The Meat Mafia Podcast

Full YT Episode
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[00:00:00]

The fact

that we

needed to

have

a congressional

Senate panel

to debate whether we should poison our own people is

so f***ing insane. Every single metric is at

all time

worst. Cancer

never been higher

suicide rates

never been higher

obesity rates

never been higher

every year that goes by we get sicker and sicker because we are that frog in the boiling pot.

This argument of

Oh

it can't be done.

It's not a valid argument

and we showed you that it can be done.

and true food

How quickly do you think some of these policy changes can actually get into play?

Kellogg's would change their formulation overnight. Welcome back to another episode of the meat mafia podcast on today's episode. We're joined by our friend Jason Karp we had Jason on the podcast on episode number 234 and Jason's one of those guys that you get in the room and you basically don't need to ask any questions He gets going and it's just a wealth of knowledge.

So on this episode we talked about Senate hearing with people like Callie Means, [00:01:00] Dr. Casey Means, and several others going to Congress and actually speaking on the topic of health and nutrition. they went two weeks ago from when this episode is going to be released and spoke to Senators Ron Johnson, uh, among many other senators talking about how to fix the health of our country in the U.

S. And I think that Jason's perspective on this, just being someone who is an initial invitee to this conference or to this panel was really unique and his ability to break down the incentives that are keeping us sick and the policy changes that need to happen. were incredibly insightful, really interesting, and Jason himself talks about why he was initially invited to this panel to begin with, and it was because he's a business owner and an investor in a lot of health and food products.

Um, he's originally the CEO and founder of Co founder of Hugh chocolate. Um, and now he is, uh, the CEO and founder of, um, human [00:02:00] co, which is investing in all sorts of health and wellness brands that are better for you. So he brings a very unique and insightful perspective to this conversation. And we really hope you guys enjoy this combo because we learned a lot.

And, uh, it was, it was really great to hear his perspective on what's happening in food. And one of our favorite topics of. uncovering the spiritual essence of what is going on in our food system. We talk about God, we talk about the incentives in the food system and so much more. So we hope you guys enjoy.

Jason, welcome back. Thank you. Good to have you back. me. Part two, man. Part two. You've been a busy man. It was a busy week. Yeah. A week ago today was the Senate panel. Yeah. So why don't we tell the listeners, how did that panel come to be? How was that experience for you? I think probably a bunch of the listeners have seen some of those clips on Instagram and Twitter go viral.

Yeah. But I think giving the listeners some backstory on that would be awesome. Yeah. So, um, [00:03:00] The panel was run by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Um, I got a call from Callie Means. Uh, Callie's a good friend now. Uh, Calley uh, and and Vani helped me write my Kellogg's activist letter back in March, which we can talk about.

I think the last time I was on, I hadn't read it. You hadn't filed it yet. I hadn't filed that letter. Uh, K reached out to me and said, Hey, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wants to put together a panel on chronic disease, uh, in the Senate and invite 10 to 12 activists, thought leaders, academic scientists to give a second opinion about how we got here, what's wrong with society, why we're all the sickest we've ever been.

And clearly modern Western medical science is not working. Because if you look at today, [00:04:00] 2024 on, on every metric that matters for human health. in terms of chronic disease, um, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, uh, related kind of mental, uh, brain inflammation disorders like autism, ADHD, even autoimmune disease, and then even getting into the pure mental health stuff, depression, suicide.

Every single metric is at all time worst, all time worst, like never been worse. Cancer, never been higher. Suicide rates, never been higher. Obesity rates, never been higher. And, uh, diabetes, never been higher. And Callie has this line that the more medication that we've prescribed, the worse it's gotten, right?

So, um, all of these advents that we've created. Things have actually gotten worse. And yet in 2024, we're supposed to be the most technologically [00:05:00] advanced we've ever been. We have more pharmaceuticals than we've ever had. We have more medical treatments than we've ever had. And we're the worst we've ever been.

So there's two ways to look at that. The simplest way to look at that is what we are doing is not working. You know, if, if my background is obviously in business and investing, and if you showed me a company where the more money you spent. The worst the P& L got you would look at that as any logical person and say shut it off It's not working And so the expression that I've been using with some people is that our maps of reality What we think in terms of how the world is supposed to work is just totally wrong With, uh, with human health and the data is, is black and white.

Um, and so Ron Johnson had heard the Tucker Carlson podcast with [00:06:00] Callie and Casey. Casey is his sister. Uh, and He was so inspired by that podcast and all the data and stats and facts that they cited on that podcast. And he said, this is totally different from what I'm hearing in my circles as a senator.

And I'd like to have a public forum where we can discuss these things. And so Casey invited, uh, Callie invited me to attend and Callie, Casey and Ron were the three that, that wanted to put it together. They deliberately chose panelists who had different uncorrelated backgrounds to provide different perspectives on different areas.

My role or purpose on that panel was as kind of the businessman investor per person who had experience with public companies and. Uh, corporations because I have a very strong view [00:07:00] that a big part of why we're here. is because of the misguided incentives and misguided regulatory approach that the U. S.

has used for the last 50 years with corporations, where corporations have been solely focused on maximizing profits and bottom line and quarterly earnings. And it's not It's not all malicious. I mean, there's a few companies that I think are malicious and knowingly are harming people like Kellogg's and we'll come back to that and Monsanto.

But I've dealt with a lot of these executives. I've dealt with a lot of these board members over 25 years, and they're just trying to keep their jobs. And if if they make a decision, In their boardroom or as an executive of one of these public companies, if they make a decision that harms their quarterly earnings to try to make people healthier, they get fired.

And, and we can get into why that is, but, but [00:08:00] ultimately it's the investors in all of these public companies If you go back 50 years ago, you knew who your investors were. You could call your investor up and just say, Hey, like I'm going to make this decision because it's better for humanity. But now with all of the giant index funds like BlackRock and Fidelity and Wellington, and there's not humans behind these decisions.

They are just trying to pick the stocks that ultimately drive the greatest investment returns. And if. If you are a company that doesn't have the best returns and there's other comparable companies that have better returns than you, they just sell your stock and they pick the better one. And so there's a, there's a, there's a whole aspect to, I think how this happened.

And it's, it's actually quite analogous also to what's happened with the food industry, where 50 years ago, you knew your butcher, you knew who was giving you your meat. You know, you knew the farm where the cow was coming from. You knew your butcher. [00:09:00] You could see when, when you slaughtered the cow. And you could go and buy it.

Whereas today there's been so much disintermediation that has happened between the end consumer and the people making the food that we have no idea how the food is made anymore. And so it's much easier to hide behind the wizard of Oz curtain. And do really nasty shit and not have the consumer know what you're doing.

Like in the case of factory farmed animals and plants. And so that's how it came together. Um, I decided, uh, for my, uh, the structure was four hours. Uh, I can give you the show notes or the, in your show notes, I can give you the link to the full four hour testimony. I think it was amazing. Um, and each panelist had about.

Six to eight minutes of prepared remarks, and then there was a fair amount of Q and a and back and forth on various topics [00:10:00] and, uh, Vani Hari, who goes by the food babe on social media, who started off as a food activist. She and I have been friends for 567 years now, because this has always been an area that has been interesting to me about how to clean up our toxic food system.

Vani has been tires tirelessly focused on this even before she had a business around it because Once you become a parent and I have two children I have an 11 year old and a 15 year old once you become a parent it becomes much more Mission critical when you start thinking about like what they're doing to our children And, uh, I decided to focus on what I think, and, and certainly what Vani highlighted as well, uh, is a very, very simple, flagrant issue.

In the, in the Senate roundtable, there were many issues that were discussed. I think some issues are more nuanced and more debatable. [00:11:00] But I think the issue Uh, of what I discussed, which is that the U. S. has much looser regulations around what ingredients are allowed in the U. S. food supply relative to other comparable developed countries like Europe, the U.

