right, and the world says that about you, it really puts into perspective what’s important and also these two basic things that really matter in life that you can control, which is your attitude and your effort, the kind of lame things, but things that I’ve lived by for a very long time. And it was what am I here to do? Am I here to be Jeff the football player? Am I here to be Jeff the human who’s going to inspire change and leave the world a better place? And I had a lot of people that challenged me like, “Why are you at USC? You’re here for an education. You’re on a full ride. Figure it out.” 

And so when I was basically told I wasn’t going to play again, I went and met with the dean of the business school and he said, “Hey, we can get you on track to graduate undergrad in three years. And I can’t guarantee you’re going to get into grad school, but we’ll take a look at your application and figure it out and you can get as much school paid for as you can while you’re on your scholarship.” Basically, I’m like okay, what’s my plan B, let’s start taking school really seriously and start thinking about life after ball. With this whole in the back of my head it’s not over ‘til it’s over type of thing. 

So I ended up getting on track to graduate undergrad in three which basically means I had two years to do three years of schooling, those last two. And then missed my whole second year. Coming up in my third year got back to playing and ended up blowing my back out, had L4, L5 discectomy. I tore it at the end of training camp so I missed my entire third season that year. And so I missed my second and third year playing. But I ended up getting my undergrad degree in three years and so I got accepted into the Marshall School of Business. So I was going into my fourth year of eligibility.

Juliet: [0:17:21] As a grad student.

Jeff Byers: [0:17:22] As a grad student, which was pretty crazy. So I was getting my MBA, I was in night school. Plus, part of the requirement was I had to have a job. So I went into an office in downtown LA for three hours in the morning after workouts, would go to work, then would go to practice, and then would go to school, which when I look back on it-

Kelly: [0:17:44] So lazy.

Jeff Byers: [0:17:45] So lazy.

Kelly: [0:17:46] College is such a fun time for everyone. I don’t understand what you’re talking about. 

Juliet: [0:17:47] Wait, were you the only one in your graduate program who was also finishing their final year of eligibility in playing a serious sport?

Jeff Byers: [0:17:56] Yes, I was the youngest, and still the youngest person to go through that program. I don’t know. I think I was very fortunate that they let me in and I worked really hard to make sure that I had more on my application other than football player because I didn’t want to be known for that. But the PM program is full of old timers, people my age now, in their mid to late 30s with kids and family. And I was totally thrust in. So I’d go from the locker room, which is 18 19, 20 year old kids, to these grown ass adults that have kids and families and it’s like this clash of reality for me. I’d literally run off the field, take a shower, ride my bike as fast as I can so I wouldn’t be late for class. Two polar opposites of life of very buttoned up, people in their suits coming from downtown LA or Boeing or these other places to… Anyways, it was quite fascinating. 

I didn’t have a huge life my last couple years in college because I was so busy. So there’s this crazy rule in college that if you have two hardship years, they grant you an extra year of eligibility. So I actually, my fourth year, my fifth year, and I got a sixth year of eligibility. So I went to school for six years, got my MBA fully completed, and was a two time captain my last two years, my fifth and sixth year was captain of the football team. And then I graduated in December and then started in the NFL in spring of 2010. I went to Carolina, did a hot second in Carolina. Not Carolina. In Seattle, did a hot second in Seattle, played my first year in Denver. By play I mean practice. And then got cut in Denver and went to Carolina, spent three years in Carolina. Started a handful of games. If you knew who I was, you care way too much about the Carolina Panthers because I was pretty much a backup offensive lineman and I got thrown in when things were going real bad for other people, which is a really interesting place to be coming off the bench as an offensive lineman. 

Kelly: [0:19:59] #shoutoutJoeKenn

Jeff Byers: [0:20:00] Joe Kenn. My guy.

Juliet: [0:20:02] I have like 45 questions and Kelly does too. But because this is The Ready State Podcast, I would like to go back and talk about your injuries and ask you do you think there was something special or super secret about the way that you managed those and rehabbed them and recovered from them that allowed you to be able to come back? Or did you just follow the program and you were diligent and organized? What was the secret there? If you have two injuries that might’ve ended someone else’s career but didn’t end yours, what was the difference?

Jeff Byers: [0:20:33] Genetic freak, A. Mutant plays a role into that. And there are just people like that. I don’t know.

Juliet: [0:20:40] Little luck. There’s a little luck involved.

Jeff Byers: [0:20:42] Little luck. My nickname was like Gristle. You just chew on me and you would never break me but I would never go away.

Kelly: [0:20:53] Old Gristle Byers. I love it.

Jeff Byers: [0:20:54] That was what a guy named Chris Carlisle, our strength coach in college, called me. Anyway, I think I had a really good team around me. So when I hurt my hip we hired a guy by the name of Dr. John Meyer. He’s director of high performance now for the Kings and the Clippers and he really transitioned me through my rehab and was extremely diligent. And for me, my rehab was my practice. I took it very seriously, did it every single day and was always trying to push and I probably pushed too hard. But for me, there was always an end. I treated rehab like a game, a competition of how do I get better, how do I improve. Knowing that they said eight weeks, I could probably do it in six. And that was my mindset and I think that’s the mindset… Oh, they say this, I could do that. And even if they had to slow me down, it was something I always pushed through and was always diligently staying on top of it. 

