Jason Karp: Live A Healthier Life

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/40c7bee46623cbfa

There were certain
fields and courses and areas where I was
Gift it, for sure.
Where I didn't have to study. I could just read it once and I would get in it.
And
I decided that I was I wanted to basically dominate
And I wanted to do it in everything I did.
And then that began a path.
for all the things I did thereafter.
Which
led to
me choosing the career that I led, which was w that I chose, which was twenty one 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.
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Check out the show notes for link.
Today my guest is Jason Carr.
He's the founder and CEO of HumanCo. Previously, Jason was the founder and CEO of a hedge fund that managed over$4 billion.
Human Co is one of my favorite food companies. They own brands like Against the Green.
Snow days 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 worst.
In nineteen ninety
Zero states in the United States had an obesity rate above twenty percent.
And only thirty years later.
Thirty years.
Zero states.
have an obesity rate below twenty percent.
Why does this matter?
While obesity is the leading cause of chronic disease and preventable death in the United States.
Humico 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.
Uh-huh.
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
Uh
Maybe slightly upper middle class area of Northwestern Connecticut.
A small town called Avon.
The successful people were doctors and lawyers.
you know, there was no real kind of
business or or or sort of entrepreneurial
kinda culture.
or finance, you know, that you typically would see in cities like LA or New York.
I had a uh
kind of a few different uh undiagnosed health issues as a kid.
That that really shaped
I think who I was and how I behaved, um
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
Uh aware.
Uh of these different
Mental differences.
Um and and especially watching my children, it it 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.
Um, and it it just made a a a lot of aspects of
what I think of as sort of typical childhood a a bit different for me.
I I I I found
kind of misfits like me.
uh when I was younger
Because I really dislike school.
I I was particularly unathletic.
Uh until
I was probably eleven or twelve.
Which was also really hard. Uh, you know, as a as a boy
Uh I I I later learned that I have a very significant difference in my right
side of my body coordination.
uh and the left side of my body coordination.
If you sort of force ranked it on a scale of one to ten.
The right side of my body is probably like a nine out of ten athletic.
Uh and the left side of my body's probably a two out of ten.
When I was doing kind of the typical kid games that required both sides of your body
Soccer, basketball.
I was they're h horrible.
Is this how you ended up on tennis?
Yes.
Yeah, this is how I ended up with Dennis. And it was actually a counselor

that sort of discovered this. I had no idea, and obviously
And and I grew up in a in a town that was very small.
Um, we had limited resources, you know, nobody was really diagnosed with anything unless you were just sort of very severely
Impaired.
I have some kind of Espergery tendencies.
Which also run in my family.
I had a much harder time
Kind of fitting in.
And I think my my ADHD
made school really hard for me.
in terms of interest level.
I I I always did quite well
Until high school.
Basically doing the bare minimum.
And you know, I repeatedly got the comments from teachers like
You know, he he he definitely has some
really interesting strengths is all 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 with all kids, but
I had some neighbors.
That were
I would say like real hooligans.
And and I looked up to them.
They they were always playing with guns and fire.
and and weapons and gasoline
And uh, 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 I I was in second grade. I was uh probably seven or eight years old.
And they wanted to do target practice with a pelic 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.
uh from thirty, forty feet away in their driveway.
And I held it up.
And they shot me in the chest.
And uh it actually went through my clothing. It went through my my winter coat, my sweater, my shirt.
And lodged into my rib cage.
Right where your heart is.
This is a B B gun.
Yeah, it was a Pelicon.
Um which is a which is a bit more
powerful than a B B 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 I don't know why, but I 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
e 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 kinda like the disciple.
I think when they got into high school
You know, when I they were in middle school in the time.
Um I think I just started to develop my own kind of habits around this stuff. And my father was was complicit in a lot of this'cause my father liked all the same stuff too.
So
In an odd way, he almost encouraged me sometimes to explore
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 a
You know, this is before the Internet and this was in a small place where
You know, we grew up in a ta in a in a neighborhood that didn't have lines on the street.
You know, we live closer to a farm than we did a city.
And this was also before video games and then and then, you know, I got my first kind of Nintendo
And
to that in uh when I was ten years old, which would have been nineteen eighty six.
Were you instantly addicted, like a lot of people with A D H D are just like instantly drawn into video games? Yeah, so it
Yeah, silly. And I became really, really good at them.
And I and I think it was
I think it was a blessing for me.
'Cause it was the first thing I could really focus on.
You know, and I and I got all the games and I would win the game.
