Jason Karp: Why You Shouldn't Eat Seed Oils, Lab Grown Meat, & Reimagining the Future of Food | MMP #234

Join us this week as we chat with Jason Karp, founder of two mission-driven companies - Hu Chocolate and HumanCo. Jason has dedicated his career to creating food and beverage brands that are better for both people and the planet.

In 2011, Jason co-founded Hu Chocolate with his family and no outside investors, a line of paleo, vegan, and gluten-free chocolate made with simple, ethically-sourced ingredients. Hu grew into a beloved brand, the #1 premium chocolate and one of the fastest growing snacking companies in America.

In 2018, Jason followed up this sweet success by launching HumanCo, a holding company focused on building and acquiring mission-driven brands in the natural CPG space. Through HumanCo, Jason is scaling companies like Snow Days Organic Pizza Bites, Against the Grain gluten and grain-free pizza and breads, and Cosmic Bliss Organic ice cream. All of his products have ingredients sourced from farms and avoid all seed-oils.

On today's show, Jason shares his entrepreneurial journey, from starting Hu as a scrappy family business to leading HumanCo's growing family of purpose-led brands. Jason explains his vision for the future of the food industry and how he plans to reshape it for the better. Jason provides insight into problems with our current food system and the need to transition to more regenerative models of agriculture. 

He shares his vision for creating a healthier, more sustainable food future, and left us feeling inspired for the change we can make in the food system.

Whether you're an aspiring food entrepreneur, a conscious consumer, or just love hearing startup success stories, you won't want to miss our inspiring conversation with Jason Karp, founder of Hu Chocolate and HumanCo.

TIME STAMPS

(18:49 - 20:04) The Dark Side of Ambition
(26:45 - 28:49) Researching a Cure for Disease
(32:05 - 33:10) Job Switching and Investment Love Thoughts
(01:04:26 - 01:05:17) Rise of Obesity and Food Engineering' or 'The Rise of Food Engineering
(01:15:01 - 01:16:09) Monsanto's Impact on Agriculture and Health
(01:25:25 - 01:26:16) Consumer Preferences for Techno Foods
(01:38:39 - 01:40:09) The Challenge of Resisting Junk Food
(01:44:40 - 01:45:49) The Impact of Diet on Wellbeing
(01:52:39 - 01:53:44) Youthful Optimism and Food Transparency

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SPONSORS

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AFFILIATES

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Creators & Guests

Host

Brett Ender 🥩⚡️

The food system is corrupt and trying to poison us... I will teach you how to fight back. Co-Host of @themeatmafiapod 🥩

Host

Harry Gray 🥩⚡️

Leading the Red Meat Renaissance 🥩 ⚡️| Co-Host of @themeatmafiapod

What is The Meat Mafia Podcast?

The Meat Mafia Podcast is hosted by @MeatMafiaBrett and @MeatMafiaHarry.

We're two guys who walked away from the typical path to carve out something different. Based in Austin, we’re on a mission to figure out what it takes to live a fulfilled life in a world that often pushes us away from meaning.

We have conversations with people we believe can help us, diving deep into the pillars of health, wealth, and faith, as the cornerstones of our mission.

Whether it's challenging the modern food system, questioning conventional health advice, or building something from the ground up, we're here to explore the tough questions and share the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

If you're tired of the noise and ready to find meaning, tune in and join us!

themeatmafiapodcast.substack.com

00:00 - Speaker 1
On today's episode of the podcast we have on one of the most remarkable thinkers and visionaries in the food industry, the founder of Human Co, jason Karp. Jason Karp, along with his wife and brother-in-law, founded Hue Kitchen in New York City in 2011, which reimagined how people were thinking about food at the time. Hue Kitchen really brought farm to table food to New York City in a way that people doubted. Jason and his wife were questioned for their vision, but ultimately held strong and created what is now remembered as one of the most revered brands and restaurants in New York City. It had a cult-like following and, on the back of Hue Kitchen, he and his wife founded Hue Chocolate, which is again another brand that has so much reverence for it. People loved it. It was just clean chocolate that, from 2012 to 2021, grew into a massive success.

01:04
Before all this, jason was working in the hedge fund world and ultimately found that his real interests were in the food industry, and a lot of this was coming from his own trials and tribulations With his own health. He was told early in his career, after working himself nearly to death, that he was potentially going to go blind by 30 and maybe not even make it to 40 years old. So this realization made Jason truly start to appreciate food, try to identify changes that he needed to make in his life around food and health really to live the most bad ass and successful life he possibly could, and he started incorporating these changes early in his career to his health. That led him to this revolution of starting Hue Kitchen, hue Chocolate and now Human Co, which is focused on launching brands that are revolutionizing the food industry. They have brands like Snow Days Against the Grain, cosmic Bliss and, of course, true Food Kitchens, which is rethinking how we are approaching the restaurant industry, and all these other brands are focused on bringing healthy snacks to your pantry. So go check them out in the link below.

02:18
I think he has going to love this conversation. Jason brings a ton of high level value and a ton of detail to the conversation of the food industry. We talked about seed oils, what is going wrong and how we can fix it. So, without further ado, jason Karp, before we get going with the show, I want to give a quick shout out to our sponsors over at the Fold app. The Fold app is a Bitcoin debit card that allows you to spend in dollars and earn in Bitcoin. So, if you're a Bitcoin or, this is a great way to earn a little bit of extra Bitcoin for every purchase that you make. If you're not a Bitcoin, or go check out the Fold app. It's a great resource and also a great introduction into the world of Bitcoin, which is sound money that cannot be messed with. So go learn more about Bitcoin. Go learn more about the Fold app. Use code Meet Mafia in the link below.

03:09
Also, before we get going, go check out Noble Origins. This is Bretman's first product. It's an all in one beef protein powder that has four different parts of the cow. In there we have beef protein, isolate, collagen, colostrum and, of course, an organ complex. It's loaded with all the nutrients that you need, plus 21 grams of protein. So go check that out, nobleoriginscom. Use code Mafia. Also, before we get going, we have a new sponsor here. It is Sacred Hunting. We had Monsel Denton on the podcast most recently and he shared with us the rituals that go into hunting and the benefits of going out in a group and learning how to hunt together and sharing that experience and the community that is built around that and the spiritual awakening that comes with it. So go check out Sacred Hunting. Let them know that the Meet Mafia sent you and you will get $250 off your first hunt. And now, without further ado, our episode.

04:28
We're rolling. We got so much of the conversation out of the way. What are we doing? We had so many golden nuggets right there.

04:35 - Speaker 3
Yeah, I know we could try to bring them back if you want.

04:40 - Speaker 4
That's what some people say is like to try and save the bullets for when you sit down or record. But it's hard when you have so many common interests in the health and wellness space. It just kind of flows out of you too. Yeah, yeah. But, dude, it's so cool to have you in studio. We appreciate you doing this. I was telling you, we were both telling you, when we met you at Sun Life a few weeks ago. We've been on our list of like dream podcast guests for a long time. We're huge admirers of what you've built at Human Co. Harry and I have had huge dark chocolate for since 2018, 2019. When I was living in New York City Never got to go to Hugh Kitchen, unfortunately, I missed out big time, but it's just amazing to get connected to you and just learn more about your story. Where we kind of wanted to kick things off, jason, is we were interested in the economics class that you took as a freshman at Wharton. Yeah.

05:26
And I've heard you say before that that first test that you took was a big transformation point in terms of like your work ethic and achieving potential. So if you could give some listeners to that story, I think that'd be a cool place to kick things off.

05:37 - Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, you went deep, right. So the background for that was I grew up kind of middle class in a very regular kind of neighborhood and I grew up in an area and also at a time which was in the early 80s, when they never diagnosed pretty much anything, especially things like ADHD, and I learned later in my life that I had undiagnosed severe ADHD until I was probably 18 or 19. And I had a really difficult time in middle school and high school. My teachers saw that I was prodigious in certain areas, particularly in areas where I really liked it. But I didn't like school. So I was obsessed with things like video games. I was obsessed with games of chance. I loved counting cards and gambling. I love weapons and explosives. I was not a model kid and maybe for another story I miraculously got into the University of Pennsylvania, probably as a function of I had a lot of interesting extracurriculars.

06:55
I was a competitive tennis player so I was semi-recruited to play at college. But because of my when I got to college I was burnt out and I dislocated my shoulder in high school so I really couldn't play the kind of level of tennis that I was expected to and a whole nother tangent, which we won't get into. But I decided I wanted to play squash college squash, which was also kind of a crazy thing to do because Penn was a top five squash program in the country and the coach generously allowed me to try out. But because of my athletic schedule I was actually pre-med at Penn. I did not know that I wanted to go into business but because of my athletic schedule I could not take the College of Arts and Sciences econ class. I had to take the Wharton econ class and for those of you that don't know at the time I think it's still the case, but at the time Wharton was the top school in the United States in terms of requirements to get into higher than Harvard, higher than Stanford, mit, you name it and I was deeply insecure about the fact that I was even at Penn and the fact that I now had to take the Wharton version of econ.

08:11
Having been insecure from my sort of childhood learning disabilities or challenges, I went into econ. It was the only one that fit into my athletic schedule because I was doing squash and I noticed that econ came to me like a second language and this was still at a time when I was kind of a reckless underachiever. I didn't really study. I was very still into the stuff of my youth and, long story short, the Wharton version of econ had a curve and I didn't even know what a curve was as a 17-year-old. I was also a year young for my class and basically only 10% of the kids in the class could get an A, no matter what you got. So if everyone got 95s, the ones who got 99s were the only ones who got an A Got it. So that just added to my level of stress and insecurity and I don't know what happened and I have a bunch of hypotheses about how I actually started to really figure out how to work with my brain.

09:22
But I took the test. I didn't really study the night before. I actually went on a date Priorities. Yeah, it was my first college exam. And I get it back and I look down and I see that it's a 91. And growing up in a regular school, that's an A so I'm like, all right, I got an A so my first college exam. This is like a big deal. My parents are going to be so proud of me.

09:48
They can't even believe I'm a pen in the first place.

09:52
And the teacher on the board starts explaining what a curve is to all of us and this is a big class, probably 200 kids in the class and he puts on the max, the min, the median, the mean, and he explains. He's like before you, all of you freak out because Wharton was filled with basically the valedictorian of every school that they went to and then there were like a handful of recruited athletes who were just there because they were athletes, and there was me, yeah, who thought I had no business being there and the mean on the test was like a 64. And which meant that if you got a 64, you got a B and an A was like a 75. And a C was like a 55. And the mean was a zero and the max was a 91. And I didn't process that. I got the max. And there was a kid behind me who pointed at me and said really loud a really competitive kid, kind of kid who wore like a suit to class, like would read the Wall Street.

10:52 - Speaker 1
Journal. We saw a few of those in our days, yeah.

10:56 - Speaker 3
And I was just like I had such disdain for these people, oh yeah, and like you're not really reading the Wall Street Journal as an 18 year old. Come on, and he's like that's the kid who got the 91. And I turned bright red. Everyone looked at me and for five or 10 seconds I was really embarrassed, I didn't know what to do. I still couldn't believe that I was the kid who got the 91, because it didn't feel like I got the highest score in the class and anyway, at first it was kind of shame and embarrassment.