K., Australia, Canada, Japan. And in those countries, they have, uh, a guilty until proven innocent approach to new chemicals and new ingredients. Where they basically are of the view that they want these ingredients before they put them into their human bodies of their citizens, they want to make sure these are safe.

And so in, in Europe, they call this the precautionary principle and they will test for up to 10 years a new chemical or ingredient that a company develops. They'll test it for up to 10 years before they allow it in the food supply to make sure that it's safe. The U. S. is the exact opposite and [00:12:00] completely backwards.

Where the US takes an innocent until proven guilty approach. Which is called generally recognized as safe or grass Um where you don't even need the fda's approval You could hire if brett wanted to create his own new toxic chemical and shove it into a protein bar He could hire his own i'm not making this up.

This is real. He could hire his own independent experts who submit a like a file uh declaring that this is safe put it in the food product and then the Our fda in the US Waits Until it's proven harmful before they decide to remove it. And there are plenty of examples of things that this happened.

With food and drug, uh, over time, where we went like 10, 15, 20 years later, like, Oh wait, that causes cancer? Oh shit, we gotta pull it out. And the most recent example was trans fats. Um, so, what I said on my panel was, [00:13:00] all of these other countries, And I cited Europe specifically, they have, we have 10, 000 ingredients here that are allowed in our food supply.

They have 400. That's the difference. And we have this approach and this view here, um, that it's helpful for innovation. Which is why we, you know, this is because we're so focused on capitalism here and we're so focused on on creating things that make money for other people that the argument is, is that the way Europeans do it and the way that all these other developed countries do it, it stifles innovation and it's over regulation and we're much more free.

But I believe and obviously the data is clear. Uh, the stat that I cited in the panel is that Europe, uh, has. Uh, significantly less obesity than we do. They have significantly better mental health than we do. [00:14:00] They have five to seven years longer longevity than we do for all other people. Um, they're much happier than we are.

And they spend anywhere between a third and a half on healthcare per person. So on every metric that we care about, they're doing better than we are. And they spend way less money than we do. And so my point to the, to the Senate was they already showed it. Like we don't have to debate this guys. Like they already have a list of banned chemicals.

These are countries that we respect. These are countries that we trust enough to have nuclear weapons. So we obviously respect them enough. If we're willing to let France have nuclear weapons, we obviously don't think they're dumb. And, and, and so my point and Vani's point was. You have foods. Like we use the example of Fruit Loops, which was like kind of a big visual where we showed the Fruit Loops from Canada and we showed the Fruit Loops from the U.

S. The Fruit Loops in the US has four different artificial [00:15:00] food dyes that are derived from petroleum, that in Europe they require cigarette like warning labels that that say on the front of a package if you use these food dyes, it says these ingredients will May cause behavioral disorders, autoimmune issues, uh, and learning issues in children.

And nobody obviously wants to have cigarette warning labels on kids food. So, all of these big food companies, uh, Kellogg's I think is one of the worst violators, but all these big food companies have a different, safer version of the exact same product that our Americans consume here, and they sell it over there.

They formulated it here. In some cases, they make the safer version here. They make it here, and they ship it there, and we, as Americans, are the ones that have to suffer because we get the shittier, more toxic, less safe version here because they make a little bit more money from it. Mm. And so the point, and it was like this sort of [00:16:00] over, when we pulled out the two bags of, of frost of, uh, fruit loops in front of the crowd, because you could see how much brighter, I mean the fruit loops in the US looks like neon and the fruit loops, which is, which is colored with, uh, fruit juice.

The fruit loops in Canada. Is a much more muted color and when we pulled it out and maybe you can clip it Like the whole audience gasped because they were guests. Yeah, it was a mic drop moment yeah, the senator gasped like he could not believe the difference and we um because I was so fed up with this, uh, this is back in march I and my My background as a professional investor was I, I did a fair amount of what's called shareholder activism, where we write letters and try to use, uh, the legal system and pressure to try to get companies to change their behavior.

And in many instances, it works. And even though I no longer run a hedge fund, I wrote a shareholder [00:17:00] activist letter to Kellogg's in March of this year, which outlined everything I just told you. Um, and basically the, the thesis of the, of the letter was shouldn't American families and American children receive the safest and best version of a product that you already make?

Um, which sounds so obvious and, uh, when Kellogg's wrote us back, they basically said two things. The first was, uh, in our consumer studies of children, they prefer the brighter colors. And, uh, um, uh, you're asking kids for something and, and, you know, the example I gave in the Senate was, uh, you know, if you give kids the option of, of taking cocaine or sugar without knowing what's what, like, they're obviously going to pick cocaine.

It doesn't mean it's right. So saying that kids prefer brighter colors is not an acceptable answer. Um, and they make more money off of it and, and it's, it's, it's far more profitable to use synthetic chemicals [00:18:00] than it is to use fruit colorings. And so it was, uh. It was a, it was like a dream come true kind of day for me, because I've been working on these issues for 15, 20 years now, I've been labeled a conspiracy theorist many, many times, people thought I was nuts, most Americans don't know.

that, that big food companies do this. They just think because it's a big public corporation, they have our best interest in mind and they don't. And so that was, uh, it was amazing to get together with a group of people who all have similar fanaticism about helping America get healthier and to address some obvious issues where the facts.

This is not conjecture. The facts are overwhelming that these countries who ban all of these chemicals are healthier than [00:19:00] us.

Were there any other topics that you were thinking about talking about other than the one that you addressed that maybe you considered bringing into the conversation? Oh, sure.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, This panel could have gone on for 20 hours because what, in the opening to my speech before I gave my prepared remarks, what is so counterproductive to this movement has been this, and I was trained as a data scientist. I was trained as a, as a, as an empirical. Data scientists, uh, in quantitative finance where everything was about data.

Everything was about is approvable. Uh, so I totally respect the scientific method and I totally respect science and I totally respect all aspects of using data to justify your arguments because otherwise you don't have anything. However, there are many things that are hard to prove. [00:20:00] Conclusively where there's a preponderance of the evidence, but it's not necessarily conclusive in a controlled study, peer reviewed study kind of way.

And what has happened in the last 25, 30 years is we have become over reliant on these peer reviewed controlled studies. At the expense of common sense and what I mean by that is, and the example I gave is one of the, uh, one of the doctors who studies human brains, uh, said that recently there has been, uh, a bunch of evidence that we have upwards of 0.

5 percent of our brain now has microplastic in it. And. The hardcore scientists who would accuse me of pseudoscience, which is this sort of way to kind of gaslight people to not listen to us. Um, the [00:21:00] hardcore scientists would say we need, we need further studies on, on this. We need further studies. And my point at, at the opening of my speech was, we don't need 10 years of controlled studies to know that having plastic in our brain We don't need that and we don't need 10 years of controlled studies to know that if there is a pesticide like glyphosate that kills every single microorganism and every insect obliterates the microbiome of what's around it, except for the genetically modified crops that are engineered to tolerate this pesticide.

We don't need 10 years of studies to know that if it obliterates all living things, we shouldn't be consuming that because what do you think that does to our microbiome? And this is, I think, the problem of where we are right now, is that you have all these scientists who are not using common sense. And, Europe and, and Australia and [00:22:00] Japan and Canada and the U.

K. They're using common sense and they're saying, Look, we probably don't need 10 years of studies to know that if it's something that's, that's super toxic to all animals and plants and, and insects. It's probably not good. And so that was like a big, big part. Um, and, uh, of, of I think, uh, the panel that needed to be touched on because there was a lot of criticism after the panel for political reasons around pseudoscience and around like, Oh, you, you haven't proven it yet.