You know, I mean I would play them until I 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 and then, you know, I got really interested in that. My my father was a retail
Stockbroker for Merrill Lynch.
and was always in and played poker every week.
With his friends and Jin.
And we had a we had very small kind of little library in our house.
With all the books.
And my father had books on
uh gambling, card counting. He had the original Ed Thorpe beat the dealer.
I just 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 and and tr and you know, wanted to teach myself how to count cards.
And I just became obsessed with games.
And beating game.
You know, all different kinds of games.
And trying to really deconstruct what makes a game a game.
And and then try to kind of unravel like what are the holes in the game and
What's the system? How do I exploit the system?
What are the weaknesses?
You would have been a good spy. And then and and
I was often kind of bored and alone.
Uh
at times and so I would just kinda hang out in the little book section and I would just take the books and
Uh and just pour over them.
Occasionally it would lead me to games of chance.
And 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 and for some reason
The quotes spoke to me.
And 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 I I found
my happy place to be more in the in the areas
Where
You know, things are predictable for me.
And and reading and 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 uh notebook of that. Did that start in your teenage years? Yeah.
I started writing the ones I like the best down when I was probably fifteen.
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 gonna paraphrase a bunch of them.
Because some of them are sort of in old English
I originally discovered a lot of the stoics.
And and didn't know who any of them were. You know, like Epictetus and
And Aurelius.
And Seneca.
Um
So there was a there was a there was a an old old quote.
Basically about that that everybody has something to teach you.
regardless of who they are.
Um and I remember that having a a real impact on me.
Um
You know, whether it's the custodian
you know, to the grandmaster
You know, in chess to some professor
you know, I I didn't fully understand the human condition
When I was
I mean I still don't, but but when I was certainly a teenager
I had a very, very
kind of naive myopic view of the world.
Um and I remember
uh 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 and there were actually some quotes in in this book.
Or maybe there was a second one. I think there was probably a second quo book of quotations from the eighties that actually had some Munger quotes it.
Early, early Munger stuff.
You know, I I'd say that that some of the quotes from Sun Tzu
Art of war.
Um in terms of preparation, in terms of battles are won before they begin.
And then I 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.
Um and so I think when I would read quotations
From Churchill.
You know, to
different and war.
Legends.
you know, talking about failure, talking about perseverance, talking about getting through tough battles.
You know, obviously the famous Roosevelt quote.
on the man in the arena.
Those were 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 where when you get to Wharton, you're basically on this path where you 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 pen and your trajectory leaving.
Or two very different paths. What are what happened?
You know, I had the good fortune of taking this really interesting class in high school.
With uh it was a philosophy class.
But
A big part of the class was actually on
Joseph Campbell.
And so I I learned of the hero's journey.
When I was probably fifteen.
And I I kind of felt like I was on the hero's journey, except that I was in the beginning of his
And and maybe this was my own way of rationalizing
That I could be good
Uh or accepted at some point.
But at that moment I was
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 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 just I had a lot of of influences
that made me both proud and insecure at the same time.
My mother's brother
is is a is a very famous scientist and mathematician.
He's uh he's the head of applied math and science at Cornell. His name's Steven Strogats.
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.
uh, 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 kinda broken.
And I'm I'm building up to the whole like Ped Wharton piece because
I had these three turs.
that helped me figure out a way to channel my ADHD.
And my parents were super laissez faire type of parents.
Like
I don't I can't literally recall a situ a s 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 and because my grades were were good
before high school when you didn't really have to do work.
Um 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.
uh and I can work longer and absorb more than most people can.
But
It and and and they discovered that I had this when it came to things that had nothing to do with school, like gambling.
Uh and video games.
Where I had
You know
knowledge and memory of these kind of things that was unusual.
Uh, 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 kinda 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 in my freshman year, I was a C student.
But I also did nothing. I did no homework, I did you know, and and by the time I was a senior I was getting A's
But I had just kinda hacked my own brain.
and developed a lot of these productivity
Packs.
And 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 it a pen.
From my high school.
And so I get there.
And um I'm deeply, deeply
Like
uh insecure about why I'm here.
But my
my Steven Strogats' other brother, my mother's other brother
Uh went to Penn.
And so uh
you know, I really wanted to kind of be there and and my parents were just thrilled that I was at a great school.
And uh
I had a couple of lucky breaks.
uh that happened to me and and this is this is also how I became really fascinated with
uh what I'll call path dependency
And
kind of positioning your life.
And like
Freshman hallway.
was a kid who was recruit to play swash a pen.