11:25
And then there was this sense of pride because for my entire youth I had been labeled a like massive underachiever. And every teacher told my parents like if he would only sit still, if he would only pay attention, if he would only like try, he could be good or whatever. And at that moment I decided like I love this feeling and I'm at a new place and I can remake myself and I'm actually going to try and I'm actually going to see, like, do I actually have these capabilities of being, you know, great at something? And that was the most pivotal moment of my entire life because from that moment on I flipped from massive underachiever to massive overachiever and decided that there were things in college that came to me very easily things generally around mathematics and things that were more engineering and there were things where, you know, I had to study like everybody else and it was hard and I had to figure out like a work ethic and my drive to overcome my childhood adversity was so strong that it just completely changed who I would become.

12:38 - Speaker 1
So would you say that the modern school system up until that point just didn't steer you in the right direction? Because in doing some research I heard that you had like three teachers who had helped you in high school really illuminate some of the gifts that you had. But you were still kind of even in your thirties. It sounded like still trying to figure out like what the not issue but like where you were struggling to fit in in the school system. But clearly you have this gift, you know, for learning or for applying yourself.

13:10 - Speaker 3
Yeah, it definitely was difficult. You know, I think both of my children have ADHD, which is how I ultimately figured out like how severe mine was. When you see it in your kids, you sort of realize like, oh wow, I was pretty fucked up. Yeah, and I didn't. You know, I think it was a combination of nobody talked about that stuff 30 years ago and I think I was in denial and I just thought like maybe I was just like not smart in certain areas, whereas it was clear to me now that it's clear with my children and it's clear with a lot of people that people's brains work differently, and I think typical school systems have a very cookie cutter approach to how you teach kids, and many of the most famous, accomplished people in the world had dyslexia, had ADHD, had aspir, have Asperger's, and I prefer using the term learning differences instead of disabilities, because in certain ways my brain works much better than the average person in that I can hyper-focus and I have a photographic memory.

14:20
But what was the problem when I was a kid was, if I wasn't interested in it, I couldn't focus at all and so I had to hack my brain and those teachers who were so gracious and generous to take me under their wing. They saw something in me that I didn't see in myself at the time, and I was just so insecure and so ashamed of who I was. They could see that I had potential, and I think what is really important in school systems today is that teachers come equipped with a framework of how to identify kids' learning differences so that they can show them their strengths early. Because what's so clear, now that I'm a parent and looking back on my own history, is having confidence and having those reinforcing episodes that you're winning and that things you're doing or working are so critical to teaching children to have a love of learning or getting better at things. If they don't have that self-confidence, they'll constantly be shooting themselves down, and I had a lot of teachers three but I had many people over my life give me nuggets of encouragement, but I never believed it, and I think that episode at Wharton was so black and white, objective that it made me think, oh, wow, maybe these people who told me this were right, and it didn't fully squash my insecurity, but it gave me enough of reinforcement to say I can go now.

15:55
And I think that's what schools need to do is they need to figure out if they see a kid who's bad in a traditional learning way, but they show signs of excitement. For me, it's really about looking at where people's energies and you all know it. You'll be doing something and you just like, and then something happens and you're like, wow, I have energy for this. Yes, and it may have nothing to do with business or money. It might be art, it might be music, it might be reading, it might be philosophy, whatever. And I think figuring out ways to find where people's energies naturally turn on because that energy, when you really like something, is limitless and figuring out ways to explore that energy to me is the most important thing you can do to teach somebody.

16:41 - Speaker 4
Yeah, your story reminds me so much of Ari Emanuel that founded William Morris Endeavor and then he's the real life inspiration for Ari Gold from Entourage. He was like severe, severe ADHD and dyslexic and a lot of his inspiration came from the fact that a lot of people thought he was stupid compared to his brothers, because his brother was a Zeke, emanuel, who I think ran like Johns Hopkins Medical System, and then Rom, who's the mayor of Chicago, so Ari was a squash player too. So another strange coincidence he went to McAllister College and all these weaknesses that he thought he had the ADHD actually became his strength and business of like tenacity, being able to build relationships, get deals done, be comfortable in very uncomfortable situations. He realized that it was a massive blessing in disguise. So I'm just curious for you like, in the beginning maybe you thought you weren't the best traditional student. You disproved that at Wharton. But, like, does the ADHD materialize in other positive ways, in terms of like how you work or how you approach lives or your life or anything like that?

17:38 - Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, I think the general theme with a lot of these stories, and certainly the theme with me, is the level of adversity that people have to go through. And I think all of the you know cliches about you know creating a diamond comes from pressure and all the there's many cliches that sound like that. I think it's true and I always look when I've hired hundreds and hundreds of people over 25 years and I always look for adversity in people and I always look for what was their adversity? How did they get through it? How hard did they fall? What did they do to get to recover and get back up? And the more adversity someone's had and gotten back up over and over again, I think the better it is for that person in every aspect of life. And so I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of some of the greatest successories in all endeavors are people that had real adversity, because it also gives you a chip on your shoulder and that chip on your shoulder is positive from a work ethic and sort of proving everybody wrong perspective of like, screw you, like. Let me show you what I could do, which was like such a powerful fuel for me, but it's also a corrosive and toxic fuel. And you know, the other kind of correlated attribute with a lot of people who have my kind of arc is they have typically a lot of mental health problems, which I've also had, because going through those ups and downs over and over and over again and having that kind of fuel of like I'm going to show everybody, screw you, like that comes from a dark place and it rarely comes from a good place.

19:30
And most multi-billionaires who accumulate the billions over time, they all have the same kind of psychodynamics because most people, when they reach a certain level of accomplishment or money or achievement, they stop. Most people like, have a number with money and they stop. And they're like, oh, if I make 10 million, I'll stop, if I make 30, I'll stop, if I make 100, I'll stop. And then you wonder like how did that guy get to 10 billion? And it's because it was never about the money, it was about quieting a demon. In psychology or psychiatry they call it the imposter complex, where you literally don't believe you're the person that people believe you are. You believe you're an imposter and you're constantly trying to tell the world like I'm not an imposter, I'm real. But inside that little voice inside your head is telling you you're a fraud, you're fake, all these people hate you, and it's the most powerful fuel for success and for achievement, but it's also the most powerful fuel for mental health problems.

20:38 - Speaker 4
Yeah, it's like those demons work, but they only work to a point, and you're the perfect example of that, because the way that I understand it. So you graduate, you crush it in college, summa cum laude, academic, all American, you get your dream job in the hedge fund space and at a young age, you're crushing it Like you're optimizing, you're hacking your sleep, like didn't you calculate, like, the minimum amount of sleep that you needed, and started speed reading. But then by the time you're 23, like you're all fucked up with gender divide, diseases and things like that. So maybe you could tell that story too.

21:06 - Speaker 3
Yeah. So what happened to me that moment in the econ class, which was, you know, 17. And you fast forward to when I was 23. So those six years for me were just this like massive ascent, almost like in a fable, and where I went from this like no name underachiever I was the top student athlete in the entire university, graduated three of my number three in my class for Wharton, and just like one every award that you could win and it almost looked fake, like all the, all the accomplishments that I like racked up over the next. And then I got this coveted job. I was made the youngest partner at my hedge fund in history. I was making more money than I thought I would make by the time I was 45 at 23.

22:00
And so, on the one hand, it looked like everything's like amazing, but on the other hand, my health started to deteriorate massively and I didn't listen to it. And because I had, in some ways it was like that movie Limitless with Bradley Cooper it's a great movie when I started to have like these delusions of like. You know, some people call it a God complex, but it was a, it was a, it was. There were delusions of grandeur, of like wow, like I can remember everything I read and I'm out, I'm out doing everybody at everything I apply myself to. And so I thought like I'm just going to keep going and I'm going to optimize even more. And so, yes, I taught myself how to speed read. I also started looking at things from a cost benefit analysis of, like how valuable is exercise to my goals, how valuable are people to my goals. It was really deranged, to be clear, like I was certifiably crazy and for you know, for like six to nine months, it was working. So I got myself to be able to sleep for four hours a night. I was reading things on like military research, on how to do micro napping, and I taught myself how to speed read. And that actually worked for a while, you know. And I, and then I'm like, all right, now I'm like goodwill hunting. This is amazing. And and it actually wasn't about money for me, it was just about like exploring, like how far I could push my quote gifts.

23:32
But my body had a different answer. My body was like this is a problem, jason, and we're going to show you. And so I started getting really sick and, and I started to, my hair started falling out in clumps, I'd be showering and, like I'd see, like a clump of hair in my hands, I started developing all these skin rashes that that you know they now describe as eczema and psoriasis, and I kind of ignored all of it, except when my vision started to go and I noticed one morning that I was looking at a sign and it looked a little bit double and I went and saw several eye doctors. They couldn't figure out what I had. And then I finally went and saw some specialist ophthalmologists and I was diagnosed with the degenerative eye disease, where I was literally going blind at the age of 23. And they told me I'd be fully blind by the age of 30, based on the pace of the progression of my vision loss.

24:32
And it was interesting because I was. I was so I was proud of my accomplishments at that point that I didn't really tell people how sick I was. I was actually ashamed of the fact that I was breaking down. I didn't even tell my parents the extent of how sick I was and I told nobody, which was also a problem of bottling things up. And I fell into a really deep depression around that time because I was also physically ill and like I had many doctors tell me that I had many of the markers of someone who was like dying, and I met one doctor who told me that he didn't think I'd live to the age of 40 with what was happening with my internals and so Didn't he say you had the highest cortisol levels he's ever seen before?

25:17
Yes, that's wild, yeah, and I didn't know what cortisol was back then. But the combination of the self-induced stress and I think a lot of people mistake stress for chronic stress. So typical stress, or the way when people use the word stress, they think of like a stressful event, that's like you didn't study for your exam or someone dies or something horrific happens that's a very high stress moment. But overachievers, which probably many of your listeners are, have constant chronic stress. And that chronic stress comes internally from your own drive, from your own desire to just keep pushing the envelope of like I gotta do more, I gotta fit more into my day, I gotta work out, I gotta do this so and all of those thoughts of constantly optimizing are a form of stress and that elevates your cortisol. And so I was doing that probably better than anybody. Combined with sleep deprivation and eating a modern, processed, standard American diet, which is I was eating and drinking caffeine every morning, alcohol at night, you know the whole. Work hard, play hard, bullshit the combination of all of those factors literally led my body to break and I decided that it didn't make because I was, I viewed myself as healthy. I was, you know, an active athlete all four years of college, I decided that I was going to try to see if I could do my own research on if I could cure this, and the ophthalmologist who was working with me thought I was nuts and basically said kid, there's no cure for this disease. It's a degenerative disease, like do whatever you want, but it's not gonna work. And I, basically that was one of the sort of positive attributes that I've had my whole life is, I've never fully accepted authority and I've always been naively optimistic about, like, what can be done.

