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There were certain fields and courses and areas where I was gifted, for sure, where I didn't have to study. I could just read it once and I would get an A. And I decided that I wanted to basically dominate, and I wanted to do it in everything I did. And then that began a path forward.
for all the things I did thereafter, which led to me choosing the career that I chose, which was 21 years in the hedge fund business, but then also how I got really, really sick.
Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. This podcast is about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life.
If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand-edited transcripts, including my personal highlights from the conversation, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join us at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link. Today, my guest is Jason Karp.
He's the founder and CEO of Humanco. Previously, Jason was the founder and CEO of a hedge fund that managed over $4 billion. Humanco is one of my favorite food companies. They own brands like Against the Grain, Snowdays, and Cosmic Bliss. And they have a huge investment in True Food Kitchen.
The common thread that connects all of these things is that they promote healthy living. As you'll hear in this interview, when they buy a company, they actually increase the quality of the ingredients.
As a modern society, we exercise more than ever. We have more technology available to us than ever. And we know more about food and nutrition than at any point in history. And despite this, trends continue to accelerate for the worse. In 1990, zero states in the United States had an obesity rate above 20%. And only 30 years later, 30 years, zero states have an obesity rate below 20%.
Why does this matter? Well, obesity is the leading cause of chronic disease and preventable death in the United States. Humanco is on a mission to tackle this problem. This episode isn't just about food. As you'll see, Jason is a remarkable individual. We talk about investing, food, what it means to be great, high-stress jobs, and so much more.
While this episode might change the way you eat, it will certainly change how you think. It's time to listen and learn.
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Let's start with your childhood. You were a bit of a misfit, spending a lot of time on video games and card counting and building weapons and playing with wire. Tell me more about these years. I grew up in a kind of middle class, maybe slightly upper middle class area of northwestern Connecticut, a small town called Avon. The successful people were doctors and lawyers.
There was no real kind of business or sort of entrepreneurial kind of culture or finance that you typically would see in cities like LA or New York. I had a few different undiagnosed health issues as a kid that really shaped, I think, who I was and how I behaved. I had pretty severe undiagnosed ADHD.
which I now know, you know, both runs in my family. My children both have different variations of this. And so now I've had to become a lot more aware of these different mental differences. And especially watching my children, it's become very clear that I had a lot of this
I was a very allergic kid. I had sinus infections very often. I had asthma. And it just made a lot of aspects of what I think of as sort of typical childhood a bit different for me. I found kind of misfits like me when I was younger because I really disliked school. I was particularly unathletic until I was probably 11 or 12.
which was also really hard as a boy. I later learned that I have a very significant difference in my right side of my body coordination and the left side of my body coordination. If you sort of force ranked it on a scale of one to 10, the right side of my body is probably like a nine out of 10 athletic. And the left side of my body is probably a two out of 10.
When I was doing kind of the typical kid games that required both sides of your body, soccer, basketball, I was horrible. Is this how you ended up on tennis? Yes. Yes. This is how I ended up with tennis. And it was actually a counselor of mine at a camp that sort of discovered this. I had no idea. And obviously, and I grew up in a town that was very small.
We had limited resources. Nobody was really diagnosed with anything unless you were just sort of very severely impaired. I have some kind of Asperger-y tendencies, which also run in my family.
I had a much harder time kind of fitting in. And I think my ADHD made school really hard for me in terms of interest level. I always did quite well until high school, basically doing the bare minimum. And I repeatedly got the comments from teachers like, he definitely has some
really interesting strengths is if only he could sit still, if only he could, you know, stop trying to be the class clown. And I think this is the case with all kids, but I had some neighbors that were, I would say like real hooligans. And I looked up to them. They were always playing with guns and fire and weapons and gasoline. And, you know, my first
kind of formative moment. And you would think this would actually deter me away from spending a lot of time in these areas. I was in second grade. I was probably seven or eight years old. And they wanted to do target practice with a pellet gun that they had just bought. They wanted me to hold up a piece of paper and they wanted to see if they could shoot it from 30, 40 feet away in their driveway. And I held it up.
and they shot me in the chest. And it actually went through my clothing. It went through my winter coat, my sweater, my shirt, and lodged into my rib cage right where your heart is. This is a BB gun. Yeah, it was a pellet gun, which is a bit more powerful than a BB gun. But if I was in a T-shirt, I think it would have killed me. I still have a scar to this day. And instead of it deterring me away from
you know, this life of risk taking, it made me more risk seeking. I don't know why, but I spent a lot more time and became fascinated with guns and weapons and fire, particularly fire and explosives. And we used to just try to light everything we could on fire and see what would happen. And how did you get out of hanging with these people? Like once you fall into a crowd like that, it's really hard to change your trajectory and get out of that group.
They were much older than me. And I think I was just kind of like the disciple. I think when they got into high school, you know, and they were in middle school at the time, I think I just started to develop my own kind of habits around this stuff. And my father was complicit in a lot of this because my father liked all the same stuff too. So in an odd way, he almost encouraged me sometimes to explore things.
you know, chemistry and explosives. And he even showed me how to make a couple explosives that he made when he was a kid. You'd all be locked up for this now. I know, I know. And it was, you know, this is before the internet and this was in a small place where, you know, we grew up in a neighborhood that didn't have lines on the street. You know, we lived closer to a farm than we did a city. And this was also before video games. And then, you know, I got my first kind of Nintendo game
when I was 10 years old, which would have been 1986. Were you instantly addicted? Like a lot of people with ADHD are just like instantly drawn into video games. Instantly. Instantly. And I became really, really good at them. And I think it was a blessing for me because it was the first thing I could really focus on. And I got all the games and I would win the games. I mean, I would play them until I'd win them.
Yeah, you get rapid feedback, a lot of iterations. I mean, things are very predictable. The world makes sense. It's not a people-based world where feelings and sensitivities and some other stuff play. Yeah. And then I got really interested in that. My father was a retail stockbroker for Merrill Lynch and played poker every week.
with his friends and gin. And we had a very small kind of little library in our house with all the books. And my father had books on gambling, card counting. He had the original Ed Thorpe Beat the Dealer.
I don't know what it was, but I became really interested in games of chance and I became really interested in probabilities. I just poured over this book over and over and over again and wanted to teach myself how to count cards. And I just became obsessed with games and beating games, all different kinds of games and trying to really deconstruct what makes a game a game.
And then try to kind of unravel, like, what are the holes in the game? What's the system? How do I exploit the system? What are the weaknesses? You would have made a good spy. That's right. And I was often kind of bored and alone at times. And so I would just kind of hang out in the little book section and I would just take the books and just pour over them. Occasionally it would lead me to Games of Chance. And then there was a book of quotes.
And I loved quotes because they were just, they had so much knowledge distilled in very, very short passages. And for some reason, the quotes spoke to me. And many of the quotes were from people I'd never heard of. You know, I didn't want to be introverted. I just had a hard time relating to a lot of people back then. And so I found...
my happy place to be more in the areas where, you know, things are predictable for me.