And he'd asked me one more one day, like, Hey, I heard you were a tennis player. Can we go hit some squash balls?
Uh, 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 and 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 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
uh tendency
When people would say you can't do that.
For me to say, watch me.
And I'm gonna 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.
Uh, 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 teen?
He actually said to me, he said, You know what?
I like your attitude.
We have twenty spots on the team.
The top ten are varsity, the bottom ten are J V.
If you can make it through pre season, 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 to try out for squash
They basically said, Well, you know, your athletic schedule
doesn't allow you to take the college version of Econ, which is a requirement, so you have to take
The Warten version of Eco.
And everyone told me they're like do not take the Warden version of Econ.
Those are the smartest kids.
You know, it's 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 gotta do it. So I did it.
The reason I go in this depth chain 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, uh, who had all these deep insecurities and still hated himself.
And
I noticed it in the first few weeks of econ that it just came to me like a second language. And I didn't I couldn't understand why.
I'd read I'd read the textbook once, I'd remember everything. I asked a lot of apparently really interesting questions. It was a
I a kid who came up to me
Who I thought was like a brilliant
kind of nerdy kid who 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 and nobody had ever asked to study with me.
And it it was just this like
Amazing weird feeling for me.
Um, and I was like why? It'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 look down at my test
And it's a ninety one.
And I you know, 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, like
And then the teacher's explaining a curve to us on the board.
And and
The max was a ninety one.
And the min was zero.
And the mean was like a sixty two.
And then there was this kid behind me who was very nosy.
Like looking around at what everyone got.
And he just says like kinda loudly, he's like, That's the kid who got the ninety one.
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 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 ha 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.
Oh.
What
I call with my therapist's terminator, Jason.
Terminator Jason was a completely different Cursola.
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 expect
Except
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 and and courses and areas where I was
Uh gift it, 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 was 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 I did have some really good friends in college who did get me
Um
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 a I I had like a an alter ego they would call fungi.
So they would say like Oh, is Funjas coming out tonight?
You know, and I'd be like, Okay, you know, you'll get fine Jason for three app.
So that's 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, which was w that I chose, which was twenty one years in the hedge fund business.
But then also how I got really, really sick.
I w I wanna talk about that in a second. Uh
Th there was w 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 what is that?
Backstory though.
Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. Um I'm glad you brought that up.
So basically after like
Two or three tests.
when I was clear, like I I I
I was good at at
Uh
uh business.
I talked with my father about it and and I said like maybe I sh
Maybe I should like transfer into business and transfer into Wharton.
But it required you to basically have a three nine or higher.
And I'd never had a three nine in my life.
And so I was like
I don't
I'm pro I'm gonna have to give up the squash experiment.
This was after about
Six weeks of pre season.
And this was after he'd already accepted me on the team and I was twenty out of twenty.
And I went to the coach and I said, Look, I'm gonna transfer into 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, his guy in his nineties, who's no longer alive or eighties.
They both sat me down and they both said like
You should not give up.
Squash.
You know, with the same the same speech that my
three teachers in high school gave me.
We see greatness in you.
You could do some really good stuff.
It's gonna help you with your life and your balance and
All this other stuff.
Your special I don't know if they actually believed it or not.
But hearing it felt so
Important to me.
Then he basically said, Don't do that.
Stick with it. I wanna see what you become.
And I did.
And I stuck with it.
And uh
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.
How I wanna 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.
Uh, and it was all about decision making.
And and it was like it was a class you had to apply.
To get into.
You know, they only took I don't know.
Fifteen kids, twenty kids.
The guy who taught it.
was a Russian
former I believe he was a international master.
Um, he wasn't a grandmaster, but he was the level below that.
And it was a
Totally bespoke.
Course.
Which had no analogue 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 and the premises
was
Chess is like a game that's a thousand years old.
And
Up until the eighteen hundreds, chess was played the same way everywhere.
Which is the way most people who aren't experts in chess play it.
called combinational
Chase.
You just try to anticipate the next move or next
series of moves. I do this, he's gonna do that.
She's gonna do that, then I'm gonna 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.
Um and they multiply like factorial.
And
In the in the eighteen hundreds
A twenty one year old
Genius.
Name Paul Morphy.
uh became the gr the world champion.
Of chess as a twenty one 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 a a bad move
Which you didn't anticipate.
You can attack.
If they make a great move, which you couldn't anticipate, you could 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.
Whereas in a game like poker
You don't fully know.

Kind of.
beneath the cards.
Because they're hidden.
This metaphor for me'cause 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 the 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.
