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 Welcome to the Knowledge Project.
I'm your host Shane Parrish This podcast is about mastering the best 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 slash membership check out the show notes for link Today my guest is Jason Karp He's the founder and CEO of human co previously Jason was the founder and CEO of a hedge fund that managed over four billion dollars Human Co 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 worst in 1990 zero states in the United States had an obesity rate above 20% and only 30 years later 30 years zero states have an obesity rate below 20% Why does this matter?
Well obesity is the leading cause of chronic disease and preventable death in the United States 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 Well this episode might change the way you eat.
It will certainly change how you think it's time to listen and learn Let's start with your childhood you were a bit of a misfit spending a lot of time on video games and cart counting and building weapons and playing with wire tell me more about these years I grew up in a kind of middle-class Maybe slightly upper middle-class area of northwestern Connecticut a small
town called Avon The successful people were doctors and lawyers.
You know, there was no real kind of business or 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 that really shaped I think who I was and how I'd be in my life I had pretty severe on diagnosed ADHD Which I now know, you know both runs
in my family My children both have different variations of this and so now I've had to become A lot more aware of these different mental differences And especially watching my children it's become very clear that I had a lot of this I was a very allergic kid.
I had sinus infections very often.
I had asthma And it just made a lot of aspects of What I think of as sort of typical childhood a bit different for me.
I Found kind of misfits like me when I was younger because I really disliked school I was particularly unathletic Until I was probably 11 or 12 which was also really hard.
You know as a boy I later learned that I have a very significant difference in my right side of my body coordination And the left side of my body coordination if you sort of forced ranked it on a scale of 1 to 10 The right side of my body is probably like a night out of my life And the left side of my body is 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 horrible.
Is this how you ended up on tennis?
Yes, yes, this is how I ended up with tennis and it was actually a counselor of mine at a camp That sort of discovered this I had no idea and obviously And I grew up in a town that was very small We had limited resources, you know, nobody was really diagnosed with anything unless you were just sort of very severely Impaired I have some kind of aspergery 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 health care Made school really hard for me in terms of interest level I always did quite well until high school basically doing the bare minimum And you know I repeatedly got the comments from teachers like you know he he he definitely has some Really
interesting strengths is all of only he could sit still if only he could you know stop try 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 were always playing with guns and fire And and weapons and gasoline and you know my first kind of formative moment
And you would think this would actually deter me away from spending a lot of time in these areas I was in second grade I was probably seven or eight years old And they wanted to do target practice with a pellet gun that they had just bought They wanted me to hold up a piece of paper and they wanted to see if they could shoot it From 30 40 feet away in their driveway and I held
it up and they shot me in the chest And it actually went through my clothing it went through my winter coat my sweater my shirt And lodged into my rib cage right where your heart is This is a BB gun Yeah it was a pellet gun which is which is a bit more powerful than a BB gun But if I was in a t-shirt I think it would have killed me I still have a scar to this day and instead of it deterring
me away from you know this life of risk taking It made me more risk seeking I don't know why but I spent a lot more time and became fascinated with guns and weapons and fire Particularly fire and explosives and we used to just try to light everything we could on fire And see what would happen and how did you get out of hanging with these people?
Like once you fall into a crowd like that it's really hard to change your trajectory and get out of that group They were much older than me and I think I was just kind of like the disciple I think when they got into high school you know when they were in middle school in the time 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 You'd all be locked up for this now I know I know and it was it you know this is before the internet and this was in a small place where You
know we grew up 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 two that and when I was ten years old which would have been 1986 Were you instantly addicted like a lot of people with ADHD or just like instantly drawn
into video games? Is silly and I became really really good at them 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 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 father was a retail stockbroker from Errol Inch And was always in and played poker every week with his friends and Jin And we had a we had a very small kind of little library in our house with older books And
my father had books on 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 you know wanted to teach myself how to count cards 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 What's the system how do I exploit the system what are the weaknesses you would have made a good spy That's right and 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 and so I found 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 places Is this when you started to keep you used to keep a book of quotes right like
a little notebook of that did that start in your teenage years Yeah I started writing the ones I liked the best down when I was probably 15 Are there any that still stick with you today that you like use either from childhood or that you like remind yourself of Well I'm 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 and Aurelius and Seneca 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 And I remember that having a real impact on me you know whether it's the custodian you know to the grandmaster you know
interest to some professor You know I didn't fully understand the human condition when I was I mean I still don't but but when I was certainly a teenager I had a very very kind of naive myopic view of the world and I remember reading a bunch of these quotes are 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 quote book of quotations from the 80s That actually had some monger quotes it early early monger stuff you know I'd say that that some of the quotes from Sun Tzu Art of War In terms of preparation in terms of battles or one before
they begin and then and then I also was very focused on quotations from people who failed a lot Because at the time I felt like a real failure and had a really really hard time as a teenager And so I think what 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 So at the point where when you get to Wharton you're basically on this path where you don't expect much out of life I like inflection points because it seems like
whatever happened at Wharton or no sorry it was Penn and then you transferred into Wharton Whatever happened at Penn became this massive inflection point because your trajectory going into Penn and your trajectory leaving were two very different paths What happened?
