Jason Karp: Live A Healthier Life

Jason Karp was living what he thought was a successful life in his 20s. He graduated near the top of his class from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and was well on his way to becoming a successful hedge fund manager. But when he noticed a series of health issues cropping up - including the frightening diagnosis that he would go blind by the age of 30 - he made a series of life-altering decisions focused on his health and wellness. On this episode Karp dives deep into the changes he made that saved his life, and offers valuable insights into what you can do to live a healthier life. Karp is the Founder and CEO of HumanCo., a private holding company that invests in and builds brands focused on healthier living and sustainability, including Snow Days, Cosmic Bliss, and Against The Grain. He also co-founded Hu Products and Hu Kitchen, and Hu is now one of the fastest growing snacking companies in the U. S. with a strict focus on transparent, simple ingredients to help everyone live a healthier life. Prior to founding Hu, Karp was the founder CEO of Tourbillon Capital Partners, an investment fund that managed over $4 billion. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Our Sponsors: MetaLab: Helping the world’s top companies design, build, and ship amazing products and services. https://www.metalab.com Aeropress: Press your perfect cup, every time. https://aeropress.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 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, that I chose, which was 21 years in the hedge fund business. But then also how I got really, really sick.

• 0:50Shane Parrish?

  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/membership. 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

• 1:33Shane Parrish?

  that managed over $4 billion. HumanCo is one of my favorite food companies. They own brands like Against the Grain, 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 worse. In 1990, zero states in the United States had an obesity rate above 20%.

• 2:20Shane Parrish?

  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. Human Co. 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.

• 3:04Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  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. You know, there was no real kind of business or sort of entrepreneurial kind of culture or finance, you know, that you typically would see in cities like LA or New York. I had a kind of 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.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Which was also really hard, you know, as a, as a boy. 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 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.

• 5:21Shane Parrish?

  Is this how you ended up on tennis?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  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, and I grew up in a, in a town that was very small. Uh, 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 Asperger-y 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.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  And, you know, I repeatedly got the comments from teachers like, you know, he, he, he definitely has some really interesting strengths, 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.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  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, my winter coat, my sweater, my shirt, and lodged into my rib cage, right where your heart is.

• 7:19Shane Parrish?

  This is a BB gun.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a pellet gun, um, which is, 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, 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 everything we could on fire and see what would happen and.

• 7:53Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  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. 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 because 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.

• 8:32Shane Parrish?

  You'd all be locked up for this now.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  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, in a, 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, and then, you know, I got my first kind of Nintendo in 2000, when I was 10 years old, which would have been 1986.

• 8:58Shane Parrish?

  Were you instantly addicted? Like a lot of people with ADHD are just like instantly drawn into video games.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Instantly, instantly. And I became really, really good at them. And I, and I think it was, I think it was a blessing for me because 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'd win them.

• 9:21Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  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 gin. And we had a, we had a very small kind of little library in our house with old books. And my father had books on gambling, card counting. He had the original Ed Thorp, 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, you know, wanted to teach myself how to count cards.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  And I just became obsessed with games and beating games, you know, all different kinds of games and trying to really deconstruct what makes a game a game. And, and then trying to kind of unravel, like, what are the holes in the game?

• 10:27Shane Parrish?

  What's the system? How do I exploit the system? What are the weaknesses? You would have made a good spy.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  That, that's right. And then, and, 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, 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.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  And so 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.

• 11:43Speaker 02

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• 11:59Speaker 03

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• 12:27Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. I started writing the ones I liked the best down when I was probably 15.

• 12:40Shane Parrish?

  Are there any that still stick with you today that you like use, either from childhood or that you like remind yourself of?

• 12:47Speaker 00

  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 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, in chess, 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,

• 13:32Speaker 00

  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 it. Early, early Munger stuff. You know, 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, and then I also was very focused on quotations from people who failed a lot.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  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, you know, to different 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.

• 14:48Shane Parrish?

  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 Penn and your trajectory leaving were two very different paths. What are, what happened?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  You know, I had the good fortune of taking this really interesting class in high school with, 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 15. And I, I kind of felt like I was on the hero's journey, except that I was in the beginning of this. And, 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.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  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 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, he probably went into some of his accolades.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  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. And, and I just was, was really self-loathing and deeply insecure because of all the other things that I mentioned. I just thought I was kind of broken. And I'm, 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.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Like, I don't, 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, and because my grades were, 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.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  But, and, and, 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, you know, 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. Was that I kind of hacked my own brain to understand what its strengths and weaknesses were.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  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 STE 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 kind of hacked my own brain and developed a lot of these productivity hacks. 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 into Penn from my high school. And so I get there and I'm, I'm deeply, deeply like insecure about why I'm here.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  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, 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, and this is, 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 at Penn. 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? And I said, sure, like, I don't really know how to play squash. I've only played twice.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  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, and I had this attitude, this is 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 gonna do it twice.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  When I signed up 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 Wharton version of econ. And everyone told me, they're like, do not take the Wharton version of econ. Those are the smartest kids. You know, 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 change is because you have a few moments in your life that change 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.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  And I noticed that 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. There was a, a kid who came up to me, who I thought was like a brilliant, kind of nerdy kid who, who deserved to be in work and 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? And 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.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  And I take the exam and a long story short, and the teacher's explaining the curve. And I looked down at my test and it's a 91. 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 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 nosey, 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 poked.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  And that was the beginning of what I call with my therapists Terminator Jason. Terminator Jason was a completely different persona 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.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  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 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 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",