Um, 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 there's so much about positioning that people
uh don't think about and I've s I've sort of studied and talked with people about decision making
over the last twenty years and the one thing that 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 and and I I the the way
When I began my hedge fund career and I eventually had to start training people.
I was a 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,'cause I played in high school, I played in college.
I became obsessed with that. And so one of the things once once they had internet poker
Um, 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.
Um
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 in no limit is
is what's called pocket aces, which are two aces.
Um, or what they call premium pair, which is pocket kings, pocket queens, pocket jacks.
You can literally just full you know, open up twenty windows.
On your screen.
And just literally fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, full, 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 I I like that because then then you just play the hand where you're 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 learn through that class or how to how to apply them to life?
Yeah, there was a lot about
Um
human relationships.
If you take that class to an extreme
Or that view of of like everything's an option.
Um, you start viewing everything in life with a cost benefit analysis.
And including people.
Includes, including
You know, things that are m less tangible.
Um but her
What are the essence of what makes life life?
Um, 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.
um, relationships, your physical health.
Your sleep.
And and so if you take that
to an extreme.
You become a expected value optimization machine.
Uh and you actually will ruin your life.
And that's where you started to go with this, right? And that's that's how I
Initially ruined myself.
Initially.
There's multiple times.
Yeah, there were multiple times. So talk to me about that that first time. That was in your your sort of like early twenties, right? Yeah. So what happened was
Um and it it's a real like 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 I learned how to apply myself to such a degree
that everything I did I became very good at.
that I put my mind. Um so I became a top squash player.
I graduated the top student athlete of the entire university.
Um, I think I was three of my
Wharton class.
I had one A minus in four years.
Wow. And all of these
kind of applications of myself. I started to
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.
They had these gifts and that if I didn't use these gifts
It was a it was like a waste.
And I just kept applying myself more and more and it kept working.
So I get out of
Pen.
I won, you know
all sorts of awards and like all this stuff that I thought was gonna make me happy.
I got, you know
a a really interesting job out of college.
And I didn't 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 the squad job. Like it sounds awesome. They're pay they were paying me five thousand dollars more.
than what the top banking offer was. So I I took that.
And I knew I didn't like banking. Anyway.
Um
I had a lot of really early success in my first year.
And just solved a lot of really interesting problems.
It and and you're simultaneously as you're doing this at the hedge fund though, you you're you're diving deep into your health issues.
I'm curious as to what you learned.
uh through the health stuff because you basically
Uh we're gonna die. So what happened was, which is again like
A 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.
Um it it was about just self improvement.
And I know many of your
listeners are are so focused on that.
Because I was speed reading
And because I was remembering most of what I was
Doing.
Um
I just sort of thought like
Like literally
I I thought like I w 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.
Um, but to do that I started to give up
Exercise.
I gave up.
friends and people I gave up
um connection.
And I gave up sleep.
And I I I was even reading all these like obscure military things about how to power nap.
And micronap.
And like how to basically go on three hours of sleep.
Which I would not recommend for anybody.
And and
I started to get
really, really sick.
And it took a while, actually.
Um, you know, and 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.
Um, where your prostate becomes really big, which isn't supposed to happen to a twenty three year old.
And then my vision started to go.
And when your vision starts to go
That's
That was terrified.
I I was already had bad vision.
You know, we need glasses.
But I was seeing double.
And and it started with my left eye and then s went to my right eye.
where I would literally see like a second version of something out of my left eye.
And at n 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 like I couldn't process. And so
Uh that's so freaky.
Yeah, and it was twenty three. And like, mind you, like two years earlier
At twenty one.
Like I was like a top athlete.
I thought I was super healthy.
I was strong, I was fit, I was great performer.
And 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 this is 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 corneal transplant list, uh, which had a huge waiting list.
And they said I would probably be blind by the age of thirty.
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
T month ago.
Uh, it's obviously traumatic, but like 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
Uh, 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.
Um, it's not weird anymore, but back then was weird.
in this area that they now call functional menace.
Um
which are addressing the root causes of disease instead of
Oh
The symptoms.
Um, and there were some kind of like OG
Doctors.
A guy named Doctor Andrew Wyl.
Um

and and quite famous.
Um, there was a doctor named Doctor Mark Hyman who was just getting started.
At this time.
who wrote a book on inflammation and autoimmunity.
Um, and I would find these things and I was just trying to make patterns.
And
Uh
Long story short, there was one time
Where I had my skin issue with the
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.