And reading and kind of self-reflection was one of those plays. Is this when you started to keep, you used to keep a book of quotes, right? Like a little notebook of that. Did that start in your teenage years? Yeah. I started writing the ones I liked the best down when I was probably 15. Are there any that still stick with you today that you like use either from childhood or that you like remind yourself of? Well, I'm going to paraphrase a bunch of them because some of them are sort of in old English.
I originally discovered a lot of the Stoics and didn't know who any of them were, you know, like Epictetus and Aurelius and Seneca. So there was an old, old quote basically about that everybody has something to teach you regardless of who they are. And I remember that having a real impact on me, you know, whether it's the custodian, you know, to the grandmaster,
you know, interest to some professor. You know, I didn't fully understand the human condition when I was, I mean, I still don't, but when I was certainly a teenager, I had a very, very kind of naive myopic view of the world. And I remember reading a bunch of, these quotes were generally organized by topic. And I remember reading a bunch of quotes on basically how to learn and how to learn from other people.
And there were actually some quotes in this book, or maybe there was a second one. I think there was probably a second book of quotations from the 80s that actually had some Munger quotes in. Early, early Munger stuff. I'd say that some of the quotes from Sun Tzu, Art of War, in terms of preparation, in terms of battles are won before they begin. And then I also was very focused on quotations from people who failed a lot. Because at the time, I felt like a real failure.
and had a really, really hard time as a teenager. And so I think when I would read quotations from Churchill to different war legends talking about failure, talking about perseverance, talking about getting through tough battles,
Obviously, the famous Roosevelt quote on the man in the arena, those were quotations that really kind of deeply affected me and how I sort of thought about the world and myself. So at the point when you get to Wharton, you're basically on this path where you don't expect much out of life. I like inflection points because it seems like whatever happened at Wharton or no, sorry, it was Penn and then you transferred into Wharton. Whatever happened at Penn
became this massive inflection point because your trajectory going into Penn and your trajectory leaving were two very different paths. What happened? You know, I had the good fortune of taking this really interesting class in high school. It was a philosophy class, but a big part of the class was actually on Joseph Campbell. And so I learned of the hero's journey when I was probably 15.
And I kind of felt like I was on the hero's journey, except that I was in the beginning of it. And maybe this was my own way of rationalizing that I could be good or accepted at some point. But at that moment, I wasn't. I had three teachers through high school that had a profound impact on me because they saw something in me that I didn't see.
And they said to me, you know, to the effect each time, Jason, you know, I see greatness in you. You don't know how to channel it yet. Let me give you some tools because I think you could be really good at this. And at the time, I thought I was good at nothing. I had a lot of influences that made me both proud and insecure at the same time.
My mother's brother is a very famous scientist and mathematician. He's the head of applied math and science at Cornell. His name's Steven Strogatz. He was on the podcast. He was on the podcast. That's my uncle. I didn't know that.
But growing up with him, he was, he was, you probably went into some of his accolades, but he was a very accomplished chess player as a, as a child. He was a prodigy. He graduated high school and college way, way young for his age. And, you know, I always got like a lot of commentary, you know, about like, oh, you have aspects of Steven in you and you just have to figure out how to use it. And, and I never believed it.
Um, and, and I just was, was really self-loathing and, and deeply insecure because of all the other things that I mentioned. I just thought I was kind of broken and I'm building up to the whole like Penn Wharton piece because I had these three teachers that helped me figure out a way to channel my ADHD.
And my parents were super laissez-faire type of parents. Like, I can't literally recall a time or a situation where they said, Jason, have you done your homework? Like, it was just this like immense trust kind of household. And because my grades were good before high school when you didn't really have to do work, these three teachers basically helped me figure out that my problem
was, and I'm sure you've seen this on your podcast, Shane, is that there's many different flavors of ADHD, but I have this flavor where if I'm not interested, I can't focus at all. And if I am interested, I'm a hyper-focuser and I can work longer and absorb more than most people can. And they discovered that I had this when it came to things that had nothing to do with school, like gambling.
and video games where I had knowledge and memory of these kind of things that was unusual. But then when it came to basic school, I didn't. And they basically figured out a way to show me that if I could find what I was studying interesting and I could make it interesting, then I could apply that same hyper-focus to things that actually weren't that interesting to me.
And, and this is how I figured out how to eventually study, um, was that I kind of hacked my own brain to understand what its strengths and weaknesses were. And I, and over the course of my high school, my grades got way better, but I started, I mean, my freshman year, I was a Steve student.
But I also did nothing. I did no homework. And by the time I was a senior, I was getting A's. But I had just kind of hacked my own brain and developed a lot of these productivity hacks. And I became really interested in kind of self-improvement at this time because I noticed that when I became self-aware of like, okay, your brain doesn't work like regular people. This is what you have to do.
And then I, you know, I miraculously, and I'll say miraculous, and I have a few friends who also got into Penn from my high school. And so I get there and I'm deeply, deeply like insecure about why I'm here. But my, my Steven Strogatz's other brother, my mother's other brother went to Penn. And so, you know, I really wanted to kind of be there. And my parents were just thrilled that I was at a great school.
And I had a couple of lucky breaks that happened to me. And this is also how I became really fascinated with what I'll call path dependency and kind of positioning your life. On my freshman hallway was a kid who was recruited to play squash, a pen. And he'd asked me one day, like, hey, I heard you were a tennis player. Can we go hit some squash balls? And I said, sure. Like, I don't really know how to play squash. I've only played twice.
And I remember thinking like, wow, this is really fun. Like, this is something I really enjoyed and I haven't enjoyed tennis in so long. Like maybe I should try squash. I brought it up to him. He's like, dude, we're like, we were number four in the country last year. Like, you can't just like walk on to the squash team. And I was like, let me just go to the coach. And I had this attitude. This was always one of my blessings is that I always sort of thought
a lot more was possible than most people around me thought. And I always had this tendency when people would say, you can't do that for me to say, watch me. And I'm going to do it twice.
Like there was this chip on my shoulder of disproving people, which came from probably because of my deep insecurity of feeling like an outsider for so long. I never wanted people to tell me what I could and couldn't do. Long story short, I went to the coach, who's still a friend, and I said, look, I'm in really good shape. I'm a tennis player. Can I try out for the squash team? And he actually said to me, he said, you know what? I like your attitude. We have 20 spots on the team.
the top 10 are varsity, the bottom 10 are JV. If you can make it through preseason, I'll save a spot for you. And the reason I bring up the squash part is because
It forced me to take an econ class that I wasn't supposed to take. When I signed up to try out for squash, they basically said, well, your athletic schedule doesn't allow you to take the college version of econ, which is a requirement, so you have to take the Wharton version of econ. And everyone told me, they're like, do not take the Wharton version of econ. Those are the smartest kids. It's higher criteria to get into Wharton undergrad than it was to get into Harvard.
And I was already deeply insecure and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. And they're like, that's your only choice. So you got to do it. So I did. The reason I go in this depth saying is because you have a few moments in your life that changed the trajectory of your life forever.