But one thing I can tell you, having looked at 20 years of nutritional studies and human beings. Is you can make studies tell you whatever you want and this is why things like eggs and meat have been labeled bad and then good and then bad and then good and then bad and then good because it's very, very hard to do proper scientific [00:23:00] controlled studies on human beings and isolate every variable.

Which you cannot do. It's literally not possible to isolate every variable and everyone has different genetics. And so I wanted one of the takeaways of the panel to be, let's start using common sense about taking care of each other first. And, and if there are companies that really want to introduce a new chemical into our food system, put the onus on them to spend their money to prove over 5 to 10 years.

Thank you. To the FDA or to our American consumers, put the onus on them and the cost on them to prove that it's safe and let them deal with it and don't put it on us to be the guinea pigs. My immediate thought when we saw you speak on the panel was my brain immediately went back to our first podcast where you did the deep dive on your whole story.

And so for people that aren't familiar, this is, this has truly been a two decade long journey for you where you were, Working at [00:24:00] the fund you were going blind reading all these different books. You were so deep in the alternative health rabbit hole because early 2000s vastly different time than 2023 And I think about as a guy that's been in the alternative health field Or even myself with ulcerative colitis, you know, you see these clips and you see the changes On social media, the last three years and people starting to, you know, purchase raw milk and eat more animal products.

And even all the brands that have come out the last few years, you get the sense that things are trending in the right direction, but you never know how tangible it is. And so I think when we were watching it, there was just this feeling of hope of, you know, Hey, maybe this isn't going to just be labeled as alternative health anymore.

Maybe it's just common sense and we can actually reverse this thing. What was the, what was the, um, the feedback like after the fact from the senators? Did you, are there like tangible next steps for that conversation? It was amazing. Incredible. It was incredible. I mean, I, I am so heartened and excited and many of us like Vani.

Uh, have [00:25:00] been and Max Lugavere. These are, these are actually close friends of mine who I've known for years because we all have similar missions. Many of the people were so pleasantly surprised at the reception from so many people. I mean, this was an event that was supposed to be pretty low key. Uh, we were in a room that.

That maybe accommodates 250 people. Uh, I was told that upwards of 2, 000 people showed up for this. And the virality of the clips that went around. And the other thing that was amazing, which, which I kind of knew, but I didn't know to the extent, were some of these things, like the differences in the, in the food regulations between Europe and all these developed countries and us.

There were many. Senior politicians, senior decision makers, staffers, people who work in the government. There were many who didn't know this. And [00:26:00] that was actually really encouraging because the big food companies and the scientists who work for the big food companies have spent so much money. In lobbying, in corporate capture, in actual corruption to try to make sure that we as Americans didn't know this.

I mean, this is something that when I first filed my Kellogg letter, uh, and, and, you know, Vani's been campaigning about this for like a decade. But when I first filed my, my Kellogg letter, the number of messages that I got from moms that said, I had no idea that, that these food companies made a safer, better option for me.

For these other countries and I'm serving my Children. I mean the outrage and I don't know how you can't be outraged by this and and and the, you know, look, I think in in four hours of testimony, there was a lot of stuff that was [00:27:00] nuanced about how to apply it and can people do it. You know, there was there was a fair amount of commentary in the beginning about very strict ketogenic Like full ketosis, only carnivore type of diets, which can be an incredibly therapeutic intervention if you have certain diseases or certain autoimmune issues, but it's obviously not something that is easily done by regular people every day to live and eat that way.

And so that's something that's more nuanced and harder. Uh, or easier to debate, whereas there's other aspects of the glyphosate usage, the artificial food dye usage where other countries are already doing it. In a better way by banning these things. Um, and, and to see so many people and Republican and Democrat alike, by the way, that were were just outraged.

And again, like you see the health stats of these other [00:28:00] countries, right? This isn't pseudoscience. Like you see how much better they're doing than us. Um, and you know, I would encourage you also Uh, to listen to the testimony of Dr. Casey means Callie's sister. One thing she said that really resonated with me and something I've been talking about for a couple years now is she called this a spiritual crisis.

She called this a crisis of basically moving away from the things that intrinsically make us human beings in terms of our workaholism, our isolation. are moving away from the sun, are moving away from nature. And what's so clear from all of my research and all of my studies, and I don't remember if on the last podcast that we might have where I talked about indigenous communities and indigenous peoples and hunter gatherer type of, of tribes who live very close to [00:29:00] nature and many modern technologically advanced Americans would view these hunter gatherer peoples as, as heathens, uh, because they don't have iPhones.

But when you study these different peoples of all over the world, they're so much healthier than us and they, you know, one thing that's important to note because, you know, I've heard all the counter arguments of like, you know, people live longer today than they did 100 years ago. The average lifespan 100 years ago was like 40.

and today the average lifespan is 77. What that doesn't take into account is the difference between acute disease and chronic disease. So acute disease is if you get like a terrible infection in your leg, a hundred years ago you would die of gangrene or they'd have to amputate your leg or you'd have complications with childbirth and the mother would just die.

Those are acute problems. We have done a spectacular job with modern science at addressing acute. medical [00:30:00] issues so that when you get an infection or you have a childbirth problem or you break your leg or you need a hip replacement or you need a heart transplant. We're great at that. But in terms of how we're living, there were plenty of people hundreds of years ago that lived into their 80s, 90s and even hundreds if they didn't have an acute problem, but they didn't have any of our chronic diseases.

And none of these hunter gatherer tribes have any of our chronic diseases. And so there's, there's what I would call population based evidence on millions and millions and millions of people, tens of millions of people. Okay. Over generations that are far more meaningful to me as a scientist or as an empiricist.

They're far more meaningful to me than any peer reviewed, controlled study with 5, 000 people you can conduct. Totally. It sounds like you kind of took the 80 20 principle to the Senate hearing where it's like, Hey, what can we [00:31:00] do? Immediately. Yep. And we'll have the biggest impact and it's really, it's just so encouraging to see how close we could actually be.

Like if Kellogg's were to make, like if we were to enforce some of these changes on Kellogg's and other companies, we could see some of these outcomes start to reverse and that could just be a gateway to so many more things that could change in the food system over, you know, a long period of time. How long do you think that, um, It could take to get some of this stuff like actionable into a bill.

Yeah. Well, the first thing I want to point out because I've, I've now received a lot of, uh, feedback from the testimony. The first thing I want to point out, which apparently wasn't clear enough. is I'm not an advocate of sugar cereals at all, like I don't eat them, even if they took the food dyes out and BHT, which is a carcinogenic preservative, like I'm still not eating Froot Loops, but I do want to meet people where they are, and I know that there are millions and millions of Americans that [00:32:00] eat processed food, and there are millions of Americans that eat sugar cereal, uh, so I'm not an advocate of sugar cereal, full stop.

Having said that, knowing that people are eating it, it is definitely better to eat it without the chemicals and without the synthetic artificial food dyes. It's better to eat it without it than with it. What was the second question? I was just, I was asking how quickly do you think some of these policy changes can actually get into play?

So what I said at the panel, which I think is really important for your listeners, is there's, there's two aspects to this that I think will help us get dramatically healthier. The first aspect is what what I call top down, which is from regulation that by working with governments for things like what goes into our food supply, if they banned all these chemicals, the way Europe and all these other developed countries do.

Or require these very strict warning labels, which would make companies not want to use them. If they did that, then [00:33:00] these companies wouldn't have a financial incentive to use them. Because they can't right now they can and when they're debating like, hey, how do we increase our margins by a few percentage points?

We could use this natural ingredient. Ooh, or we could use this chemical synthetic ingredient, which is deemed safe in the US and it'll give us a few, you know, pennies extra per box. We have to remove the financial incentive for these companies because their incentive currently is just to maximize bottom line.