Um
And so I just developed this hypothesis that was totally naive and no one thought

Plausible.
Exactly.
Uh
If I taught myself how to start sleeping again.
And dramatically cleaned up my diet.
And started exercising again.
maybe my skin disease will go away and maybe my eye disease will go away and and
The reason I 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 say, you know, showing a correlation. And so anyway
I did that.
And I decided like okay.
I'm gonna have to like
Turn off
this sort of terminator mode and just try to like 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?
Um, 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.
Um it's not like do you see, do you not see? It actually measures the surface area of your eye.
And I had fulversed it.
And the ophthalmologist said in his entire practice he'd never seen anyone reverse this disease.
Because it's a degenerative disease.
Uh and that was like the next real pivotal moment of my life where I said, You know what?
I'm not gonna accept
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 gonna spend all my time on that.
So so let's fast forward over the the second job, which was another hedge fund and and get to
Uh Hugh.
And starting this, which is the start of this journey outside of

And the phonetical, phonical, 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?
w what is your lifestyle like in terms of caffeine, alcohol, sleep
What goes into your body.
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 cola.
It turns out that
Everything that affects me affects everyone else, except I just respond fast.
And I and I experimented with lots of different variations of it, but basically the the the style that resonated the most with me.
was what they now call paleo.
Um 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 you know, I was trained as sort of a scientist.
And I didn't want to do anything that was like not provable.
In terms of my own
Discovery.
And thankfully there's a lot of populations out there.
Um that are still indigenous people.
And they live the way that we lived ten thousand years ago.
Or even a thousand years.
Um
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
you know, what I'll call third world diseases still.
like tuberculosis and and you know
Foodborne illnesses, etcetera.
But all the things that are that are
literally killing off more people than anything we know of is related to life.
uh lifestyle and diet.
And so I was studying all these
And I was like
Y no, evolution is our strongest.
sort of scientific
Uh 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 two hundred thousand years.
And we have been hunter gatherers.
for ninety nine point nine nine percent of that period.
And so to me, what resonated the most about
how I was gonna 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?
Um
And
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, you know, it's it's it's harder, it's inconvenient, it costs more.
Nobody knows how to do it.
You know, life is too
Uh
It's
It's just too difficult.
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.
Like
No chance.
After enough back and forth.
I sort of decided like
Okay.
I I was fortunate enough in my career that I could I could afford it.
Um I never thought it was gonna 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 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 the genesis of of Hugh Kitchen and
We
We were very humble about what we didn't know.
We hired a bunch of people to help us'cause 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't.
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 is doesn't really incorporate dairy.
And doesn't incorporate legs.
We were more of a modified p paleo.
Um
Uh 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 uh 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 and we hired a guy to help us make uh a a a
a hue version of our own chocolate that that didn't have all the chocolate we could find
Had refined white cane sugar.
had soycithin, 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.

And and that was how Huge Awkward got started.
I I love how the standards were so fanatical that something as simple as the chocolate chips, you know, we couldn't find a good supplier, so we're gonna make our own
Do do you what do you eat today? Do you consume dairy?
I do. So I o I generally only consume grass fed.
Organic dairy.
Dairy's pretty controversial.
Uh, 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.
Um I live what I would call sort of a
Eighty five fifteen.
And a life.
Eighty five percent of the time I'm super clean, fifteen percent of the time.
I'm having
Cheeseburgers and fries.
I I I'm completely gluten free.
That's both a
An issue I have with the wheat.
uh uh industry here in the US and also something I I have a pretty noticeable intolerance to gluten.
Uh I don't have a I don't need anything that's that's kind of
Laboratory produced or made.
F
colours and chemicals and and
chemical preservatives.
But I'm not vegan.
Uh, you know, I eat plenty of animal products.
Uh, 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?
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.
uh which is kind of an American innovation because it fattens them up.
Same thing goes with fish, same thing goes with chicken.
Um 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
What effects
me affects everybody.
And it's just time.
Um, and y this is not something that's controversial, Shane, like
You just have to look at current status.
Of
You know, any developed country.
I mean w this is the first generation in human history that is predicted to live shorter than the previous.
Um, we are the sickest we've ever been on any objective measure. We exercise the most
We ever have.
Uh seventy percent of Americans are either overweight or obese.
Night over ninety percent are metabolically unhealthy.
It's all staring us in the face and but it's so inconvenient.
It's like an inconvenient truth. It's much worse than global warming. Let's go back a sec. Wha 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 glute
in France and Italy.
And cannot tolerate it here in the US.