27:25
And so I started doing my own research and I was a. My job was partially as a researcher. You know, I was actually a data scientist Back then they called it a quant, but my job was research and engineering. And so, like, I was used to doing extensive amounts of research and trying to solve problems using math and statistics, and I discovered that there was an interesting correlation between my skin disease and my eye disease in some obscure journals and this is like early internet, so there wasn't like a lot of, there was certainly no social media, there were no like chat rooms or anything and I just decided that my skin disease was clearly linked to inflammation, and there's a lot of literature. That's that the tissue in your eyes are kind of like your first line of defense, as is your skin. It's sort of the canary in the coal mine for all humans. So when you start getting like internally sick, it starts showing up in your skin, and your eyes are basically your thinnest, most permeable form of your tissue. And so my hypothesis, which was totally naive, was if I could make my skin disease go away, maybe my eye disease would reverse.

28:34
And so I decided to just pursue all things that were related to anti-inflammatory modalities, so figuring out how to sleep again, starting to exercise again and, most importantly, massively changing my diet. So I gave up alcohol, I gave up caffeine, I gave up gluten, I gave up processed food, I gave up refined sugar, which, as a 23 year old single guy in New York City, was really difficult, especially giving up caffeine and alcohol. That, ironically, was like the hardest. The hardest Because you're going out with the boys, you're going on dates, you're doing all these things. And this was when, like, alcohol was revered and people thought you were literally coming out of AA if you didn't have a cocktail every time you went out.

29:19
New York early 2000s yeah, 2001, new York City, and I got a lot of shame for it. I got more shame for the alcohol than anything, but I'd have to tell people I'm sick, like I have to try to heal myself and I don't care that it doesn't look cool. And anyway, a couple of months into it I noticed my vision started getting better and I told my doctor and he didn't believe me and I was like, fine, I'll just keep going. And five months or six months later my vision felt like it was completely back and thankfully there was an objective test that you could get for this eye disease where they actually measure the surface area of your eye to see the shape of your eyeball. And my eyeball previously was shaped like a cone, like your eyeball is supposed to be a sphere around the cornea.

30:13
And my degenerative disease is called cariconis, where the cornea literally implodes on itself and you have to get a corneal transplant.

30:22
And there was a nine year waiting list for that at the time and he did the test and my eye was spherical and he couldn't believe it.

30:29
He said he'd never seen anyone reverse the disease in his career.

30:32
He called in a colleague to look at the thing to make sure he misread it and they both were like we've never seen this before, and they assumed that they must have misdiagnosed me because this is a degenerative disease, they can't be cured, and I cured it, and that was the beginning of my basically second half of my lifelong journey to pursue health and wellness and to recognize that we are all poisoned in the modern food system. I turns out I have some genetic predispositions for not detoxifying properly, and so what makes every American or every human sick makes me sick faster. And because I was more sensitive than most people, I had to become an expert on all things that are adulterants in the food supply and also in basically anything you put on your body. So I had to become an expert in anything you put in your body and anything you put on your body, and that's what I've been doing for the last 20 plus years and was the genesis behind why my family and I started Hue Kitchen.

31:41 - Speaker 1
All right, guys, are you enjoying this podcast? If you are, go to sacredhuntingcom and set up an intro call with Monsell. Let him know the meat mafia sent you and you will get $250 off your first hunt and that first consultation is free. He'll walk you through everything that you're gonna do on the hunting experiences and much, much more. So go check out the link below, sacredhuntingcom. All right back to the show. Was there any thought in your head that you needed to switch up what job you were doing when you were going through that? Like, take away some of the stressors of being on Wall Street and being in the hedge fund space, cause I know you continued your hedge fund career, but there must have been some level of like man, this job is like wearing me down.

32:22 - Speaker 3
Yes, you know it was funny cause I was still in like demon mode. Yeah, you know, in my many, many years of therapy we have come to name my alter ego Terminator Jason and until like five years ago, I was Terminator Jason for 20 plus years. And I think Terminator Jason because I was so good at that job and because I still was kind of hell bent on like proving the world went wrong, that I could make a lot of money and be successful. It crossed my mind, but I was really thinking how can I cure this disease and stay as an investor? And I did modify how I invested after that, but there were many aspects of investing that I just loved and I didn't want to give that up.

33:11 - Speaker 4
Yeah, I don't think people have the full context for how different things were back in 01 when you were trying to heal, Because now obviously there are a lot of downsides to social media. But the benefit of social media and podcasting is like you could legitimately Google, you know, Ulcerative Colitis or degenerative eye disease, Carnivore diet or Paleo diet and you can find a bunch of case studies of people that have healed themselves holistically. They tell you the playbook, you can listen to it and it gives you that proof of concept. Back then, I would imagine you almost feel like you're on an island because you don't have access to this information at all. So I'm curious were there like books, resources, doctors, that kind of gave you that belief? I've heard you talk about like why zebras don't get ulcers. I think that was impactful to you. Just yeah, just curious what?

33:55 - Speaker 3
they do.

33:56
Yeah, there were a bunch of books and there were some early pioneers of what they now call functional medicine. It used to be called integrative medicine. Guys like Dr Andrew Weil wrote some of the earliest books on this, dr Mark Hyman, who's now quite famous and prominent. He had written, I believe, his first book that I got ahold of.

34:19
The why zebras don't get ulcers, is a psychologist named Robert Sapolsky who really talked about cortisol and about how animals have these fight or flight responses to danger and literally like the metaphor is, when a zebra sees like a lion, it's able to massively upregulate their cortisol and adrenaline and run away and then it turns off and that's actually healthy. But we are the only species that, through our own imagination, can make our body think it needs to run away, except that we do it through productivity. We don't do it through danger, we do it through productivity. So when we're thinking of I'm gonna wake up at six, I'm gonna work out, I'm gonna sauna, I'm gonna cold plunge, I'm gonna eat my breakfast, then I'm gonna do the Pomodoro method of I'm gonna do 25 minutes of work and then five minutes of pause and then I'm gonna do some squats in between and then I'm gonna. All of those forms of kind of obsessive, compulsive behavior are telling your brain to run literally, and the book is basically about that. Humans are unique in that we can make ourselves sick by making up things in our head of what we're supposed to do, whereas as we evolved as hominids, when we literally had to run away from a saber tooth tiger, like that was helpful, but then we would chill out and then we would like rest and hang out and eat and not be constantly pushing ourselves.

35:59 - Speaker 1
Is there anything that you've learned through that period of getting you out of that depression where there was like sleep, sauna, ice bath, just some of these hacks that helped you create that alpha for yourself to get healthy again that you still do today and still try to incorporate?

36:12 - Speaker 3
Yeah, definitely there are immense connections between physical health and mental health and there's immense connections between dietary health and what you consume and mental health and there's tons of studies that are easily shown to people if they're skeptical. Where they've done this, where there was a famous study where they took inmates in a prison and they fed one group the standard American diet and another group much more of like a paleo, low carb, no refined sugar, like gut healing kind of diet, and the violence levels in the latter cohort was dramatically lower than the first cohort. And they've shown this over and over again with children. Adhd is very much exacerbated by highly processed foods, sugar food, dives, which, of course, as a kid growing up, all I ate was the standard American shit diet, yes. So I would say diet would be first and foremost. Probably sleep would actually be higher than diet. Actually, sleep deprivation can literally make you crazy and like literally another thing that they've done studies on where they go in and they put EEGs on people's heads and like when they're hitting like REM or when they're hitting deep sleep, they wake them up and they see what happens to them and they actually can induce psychosis through sleep deprivation. So that's actually well understood. So sleep is immensely important for mental health.

37:56
And then all those other things that you mentioned. Those are, I'd say, the sauna and the cold plunger certainly helpful. I sauna almost every day. Physical exercise is probably number three, with sleep and food being one and two. Physical exercise is one of the few things that, if you do it in a moderate way, has literally no downside other than time, and dramatically improves your neurotransmitter levels, particularly serotonin and dopamine, and can reset the brain in a way that many anti-depressant drugs don't even do.

38:37 - Speaker 4
I know you're good buddies with Peter Atia. One of my favorite podcast episodes he's ever done was back in 2018 with his buddy named Mike Trevino, who's this incredible. Like he's like the best amateur ultra endurance athlete that no one knows about. So he won the Badwater Ultra Marathon in like 01 and then he came in second in the bike race, the RAM, the Race Across America.

38:58
So they basically they drop you in San Diego, they just say go and you just pedal for like maybe it's like two weeks and then you end in New Jersey and they were finding with cyclists because you sleep as minimally as possible, but they were finding that with the cyclists that got the most amount of sleep, they were performing the best. But he said for him it was such a mental barrier because he's like all right, I'm gonna sleep for five hours tonight, but I know this other guy that I'm competing against is only gonna go for two hours. Like there was a psychological hurdle. So I'm curious, when you were in terminator mode still, because you're making these changes, because you have to was there a barrier of like fuck, am I really gonna sleep seven or eight hours when I could be sleeping for four and be way more productive at work, like was there a mental conflict there for you?

39:38 - Speaker 3
Yeah, there was and it was. I had to learn it the hard way and I think for a lot of people they have to learn it the hard way. No matter how many podcasts or experts they listen to, they just don't believe. It's similar with meditation, where you could sort of view it like that's a waste of time, like I don't have a half hour for that, and I think you have to do enough iterations of being sleep deprived, seeing how you perform, and then iterations of where you get your eight hours and you're like holy shit, like I can go the whole day without pause.

40:13
My memory is working fantastically. My processing speed is high. I think for me it got to the point where I just I saw how much better my performance was, even though, like it was obvious my mental health was better. But my performance was so much better and because my kind of main unique attribute when I was healthy was my memory, my memory was the first to start getting impaired when I was really sick, and so to me that was like catastrophically terrifying.

40:50
And I noticed that when I got healthy again and I started eating clean and I started sleeping and exercising again, my memory came back and in my job my memory was immensely important. We were investing in my portfolio, typically had like a hundred stocks in it, and so I had to remember, like what every company did and what the earnings were and what the bull and the bear case of every stock, and I had to trade all the time and I had to make rapid decisions. So for me it was feeling how much better I was and I didn't really care if, like, somebody got two hours less to sleep than I did at that point.

41:30 - Speaker 2
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42:21 - Speaker 1
You mentioned that you started investing differently. What did that look like?

42:26 - Speaker 3
It wasn't so much for the mental health goal, it was really. I've always been very introspective and I started off as a pure quant and back then there weren't that many quant. Now there are a ton but we didn't even use the phrase AI back then. Like there were things like genetic algorithms and neural networks which were the precursors to AI, but really what we were doing was we were using mathematics and algorithms to detect anomalies in the stock market. And when I first started off I went to a hedge fund. There were only A there were only a few hundred hedge funds in 1998. And B there were probably five or 10 that were doing anything real in the quant world. And so when we first started doing what we were doing, it was very successful and, like in some parts of what we were doing, we were literally just printing money. There wasn't a lot of competition. What we were doing was we were exploiting anomalies that were easy mathematically to identify. But again, like this was at a time where not everybody even had like computers and had like Bloomberg's and people were, if they were doing research on a company they would go get the 10k and the 10q from, like the public library. Like this is a very different time. Just a level set and in 2001, when the markets crashed also, the way we were doing things was what was called market neutral, where we were always short just as many stocks in terms of dollar amount that we were long. They also call that beta neutral in certain worlds and the competition started going up exponentially. So many people were coming out of really high finance and in some cases, coming from like high science. You know, there was literally like rocket scientists coming into the quant world in 01.