That's the top down. Unfortunately, I think it takes a long time and we have way too much bureaucracy. A lot of these things are way too politicized, and they shouldn't be, and I want to come back to the whole Republican versus Democrat issue for this. It should not, this, human health and poisoning our citizens should not be a partisan issue, and unfortunately, it has been one.

The, the much [00:34:00] faster way, which I talk about at the end of the panel, is what I call bottom up, which is consumers voting with their wallets. And what I said to the, to the group, uh, on the panel, Is that consumers have far more power with their wallets than we realize and that all of these big public food companies, and I know this because I've studied them.

I used to invest in short them and trade them and everything like that. These all these giant food companies are very low growth companies, but they grow and it's a it's a whole nother story about how they consistently grow, but they grow and they're very sensitive to not growing. And they will react very quickly.

If consumers stop buying their stuff. And so what I had said as kind of a plea to the crowd and I said, I'm hoping that some very high profile celebrities with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of followers are listening to this because [00:35:00] if you have some extremely influential people come out on Twitter, on Instagram, on whatever social media platform and say, Hey, This is outrageous what Kellogg's is doing by selling an inferior, more toxic version in the US I'm telling everyone who's following me, do not buy Kellogg's cereal until they change to use the safer, cleaner ingredients that are in Europe and, and you could engineer just from a boycotting. A 5 drop in quarterly sales. Kellogg's would change their formulation overnight, overnight. I mean, you probably remember what happened with Bud Light with that issue.

And granted that was a different issue and that's a political issue, but their sales dropped 20 percent from that. And it was, uh, it was like, like an apocalypse at that company when that happened. And so I want to figure out [00:36:00] ways in which consumers can band together. And share factual information. This is, you know, this is not conspiracy theory stuff.

This is facts. And I want to figure out ways where consumers can share factual information and basically start boycotting as groups, because if consumers don't buy it and they start rewarding companies who are doing it right, and yes, it does cost a little bit more money to do it right. Um, and we should, we should talk about that as a second point, but the bottom up part.

Can happen fast and what I'll tell you about Kellogg and this is really exciting at the end of Vani's testimony So Vani and I when I wrote when I uh wrote my letter Um, Vani had set up like a few years earlier actually a petition for Any american to put their signature on it? It's it's 10 seconds and I encourage all of your listeners to do this It's 10 [00:37:00] seconds You literally just put your name on that basically says to Kellogg what I have what i've told you which is You We don't want these artificial food dyes and these banned chemicals in our food here.

We now have about 150, 000 signatures on this petition. On October 15th, and Vani declared this publicly, so this is like, Kellogg's knows this is coming. On October 15th, Vani and I are going to Battle Creek, Michigan, to the headquarters of Kellogg's. And there are hundreds of people who have already signed up, it might be thousands at this point, who are going to show up at the front door of Kellogg's headquarters with petitions in hand, uh, and effectively boycott them in person.

And I'm very hopeful, if Kellogg's was even remotely intelligent about this, because this is gonna be a horrible publicity event for them, I'm very hopeful that they come out before October 15th and say, [00:38:00] okay, we heard you Americans. We know that you all want this change. Oh, and by the way, Uh, over the weekend, California just officially passed a bill where artificial food dyes are now banned in public schools in the whole state of California.

And there are multiple states now that are evaluating doing the same because again, the data is, is overwhelming, uh, that these things should not be in our food supply. And if you have a few more states that basically ban this stuff. Kellogg's will have but no choice but to change. If we have the CEO of Kellogg's on the podcast, how do you think he or she would justify what they're doing to customers?

Do you think they would just purely focus on keeping their jobs and shareholder profit? Or do you think that there's a degree of undertone of understanding what they're doing to customers? Well, I mean, I could tell you what their letter said back to me. I mean, they, they were very, very careful in their legalese because this was a letter that I could obviously post online.

Um, [00:39:00] they, they are hiding behind the fact that consumer preferences. prefer the brighter colors in America. So they're, they're claiming it's a preference thing because the kids prefer brighter colors. They will never admit publicly, but this is factual that they make more money by using artificial food dyes than by using natural food colors.

So he doesn't really have a leg to stand on. There is, there's literally no counter argument other than This is what's maximizing shareholder return. Hmm. And it, and it, and it will cost them some money, um, to, uh, alter their production capabilities to meet the amount of, of demand that they're doing in the US to do what they're already doing in Canada and these other countries.

The beauty of this and why Vanni and I picked on it, is because they're already making it. They already have the recipe. They already make it. So they just have to [00:40:00] basically just change the recipe to what they already know works. It's really silly. It's, it's really insane. Like the fact that this is even a discussion is insane.

And the fact that we needed to have a congressional. Senate panel to debate whether we should poison our own people or not is so f***ing insane insane That that's even a like a discussion the theme of your talk was like just let's use our brains here. Yeah common sense. Yeah Yeah, yeah, like if you were like Another if you were like an alien race looking down on us and watching this and you were looking at all of our health metrics and by the way, we're literally extincting ourselves the part that I didn't mention at the beginning, which Casey and Callie talk about are the fertility rates.

I mean, men's sperm counts down 50 percent in 40 years, and women, uh, the, the leading cause of infertility in women is polycystic ovary syndrome, and it's, [00:41:00] it's up to 26 percent of women now. I mean, we are, it's not even like disputable that we are extincting ourselves. And it's just that we're the frog in the boiling pot and it's slow.

So, and it is, look, it's very inconvenient and it's annoying. And, you know, a lot of the, the commentary that came out of the panel, which if you watch the last woman, uh, whose name is Alex Clark, who's very animated and very angry, you know, about what, how hard it is for moms. It's really hard for everybody to live like this because you can't trust anything.

You can't trust the tap water. You can't trust the food in grocery stores. You it's very, you can't trust any of the products you buy in pharmacies. It's very hard to live because you have to look at every ingredient label. You have to ask all these questions like who made this? Where's it from? What's their agenda?

Um, It's exhausting. And nobody wants to have to think about that [00:42:00] stuff. It's just so much easier to just like pull up to a drive thru, order it, not look what's in it, shove it in your mouth, go on your way. Because everyone's busy. Everyone, you know, everyone has families, everyone has jobs. I'm very sympathetic to how hard regular life is.

So this is one of those things where the big food and big pharma and big chem and all the big industries, they rely on the fact. That we are so enslaved as humans. We are enslaved with our day to day bullshit. We are enslaved with how much time we spend on our computers and our smartphones. We are enslaved where we're not asking questions and, and they rely on the fact that we don't have time to ask these questions and we don't have time to change our behaviors.

And so every year that goes by, we get sicker and sicker because we are that frog in the boiling pot. Yeah, it's pretty easy to go pretty dark with what's happening in the food system. [00:43:00] But I think what you guys did was bring in a lot of hope. And what shocks me is there's clearly a moral. Problem at the root of all this it's these big companies have the choice of actually acknowledging the fact that there's They're, you know harming people the products are putting out there or just continue to go down this path And not take any responsibility and the responsibility aspect of it is something that's so easily obfuscated Just through the system that we have in place.

Yeah, how do we actually like hold them? Accountable outside of just bottom line, or is it all just bottom line focus? Like, do we just boycott all these? I mean, look, I think there's a few things. I think one thing that I, I said to Kellogg, which they didn't take me up on. And I know I seem like I'm like enemy number one to many of these big corporations right now, but many of us on that panel are willing to help them.

We are willing to give them advice, we're willing to consult, we're [00:44:00] willing to show them which ingredients to use and not use. I've done this for a few companies before who have been more open minded, where they've asked me, like, should we cut out seed oils, should we not, you know, how do we, how do we explain this, um, you know, should we use this or this ingredient, what do you think?