And there's two hypotheses on that.
It hasn't been proven, but these are my hypotheses. I've I've heard them from others too.
The first and most important one.
Is that
Um
I don't remember the exact number, but it's in the high nineties percent. Might be ninety nine percent, might be ninety seven percent.
uh of the US wheat crop that's not organic.
has traces of glyphosate.
Which is Monsanto's
Herbicide.
Um also called Round Up.
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.
Is banned.
Many countless countries.
It it wa uh there was a gigantic class action lawsuit.
That
Uh they lost.
Uh
in the many, many, many billions of dollars.
Uh 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, like this isn't require like 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.
Um 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 and our body are not gonna respond to it is insane.
So
If you buy organic weed, are you still exposed to that? No, you're not.
So if if you're a consumer in North America, one way to sort of like opt out of this is to to buy organic flour. So that's part of it.
Not all of it.
Glyphosate's also on
Uh beet sugar.
There's a bunch of crops.
Uh, including soy. Basically any of the big crops
Just as a as like a lesson for your listeners.
Any big crop where there's a lot of money.
Um, is is filthy.
Um
And it's logical, right,'cause there's so much money in big crops.
That like to make the crops
Be weather resistant.
To be cycle resistant.
To be
Pest resistant.
Like 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
We
Corn.
Coco.
Coffee.
Uh anything like that.
You always want her dance.
The second rule.
Uh 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.
You know, and look, there's a lot of of hypotheses today on why we're all so sick.
Um, 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.
Um, unless they're like reverse osmosis filtered. It's in everything.
So
We have literally poisoned ourselves.
Um, and again, like 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 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 incidents
Uh, you don't have to be s 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 d 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 ouch.
One.
Now like a qu a quarter of my kids class are allergic to something.
A court.
I wanna go back to this. You said one there's two differences between US wheat and sort of uh European or f you specified French and Italian. One was the glycosin. What is the other big difference? Is it the type of wheat that they're growing? Yeah.
I it's a much more
Um
Kind of agent form.
So there's um
There's some
There's some really interesting like rabbit holes in nutrition.
Where there's some people, particularly some farmers
There's a guy
Um
Dan Barber, who started a a very famous
Restaurant.
Called Blue Hill at Stone Barnes.
And
Um
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 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 cross breeding.
Which we've been able to do for hundreds of years. And and how all modern dogs
exist is through Crossbreak.
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 cross breed wheat.
to increase its gluten levels.
Which makes it more robust.
Um
And
Uh
I I have heard and and I I haven't seen any any actual proof on this
But they have found
fossilized versions of wheat.
From biblic.
when literally bread was like the staple for everybody.'Cause 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 is
magnitudes less than the amount of gluten that we're consuming today.
Um
Same thing by the way with the cannabis plant.
Which I'm sure you've heard.
uh the amount of like T H C in the cannabis plant today is very different from what like the people at Woodstock were smoking in the sixties.
Um
We've done this.
And and you know, 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.
'Cause it inflames your gut.
Um, and then a lot of weird things start to happen to you when your gut is inflamed.
So it in Europe
The glyphosate band.
And the gluten levels are much lower.
And the the the strains of wheat that they typically use
are are typically a lot less inflammatory than the ones that they use over here.
That's the it.
And so now like you sold this company to Mondelez, now you're you're doing Human Co.
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 is again, I stayed in the hedge fund career for twenty one years.
I officially retired from that.
in the beginning of twenty nineteen.
Hugh Kitchen the restaurant was my first like real foray.
into trying to change
What I think is wrong with the world.
By using my own tools.
Um
And Hugh Kitchen opened in October of twenty twelve.
Just to give you a sense of time.
Um
Hugh became quite
a a large and successful business.
And what was so amazing about it, and this is the prelude to Human Go.
But what was so amaz and by the way, Hugh was called human.
Hugh was 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.
Um, which is also why Human Co is called Human Co.
Everything I do has the word human or s some variation of hue human in it because of all my
Uh like learning's the hard way.
And
The Hugh 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.
Um, and it taught me how desperate everyone is to try to live healthier.
And how hard it is right now.
What
What was clear to me
When 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 is a top nutrition school in the country.
Um
And
What's clear to me is that for
At least sixty years.
We have known that fruits and vegetables are far healthier for people.
Then like
Twinkies and cakes.
That hasn't really changed behavior.
Um
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 it 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 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 and
it 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 and so my belief, which was a little controversial at the time
Was
I wanna take foods that bring people happiness and joy.
Because many of those are the are the are the quote dirtiest, are the least healthy.
