The BIGGEST Longevity Mistake Most Brands Make

Most beauty and wellness brands mistake a viral product for a long-lasting brand. But real longevity is built through trust, consistency, community, and science.

In this episode of Beauty Biohacks: Biohacking for Beauty, Longevity & Beyond, host Iryna Kremin speaks with Dr. Brent Ridge, physician, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Beekman 1802, as they explore what it truly takes to build lasting success in beauty, skincare, and wellness.

Drawing on insights from his book G.O.A.T. Wisdom: How to Build a Truly Good Business from the Founders of Beekman 1802, Dr. Ridge explains why authenticity compounds over time, how the skin and gut microbiome influence healthy-looking skin, why reducing inflammation matters for longevity, and how kindness can become a powerful business strategy.

In this episode:

• Why the biggest longevity mistake is chasing trends instead of building trust
• The science of inflammation, the skin microbiome, and healthy aging
• How to create a beauty brand that thrives beyond social media algorithms
• Why community is your strongest long-term competitive advantage
• Lessons on resilience, entrepreneurship, and sustainable growth
• Practical advice for founders, skincare professionals, retailers, investors, and product innovators

If you're passionate about beauty biohacking, longevity, healthy aging, skincare science, microbiome health, entrepreneurship, brand building, wellness innovation, and building businesses that last, this episode is for you.

Subscribe to Beauty Biohacks: Biohacking for Beauty, Longevity & Beyond for conversations with the world's leading experts in beauty, longevity, health, and performance.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Welcome to the Beauty Biohacks series, where I invite health and beauty experts to talk about optimizing your health, beauty, and well-being with the help of the latest science, nutrition, technologies, and data-driven self-experiments. I'm Irina Kremin, and I'm the founder of INACOS Beauty Network, professional connector and turned biohacker. Now, back to episode. So, welcome everyone to the Beauty and Longevity Podcast. And today our special guest is Brent Reach from Big Man 1802. As we changed our podcast from the beauty biohacks to beauty and longevity focus, when I was thinking who is the first guest I would like to invite, I thought of you, and I'll tell you why. Because when I read your book, which is absolutely amazing, actually, it's a really universal book. I like it. And and uh what amazed me here is that first of all, it's very nice written. It reads like very smoothly, like interesting story, and it's uh it has this combination of the mini MBA with a lot of like you go through the all major uh epstones uh we can uh face in a business. And as a business owner, I have to tell you that I've seen quite a few uh examples you were telling about your brand, which is I'm very much related to. And there are a couple of things which I sort of know, but I was not paying too much attention to, and I made some notes. Yeah. It's a very smart educating educational book, but at the same time, it reads very smoothly and interesting, and as you go through, we're voting for big team and these amazing people.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

Well, you're you're you're welcome every time and uh anytime. And uh I appreciate that that praise um because I know you do read voraciously. And yeah, that's what we wanted to try to do with Goat Wisdom is uh use our story um of 16 years and inspire other people with the story, but really give them the foundational tools they need to build their own greatest of all time business. I mean, that's really what we we want to focus on, not just building a good business, but building a great business.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Meaningful and uh and it doesn't matter what business, it can apply to any business. You already were thinking about building a legacy brand and longevity. And your brand is combined both longevity as in the core in the science in your product, so you can think about health, longevity, but also longevity of the business and all this looking at the legacy. And then I was thinking, my God, I like to speak about this longevity, actually, longevity of the business, how you started.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