Like I've talked to a bunch of companies about this and we're not necessarily your enemy. Like we want to help you. And I think they just keep digging in their heels. Another thing that could be done, the reason why I don't have sympathy for this solution, but it would work is most of these big food companies have very high margins.

They make a lot of money. These are not philanthropies. They make a lot of money. If the government said to me, Hey, Jason, these companies aren't willing to do it. And until we make it illegal, they're not going to do it. So we're thinking about creating like a one time, you know, tax credit to [00:45:00] allow them to reformulate and we'll give them a list.

Here's a, here's 50 ingredients that are banned abroad, and we're going to give you two years to remove these and we'll give you a tax credit for up to X, whatever that would help. That would help. And you know, they know it. The one thing I'll say also is, is they cannot play dumb about this because when some of these regulations were put in, in some of these other countries, which were in the last 20 years, they reformulated, they knew it, they changed it, voluntarily they changed, you know, to these better versions so that they didn't have to put the cigarette warning labels on their products.

So they're not naive about it. They know it, but it's too easy to keep going. And what Kellogg said to me is basically, um, until this is illegal, like go pound sand. Yeah. And you can speak on this too, because [00:46:00] you're not just a theorist. You've had so much skin in the game. People might not realize this, but before Hugh Chocolate was Hugh Chocolate, it was Hugh Kitchen.

So you were seat all free in New York in the mid 2000s when no one really was aware of this stuff. And now Human Co owns True Food Kitchen. And this is a true plug. Harry saw this firsthand August. I lost 14 pounds, so I was cooking most of my meals, but when I wouldn't, when I couldn't order or when I couldn't cook, I would order from sweet green and I would order from you guys.

So I would get the grass finished steak, little bit of the Mac and then the air fried chicken tenders. And I would just door dash it right to the place. Cause we're on the East side of town. I didn't want to drive all the way downtown. But that stuff saved me, man. So it's like you do have that skin in the game.

You understand the margins from a restaurant perspective. And we've done it. And, and, you know, the thing I mentioned in the opening of my speech about Hu Chocolate was we scaled Hu to be the number one premium chocolate in the country without using any of the fake synthetic artificial crap. [00:47:00] And so this argument of like, Oh, it can't be done.

It's not a valid argument. It can be done. Yeah. And we showed you that it can be done and true food showing you, it can be done. Sweet green recently got rid of seed oils. They're showing you, it can be done. This can be done. And so that's not an acceptable answer. It's just that it, yes, it is a little easier when you use these synthetics because synthetics by definition are much more homogenous, much more consistent.

Natural food, natural ingredients, anything from the earth by nature is not homogenous and always the same. And as food companies have scaled and wanted to be these giant multinational corporations, they have wanted to have all of their food be identical in every place, in every location, because they think of scaling food companies The same way we've thought about scaling [00:48:00] semiconductors or the same way we've thought about scaling cars or iPhones, but food and agriculture should not be scaled in the same way as iPhones, and we have learned that the hard way.

Yeah, it's, it's very clear you were scaling disease. That's a scale through the food that we're putting out there. That is truly like it's killing people slowly. Yeah. The frog in the water is a perfect analogy. Yeah. So after you guys had your, your Senate panel, there was an article written that categorized you guys as woo woo.

And we were talking a little bit before the show, but I would love to just hear your thoughts when you see something like that, because you can just see the nature of how you guys are all approaching everything. And it's clearly coming from a place of wanting to see the food system change for the betterment of future generations.

Yes. So to see that article actually hit print and make it out there, like I was pretty, I was obviously. You know, expecting anything, but like pretty stunned to see that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, we knew there was going to be some blowback [00:49:00] and there are two reasons for the blowback. The first, and this is something I would also encourage all your listeners.

And it's something that I learned a long, long time ago that I thought made me a much better student investor person is when you're evaluating information from anybody. You have to evaluate the information and ignore who the messenger is. What's happened is, is this country has become so polarized of this, you're either on this side or you're on that side.

There, I don't personally like Trump as a, as a, as an individual. Um, I also don't like Kamala. There are plenty of things Trump has said that I agree with. And there's plenty of things that Kamala has said that I agree with. And you have to be able to, as an objective person, be able to listen to a message or a fact and disregard who delivered it.

And [00:50:00] what happened is, you know, RFK has said some things, he was the main person of the panel, was Bobby Kennedy. And RFK has said some things in the past that I don't agree with. And he said some things that make him seem conspiracy theorist. Most of what he has said, especially recently, is spectacularly accurate and comes from the heart and comes from a good place.

What happened was when RFK, uh, suspended his campaign and said he was endorsing Trump, then everyone basically put the, Oh, now this is a, this is a Republican issue. This is a Trump issue because RFK is supporting Trump. So anything that comes out of RFK or anything that comes out of the groups that RFK is surrounded by or trying to help with, that's a Trump issue.

And so there were the, the woowoo caucus article. Was clearly from [00:51:00] someone who is massively, massively anti Trump and tried to portray all of us as pseudoscience, as woo woo, um, and, you know, we had three doctors on that panel, one from Stanford, one from Johns Hopkins, one from Harvard, like, this is not woo woo stuff, and, you know, Callie, when, when this woman, she wrote for the Atlantic, she And she got skewered.

Like, I would, I would, like, urge all of your listeners to go look at her posts and look at the comments of what people said. Uh, you know, Callie wrote, right back to her, Which specific facts Did you disagree with like, I'd like to meet anybody who objects to the facts that Vani and I presented about the chemicals that are allowed in this food supply versus all the ones that are banned and all these other developed countries to me, it's black and white.

And so I think it is. It is a shame. And [00:52:00] it is a tragedy that this has become such a politicized political us versus them kind of issue. This is a very nonpartisan issue. And I can tell you this, and if you listen to the four hour panel, you can confirm this, not for a one second. Did anybody bring up the term Republican or Democrat in the entire four hour panel?

In fact, we had no idea of all the panelists who were there, who was Democrat and who was Republican. I think a lot of the people there were actually Democrat. Um, and, and so it was a shame that, that people Got very, very angry that this was actually fact based and that it made sense. And a lot of people are so vitriolic right now around anti Trump or anti Kamala [00:53:00] that to try to To to try to kind of stop the momentum of what's happening with the make America healthy again movement.

People are using all of these other ways to try to gaslight Americans and make them doubt the facts that they heard by saying things like, Oh, Jason Karp is not a scientist. You know, he does not have a degree in nutrition. No shit. That doesn't mean that the facts that I presented are not true. And If you look at how we got here and you look at why Americans are so sick today, those policies were all written by people who had degrees from various prestigious places.

Just because you have a degree does not mean it's right. Just because there's a scientific study that says seed oils are fine doesn't mean they're fine. It's the same thing with the plastics argument in your brain. And, and so [00:54:00] there was an article, there was another article today that came out from someone.

And by the way, what's really fun about this and, and our panel, uh, we have kind of like a team group now where we talk to each other about all the stuff that's going on. And when you dig into the background of the Atlantic and who owns it. And who funds their advertising? And you dig into the background of some of these articles that have recently come out that have tried to disparage us or discredit us.

You just follow the money. These places, these people who are writing these articles are deeply entrenched and funded. by Big Pharma and Big Food. And you just have to look at that. And, you know, nobody had on that panel any profit motive. There's nothing that, like, we can, like, benefit from. We're trying to wake people up that we are collectively poisoning each other with the forever chemicals, with the plastics, with the food.

And we have to [00:55:00] stop it. It's fascinating how people were using you not having NMD as like a point of contention against the arguments that you were making, because I would imagine that there are probably hundreds of people over the last two decades that had a similar autoimmune eye disease to what you had that reached out to you.