You know I had the good fortune of taking this really interesting class in high school with a it was a philosophy class But a big part of the class was actually on Joseph Campbell And so I learned of the hero's journey when I was probably 15 And I kind of felt like I was on the hero's journey except that I was in the beginning of his And maybe this was my own way of rationalizing
that I could be good 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 I'll just I had a lot of 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 he's the head of applied math and science at Cornell is named 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 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 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 building up to the whole like Penn Wharton piece because I had these three teachers That helped me figure out a way to channel my ADHD and my parents were super laissez faire type
of parents Like I 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-focusser and I can work longer and absorb more than most people can 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 strikes 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 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 a pen from my high school And so I get there and I'm deeply deeply like insecure about why I'm here But my my Steven Strogatz's other brother my mother's other brother went to pen and so you know I really wanted to kind of be there And my parents were just thrilled that I was at a great school and I had a couple lucky breaks that happened to me 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 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 And I said sure like I don't really know how to play squash I've only played twice and I remember
thinking like wow this is really fun like this is something I really enjoyed and I haven't enjoyed tennis in so long like maybe I should try squash I brought it up to him he's like dude we're like we were number four in the country last year like you can't just like walk on to the squash team And I was like let me just go to the coach and and I had this attitude this was always
one of my blessings is that I always sort of thought a lot more was possible Than most people around me thought and I always had this tendency when people would say you can't do that for me to say watch me and I'm going to do it twice Like there was this chip on my shoulder of disproving people which came from probably because of my deep insecurity of feeling like an outsider
for so long I never wanted people to tell me what I couldn't 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 tenor varsity the bottom tenor JV If you can make
it through preseason I'll save a spot for you and the reason I bring up the squash part is because it forced me to take an econ class that I wasn't supposed to take When I signed up to try out for squash they basically said well 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 got to do it So I did the reason I go in this depth saying is because you
have a few moments in your life that 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 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 the textbook once I'd remember
everything I asked a lot of apparently really interesting questions it was a kid who came up to me Who I thought was like a brilliant kind of nerdy kid who deserved to be in Wharton and I didn't And he's like hey you know we have our first midterm exam coming up can we study together And nobody had ever asked to study with me and it was just this like amazing weird feeling
for me And I was like why?
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 the love story short and the teacher's explaining the curve And I look down at my test and it's a 91 and I you know I thought that's an A- and I'm like great I got an A- I'm 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 the max was a 91 and the min was a zero and the mean was like a 62 And then there was this kid behind me who was very nosy like looking around at what everyone got And he just says like kind of loudly he's like that's the kid who got the 91 And I looked over my shoulder and I was all bright red and blushing
and my heart was racing I didn't know I felt like I was poked 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 happening like I didn't know what was happening And then I remember feeling proud and then I remember feeling like I never want this feeling to end And that was the beginning
of what I call with my therapist's terminator Jason Terminator Jason was a completely different Cressola that wanted to bury everything from my youth That was so ashamed of what I was and I just wanted to be this different person who I thought would be impressive Would be respected would be rich and with all of those attributes people would like that person And people
would accept that person because I felt like I wasn't accepted And I decided that I was going to remake myself now that I was in college and become this totally different person There were certain fields and 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 did have some really good friends in college who did get me And I did it was so obvious even to them that when I would have a quote good time which most kids did in college They would say like I had a I had like an alter ego they would call
fun Jason So they would say like oh it's 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 I want to talk about that in a second There was another moment there that made a big difference though because you wanted to quit the squash team and then The coach wouldn't let you or he challenged you.
What is that backstory there?
Yeah, no, that's right.
That's right. I'm glad you brought that up So basically after like two or three tests when I was clear like I was good at business I talked with my father about it and I said 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 proud.