For for people who are who are unfamiliar with beef, and I'll just give a little snippet of how we got started. My background was in medicine and longevity. I was originally on faculty at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and then had gone back to business school. And after business school, went to work at Martha Stewart to head up her new health and wellness division that they were creating. My partner, both my romantic partner, now my husband, and um now my co-founder, Beakman 1802, was uh in advertising. So we're both living and working in New York City with these big careers, um, both around 30 years old. And in 2006, we um were driving in upstate New York on a weekend getaway from the city and decided that we needed a farm. You know, we needed a place to go on the weekends, and we found this beautiful farm, this tiny little village of Sharon Springs, New York, and decided to buy it. And one weekend we came up, um, this was around 2007, and there was a note in our mailbox, and it was from a local farmer who was losing his farm. And he asked, could he bring his goats to our property? Otherwise, he would have to sell his herd. And because we were only there on the weekends, we said, sure, bring, bring the goats. There's another little cottage on the property, you can live there. And ultimately, we say that was the original act of kindness that started Beakman 1802, um, helping this neighbor who was in need. Because in 2008, when the recession hit and we both lost our big fancy jobs in the city, um, we had to figure out what we were going to do to save the company, uh, to save the farm. We didn't have a company then. And so we Googled what we can make with the goat milk that Farmer John had brought to the farm. And that's how we started making our original bars of goat milk soap, which kind of started our company. And since that time, we have made and sold 60 million bars of just that bar of soap. Um, and that's what really started our whole journey at Beakman 802. But going back to your question of marrying the idea of longevity and science and longevity in the business, um, when we started the company, because I had just come from working at Martha Stewart, um, we knew how dangerous it could be if you tied a persona, a persona to a company too directly. And so from the very beginning, we never wanted Brent and Josh to be the central figures of the company. We wanted people to see themselves as the company and the idea that we represented, this idea of kindness and neighborliness. And so, even going back to when we were trying to figure out what we were going to name the company, we were for certain we're not gonna name it Dr. Brent Ridge or, you know, Dr. Ridge, anything like that. We said, okay, what are some of the companies that have been around forever? And what can we learn from the way they named their products or their company? And so we made like a short list of just names, legacy names that we could think of. And Chanel number five was on the list. We said, Oh, what makes this interesting is that it's a name and a number. So there's something mysterious about it. There's something that seems to have gravitas to it. And so we said, okay, our farm was built by a man named William Beekman in the year 1802. So let's call our company Beekman 1802 and let that represent everything that we're trying to represent with this company. And, you know, I think what was, you know, as I said, we've been around for 16 years, and we started the company not thinking how we are going to sell the company. We started because we needed to survive. And I think for so many hundreds and thousands of years, that's how people started companies, right? You were starting your company for your own personal livelihood. And I think something happened over the past maybe 20 years, even more dramatically in the past decade, is that people went into founding companies with the exit in mind from the very beginning, which is fine. You can have a very good business, you can have a very good lucrative business, you can have a phenomenal exit. But I don't think that that is the strategy for having a legacy business, a truly greatest of all time business. I think if you happen to achieve that using that starting from the beginning, thinking of the exit, then you are an anomaly. I think very few companies that start out thinking, here's my path to exit, are actually going to become a legacy company.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

Yeah, I have not, I don't know many companies who would think about it uh from the very beginning. And I think it's one of the perhaps ingredients for your success when you're thinking about legacy. You're really thinking deep about culture and many, many aspects. So one of the quotes I would like to uh quote and and uh and have you commented on that. Better aging begins at birth.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