I go back and this was in the mid to late 2000s where we didn’t have nutrition and all of the things that we had back then. But I also just always thought about more than just the plan. Like here’s what you have to do, I was always the I’m going to do more, I’m going to go swim, I’m going to go do this. So with my hip, I did a ton of pool workouts like running in the water and it took a ton of extra time and they weren’t mandatory. But it was something that was important to me. And so it was this diligent effort to stay relevant and work through but always, well, they say eight weeks, I can do it in six. And that has backfired on me in the past and does on a lot of people. But there was a light that I saw at the end of the tunnel that I was going to get there as fast as I could. 

And then in the NFL it was really about longevity and a friend of my named Jordan Senn who was a captain in Carolina introduced me to your book, Supple Leopard. And in Carolina it was like the Bible, it was like the Gospel. We’re doing flossing and all this other stupid shit in the locker room. Sorry, not stupid. Really good stuff. But at the time, it was really new and it was towards the end it was coming out who’s this crazy guy Kelly Starrett, the Supple Leopard. I don’t know. I also think a big thing for me was I was never single minded in sports. I love being active and even when I was hurt, I was still riding my bike or hiking. In Carolina we went backpacking and paddling and all of these things. I just never believed that I just needed to be a one trick pony. I just loved so much about being active, an adventurer, that I was always thinking about other things and I think that has given me a lot more longevity, not being like I’ve only got a bench squat. Yes, I love to do that. But I also love to do a lot of other things and that was always really important to me.

Kelly: [0:24:06] Did you know coming out of the NBA program at USC and then all of a sudden, you’re like whoa, I have this other opportunity, did that change or did you have a moment where you thought maybe I shouldn’t play in the NFL because I’ve already invested in this thing. Or do you realize that maybe I can use the NFL as another springboard and a quick way to gather a bunch of capital and launch a business because it sounds like you’re going in that direction. And you realize it’s fragile and can be taken away from you via freak accident.

Jeff Byers: [0:24:34] Yes to kind of all of those things. So you put those words into my mouth. But that’s 100 percent it. So I got to this tipping point. What do I do? I invested and scarified a ton over two and a half years, longer than that at USC, to hey, I didn’t get to go out, I didn’t get to do a bunch of things normal college kids do and just like grinding, and basically it was like do I go playing the NFL, do I become irrelevant in the business world. And the answer is like many children, it was my childhood dream to play professional sports. And it was like this comes once in a lifetime and I’m going to choose when I’m not ready to play. And it was one of those things where I made a couple deals with a couple people. One of them was I was always going to stay relevant outside of sports and I was going to never let sports take more from me than I took from it. And I condensed that last one pretty close. Obviously, football and traumatic brain injury, if I knew what I know now, I would probably change some of my thought processes and probably would have walked away a little bit sooner. But definitely I stayed relevant. I worked a job every off season. Had a longstanding job offer in finance, which I instantly realized I didn’t want to do once I retired and started working in finance. And it led me to where I’m at now. Everything post finance has really been stepping stone into creating Momentous and this thought of how do we democratize high performance.

Juliet: [0:26:06] So I have two questions. I mean you just seem to have such a solid head on your shoulders about how you framed the importance of your football career in your life and how you always made sure you had a plan B. Where’s that come from? Was that from your parents? What’s the influence there because I feel like that’s actually not that common. A lot of kids don’t have that perspective. Where do you think that comes from?

Jeff Byers: [0:26:27] Family for sure. I’ve been really blessed to have a pretty solid foundation in my life. I was really close to my grandparents. My grandfather’s no longer here. Been a long time. And then my grandma on my dad’s side are people I was close to and watched how they affected change in community and drove a lot of betterment in the world and that really inspired me to think about life more than what you’re doing and when and how can you actually inspire change. But when times get tough the people that you surround yourself with really make those tough times into opportunities and inflection points. And so I feel very lucky to have my parents, my brothers, sisters, and the friends that I have. They really rallied around me and glass half full. This attitude and effort thing is something my dad preached to me a lot when I was young and really related to sports but also school. There’s a lot of things you can control in life, there’s a lot of things you can’t control in life. But there’s very few things that you can control and that are important and attitude and effort are two of those really, really important things that only you can control. And those things, and I talk about it a lot, talk to myself about it a lot, so I talk to myself, yeah. And those are two things I always remind myself. I can control how my day’s going. I can control effort. That’s a really important thing for me.

Kelly: [0:27:52] Do you feel like winning a national title, which is the highlight of a college career, did it help having that in the pocket so you had some consummation of this work and this dream or did you get that early success and you’re like I should be able to do that again and the rest of this time this thing ghosted you? Did that help in that way?

Jeff Byers: [0:28:11] I don’t know.