Yeah, not because you had an MD or didn't have an MD, but you got results just like me with my stomach with ulcerative colitis. People don't care. I literally was reading reddit forums. That's how I yeah and podcasts. Yeah, that's how I healed myself. We care about results at the end of the day. Yeah, I look I again.

I don't want to sound anti science. I think, and again, having done countless hours of quantitative research over decades, there are many things that we can't measure. And just because we can't measure it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You can't measure love. You can't measure loneliness easily. Loneliness is the number one [00:56:00] predictor of early death.

Number one, more than cigarettes, and the definition of being isolated, of being alone, of feeling depressed, of not having love in your life, not having community, that's very hard to quantify in a scientific paper. You know, how you show love to your children. That's not something that you can quantify in a peer reviewed paper.

It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And there are plenty of things that, you know, these hard, hardcore scientists have this view that if it can't be measured, it's not real. And this was, I think we might have talked about this, but this has always been my issue with lab grown meat. That just because we can do a mass spectrometry on the flesh and declare that it looks bio identical.

To the animal and that it has the same amino acid profile and it has the same genetics. It doesn't mean there's things in there that we haven't measured yet. And, [00:57:00] and for anyone who has children, the easiest way to conceptualize this is if I cloned your child and grew that child in a matrix like pod.

Without your nurturing and without your love and without any of that stuff, is that going to be the same child as your child? Of course it's not. And so, I always ask the question of like, what if there's stuff that we're not measuring? And guess what? There's a lot of stuff we're not measuring. And the thing I like to point out to these scientists who are so arrogant and hubristic is that the number one feature every human trial is the placebo effect.

You have to incorporate the placebo effect in all human trials. We have no idea, scientifically speaking, how the placebo effect works. We still don't know. We have no idea. We have no idea of the origins of human consciousness. We have no idea of the origins of human life. We have no idea of the origins of, of the [00:58:00] universe and all planets and the cosmos.

When I was growing up, the Big Bang Theory told me that the universe started 5 billion years ago. Now it's 14 billion. They've changed it four times for me in the last 20 years. We have no idea what the fuck we're talking about. And so like, there's so many aspects of human life and nature that are complete mysteries to us.

And when you see decades of human suffering in terms of our chronic disease and our illness and our mental health illness and what's been happening to humanity, that's enough evidence that what we're doing isn't working. Do you think there's any way to. Re like reintroduce spirit and the soul of what food actually is to us, which is our, our life back into the food system.

Yes. Yes. I think that's a great point. And this is what Casey means talked about. And look, this is a very hard topic for a lot of people because the [00:59:00] concept of spirituality, the concept of God, the concept that there is something bigger than us, the concept that there might be a creator. Um, if, if If you spend enough time as a scientist, and many of the greatest, most brilliant scientists of all time were very spiritual, Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Da Vinci, Ben Franklin, like, the more you study, the more you realize that there is a ton that we can't explain, even Huberman talks about it, like, the more time you spend on the absolute miraculousness of life, And how it works, the more you have to question that we don't know so much.

And there's so many things that we can't measure. The loneliness example is a great one. And, and when you study, for example, all of the blue zones. [01:00:00] And you study all of these, like, subgroups of populations that are incredibly healthy. They spend so much time with each other. They spend so much time in community.

They spend so much time laughing. in loving circles. And we don't know how to quantify that, but we know it's real. And I believe that when we eat an animal, we are absorbing some of that animal's energy and you can call it its soul. You could call it consciousness. There's a lot of different terms for energy and, and science is catching up and quantum physics is all about this by the way.

Um, but if you're constantly eating diseased, sick. Abused animals. What do you think you're absorbing? I mean, just think about it like in a simple way, you don't even have to get super spiritual about it. I firmly believe from everything I have seen and studied that the [01:01:00] closer we get to nature and the meaning in terms of lack of processing, the closer we get to the ground, the closer we get to animals and plants and, and the sun and everything that is intrinsic to the majesty of nature, the healthier we become and the farther we move away.

And the farther we think we can distance ourselves and play God, where we grow our food in laboratories, we don't need actual sunlight, we can use sun lamps, we can spend all of our time inside, we don't need to exercise, we can just put on those vests that vibrate our muscles. Like, basically a lot of what Brian Johnson is advocating, I am not a fan of.

Um, I, I think that is, is completely backwards. And if you do believe there is a creator, which I do, that is not what the creator wants from us. The creator wants us to enjoy and live off of the unbelievable, incredible [01:02:00] aspects of nature that they created for us. We are children of this earth. This earth is a living conscious entity and we need to respect what it is.

And the more we accept that. And, and treat the earth as our mother, I think the healthier we'll become. Yeah, it makes me, it makes me think of, um, Genesis, you know, we're created in the image of God. So if we're eating in alignment with what God has provided for us. Yes. We're gonna be, we're gonna be healthy.

We're gonna be fine. Which is too simple of an answer for a lot of people who have degrees Yeah, around nutrition. Yeah, like very very simply put like that's a very easy compass for people to follow. It's a very easy compass Yeah, and again go study all these indigenous peoples all over the world and they've been living this way for thousands of years and They're happier than we are They're thinner than we are, they have no chronic disease, and there is a [01:03:00] way to take the best of our modern technology and these, and the wisdom of nature that we had for thousands and thousands of years, and then just somehow in the last 50 years, we somehow like figured it out.

Like, this is when we got sick. When we started playing God and we started thinking that we are smarter than nature is when we all have started to become as sick as we are. So it's really an integration of modern technology and God foods that have always been readily available to us. Yeah, I don't think it's that complicated.

Yeah. I really don't. I really don't. And, and, and I, look, I also think there's something to be said about prayer. And I think about appreciation for the bounty and the abundance that we have as human beings. Um, there's, there's actually been scientific studies on people's health and people's outcomes when they pray on their food and when they give blessings to their food.

And you [01:04:00] can look these up. Like, this is not something I'm making up. And, um, I think there's something to be said about having appreciation and respect for what we have been given. Yeah, there's something powerful around just learning how to develop your own intuition and understanding does this certain modality or this certain food, does it make me feel good or not?

And just between the two of us and a lot of our best memories have been sharing meals with the people that we love and when you pray over that meal, that connection to the food, that connection to the people you're with are some of the best memories, man. And it's so simple too. It's so simple. So it's like, I don't even need to see a study.

I just know how I feel when I do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's so simple. It's so simple, but it's really hard for people because we've become such a, such a society focused on pure science. That we've lost our our connections to each other and we've lost our connections to nature and the more disconnected We become the sicker.

We've become hmm I believe that [01:05:00] public prayer over our food could be such a simple anecdote for such a large scale problem Because to me the reverence for food is just such a deep human connection that it's hard to put words To describe To that connection. Yeah. But when you do share food with people and you have great conversation and you're eating food that's sustaining your life.

And you pray in a world where prayer is is so it's it's such a juxtaposition to the world today We're too busy to slow down and actually have that appreciation for food But if you do go out in the public or bold enough to pray over your food amongst other people I think people take notice of that.

Yeah, and we're like, okay, they're praying over their food Like that that's interesting at least like, you know, an awakening happens in small moments like that Well, it just teaches people respect you know that that We take for granted how easy our modern lives are, where you could just drive one mile to a 7 Eleven and just pick up a bag of Cheetos.

[01:06:00] We have lost respect for how fortunate and blessed we all are. And, you know, just to remind your listeners, I was an atheist for 22 years. You know, I was, I was trained as an empirical data scientist. And so I had a long period of time where I only believed in what could be quantified and what was data.

But when I cured my eye disease, and every doctor told me what I did was impossible, like, I am a living, walking miracle that science can't explain. If you Google my eye disease today, it still says it's incurable. And I've met hundreds of people over the last 20 years who have similar anecdotes to me, like Brett.