Right.
And I wanna take those.
And clean those up.
Because if I can 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 days.
Three times a day.
And you're not moving them to salads.
Like that's never happening.
Um overnight.
No, but you can take something like pizza.
Correct.
Yeah.
Correct. And so I I a 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.
Um
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 are chocolate.
Right. Hugh Hugh was primarily a snacking company.
Hugh is doing
you know, 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.
Um in terms of
of how gross the ingredient labels are.
And so for example
Um
The the the brand that we created from scratch.
uh at Human Co, which is the second company I've done
From scratch. It's called Snow Days.
And Snow Days is a is a pizza bite.
Um
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.
Um
The prevailing
Winner.
in pizza bites. So pizza bites are a surprisingly big category.
um what I'll call frozen appetizers, but pizza bites are enormous. And the market leader is a company called Totinos.
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 seventy
Seven zero.
Ingredients long.
It doesn't even use real cheese.
It actually says on the label.
Imitation Cheese.
It has
At least a dozen chemicals.
Yeah.
That are in the ingredient lab.
I mean it is literally like nuclear waste.
And
This business from our last check.
Does
Clost to eight hundred milyen dollars a year.
In Rabbit.
It's an enormous business.
Um
Um, you look across other categories.
Um
And and there's uh
Categories like
Peter.
Bread.
Ice cream.
Cakes.
You know, anything that people like.
Love?
And they feel great about
You know, if you go to fast food places, like 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 like debatable.
Um
But because our food system here in this country
um has massive amounts of other interests.
Particularly from lobbyists.
We are corrupt.
And and I don't think there's enough accountability
around the corruption.
That happen that has happened in our food industry in the last thirty years.
Um
And I I don't
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 and I wanted to change that.
And that was why we created Human Co is that we think this paradigm change.
We are already or we are already at like
Like
You know.
Cold red.
For humanity.
And not many people are doing anything about it and we wanted it.
I I love that. And one of the things that you guys have done that I I've
I can't even recall an example where I've seen this. You bought Against the Green
And you change the ingredients, but you change them for the better.
uh 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, Shane,'cause like when when it happened.
We were meeting actually with a large grocery
Uh
Chain.
And we were talking to their executives about it.
And I just kinda 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 kinda 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 make 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.
Um which is why you don't see many people do it.
because it it requires a real
belief.
We did have a very successful outcome with Hugh.
Human co is doing well.
Um, but
Like
I have another five plus years to prove this out.
And 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,'cause those are two countries that I've studied exhaustively.
In this country.
We have an obsession.
With cheap.
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 distinct
For cheap food.
Yeah, it's counterculture. 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.
Um
And the reason it's a myth.
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
Um vitamins and minerals.
For people who live above the poverty line.
Which is actually like
You know.
Ninety nine percent.
of Americans.
Anyone who has a smartphone.
Anyone
Who has
Any streaming service.
Includy 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
you know, an extra dollar or two on better stuff.
But it's a choice.
And and the mission we have to 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 like what you're trying to do there.
Yeah, so we just uh it's a couple months ago.
True Food Kitchen is the largest
Health and wellness oriented full service restaurant.
uh company in this country.
Um it's still pretty small, but it's it's
Because there's not many of them.
Um, there's forty three units.
Across seventeen states.
Um, it was founded by doctor Andrew Weil, who was one of the men I mentioned.
uh earlier in our conversation who helped me
Um, kind of discover functional medicine.
It was a restaurant really based on
Pretty similar principles to Hue. It was started a actually a few years earlier than Hue.
Uh, I was started in two thousand eight.
It was started in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Um
And
True food is very much
A restaurant
That
Uh
prioritizes
Taste first.
but has very uncompromising guardrails around health.
Um, they're less restrictive than he 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
uh list of which foods
Which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticides, so they have a lot of organic stuff.
The beef is
Grass fed and pastured.
Um
Uh, and they make everything from scratch.
V a at each restaurant.
And it's really, really delicious food. And they have what I love about it, which is why we invest in
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
Um 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 like the ones that
basically made it more accessible, not less.
There's a there's a cohort of health and wellness people.
That are trying to be very exclusionary.
Like
Yeah.
For example,
Not not all, but some
of the some of the vegan community.
can be very
Uh intolerant.


Um and basically subject their personal views on people who might eat meat.
And say how dare you?
You shouldn't eat animals.
You know, that's like an ethical violation.
What I love about True Food is is tr and this is what we're doing at Human Co is it
We're trying to be
Um
Healthier living for all diets.
