[00:03:50] Intro: You are listening to The Richer, Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world’s greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life.

[00:04:08] William Green: All right. Hi folks. I’m absolutely delighted to welcome today’s guest, Jason Karp. When I was interviewing great investors for my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, Jason was one of my absolute favorite people to interview. So, Jason, it’s lovely to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us.

[00:04:24] Jason Karp: Yeah, thanks for having me today.

[00:04:27] William Green: You once told me that before you went to college, you didn’t study much, you didn’t do that well in school. You didn’t have a great work ethic and that basically you played video games most of the time, and then something flipped when you got into Wharton and you described yourself to me a college as a hyper neurotic overachiever, and I’m wondering what happened, why you made this sudden transformation.

[00:04:51] Jason Karp: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting from the first time we spoke, ’cause I actually have a little more insight also into the biological kind of basis. So, for my whole youth, I was regularly described as the class clown. My nickname as a kid was Dennis the Menace. I always got into trouble. I realized once I had my own children, that I had undiagnosed pronounced ADHD and still have aspects of it, by the way.

[00:05:21] Jason Karp: But it’s much, much better. And we can go into how I reversed some of that. But, you know, I think the narrative for me in middle school and high school, well I actually got by pretty well in middle school when things were easy. And then I went to a very rigorous, difficult high school where my kind of just being smart and kind of hacking oriented didn’t cut it.

[00:05:45] Jason Karp: And I didn’t do particularly well in high school. And I miraculously, for a variety of reasons, whether it was my tennis or some of my extracurricular activities or some of my testing scores, I don’t know what it exactly was. But I miraculously got into Penn against the advice of all my guidance counselors who told me it would be impossible for me to get into that school.

[00:06:07] Jason Karp: And when I got there, I decided in almost an act of self-flagellation, decided to take on a completely new sport, which was squash, having been a tennis player. And the reason for that was I was very burned out in tennis. I didn’t think I actually wanted to play college tennis. And I had a dislocated shoulder at the time.

[00:06:27] Jason Karp: And the short version of the story is I was taking an econ class that was reserved for the Wharton students. I was pre-med actually when I got to Penn. And because of my athletic schedule, I could not take the College of Arts and Sciences econ, I had to take the Wharton Econ, which had a strict curve on it and also had a caliber that was significantly higher.

[00:06:51] Jason Karp: As good as Penn is as a school, the Wharton School has the highest selectivity of any university in the United States in terms of an admit rate. And I was deeply insecure and sort of nervous about why I was even there in the first place. But nevertheless, I took this econ class and for some reason, econ came to me like a second language. And I still had my old habits when I got to Penn, I didn’t really know how to study. I didn’t really have a strong work ethic. I was just pretty happy that I was at that school in the first place, frankly. And for, you know, I don’t quite know exactly how it happened, but it felt like a miracle. I didn’t really study for the first exam. And when I got the test back, I got the highest score in the class out of probably 200 kids.

[00:07:39] Jason Karp: And there was a kid behind me who was very nosy and looked over my shoulder and said, you know, that’s the kid who got the highest score in the class and pointed at me. And I had never been in the position where I was somebody who got the highest score on anything. And I blushed at first, and I felt unbelievably nervous.

[00:07:57] Jason Karp: And then I felt really proud at the same time. And I remember thinking I had this sort of rush of adrenaline of I’m now at this new place where I’m kind of a new person and I can unweave the threads of my entire life of being an underachiever in kind of one fell swoop. And I could remake myself as, you know, someone who for my whole life, my teachers told me like, if he could only focus, if he could only take it seriously, maybe he could do something with himself.

[00:08:26] Jason Karp: So, I had this deep, deep insecurity and chip on my shoulder that I wasn’t enough. And I used this moment to catalyze me to try to become what I think everyone thought I should be. And that began and flipped the switch, like 180 degrees from going from underachiever to overachiever. And I thought, I never want this feeling again of how I felt in high school, and I only want this feeling of what I have right now to continue.

[00:08:53] Jason Karp: And that was the beginning of my insane kind of overachievement trajectory.

[00:09:00] William Green: It’s kind of dangerous and powerful at the same time because there’s something about that desperate desire. And I speak from personal experience on this front ’cause I have similar insecurities and fears of mediocrity and falling back and the like.

[00:09:13] William Green: And there’s something very fragile about the foundation when you build it on that desperate fear that everyone’s going to think maybe you are mediocre or maybe you were what they used to think you were, or, and yet at the same time it’s really powerful because you’re so, there’s such an intensity to the desire to change and to be seen differently.