44:26
And I thought I was very good at it, but I didn't think that my capability of writing even more algorithms or doing more quantitative research I didn't think that was my edge in life and I think it's really important for everybody, regardless of whether it's finance or something else, to kind of know what your edge is. And this is also related to the learning differences that we talked about. Like everyone just has different strengths and weaknesses. And I thought my strength because I also was like a semi professional poker player for my first few years coming out of college and where I was playing one or two times a week I was literally making a living playing poker and my strength, I thought, was judgment and judgment. To me, human judgment was something that can't be arbitrage, whereas quantitative algorithms are spotting anomalies, using algorithms to identify those anomalies in the stock market. That's something that someone who works a little bit longer or harder could figure out, Whereas I had worked with enough rocket scientists to know that they don't have judgment.

45:30
And so I sort of thought like I want to morph my career to be more focused on making much larger concentrated bets that aren't a function of a machine.

45:41
I could use the machines to identify, like, the opportunities, but then it would be my human judgment that would decide like this should be a 10% position, this should be a 5% position, this should be something that actually the machine says is worth doing, but I'm going to actually know why it shouldn't do it.

45:56
And so I moved into more fundamental investing, which at the time what we did was called like quantum mental, which was combining quantitative principles but with fundamental kind of decision making, and that was a lot more fulfilling for me, because I kind of felt too distant from the investing when it was pure quant. And then when I started being able to like meet with executives and meet with companies and realize like, oh, wow, like this sounds great, but it's a piece of shit Like a quantitative method. Didn't tell me that, or I'd be like, oh, this is something that there's no math that can tell me why this is a good investment. But I know that, like, this is going to be something that's going to be big and I want to bet on it, and so that was how I altered my investment approach.

46:43 - Speaker 4
So it sounds like when you change your diet. You're like I think you had what 17 more years working in the hedge fund space before you got out of it.

46:53 - Speaker 3
I officially retired in the first quarter of 2019.

46:56 - Speaker 4
Okay, the reason why I'm asking that is you obviously noticed incredible benefits as a professional after changing your diet and your lifestyle and I'm curious did other executives or coworkers pick up on that and kind of want to like gravitate towards you and pick up the secret sauce? Or were they just like, oh, this guy's not sees, just like off on an island doing his own thing?

47:15 - Speaker 3
No, there were a bunch. You know there's probably similar to crypto. There are a lot of people that have similar curiosity in finance, particularly in the hedge fund world, which was like sort of a very high stress, high performance, high achiever kind of world, and there were a lot of people who looked at me like I was nuts, but there were also. There was this class of people and it typically was the former athletes and former military that were much more open minded to what I was doing. And these were like the early days of biohacking and we kind of found each other. You know, like, because there weren't a lot of us but we would find each other, and then we'd all hear about like, ooh, like we realized that if you eat blueberries every morning, it's actually anti inflammatory for your brain and you might have better memory, and you know there'd be things like that, and there were definitely a handful that we found.

48:17
And then, when we ultimately my brother in law certainly was one of them, my wife's brother, because he saw a lot of what I was doing. He's a few years younger than me, he wasn't in finance, he was in real estate, but he saw a lot of what I was doing and he. He read a lot of the books that were influential to me and he started doing it. He didn't have any of my illnesses, but he noticed that when he started eating a more paleo diet, he noticed that his skin improved, his health improved, his performance improved. He actually needed less sleep than he thought and that was the ultimate genesis for how we all came to the decision to open Hugh kitchen, because he's like Jason this is amazing.

49:00
Like like there's nowhere to eat like this in New York City, which is like the Mecca for food diversity. We should create a place that's the manifestation of all these principles and you know it'll be a place for you to eat every day, because at that point, I had to eat a restricted diet and I think, like people in New York will love this and the the feedback you know from others was that's insane. Like there was no restaurant like that, I mean in 2000,. We came up with the idea in 2010. And we came up with like the guardrails of what we would allow in the restaurant in 2011. And you know, the whole restaurant was gluten free, dairy free, refined sugar free, was seed oil free in 2011, which was like that's insane.

49:48
That was insane. And obviously the math and the margins of doing food that way was unheard of. And restaurants, notoriously to investors, are not good businesses there's a handful that are but restaurants legitimately have a 95% fail rate and and anyone could open a restaurant. And so I kind of went into an eyes wide open as a professional investor, thinking like, okay, the odds are massively stacked against me with this, but if we could break even and I can have a place to eat and I can prove to the world that you can make amazing food that's delicious, that doesn't have all this fake shit in it, then like that's a win. And I kind of viewed it partially as philanthropy. And it was. It was. It was a bit lucky and a bit, you know, fortunate and and we were certainly blessed that it actually took off the way it did.

50:46 - Speaker 1
What sort of feedback were you guys getting from the kitchen that ultimately led you guys to think, hey, maybe we can do something else here with the chocolate bars, because I imagine it sounds like it was so well received that I obviously never went to Hugh kitchen, but it seems like there was like this cult like following around it.

51:02 - Speaker 3
Yeah, it was interesting because we were. We were, so we took no outside investors for the first many years. And it wasn't because, like, I was bullish and it wasn't because I was greedy, it was because people thought we were insane and I didn't want to have the conversation which we had many times with people where they'd be like, why don't you just put in like regular pasta, like why don't you, you know, why don't you just use like regular conventional chicken instead of pastured organic chicken, or instead of grass fed, grass finished beef, why don't you just use the conventional? Nobody's going to notice the difference and your profit margins will be way higher. And I thought I never want that conversation. I never want to have to articulate to somebody why I'm not doing that, because it would have been more profitable to do it that way.

51:54
And so that was really the, the genesis for how we started the approach the chocolate was was a bit of a fluke, so we had a grain, so the whole format of the restaurant and it was kind of around the time when the word paleo was being coined. But we kind of referred to ourselves more as like ancestral and the name Hugh comes from human and our slogan was get back to human, because all of my research and and how I cured myself and and all of my studies of what's wrong with kind of modern humanity was basically that we live at odds with how we evolved as humans and our slogan is we need to get back to how we were as humans, and so that's why it's called Hugh kitchen and most people actually call it who, because they actually don't read the slogan that says get back to human, with the logo he H U M A N. But we had. It was basically like a paleo inspired food court was the format of the restaurant was fast, casual. There were. There were multiple stations and one of our stations was a gluten and grain free bakery and we had gluten. We had gluten and grain free cookies, muffins, we had like banana bread we had.

53:13
Our baked goods were amazing and right before we opened we had the recipes for the baked goods. But we wanted to put chocolate chips in a lot of them because we love chocolate and we went out to go buy chocolate chips that met our specs and there were none. You know, all the chocolate chips that you could buy at that time had refined, genetically modified cane, sugar in it, had dairy in it, had soy less than in it, had like weird stabilizers and preservatives in it. So we were like shit, like we can't find chocolate chips that meet our guardrails. And on the wall we had our guardrails up. So it was very clear to everybody, which is partially how it got like cult status because people could come in and be like these people are fucking crazy, but I like it Right, you know. They could tell like we weren't compromising for money and we had to make our own chocolate chips for the baked goods.

54:05
And we found a French pastry chef who had a moonlighting job, is making homemade chocolate. And we said do you think you can make chocolate this way? And it turns out that, like even to this day, probably 99 plus percent of global chocolate is made with refined white cane sugar. That's how, like, global chocolate has been made for 40 years. And we used organic, unrefined coconut sugar and it's it's a much bigger granule, it's like a dark brown. It definitely has more trace minerals, it's lower glycemic if you consume it in the whole form. And we're like can you make chocolate this way? And the French pastry chef's like no. And we're like just try it, just try it, we're gonna pay money like this. Let's figure it out. And what was amazing is the first few versions of it were disgusting, and with the same exact ratios, by the way. So it was just at the time. It was 72% cacao, 28% sugar. That's it. Those are two ingredients.

55:07
And after a lot of trial and error and this is where my brother in law was like a true mastermind he helped a lot with the iteration of how we got it and we got to this place where the chocolate chips were amazing. And then his his idea was this is so good, we should make chocolate bars out of it and we should sell it in the restaurant as like our own homemade chocolate. And so when we opened, we had the chocolate, but it was really for the chocolate chips. And then we got lucky, because one of our chefs, his girlfriend, worked at Whole Foods and he used to bring her home our our homemade chocolate and she's like this is the best healthy chocolate I've ever had. Can we sell it at Whole Foods? And we're like sure.

55:49
And we had to figure out how to sell chocolate now into a grocery store where you need like nutrition fact panel on the back and you need to have all the regulatory things that you typically see in a consumer product.

56:00
And so we had to get really smart on how do we get into CPG and and it was clear in the first year that we had people who would come into the store and they would hoard our chocolate and you know, sometimes you just have to watch and we had people who would come in from out of state and they'd come and they'd buy like 20 bars at a time and, by the way, they were $10 a bar at the time and they were not $10 because, like we were trying to make money. They were $10 because it cost us a lot to make the bars and just watching as a businessman I'm like people are hoarding our chocolate, like this is crazy. And so at that moment we realized, like we got something here and we separated the, the, the businesses, into Hue restaurants and Hue products and that was the beginning of Hue chocolate.

56:50 - Speaker 4
That's the beautiful thing about making a product that doesn't compromise at all on the values, because there's going to be customers that also won't compromise and when they find those brands that have the same values, they will literally go crazy for it and just buy so much of it.

57:04 - Speaker 1
So the tagline for Hugh is interesting to me because I feel like from our corner of the world where it's I feel like a lot of extremists when it comes to the food world. They might be like. You came up with a chocolate bar with that tagline of get back to being human and I would love to just get your take on how you view the food system in general and making these subtle changes to things that people use on a daily basis and just making the right swaps in terms of ingredients, because chocolate is something that everyone can enjoy, but you need to have the right, proper ingredients in there and none of the bad stuff.

57:40 - Speaker 3
Yeah, well, the slogan was for the restaurant, not just the chocolate, so get back to human. Applied to our entire restaurant, and the idea was we were going to make everything with much less processing, with ingredients that were as close to the farm and as close to the ground or as close to what is sort of evolutionarily consistent with the animals as possible. So, like, our beef was grass-fed, grass-finished, pastured, the chicken was organic and pastured. When we had fish it was pole caught, right, it wasn't farmed. And so an occasion we had like weird wild game on the menu which people loved, we'd have specials and stuff, and so the idea was all ingredients should be as close to the way we would have consumed it 50-100 years ago, 200-300-400 years ago, as possible. That has been my food philosophy for 20 years now, and I think the evidence has gotten much, much stronger in favor of that philosophy over the last decade than it even was when we did you it started 12, 13 years ago.

58:56
It's so clear today that, like all of our modern ailments are very much attributed to the fact that we live at odds with our evolution. And it's not just the food I mean, it's also that we're sedentary now. We spend most of our time on screens. We're not community based anymore. You know we evolved as a social species that lived in tribes and in communities and, from a food system perspective, we have been omnivorous, an omnivorous species for as long as we've been hominids walking on two feet, and I know there's like debates about what we should eat and what we shouldn't eat, but like it's not even debatable, like they found tons of fossilized records of you know, hominids from several hundred thousand years ago with evidence that they were, you know, eating meat using fire. And there's a lot of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists who believe that a big part of why our brains developed to the extreme that they did is because of the concentrated caloric source of animal protein.