I'm gonna have to give up the 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 at a 20 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 guide is 90s.
He was no longer alive or 80s.
They both sat me down and they both said like you should not give up squash You know with the same speech that my three teachers in high school gave me we see greatness in you You 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 and that was You know another moment where somebody believed in me at a time when I didn't believe in myself and it really really helped me One of the glasses you took at Penn was an aesthetic approach to decision-making and you learned about decision-making through chess I want to talk about this class because it
left a huge impact on you even to this day Yeah, so it was an elective class.
It was considered a very hard and weird class That like not a lot of people chose to take but it incorporated philosophy chess games of chance And it was all about decision-making and and it was like it was a class you had to apply to get into You know, they only took I don't know 15 kids 20 kids the guy who taught it was a Russian Former I believe he was a international master
He wasn't a Grandmaster, but he was the level below that and it was a totally bespoke course which had no analog at any other school About how to make better decisions in business and life and he used a bunch of different games But chess was the primary one and 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 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 Morphe Became the world champion of chess as a 21 year old and he had a style that nobody
had seen before and they didn't have a name for it But it was later called positional chess which became the dominant form and now all of the best chess players Do positional chess instead of combinational chess you want to position your board in such a way that you can handle whatever is thrown at you So if they make a bad move which you didn't anticipate you can attack
if they make a great move which you couldn't anticipate you 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 there
Whereas in a game like poker you don't fully know and can never fully know what was kind of beneath the cards because they're hidden This metaphor for me because my father growing up in 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 The concept of the harder I work the luckier I become is a form of positional chess It's not that hard work necessarily makes you luckier it's that putting in a lot of work positions you So that you will see more opportunities and be prepared to pounce on those opportunities because you're prepared And so this spoke
to me so strongly as a metaphor for life and because I was very mathematically minded this concept of optionality really resonated about what I think is the best way to live your life And you applied that outside of that class I mean there's so much about positioning that people don't think about I've sort of studied and talked with people about decision making over
the last 20 years and the one thing that most people who have exceptional results do well and think about is how their position 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 offence Yeah no I think that's right and the way when I began my headphone career and I eventually had to start training people I was a very enthusiastic poker player during the time when poker wasn't like cool This is like pre-internet
poker this is like pre-rounders you know because I played in high school I played in college I became obsessed with that and so one of the things once they had internet poker One of the things that I would show people as a metaphor for this was the most popular game today is what's called Texas, No Limit Texas Hold'em where you're dealt two cards And then they put five
cards on the table and you have to make a combination of your two cards with the cards on the table to make the best five card hand But what was cool about internet online poker is that you could open up lots of windows at the same time and if you had the pattern recognition down for what a good starting hand was Which in No Limit is what's called pocket aces which are two
aces or what they call premium pair which is pocket kings, pocket queens, pocket jacks you could literally just open up 20 windows on your screen And just literally fold fold fold fold fold fold fold fold fold and all you had to do was wait for pocket pair or pocket premium pocket pair and those were the ones you played And each window you opened was a form of optionality
that allowed you to wait for the so called fat pitch and I view that as a metaphor for investing and I view that as a metaphor for life I like that because then you just play the hand where you're playing when you have the advantage and you're not playing when you don't have an advantage or you're minimizing your losses when you don't Were there other sort of like mental
models that you learned through that class or how to apply them to life?
Yeah there was a lot about human relationships.
If you take that class to an extreme or that view of like everything's an option You start viewing everything in life with a cost benefit analysis including people, including pleasure, including things that are less tangible but are the essence of what makes life life And it's very easy to sort of view everything with this sort of cost benefit expected value lens
and I'd say there was a period when I did not assign enough of a weight on things that were less tangible Relationships, your physical health, your sleep and so if you take that to an extreme you become an expected value optimization machine and you actually will ruin your life And that's where you started to go with this right?
And that's how I initially ruined myself Initially?
There's multiple times?
Yeah there were multiple times So talk to me about that first time that was in your sort of like early 20s right?