And I was still what I would call sort of inner child Jason, who had all these deep insecurities and still hated himself. And I noticed that in the first few weeks of econ that it just came to me like a second language. And I couldn't understand why. I'd read the textbook once. I'd remember everything. I asked a lot of apparently really interesting questions. It was a
A kid who came up to me who I thought was like a brilliant kind of nerdy kid who deserved to be in Borkman. I didn't. And he's like, hey, you know, we have our first midterm exam coming up. Can we study together? And nobody had ever asked to study with me. And it was just this like amazing, weird feeling for me.
And I was like, why? He's like, you just seem like you know what you're doing. And I was like, okay, no one's really ever told me that. And I take the exam and long story short, and the teacher's explaining the curve. And I looked down at my test and it's a 91. And I thought that's an A minus. And I'm like, great, I got an A minus on my first college exam. And I'm at this good school and my parents are gonna be so happy. And then the teacher's explaining a curve to us on the board.
And the max was a 91 and the min was a zero and the mean was like a 62. And then there was this kid behind me who was very nosy, like looking around at what everyone got. And he just says like kind of loudly, he's like, that's the kid who got the 91. And I looked over my shoulder and I was all bright red and blushing and my heart was racing. I didn't know, I felt like I was punked.
And then I realized, like, I just got the highest score on this test in, like, the hardest school in the country. And I didn't even try. Like, what's happening? Like, I didn't know what was happening. And then I remember feeling proud. And then I remember feeling like, I never want this feeling to end. And that was the beginning of...
what I call with my therapists, Terminator Jason. Terminator Jason was a completely different Griselda that wanted to bury everything from my youth that was so ashamed of what I was. And I just wanted to be this different person who I thought would be impressive, would be respected, would be rich. And with all of those attributes, people would like that person.
And people would accept that person because I felt like I wasn't accepted. And I decided that I was going to remake myself now that I was in college and become this totally different person. There were certain fields and courses and areas where I was gifted, for sure, where I didn't have to study. And I could just read it once and I would get an A. And I decided that I wanted to basically dominate
And I wanted to do it in everything I did. And I did it at the expense of having a good time to the point where, you know, and I did have some really good friends in college who did get me. And I did, it was so obvious even to them that when I would have a quote, good time, which most kids did in college, they would say like, I had like an alter ego they would call fun Jace.
So they would say like, "Oh, is Fun Jason coming out tonight?" And I'd be like, "Okay, you'll get Fun Jason for three hours." So that's what changed. And then that began a path for all the things I did thereafter, which led to me choosing the career that I led, that I chose, which was 21 years in the hedge fund business, but then also how I got really, really sick. I want to talk about that in a second.
There was another moment there that made a big difference though, because you wanted to quit the squash team and then the coach wouldn't let you or he challenged you. What is that backstory there? Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. I'm glad you brought that up. So basically after like two or three tests, when I was clear, like I was good at business,
I talked with my father about it and I said, maybe I should transfer into business and transfer into Wharton. But it required you to basically have a 3.9 or higher. And I'd never had a 3.9 in my life. And so I was like, I'm going to have to give up this squash experiment. This was after about six weeks of preseason. And this was after he'd already accepted me on the team and I was 20 out of 20.
And I went to the coach and I said, look, I'm going to transfer to Wharton. My academics are really important to me. I don't think I can do both. And he and his coach, who happened to be there, he was a guy in his 90s, he was no longer alive, or 80s. They both sat me down and they both said, like, you should not give up squash.
you know, with the same speech that my three teachers in high school gave me. We see greatness in you. You can do some really good stuff. It's going to help you with your life and your balance and all this other stuff. You're special. I don't know if they actually believed it or not, but hearing it felt so important to me that he basically said, don't do that. Stick with it. I want to see what you become. And I did. And I stuck with it. And that was...
you know, another moment where somebody believed in me at a time when I didn't believe in myself and it really, really helped me. One of the classes you took at Penn was an aesthetic approach to decision-making and you learned about decision-making through chess. I want to talk about this class because it left a huge impact on you even to this day. Yeah. So it was an elective class. It was considered a very hard and weird class.
that like not a lot of people chose to take, but it incorporated philosophy, chess, games of chance, and it was all about decision-making. And it was like, it was a class you had to apply to get into. You know, they only took, I don't know, 15 kids, 20 kids. The guy who taught it was a Russian former, I believe he was a international master. He wasn't a grandmaster, but he was the level below that.
And it was a totally bespoke course, which had no analog at any other school about how to make better decisions in business and life. And he used a bunch of different games, but chess was the primary one. And the premise, Shane, was chess is like a game that's a thousand years old.
And up until the 1800s, chess was played the same way everywhere, which is the way most people who aren't experts in chess play it, called combinational chess. You just try to anticipate the next move or next series of moves. I do this, he's going to do that, she's going to do that, then I'm going to do that, then, you know. Your brain, no matter how smart you are, can only go out so many moves because of the sheer number of combinations. And they multiply, like factorial. And
In the 1800s, a 21-year-old genius named Paul Morphy became the world champion of chess as a 21-year-old. And he had a style that nobody had seen before. And they didn't have a name for it, but it was later called positional chess.
which became the dominant form and now all of the best chess players do positional chess instead of combinational chess. You want to position your board in such a way that you can handle whatever is thrown at you. So if they make a bad move, which you didn't anticipate, you can attack. If they make a great move, which you couldn't anticipate, you can defend it better. And it's all about how you position your board without necessarily knowing what's coming.
Now chess is what's called a deterministic game. There actually is a finite number of moves and the amount of information that is possible other than what's in your opponent's head is fully there. Whereas in a game like poker, you don't fully know and can never fully know what was kind of beneath the cards because they're hidden. This metaphor for me, because my father growing up and a lot of the quotes that I used to read always talked about aspects of position.
but without ever using the words position. The concept of like, don't burn your bridges because you may have to cross that bridge one day is a form of positional chess, right? The concept of the harder I work, the luckier I become is a form of positional chess. It's not that hard work necessarily makes you luckier. It's that putting in a lot of work positions you
So that you will see more opportunities and be prepared to pounce on those opportunities because you're prepared. And so this spoke to me so strongly as a metaphor for life. And because I was very mathematically minded, this concept of optionality.
really resonated about what I think is the best way to live your life. And you applied that outside of that class. I mean, there's so much about positioning that people don't think about. And I've sort of studied and talked with people about decision-making over the last 20 years. And the one thing that most people who have exceptional results
do well and think about is how they're positioned. They're never trying to maximize the current moment and they're never trying to precisely predict the future. They're trying to put themselves in a position to take advantage of whatever the situation may arise rather than being mastered by the circumstances, right? They want to master the circumstances. So no matter what happens, they're always in a position to play offense. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And the way
When I began my hedge fund career and I eventually had to start training people, I was a very enthusiastic poker player during the time when poker wasn't like cool. This is like pre-internet poker. This is like pre-rounders, you know, because I played in high school. I played in college. I became obsessed with that. And so one of the things, once they had internet poker, one of the things that I would show people as a metaphor for this
was the most popular game today is what's called Texas, the No Limit Texas Hold'em, where you're dealt two cards and then they put five cards on the table and you have to make a combination of your two cards with the cards on the table to make the best five card hand. But what was cool about internet online poker is that you could open up lots of windows at the same time.