[00:09:32] William Green: And so, it explains a lot about your career, right? Like the intense desire to achieve, but at the same time, this slightly fragile foundation that would come back and haunt you later.

[00:09:42] Jason Karp: Yeah. And look, it also marked the beginning of my approach to things as an outsider. You know, most of my adult life has been approaching and tackling things as an outsider, as someone that people said, you can’t do that.

[00:09:59] Jason Karp: You know, here I was a pre-med student taking the Wharton version of econ, which I thought I had no business being in, and based on one data point of the first test being told you’re the best student in this class. And so, for me, you know, I think it was a very powerful but dangerous first lesson for me, you know, as a college student.

[00:10:21] William Green: It’s funny, I saw something on your Twitter feed a while back where you had said, my whole life, modus operandi can be summed up by this one quote, which is the man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the man doing it. It seems like that’s very resonant for someone who grew up with people thinking, ah, he’s not, he’s disappointing.

[00:10:40] William Green: He is letting himself down.

[00:10:43] Jason Karp: I was told I was disappointing for most of my youth, and that, you know, created a lot of insecurity, trauma, chip on your shoulder, imposter complex, all the classic psychological traits that fueled probably many people in your book, and I’m sure we’re going to get into it over the next hour and a half.

[00:10:59] Jason Karp: But for a while, that was an unbelievably powerful source of fuel for me to do things that most people thought weren’t humanly possible in terms of work ethic, sleep deprivation, you know, doing things that just were unthinkable to a lot of people because that fuel had no limits to it because it came from a really deep protective place that was almost trying to prevent annihilation, for lack of a better word.

[00:11:30] William Green: I once had a conversation with Tony Robbins about this, where I said to him, so a lot of my life, I’ve been motivated by this terror of mediocrity and this fear of failure and a desire to show people that I’m not as much of a schmuck as they thought I was. You know, all these kinds of negative emotions. And I said, if I dismantle all of that, what do I replace it with?

[00:11:49] William Green: It’s kind of terrifying.

[00:11:51] Jason Karp: Yeah.

[00:11:51] William Green: And there was a kind of silence and then I sort of said, service and he just nodded quietly. And I think that’s kind of, I do think that’s the secret transformation in some ways is when you shift from being motivated by these very powerful but negative emotions to some sense of, all right, yeah, I’m still a schmuck, but I’m going to try to serve others and be helpful and do something for the greater good.

[00:12:13] William Green: Even though that sounds sort of a little sanctimonious and pious, it actually, I think it’s a powerful switch and it’s something, you know, as we’ll talk about later, it’s something that you’ve clearly done with your healthy living company, where you are serving the greater good. It’s a kind of much more powerful motivation.

[00:12:31] Jason Karp: Yeah, it is. And I’d say in the last year in particular, and we can get to this, you know, I meet a lot of people who have read your book or have followed parts of my career, and they’re in that early period of their, you know, what I’ll call material or extrinsic or externally motivated part of their ascent.

[00:12:51] Jason Karp: And I’ll tell them, I’ll say, look, I might be one of the greatest, and this sounds ridiculous, but I’ll say it anyway, you know, I might be one of the greatest overachievers that you’ll ever meet. I’ll say to somebody in terms of, you know, things that I’ve done that were six standard deviation things, whether it’s in sport or in school or in business or in entrepreneurialism, and yet I’ve had massive mental health issues.

[00:13:15] Jason Karp: I’ve had massive physical health issues, and you have to be careful what you wish for and how you get to it, because what got me here was a corrosive, toxic source of fuel that wasn’t from necessarily a good place. And where I’ve derived the most amount of satisfaction and fulfillment in my life has been in helping people. So, I think that’s a very powerful and important point you make.

[00:13:39] William Green: Yeah, it’s a major shift in the trajectory, but I wonder if in some ways we have to experience this ourselves. We have to go through that period of discovering that, just getting an advancing, making, impressing people. You have to get to the point where you realize, well, that didn’t work.

[00:13:54] William Green: You know, may maybe it impress people, maybe you succeeded, maybe you achieve what you wanted, but you still feel kind of empty and hollow. And so, then you’re like, oh God, so what do I do now? And so I think there’s a, for me anyway, there was a sort of crisis, I think in my early forties. I’m 54 now, where suddenly things kind of fell apart and I was like, oh God, well, how do I rebuild my career and my life on a better foundation?

[00:14:19] William Green: There was like less motivated by fear and a desire to show people. And so, I, maybe this is just part of the trajectory we have to go through, that there has to be some kind of collapse at some point. I don’t know.