My especially in longevity and aging, um, I think my interest in longevity and aging began when I was a child. You know, I I was in a single family home, and my mother was a nurse, and so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, and I was fortunate that even up until the time I was in college, I still had two of my great-grandmothers. Um I was just always fascinated by the aging process and always wanted to be around people who were older than me. I just I loved the wisdom that I got from people who were much older than me. So I always had an interest in the aging process and wanted to just keep my grandmas around longer. And and then when I went into uh practice at Mount Sinai, so much about living a long life is something that you really have to start thinking about before you get to the age of 50 or before age of 60, which is when a lot of people start thinking about it. Um, it really does begin at birth. And um, that actually came from my very first ever conversation with um Martha Stewart. We were um creating this idea to found the Martha Stewart Center for Living, which ultimately became one of the largest centers for the study and caring of um aging people. Um and that center is at Mount Sinai Hospital. And in our very first conversation, she asked, What makes people age better? And I said, Well, Martha, better aging begins at birth. So every decision that is made for you, even before you come out of the womb, you know, the things that the mother made prenatally, those are contributing to how well you're going to age. Every decision that you make in your life, whether it's what you put in your body, what you put on your body, the environment you surround yourself with, the people you surround yourself with, the stressors that you put on yourself, all of those things contribute to better aging. And in fact, right after medical school, I received a fellowship from the American Foundation for Aging Research. And I went to work at Harvard working on this project called the New England Centenarian Study. And at the time, they were trying to find a genetic contribution to aging. So they were really trying to find what was this, what could that possible little piece of code in DNA be that could contribute to people who have extreme longevity? And so we were looking at all of these families who had longevity in multiple generations in the family. And at the end of that study, what we found was that there really wasn't a genetic component. The most important thing for aging better and living a long life, like to the age of 100, was the social connections and the optimism. And I think these days, so much is made about here are five easy steps to accomplish this, or here is a biohack to do this. And that's just not how things happen. Things happen because you plan for them, you have a long-term perspective of things, and that's how you reach success, either success in business or success in longevity. And we think the same thing with the company as well. Like we have always played the long game. We never wanted to be like, we never aim for triple-digit growth or virality or anything like that. We're like our goal is to just to grow steady, keep moving forward, the science we will move forward, the mission we will move forward step by step. Josh, my partner, likes to say, you know, you can look at things, you can there are two ways to get to the moon. You could build a rocket ship or you could build a ladder. And a rocket ship might get you there faster, but a lot of times the rocket explodes, you know, and so you never make it anywhere. But with a ladder, you might get there very slowly, wrong by wrong by wrong, but you're much more likely to get there in the end.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

This is uh Yeah, and this is the reason why your your brand is um is so strong, is because you were thinking from the very beginning about longevity, right? It's about uh how to make a difference in the in the people's life. And stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

So when we look about the brands who are not successful, uh let's say the brands mistakes, this podcast, one of the subtitles for this podcast is like biggest longevity mistakes that most brands make. So what do you think is common in the beauty involved, for example, in the beauty?

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Yeah, and I'll just um comment on this for from my experience in the past decade is that when with the um advent of social media, Web 2.0, um, and the rap the lower barriers of entry into the into the industry and the increased pace of the trend cycle, uh, I think people became confused about what it means to have a brand. Um, you know, a brand is not one viral product, a brand is not even a collection of products. A brand is something much deeper and much more layered than that. And I think that having a strong, you know, I think over the past decade, people have diminished what they thought of a brand and diminished um the power of the brand. And I think now coming out of Web 2.0, when attention spans are even shorter, now with the advent of AI, where there's going to be so much content being spun out, getting attention and being sticky is going to be even harder. I think we're going to see people come back to the realization of how important brand depth is. Because so many of the brands that were built and scaled over the past decade were very superficial. And they were beautiful brands. Some of them even had an amazing product, but the depth of the brand story was very superficial. And, you know, so much is made these days about authenticity. It's like authenticity is one of those things you're like, well, I know it when I see it. But there is one true KPI for authenticity. And that KPI is longevity. And you cannot prove that you're authentic in a year or two years or three years. That's something you prove over a decade or multiple decades because it proves that you had the purpose, you had the vision, you had the drive to last over every trend cycle, over every era. And I think that that got lost over the past decade. And I think people are coming back to that.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

Yes, they're sometimes they're looking for the fast wins because it's a business, business needs the cash flow. You go on social media, you make some some bunch of statements, uh, it works for you in the fast uh way, uh right?

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Uh and let's let's be clear, you can have a very good lucrative business that way. And some people are serial entrepreneurs, and that's what they love, and that's their passion, and they do that. Um, but that is very different from building a greatest of all time business. It's just it's a different concept.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

So, for the greatest of all-time business, what is essential ingredients to the model design for long-term relevance?