• 25:43Speaker 00

  which most kids did in college, they would say like, I had a, I had like a, an alter ego they would call Fun Jason. So they would say like, "Oh, is Fun Jason coming out tonight?" You know, and I'd be like, "Okay, you know, you'll get Fun Jason for three out." 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, that I chose, which was 21 years in the hedge fund business. But then also how I got really, really sick.

• 26:16Shane Parrish?

  I want to talk about that in a second. There, there was another moment there that made a big difference though, because you wanted to quit the squash team and then.

• 26:27Shane Parrish?

  The coach wouldn't let you or he challenged you? What is that backstory there?

• 26:32Speaker 00

  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 like, maybe I should, 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 probably, I'm gonna 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'd said, look, I'm gonna transfer into Wharton. My academics are really important to me.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  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, who's 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, 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. 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.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:08Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  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, 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 gonna do that, she's gonna do that, then I'm gonna do that, then, you know.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  So if they make a, 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. Cause they're hidden. This metaphor for me, cause my father, growing up and a lot of the quotes that I used to read,

• 31:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:01Shane Parrish?

  And you applied that outside of that class. I mean, there, there's so much about positioning that people don't think about. And I've, I've sort of studied and talked with people about decision making over the last 20 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.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think that's right. And, and, and 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

• 33:25Speaker 00

  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, 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 could literally just, you know, 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.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:22Shane Parrish?

  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 learned through that class or how to, how to apply them to life?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  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, including people, including pleasure, including, you know, things that are less tangible, um, but are, but 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

• 35:21Speaker 00

  that were less tangible. Um, relationships, your physical health, your sleep. And, and so if you take that to an extreme. You become an expected value optimization machine and you actually will ruin your life.

• 35:40Shane Parrish?

  And that's where you started to go with this, right?

• 35:42Speaker 00

  And that's, that's how I initially ruined myself.

• 35:46Shane Parrish?

  Initially, there's multiple times?

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, there were multiple times.

• 35:50Shane Parrish?

  So talk to me about that, that first time, that was in your, your sort of like early twenties, right?

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. So what happened was, um, and 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 to. So I became a top squash player. I graduated the top student athlete of the entire university.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  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 a, 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.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:54Shane Parrish?

  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 gonna die.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  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, 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

• 38:52Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  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 23 year old. And then my vision started to go. And when your vision starts to go, that's, that was terrifying. I was already had bad vision, you know, and neat glasses. But I was seeing double. And, 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, 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.

• 40:21Shane Parrish?

  That's so freaky.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I was 23 and like, mind you, like two years earlier, at 21, like I was like a top athlete. I thought I was super healthy. I was strong, I was fit, I was a 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, 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, uh, which had a huge waiting list. And they said I would probably be blind by the age of 30, fully blind.

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• 42:00Speaker 00

  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 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, 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.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Even though the doctors weren't saying. And I started reading all this weird stuff. 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.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  And, long story short, there was one time where I had my skin issue with the psoriasis happen 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

• 44:11Speaker 00

  would go away. And, 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 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.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  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. 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 kind of common Western dogma about medicine and lifestyle and like

• 45:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:44Shane Parrish?

  So let's fast forward over the, 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 the fanatical, fanatical, I say, standards that you.

• 46:03Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 46:20Speaker 00

  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 coalmine. It turns out that everything that affects me affects everyone else, except I just respond faster. 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.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  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, et cetera. 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.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  And I was like, you know, 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?

• 48:58Speaker 00

  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 aren't 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. 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.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  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 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

• 51:08Speaker 00

  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. Um, uh, but 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.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  And we couldn't find chocolate chips that met our specs. And, and we hired a guy to help us make a, a, a Hugh version of our own chocolate that, 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, and that was how Hugh Chocolate got started.

• 52:19Shane Parrish?

  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 going to make our own. Do, do you, what do you eat today? Do you consume dairy?

• 52:30Speaker 00

  I do. So I, 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 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,

• 53:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  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. Like, you just have to look at current status of, you know, 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. Uh, 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  Nine, over 90% 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.

• 54:51Shane Parrish?

  Let's go back a sec. What, what's the issue you have with the US wheat industry? Is it just US or is it the wheat in general?

• 54:58Speaker 00

  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 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 90s percent. It might be 99%, it might be 97% uh, of, of the US wheat crop. It's not organic.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  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 is banned in many countless countries. It, it was, there was a gigantic class action lawsuit that, uh, they lost.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 57:14Shane Parrish?