Yeah so what happened was 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 learned how to apply myself to such a degree that everything I did I became very good at that I put my mind to So I became a top squash player, I graduated the top student athlete of the entire university I think I was three in my Wharton class, I had 1A- in four years And all of these kind
of applications of myself I started to hone like a process of like if I do this I'll be really good at this and if I do this and I started to teach myself how to speed read I started to teach myself how to go on less sleep because I started viewing things again through this kind of lens of like it was like that movie Limitless Where I sort of thought like I was this like freak
that had these gifts and that if I didn't use these gifts it was like a waste And I just kept applying myself more and more and it kept working So I get out of Penn, I won you know all sorts of awards and like all this stuff that I thought was going to make me happy I got you know a really interesting job out of college and by the way I didn't even know what a hedge fund was I was hired
as a quant and I had not studied computer science or programming I had a lot of math and statistics and econometrics as a background But I didn't you know I was like okay I'll just take this quant job like it sounds awesome they were paying me $5,000 more than what the top banking offer was So I took that and I knew I didn't like banking anyway I had a lot of really early
success in my first year and just solved a lot of really interesting problems And you're simultaneously as you're doing this at the hedge fund though you're diving deep into your health issues I'm curious as to what you learned through the health stuff because you basically were going to die So what happened was which is again like an important lesson for everyone
listening I took everything I had learned to an extreme and it wasn't about money for me which is really interesting It was about just self-improvement and I know many of your listeners are so focused on that Because I was speed reading and because I was remembering most of what I was doing I just sort of thought like literally I thought like I was a god And I could just
start like staying up till four in the morning reading countless and countless books absorbing all of it And just becoming like superhuman I was also doing really well at work But to do that I started to give up exercise I gave up friends and people I gave up connection And I gave up sleep and I was even reading all these like obscure military things about how to power
nap and micro nap And like how to basically go on three hours of sleep Which I would not recommend for anybody and I started to get really really sick And it took a while actually you know and I went a good six months doing this And then I just started noticing like some things started happening to me I started developing all these skin rashes My hair was falling out in clumps
I had all these weird things popping up like prostatitis where your prostate becomes really big which isn't supposed to happen to a 23 year old And then my vision started to go And when your vision starts to go that's that was terrified I was already had bad vision you know in neat glasses But I was seeing double and it started with my left eye and then went to my right
eye Where I would literally see like a second version of something out of my left eye And at night I had a really hard time seeing anything at night because all the lights had all these halos and rings around them And I couldn't process and so That's so freaky Yeah and it 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 great performer And now two years later I'm like literally falling apart and every doctor I went and saw was like you have this disease you have this disease you have this disease and this disease you know and they're all like supposedly separate diseases And the eye disease I was told was incurable and then I had to put my name on a cordial
transplant list which had a huge waiting list And they said I would probably be blind by the age of 30 fully blind This was obviously very traumatic for me and I don't think I processed how traumatic it was for me until literally like two months ago It's obviously traumatic but 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 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 That's not weird anymore but back then was weird in this area that they now call functional medicine Which are addressing the root causes of disease instead of the symptoms And there were some kind of like OG doctors a guy named
Dr. Andrew Weil who's now 80 and quite famous There was a doctor named Dr.
Mark Hyman who was just getting started at this time who wrote a book on inflammation and autoimmunity And I would find these things and I was just trying to make patterns and long story short there was one time where I had my skin issue with the psoriasis happened in college And it happened during my pledging for my fraternity when we were forced to not sleep for three
days and drink only beer and have no food And I sort of thought like okay the only time I had this skin issue was when I literally couldn't sleep and I could only drink beer And so I just developed this hypothesis that was totally naive and no one thought was plausible that if I taught myself how to start sleeping again And dramatically cleaned up my diet and started exercising
again Maybe my skin disease would go away and maybe my eye disease would go away and the reason I had that hypothesis is there was one journal I found that connected my eye disease to my skin disease Not fully connecting it but say you know showing a correlation and so anyway I did that and I decided like okay I'm going to 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 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 nutrition and all this stuff I just cured myself through literally food and lifestyle
when everyone told me it was impossible I'm going to spend all my time on that So let's have a photo of 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 held for what was going in your body and then creating a company around those
standards And I also want to explore a little bit about how do you eat today like how does the food system poison us what is your lifestyle like in terms of caffeine, alcohol, sleep, what goes into your body What I have learned which I didn't know at the time because now we have modern testing in simplest terms I don't detoxify like a regular person So things build up
in me faster than regular people I'm kind of like a canary in a coal mine It turns out that everything that affects me affects everyone else except I just respond 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 And the reason that in 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 that are still indigenous people and they