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Yep. I think it goes back to the foundation of any great business. And the reason in the book, you know, all of the chapters, this is the book, Goat Wisdom, the reason it's called goat wisdom, greatest of all-time wisdom, is because we went back to all of these old proverbs that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years, used in every culture around the world. And often many of the proverbs are rooted in agrarian economies because farmers were the original entrepreneurs, even going back to the hunter and gatherers, right? And what was it about these bits of wisdom that made them so relevant that they still exist today? And so what we did was we married those proverbs and what those proverbs tried to teach with the latest psychology and economic research from Harvard Business Review to prove here is why these things are essential for the foundations of a good business. And to be honest, when we started Beepman 1802, we weren't thinking in this way. It's only in the reflection of the past 16 years that we can say, yes, these are the things that made us successful. And, you know, I think boiling everything down, and what we hope that people will get by the time they finish the book is that in this world where we are bombarded with so much information, right? There's too much information for even our brains to comprehend, it becomes useless. So, how do we take information and convert it into wisdom? And so, if you see in each chapter, you know, we tell our personal journey, there's bits and pieces of our personal story. We then have the research from Harvard Business Review that that validates it. And then at the end of each chapter, we have these specific exercises that enable you to take the information you just received and convert it into wisdom. And we hope that by the time people have gone through all of the chapters, that just becomes an innate part of their processing in their daily life so that if they see a bit of information wherever it happens to be coming from, then immediately they're like, okay, how am I going to apply this to a problem that I am facing right now? So, how am I converting this information into wisdom and not just scrolling past it for the next dopamine hit of information? Um, so that's what we're hoping the book accomplishes when people read it.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

I love all the wisdoms. This was the 12 wisdoms, right? Yes. I love how also structured uh the book is structured. It's so easy to jump from one wisdom to another wisdom. So let's talk about the beauty industry, right? I find the beauty businesses they have to balance between trends and and thinking about building for longevity. So there are a lot of challenges. What challenges do you think the main challenges uh you face uh to balance this thing?

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Yeah. Yeah, I think the current challenge is that a lot of businesses, as you know, it's a very competitive industry. It's a very expensive industry to operate in, even though the barriers are lower, in order to get attention, in order to get shelf space, and then in order to move product off of shelf, it's very expensive. And I think a lot of companies are forced to take investment earlier than they should before they have proved out the concept, before they have got the right team in place. And then the the reason that that's a problem, we call it the shark tankification of American entrepreneurship, is because now all of these entrepreneurs think I have to have the idea and get the investment to start the company. And once you take investment, and I think a lot of young founders and new founders don't think about this when they take their first investment, is that once you take investment, you are a company that is based on getting more investment. Because each subsequent investor, you know, you take investment, then those investors want to get their return. And a lot of times to get that return, you have to take more money in. So you just it becomes this constant cycle that actually detracts from building your brand. Um, that has happened because of the trend cycle and the rapidity, you know, how fast things are happening. And I think people just need to take a, if they want to build a great brand, they have to take a step back and say, you know what? I'm not going to be that person that in three years has a billion dollar exit. I'm not going to, you know, do these things in, you know, this short time frame. Again, it's fine if you want to do that. You can have a good, could have a good outcome. Um, but if that's not going to build a legacy brand, most likely. Um so I think you do have to just decide what type of company you are trying to build. We went into it thinking we want to build a brand that will outlast us. And I think if if that's the type of brand you want to build, then all the principles you need, you will find in GOAT Wisdom. If you do not have that goal in mind, if you just want to build a good brand, sell it, or make some money, you can do that too. We're not placing a judgment on either way you do business. They're both completely valid ways to do business. But if you want to create the a greatest of all time brand, you have to think about things with more longevity.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Yeah, yeah. I've seen I've met some brands who already think in that way, so which is very amazing, who are saying that we don't we are not ready to take investment yet. We want to build it first.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Good.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Yeah. So um, so like can you share some practical space that founders can uh future-proof your brand from the day one?