Kelly: [0:28:12] Didn’t matter because your back was hurting? Second question and this is more important: You’re not actually the athlete in your family. Can you talk about the real athlete in your family? How did you meet? Because I think that’s really interesting, this aspect of your partnership.

Jeff Byers: [0:28:27] Yeah. So my wife Bethany has been an incredible partner for a very long time in my life. She played volleyball at USC, played overseas in Europe for a season. But she is 100 percent the better athlete than I am. She can jump, she can powerlift, all of those things. And we have three amazing-

Kelly: [0:28:47] How tall is she?

Jeff Byers: [0:28:48] She’s 6’4. So she’s a complete animal.

Kelly: [0:28:51] How do I get on the list to get one of your children, not to be creepy?

Juliet: [0:28:54] If I’m not mistaken, your four-year old’s already like 6 feet tall?

Jeff Byers: [0:28:59] Yeah, essentially. My four-year-old is a little tank. I have three boys. People will be like, “They are all you.” And they’re all me and my wife. My wife’s full energy and obviously very athletic and active and our boys are just amazing little creatures that we’ve made and they are large and they love to be going fast and always wrestling. Yes, I have an eight-, six-, and four-year-old, which is crazy to think about.

Kelly: [0:29:30] It must be just like our house with teenage daughters.

Juliet: [0:29:31] Oh my God. Okay, so tell us a little bit about the timeline post NFL career. And if you could talk about how sounds like you took a job in finance that you didn’t like and how did Momentous come to being. And my sub-question there because you mentioned it, is was your fear of traumatic brain injury, did it come into play at all in your specific interest in what you’re doing now?

Jeff Byers: [0:29:55] I wish I had a pen to write all those down. So I will say my last full NFL season was 2013 and so the last game is like January of 2014. But I got hurt at like week eight or week nine that year. I had Lisfranc, which is a terrible foot injury but it is what it is. And so my last play of my career was me getting carted off the field, which sucks.

Juliet: [0:30:19] That sucks.

Kelly: [0:30:20] But lot of people were cheering.

Jeff Byers: [0:30:20] Lot of people were cheering. There are pictures of that cart ride too out there that Google is not friendly with. Anyway, so I knew I was done. And I had this longstanding job offer in finance. It was actually my dad’s really close friend who was looking to transition his business out and I had worked for him a couple of off seasons. And as soon as I jumped in, I realized it was not what I wanted to do. It was a great way to make a living, but it wasn’t team, it was very lone wolfish and it was playing in the margins. And that’s not who I am and that’s not when I look back on my life what has made me great. What has made me, me is high energy effort and taking risks and just blowing through as many walls as I can. And that wasn’t finance. That wasn’t this financial… I love to build, I love to do, I love to challenge. And I love to do the impossible and make things and, using a quote from Pete Carroll, do it better than it’s ever been done before.

Juliet: [0:31:22] Hey guys, we just wanted to take a little break in this podcast episode to actually tell you about one of our own products and that’s our Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach.

Kelly: [0:31:31] Yeah, the app literally is the first place you should go if you’re trying to feel better, if you’re trying to solve an old movement related problem, if you’re just trying to just not be as sore from your workout.

Juliet: [0:31:43] There is so much going on in this app. We have a mobility test that is comprehensive and designed by Kelly Starrett himself.

Kelly: [0:31:51] It’s pretty good. 

Juliet: [0:31;51] So you can figure out what your biggest limitations are and start to work on that. There are sports specific mobilizations if you want to try to lift more or run faster. There is a pain area. And we even have a ton of bonus content. You can do challenges around squat and ankle and a bunch of other specific body parts. So you can just generally get more supple and awesome.

Kelly: [0:32:12] JStar, you’re killing it. You should talk about this app more often. We started the original mobility project back in 2010 trying to help people solve problems for themselves. We think that every human being should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves and we want you to be able to engage in self-care in a really reasonable, responsible way. One of our favorite parts of it, daily mobility. You have a 10, 20, 30-minute follow along with me if you just have a ball and a roller and think you want to feel better, move better, play along. I mean we really feel like that’s the base camp practice and you can add in what you need.

Juliet: [0:32:45] We’re really proud of this and what we’ve created here and we think you should give it a try. Head on over to thereadystate.com/trial and use code Pod 20 for 20 percent off your first month. And just FYI, including your two-week free trial, that’s literally six weeks for $11.99. You can’t beat that. There’s so much amazing content to help you feel better and move better for $11.99.

Kelly: [0:33:09] In the words of our podcast producer: bananas.

Kelly: [0:33:14] Oftentimes we have a lot of friends who are in similar boats as you, who retire from sport. And our friend Gabby Rece says you actually retire twice if you’re a professional athlete. You retire from your sport and then you retire from your job after your sport. Did you ever feel like you got a chance to retire from the NFL and mourn that? The depression after a sports career is real. Or are you just too manic and already had a plan in place that didn’t even have a chance?