01:00:12 - Speaker 4
Yeah, one of the big mistakes that I think the alternative health community gets wrong is just demonizing food groups versus the actual processing behind those foods. And what I mean by that is like if someone in this space sees a snow day, which is one of the products that you make, they're like oh, looks like a pizza bite has to be unhealthy, but it's like no grain free crust, grass-fed cheese, organic tomato sauce baked in olive oil. It's like that's actually a health food that actually tastes really good and is good for you. Just like, oh, ice cream is bad for you. And it's like have you ever made like raw milk ice cream with egg yolks and maple syrup and raw? Like that's literally a health food. But we just demonize these certain food groups instead of focusing on like no, what are the ingredients and the processing methods behind those food groups?

01:00:53 - Speaker 3
Yeah, no, that's spot on and that's a big part of my MO, and our whole philosophy is we've never by we I mean the people who've been in kind of my orbit and the people who've been part of the things that we've done we've never counted calories. I've never counted calories in my entire life and, as you can see, like I'm fit and healthy and lean. I think there are certain truisms that hold, which is, if you are in massive caloric deficit, you will lose weight, regardless of what kind of food it is, and if you are in massive caloric excess, you will gain weight. That's true, right, if you eat 5,000 calories of avocados a day, you will gain weight. But when you're within the homeostasis boundaries the kind of 80 confidence interval of what your body can tolerate every day the type of calories matters immensely. You know, eating 500 calories of whole pastured eggs will affect your body differently than eating 500 calories of oreos, for sure, and so I think it's. I think you're right that we.

01:02:07
What happened was, was and there's a lot of history here but the 80s were really remarkable in terms of taking this country many steps backward. The 80s, which is where I grew up, was the was the low fat and no fat era. That was the era of snackwells, cookies, where everything was was fat-free, and there was this belief that fat was the cause of that. Dietary fat was the cause of body fat and and because in our country and other languages, by the way dietary fat has a different name than the fat that's on your body, what's the name of it in our country.

01:02:49 - Speaker 4
It's just fat, yeah, it's all you know.

01:02:51 - Speaker 3
When, you, when you see a food label, you know it's it's the macros are protein, carbs and fat, and then when you refer to somebody who is overweight, you refer to them as fat, and when you refer to the literally the subcutaneous layer of adipose tissue, we call that fat. In other languages it has different words. So the dietary fat that's in food is a different word in in some languages than it is in terms of the fat that's on your body, and I think that it sounds so simple. But that actually created a problem. Yeah, because people are like oh, eating fat means you get fat, and that's. It turns out that most dietary fats, um, particularly the omega-3 kind and particularly the, you know, mono and saturated kind, are very healthy, and it turns out that your brain is literally made out of fat, um, and and so what we did in the 80s was we basically valued carbs and refined carbs, um, and got rid of fat. And and that did two things um, by getting, by getting rid of the fat, you actually increase the glycemic effect of all the foods, because when you have the presence of fat, it reduces the glycemic effect of the sugars and the carbs that are in the foods. Um, so we massively increased the glycemic effect of all the foods and we deprive people of actually a very necessary nutrient that they need, which is actually good fats, right, um, and that is when you see the beginning of the explosion of chronic disease.

01:04:26
Uh, and obesity was really in the 80s, as when it really started to go parabolic and I think there were a lot of other um factors. Uh, that started happening in the 80s. You know, we got much better at hyper processing. All the public companies got really good at at food engineering, uh, in terms of bringing chemicals in that previously weren't in the food supply. Many of these chemicals are what are called obesogens, which actually alter your metabolism and actually slow down your metabolism. Um, these are things like MSG, uh, and so when we started incorporating a lot of these food-like substances into our diet, that was the beginning of how we kind of really went off the rails the point on fat is so interesting and it kind of speaks to this whole concept of just dumbing down nutrition for people.

01:05:18 - Speaker 1
Yeah, and to the point that, like, not all fats are the same, not all carbs are the same, not all proteins are the same, and I feel like today, most people don't really understand that concept. Still, yeah, um, and even the scientific community is reluctant to talk about it. Like I was telling you before we hopped on that, hubert Mann was talking about seed oils and he posted a tweet where he basically said there's no scientific backing behind this whole anti-seed oil movement. And then he had Lane Norton coming into the comments talking and just saying hey, show, show the studies for all these people who are trying to push back and say, no, seed oils are actually bad for you. Yeah, so I'd be curious to get your take on that whole topic as well yeah look, I, I I have been sort of a quasi-nutritionist for 20 years.

01:06:02 - Speaker 3
I was on the board of the top nutrition school for several years. I've seen as many studies as you would ever want to see on nutrition. Nutrition is a very, very hard thing to show scientifically and and it's particularly difficult for typical for, like traditional scientists who are used to the scientific method and used to things like peer reviewed studies where you have a control or a placebo. And the problem is is that with humans you are not allowed ethically to have a typical scientific study where you take a cohort of people and knowingly put them on something bad and take another cohort of people and knowingly put them on something good. You're not allowed to do that. And then the second thing that you that makes nutritional studies is very, very difficult is that it's very difficult to separate correlation from causality, and so what I mean by that is there was a very famous study that has since been debugged many, many times for the anti-meat movement called the China study. That came out like 20 plus years ago, but what they did was they basically did an immense amount of research on the Chinese population that showed that, as the standard of living went up peasants, who were used to eating like very, very basic things, like rice and grains, and didn't have access to meats that when they started bringing meat into their diet, western diseases started showing up and chronic diseases and cancer incidents and all these things, and so they were able to make a very conclusive argument that eating meat causes cancer, causes chronic disease. Therefore meat is bad. What they weren't able to show, which of course would have been impossible, is when people's standard of living went up and mcdonald's comes into the country, what else were they doing like? So, yes, they were starting to eat chicken and beef, but what else were they doing? Well, it turns out, they were starting to eat french fries, which they never eaten before. They were starting to smoke cigarettes, which they never done before. They were starting to eat processed foods, which they never done before, and so they start bringing on all these other habits that weren't part of their life, and so you can't draw the conclusion that it was the meat, like it could have been all these other things that happened. And then the other thing that was the problem, particularly with china, is, as you probably know, the chinese meat supply is not a clean meat supply. No, so they weren't eating grass-fed grass, finished wild animals. They were eating caged, antibiotic growth hormone, horrifically treated, stressed out animals as their meat consumption started to rise.

01:08:47
So all nutritional studies are what are called epidemiological, which is where they basically look at a swath of people and they're like, oh, let's study what these people did. Um, and then you have other nutritional studies where they literally ask people questions from like a year ago and they're like, hey, what did you eat a year ago? Like I don't remember what I two days ago, yeah, never mind a year ago. And so nutritional studies are notorious for being like a joke, um, and so what you have to do is you basically have to draw conclusions from generalizations, and there's certain things that are very, very conclusive. Um, like drinking a ton of soda will give you diabetes, right, and they now know that consuming massive amounts of refined sugar and carbs have a direct correlation to chronic disease. That is like indisputable right.

01:09:42
But there's a lot of stuff that's gray, and the thing with seed oils is that there are a lot of people that are. You know there's a and again, my background is literally statistics and econometrics, where you look at charts and look at correlations and look at autocorrelations and things like that. And so there are a lot of people who will show charts of like obesity levels, like this, and then they'll put like a chart of seed oil consumption and it looks like this, right, but unfortunately for them and I'm anti seed oil, to be clear, but it's for a different reason, but unfortunately for them you could also put on like exercise per capita also looks like this, yeah, and there's a lot of other things that look like that that, like you could even find like rainfall in columbia turns out to be correlated with like chronic disease. And for me, I go back to simple rules, which is if you see how seed oils are made and you and you look at how they're produced, and then you look at some of the studies on what's in the seed oils in terms of trace levels of certain chemicals seed oils industrially. So I try to separate artisanally extracted seed oils, so like if your mom had a bunch of sunflower seeds in her kitchen and she used a food processor and out of that food processor came some sunflower seed oil, like I bet you that's fine, but the way that industrial seed oil is made, which is what's in all the foods that are processed today and everything that's fried is.

01:11:13
They're generally extracted using a petroleum derivative like hexane or butane. They're bleached using definitely a toxic chemical. There's many forms of that you could bleach. They're deodorized also using chemicals and they have found in many, many samples of seed oils traces of these chemicals that don't fully quote wash away. And so when you see how they're made and how they're processed with the bleaching and the deodorizing, and then a lot of times, and the reason they deodorize them is because the amount of time it takes from when the seeds are harvested to when they actually process them, they go rancid. These are fats, and fats go rancid, and so a lot of seed oils are rancid, which is why they have to deodorize them, because they fucking smell like shit, right, um? You don't want to be consuming rancid anything.

01:12:05
And so, without getting into the like, the scientific studies of a lot of the, a lot of the arguments, uh, for seed oils or against seed oils, um are the very high levels of omega 6 to omega 3 as a ratio, um, and there's all sorts of like correlative studies that show that if you're six to three ratios, two out of whack, it leads to inflammation, which I think is generally accepted, but it's still debatable and they haven't been able to prove it.

01:12:35
But my point is you don't even need to debate the ratios, you don't even have to debate the rancidity like just look at how it's made. And if you showed Americans like this is how it's made, this is the bleach that goes into it, this is the deodorizer that goes into it. Do you want to feed your kids this? Right? Like most people, be like hell. No, so to me it's. It's a much simpler thing, which is like I don't want massively chemically processed industrial things in my food, right, and I don't need you to show me a conclusive study if those chemicals are harmful or not. I know they're harmful. I know I shouldn't be consuming petroleum in my like, in my mouth, right yeah.

01:13:14 - Speaker 4
So your thought process is like you should have the intuition to realize look, I don't need a peer reviewed study to show me that seed oils are terrible. I just can look at the 15 steps that seed oils go through to realize I don't want to put that shit into my body, I don't want to feed my kids with it, right, yeah?

01:13:28 - Speaker 3
and then and then, and I've had debates, by the way, with the people, like kuberman, where I've said look like like I'm actually agnostic to artisanally extracted seed oils, like, like I eat sunflower seeds from time to time. I have no problem with sunflower seeds, air go, the seed oils probably. Okay, yeah, right, but the way they make canola oil and, by the way, a lot of those seeds are genetically modified, a lot of those seeds are also massively sprayed with pesticides, herbicides, etc. That also makes its way into the oil, right, right, and so, like you know, the conventional seed oils are filthy.

01:14:07 - Speaker 1
Yeah, you know, we could find we could talk about the organic seed oils separately, um, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's my point of view it's funny you mentioned that because that was my exact response was you talked about like the latter half of the process of once the the seeds are there and then the extraction process to get the oil? I was like anything that's bad for the soil is gonna inevitably be bad for the person consuming it. So they're spraying all these different herbicides, pesticides, inducing it with synthetic fertilizers to make it grow. It's like it's killing everything in the soil. You wouldn't even be able to naturally repeat that process if you did it over a long enough period of time without those chemicals. So hundred percent there's. There's a through line there through the whole process that's like.