[00:14:31] Jason Karp: Yeah, look, I mean, I’ve studied a lot of the kind of wiser older people, you know, and some of whom, like the Buddha go back thousands of years and it’s amazing how the human condition has basically always been the same.

[00:14:44] Jason Karp: It’s just that we have much fancier, newer toys today, you know, and things to acquire that weren’t as available then. But it’s the same arc that humans go through. And I think a lot of it is unfortunately why, you know, why you see this just keeps happening and happening with everybody, is that we’re instinctively hardwired to do this.

[00:15:04] Jason Karp: You know, if you go back to how we evolved when we were hunter-gatherers, or even in the beginnings of when we were homages and like half apes, it was all about procreation and it was all about having like the bigger cave and more food and you know, and like that’s what got the mates and we have this so deeply hardwired into us to achieve and dominate and have power.

[00:15:27] Jason Karp: And I was talking with somebody about this a couple weeks ago. You know, I just went on spring break with my children to Mexico and we went whale watching. We saw these beautiful majestic, giant humpback whales and there was a mom, a baby, and there were two giant male humpbacks following her and she was ready to meet again, and the two males were fighting for the privilege to meet. And yeah, we had a biologist on our boat who was explaining to us, you know how this works in nature. And I knew a lot of this ’cause I love animals and I knew, love nature, but like for my kids to listen to this and they were describing, well, you know, the male that’s bigger, the male that fights harder, the male that dominates, you know, the male that shows he’s the bigger, better, like basically source of continuing the bloodline was the one that would get to mate with the female.

[00:16:18] Jason Karp: And I, you know, as this biologist is describing it to me, it was just like, this is what we do, you know, in overachievement. Like all of this is for the same kind of crap and it’s amazing how it’s hardwired into us.

[00:16:30] William Green: It’s also beautiful. Before I quiz you about your story, your narrative of your career and your life, I would just point out that in some ways the story you just told of being on a boat with your kids, watching whales and learning stuff, that’s sort of the perfect embodiment of what actually true abundance looks like, like that.

[00:16:49] Jason Karp: Right.

[00:16:49] William Green: All the things you were striving for don’t actually match the joy of that kind of experience where you’re learning together with your kids about something really beautiful in nature.

[00:16:58] Jason Karp: Right. Which is priceless, right? That was a priceless setting and scene to see that happen.

[00:17:04] William Green: Yeah. So, it’s funny, so you spend all of these years chasing stuff, then you discover that it was really that sort of experience that you were chasing sort of underneath it all, and the money actually does enable you to get the boat and the guy to guide you and stuff like that, and the time off.

[00:17:18] Jason Karp: Yes, it does, and yeah. And I don’t want to minimize the value of having some money which affords you freedom to do certain things.

[00:17:26] William Green: Yeah.

[00:17:26] Jason Karp: But I think what a lot of people miss, and I’m sure you’ve seen this with all the people you interviewed for your book, what a lot of people miss though is that there’s very marginal utility once you reach a certain level and all the sources of abundance and fulfillment are not solved with money.

[00:17:43] William Green: Yeah. I remember you once, I won’t name this person, but a famous ambassador who you knew well, who had many children and was a brilliant trader, and you painted this sort of, unforgettable image of this guy. Almost as like a junkie, like an addict just sitting there trading obsessively.

[00:18:01] William Green: And, you know, with no relationship with the kids, no relationship with the wives and former wives, you know, but a brilliant trader. And there is something kind of—

[00:18:09] Jason Karp: Yeah, I’ve known many people like that. And, you know, those are people you probably want to give your money to, to invest, but if you could be long, their fulfillment and happiness, you would not want to own stock in that part of their life.

[00:18:21] William Green: Ah, yeah, that’s true. That’s true. And they’re not people you necessarily want to clone and emulate. I mean, I think, yeah, it’s not a great path to happiness and success in the broadest sense of it, but, so anyway, let’s get back to your, the actual specifics of your story. You graduated summa cum laude from Wharton.

[00:18:38] William Green: You came in the top four in your class. You competed as an Academic All-American, an academic All-Ivy squash player, obsessed with learning and achievement for the reasons that we’ve discussed. And then you come out of Wharton, I think in 1998 and you go work for this hedge fund firm called George Weiss Associates, where you ended up spending about seven years working until 2005 and became the youngest partner.

[00:18:59] William Green: So, on the surface, this is a story of enviable success, but underneath this, there’s a sort of more dramatic story of you kind of crashing and burning personally. And I wondered if you could take us through that story in some detail, telling us what actually happened to you and what the price in a way of this hyper neurotic, overachiever mindset was in terms of your body and mind.