And if you had the pattern recognition down for what a good starting hand was, which in No Limit is what's called pocket aces, which are two aces, or what they call premium pair, which is pocket kings, pocket queens, pocket jacks, you could literally just open up 20 windows on your screen.
And just literally fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold. And all you had to do was wait for pocket pair or pocket premium pocket pair. And those are the ones you played. And each window you opened was a form of optionality that allowed you to wait for the so-called fat pitch. And I view that as a metaphor for investing. And I view that as a metaphor for life.
I like that because then you just play the hand where you're playing when you have the advantage. You're not playing when you don't have an advantage or you're minimizing your losses when you don't. Were there other sort of like mental models that you learned through that class or how to apply them to life? Yeah, there was a lot about human relationships. If you take that class to an extreme or that view of like everything's an option.
you start viewing everything in life with a cost-benefit analysis, including people, including pleasure, including things that are less tangible, but are the essence of what makes life, life. And it's very easy to sort of view everything with this sort of cost-benefit expected value lens. And I'd say there was a period when I
I did not assign enough of a weight on things that were less tangible. Relationships, your physical health, your sleep. And so if you take that to an extreme, you become a expected value optimization machine and you actually will ruin your life. And that's where you started to go with this, right? And that's how I initially ruined myself.
Initially, there's multiple times. Yeah, there are multiple times. Talk to me about that first time. That was in your early 20s, right? Yeah. So what happened was, and it's a real Icarus type of fable that actually was true. A lot of what I did in college, on the one hand, was very empowering because I found that I learned how to apply myself to such a degree that everything I did, I became very good at.
that I put my mind to. So I became a top squash player. I graduated the top student athlete of the entire university. I think I was three in my Wharton class. I had one A minus in four years. And all of these kind of applications of myself, I started to hone like a process of like, ooh, if I do this, I'll be really good at this. And if I do this, and I started to teach myself how to speed read.
I started to teach myself how to go on less sleep because I started viewing things again through this kind of lens of like, it was like that movie Limitless where I sort of thought like I was this like freak that had these gifts and that if I didn't use these gifts, it was like a waste. And I just kept applying myself more and more and it kept working.
So I get out of Penn. I won, you know, all sorts of awards and like all this stuff that I thought was going to make me happy. I got, you know, a really interesting job out of college. And by the way, I didn't even know what a hedge fund was.
I was hired as a quant and I had not studied computer science or programming. I had a lot of math and statistics and econometrics as a background, but I didn't, you know, I was like, okay, I'll just take this quant job. Like, it sounds awesome. They were paying me $5,000 more than what the top banking offer was. So I took that and I knew I didn't like banking. Anyway,
I had a lot of really early success in my first year and just solved a lot of really interesting problems. And you're simultaneously, as you're doing this at the hedge fund though, you're diving deep into your health issues. I'm curious as to what you learned through the health stuff because you basically were going to die. So what happened was, which is again, like an important lesson for everyone listening,
I took everything I had learned to an extreme and it wasn't about money for me, which is really interesting. It was about just self-improvement. And I know many of your listeners are so focused on that. Because I was speed reading and because I was remembering most of what I was doing, I just sort of thought like, literally, I thought like I was a god and I could just start like
staying up till four in the morning, reading countless and countless books, absorbing all of it and just becoming like superhuman. I was also doing really well at work. But to do that, I started to give up exercise. I gave up friends and people. I gave up connection.
And I gave up sleep. And I was even reading all these like obscure military things about how to power nap and micro nap and like how to basically go on three hours of sleep, which I would not recommend for anybody. And I started to get really, really sick. And it took a while actually, you know, and I went a good six months doing this. And then I just started noticing like some things started happening to me. I started developing all these skin rashes,
My hair was falling out in clumps. I had all these weird things popping up like prostatitis, where your prostate becomes really big, which isn't supposed to happen to a 23-year-old. And then my vision started to go. And when your vision starts to go, that was terrifying. I already had bad vision and neat glasses, but I was seeing double.
And it started with my left eye and then went to my right eye where I would literally see like a second version of something out of my left eye. And at night, I had a really hard time seeing anything at night because all the lights had all these halos and rings around them. And I couldn't process. And so- That's so freaky. Yeah. And I was 23. And mind you, two years earlier at 21, I was a top athlete.
I thought I was super healthy. I was strong. I was fit. I was a great performer. And now two years later, I'm like literally falling apart. And every doctor I went and saw was like, you have this disease, you have this disease, you have this disease, and this disease, you know, and they're all like supposedly separate diseases. And the eye disease I was told was incurable. And then I had to put my name on a cordial transplant list, which had a huge waiting list. And they said I would probably be blind by the age of 30, fully blind.
This was obviously very traumatic for me. And I don't think I processed how traumatic it was for me until literally like two months ago. It's obviously traumatic, but what it really did to me, I think was profound. And I had to discover on my own what was really wrong with me. Because at the time, Western medicine, it's still flawed, but at the time, Western medicine was really about
Here's your symptoms. Here's a pill. The pill will make your symptoms go away, but it won't necessarily address the root cause of the disease. And I just sort of had this view, like there's no way all of these different diseases just happened at the same time. Like they have to be related. It just didn't make any sense. Even though the doctors weren't saying, and I started reading all this weird stuff online.
It's not weird anymore, but back then was weird in this area that they now call functional medicine, which are addressing the root causes of disease instead of the symptoms. And there were some kind of like OG doctors, a guy named Dr. Andrew Weil, who's now 80 and quite famous. There was a doctor named Dr. Mark Hyman, who was just getting started at this time.
who wrote a book on inflammation and autoimmunity. And I would find these things and I was just trying to make patterns. And long story short, there was one time where I had my skin issue with the psoriasis happened in college. And it happened during my pledging for my fraternity when we were forced to not sleep for three days and drink only beer and have no food. And I sort of thought like, okay, the only time I had this skin issue
was when I literally couldn't sleep and I could only drink beer. And so I just developed this hypothesis that was totally naive and no one thought was plausible that if I taught myself how to start sleeping again and dramatically cleaned up my diet,
and started exercising again, maybe my skin disease would go away and maybe my eye disease would go away. And the reason I had that hypothesis is there was one journal I found that connected my eye disease to my skin disease. Not fully connecting it, but showing a correlation. And so anyway, I did that. And I decided like, okay, I'm going to have to turn off this sort of terminator mode and just try to get healthy.