live the way that we lived 10,000 years ago or even a thousand years ago And they have none and by the way many of these indigenous peoples are in every continent They're in Alaska, they're in South America, they're in Africa, they're in all different climates, they have none of our modern lifestyle diseases They have no autism, they have no allergies, they have no autoimmune
disease, they have no obesity, they have no diabetes, they have no heart disease They get you know what I'll call third world diseases still like tuberculosis and you know food board illnesses etc But all the things that are literally killing off more people than anything we know of is related to lifestyle and diet And so I was studying all these and I was like 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 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 harder, it's inconvenient, it costs more, nobody knows how to do it, you know life is too, it's just too difficult And he said we should create a restaurant that's the manifestation of these principles And I'm like dude, I'm a professional investor for a living, restaurants are not good businesses most of the time, like no chance After
enough back and forth I sort of decided like okay, I was fortunate enough in my career that I could afford it I never thought it was going to be a big business, I just wanted it to make a little bit or break even And basically have a place where A I could eat every day and B we could prove to New York that you could have the combination of tastes great and healthy Which prior to
this really didn't exist, you only had places that were super healthy That most people who are used to the standard American diet would basically say like this is disgusting And then you had places that were like farm to table, really unapproachable, super expensive That like nobody unless they had a lot of money would ever do And that was a genesis of Hugh Kitchen
and we were very humble about what we didn't know We hired a bunch of people to help us because I didn't know anything about running a restaurant Neither did my brother-in-law, neither did my wife, this was a family business We had no outside investors for the first many, many years And the idea was to basically make like a paleo haven Before paleo was really a term,
it was basically like you know some people call it ancestral But it's basically ingredients that your grandmother or your great grandmother would have been cooked with Like that's the litmus test, like if your great grandmother used it, it's probably okay Except that true paleo doesn't really incorporate dairy and doesn't incorporate legumes We were more
of a modified paleo 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 the chocolate was an accident, kind of an accident because we were baking grain free, gluten free, muffins, scones, cookies Right before we
opened and we needed chocolate chips And we couldn't find chocolate chips that met our specs And we hired a guy to help us make a Hugh version of our own chocolate that didn't have All the chocolate we could find had refined white cane sugar, had soy lecithin, had preservatives, had dairy And so we had to make our own chocolate and we liked it so much My brother-in-law
had this idea of turning them into chocolate bars And that was how Hugh chocolate got started I love how the standards were so fanatical that something as simple as the chocolate chips You know we couldn't find a good supplier so we're going to make our own What do you eat today?
Do you consume dairy? I do, so I generally only consume grass fed organic dairy Dairy is pretty controversial, I don't think it should be Because I've been able to get a lot of my other aspects of life kind of in check I live what I would call sort of a 85-15 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 need anything that's kind of laboratory produced or made Fake colors and chemicals and chemical preservatives But I'm not vegan 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 So for example cows have evolved to be on grass and be pastured Meaning they're supposed to roam around and eat grass Cows are not supposed to eat corn Which is kind of an American innovation because it fattens them up Same thing
goes with fish, same thing goes with chicken I try to eat wild animals when I can And then with vegetables and fruits, I'm pretty strict on organic Most of the modern food supply is literally poisoned I'm more susceptible to it than most But what affects me affects everybody And it's just time And this is not something that's controversial, Shane You just have to
look at current status of any developed country This is the first generation in human history that is predicted to live shorter than the previous We are the sickest we've ever been on any objective measure We exercise the most we ever have 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese Over 90% are metabolically unhealthy It's all staring us in the face but it's
so inconvenient It's like an inconvenient truth, it's much worse than global warming Let's go back a sec, what's the issue you have with the U.S.
wheat industry? Is it just U.S.
or is it the wheat in general?
No, it's predominantly U.S.
So you will notice if you ask a lot of people who don't eat gluten You will notice that many, many thousands Like this is not just like five random people Many people can tolerate gluten in France and Italy And cannot tolerate it here in the U.S.
And there's two hypotheses on that It hasn't been proven but these are my hypotheses, I've heard them from others too The first and most important one is that I don't remember the exact number but it's in the high 90s percent Might be 99% might be 97% Of the U.S.
wheat crop that's not organic Has traces of glyphosate Which is Monsanto's herbicide Also called Roundup They find this on children's cereal Traces but it's still there They find it on everything that has wheat in this country That's not organic Glyphosate has banned many countless countries It was a gigantic class action lawsuit That they lost in the many,
many, many billions of dollars The German company Bayer now owns Monsanto Where it was deemed carcinogenic officially They've also found that when you feed glyphosate to rats It destroys their microbiome And the rats start to develop all these weird autoimmune diseases Including autism It's so obvious, like this doesn'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 developing their own seeds That can tolerate glyphosate Regular plants die from glyphosate They develop their own plants that can tolerate glyphosate Everything around it dies But their plants
survive And then we think that if we eat it That our microorganisms and our body are not going to respond to it is insane So if you buy organic wheat are you still exposed to that?