[00:19:23] Jason Karp: Yeah, and I didn’t fully know why it was happening at the time. I think with the benefit of time and hindsight, it looks a lot clearer in terms of what happened to me and how I did to myself, what I did. But I was, you know, I was hell-bent on this continued path of overachievement. I got this very coveted job right out of college.

[00:19:44] Jason Karp: I wanted to be great at it, you know, and I obviously wanted to make a lot of money, but I also wanted, I wanted the accolades. I wanted to feel impressive. I wanted to quiet all those insecure imposter demons and I was very good at my job. And in the second, third year of working, I think it first started about a year into it, I had continued to evolve my own different forms of efficiency hacking.

[00:20:13] Jason Karp: And this is before like podcasts and before, you know, four-hour work week was out and all these things. I was really obsessed with how do I improve my efficiencies. And it wasn’t just for business. I was so curious and so interested in knowledge acquisition and I had sort of delusions of my own grandeur at the time because I had been so everything, I put my mind to in college I did, I sort of thought, oh, sky’s the limit.

[00:20:41] Jason Karp: Let’s keep going. And I taught myself how to speed read. I taught myself how to go on less sleep and I started taking a very myopic approach to productivity and efficiency. And if it didn’t fit into my rubric of is this going to make me more productive or better, it didn’t fit into my life. And over, you know, in college.

[00:21:07] Jason Karp: Primarily because like I had an athletic schedule, I was working out, you know, an hour and a half to three hours a day and I didn’t realize how beneficial that was for me. Both mental health and physical health. And then I get into this kind of work hard play hard environment, New York City, 1998, 1999, 21, 22 years old.

[00:21:25] Jason Karp: And everyone’s like, you know, caffeine in the morning, crappy lunch, you know, work till nine o’clock at night, go out for cocktails, get five hours of sleep back again. And I started doing that and then I realized well wait. Like a lot of this is not helping my productivity. So, I’m going to teach myself how to sleep less.

[00:21:43] Jason Karp: I’m going to basically stop hanging out with people because hanging out with people didn’t have a tangible benefit for me. I’m going to teach myself how to speed-read. And so, I started reading. I got so fast at one point I was reading a book a day and that was outside of work. And I gave up exercise ’cause I didn’t see how that fit into my goals.

[00:22:00] Jason Karp: And for a couple months it was working. If your objective function was like, get more productive. And I kind of felt like it was just around the time that Good Will Hunting had come out and I was like obsessed with that movie and I kind of felt like maybe, maybe I could be like him, and which obviously is a fictional character.

[00:22:20] Jason Karp: And I always had these, you may or may not remember, I have a mathematician uncle who was a child prodigy and was kind of like Good Will Hunting, you know, and graduated high school and college three or four years early and you know, just went on to do crazy things in the mathematics world. And I always kind of looked up to him and wondered like, you know, was I anything like him?

[00:22:40] Jason Karp: Could I be like him? And so, I had that kind of fueling me. And then I noticed that I started getting sick and it started with some weird symptoms, and I started developing these rashes on my body. I noticed my hair started falling out in like clumps. And then what was really acute was my vision started to go.

[00:23:00] Jason Karp: And I remember one day walking out of my apartment and at this point by the way, I was sleeping three, four hours a night tops. And not ’cause I was having fun because I was like, I was neurotically reading things and doing things and I was teaching myself how to do these like 10-minute military-style power naps and all for like acquisition of knowledge and productivity.

[00:23:22] Jason Karp: And I noticed walking out in my hallway at like six in the morning that the lights had like kind of double and I noticed I was having a hard time reading and I ended up going to see a few doctors and I was diagnosed with degenerative eye disease that has no cure. And has just sort of like a rate of acceleration that you can maybe control.

[00:23:46] Jason Karp: But they basically said I would be fully blind by the age of 30 and I was going blind, and I had to put my name on a corneal transplant list. And while this was happening, I had all my other health symptoms, the hair, the rashes. I had a few other things that are probably not worth going into, but I felt awful.

[00:24:02] Jason Karp: And yet in what I thought mattered, I just kept bringing up more points at work.

[00:24:08] William Green: And they had no idea what was happening to you. No one sort of stopped and said they were just looking at you like you are Superman.

[00:24:14] Jason Karp: Yeah, and I was ashamed of it because I was like, look at all this shit that I’m accomplishing.