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Well, I think to future proof your brand, you have to understand what your personal measure of success is going to be because that's going to always enable you to have the goal in mind. I think if you are starting a company of any type, beauty, a beauty company or any type, it's so critical for you to understand what your metric of success is going to be, and also not compare yourself to other people's successes because their measure of success may have been different from yours. I think so much in social media and even in all of media right now, the only measures of success that you see or that get any attention are billionaires or you know, social media influencers who are flying around on a private jet, or you know, these are the only images that you see. And one of the reasons that we wanted to write Goat Wisdom was because we know that you can start a very great business on Main Street in a small town where you're not only contributing to your own personal satisfaction, but you're putting good out into the world and you're helping the community around you. And so We wanted to give those types of entrepreneurs who aspire to have that type of business not only inspiration that yes, you can do it, even if you're in the middle of nowhere, but that that is a perfectly legitimate measure of success. And, you know, so much on social media, when you read, you're hearing these things that make you think that no matter how hard you work, you can't be successful because you're not going to have a billion-dollar exit or you're not going to, you know, sell out in three seconds, or whatever is the headline of the day. And we always say that comparison is the thief of your own personal joy. Um, because once you start comparing yourself to the headline, you're never going to feel like you're successful. So we tell every entrepreneur identify what it means for you to be successful and be satisfied. This is also important. Be satisfied when you meet that success. Don't get to that point and then change your goalpost. Because at the end of life, this is going back to better aging. At the end of your life, you want to have reached a point of contentment and happiness, right? You don't have to keep going on to the next thing and the next chapter and prove yourself to someone else. But you can only do that if you set the goalpost early on, aim, take the steps to reach that goalpost, and then be satisfied when you reach that goalpost. Then don't look at the next social media post and say, oh, now I have to do that. No, you don't have to do that. You can be, you can be content with what you achieved.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Yeah. Plus, you know, like there is a lot of behind this headlines and social media posts. We all know there is like not always exactly the same life behind it. It's uh sort of can be misleading, right? Uh often. It is.

SPEAKER_00 24:15

But isn't it something, Irina? It's something, Irina, because we know we know that, but then we also question it, right? Like even though we know it, you and I know it, yeah, we still don't you sometimes read something and you're like, well, how why did that happen to them and why is it not happening to me, right? Yeah. So even though we know that there is some falsity to it, yeah, you can't you can't completely divorce yourself from those feelings that you're an inadequate and social media, you know, pray praise on that.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Doing great job.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

So let's talk about authenticity. Like how what a role authenticity and community building plays in ensuring the background longevity. I think you have done it brilliantly with your uh network. I love how you call your uh customers neighbors. I actually was thinking, my God, you know, I should call my customers maybe sisters and brothers.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Well, I mean, why not? Why not? And you know, the the way that came about was that, you know, early on in the company, of course, Farmer John was the original neighbor, I mean the original act of kindness. But when we first, when we got our first big order from our first national retail partner, this was about 14 years ago, um, this uh company called Anthropology. And um, they had placed an order for 52,000 bars of soap. It was like a big holiday assortment that we were doing for them. And um, we could not get the soap wrapped. We were still making everything and wrapping bars of soap at our dining room table, and we could not get our bars of soap wrapped in time to ship them out. And so we did a phone tree um with to anyone who had extra time in our little village, you know, whether you were a stay-at-home mom, whether you're a retiree, we said, can you come and help us? And people even then were so isolated, they're like, Yeah, we would love to come and help out. And it became like a like almost like a quilting bee, you know, when when women used to get together and do quilts or needlepoint and things like that, and that was their social activity. The social activity became helping the guys at the Beekman Farm wrap these bars of soap for this big order. And so we always knew from the very beginning how powerful this idea of being a neighbor was. And then when we first launched on TV, which has been a big part of our success because TV retail enables you to tell a story better than any other medium, probably. And um, we we were telling that story about the neighbors helping us round wrapping bars of soap. And one of us just, and we don't remember who said it at this time, we said, and all of you who are watching right now are our neighbors. It doesn't matter if you live next door to us, we still consider you our neighbor. And that has been such an important aspect of Beakman 1802 that people consider themselves our neighbors philosophically. And, you know, the last bit of wisdom that we have in Goat Wisdom is a chapter called Love Thy Neighbor, which has been the most important bit of wisdom that has guided us. And that idea of neighbor is so important. And the reason that in almost every religion in the world, there's this idea of neighbor. And they don't, they don't say, you know, help all of mankind or even help your village, they'll say, help your neighbor or do something for your neighbor or how important your neighbor is. And that's so critical because we can sit, we can get so overwhelmed by all that we need to accomplish or want to accomplish or all the problems in the world. But if you scale it back and just say, hey, what can I do for the person standing right here next to me? And then that person thinks, what can I do for the person standing next to me? And so on and so on. Well, before you know it, you have solved a global problem, but you've done it one neighbor at a time. And so we always say that we grew our business one neighbor at a time. And every person who comes into our business, they consider themselves a neighbor. They consider themselves as contributing not to necessarily the success of Beekman, but contributing to the purpose of Beakman, which is putting more kindness out into the world. And by virtue of putting more kindness out into the world, we get more people who want to come into the brand and support the brand, try the product, then because we do quality product, they become Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