No you're not So if you're a consumer in North America One way to sort of like opt out of this is to buy organic flour So that's part of it, it's not all of it Glyphosate's also on beet sugar There's a bunch of crops including soy Basically any of the big crops Just as like a lesson for your listeners Any big crop where there's a lot of money Is filthy And it's logical, right?
Because there's so much money in big crops To make the crops be weather resistant To be cycle resistant To be pest resistant There's just way too much money in those crops For you not to go organic That's number one So any kind of big popular crop Soy, wheat, corn, cocoa, coffee Anything like that You always want organic The second rule Is anything you concentrate
Juice Chocolate Coffee Coffee's a concentrate They grind up all the beans They make a concentrated version And then water goes through the concentrate 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 So there's
a lot of hypotheses today On why we're also sick I do think it's a function Of not just the food I think there's some environmental stuff too Particularly plastics That permeate everything that we do Microplastics are in all the water That we drink Unless they're like reverse osmosis filtered It's in everything So we have literally poisoned ourselves And again,
this sounds like Sensationalist, it sounds conspiracy theory It's not You just have to look at the human population right now You just have to look at the stats On how sick everyone is And how overweight they are And they've proven it's not just calories They have proven That it's not just that people are eating more It's not just that people are sitting down more
I mean, when you look at the incidence You don't have to be a scientist to see this When you look at the incidence of food allergies You look at the incidence of autism You look at the incidence of autoimmune diseases This is not like Ooh, now we're able to diagnose it So now we're seeing it's there Like when I grew up, I don't know about you Shane When I grew up there was one kid
In my entire school who had a peanut allergy One Now like a quarter of my kids' class Are allergic to something A quarter I want to go back to this You said there's two differences Between US wheat and sort of European Or you specified French and Italian One was the glycosine What was the other big difference?
Is it the type of wheat that they're growing?
Yeah It's a much more kind of agent form So there's 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 And are kind
of ancient versions Of what we have today And so basically over time As we got more and more And this is by the way This is without what I'll call Like genetic modification This is through regular crossbreeding Which we've been able to do For hundreds of years And how all modern dogs Exist is through crossbreeding You know, without actually going Into the DNA and manipulating
Gluten is a protein That gives wheat part of its robustness And you can actually crossbreed wheat To increase its gluten levels Which makes it more robust And it's a very important part Of the gluten level And it's a very important part Which makes it more robust And I have heard And I haven't seen any actual proof on this But they have found Fossilized versions of wheat From
biblical days When literally bread was like The staple for everybody Because like one of the push backs On gluten intolerance is like Haven't we literally been eating bread Every day for like human civilization And the gluten level In fossilized wheat And the gluten level In some of these ancient grains Versions of wheat Is magnitudes less Than the amount of gluten
That we're consuming today Same thing by the way With the cannabis plant Which I'm sure you've heard The amount of like THC And the cannabis plant today Is very different from what We've done this And gluten is an inflammatory protein But we can take a certain amount of it Just like we can take a certain amount Of dairy for most people But once you take it to the extreme
then If you drink a gallon of milk Shane Like I'm not lactose intolerant If I drink a gallon of milk I'll show you I'm lactose intolerant But gluten disrupts the microbiome Because it inflames your gut And then a lot of weird things start to happen to you When your gut is inflamed So in Europe The glyphosate band And the gluten levels are much lower And the strains of wheat that they
typically use Are typically a lot less inflammatory Than the ones that they use over here That's the answer And so now Like you sold this company to Mondolas Now 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 healthy
And with healthy ingredients 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 Well what's happened Shane Is again I stayed in the hedge fund career For 21 years I officially retired from that In the beginning of 2019 Hugh Kitchen the restaurant Was my first 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 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 amazing 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 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 And it taught me how desperate everyone is To try to live healthier And how hard it is right now What was clear to me In my studies and eventually I joined the board of the Tufts Nutrition School Which I'm still on The Tufts Nutrition School is a top nutrition school In the country And what's clear to me is that For at least 60 years We have known that fruits
and vegetables Are far healthier for people Than like Twinkies and Cakes But that hasn't really changed behavior You don't need to even educate Like middle school level education people That's true And yet we're not really changing And so what was clear to me Also as someone who was sick And had to eat a lot of weird things over time Was that food is a part of human civilization It's
a part of culture It's a part of family It's a part of I think what makes The human condition what it is And there's a lot of pleasure And ritualism And there's a lot of pleasure and ritual And good things that come with food And what was so hard for me Was that a lot of the foods that I had to eat When I was sick were gross They weren't delicious They didn't bring happiness