[00:24:19] Jason Karp: I can’t be sick. Like I’ll just ignore it. And it just kept getting worse. And it got to the point where I started seeing some other kinds of doctors who weren’t specialists in vision, and I was really starting to get very depressed because I also wasn’t hanging out with people other than at work. I told nobody about how bad this was, including my parents because again, there was this source of shame like maybe this means that I’m mortal.

[00:24:43] Jason Karp: And right now, I was in this mode of not feeling like a mortal, and I finally, I saw like four or five doctors, they just kind of kept saying like, we have no idea what’s wrong with you. Because I had all these different diseases that like were seemingly unrelated and I was smart enough to realize like, there’s no way, these are all unrelated.

[00:25:01] Jason Karp: And I finally saw a guy who’s more of an endocrinologist, and he did all this blood work on me. He did all those kind of tests where you like run on the treadmill and you know, you wear the mask and that whole thing. And he came back, and he goes, he says, Jason, do you know what cortisol is? And you know, and this is before all this movement.

[00:25:20] Jason Karp: And I said, no, I, you know, and he said, well, cortisol’s, like, he explained it in a very layman-dumb way to me. He’s like, cortisol’s like the sister to adrenaline. It’s your fight-or-flight hormone. And we secrete it and we’ve evolved to secrete it when we are in danger. And so like if a sabertooth tiger was chasing you, you would secrete a lot of adrenaline and cortisol and you would have super strength and super speed, and then it would go away.

[00:25:44] Jason Karp: And all animals have this when they need to fight or flight. But humans have evolved to be able to secrete this in their mind when there’s no actual threat. And people who are very type A or neurotic, or if you’re sleep deprived or if you’re too focused on winning all the time, you can teach yourself how to secrete too much cortisol because it’s like a fuel.

[00:26:06] Jason Karp: And cortisol is the number one excessive cortisol is the number one determinant of kind of early death in people. It’s like redlining an engine is the way he described it. And there, you know, he referred me to this book that was written by a psychologist probably 20 years ago called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.

[00:26:24] Jason Karp: And it’s the same principle of basically animals in the wild and he’s like, I don’t know what you do. I don’t know what you’re doing to yourself. But you won’t live past the age of 40 if you don’t figure out how to get your cortisol under control. He said, you have the highest level of cortisol I’ve ever seen in a human being.

[00:26:40] Jason Karp: And I said, okay. And he referred me to a psychiatrist and said, you should go and really start to sort out like what’s causing this. And I had like real clinical shit that I had to do. I had obsessive-compulsive disorder. I was a hoarder of information. Some people hoard like things. I was an information hoarder.

[00:27:01] Jason Karp: So, if there was information, I wanted to read it, I couldn’t delete emails, I couldn’t throw away magazines or books without reading them. And I kind of realized at that moment like, wow, I’m like really sick. But I was only 23 and I didn’t view it in like an enlightened like way. I viewed it as an impediment to my productivity.

[00:27:20] Jason Karp: So, the way I tackled my problem at that age worked, but it wasn’t coming from the right place. It was like, I need to get healthy so that I can like continue, not like I’m not happy.

[00:27:32] William Green: Yeah. I should beat myself up in a more efficiently productive way.

[00:27:36] Jason Karp: Yes, yes. And I started doing a lot of research. So first and foremost, this shrink, who saw mostly people in their forties and fifties, he said he’d never seen a 23-year-old.

[00:27:47] Jason Karp: He’s just like, I specialize in type A personality, overachievement kind of disorders. And he basically told me I had to spend at least two hours a day on activities that had no observable benefit to me. So, he is like, you can’t watch a documentary. You can’t read a book that’s non-fiction. There can be no objective of learning or bettering yourself in any of this two-hour window.

[00:28:12] Jason Karp: So, it has to be dumb stuff. Watch Sex and the City, play a stupid video game. But if you play the video game, don’t try to beat it like he was very specific. And my girlfriend at the time who also thought I was nuts was thrilled that like this was now part of my protocol and it was really, really hard for me to do that.

[00:28:31] Jason Karp: It was really hard for me to engage in something that was supposed to be for human enjoyment with no measurable, like productivity benefit. And I’m actually probably sure that you have many listeners right now who will understand this, that the idea of having, like watching a dumb movie in the middle of the day feels more indulgent than like most things they could fathom.

[00:28:52] William Green: In some ways, you’d learn to get ahead by punishing yourself. So, all of the reinforcement you’d got had been, if I’m sufficiently mean and tough to myself, I can overcome my attentional difficulties, my lack of focus, my weakness, my imperfection, and then you do all of that, and then everyone congratulates you for it.