I gave up alcohol. I gave up caffeine. I gave up processed food. I tried all sorts of different diets. I had to start teaching myself how to sleep again, which interestingly, if you force yourself to be an insomniac for a period of time, your body gets used to it and it becomes harder to go back. So I read every book there was on sleep at the time. And after about two months of this, my vision started coming back.
And nobody believed it. And thankfully, there was an empirical test that the ophthalmologist can do that basically can show the progression of your blindness. It's not like, do you see, do you not see? It actually measures the surface area of your eye. And I had fully reversed it. And the ophthalmologist said in his entire practice, he'd never seen anyone reverse this disease because it's a degenerative disease. And that was like the next real pivotal moment of my life where I said, you know what? I'm not going to accept this.
kind of common Western dogma about medicine and lifestyle and like nutrition and all this stuff. I just cured myself through literally food and lifestyle when everyone told me it was impossible. I'm going to spend all my time on that. So let's have forward over the second job, which was another hedge fund and get to Hugh and starting this, which is the start of this journey outside of your normal job and
And the fanatical, fanatical, I say, standards that you held for what was going in your body and then creating a company around those standards. And I also want to explore a little bit about how do you eat today? Like, how does the food system poison us? What is your lifestyle like in terms of caffeine, alcohol, sleep? What goes into your body? What I have learned, which I didn't know at the time because now we have modern testing,
In simplest terms, I don't detoxify like a regular person. So things build up in me faster than regular people. I'm kind of like a canary in a coal mine. It turns out that everything that affects me affects everyone else, except I just respond fast. And I experimented with lots of different variations of it. But basically, the style that resonated the most with me was what they now call paleo.
And the reason that, and paleo stands for paleolithic, which sort of ties back to what we were as hunter-gatherers. And a lot of the research I did, Shane, was around evolution and around anthropology. Because I was trained as sort of a scientist, and I didn't want to do anything that was not provable in terms of my own discovery. And thankfully, there's a lot of populations out there that are still indigenous people.
And they live the way that we lived 10,000 years ago or even 1,000 years ago. And they have none. And by the way, many of these indigenous peoples are in every continent.
They're in Alaska. They're in South America. They're in Africa. They're in all different climates. They have none of our modern lifestyle diseases. They have no autism. They have no allergies. They have no autoimmune disease. They have no obesity. They have no diabetes. They have no heart disease. They get what I'll call third world diseases still, like tuberculosis and
food-borne illnesses, et cetera. But all the things that are literally killing off more people than anything we know of is related to lifestyle and diet. And so I was studying all these and I was like, evolution is our strongest sort of scientific North Star. And it was clear to me that we have been living in a way that's at odds with our evolution for at least a couple hundred years.
which, if you study evolution, we've been hominids, people, things walking on two feet for at least 200,000 years. And we have been hunter-gatherers for 99.99% of that period. And so to me, what resonated the most about how I was going to change my lifestyle was how do I get back to a place where I'm living consistent with how I evolved? And how do I do that while living in New York City?
And so I started talking a lot about this stuff with my brother-in-law, my wife's brother, Jordan Brown. He started reading the same books that I was reading. He didn't have any of my illnesses, but he noticed that when he started living more paleo, he looked better, he felt better, he performed better. Everything got better for him. And he's like, this is incredible. Like, why are people doing this?
And I'm like, "Well, it's harder, it's inconvenient, it costs more. Nobody knows how to do it. Life is too... It's just too difficult." And he said, "We should create a restaurant that's the manifestation of these principles." And I'm like, "Dude, I'm a professional investor for a living. Restaurants are not good businesses most of the time. No chance." After enough back and forth,
I sort of decided like, okay, I was fortunate enough in my career that I could afford it. I never thought it was going to be a big business. I just wanted it to make a little bit or break even and basically have a place where A, I could eat every day and B, we could prove to New York that you could have the combination of tastes great and healthy, which prior to this really didn't exist. You only had places that were super healthy
that most people who are used to the standard American diet would basically say like, this is disgusting. And then you had places that were like farm to table, really unapproachable, super expensive, that like nobody, unless they had a lot of money, would ever do. And that was a genesis of Hugh Kitchen. And we were very humble about what we didn't know.
We hired a bunch of people to help us because I didn't know anything about running a restaurant. Neither did my brother-in-law, neither did my wife. This was a family business. We had no outside investors for the first many, many years. And the idea was to basically make like a paleo haven.
Before paleo was really a term, it was basically like, you know, some people call it ancestral, but it's basically ingredients that your grandmother or your great-grandmother would have been cooked with. Like, that's the litmus test. Like, if your great-grandmother used it, it's probably okay, except that true paleo doesn't really incorporate dairy.
and doesn't incorporate legumes. We were more of a modified paleo. We were grain-free. We were gluten-free. We had only grass-fed milk for the coffee.
Everything that needed to be organic was organic. There was no refined sugar and everything was made from scratch. And the chocolate was an accident, kind of an accident because we were baking grain-free, gluten-free muffins, scones, cookies right before we opened and we needed chocolate chips and we couldn't find chocolate chips that met our specs.
And we hired a guy to help us make a Hugh version of our own chocolate that didn't have all the chocolate we could find, had refined white cane sugar, had soy lecithin, had preservatives, had dairy. And so we had to make our own chocolate and we liked it so much. My brother-in-law had this idea of turning them into chocolate bars. And that was how Hugh Chocolate got started.
I love how the standards were so fanatical that something as simple as the chocolate chips, we couldn't find a good supplier, so we're going to make our own. What do you eat today? Do you consume dairy? I do. So I generally only consume grass-fed organic dairy. Dairy is pretty controversial. I don't think it should be. Because I've been able to get a lot of my other aspects of life kind of in check, I live what I would call sort of a 85-15 lifestyle.
kind of life. 85% of the time I'm super clean. 15% of the time I'm having cheeseburgers and fries. I'm completely gluten free. That's both an issue I have with the wheat industry here in the US and also something I have a pretty noticeable intolerance to gluten. I don't eat anything that's kind of laboratory produced or made
fake colors and chemicals and chemical preservatives, but I'm not vegan.
You know, I eat plenty of animal products, but when I consume animal products, most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time, they are animals that are raised in an evolutionarily consistent way with how they were supposed to evolve, right? So for example, cows have evolved to be on grass and be pastured, meaning they're supposed to roam around and eat grass. Cows are not supposed to eat corn, which is kind of an American innovation because it fattens them up.
Same thing goes with fish. Same thing goes with chicken. I try to eat wild animals when I can. And then with vegetables and fruits, I'm pretty strict on organic. Most of the modern food supply is literally poisoned. I'm more susceptible to it than most. But what affects me affects everybody. And it's just time.
And this is not something that's controversial, Shane. You just have to look at current status of any developed country. I mean, this is the first generation in human history that is predicted to live shorter than the previous. We are the sickest we've ever been on any objective measure. We exercise the most we ever have. 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese.