It's makes so much sense. I'm totally calling my customer sisters and brothers. I always felt like it's a family, and I thought that it's a family, you know. Sisters and brothers. I'm I'm taking it.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

And you and you have you have to live up to that though. You have to live up to it. And even with even with our in our company, we we teach all of our, we don't call it customer services, we call it neighbor services. And we are told, we tell all of our neighbor services representatives, the people who interact online or you know, email, response, or telephone. We say treat the person that you are communicating with as if they were someone that you were going to see in person the next day, as if they were a neighbor. So you don't want to say anything or communicate in a style that is going to make you embarrassed to see this person face to face.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

Um, and so and so they treat every every interaction as they're talking to a neighbor.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

So now let's talk about my favorite topic: personal bi hugs and longevity uh insights. Let's say uh I'm just curious. Uh, I follow different longevity protocols. You know, what is your longevity and wellness practices that you are kind of swear by and which is important for entrepreneurs to it is.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Well, again, you know, my philosophy, having studied aging, genetics of aging, that was the biggest part of my academic career. My philosophy is that better aging starts at birth. And I think that really it all comes down to the amount of inflammation that you can control throughout the course of your life and how that inflammation is going to impact your microbiome, both your internal microbiome and the external microbiome on your skin. You know, inflammation is what is going to contribute to how well you age. And that's why I say better aging begins at birth. Every decision that is made for you, are you going to eat ultra-processed food and start inflammatory processes in your body from the very beginning of your life? Are you going to use products on your skin that are too harsh for your skin and start inflammatory processes on your skin that then lead to inflammatory processes in your body? So, really, I think inflammation is the key. And so, how are you going to control and stress, of course, and what stress does to inflame inflammation in the body? So I think inflammation, I think that's the big field and the microbiome. Yeah, because I feel I still think, even though we've been talking about microbiome now for six or seven years, really since skin microbiome started to get some serious uh attention and research, I still think that people do not understand how important the microbiome is. It basically holds the entire body together. And, you know, I think we are just at the very beginning of understanding how powerful this is. I think AI is going to help us with that research. But I call the microbiome the God particles. You know, people always think about things that are big and things that are monumental. And I said, no, what controls the world are the small things. And the microbiome, I think we're going to show is the most powerful thing that drives our health. And anything that you do that's going to impact the health of the microbiome is going to impact your systemic health and how you age.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

We've been speaking about microbiome already for years. And the further we go, the more and more connections with the health and longevity we find. It's like new things every day.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

And I think it does come back. The interaction between inflammation and microbiome health. I think that's where we're going to see kind of the biggest advances in terms of longevity. But I also want to go back to what I was talking about with that research that I had done at Harvard early on in my career. It's not just about well, maybe it is related to inflammation too, in terms of how you process stress in your life. And, you know, when you when you think about all, and this is not just this one study, multiple studies have talked about social interaction, optimism, and how these things contribute to longevity. And probably because having an optimistic mindset, having social engagement helps you manage the levels of stress that we all face in our daily lives. Like we live in stress, stressful societies. But if you have an optimistic mindset, if you have an idea about kindness and how you treat yourself with kindness and how you treat other people with kindness, those things help control stress, which then helps control inflammation, which then helps make your microbiome healthier. So I don't want people, uh I think it is very tempting and easy. And I'm not saying that there aren't certain modalities, certain supplements and certain interventions that can help us age better or help us get a jump start. I'm not saying that. But I think that over the course of your lifetime, the most impactful thing that you can do in terms of aging better is figuring out how am I going to be kinder to myself and how am I going to be kinder to other people around me and build those social connections that are going to help me be more resilient throughout the course of my life. And just, you know, I know coming, you know, people often think, how can you be a brand that's built on kindness? And I'm like, listen, as a physician, I counsel people all the time about eating the right diet, getting the right amount of exercise. And I am telling you that kindness is an equally important preventative measure as your diet and as your exercise program. So people get on board with kindness. And it's not kindness is not easy. Just like choosing a salad over a donut is not easy, you know, or getting on the treadmill every day is not easy. Kindness is not easy. You have to work on it. For true kindness, you have to work on it. But it is one of the most powerful things to help you age better.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