[00:29:11] William Green: And then so you get all of this reinforcement of this habit of beating the hell out of yourself, being brutal to yourself. And once that’s worked, it’s very hard to dismantle that and to say, actually no, there’s a better and more sustainable method here. Which actually to have some degree of self-compassion and joy and softness, it’s a very, very hard thing to unlearn, right?

[00:29:33] Jason Karp: It was brutal for me. And you know, I think I had such self-hatred for who I was prior to college, that I did everything I could to not allow that kid to come back. And so, I was brutal to myself. And I had zero self-compassion and I also think now that I’ve been studying a lot of what they call kind of somatic disorders, which is how, you know, what’s, where the term psychosomatic comes from is how certain things in your mind can manifest physically in your body.

[00:30:05] Jason Karp: And there is very strong scientific evidence. It’s not like woowoo, that your body manifests a lot of what is in your brain, and that if you are living a life that is deeply inconsistent with your values or what your inner soul wants, you will get sick through physical sickness. And I think a lot of my physical ailments were manifestations of the inner kind of trauma and fight that I was having.

[00:30:32] Jason Karp: And what I did was I decided, which also worked. So, it turns out that I also had a variety of autoimmune diseases that were effectively epigenetically triggered from all of this immense amount of stress. And if you saw, there have been like kind of several movies that kind of touch on this, but if you ever saw the movie Deadpool with Ryan Reynolds, it’s a fabulous movie.

[00:30:52] Jason Karp: It’s a fun Marvel movie, but basically, they turn, Ryan Reynolds is dying of cancer and he’s a normal person, and they come to him with this sort of promise that they could basically stop the cancer, but they didn’t explain to him how, and they basically threw massive amounts of stress. Were able to kind of epigenetically turn him into a mutant, but it comes with a lot of downside.

[00:31:13] Jason Karp: Like he totally changes how he looks in a, not a good way. In some ways, what I had done to myself was I brought out all these diseases over the course of a couple years through the intense amount of stress and pressure I put on myself, and it was exacerbated because I have some kind of natural autoimmune genetic things where the foods that I was eating made me a lot sicker.

[00:31:34] Jason Karp: Turns out I’m basically celiac, so I can’t really eat gluten. And I was eating gluten like eight times a day. I was eating a lot of processed food. I was drinking alcohol at night. I was drinking caffeine in the morning, wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t exercising. And all of my diseases, it turns out, were linked to the way I was eating and the way I was living.

[00:31:53] Jason Karp: And I went on this almost year-long journey of like trying to clean up my lifestyle to cure my blindness. And it worked and my vision came back and all of my ailments, my hair loss, my rashes all stopped. But I had to do it by giving up all these things in my life that actually brought me pleasure. Gave up alcohol as a 23-year-old single person in New York was very difficult in 1999.

[00:32:20] Jason Karp: You know, giving up caffeine. I loved coffee, giving up processed food, giving up refined sugar, giving up gluten, giving up dairy. I tried all these different things to try to cure myself and a lot of them worked, but they didn’t get to the full root cause of I think what was troubling me. And so, in some ways, while that was amazing and I cured myself, it was a partial cure.

[00:32:43] Jason Karp: It didn’t address the demons that we talked about in terms of like why I was so relentlessly driven, and that was something I had to address many times later in my life.

[00:32:54] William Green: We’ll get to that later in the episode, ’cause I think it’s really critical, the mental health journey that you’ve been on and I love the fact that you’ve always been so candid in our conversations about it.

[00:33:03] William Green: So, it’s an amazing thing and incredibly helpful for other people. But let’s start for now with what you’ve figured out about what was causing these diseases and how by changing your lifestyle, you could take control of your own life, your own physical life. But in some ways, the things that you were discussing really are at the heart of this kind of broader movement that we are seeing in lifestyle medicine and functional medicine where people are starting to understand the enormous power of lifestyle choices.

[00:33:33] William Green: So, can you give us a sense of how, what you were learning then about how to change your own lifestyle is actually really broadly applicable to pretty much all of us, despite our idiosyncrasies in how we process foods and react to things and what our genetics may be.

[00:33:46] Jason Karp: It’s, you know, and now, thankfully there’s so many resources and books and I can give you a bunch for your listeners.

[00:33:53] William Green: Yeah, do.

[00:33:53] Jason Karp: Back then there weren’t many, and you know, back then there was a burgeoning science that was considered almost voodoo. Called functional or integrative medicine. And the idea behind functional medicine is that modern western medicine, which, you know, some people call it healthcare, but it’s really disease care, is what most Western medicine is, which is people come in with sicknesses and we figure out ways to address the symptoms of those sicknesses, but not necessarily the root cause.