Jeff Byers: [0:33:39] I say I retired from football. I left on my own terms. They wanted me back. I dove right into it. I was prepped. I knew there’s life after ball. Football got taken away from me and I already in my mind was like what is next. And that was from a young age in college of football can be taken away, it’s a part of my life, it’s not who I am. And I think I was blessed really young to have that because like you and like a lot of us, friends that have served in the military or played professional sports or really high-level college sports, when you leave it is really hard to find purpose in your why because it is so different. And your value is so different in the real world than it is than when you’re doing something that you’re highly skilled and done for a very long time. 

So I transitioned out into finance and realized that I didn’t want to do it. I kind of took a lateral forward step and jumped into a family office who was doing growth stage investing and was dabbling. And just realized I was sitting at the wrong side of the table. I was listening to these entrepreneurs pitch their businesses and was like I’m a doer, builder, I’ve got to get completely out of finance no matter what it is. And I joined this early-stage biotech company in early 2015 and the biotech was creating a transdermal drug with their new system. I knew nothing about it. I have no science background. You’ve got my background. I took oceanography in college. Anyway-

Kelly: [0:35:04] Step one, oceanography. Step two, NFL.

Jeff Byers: [0:35:05] Yeah. Exactly. So don’t judge me too hard.

Kelly: [0:35:09] Step one, dolphin. Step three, found a company. 

Jeff Byers: [0:35:12] So I joined this early-stage biotech and I was employee number four. And they hired me for two reasons. I had this really untraditional background, obviously. They needed to raise capital but they also an idea to use this technology outside of medicine and use it in sports performance, high performance, and what if we could bypass the GI system and deliver substances in the skin. Vitamins, minerals, substances, et cetera. And that was really the birth of what is now Momentous, what started there and really cut my teeth and really got into exercise physiology. And sport was something I didn’t think I was going to get back in, work in. When I retired, I was like I’m never going back into sports.

Kelly: [0:35:50] Was that the birthplace of Amp and PR Lotion.

Jeff Byers: [0:35:53] That was the birthplace of Amp Human and PR Lotion was at that biotech. And so in 2018 my cofounder Eric and I acquired the rights to PR Lotion and started Amp Human. So Amp Human had a little bit of traction before that. We were doing some work with Special Forces, with some elite endurance athletes, and had some traction in pro sports here in the US, like traditional pro sports. We had just enough to say, hey, there’s an ability here. And what we were doing was so different and such at the forefront. We had a little bit of early clinical data but what we saw was this ability to create a human performance company centered with this now patented technology where we had some really good clinical data behind it. And we were unlocking something really pretty basic in the body but making it practical for the first time ever really for humans to unlock some performance gates.

Kelly: [0:36:47] Can you talk about what PR Lotion is just for everyone so they can hear it?

Jeff Byers: [0:36:50] Yeah. So PR Lotion gives your body more sodium bicarbonate. Bicarb is a basic electrolyte. And bicarb’s role in the body is super simple: It helps reduce hydrogen ions, lactic acid. And so when we go harder long our bodies produce acid as a byproduct of energy production and that acid builds up in our body. We naturally clear it and that acid combines with bicarbonate in the blood or bicarbonate pulls the lactate and the hydrogen ions, lactic acid, out of the body. Hydrogen ions and bicarb interact and form CO2 in water. It’s the byproduct of the waste. Lactate gets converted into pyruvate. So anyway, bicarb buffers acid. Taking bicarbonate orally causes massive GI distress. Your stomach is acidic.

Kelly: [0:37:40] No, no, no. This is real.

Jeff Byers: [0:37:42] This is real. 

Kelly: [0:37:43] This is why people were like oh, you can load bicarb and it works and it’s legal, but also, it’s really gnarly.

Jeff Byers: [0:37:50] So we all did like a third or fourth grade papier-mâché volcano experiment in elementary school.

Kelly: [0:37:56] That’s your stomach.

Jeff Byers: [0:37:57] That’s your stomach. And what that papier-mâché volcano is, it’s vinegar, acid, your stomach, and baking soda. Bicarb. And it explodes. And some people call it the double dragon. It goes up and out and down and out real fast. The double dragon. Visual image for everybody here. It’s a really fascinating product because it’s doing something that’s never been done a lot. We have really good data on it. We don’t have great data. It’s still super early days when we think about it. We’ve won a handful of government innovation contracts through the Department of Defense that have helped fund clinical data. We have some clinical data that’s coming out in the next six to nine months as it goes through the peer review publishing cycle. That’s what I call the cornerstone or keystone of the literature for this. But essentially you put it on before you work out really high intensity or really long days and it helps buffer that acid so that you can go a little harder for a little longer and feel better the next day. It’s a really special product. It’s not for everybody all the time. But it’s what propelled us to be at the forefront of high performance.

Juliet: [0:39:07] And tell us how did you go from making those two products—Amp Human and PR Lotion—and what you are doing there to now this gigantic enterprise that is Momentous. Tell us about that.