Yeah, I have to tell you, like we live in this technology developed world. And every time we speak about longevity, biohax, we tend to go to all kinds of devices and supplements and stuff like that. We think like this is the key, this is what it helps us. And very easy to overlook, very, very simple things such as like kindness.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

And that we are so and I fall prey to it as well. The reason that we are so attracted to these quick fixes or the one pill solution is because we are trained to want instant gratification. But you know, this the whole point of our conversation today has been about longevity, right? And long-term thinking. And it's those things, these practices, these foundations that you put, you know, down at the very beginning of life, the very beginning of a business. These are the types of foundations that lead to true longevity.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

And it's very interesting as a scientist, you understand these basic things. There is a science in it because stress uh affects directly into the the way how cells are working. I know this company in Germany who taking a couple of your hair and it looks in your stress. They say that uh during your lifetime, you have a like as a hair grows, you have a stress, uh, different stress levels, and it's uh it's actually imprint in the hair. So they can take a hair and tell you like months ago, year ago, you how how high stress you had. How crazy it is. So it's mean that it works on the cellular level. And it's like for hair, it works for other cells also inside of the body.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

Correct. There's lots of epigenetic research that looks at DNA methylation, telomere length, yeah, and and the amounts of stress that you have been exposed to over the course of your life. And um kindness can save that.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

Yeah, totally. Uh, like if you speak about science-backed biohacks, do you have is there trends uh you're most excited about right now? What the what is coming for the better aging?

SPEAKER_00 36:55

Well, I think you know, I think with all of the um the idea of biohacking, I think the most exciting thing for me is not one individual modality, it's the overall interest in living a healthier life. And sometimes the sexy thing, whether it's a a device or a treatment or uh, you know, whatever pill, um that one thing is not going to be the solution. But culturally, if you get more people interested in understanding how my body ages, and if you can start that early in life, people are going to live healthier longer. And that is the goal, right? To live healthier, not just to live a long time, but to live healthier longer. And so anything that we can do that inspires people, that gets them engaged, that captures their attention, you know, that's what a lot of these biohacks are so great about doing is capturing people's attention. Um, and just help them go deeper and spend a little more time thinking about the things that they can do to live a better, longer life.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

The concept should be personal, right? Uh I just was listening to the webinar uh like a few days ago about the uh the medications, longevity medication, like metformin, drapamycin, and stuff like this. And they were saying that different people uh reacting on it differently, you know. So there is no unpeel that works for everyone. Uh for correct. It's all personal. The same with the lifestyle, everything needs to be adjusted to your body to yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

That's right. And I do uh what you know, I think one of the things that fascinates me most is um diagnostics, you know. So, you know, looking at biomarkers, total body scans, and I think, yes, these are all expensive things. And right now they are limited, you know, by the expense of them. So the vast majority of people can't. But if we do a better job of explaining to people how important it is to pay attention to what's happening in your body and learn as much as possible about your body as early as you can. Maybe we divert some of the money that we waste on other things, you know, whether it's fast fashion or, you know, whatever. We waste, we find lots of things to waste our money on. What if we took that and invested it in understanding our bodies a little bit better, right? Then maybe we could all afford to have full body scans or look at our biomarkers from time to time.