Over 90% are metabolically unhealthy. It's all staring us in the face, but it's so inconvenient. It's like an inconvenient truth. It's much worse than global warming. Let's go back a sec. What's the issue you have with the US wheat industry? Is it just US or is it the wheat in general? No, it's predominantly the US. So you will notice if you ask a lot of people who don't eat gluten, you will notice that many, many, a thousand, like this is not just like five random people.
Many people can tolerate gluten in France and Italy and cannot tolerate it here in the U.S. And there's two hypotheses on that. It hasn't been proven, but these are my hypotheses. I've heard them from others too. The first and most important one is that I don't remember the exact number, but it's in the high 90s percent. Might be 99%, might be 97% of the U.S. wheat crop that's not organic
has traces of glyphosate, which is Monsanto's herbicide, also called Roundup. They find this on children's cereal traces, but it's still there. They find it on everything that has wheat in this country that's not organic. Glyphosate has banned in countless countries. There was a gigantic class action lawsuit that they lost.
in the many, many, many billions of dollars. The German company Bayer now owns Monsanto, where it was deemed carcinogenic, officially. They've also found that when you feed glyphosate to rats, it destroys their microbiome and the rats start to develop all these weird autoimmune diseases, including autism. It's so obvious. This doesn't require conspiracy theory. What glyphosate does is it obliterates
every microorganism except the things that Monsanto has genetically engineered to tolerate it. So Monsanto has this genius business model of developing their own seeds that can tolerate glyphosate. Regular plants die from glyphosate. They develop their own plants that can tolerate glyphosate. Everything around it dies, but their plants survive. And then we think that if we eat it,
that our microorganisms in our body are not going to respond to it is insane. So if you buy organic wheat, are you still exposed to that? No, you're not. So if you're a consumer in North America, one way to sort of like opt out of this is to buy organic flour. So that's part of it. It's not all of it.
Glyphosate's also on beet sugar. There's a bunch of crops, including soy. Basically, any of the big crops, just as like a lesson for your listeners, any big crop where there's a lot of money is filthy.
And it's logical, right? Because there's so much money in big crops that to make the crops be weather resistant, to be cycle resistant, to be pest resistant, there's just way too much money in those crops for you not to go organic. That's number one. So any kind of big popular crop, soy, wheat, corn, cocoa, coffee, anything like that, you always want organic. The second rule is
is anything you concentrate, juices, chocolate, coffee, right? Coffee's a concentrate, right? They grind up all the beans, they make a concentrated version, and then water goes through the concentrate, right? Think of what chocolate is. Chocolate is ground up cacao beans, flour, anything that's concentrated. The pesticides are also concentrated. Anything that's concentrated, you always want to go organic, no matter what.
And look, there's a lot of hypotheses today on why we're all so sick. I do think it's a function of not just the food. I think there's some environmental stuff too, particularly plastics that permeate everything that we do. Microplastics are in all the water that we drink unless they're like reverse osmosis filtered. It's in everything. So we have literally poisoned ourselves
And again, this sounds like sensationalist, it sounds conspiracy theory. It's not. You just have to look at the human population right now. You just have to look at the stats on how sick everyone is and how overweight they are. And they've proven it's not just calories. They have proven that it's not just that people are eating more. It's not just that people are sitting down more. I mean, when you look at the incidence...
You don't have to be a scientist to see this. When you look at the incidence of food allergies, you look at the incidence of autism, you look at the incidence of autoimmune diseases, this is not like, ooh, now we're able to diagnose it. So now we're seeing it's there. Like when I grew up, I don't know about you, Shane. When I grew up, there was one kid in my entire school who had a peanut allergy. One. Now like a quarter of my kids' class are allergic to something. A quarter.
I want to go back to this. You said there's two differences between US wheat and sort of European or you specified French and Italian. One was the glycosin. What was the other big difference? Is it the type of wheat that they're growing? Yeah. It's a much more kind of agent form. So there's some really interesting like rabbit holes in nutrition where there's some people, particularly some farmers, there's a guy
named Dan Barber, who started a very famous restaurant called Blue Hill at Stone Barns. And he, you can Google him, he's quite prominent. He grows a lot of fruits and vegetables that are kind of ancient versions of what we have today. And so basically over time, as we got more and more, and this is, by the way, this is without what I'll call like genetic modification. This is through regular crossbreeding.
which we've been able to do for hundreds of years and, and how all modern dogs exist is through crossbreed, um, you know, without actually going into the DNA and, and, and manipulating. Gluten is a protein that gives wheat part of its robustness and, and you can actually crossbreed wheat to increase its gluten levels, which makes it more robust. Um, and, uh,
I have heard, and I haven't seen any actual proof on this, but they have found fossilized versions of wheat from biblical days when literally bread was like the staple for everybody. Because like one of the pushbacks on gluten intolerance is like, haven't we literally been eating bread every day for like human civilization?
And the gluten level in fossilized wheat and the gluten level in some of these ancient grains versions of wheat is magnitudes less than the amount of gluten that we're consuming today. Same thing, by the way, with the cannabis plant, which I'm sure you've heard. The amount of THC in the cannabis plant today is very different from what the people of Woodstock were smoking in the 60s.
We've done this. And gluten is an inflammatory protein, but we can take a certain amount of it, just like we can take a certain amount of dairy for most people. But once you take it to the extreme, then- If you drink a gallon of milk, Shane, like I'm not lactose intolerant. If I drink a gallon of milk, I'll show you I'm lactose intolerant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But gluten disrupts the microbiome because it inflames your gut. And then a lot of weird things start to happen to you when your gut is inflamed. So in Europe, the glyphosate's banned.
And the gluten levels are much lower. And the strains of wheat that they typically use are typically a lot less inflammatory than the ones that they use over here. That's the edge. And so now, like you sold this company to Mondelez. Now you're doing Humanco.
Talk to me about human co, what you're trying to do and how you're taking sort of what previously has been these, I wouldn't say niche products, but it's been hard to scale something that is, uh, healthy and with healthy ingredients and, and, and you know how hard it is to run a restaurant yet. You just bought a restaurant. I know, I know I've gone kind of full circle. Um,
Well, what's happened, Shane, is again, I stayed in the hedge fund career for 21 years. I officially retired from that in the beginning of 2019. Hugh Kitchen, the restaurant, was my first real foray into trying to change what I think is wrong with the world by using my own tools. And Hugh Kitchen opened in October of 2012, just to give you a sense of time.
Hugh became quite a large and successful business. And what was so amazing about it, and this is the prelude to Humanco, but what was so amazing... And by the way, Hugh is called human. Hugh is called Hugh because our slogan was get back to human, which is our acknowledgement that we don't live and behave consistent with human evolution, which is also why Humanco is called Humanco. Everything I do has the word human or some variation of Hugh, human in it because of all my
learnings the hard way. And the Heal chapter was so interesting because it taught me a lot about myself. It taught me a lot about what's wrong with the modern food system. And it taught me how desperate everyone is to try to live healthier and how hard it is right now. What was clear to me in my studies, and eventually I joined the board of the Tufts Nutrition School, which I'm still on. The Tufts Nutrition School is a top nutrition school in the country.