Jeff Byers: [0:39:20] So when we started Amp Human the company, it was to never make be a lotion company or a transdermal nutrient delivery company. It was to create a high performance company. That was the vision we had. And I go back to my playing days. One of the things that I saw was what happens in the locker room or at the elite level very rarely trickles to the consumer. And as we think about that, innovation, the technologies, the guidance, the knowledge, very rarely trickles to that consumer. And what I saw was this huge gap in the market of how do we bring the right knowledge, innovation, the access to the consumer, and what we had with being at the forefront was very, very different than what other people were doing. 

And so we started a company with this patented clinically validated product the government helped fund. And it was what’s next. And I’ll use the words we use today as it evolved but really how we’re thinking about the market and what we’re doing is really our goal and vision is democratized high performance. And we do that with the best products in the world, we do that with the best access, the best knowledge and guidance. And you all are a part of that best knowledge and access of how do we get people the right products at the right time with the right content and the right knowledge to why they are doing that. And that is so important. When we think about the space that we’re in, it’s very, very fragmented. Everybody lives in their little silos. But at the end of the day, the human body’s the most complicated system in the world. And if you just think about it by just one thing or that thing, you’re missing the whole big picture. And it’s how do we boil it up and what I call create a systematic approach based to high performance. Get people into the right behaviors, the right products, the right times.

Kelly: [0:41:05] I have to say that I work with a local college team and sometimes you can hear this and you can see that people can get lost in the weeds, the biohackers. If I just take this molecule, it will optimize me. But oftentimes we’re seeing that the big basic blocks, people aren’t eating enough and we aren’t making it simple enough for them to get enough calories that they can digest during workouts because they can’t eat a sandwich, they can’t eat a peanut butter sandwich and do their sport right away. Do you still see that we’re still making those fundamental type one basic sort of errors in our food and nutrition and sleep or do you feel like the marketplace is going, we really need to hyper specialize and that you’re missing this one molecule which gives you a .01 bump?

Jeff Byers: [0:41:53] A hundred percent we still have the base of the pyramid to optimize and I would say that across the board. So if you’re looking at a pyramid and you say 80 percent of information and products and ideas out there are well known, pretty accessible, the knowledge, the problem is what’s good for me and what fits my goals and my fears are very different than what fits yours. And the challenge is just doing a couple things really, really good for long periods of time has epic, epic, good consequences for us. And but that’s where when I think about what we did in the NFL and what’s happening there is it’s a systematic based approach. It’s not anything crazy. It’s like everybody’s a mutant – your words. 

And what you do is you put together a couple… Me, I had high injury prone soft tissues. So 80 percent of everything I did from nutrition to body maintenance to how I worked out and how I practiced was directed back towards, hey, I’m broken, I need to not be broken, let’s think about how do I have variance in my workouts and in my diet and in my life, right? And so as you weed those things through. But it wasn’t you need to do 900 things, it was you did these five things, hard stop. Because as you know, the more stimulus you throw at somebody, you basically reach this point in the curve where too much stimulus you just fall off this cliff and you stop doing it.

Kelly: [0:43:28] Bone crushing consistency.

Juliet: [0:43:30] Yeah. That’s from Layne Norton. So Momentous products are all NSF certified for sport. Or not all, some?

Jeff Byers: [0:43:38] All of our products are third party tested. A whole bunch of our sports nutrition line or our whole sports nutrition line is NSF and informed sport and then we have a whole other chunk of our product line that is informed sport. We have a handful of products that are on the supplement side that are going through informed sport cycle testing.

Kelly: [0:43:59] Can you explain what that is real quick?

Juliet: [0:44:00] Yeah. I don’t think everybody knows what that is. What are those two things and- 

Kelly: [0:44:03] Why is it important?

Juliet: [0:44:04] Why is it important? Because we know that it’s super important but why is it important?

Jeff Byers: [0:44:11] Well, as we know, anybody can start a supplement company in their bathtub tomorrow. The barriers to entry are literally zero.

Kelly: [0:44:16] That’s a true statement, everyone.

Jeff Byers [0:44:19] True statement.

Kelly: [0:44:19] Literally, you can make a supplement, a dietary supplement and market it as food.

Jeff Byers: [0:44:25] And do whatever. You put asterisks, “These statements have not been…” It is literally the Wild West. And it creates a very messy, confused consumer. So essentially all the dietary supplements, vitamins, minerals, and such that you take, are not regulated. And what’s on the label doesn’t have to be what’s in the bottle because there’s no regulation on there. And so there’s really two certifications that are held in the highest regard. One of them is NSF; the other one is LGC, which is known as informed sport. And those two, they content certify it and then they test it for banned substances against the WADA anti-doping list. So basically it’s how these practitioners have found a way to pro college sports to say what are the highest quality safest ones, supplements, it’s these. These things cost a lot of money to get certified. So the content certified is really what is important I think for the general consumer, which they don’t understand. A lot of people say, “Oh, they’re third party certified.” And they have a logo that says third party certified, which means nothing. Everybody has, again, that literally means nothing.

Kelly: [0:45:35] It means organic or natural. 