[00:34:23] Jason Karp: So, for example, I came in with alopecia. I came in with eczema and psoriasis. I came in with a degenerative eye disease. They’re like, okay, here’s a cream for your eczema and psoriasis. Here’s a pill that will stop your hair from falling out. Here is a vitamin that might be in antioxidant to help your eyes from degenerating further.

[00:34:44] Jason Karp: And doctors all thought they were separate, whereas there were doctors who were pioneers at the time, like Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Mark Hyman who have both written many books on integrative or functional medicine and their approaches treat the root cause of disease, not the symptoms. And they’re like, get processed food out of your diet.

[00:35:01] Jason Karp: Make sure you sleep at least seven hours a night. Make sure you’re not eating like super processed junk food that’s causing systemic inflammation. And so, I had been doing a lot of reading on inflammation, on anthropology and evolution and biological aspects of how the body works, and there was enough science then that most of our problems as humans are related to single causes of things, as opposed to lots of little things.

[00:35:31] Jason Karp: And so, my approach was I’m going to basically try to reduce my body inflammation. And it turns out that even today with the advances in science that we have, and you know, on all these podcasts, people are talking about crazy cutting-edge things, you know, that extend your age by five or 10 years. And you hear about these molecules like rapamycin and metformin, and you know, they’re all talking about Ozempic now.

[00:35:53] Jason Karp: But you can get 80, 90% of the way there in terms of living well to the age of a hundred with like four simple things that we’ve known about for like a hundred years, right? Which is unprocessed food. And that we could go in depth in any of these, which is basically what you put in your body, right? Which food is the most important thing you can do.

[00:36:12] Jason Karp: But that also includes supplements, what you put on your body. So that also includes like pollution, chemicals, mold, lotions, you know, shampoos. There’s so much toxic crap in most products today that you’re constantly slathering on your skin, which is your largest organ, and seeps right into your bloodstream, sleep and stress levels. And then you can kind of dig into stress levels in terms of things like laughter, community, service to others. And when you study Blue Zones and these Blue Zones, for some of your listeners who may not know them, Blue Zones are basically a select group of towns and cities in the world that have been studied by anthropologists, where they have multiple standard deviations, more of centenarians, people who live to a hundred than any other cohort.

[00:36:59] Jason Karp: And they’ve studied these groups and they’re all over the world. Most of them are in Europe, a few in Asia, we have one here in the US which are the Latter Day Adventists, but there’s a couple in, and there’s Sardinia one, and there’s one in Greece and there’s two in Japan. And they all have this kind of common thread of having those variables.

[00:37:18] Jason Karp: And you know, most people get nervous that they have to do all this biohacking to live longer. And ironically, all that biohacking stuff is actually on the margin. If you’re not eating really well and clean, then we can go into what that means and you’re not sleeping seven, eight hours a night. And I was a sleep expert, and it is like one, 100th of a percent of the population that has a weird disorder where they can survive on six hours or less of sleep a night.

[00:37:45] Jason Karp: It’s not like 10% of the population. It’s like one, 1000th of a percent. We all need seven to eight hours of sleep a night every night. Good sleep. And then there’s like a bunch of sort of obvious things that are automatic life detractors that we know are dumb to do, but people still do them like smoking cigarettes, drinking soda.

[00:38:05] Jason Karp: Those will shave off five to 15 years of your life automatically if you do those activities. And so, for me, a lot of my journey was just understanding what it is about these populations. And by the way, not just the Blue Zones, but also there’s a number of indigenous peoples that still exist as hunter gatherers all over the world that have lived this way for a thousand plus years.

[00:38:27] Jason Karp: And they have them in every continent, you know, from like Arctic, you know, to the jungle, to Africa, to US. And they all have the same attributes. And what’s interesting about the indigenous peoples who don’t live with any modern technology, they have no allergies, they have no autism, they have no chronic diseases.

[00:38:47] Jason Karp: So, no diabetes, no heart disease, no obesity. They have none of our modern diseases. Many of the elders live to a hundred. And what’s amazing is that, you know, there’s ones in the Arctic that have absolutely no fruit and vegetables. They eat literally well, blubber and meat. There’s tribes that live only off of fruits and vegetables and seeds.

[00:39:07] Jason Karp: There’s tribes in Africa that consume a shocking amount of cow blood and meat. So, you have vegans, you have carnivores, you have all these different types. And what’s consistent about all of them is that they all eat as close to the earth as possible with the minimal amount of processing as possible.