And what's clear to me is that for at least 60 years, we have known that fruits and vegetables are far healthier for people than like Twinkies and cakes. But that hasn't really changed behavior. You don't need to even educate like middle school level education people that that's true. And yet we're not really changing.
And so what was clear to me also as someone who was sick and had to eat a lot of weird things over time was that food is a part of human civilization. It's a part of culture. It's a part of family. It's a part of, I think, what makes the human condition what it is. And there's a lot of pleasure and ritual and good things that come with food. And what was so hard for me was that a lot of the foods that I had to eat when I was sick were gross. They weren't delicious.
They didn't bring happiness. They didn't bring joy. And it makes you even more anxious if you're sick, that you have to eat stuff that you objectively find gross or not good. And so my belief, which was a little controversial at the time, was I want to take foods that bring people happiness and joy because many of those are the, quote, dirtiest or the least healthy.
right? And I want to take those and clean those up because if I can change people's behavior with the foods that they love and provide a better option for them, then I can provide kind of a gateway for them to start experimenting with other healthy things, right? You're not getting people who eat McDonald's three times a day and you're not moving them to salads. That's never happening overnight. No, but you can take something like pizza
Correct. Yeah, correct. And so I, a lot of what I've done and a lot of what we're doing at Human Co. is literally based on personal desire and need. And, and we're taking the same guardrails and the same level of strictness that we did with Hugh. And we decided that we want to apply it to other categories that aren't chocolate.
right? Hugh is primarily a snacking company. Hugh is doing predominantly chocolate, but also crackers and cookies. And as a consumer, I look around and I say, "Okay, but there's all these other categories that are disgusting in terms of how gross the ingredient labels are." And so, for example, the brand that we created from scratch at Humanco, which was the second company I've done from scratch, it's called Snow Days.
And Snow Days is a pizza bite, but it's grain-free, it's gluten-free, it's organic. It has no chemicals, no preservatives. The dairy in it is from grass-fed cows, and it has seven vegetables infused into the sauce. The prevailing winner in pizza bites, so pizza bites are a surprisingly big category,
what I'll call frozen appetizers, but pizza bites are enormous. And the market leader is a company called Totino's. Totino's is owned by General Mills. I used to eat them as a kid. They're called pizza rolls. Totino's has an ingredient label that's over 7070 ingredients long. It doesn't even use real cheese. It actually says on the label imitation cheese. It has at least a dozen chemicals.
that are banned in other countries that are in the ingredient label. I mean, it is literally like nuclear waste. And this business from our last check does close to $800 million a year in revenue. It's an enormous business. And you look across other categories and there's categories like pizza, bread,
ice cream, cakes, anything that people love and they feel great about. If you go to fast food places, you can't believe what's in most of the fast food that they serve you in terms of chemicals, additives, things made in laboratories. And so for me, a lot of it was like,
was just thinking, you know what? Most people don't read ingredient labels. I think you should. But even if you do, most people don't know how many things are toxic and how many things are proven, by the way, to be toxic. Many of these ingredients are banned in other countries. This isn't something that's debatable. But because our food system here in this country
has massive amounts of other interests, particularly from lobbyists, we are corrupt. And I don't think there's enough accountability around the corruption that has happened in our food industry in the last 30 years. And I don't think most of these food companies, by the way, are malicious. I think they are public companies.
who have public shareholders, who care about profits first and corporate quarterly earnings,
And they have to prioritize earnings and cash flows over the sake of humanity, which is hard to measure. And I wanted to change that. And that was why we created Humanco, is that we think this paradigm needs to change. We are already at code red for humanity, and not many people are doing anything about it, and we wanted it changed.
I love that. And one of the things that you guys have done that I've, I can't even recall an example where I've seen this. You bought against the grain and you changed the ingredients, but you changed them for the better, more expensive ingredients. You made the product better. You made the product healthier after you bought it. Talk to me about that thinking. I'm glad you picked up on that chain because like when it happened, we were meeting actually with a large grocery chain and we were talking to their executives about it.
And I just kind of made it as a joke and it turns out that it was true. And I just said, "I think we might be the only company that buys other food companies and makes them better." And he kind of looked at me and he laughed and he goes, "You know what? I think you're right." And it's a shame because, I mean, it makes sense from an economic perspective. When you buy a food company, which a lot of companies do, they want to increase the shelf life.
They want to cheapen the ingredients, which improves their profit margins. And they want to do things that are consistent with improving the bottom line. Whereas what we're doing, and by the way, what we're doing is a much harder business model currently than selling crap, which is why you don't see many people do it, because it requires a real belief. We did have a very successful outcome with Hugh.
Humanco is doing well, but I have another five plus years to prove this out. And we're early because a big, big part of what we're doing is we have to educate people that you get what you pay for. And currently in this country, and this is not the case, Shane, in France and Italy, which is really interesting because those are two countries that I've studied exhaustively. In this country, we have an obsession with cheap technology.
And I don't mean cheap in terms of necessarily low price, meaning cheap. I mean cheap food. In countries like France and Italy, they actually have disdain for cheap food. Yeah, it's countercultural. They have disdain for it. They actually would rather spend more on properly made, properly farmed food than other things. And in this country, it's a myth that only people with money can afford healthy food. And the reason it's a myth is
is because we've looked at the data and it's a choice. So what I mean by that is anyone who has a smartphone, right? And you have to separate people who are below the poverty line and literally don't have enough calories. Those people have a different solution that they need, right? They need calories, they need sustenance, they need vitamins and minerals. For people who live above the poverty line, which is actually like, you know,
99% of Americans, anyone who has a smartphone, anyone who has any streaming service, including Spotify or Netflix or Hulu, anyone who's been to a Starbucks in the last six months can afford to have healthier food. And that is actually almost everybody. And it's a choice.
And a lot of people would prefer to get an occasional Starbucks for six bucks instead of spending an extra dollar or two on better stuff, but it's a choice. And the mission we have to keep pushing is convincing people that this is a long-term investment and that the reason people don't do it is because by the time you realize how sick you are, it's A, too late, and B,
Someone else bears the cost. It's usually the insurance companies. Talk to me about True Food Kitchen and what you're trying to do there. Yeah. So we just, it's a couple months ago, True Food Kitchen is the largest health and wellness oriented full service restaurant company in this country. It's still pretty small, but it's, because there's not many of them. There's 43 units across 17 states.
It was founded by Dr. Andrew Weil, who was one of the men I mentioned earlier in our conversation who helped me kind of discover functional medicine. It was a restaurant really based on pretty similar principles to Hugh. It was started actually a few years earlier than Hugh. It was started in 2008. It was started in Scottsdale, Arizona.
And true food is very much a restaurant that prioritizes taste first, but has very uncompromising guardrails around health.
They're less restrictive than Hugh was. So they have some gluten there. They have dairy, but they adhere to something called the dirty dozen list, which is the environmental working groups list of which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticides. So they have a lot of organic stuff. The beef is grass fed and pastured. And they make everything from scratch at each restaurant.