SPEAKER_01 39:26

Yeah, there are companies who democratize this right now. Like this kind of test will cost like $200.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Uh yeah, it has gotten a lot cheaper. Yeah, for sure. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Some of them. I do a lot of tests.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

No, you I'm you're you're interested, you're curious about your body, and I wish everybody, and I'm saying this as a physician, I wish everybody was as curious about their body and their mind as you are.

SPEAKER_01 39:50

Is this like favorite lessons story?

SPEAKER_00 39:52

The listen that can apply and I think probably my favorite story changes by the day, um, depending on who I'm in conversation with. But I think right now, for the people who um may be listening to this particular interview, there's one of the lessons that an empty vessel makes the most noise. And this kind of goes back to the conversation that we were having earlier, because we are a society which is so propelled by social media and by getting a dopamine fix from the next bit of information. And I just want people to take a step back and think to themselves, whenever they see something, a headline, a post, whatever, whatever, and it becomes viral and it's like everybody's talking about it. Just remember that an empty vessel makes the most noise. So the reason something and people are working so hard to make the noise is because there's no there. So don't compare yourself to the people that are getting the most attention, because almost always the people that are getting the most attention are not the people that are going to be getting the most attention the next day or the next day, even the next minute, right? Because they haven't built the foundation. The reason they're putting so much effort into making the noise is because they don't have the foundation to last for a lifetime.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

And uh now it's very difficult probably for you to to narrow down, but uh is it like one of the mistakes you made very early on the in at the start of the company that uh that taught you uh special lessons about sustainable growth?

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Well, here's I won't say this is a mistake, uh, but I'll say this is how I have always approached, I think, life in general. And I think this book is, as you said at the beginning of the interview, it's not just a book for beauty businesses, for any business. It's actually a very good guide for life as well. And you know, I've always gone through life. I'm a very optimistic person. And I I have always said, you know what, I have never lost anything in my life. Like there's never been anything that I lost at. And that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that I have gotten every gold medal or every blue ribbon. It means that if I have set a goal, I may not have reached that goal in my mind the way that I had set out to reach that particular goal. Maybe I didn't hit that particular sales target or I didn't get the number of press hits or, you know. But I always think to myself, okay, I did hit that goal, but what was the win? And there has never been any situation in my life where I was not a winner. Because I always look at any outcome and think, okay, what was the win in that situation? How did I move the needle a little bit, you know, to the right? How did I take one inch, you know, ahead? So I tell anybody that that that's a great way to look at any failure in life is hey, it wasn't a failure. There was just a win that maybe wasn't as big of a win as I thought it was going to be, but there was still a win in there. And when you can you can lead your life that way, thinking, I'm going from win to win to win, no matter how big or small they are, you'll get there. You'll get there.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

So let's do the final questions. What are the top skills or mindsets leaders need to cultivate to the build a business?

SPEAKER_00 43:15

Well, just just to recap, yeah, just to recap what we said, know what your goal is, know what your metric of success personally is going to be, not what someone else is telling you, what you personally need and want out of starting this business. Is it to change some particular aspect of culture? Is it to make X amount of money? Is it to have work-life balance? Whatever is your reason for starting your company, know that from the very beginning, and then take the necessary steps to meet that goal. Don't get distracted by other people, whatever their goals happen to be. Know what your metric of success and your goal is going to be. So start there. And then, as I was just saying, take the wins. Every situation, take your win, pat yourself on the back, because that's part of being kind to yourself, right? You're not defeating yourself every single day, looking in the mirror, saying, Oh, you didn't do X, Y, Z. Look at yourself in the mirror and say, you know what? There was a win that I had yesterday. No matter how small, and give yourself credit for it.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

Wow, the great tips. I mean, thank you so much. Brent, you know, I'm so proud that I had a chance to meet you and to have a chance to interview you because you're you're an amazing person, you built a great company, and it's uh loved your book because how transparent it is, with all the lessons learned and pitfalls and little successes, and also really valuable advices for any businesses. Uh uh, you know, like which I find it very practical. And yes, so thank you so much for taking part in the world.

SPEAKER_00 44:54

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 44:55

I am super conversations, and I uh can't wait to share all your wisdoms uh in our network as well.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

So thank you for always sharing yours as well. Take care.