Jeff Byers: [0:45:37] Yeah. Third party certified for what? And so NSF certified is an example. If our protein powder or 20 grams of protein in it on the label and it comes back with 21 grams of protein in it on the sample, we don’t pass content certified. Or if it has five extra milligrams of sodium. So what’s actually in the label has to be in the bottle or in the jar or in the bag, whatever the thing is, which is really, really important. And so they’re actually certifying that. And if you’re out of whack, you have to have a variance report that shows you have to have a way in to change that. And so it creates a very tight manufacturing certification. 

And all of these manufacturers are audited by these two groups. And then to be…. They have substance tests and basically, they just test you for all the banned substances and say clean or not clean and that’s a very black and white situation there. It’s very important to us as we sell into 200 pro college teams now to have these pro certifications. The consumer doesn’t understand because it’s, again, we live in this land, this industry, that is noise and confusion of buy this, buy that. And when we talk to consumers, people don’t know what they’re getting or why. And quality is very, very different from what you buy in a big box to what you buy from us. I like to say we compete for free in the locker room. Teams get things for free from all these companies; they buy our stuff.

Juliet: [0:47:14] Compete with free.

Jeff Byers: [0:47:14] We compete with free, which speaks to my sales team of how good they are but also speaks to the quality of products that we have, but also why we’ve chosen to partner with these experts and these practitioners like you all because companies are always saying, well, we have the best products, we have the best ingredients and formulations.

Juliet: [0:47:36] Do they?

Jeff Byers: [0:47:37] We can say the same thing. Nobody listens to us. We say all these things but what we’ve found is we have this unique ability to partner with experts because we’re doing clinical research, we’re innovating, we truly have the best products and Dr. Andrew Huberman or you two or Stacy Sims says this is the company that I believe in and that I’ve gotten behind. They can pick any supplement. There’s 1,000 supplement companies in the world. I choose to work with Momentous because they stand for the same things I do. That carries a lot of weight because you all can work with anybody. I know you. You have probably 20 people that would love to work with you in our space. And it’s more than just slinging supplements. My goal is not to create a supplement company. We are trying to democratize high performance. That is a very different thing than just be a supplement company now.

Juliet: [0:48:28] Yeah, it really is. Well, okay, so I just want to try to do a slight repeat because I think people learn that way. And I do think you’re right that there’s a massive amount of confusion in the market and maybe just this little podcast episode can help fix some of that confusion. But if there is a consumer that’s listening to this who wants to buy content certified supplements, what do they look for? How do they know?

Jeff Byers: [0:48:52] So there’s logos that will go on a product page on the website that says, “NSF Certified” “Informed Sport NSF Certified for Sport,” et cetera. That will be on those logos. And again, it’s literally a check the box. These companies could do it. It just costs money to check the box and people choose not to do it, which blows my mind. It’s the only way.

Kelly: [0:49:13] If you’re a drug tested athlete, would you take anything that wasn’t NSF?

Jeff Byers: [0:49:17] No, never. You should never take anything. Teams can’t buy that. They can’t give their athletes that. And you should never risk it. If you’re pay check depends upon you peeing in a cup and having to come back clean, why would you ever risk it for a Vitamin D? You never know. Things get cross contaminated.

Kelly: [0:49:36] Or creatine or protein. Because we’re in this space, the stories we’ve heard of things being in pre-workout, being in protein supplements, it’s insane how-

Jeff Byers: [0:49:50] It’s way more common than you think and I have no idea. That’s one level. The other level here to me is this is a barrier to entry. You shouldn’t have a choice. How are you not content certified? How are you not doing that? The other thing is just the quality of ingredients and the thoughtfulness behind the portfolio of products. What’s the new sexy sleep cocktail or this or that. How do we go back to scientifically led expert products to say this is why these products exist and this is how you use them together? And I won’t say we’re great at that as a business but what we’re trying to get to is how do we get people in the right products at the right time because that’s how you create longstanding habits and create real change in somebody’s life. For me, I care about connective tissue health and cognitive health and then I want to be able to go really hard and perform when I go really hard. Those are the only three things I care about. Everything else is below that. Yeah.

Kelly: [0:50:54] I’m going to put connective tissue health above my cognitive health. I might be a little slower but my knees are going to feel great.

Juliet: [0:50:58] You’re going to be able to squat. First of all, just one last thing on this certification thing, it’s like because I’m sort of a skeptical person, I would think, okay, if a supplement does not have those two things, it probably does not have what it says it has. If it’s not that hard to get it done. I don’t know if that’s-

Jeff Byers: [0:51:21] I would say there’s a lot of really good companies out there that choose not to get certified.

Kelly: [0:51:27] It’s expensive and a pain in the butt.

Juliet: [0:51:28] For those reasons.

Jeff Byers: [0:51:30] For business reasons. That make high quality products. But again, if we’re going to be leaders in high performance and we want to work with you or Stacy or Andrew or anybody in this space, it’s just like just to show up to the party you’ve got to have it. It doesn’t even matter in my opinion.

Kelly: [0:51:52] Especially anyone who’s going to be drug tested at all. I mean at our gym, we actually had people who were in strength sports who would show up. And that is to say free form strength sports; you can take whatever you want, do a strength sport. And then we’d have people who would be doing cycling in the Olympics and we’d be like, no, no, no, no, you can’t shake hands. You guys can just air knuckle.