They didn't bring joy And it makes you even more anxious If you're sick That you have to eat stuff That you objectively find gross or not good And so my belief Which is 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 quote dirtiest Are the least healthy Right And I want to take those And
clean those up Because if I can change people's behavior With the foods that they love And provide a better option for them Then I can provide kind of a gateway For them to start experimenting With other healthy things You're not getting people who eat McDonald's Three times a day And you're not moving them to salads Like that's never happening Overnight No, but you
can take something like pizza Correct Correct And so a lot of what I've done And a lot of what we're doing at HumanCo Is literally based on personal desire And need And we're taking the same guardrails And the same level of strictness That we did with Hugh And we decided that we want to apply it To other categories that aren't chocolate Right, Hugh was primarily a snacking
company Hugh was 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 And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go But there's all these other categories That are disgusting In terms of how gross the ingredient labels are And so for example The brand that we
created from scratch At HumanCo Which was the second company I've done From scratch, it's called SnowDays And SnowDays is a pizza bite But it's grain free It's gluten free And it has no chemicals, no preservatives The dairy in it is from grass fed cows And it has seven vegetables Infused into the sauce The prevailing winner in pizza bites So pizza bites are a surprisingly
big category What I'll call frozen appetizers But pizza bites are enormous And the market leader is a company called Totino's Totino's is owned by General Mills I used to eat them as a kid They're called pizza rolls Totino's has an ingredient label that's over 70, 70 Ingredients long It doesn't even use real cheese It actually says on the label Imitation cheese
It has at least a dozen chemicals That are banned in other countries That are in the ingredient label I mean, it is literally like a pizza But it's not like a pizza It's like a pizza I mean, it is literally like nuclear waste And this business from our last check Does close to $800 million a year In revenue It's an enormous business And you look across other categories
And there's categories like pizza Bread Ice cream Cakes Anything that people like love And they feel great about If you go to fast food places You can't believe what's in most of the fast food That they serve you In terms of chemicals, additives Things made in laboratories And so for me, a lot of it was like Was just thinking You know what?
Most people don't read ingredient labels I think you should But 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 But because our food system here In this country Has massive amounts Of other interests Particularly
from lobbyists We are corrupt And I don't think there's enough accountability Around the corruption That has happened in our food industry In the last 30 years And I don't think most of these food companies By the way, are malicious I think they are Public companies Who have public shareholders Who care about profits first And corporate quarterly earnings And
they have to prioritize Earnings and cash flows Over the sake of humanity Which is hard to measure And I wanted to change that And that was why we created HumanCo Is that we think this paradigm needs to change We are already at like You know, code red For humanity And not many people are doing anything about it And we wanted to change it I love that One of the things that you
guys have done That I've been doing One of the things that you guys have done I can't even recall an example Where I've seen this You bought against the grain And you changed the ingredients But you changed them for the better More expensive ingredients You made the product better You made the product healthier After you bought it Talk to me about that thinking I'm
glad you picked up on that chain Because like when it happened We were meeting actually with a large grocery 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 And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want
to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy
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company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company
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you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you
want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company And you want to buy a food company 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 the mission we have to keep pushing is convincing people that this is a long-term investment and that the reason people don't do it is because by the time you realize how sick you are it's A, too late and B, someone else bears the cost It's usually the insurance companies Talk to me about True Food Kitchen
and like what you're trying to do there 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, 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 them and 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 Hue It was started actually a few years earlier than Hue It was started in 2008 It was started in Scottsdale, Arizona and True Food is very much a restaurant that prioritizes
taste first but has very uncompromising guardrails around health They're less restrictive than Hue 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 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, Buji, wealthy people They're targeting everyone who wants to eat healthier and they have things for everybody So they have pizzas
They have cheeseburgers They have Yeah, you can take the kids there You can take the kids They 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 cohort of health and wellness people that are trying to be very exclusionary like for example not all but some of the vegan community can be very intolerant of people who aren't vegan and basically subject their personal views on people who might eat meat and say how dare you