01:14:50 - Speaker 3
This really isn't good for anything yeah, and that's like you know that that that comes back to the the whole problem with glyphosate, or what most people call roundup. It is so naive to think that that Monsanto developed this amazing chemical that literally obliterates every form of life around it except for the genetically modified plant that they created. I mean, it's a genius business model. What they did right, they literally came up with a genetically modified plant that could tolerate their chemical and everything around. That genetically modified plant can't live, so the whole microbiome of the soil and everything around dies. And then to presume that we could eat that and it wouldn't wreak havoc inside of us if it obliterates everything in living nature is so insanely dumb to me. That like what are we?

01:15:51 - Speaker 4
doing, yeah, yeah, what you just said reminds me of this meme that I saw on instagram two days ago, and it's it's from Breaking Bad. It's like Walter White and Jesse Pinkman and they're making methanol lab and the caption is like plant-based scientists mixing together 75 chemicals instead of just eating an egg. Yes, which is so. It's so funny and it's so true. And I'm curious to someone like you that you know has had multiple cpg brands that are like leaning into animal products and organic and non-gmo and doing things the right way. What's your response to the rise of like fake meat and synthetic meat companies and beyond, beef, because I'm sure it drives you crazy yeah, look, I think I I'd like to separate the cell-based meat movement from the kind of, you know, synthetic, plant-based meat.

01:16:33 - Speaker 3
Right, so, beyond meat would be in one category, which is just a hyper-processed alternative to meat that's supposed to taste like meat, versus things like impossible burger, where you're literally genetically modifying and creating a molecule that's never been consumed in human history. Um, the heme was what they call it. That bleeds, right, the, the Frankenstein method that they did to soy to do that. Um, and then you have the, the bioreactor, petri dish, cell-grown meats, and I don't like any of them, but I have different views on why I don't like any of them. Um, and, by the way, like I'm an omnivore, like I love fruits and vegetables, there's certain vegetable patties that aren't trying to be meat that I like to eat, and because they're vegetables and, by the way, vegetables can be delicious and like you don't need to pretend it's meat, yeah, um, there's plenty of vegetables that, as vegetables are great. Um, beyond meat is just a super processed uh, ultra processed, um piece of like chemical garbage, um that, in addition to the fact that it's not healthy for humans, um, it's it's also not healthy for the land, and and they greenwash the hell out of that. It's definitely probably better for cows that's probably true, but it's definitely not better for the land. I mean the whole idea of massively monocropping and taking land that was probably fertile and tilling the shit out of it, spraying tons of chemicals and pesticides to make the plants like thrive, and then doing that over and over again and destroying the fertility of the soil, which ruins the top layer of the soil, which obviously ruins the ability for that soil to sink carbon. Not to mention the fact that when you're preparing all that land for your massive industrial uh, plant supply, you are killing all of the life in that, in that, whatever that land has, you're killing the snakes and the rabbits and all the insects and the fuck. You're obliterating the microbiome of the land, which you know, the, the, the anti-animal people don't even talk about. Like how many? After they tell soil for the first time, you will see massive amounts of vultures. And the reason is is because there's so many fucking dead animals in the soil from what they did, and and and again. Like I'm okay with the fact that there's people who want to do that, but don't claim that it's like better for like Animals like you are killing tons and tons of animals, and to claim that rabbits and snakes are Far less important to the earth and mother nature than cows are is just hubris. Yeah, like, everything to me is part of mother nature. And like you shouldn't just pick and choose and be like, oh, you shouldn't kill cows, but it's okay to kill all the rabbits, all the snakes, all the mice, all the things that are in the soil. Yeah, so that's my issue with monocropping and that's my issue with with Beyond Meat. It's just an ultra processed like it may as well be a twanky. Yeah, the thing I.

01:19:43
The problem I have with impossible and anything that's heavily genetically modified, which also applies to some of the cellular meat stuff, is, if you look at the policies of the US and you compare it to the policies of Europe, the US has a policy of innocent until proven guilty and they kind of put this under the rubric of generally regarded as safe or grass gras, and History is replete with examples over the last 20, 30 years of the FDA or the USDA or whoever's the regulatory body being like oh, that's fine, let's try it right. And like, and then you realize like, oh shit, you know this happened with asbestos. Asbestos was originally viewed as, like this, amazing in you know, insulating material that obviously we know causes massive amounts of cancer. This happened with many drugs that were supposed to be wonder drugs. There was one called philitamide that turned out to give kids webbed fingers and webbed feet and they're like oh wait, that's a problem. It happened with trans fats, it happened with a lestra, and, and every time there was some lobbying effort from big food or big ag or big pharma or big chemistry or whatever you want to call it, that Paid the government enough money to be like just do three months of studies, it's safe, it's safe.

01:21:08
So, in the case of impossible, they come up with this genetically modified bizarre concept called soy leg hemoglobin that's never been consumed by anything in history and they tested it for like three months and they're like oh, soy, safe, this seems safe, let's try it. And Whereas Europe has what's called the precautionary principle, which is the opposite, which is you're guilty until proven innocent in Europe when it comes to introducing new products into human consumption, so they're like you got to test this for ten years Before we decide that this is safe and we could feed it to our population, the US is quite operated. They like money, so they're just like, okay with, like, and they and they shrouded under this like view of innovation, like, oh it'll, it'll stymie innovation if we don't let all this dangerous shit come in, so they just let it happen. And so when something's introduced into the food supply that's never been consumed in human history and has been tested With with only a limited amount of time, like I don't know, I just raised my hand and go, I don't want to be the guinea pig on that. Like, look at the history of the government. It's not like they know what they're doing.

01:22:25
And so with the cell-based meats, there is a, there is a hubris that If we can make a bio identical and I boo it in quotes a bio identical by literally taking, you know, stem cells and taking the DNA and cloning it of Something, putting it in a bioreactor with a growth medium, putting scaffolding so that the growth, the cells, can grow on something and mimic flesh, they'll do like an amino acid assay and they'll do a bunch of tests and they'll be like, oh, this looks bio identical to brets flesh, right, but when you think about, like when an animal grows in nature, right, and part of what makes nutrition nutrition when we eat things including plants also, not just animals is the robustness of the animal, the fact that that animal had to survive and grow in nature with gravity, with wind, with all sorts of stressors. That's what makes the animal Healthy to eat is because it has all those stressors. If I said to Brett, all right, let's clone Brett and let's grow a version of Brett in a matrix like pod, right? So a full clone with no food will just, we'll put a, we'll put like a tube in him and we'll feed him that way. So no food, no movement, no stressors of any kind, no gravity, etc. And like, brett grows up to be this you know bald, weird Matrix like thing, and then I eat a piece of that Brett. Would that be the same flesh as this Brett? Probably not, yeah and like.

01:24:08
And then my other issue with the cell-based meat thing is like. So To presume that because we can do certain scientific tests and say like this is bio identical is such hubris. There are definitely things we can't measure. And just because we can't measure it doesn't mean it's not there, right? So that's my first. That's my first fear is that there's stuff in a growing animal when you eat, like the muscle of an animal that grew in nature. There's definitely stuff that went into that that we can't measure. That's not in the clone version. That's grown in a Petri dish, absolutely, and so that's like my first issue with it. My second issue with it is, which is much simpler, is if it's similar to Canola oil or the seed oils. If you explained to a mom, this is how it's made, right, how many people would feed that to their children knowingly?

01:25:00
And this gets into the whole transparency problem, because the, the, the cell-based meat movement, is trying to obfuscate and come up with names so that it's also called meat and they don't have to say that it's grown in a laboratory or it's grown in a Petri dish. They're trying to use things like cultured, like fine, like let the consumer make up their mind. Like don't try to like, you know. And they're like oh, it's gonna scare people. Well, of course it's gonna scare people. It's fucking scary. Like let them make up their own mind.

01:25:25
And my problem with a lot of these these what I call techno foods is Is investors want these techno foods, but the consumers don't want them. Yeah, they just don't want them. So like and and they think they want them because they do these, these rigged poles and I've seen these rigged poles They'll blow your mind. They'll be like, they'll go to like a hundred people before they get their venture funding and they'll be like hey, would you like meat, would you like beef that uses one percent of the carbon and uses no land and Doesn't harm the animal? Would you like that? And, of course, like, people are like yes, whereas the proper polling question is would you like a genetically modified clone grown in a laboratory, in a bioreactor, and Then we feed that to your children like see what the difference is in the polling on that is.

01:26:18 - Speaker 1
We're just praying on people's empathy, which is like another part of the big food engine where they just market and use media and celebrities to really push the agenda To, which is like a whole another side of this problem that they're so well funded that they can spend Astronomical amounts of money just pushing some false narrative and trying to manipulate people in that way too.

01:26:38 - Speaker 3
Yeah, and look to be clear and to be generous, like the, the pursuit of what they're trying to do is noble, right, right, like we have a problem.

01:26:45
We know we have a problem, right, like, like concentrated animal feeding operations is disgusting and Industrial agriculture both industrial plant agriculture and industrial animal agriculture is disgusting, right, and we know we have a problem and we have to change that.

01:27:02
So, like, I am all for changing that, but the way I'm approaching it is through more regenerative methods and the way I'm approaching it is teaching people that there are a lot of externalities in the cost of making food and we have to tell people what those costs are and that we should be willing to pay more for better practices in food and Maybe pay a little bit less for all of the indulgences that we're used to, things like all the streaming services we subscribe to and are Really expensive sneakers and our cigarettes and our alcohol and like all these things that we waste money on.

01:27:36
And people complain that, like organic food is one dollar more than non-organic food, or that regenerative beef is $3 more than conventional beef, and they're like, oh my god, that's so expensive. And then they go out and they buy a seven dollar Starbucks. Like we just have to like, change the conversation and teach people that there is all these extra costs and externalities that we don't price, that you're harming the land, you're harming your family and then you're gonna pay for it with your health for 50 years and your health insurance costs are gonna go nuts and like we're not having that conversation and that, to me, is the biggest tragedy of all that's happening right now.

01:28:14 - Speaker 4
Hmm, yeah, we had on Amy's El Neuritis, who's the founder of we feed raw, which is this incredible organic raw dog food company. So you talk about a tough business, right? You're good, you're selling this expensive organic raw dog food that's way more expensive than grain fed kibble that they can make for pennies on the dollar. And the way that she described it was very similar to you. She described the difference in prices just like a reallocation of funds for your pet, where it's like you're they're gonna pay a little bit more For the food now and keep them healthy, or you're gonna pay for medical bills on the back end. And it kind of reminds me of snow days, of a mom that's in target and she's like well, I have the Totino's pizza rolls that are two dollars a bag, versus the snow days that are like six or seven dollars a bag, like why am I choosing this? And it kind of reminds me of that reallocation of funds methodology which you touched on too.