Juliet: [0:52:13] Yeah, you guys just don’t even be on the same side of the gym. That’s fine.

Kelly: [0:52:16] We go, we’ll just move your bags apart.

Juliet: [0:52:18] Don’t touch.

Kelly: [0:52:20] If you’re afraid of testing from drinking some weird Mexican milk in South America, we need to also be aware. So we appreciate where you’re coming from on that.

Juliet: [0:52:29] Okay, so quick turn, 180 here, but I wanted to ask, you were on the other side of the table when you were working in venture capital or in finance before you became an entrepreneur yourself. What has surprised you the most running a business as a CEO and growing a company?

Jeff Byers: [0:52:50] Ah, man, that is a really loaded question. I would say everything feels like it takes longer than it does, but everything goes faster than you think it does. When you look like, man, why are we going so slow and you look forward and today’s like, man, why are we going faster, and then you look backwards when you take this deep breath and you’re like, ho, we been going real fast, how did we get here, how are we this far along? I mean just the amount of grit and resiliency that takes the growth early stage business to be a founder is incredible. I feel so lucky to have a business partner that has and shares that same grit, that resiliency that I do because it’s really hard. And some times are great and you’re high-fiving and other times it’s not great but you still got to high five because those are the times that are really, really important. 

And it’s been an incredible, incredible journey but I also… Finance is very transactional and a lot of things in life there’s transaction. And one of the things that I love so much about being in a passion driven industry company is it’s about the people you surround yourselves with in this community. There’s a higher purpose for what you do and what we do than always the bottom line. The bottom line is really important. But we get to wrap ourselves around people we love doing things that we love and talk about those all the time. That to me is what’s so different is, yeah, we’re transactional at times but we really… The business and the ethos of this community that I’m lucky to be in with you all is so much more than transactional. And that is not how the other side works all the time.

Kelly: [0:54:48] No, that’s true.

Juliet: [0:54:49] Yeah, that’s so true. Okay, so tell us what is next for you and your company and what is your next athletic event as well?

Jeff Byers: [0:54:59] Whoo. Next athletic event is I don’t know.

Kelly: [0:55:02] Let me just tell everyone, Jeff gets together with some friends who are also freaks of nature and you go out there and you do something crazy once a year and it’s got to be brutally hard. You would never do it for fun.

Juliet: [0:55:13] And it takes all day.

Kelly: [0:55:14] And potentially high risk of not completing it. And what I love about this high risk of not completing it is the people involved always complete everything they do. So suddenly you guys are presented with a task where you may or may not complete that and I won’t bore people with the ridiculousness. I mean you guys are talking about paddling the Molokai Channel next year, right? That was one of the ideas floated?

Jeff Byers: [0:55:35] Yeah. Yeah, and I think it’s still on the radar. There is some other stupid thing. I don’t know what it is. It has to do with a lot of water activities too of like a river and holding your breath, and I don’t know. I’m always in for challenging, out of body, out in the world experiences of suffer, suffer, suffer. I think they’re so important for us to ground all of us.

Kelly: [0:55:59] Wait, I’ve got to jump right in and just say something. We had recently, you came, you’re a user, you’re down to throw down. You just had the alpaca sled world champion of the world here at the office. And even though it’s representative that the reigning gold medalist in bobsled won, do you want to set the record straight officially on this podcast?

Jeff Byers: [0:56:17] I hope she’s not listening.

Kelly: [0:56:19] You outweigh her by a lot.

Jeff Byers: [0:56:21] By a lot. Technically in a heat of three, technically I won, but I’m not keeping score in the alpaca sled challenge.

Kelly: [0:56:29] I just wanted to give you an opportunity. You’ll be released on the internet here soon.

Jeff Byers: [0:56:32] And I’m happy to challenge anybody to go to The Ready State’s gym and attempt to break that and I will come out and break your time. I will start training for it immediately.

Juliet: [0:56:42] Oh, it’s a thing now. Anyone who comes has to do it. Any visitor has to do it. So I mean it’s on. It’s on. I don’t know if they actually can but they’re going to try. Oh, they’re going to try. 

Jeff Byers: [0:56:52] It’s sticky. It really is. Anyways, my next sporting event is definitely skiing. The next thing I’m going to do has to be on the snow. I don’t know, we’re like a month out from ski season opening in Park City so I’ve just got to figure out how to get on the mountain sooner and start skiing. And then what was your other question, Juliet?

Juliet: [0:57:10] What’s next for Momentous? What’s going on? What are you looking forward to?

