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Justin Mares

Founder & CEO, Truemed · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveauthorinvestor@jwmares ↗LinkedIn ↗justinmares.com ↗

Justin Mares is the founder of health brands including Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto, and Surely, as well as Truemed, a platform enabling HSA/FSA spending on preventive health. He also co-authored the startup growth book Traction.

15statements → 8claims → 6claims resolved → 17%fully supported → 3.73/5average certainty → 2.47/5average debate potential → 46said about them ↓

1 supported 4 partly supported 1 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 7 assertions · 4 opinions · 1 insight · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Justin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Mares: 90% of $4.5T Annual US Healthcare Spend Goes to Chronic Conditions
“Like healthcare, four and a half trillion dollars a year in spend. 90% of that goes towards chronic conditions.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 16:27 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Mares: Average American food is 40% to 70% less nutrient dense than 50 years ago
“Like, you know, the average American's food is something like between 40 and 70% less nutrient dense than it was even just 50 years ago.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 22:13 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
25% certainty 3
67% certainty 4
50% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Everything Justin Mares said on TBPN that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mares: Exercise and sleep treat chronic conditions better than pharmaceuticals
“If you look at studies, they show that exercise, sleep supplements, all these things actually work better for treating many chronic conditions than, you know, SSRIs or any such sort of other like pharmaceutical intervention.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 3:38 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Opinion
Mares: The US food system is poisonous to weak-willed Americans
“The American food system is basically poisonous to weak willed people like most Americans.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 7:28 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Assertion Contradicted
Mares: Average American food is 40% to 70% less nutrient dense than 50 years ago
“Like, you know, the average American's food is something like between 40 and 70% less nutrient dense than it was even just 50 years ago.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 22:13 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Opinion
Mares: Building an AI startup outside San Francisco is a bad idea
“The reality is I think that like in SF, if you're building an AI company and you're not an SF right now, it's just, it just seems like a bad idea. Like you should just move to the place where all the AI stuff is, is happening outside of that though.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 1:41 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Opinion
Mares: Austin is a much better hub for health and defense tech than SF
“I mean, I think that you could make a pretty compelling argument that Austin is a way better place to build a health company, a defense tech company, like any number of these sort of hard tech or other companies that You know, the Bay doesn't necessarily have …”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 1:57 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Assertion Partly supported
Mares: Atrazine exposure turns 40% of male frogs into fertile females
“And provably, when you expose atrazine, expose male frogs to atrazine, like four out of 10 of them become female frogs to the point where they can bear offspring.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 19:31 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mares: Environmental toxins will be the biggest trend of the next decade
“I think environmental toxins are going to be the biggest trend of the next decade. And we just don't even understand or begin to understand how bad a lot of these things are.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 21:41 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Opinion
Mares: Keto Lost Staying Power Because People Ate Low-Quality High-Fat Foods
“And this is why things like keto didn't have necessarily the staying power where people were like, oh, that means I can buy dog shit cheese and dip it in butter and just like max out on fat content and not eat any, like anything healthy.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 24:23 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Assertion Partly supported
Justin Mares: TruMed raised $36M led by Andreessen Horowitz
“The big news is that we actually closed a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Yeah, so we raised thirty six million dollars led by Andreessen Horowitz.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 2:44 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Insight
Mares: Engaging founders pre-launch yields angel pricing advantages
“If you can play some role in the journey that your friends have, or like other people, you know, have, In going from, should I start a thing to I'm doing this thing? Oftentimes you have pricing advantage of that, but you're also like part of the journey and pa…”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 12:41 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Disclosure
Mares: Kettle & Fire Has Stopped Hiring Copywriters and Ad Creators
“For Kettle and Fire specifically, we are not hiring like ad creators. We're not hiring copywriters. Like there was this whole slew of marketing adjacent people that we previously, you know, had to hire. We had a copywriter for the first like five and a half ye…”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 14:04 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Assertion Partly supported
Mares: Atrazine is the third most used US pesticide and banned elsewhere
“Our third most popular pesticide is called atrazine. Just to give an example, it's banned in the EU, banned in Mexico banned in Canada. Third most popular pesticide in the US.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 19:22 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Assertion Partly supported
Mares: Spinach loses 70% to 90% of nutrient density during 12-day transit
“Like if you grow, you know, spinach in California, package it, put it on average, like a 12 day kind of like supply, put it through the supply chain. It gets to where you're eating at 12 days later. In that 12 day period, that spinach is going to lose like rou…”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 23:21 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Disclosure
Mares: Kettle & Fire Is Building a 150,000-Square-Foot Factory
“We are building a factory. It's like a massive 150,000 square foot bone broth you know, bone broth kind of spot.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 15:07 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.
Assertion Supported
Mares: 90% of $4.5T Annual US Healthcare Spend Goes to Chronic Conditions
“Like healthcare, four and a half trillion dollars a year in spend. 90% of that goes towards chronic conditions.”
Justin Mares Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 16:27 Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG.

The other half of the tape: Justin Mares's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 45 times in 21 episodes on TBPN. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Jordi Hays 20John Coogan 13Calley Means 5Augustus Doricko 2David Senra 1David Perell 1

Statements about Justin Mares, by other people (1)

Assertion Contradicted
Coogan: Wealthy Americans traveled abroad for GLP-1 drugs before US availability
“The, like, GLP-I's were, like, widely available for, like, five years before they came to America, and a lot of rich people were going abroad to get them.”
John Coogan Nov 12, 2024 ▶ 1:26:39 Inside JD Vance's Portfolio (ep8)

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
001583015202420252026episodesmentions
0815202420252026episodes it came up in
001.37.52.515202420252026episodesmentions per episode
2026 2 mentions in 1 episode
2025 26 mentions in 11 episodes 2 per episode
2024 17 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Justin Mares talks Tru Med, MAHA, and the Future of CPG. Mar 14, 2025 13m
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