01:28:58 - Speaker 3
Yeah, you know, you raised two interesting points and and I don't want to digress on the pet thing, but it turns out in studies People have a greater propensity, or they have Less elasticity in economic terms for pet food than they do for baby food. People are willing to spend more on their pets than they are on their humans. That's fascinating, isn't that amazing? Which is why, by the way, the pet food business is amazing business, because it's like what and and I we've studied this as to like why, and there's a lot of reasons. But that to me is is is nuts that that people think that way and the and the other problem with the Totino's versus snow days comparison. Snow days in and of themselves are not expensive, right, like you can have a full meal of snow days for less than you can have a meal at Chipotle for less than probably like a Meal at 7-eleven, right? So in and of itself, you can have like 6700 calories of snow days and it has the full nutritionals. It's a full meal for probably the equivalent of six or seven dollars. That's not expensive when you compare it to Totino's, which they have. General Mills has engineered a way to make those things with 90 90 ingredients, most of which is fake. Many of their ingredients are banned in Europe. They figured out a way through chemistry To make those for five cents a bite, like you shouldn't be able to make anything that you can eat For five cents a bite.

01:30:37
And so the problem with where we are today in the food system is that. It's not that I'm an elitist and it's not that I'm preaching for expensive food. We never should have had food that cheap in the first place, and now we have to unlearn that. It should never have happened. Like, for 20 years, a McDonald's cheeseburger was cheaper than a fruit cup at McDonald's. Just think about that. That's wild. The bun, the beef, the lettuce, the tomato, the sauce, the cheese, fruit cup cut up in a cup. How is it possible? Right, like and obviously a lot of that has to do with the economies of scale, the subsidies, the lobbyists, all that stuff. So we don't have to get into that. But we got used to as a country and not every country got used to this. France and Italy don't do this. We got used to as a country of ultra cheap food and we have to break that mindset Because for some reason, you have consumers today who don't even have much money, like people who are right above the the poverty line and have a little bit of discretionary income.

01:31:47
Basically, anyone who has a smartphone which is 99% of the population, anyone who has a smartphone probably also has a streaming service that they pay for Netflix, spotify, hulu, whatever you name it. They probably wear a pair of sneakers that has either Nike or Adidas on it. Those are 150 bucks, right, they've probably been a Starbucks in the last six months. That's $7 for a stupid coffee. A lot of people spend money on things like booze and beer and cigarettes and soda.

01:32:17
So it's not that the money isn't there, it's that people are making a choice and they're just saying you know what? I want all this other stuff here, but I don't want to spend more than three dollars for what I feed my family, hmm, and we have to break that mindset because that is the most important thing and and when it comes to animal products and it comes to meat Like that should be revered. That should be the most expensive and we should be okay, because we have to honor the fact that we have been hunter-gatherers and obviously we've we've evolved to kill and eat animals, but we also have to honor the fact that we're killing a sentient being and that shouldn't be hyper cheap. Yeah, hmm, and like that should be okay.

01:33:03 - Speaker 1
Hmm, all right, let's just imagine that we fixed this problem. 50 years from now we fixed it. How do you Think that we've solved that problem going from now until however long it takes us to do it?

01:33:18 - Speaker 3
I think it's gonna be a mix of a lot of solutions and this is why I'm not like super against, like I'm not a carnivore, I'm omnivorous. I'm definitely pro animal and I think we need animals to make the whole world healthy and I'm an avid consumer of animals. But I think we're gonna need a lot of solutions and I think some of the solutions that are happening with technology as it relates to farming methods Right like they have developed robotic methods of how to spray safer herbicides in very, very concentrated ways using AI, whereas, like in the past, it literally was like crop dusters, like just on everything they now have the ability, using robotic machinery, where it can, in less than a second or like literally milliseconds, spot where there's weeds versus the plant, spray just that weed, not coat the rest of it, and it massively decreases the chemical load, it decreases the cost, it improves the efficiency and there's a lot of stuff like that that's coming that's gonna make regular, what I call more traditional farming just far more efficient, without chemistry, without genetic modification, without literally playing God. So I think there's gonna be a lot of that. I think the regenerative movement is finally starting to get traction and I think we're gonna see a lot more of that and where I hold out hope is I was consuming grass-fed milk like 15 years ago.

01:35:04
And grass-fed milk 15 years ago was impossible to find and it was also like 4x the price of conventional milk. They had organic milk but they didn't have grass-fed milk. Where'd you go? Amish there was some Amish. There was always farmers markets, right Like. Sometimes it had it ended up being raw like, but you had to find it. It was impossible and somehow it wasn't the crazy people like us, it was regular people who started asking for grass-fed milk. And over 15 years, which isn't that long the availability of grass-fed milk and the price of grass-fed milk has plummeted. The price has plummeted, the availability has skyrocketed. So now you can go to almost any grocery store and there'll be grass-fed milk there and it used to be 400% of the price and now it's probably 40% higher. And that was because of the invisible hand and consumers demanding and willing to pay a premium for it and farmers responded. And farmers are like, oh, I can make more money treating cattle more responsibly and it can be a business for me and the consumers want it and it worked and now you can get grass-fed milk all over the country.

01:36:20
I don't see why that shouldn't be able to happen with foods like Snow Days and foods like Cosmic Bliss and foods like Forza Nature. Like we just need more demand and we need consumers to vote with their wallets and to say I'm not buying that horrific, cheap, industrially produced garbage even though it's cheaper. And I think we have to change the conversation around price versus value. Like you could give someone a lot of calories that has no nutrients. There's no value in that it might be a third of the price of something, but it's no value.

01:36:58
And I think we have to figure out ways to make healthier food that's better for people on the planet. Make it cool, because when it gets cool, people will feel proud, the same way they feel proud to wear a cool pair of Air Jordans. Like I want people to be. Like I chose to spend an extra $3 this week for food that is with farmers that take care of their animals, they take care of their land, they're not poisoning the earth, they're not poisoning me. And when that becomes cool and it becomes like a badge of honor which, by the way, is how it is in Italy and France right now and it has always been I think we really solved the problem by doing that.

01:37:39 - Speaker 4
I loved how you were saying how the value of doing things from a regenerative practice, the energy of regenerative agriculture, is where the value comes from and that product should be expensive. It's like challenge anyone to go out to a regenerative farm and watch the way that. Watch how hard it actually is to produce like a grass-finished animal, how much effort and intensity goes into that. And you also reminded me you were talking about, hey, you spend money on all these things, these Netflix subscriptions, whatever. If you cut back on that, that would free up your budget to be able to buy regenerative meat.

01:38:10
You also reminded me of when you were younger and you fixed your diet. You were like, wow, I'm improving in my job. Like over the course of those 17 years that made millions of dollars for you from improving that performance. So it's like the food itself is a holistic asset. But like I just wonder, like how do we get people to really see that that it really is a holistic asset? And also take it a step further you have the energy when you're in your 50s to play catch with your son or your daughter, whatever. Now we're talking priceless investments.

01:38:39 - Speaker 3
No, it's really hard, and I think to be very compassionate about most people because I've spent a lot of time with people all over the country of all walks of life. We are wired evolutionarily to crave ultra processed, highly developed fat, sugar, salt. All the big food companies are preying on our instincts by creating these things. Like you've seen, the books I mean there's literally been books that have been written about. There's one called the Dorito Effect that are literally about the food engineering, about how they engineer it so that our impulses are to eat it. And that's what we're doing. We're doing it to make sure that our impulses are to eat it.

01:39:28
And the problem with humans is that we are ultimately animals which have animal instincts, and everything that you mentioned is a deferred gratification or delayed gratification concept of I'm going to eat something that might not be as hyper palatable and might not taste as good as the Dorito, but it's gonna make me live better. And I think we're asking people to basically fight impulses and that's really hard. That's really really hard. I mean it's no different than like addicting your whole population to drugs and then telling them to not do drugs, like it's really, really hard. And I think the reason we do what we do, the way we do it and why everything I've done have been what we call comfort foods, or foods that bring people joy chocolate, cookies, crackers, pizza, ice cream, bread.

01:40:22
These are not health foods in the classic sense, these are not salads, but they're amazingly delicious.

01:40:31
And they're amazingly delicious without all the processing and without all the fake shit, without all the chemicals, with far less added sugars in the case of our ice cream. Our ice cream also was 30% fewer greenhouse gas emissions per pint of a Ben and Jerry's. So we're creating things that, if you eat them objectively, you're like this is amazing, and so you don't feel like you're sacrificing. And I feel like the only way we're gonna get real movement in the population is you gotta make people feel like they're not sacrificing on what they love. And as soon as people feel like they're on a diet or if people feel like they're a medical patient, they're gonna do it for a short period of time and then they're gonna be like nah. But if they don't feel like they're sacrificing, and then they realize all the positives that come from spending a little bit more money and remember it's not expensive, it's just expensive relative to what they're used to and that, I think, is also really important to keep emphasizing that, like you can't go to Chipotle and spend less than $13.

01:41:36 - Speaker 1
Like no, you pay the price for that cheap food eventually at some point. And what I love about what you guys are doing is it seems like all the products that you guys are creating are great gateway drugs into the whole way of thinking around, this existing paradigm that you can easily get trapped in because of the hyperpalatability of all these foods. It's so easy to get addicted to the cheap stuff. It's cheap, so it helps your wallet. But if you take a step back and you start to actually pay for some of these higher quality versions of these foods and still enjoy them, then you can get access to the information through the actual experience of eating better and paying a little bit more for those high quality foods.

01:42:13 - Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah and look, there've been many times when we have to convince people and sometimes I'll give them my spiel about how much better the product is made and what goes into it and how we take care of the land or the animals. But usually the way I get people is I'm like just taste it, like let's just do a taste Like. Snow Day's objectively tastes better than Totino's. So if you just do a side by side taste like Pepsi Challenge taste test and I think there's a lot of up and coming products that are better for people in the planet that also taste better the only catch is they're a little more money and I think we also have to figure out ways to encourage people to just try it.

01:42:58
Like, try some Snow Day's, try some Against the Green Pizza, instead of eating Dijournos. Try some Hugh chocolate. This is objectively delicious. Like I don't know anybody who's ever had we had a couple of bad batches over the years, whatever. But like when we have a good batch, which now pretty much everything is, I don't know anyone who's objective, who's ever taken a bite of this and been like that's not good, Right?

01:43:23 - Speaker 1
Yeah, there's something about and I think all three of us will agree on this I'm gonna ask them right now.

01:43:26 - Speaker 4
Should we have some too.

01:43:28 - Speaker 1
All three of us will agree on. This is the experiential aspect of getting healthier, is where the information and knowledge comes from that you can then just apply to your life going forward and be like, okay, I lost 20 pounds or I fixed my vision so that now I can actually not have to deal with these autoimmune issues. Now I know that food is a part of this equation and now I can go apply this information that I've essentially figured out for yourself just by listening to your body.

01:43:55 - Speaker 3
Yeah, well, that's the other thing. That's a great point, which is a lot of people don't wanna believe what I say. Right, because it's inconvenient, and if you're used to a certain excuse me, if you're used to it, it's our chocolate popcorn. Don't choke on my own chocolate on there.

01:44:16
But that's not how you're gonna go. Not many people will do this test, but I've had a few do it for me when I've said, look, I'm gonna tell you what to eat for two weeks and just go two weeks. It doesn't take five months, just two weeks. Just tell me how you feel after two weeks. And that you always get people that way. But it's very hard to get people to drastically change for two weeks. But that's another way to convince people. Like once they feel we had an expression of hue, which is something the effect of the bar for fine is set way too low, which is like a lot of people don't realize how shitty they feel until they don't feel shitty. It's so true. And so when you get them to go on this kind of diet where they're eating more ancestral, less processed, less garbage which, by the way, no caloric restriction, like you could still eat indulgent foods and then they're like, wow, I can't believe how shitty I actually felt. They don't realize how shitty you feel if you've been like that for years.