Where they had something that was supposed to be incurable, or something that pharmaceuticals was supposed to fix, and it didn't. And there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of anecdotes of people healing themselves. with things that aren't [01:07:00] modern pharma. That's not to say that modern pharma doesn't work for certain things.

And again, I'm very appreciative of modern science for certain things, but a lot of our chronic issues are not going to be solved with pharmaceuticals. Ozempic is not a fix for what's happening with our obesity crisis. It reminds me of when we had, uh, Evan Britton on the podcast and he said the best case for why he chooses to eat single ingredient real foods is he said that he feels that it develops his antenna to God.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that you start eating God foods. You change your lifestyle, you heal this incurable disease, and then around the same time you start to believe in God too. No doubt. No doubt. And I think, honestly, I think that's part of our, I think that's part of our epidemic. I think, I think the farther we've gotten away from God, I think the sicker we've become.

And I think we also have a crisis of love and connection. And everyone's just so [01:08:00] isolated and, and it's um, it's hard not to be, you know, just go to a restaurant at, you know, family meal time when there's kids and you'll see every kid on their phones, on their iPads. They're not talking to each other, and I'm guilty of it, by the way, all the time, you know, and we are able to rationalize our enslavement to technology.

With workaholism and productivity, right? It's always for work. It's for work. It's for work, you know, and, and we have glorified the workaholic billionaire who works a hundred hours a week, doesn't sleep, doesn't have a family life, you know, doesn't know his kids. And there's a lot of those figures that we have glorified as something that like we should aspire to.

And It is possible to live a great [01:09:00] life, make plenty of money, build plenty of businesses, and, and still value your family first. And, and I think that if we start to prioritize family, love, and community first, We will heal tremendously, and that's even before we get all the poisons out of the food supply.

Hmm. Are there corners that you turned with your spiritual walk after healing from the regenerative eye disease that you noticed in your own story that was really helpful for you? Yeah, I mean, when I was at my peak sickness, I was viewing everything in my life with a cost benefit analysis. Okay. And, um, and there are things that are harder to quantify.

So I would, I would view things like reading or, or, you know, doing Excel modeling, which was part of my job at the time, or doing research on [01:10:00] stocks. That was something that I could quantify. Whereas spending time with friends. Laughing, even like exercise, I had a hard time quantifying the benefits of it. I even, I even looked at sleep as something that I could shortcut.

And that was when I got really, really sick, was when I was using a cost benefit approach to all things that were hard to quantify. Yeah. And when I started, um, spending more time with loved ones, when I started spending more time on things that were nourishing to my body that were hard to quantify like sleep and laughter.

Laughter is a big one by the way. And play, this concept of play. It's very easy to look at play as something that is only for children and unnecessary. And there've been a lot of studies in recently that have showed that a play in adults is incredibly valuable. Um, turning off. [01:11:00] The, you know, the, the left brain, which is the analytical, everything must be quantified part of your brain and engaging the right side of your brain, which is much more fluid, creative, um, less analytical, has, has shown tremendous benefits for a lot of people, and we have created a culture, particularly in capitalistic America, where we have grossly overweighted our left brain, Where everything must be analysis, everything must be quantified, and, and I think it's, it's not coincidental, um, so yeah, I mean, I, I, I think deliberately trying to find times where you take breaks, where you honor nature, where you honor each other, where you honor love.

Is tremendously helpful for everybody. Yeah, you see this a lot now With men in their 20s where they're watching Alex hormozy or some of these other hustle culture people where it's just focused [01:12:00] on, you know Grinding 80 to 100 hour work weeks doing whatever you can to be singularly focused to set yourself up for financial success And I was noticing like I intuitively know this is wrong and I'm still attracted to these content pieces.

And then we had Mark Sisson on about a year ago and he was like, he's, he looked at us in the eye and he said, I firmly believe you guys can build an amazing company, have an incredible quality of life, great relationship with your wives, future children, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I'm like, you should probably listen to a guy that sold a company for X amount of money and is an incredible shape too.

And you're saying that that's possible as well, especially someone that was so skewed. to one end of the curve and look like, uh, you know, I, I was, I was depressed for 25 years. Despite my financial success, despite all my accolades, I was miserable for 25 years and I hit it because I was so ashamed. I didn't want people to see because on the outside I look like this pillar of success, but on the inside my soul was rotting and, and it took me a long time.

And I had to read a [01:13:00] lot of stories about billionaires who died and, guess what, like, everyone forgets about all these billionaires. Like, they die, two years later, no one's talking about them. And two years later, their money goes to somebody else. It's not your money anymore. Like, you are just a, a loan in your cemetery and no one's talking about you.

And I read all these books about people who are at end of life. And I highly recommend there's a few books about there were some journalists who were interviewing people on their deathbeds. And there's a lot of books on this. And they interviewed all these people who were literally had one month, two weeks, two months to live.

And they asked them these questions like, what do you wish you did more of in your life? Not a single person ever said they wish they worked more. Not one. They all wish they spent more time with their loved ones. They all wish they laughed more. They all wish they traveled more. They all wish they experienced earth.

And the, and you know, the, the glory of nature more. [01:14:00] No one ever said they wish they made more money or they wish they work more. And the trap, particularly for younger males, which is what happened to me, is the, I'm going to kill myself for the next 20 years so I can make enough so that when I get to 40, 45, Then I can start to understand what life's about.

And the problem is 98 percent of the people who do that, if there's very successful financially, They can't get off of the hamster wheel. Very few people truly have the, like, I've seen it a few times where they build something spectacular. They make a bunch of dough and they're like, I'm out. And then they live a great life for the next 40, 50 years.

And what most people do is they develop these skills, which is what happened to me, where you can always make money. And when you think you can always make money, you can never stop it. Because [01:15:00] if you have a number, and everyone usually has a number, like, oh, if I'm just worth 5 million, if I'm just worth 10, if I'm just worth 25, no matter what that number is, you will keep inflating it when you hit that number.

And You'll realize when you spend enough time and I spent a lot of time around some of the wealthiest people in the world, they're not that happy. And in many cases, they're actually miserable. And you're like, wow, I don't want to be like that. Like that guy's worth 20 billion and he doesn't know his kids and he's miserable.

You know, that guy's worth 50 billion. I mean, it doesn't matter what number you pick. And there's a reason why if you study all of the wisest people in history. They all talk about the same things of what enlightenment means, and it has nothing to do with materialistic accumulation. Um, it has to do with understanding that you need to cultivate things inside of you that [01:16:00] can never be taken away.

Yeah, it's funny. The book Think and Grow Rich is like, people read the cover and think that Napoleon Hill is talking about the monetary. Definition of rich, but he's really talking about spiritual richness and relationships and like how that will serve you for your entire life And actually create a lot of unseen things that create happiness and fulfillment in life Um, and I feel like being a younger guy There is a catch 22 In terms of like delayed gratification meaning that you can eventually at some point reach certain levels of success So like that kind of feeds into hustle culture a little bit, but I think there is part of me that's like you have to pull yourself out of that and understand that you can delay gratification.

And build into things that are just fruitful forever like relationships and Um, you know spending time outside like those things are just you know places where you always [01:17:00] find joy Yeah, and look I would say that they're not mutually exclusive And that's really important. I'm not saying like be a monk and and you know and just spend time on your family and live on food stamps like What I'm saying is that there, there's a spectrum and I have met plenty of people who have been able to do it all.