And it's really, really delicious food. And they have what I love about it, which is why we invested.
is they're not targeting like the East Coast bougie wealthy people. They're targeting everyone who wants to eat healthier and they have things for everybody. So they have pizzas, they have cheeseburgers, they have- Yeah, you can take the kids there. You can take the kids, but if you want to have a keto kale salad,
And that's the diet you're on. You can do that too. They have vegan options. They have vegetarian options. And so they really took what I didn't like as a personal consumer who went on this journey. I didn't like the health food companies that tried to alienate others. I liked the ones that basically made it more accessible, not less. There's a cohort of health and wellness people that are trying to be very exclusionary
Like, for example, not all, but some of the vegan community can be very intolerant of people who aren't vegan.
and basically subject their personal views on people who might eat meat and say, how dare you? You shouldn't eat animals. That's like an ethical violation. What I love about True Food is, and this is what we're doing at Human Co., is that we're trying to be healthier living for all diets, for all belief systems. And True Food's the same.
And so if you happen to be vegan, they have options. If you happen to be a carnivore, they have options. If you happen to be flexitarian, which means you don't eat a ton of meat, they have options. And the food is unbelievably delicious. And my belief in how we did You and how we've done Human Co is that if it isn't delicious,
people aren't going to change their habits. That's number one. It has to be delicious or else people are going to feel like they're compromising and they're not going to do it. And so we injected a bunch of growth capital from Humanco and a bunch of our investors and some new investors
True Food had never taken outside money actually prior to us. And we think that there should be a lot more True Foods across the country for people who want to eat healthier and do better for the planet in terms of sustainability, in terms of their practices. The other thing, Shane, that we didn't talk about, but when you treat the earth better and you treat the animals better,
than the way a lot of modern factory farming has done. The products, the meats, the fruits, the vegetables are better for you and it's also better for the earth. The only catch is that it's more expensive.
But it's more expensive because to do things right, you don't want to poison either the planet or people. And so that's the rub. And when you get involved with these companies, you're pretty hands-on. Why is that? Where does that come from? Not only about growing the brand and sort of like branding, like I think you were super involved in the Coconut Bliss rebrand. Cosmic Bliss now. Yeah. It's now Cosmic Bliss. I'm a brand guy.
personally. Different people have different tendencies. I think about brand as a promise. What a brand ultimately is, is it's an encapsulation of a bunch of values in a name. As someone who was poisoned by the food system, trust is so hard to find now. And so to me, when I find something
that has that kind of trust and goodwill that they've built up over time, but not enough people know about it, I want to shout it from the mountaintops. I want to help them because there needs to be more companies that lead with trust and mission and values and fewer companies that just lead with like, "Let's make some money." Because you can do both. What's interesting is a lot of people know me from my hedge fund days.
And what I currently do is way less profitable than if I was selling shit food. You could actually make good money selling shit food. Well, I don't know if I agree with this, right? Because if you extend the timeline, you can't poison your customers. I mean, that's not a win-win-win, right? So you...
It is in the short term when you can sort of like get these profits. But if you're looking to compound a relationship with any of your customers, if you're looking to have a customer for the rest of their life, if you're looking to sort of like pass things down from one generation to the next, if you're looking to be a good global sort of ecosystem component, then you have to be win, win, win, right? It has to be a win for the business. They got to make money. It has to be a win for the person. It has to be a win for the planet.
Yeah, but the problem is it's just like global warning, Shane. It's that it takes too long. So obviously, if you are currently and visibly poisoning customers, which is what happened with Daily Harvest, by the way, if you heard of that situation, Daily Harvest had a foodborne
illness issue where a bunch of people had to have their organs removed. That's usually the end of your business when that happens. But when you are eating something that's inflammatory, that's not acute poison, but it's a slow poison, where over 20 years you will develop metabolic disease,
It's too long. It's just like the people that produce too much carbon emissions or use coal or pollute too much or use too much plastic. The problem is that the feedback loop is too long. So by the time you reach that point where you're metabolically sick,
You don't realize that there was a connection with everything you were eating. Yeah, totally. I understand that. I want to come to one final question about the success nutrition facts behind you before we wrap up this episode.
I just want to say for anybody listening, you can look for Snow Days, Cosmic Bliss, Against the Grain in your grocery store and look for a true food kitchen near you. And you can try any of the Human Co. sort of brands and products and follow Jason as he builds this out in real time.
The sign behind you has caught my attention because it says success nutrition facts. Do you want to tell us the backstory here? And it says hustle, focus, persistence, discipline, failure, risks, and patience all at 100% per day. So I just thought this was really funny. A friend of mine had sent me this picture.
Because this actually means a lot in a lot of different ways to me, especially because I told you what happened to me in the beginning. So this is called the Nutrition Facts Panel, or in my business, they call it the NFP, which in this country is a legal requirement on all packaged food products.
except it usually has not these elements. It has things like fat, protein, carbohydrates, and then it has what are called the micronutrients, like how much vitamin C and vitamin A are in it, and sometimes it shows fiber. So you'll see this on every food product here in the US as a style. So I'm in the food business. Someone sent me a picture of this because this is kind of how I thought of myself
over, you know, since college of all the things that I would prioritize. You can also see it says serving size, 24 hours a day, servings per container, 365 days a year. And then the bottom says percent daily values are based on high levels of ambition. So...
I just thought that the fact that this thing existed and it's a combination of kind of how I've lived my life. Plus it's a food business centric thing was just so random that this thing even existed. So I bought it. But it's, it's also a nice reminder, Shane, that, you know, and I know you and I talked about this before, but that, that some of these things out here, which sounds noble or, or, or,
you know, they sound like values that we should all aspire to have. Some of these things, when you take them to extreme, will destroy you in terms of your physical health and your mental health, which is what happened to me. And sometimes I look at this and it reminds me of what not to do, because sometimes if you go too far, and by the way, this happens with healthy eating too. And I'll just say this as an anecdote for some of your listeners.
Mental health is a critical component to your physical health, and they're obviously both inextricably late. But I have met people through my own journey who are, I mentioned I live 85-15. I've met people who live 100-0.
They will never go out to dinner. And they don't need to live 100-0. Some people do. But these are people that choose. They have to make their own food. They have to know exactly where it comes from. They won't go out to dinner with people. They won't go out to lunch with people. When you get that fanatical, it starts to take a real toll on your mental health, which then affects your physical health. And so I've met some people who eat so cleanly that they actually don't look healthy.
Yeah. And I'm sure you've come across people that don't eat that healthy, that actually look great. And I just think it's a very important lesson, which I had to learn the hard way, that balance is so important in life. And that sometimes when you start to develop habits that are working, it's easy to keep going and forget about balance.
This is a great place to leave this conversation. There's so much to pick up on next time. I'm not going to spell it out for everybody, but we can get into this a lot more. I really appreciate you taking the time, Jason. Yeah, thanks for having me, Shane. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog.com. Or just Google The Knowledge Project. Until next time.