For all belief systems.
And true foods are said.
Um, 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.
Um, and the food is unbelievably delicious, and my belief
In why and how we did Hue and how we've done Human Co.
Is that if it isn't delicious.
People aren't gonna change your habits.
That's number one.
It has to be delicious.
Or else people are gonna feel like they're compromising and they're not gonna do it.
And so we injected a bunch of
Uh growth capital.
uh uh from Human Co and a bunch of our investors and some new investors.
Um, TrueFood 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 wanna eat healthier and do better for the planet in terms of sustainability, in terms of their practices.
You know, the other thing, Shane, that we've we've
Didn't talk about it.
But
Um 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 meat
The fruits, the vegetables.
Are better for you.
And
It's also better for the earth.
The only кеч.
Is that it's more expensive.
But it's more expensive because to do things right.
You don't want

Either the planet or people.
And so that's
That's the rub.
And w w when you get involved with these companies, you're pretty hands on. W why is that? Where does that come from?
Not only about growing the brand and sort of like branding like
Uh, I think you were super involved in the Coconut Bliss rebrand. Yep.
Cosmic Cosmic Bliss now.
Yeah. It's now cosmic bliss. Um
I'm a brand guy.
personally. Like, you know, different people have different
Tendencies.
Um
I I think about brand as a promise.
What a brand ultimately is
is it's a 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 built up over time.
But not enough people know about it.
I want to shout it from the mountaintops.
I wanna help them.
Because there needs to be more companies that lead with trust and mission and and values.
And fewer companies that just lead with like let's make some money.
Um
Because you can do both.
Like
You know, what's interesting is 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, it's it I 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 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 gotta make money.
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's too it takes too long.
You know, so obviously if you are
If you are
Uh currently.
and and visibly poisoning customers, which is what happened with Daily Harvest, by the way, if if you heard of that situation.
Um
Daily harvest out of foodborne.
illness issue where a bunch of people had to have their organs removed.
Um
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.
Um where over twenty years you will develop metabolic disease.
It's too long. It's just like it's just like the people that produce too much carbon emissions or or or you know, use coal or
You know
pollute too much or use too much plastic, like
The the problem is is that the feedback loop is too long.
So by the time you reach that point where you're
metabolically sick.
You don't
You don't realize that there was a connection with everything you were eating.
Yeah, totally. I I understand that. Um
I I wanna come to one final question about the success nutrition facts behind you before we wrap up this episode.
Uh I just want to say for anybody listening
Uh you can look for snow days.
Cosmic bliss against the green 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 and products and
uh follow Jason as he 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 a hundred percent per day.
Yeah.
So I just thought this was really funny. A friend of mine had sent me this picture.
Um
Because
Th this actually means a lot.
In a lot of different ways to me, especially because I told you what happened.
In to me in the beginning.
Um
So this is called the nutrition facts panel or in my
business they call it the NFP.
which in this country is is is a legal requirement on all packaged food products.
Except it usually has
Not these elements.
It has things like fat.
Protein, carbohydrates.
Um, 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 in the US.
Um, as a as a style. So I'm in the food business.
Um someone sent me a picture of this because
This is kinda how I
I thought of myself.
Over
You know, since college.
of all the things that I would prioritize.
You can also see it's a serving size twenty four hours a day.
Servings per container three hundred sixty five days a year.
Um
And then the bottom says percent daily values are based on high levels of ambition.
So
Um
I just thought that the fact that this thing existed and it's a combination of
kinda 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.
Uh
But it it's it's also a nice reminder saying
that you know, and I know you and I talked about this before, but
That that some of these things on here which sound
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 too extreme
Will destroy you.
in terms of your physical health and your mental health, which is what happened to me.
Um
And 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 set this as an anecdote.
For some of your listeners.
Um
Mental health is a critical component to your physical health and they're obviously both
Inextricably.
Uh wait.
Um
But
I have met people through my own
Journey.
Who are
I mentioned I live eighty five fifteen.
I've met people who live a hundred zero.
They will never go out to dinner.
They will ne and and they don't need to live a hundred and zero. Some people do.
But these are people that choose. They have to make their own food.
You have to know exactly where it comes from.
It 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.
Um 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 and I'm sure you've come across people that don't eat that healthy that actually look great.
Um, 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.
Um
And that sometimes when you start to develop habits that are working
It's easy to keep going.
And forget about ballots.
Uh
This is a great place to leave this conversation. Uh there's so much to pick up on next time. I'm not gonna 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.
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