  So if you buy organic wheat, are you still exposed to that?

• 57:18Speaker 00

  No, you're not.

• 57:19Shane Parrish?

  So if you're a consumer in North America, one way to sort of like opt out of this is to buy organic flour?

• 57:25Speaker 00

  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 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, wheat, corn, cocoa, coffee, anything like that, you always want organic.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  The second rule 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 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.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  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, like, this sounds like sensationalist, this 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 incidents, you don't have to be, you don't have to be a scientist to see this. When you look at the incidents of food allergies, you look at the incidents of autism. You look at the incidents of autoimmune diseases.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  This is not like, ooh, now we're, 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.

• 59:56Shane Parrish?

  I want to go back to this. You said one, there's two differences between US wheat and sort of European, or you specified French and Italian. One was the glycogen. What was the other big difference? Is it the type of wheat that they're growing?

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, it's a much more kind of ancient 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 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, 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.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  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 crossbreeding. Um, you know, without actually going into the DNA and, and manipulating. Gluten is a protein that gives wheat part of its robustness.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  And you can actually crossbreed wheat to increase its gluten levels, which makes it more robust. Um, and I have heard, and I haven't seen any, 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. 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,

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  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 THC 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 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.

• 1:02:29Shane Parrish?

  But once you take it to the extreme, then.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:39Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  But gluten disrupts the microbiome because it inflames your gut. Um, and then a lot of weird things start to happen to you when your gut is inflamed. So in Europe, the glyphosate banned and the gluten levels are much lower. And the, 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.

• 1:03:04Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  I know, I know. I've gone kind of full circle. Well, what's happened Shane is, 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 like 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.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  Hugh became quite a large and successful business. And what was so amazing about it, and this is the prelude to Human Co. But what was so ama- 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. Which is also why Human Co. was called Human Co. Everything I do has the word human or some variation of Hugh, human in it because of all my like learnings the hard way. And

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  the Hugh chapter was so interesting because it taught me a lot about myself.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  And what's clear to me is that for at least 60 years,

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  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, and there's a lot of pleasure and ritual and good things that come with food.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  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 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 want to 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 want to take those and clean those up.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  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, 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. And, and we're taking the same guardrails. And the same level of strictness that we did with Hugh.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  And we decided that we want to apply it to other categories that aren't 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 was the second company I've done from scratch, is called Snow Days.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  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 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. That are banned in other countries. That are in the ingredient label.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  I mean, it is literally like nuclear waste. And this business, from our last check, does close to eight hundred million dollars a year in revenue. It's an enormous business. And you look across other categories.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  And, and there's categories like pizza, 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.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  This isn't something that's like debatable.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  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 HumanCo, is that we think this paradigm needs to change. We are already, we are already at like, like, you know, code red for humanity. And not many people are doing anything about it, and we wanted to change it.

• 1:11:21Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  I'm glad you picked up on that, Shane, 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.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  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. Human Co is doing well, 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 because those are two countries that I've studied exhaustively.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  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 disdain for cheap food. Yeah, it's counter-cultural. 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 because we've looked at the data and it's a choice.

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  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 $6 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.

• 1:15:12Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about True Food Kitchen and like what you're trying to do there.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we just, it's a couple of 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, 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.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  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 foods, which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticides. So they have a lot of organic stuff. The beef is grass-fed and pastured.

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:17:14Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, you can take the kids there.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  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, like, for example, not, not all, but some of the, some of the vegan community

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  can be very intolerant of people who aren't vegan. And, 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, 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.

• 1:18:43Speaker 00

  And my belief in why, and 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 Human Co. 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. You know, the other thing Shane that we didn't talk about,

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  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, that's the rub.

• 1:20:00Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  Yep, Cosmic Bliss.

• 1:20:14Shane Parrish?

  Cosmic Bliss now.

• 1:20:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's now Cosmic Bliss. I'm a brand guy personally. Like, you know, different people have different tendencies. 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've built up over time, but not enough people know about it. I want to shout it from the mountaintops.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 1:21:26Shane Parrish?

  Well, it's, 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.

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  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 currently and visibly poisoning customers, which is what happened with Daily Harvest, by the way, if you heard of that situation.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  It's too long. It's just like, it's just like the people that produce too much carbon emissions, 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.

• 1:23:07Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, totally. I, I understand that. Um, I, I want to 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 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, 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 100% per day.

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  So I just thought this was really funny. A friend of mine had sent me this picture.

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  Because 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

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  this is kind of how I, 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.

• 1:25:01Speaker 00

  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 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. But it's also a nice reminder Shane, that you know, and I know you and I talked about this before, but that some of these things out here which sound noble, 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

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  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 8515. I've met people who live 100 zero. They will never go out to dinner. They will, and they don't need to live 100 zero. Some people do. But these are people that choose, they have to make their own food, they have to

• 1:26:29Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 1:27:24Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 1:27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me, Shane. I appreciate it.

• 1:27:43Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. Until next time.