Um, could they have gotten richer? Yes, for sure. I could have been much richer than I am if all I was doing was optimizing for money. I probably wouldn't be here. I probably would have killed myself. And when I recovered from my eye disease, And this was like one of my first real spiritual awakenings, where I, I felt like I was receiving like actual divine messaging that said like, you almost killed yourself, I was really depressed, I was in a very dark place, I thought I was going to be blind, and I was in a, in a position in my job [01:18:00] where the sky was the limit in terms of what I could have become and what I could have made in terms of money.

And I decided it was when I recovered from my eye disease was literally two months later, I met my now wife and I've been with my wife for 22 years. Our 20th wedding anniversary is actually this month. That's amazing. Congrats. And, and I remember thinking, and I was 25 at the time and she was 23. And I remember thinking, If I, if I get involved now and I get married now, this could get in the way of all of my, you know, hubristic goals of, of, of grandeur that I could be and I won't be able to work a hundred hours a week and I'm going to have to have kids and kids are going to get in the way of that and like that part of my brain was still very active and was like, don't do it.

Don't do it. Don't do it. And I had this other part of my brain that was like, yeah. You need to do this. This will actually balance you out. This will [01:19:00] allow you to have a great life. This will allow you to actually find what happiness is, and this will allow you to be healthy. And I did it and I got married very young and my wife was very young and I don't regret it for a second.

And I think, you know, when I interact, um, with people who are extraordinarily financially successful. You know, tens of billions of wealth built gigantic companies, not many of them have what I have in terms of my relationship with my wife and my kids. And there's no amount of money that can buy that. And that is priceless.

And that is what I'm going to remember on my deathbed. And that is what I would encourage all of your listeners who are in the hustle culture is that you can have both, but you have to remember. Like, and I like to [01:20:00] sometimes do thought experiments where, you know, let's just say that, you know, the next COVID comes and it's 10 times as bad as what we just witnessed.

And it's like an apocalypse, right? Let's just say society shuts down, right? Capital markets are closed. It's fucking chaos. Who do you want to be with? How do you want to spend your time, you know, and like, you got to think about those thought experiments because sometimes things change and you know, there's a, there's a lot of things I regret in my life, but making that decision to create a family and cultivate a relationship with my wife, which by the way, has had many ups and downs.

It's not been easy. Like developing a marriage and a family is very, very hard work. And I think it's frankly the hardest work you can do in this life, but I think that's why we're here. I think we are here to bring new souls into the world and to bring new life into the [01:21:00] world and to create glory for our creator.

Yeah, it makes me think of this post that I saw you throw up. Earlier in the summer, I meant to reach out to you and I didn't, but I think it was a post of you and your wife with your little guy, because you dropped him off to maybe like his first sleepaway camp or something like that. Yeah. And like how much that probably meant, because I remember having similar experiences with my dad and now even at 30, I can very vividly recall those things.

Yeah. Where if this was like Terminator Jason, it would have immediately been cost benefit and maybe you wouldn't have even been there. But instead, it's like you're sowing these You think they're small things, but they're actually massive things to your son and they're the most important things you could pass on to him.

Yeah. And look, it's hard. It's really hard. You know, it's, I've had so many difficult times where work got in the way. And I, there have been periods of my life where I've taken on way too much work wise and I've always regretted it. And I just, I think there is a way to balance it. And, um, I think the only way [01:22:00] we're going to mend and heal our American society is there has to be a lot more role models who do this, who show that, you know what, on Sunday or on, you know, in, in, in some religious cultures like Judaism, they have a Sabbath, you know, Friday, Friday at sundown to Saturday sundown, no technology.

I think we would be so much better off as a society. If we had a technology Sabbath, could you imagine if Friday is sundown, if like the government shut off your phones, right? Except, except for just like emergency phone calls, but like no internet, no social media, just 24 hours. You actually had to spend time with each other.

You couldn't be glued to that. You couldn't be thinking about like, You know, what thread on Twitter about productivity should I read? Like, I think a technology Sabbath would be amazing. And I think when you go back to Biblical [01:23:00] days, when you look at why they created the Sabbath, they create, you know, they created it because we needed it.

We needed it. And it was, it was incredible. Uh, it was an incredible aspect of, of life to have that. And I think we need to, we need to create role models and we need to create examples of how we can live in a way that doesn't put pressure on other people to keep up the hustle culture. Yeah. I was just going to say, I feel like the, uh, the wisdom there is just like, it's forgotten.

Um, just that. You know, the seventh day, just taking time to be with people and rest and rest. Yeah. Yeah. And we're all bad at it. And I'm, I'm, look, I work on it all the time. You know, there's always something to do. Totally. And you just gotta, you gotta build that in to your weekly routine of play [01:24:00] and rest.

And you have to view it. As a necessary self care aspect of your week instead of as an indulgence Yeah, self admittedly outside of sleeping the only technology sabbath I get is when I do contrast therapy here Where it's like sauna cold plunge couple rounds Maybe it lasts an hour total and I really try and be off my phone during that period And I notice so many of like the best thoughts feelings Um, even just business ideas come from that or just like feeling truly happy You And I'm like, there's no reason why I couldn't do this for 24 hours.

I feel like a lot of what you've been saying today is the solution is so simple. It might not be easy in practicality, but it is very simple and we all have the power to do these things and make these types of changes that we want to see. Yeah. And look, I think people are craving it too. I think that's why like Burning Man has grown 10x in size in the last five years.

Yeah. You know, and, and I think people are, people are quietly craving this, [01:25:00] you know, I mean, there have been studies recently, um, Jonathan Haidt, the, uh, professor out of NYU, who's been the one talking about how toxic phones are, has gotten all of these parents and schools aware of how toxic phones are, and many, many schools are banning phones now, and what they found is that many of the kids were thrilled that it was banned.

Because they don't want their phone banned, but if everyone's phone is banned, they're thrilled because they don't want that pressure. And like my kids go to a summer camp where they have no technology for the whole, it's seven weeks. Wow. No technology for seven weeks. They can't even bring like a Kindle.

And it's amazing what happens to these kids when they go away for seven weeks and text isn't even allowed. Hmm. And these kids actually have withdrawal. Oh. In the first, like, few days, and then when it flips, they're kids, and it's like, there's a lot of times [01:26:00] that I just wish, like, cause I grew up, I'm a bit older than you guys, and I, when I went to high school, we didn't have the internet, and we didn't have phones, I was the last, like, Year, my high school year, my high school graduation year, 1994 was the year that they introduced the net, the Netscape browser.

That was basically the first year, before that it was like, you know, America Online. Um, but nobody used it because it was the do do do do do do, you know, and, um, And, I mean, I would be a disaster. If I was growing up in this environment, oh my gosh, absolute disaster. Yeah And so I think it's a huge part of the healing.

It's not just the food. It's not just the chemicals I think it's a multifaceted problem um that is both the kind of objective poisoning Uh, and the spiritual poisoning. I think it's both. Yeah, I was just about to say it ties back into what casey brought up Just the spiritual component of [01:27:00] all of it Food technology just our relationship with both of those It's really hard not to see the the good and the evil like obviously technology can be used for so many good things but you know at its core if we have more time just being able to look each other in the eyes and Be normal humans like it's so much better than spending time scrolling the internet Yeah, look, I think we just have to we have to figure out how to use technology to enhance our connections with nature and each other instead of being slaves to our technology.

And what has happened is, is the latter. We have become slaves and we don't even realize it. And we are stuck in our cages and we need to wake up and get out of them. Yeah. Well, For us we get encouraged by becoming friends with people like you that are tangibly making an impact So just appreciate the work you're doing man Thank you for coming back on the show and just looking forward to what is all going to come in the future, man My pleasure.

Thanks for having me guys. It's boycott kellogg. And [01:28:00] yes boycott. Kellogg will be there until they change their ways October 15th look out for it We might have to go to battle creek, michigan Thanks, man. All right. Thanks cool