Jeff Byers: [0:57:12] Really, I mentioned this, the vision of how do we democratize high performance. And really, my goal and what we have to do as a brand is we have to bring that to life. And that is showing these partnerships with The Ready State or the Andrew Huberman and bringing that content and validation to life into helping people getting the right products at the right time. I really, really believe that’s a challenge of who we are and what is democratized high performance. It’s a guidance driven business of how do we provide better service and make sure people know why they’re taking collagen or why they’re taking this for sleep or why they’re not taking this versus that, whatever it may be. I really believe that’s the future and that’s who we are as a business, is how do we democratize high performance and that’s bringing the experts and the voices that surround us and combining them all together to get people in the right place at the right time. We have a couple cool products that are coming out or just relaunched that I’m really excited about. But what I’m most excited about is bringing the brand to life and really the brand expression of being at the forefront of high performance and bringing people better content and knowledge so doesn’t have to be guesswork into what you do and why you do it. It’s here’s the reason, here’s what to do, here’s some great behavior changers, and here’s some products.

Kelly: [0:58:39] Momentous is definitely part of our life. Our girls get the collagen and the creatine every day. One of the things that made me sad about being middle aged, but I’m like, “Hey, Juliet, do you want to take some magnesium and go to bed early?” That’s literally-

Juliet: [0:58:50] That’s our night.

Kelly: [0:58:52] That’s the sexiest thing you can say to someone on Wednesday at 9 o’clock. “Hey, you want to take some magnesium and go to bed?” So you’ve influenced our bed routine, Jeff. I don’t even know if you know that.

Juliet: [0:59:00] Yeah. I mean he may feel awkward about that.

Kelly: [0:59:01] And Jeff is turning red right now. It’s so great. 

Juliet: [0:59:03] Yeah. He feels awkward but it’s totally fine.

Jeff Byers: [0:59:04] Totally normal. I’m really easily awkwarded, if that’s a word. But we’re launching a sleep pack which has magnesium in it, and it’s these individual pill pouches and it has magnesium, L-theanine, and apigenin in it. And I’m really excited. It’s like Andrew Huberman sleep cocktail that he talks a lot about and it’s all super convenient. It’s nothing revolutionary. It’s like even for me what a pain in the butt to like, oh, I need one of these out of this jar, let me get this jar.

Kelly: [0:59:40] It really is. That’s who you are.

Juliet: [0:59:40] It really is, it’s sad because then you’re like, wait, where is this jar and I can’t find it, it’s in the kitchen and I’m here so you don’t take the one. Yeah, so I think the convenience is huge.

Kelly: [0:59:48] We are a one click nation, that’s true.

Jeff Byers: [0:59:50] And for us, sleep. If you boil it back down, what is the most important thing everybody can do? Sleep. It is the totally most important thing. And it’s like let’s start simplifying there because if we can provide some really basic supplements that we know help calm you down, help you get to sleep faster and keep you in deep sleep, we’re going to have a bigger impact. So that was like where are we going?

Kelly: [1:00:18] And also habit forming? Right?

Jeff Byers: [1:00:21] Yeah, a hundred percent.

Kelly: [1:00:23] It’s magnesium, it’s just magnesium.

Jeff Byers: [1:00:24] None of them are apigenin comes from grapefruits and it also comes from chamomile. But it’s one of these things how do we give somebody an easy win but also make it super consistent but if you know, oh man, I’m already getting ready for my bedtime routine and I’ve got to go back up and find my stupid pills and get a glass of water or whatever, make it super easy travel or whatever because as soon as you break your routine, you’ve got to get it started again. and I find that. And that was this other innovation, the collagen shot. If you follow The Ready State, you know the collagen shot because you guys have talked about it a lot.

Juliet: [1:01:01] Yeah, we’re obsessed with those. 

Jeff Byers: [1:01:02] Yeah, it’s one of my favorites. But it’s also how do we make it really easy to get people something that is the most impactful for the connective tissue health from a supplementation perspective at the right time?

Kelly: [1:01:14] Can I get an amen?

Juliet: [1:01:15] Word.

Jeff Byers: [1:01:15] Amen.

Kelly: [1:01:17] Where can people find out more about Momentous and Stacy Sims and Andrew Huberman and some of the partners that you have? Where do we dig in and how do we go from here? How do people take the next step?

Jeff Byers: [1:01:29] Yeah. We’re at livemomentous.com and I think we’re @livemomentous on the social media platforms. Easiest way to find us, right there. You guys also talk about us a lot and link about it. Huberman does as well, which is all great places to find really great knowledge and content across the board. So check us out. We’re super excited. Ping customer service with any questions. We’ve got a great team behind there. They can direct you to some of exercisiologists, dieticians, if you do have questions about products and things like that.

Kelly: [1:02:01] Jeff Byers, world champion of the world alpaca sled champion, good dancer.

Juliet: [1:02:05] Thank you for being here.

Kelly: [1:02:07] Nice to see you, my friend. Thanks so much for joining us.

Jeff Byers: [1:02:09] Thank you guys.

[music]

Kelly: [1:02:15] Thank you for listening to The Ready State Podcast. If you like what you’re hearing, check out all our episodes here or at thereadystate.com. And be sure to subscribe or leave a review on iTunes to help others find our show. 

Juliet: [1:02:27] Check us out and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @thereadystate.

Kelly: [1:02:32] Until next time, cheers everyone.

[music] 

Back to Episode