you should need animals that's like an ethical violation What I love about true food and this is what we're doing at HumanCo is that we're trying to be healthier living for all diets for all belief systems and true food is the same and so if you happen to be vegan they have options if you happen to be a carnivore they have options and the food is unbelievably delicious
and my belief in how we did you and how we've done HumanCo is that if it isn't delicious people aren't going to change their habits that's number one it has to be delicious or else people are going to feel like they're compromising and they're not going to do it and so we injected a bunch of growth capital from HumanCo and a bunch of our investors and some new investors
true food had never taken outside money actually prior to us and we think that there should be a lot more true foods across the country for people who want to eat healthier and do better for the planet in terms of sustainability in terms of their practices you know the other thing Shane that we didn't talk about but when you treat the earth better and you treat the animals
better than the way a lot of modern factory farms have 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 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're super involved in the coconut bliss rebrand cosmic bliss now yeah it's now cosmic bliss I'm a brand guy personally like you know different people have different tendencies 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 for the mountaintops I want to help them because there needs to be more companies
that lead with trust and mission and values and fewer companies that just lead with like let's make some money because you can do both like you know what's interesting is a lot of people know me from my hedge fund days and what I currently do is way less profitable than if I was selling shit food you could actually make good money selling shit food well 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 it is in the short term when you can sort of like get these profits but if you're looking to compound a relationship with any of your customers if you're looking to have a customer for the rest of their life if you're looking to sort
of like pass things down from one generation to the next if you're looking to be a good global sort of ecosystem component then you have to be win-win-win right it has to be a win for the business they got to make money 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 shame it's that it's too it takes too long
you know so obviously if you are if you are currently you're not poisoning customers which is what happened with daily harvest by the way if you heard of that situation daily harvest out of foodborne illness issue where a bunch of people had to have their organs removed that's usually the end of your business when that happens but when you are eating something that's
inflammatory that's not acute poison but it's a slow poison where over 20 years you will develop metabolic disease it's too long it's just like the people that produce too much carbon emissions or use coal or pollute too much or use too much plastic the problem is that the feedback loop is too long so by the time you reach that point where you're metabolically sick
you don't realize that there was a connection with everything you were eating yeah totally I understand that I want to come to one final question about the success nutrition facts behind you before we wrap up this episode I just want to say for anybody listening you can look for Snow days Cosmic Bliss against the grain in your grocery store and look for a true food
kitchen near you and you can try any of the human cove sort of brands and products and follow Jason as he builds this out in real time the sign behind you has caught my attention because it says success nutrition facts nutrition facts do you want to tell us the backstory here and it says hustle, focus, persistence, discipline failure, risks and patience all at 100%
per day so I just thought this was really funny a friend of mine had sent me this picture because this actually means a lot in a lot of different ways to me especially because I told you what happened to me in the beginning so this is called the nutrition facts panel or in my business they called the NFP which in this country is a legal requirement on all packaged food products
except it usually has not these elements it has things like fat protein, carbohydrates and then it has what are called the micronutrients like how much vitamin C and vitamin A are in it and sometimes it shows fiber so you'll see this on every food product here in the US as a style so I'm in the food business someone sent me a picture of this because this is kind of how I
thought of myself over since college of all the things that I would prioritize you can also see it says serving size 24 hours a day servings per container 365 days a year and then the bottom says percent daily values are based on high levels of ambition so I just thought that the fact that this thing existed and it's a combination of kind of how I've lived my life plus
it's a food business centered 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 on 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 too extreme will destroy
you in terms of your physical health and your mental health which is what happened to me and sometimes I look at this and it reminds me of what not to do because sometimes if you go too far and by the way this happens with healthy eating too and I'll just say this is an anecdote for some of your listeners mental health is a critical component to your physical health and they're
obviously both inextricably late but I have met people through my own journey who are I mentioned I live 85-15 I've met people who live 100-0 they will never go out to dinner they will and they don't need to live 100-0 some people do but these are people who live 100-0 and they don't need to live 100-0 some people do but these are people that choose they have to make their
own food they have to know exactly where it comes from it won't go out to dinner with people it 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 this is a great place to leave this conversation there's so much to pick up on next
time I'm not going to spell it out for everybody but we can get into this a lot more I really appreciate you taking the time Jason yeah thanks for having me Shane I appreciate it I appreciate it I appreciate it