01:45:16 - Speaker 4
That's the thing. That's one of the interesting similarities that you and I have is like whether it's not being able to read a book because your vision is so degenerated or me like shitting blood 20 times a day. It's almost a blessing in disguise, cause you're like I feel so bad that I'm willing to do whatever it takes to reverse this thing. And then you fix your diet. You feel amazing. You have that comparison. Most people it's that low, consistent bar, so they don't know what it feels like to feel good, which is like that barrier to entry to get them to try something for 14 days. And then, if you're able to get them to do that, they're like damn, I feel like a different person. Why would I go back?

01:45:48 - Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah. And look, there's some little hacks you can do, cause a lot of times people ask me, like give me some rules of thumb, I can't keep track of all this stuff. Like, give me some quick things that are heuristics that I can remember. And you know, one of the original kind of paleo principles is the grandmother test. Like, would your grandmother recognize this ingredient or would she have cooked with it? Yeah, and now you know, 15 years later, it's probably your great grandmother that you would use that example with. But like, that's a very easy thing to remember. Another easy thing to remember is if you don't recognize an ingredient, your body probably doesn't either. That's another simple one. Like, read every ingredient label. Like if there's a lot of weird shit you can't pronounce, like you probably shouldn't eat it.

01:46:36 - Speaker 4
Yeah.

01:46:37 - Speaker 3
Like it's that simple, you know. And then if it's something that you're going to eat a lot and very frequently, here's another one. Like if you're going to eat something every day as a habit, or multiple times a week for a long time and you know it's going to be like, let's say, it's a snack in your office and your boss always stocks the cabinet with that snack and you're like, if I'm being realistic, I'm probably going to get 100 of those over the next year. Like, spend 10 minutes on the website. Spend 10 minutes like who's behind this? Who made it? Why are they making it?

01:47:10
It's just some simple stuff, because people are really diligent with all sorts of things that are much less consequential than the food that they put in their stomach. And it always blows my mind that and this is one of the examples I give to people that there's certain things in life that nobody would ever knowingly go cheap on. Right, you never would go cheap on like a neurosurgeon or a heart surgeon. You would never seek out the cheapest neurosurgeon if you needed brain surgery. You would never seek out like the cheapest helmet for your kid. You never seek out like the cheapest like car seat for your baby.

01:47:49
You know, there's all these like examples where people are like of course, I would never seek out the cheapest version of X, but we do it with food and it's like why? Like that's literally the most important thing that we're putting inside of our body every day and it's because we're used to it, and it's really inconvenient to spend an extra minute being like who made this? Where did it come from? Let me read the ingredient label. And meanwhile, like you'll be at work and you'll get like I don't know something sent to you over the mail about like you know, a fine for $100 or something, and you'll spend a half hour researching like why you got fined or what's behind it, and then you'll just unknowingly just stuff your face with something that could have come from anywhere.

01:48:31 - Speaker 1
Yeah, the mindlessness around food consumption is like it's crazy to watch, but it's easy to see why it it does happen because it is addictive and there are just these pleasures that you get from eating that you know you're not really conscious of. I love your example too, because it also speaks as much as it speaks to like the consumer being like you wouldn't pay for the cheapest neurosurgeon. It also speaks to the industry, where it's like neurosurgeons have a certain standard and I think we think about food in this way, where it's like oh, we can just like race to the bottom and have crappy standards around food. We'll spray this, we'll spray that and we'll get this cheap product. At the end of the day, it's like what can we do to work on both sides of these equations? Raise the quality so we have a neurosurgeon type quality for farmers, but then also have people who are critical of what's happening there.

01:49:20 - Speaker 3
Yeah, no, I look. I think it's also important to let everybody know that like it's not your fault, it's not their fault, like the system is rigged against us 100%. And I wanna remind people of that. You know, and occasionally I'll be talking to people that are really really unhealthy, morbidly obese, lots of chronic disease, you know, and I think there's a misperception that like that's when people see people like that, that it's sloth or that you know it's people who just can't control themselves. And a lot of times it's they're in a position where they can't, they don't have access, they can't afford it, they don't have the information and the system is massively rigged against them and just literally poisoning them because they can't fight the system. And so I wanna remind people that if you're unhealthy, like you just have to get a little educated, realize that the system is rigged against you it's not a conspiracy theory and like you just have to be a little more skeptical.

01:50:22 - Speaker 4
I like that. You have that duality of admitting that the system is rigged, but then you're super positive about the future and give people a lot of really digestible, like easy to follow nuggets to improve their health, and I think that's really what the space is missing. Harry and I talk about this a lot. It's like it's almost like a lot of these alternative health influencers know what type of content feeds the algorithm. So it's like, hey, I'm going to the grocery store, I'm talking about how shitty this product is, and they just do video after video and I'm looking at these videos and I'm like, yeah, but are you actually making anyone healthier just by telling them how shitty this product is? They probably intuitively know that already. Right? Yeah, like focusing more on positive solutions. I feel like you do that super well.

01:50:59 - Speaker 3
Yeah, look again. I think and obviously sound self-serving because I sell premium food products, but I don't do this. You know I've made plenty of money in my life. Part of why I do what I do is full philanthropy, like I could be doing many, many other things that are far more lucrative and profitable than what I'm doing. I walked away from a very, very lucrative career where I had an annuity. I haven't taken a dime out of my business in terms of salary or money of any kind for over five years, and I think it's important that when I say this like it's not self-serving, that you do need to vote with your wallet, and the more, as a consumer, you engage with businesses and farms that do it right, the more it actually spurs innovation in that area and creates the future, and the grass-fed milk example is a perfect example of that.

01:52:02 - Speaker 4
Yeah, it's like Michael Pollan closes out Food Inc, which came out in either 2009, 2010. And it's crazy how relevant a lot of the themes are in that documentary. One of the things he says is it's like a panorama around the grocery store and he's like look, if you don't tell companies or grocery stores that you want the grass-fed milk or whatever the product is, they don't know that you want it. So, like you have way more power with your voice and your choice than you even realize, and businesses will listen to you because they wanna make money as well. And now you have grass-fed milk on the shelves and you have regenerative meat that's starting to pop up. So, just knowing that you have that empowering choice, like, I don't see how you couldn't be hopeful with that thought process.

01:52:38 - Speaker 3
Absolutely. I think I'm very optimistic and you're seeing green shoots and signs in a lot of areas that the younger generations are much more conscientious. They read ingredient labels at a much higher frequency than like my parents did and they kind of care who's behind it. Some of the virality that has been negative in this country. There's plenty of examples of positive virality and I think the more that we shame the industrial food system, we have to be willing to poke the bear and shame and talk about how some of this shit is actually made. It's not just like oh, my stuff's organic and it doesn't have this and it doesn't have that. It's also like let me show you how tortino's is made. And I think we have to be willing to do a lot more of that because it's transparency. If people know how disgusting most of this stuff is made, hopefully they won't eat it as much.

01:53:45 - Speaker 1
Is there a brand that you're most proud of that you've built so far, whether it's with Human Color, with Hugh or Hugh Kitchen?

01:53:52 - Speaker 3
I mean Hugh. I'm very proud of what we did with Hugh because Hugh was so early and it was such a pioneer and we had so many headwinds and difficulties to get it to where it was and now it's the number one premium chocolate in the country. So that was a real kind of Cinderella story of starting with something that had all the everything was stacked against it. You know Sonode's we built from scratch and that was really out of desire and necessity. I have kids. I love pizza rolls. Growing up I love pizza.

01:54:30
You know seeing a lot of my inspiration just comes from like seeing products that are an abomination, where I'm like I can't believe this exists. This is the grossest thing. I can't believe people eat this. I can't believe someone makes this. Totino's is like an $800 million a year business Like that. Just like. I just wanna break that for that. Like, even if I make no money, I just wanna like come up with a better version to just help people.

01:54:56
True Food Kitchen is pretty new right, we bought a material kind of position in it as human co about a year ago and True Food Kitchen is the largest health and wellness full service restaurant in the country. We're in 17 states we have 44 locations. I'm really proud of what True Food is and what I think it can become. It's a delicious experience that has really really high quality, sourcing and very intentional, you know, similar to what we did when we had you Kitchen the restaurant. And I'm very optimistic of what True Food can become because you can have a great meal for a reasonable price where you're supporting all the right people and all the right animals and all the right products and farmers, et cetera, and it doesn't feel like you're eating in like a health food restaurant and so that's very early days, but I'm very proud of what True Food represents and what it can become.

01:55:59 - Speaker 4
You've got this Korean steak dish on the menu downtown. That's absolutely delicious. I think it's like Korean steak and rice or something like that. Jason, what's the best way for people to connect with you? Just to learn more about what you got going on, or if they want to learn more about human co?

01:56:16 - Speaker 3
My handles on Instagram and Twitter are human carp. Everything I do is human. As you can tell, human co brands shows all the stuff we do, and then all of our individual brands have their own handles, and so I would encourage you to check out snowdayscom, against the grain, gourmetcom, cosmic blisscom, true Food Kitchen, and you can learn more about what we're doing. But what we're really trying to do with the human co piece is we're trying to create a family of experiences and brands that all have the same values so that you, as a consumer, if you understand like oh, I like how Jason and his team and human co approaches this and I love cosmic bliss or I loved you. Now you know like, oh, they also have snow days and that has similar values, and so you don't have to necessarily do all the diligence again of like can I trust this person, can I trust what they're doing?

01:57:27
Because ultimately, we want to try to reduce the frictions of skepticism. We want to basically have like this is a safe place. You don't have to worry that we're going to like corrupt and do some nasty shit to try to make some extra money, and there isn't any kind of groups of companies that have one value where you as a consumer can just safely approach every brand underneath it. Like if you go to any of the big conglomerate brands like Procter, gamble or General Mills, like they have dozens and dozens and dozens of brands that some of them are good, right. And like General Mills bought Epic Bar that's a good brand. They also have Totino's, though, right. So like you're not safe.

01:58:11
Like you got to be like oh Epic, is this Totino's, is that? Whereas with what we're doing, we hope for everybody, and certainly your listeners, that we can establish some level of trust that we will never violate.

01:58:26 - Speaker 1
Well, we will put links to all those in the show notes, but just appreciate what you guys are doing and what you guys are building at Human Co. It's very valuable and a ton of people are benefiting from it. So thank you for all the work that you're doing and thanks for coming on the show.

01:58:37 - Speaker 3
Yeah, thank you guys. And for all the all the knowledge you're spreading. It's great. I'm a big fan of what you guys do too. Appreciate it, thank you. Jason.

01:59:14 - Speaker 1
Thank you guys so much for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, go rate us on Spotify and Apple, and also go leave us a comment in our DMs on Instagram or Twitter. We'd appreciate hearing from you guys. And, last but not least, go support our sponsors and our affiliates in the link below. Go support the Fold app, noble Origins and Sacred Hunting, our three sponsors of the show. Without them, we would not be able to do what we love. So go check them out, give them as much love as you give us and until next time, meet Matthew.