[00:39:22] Jason Karp: They all prize community. They all prize their elders. So, their elders have a significant function in their society. They all get a lot of movement every day, and they all sleep. And that’s the common thread. And so, there’s just, there’s so much that is not controversial and not disputable, but in today’s modern society, it’s a very inconvenient truth that food and toxins in our environment and toxic lifestyle, sedentary behavior, constant addictions to the phones and the computers, et cetera, no social connection, isolation.

[00:39:56] Jason Karp: It’s a very inconvenient truth that this actually is what’s killing us, but it’s not even disputable and it’s not controversial.

[00:40:04] William Green: I’ve done a surprising amount of reporting in this area because I’m not exactly a paragon of fitness. You know, I, as with investing as Charlie Munger says, it’s simple, not easy.

[00:40:15] William Green: So, with diet and health and stuff, many of these things a simple, not easy controlling calories and or eating better, or not eating refined sugar stuff, like a lot of, it’s kind of hard for me, but at least I understand the principles. But what struck me was when I interviewed people like Dean Ornish, who was famous for his work in reversing heart disease and diabetes and the like.

[00:40:34] William Green: Or when I interviewed Valter Longo, who wrote this book on The Longevity Diet, where he looks at a lot of those zones in place like Italy, where he’s from, where many people lived to a very ripe old age. It was very striking to me. The parallels, the overlaps we’re often left thinking, no, no, that there’s so much controversy and everyone differs and everyone you know who knows, nobody knows what the right thing is to do.

[00:40:57] William Green: But actually, what was really striking to me was just how much overlap there was in what they were saying. And I was particularly struck when I read this book by Dean Ornish called Undo It that he wrote with his wife, that I just, I almost felt like I was reading, you know, Ben Graham, like that it would be the equivalent of reading Ben Graham and suddenly the scales falling from your eyes and being like, oh, those are the mechanisms by which all these things like diabetes and heart disease are occurring.

[00:41:22] William Green: And what was fascinating to me was that he said that basically the same interventions, the same levers that you were pulling on, had an effect on all of these chronic diseases, whether it was diabetes or heart disease or whatever. And he summed it up in eight words, I think, which if I can remember rightly, he said, basically, when I look back on 45 years of my research, it’s eat well, move more, love, more, stress less.

[00:41:46] William Green: This was sort of an example of like the simplicity that lies beyond complexity, right? It’s like when Joel Greenblatt, you know, reduces the complexity of investing to a couple of metrics and says, look, you know, value a business and buyer for much less than it’s worth. And that’s it. I mean, obviously these things are harder to execute, but I thought that was a really fascinating insight that in those eight words you have this idea of, okay, so I got to eat well, so what does that mean? Well, so I got to eat cleaner, right? Closer to the earth. Less processed stuff, more natural stuff. Move more, okay, so they basically see, I mean, you know much more about this than I do, but it was like, basically my conclusion was if I move like 150 to 200 minutes a week, I’m going to get a lot of the benefits of this stuff.

[00:42:22] William Green: And if some of it is intense, you know, but at least if I move. And then it was like, love more. So, community really matters, like having friends, community. And then stress less. So, things like breathing techniques and meditation and the like. It wasn’t like one of those four mattered more than the other.

[00:42:39] William Green: He said they all matter equally. And then I asked him afterwards, you know, I interviewed Matthew, what’s he called? The guy who wrote the book on Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker. And so, I was asking Ornish, you know, what about sleep? And he was like, yeah, yeah. And, and so there’s sometimes they’ll sort of add an extra pillar to their three pillars or their four pillars, but they all basically agree.

[00:43:00] William Green: It’s like sleep, meditation, exercise, community, love, cleaner eating, less processed stuff. Sorry for that long-winded view. But it’s striking to me the overlap, the parallels actually the lack of controversy and certain findings.

[00:43:14] Jason Karp: The way I’ve explained it to a lot of people. And, and it’s the reason why both of the health and wellness businesses that I co-founded have the word human in them.

[00:43:23] Jason Karp: And the easiest way for everyone to remember all this is we just have to live consistent with the way in which we evolved. Because if you think about how we’ve evolved as humans, you know, it goes back 2 million years. Right? You know, we don’t know exactly, but it’s at least 2 million years and for 99.999% of that, we live basically the same kind of way.

[00:43:47] Jason Karp: Right? And it’s rather remarkable how little progress there was until like 300 years ago in the grand scheme of 2 million years. And we were nomadic, we were hunter gatherers. We lived under the stars. We hunted and gathered for our food. We lived in tribes and communities. And when you think about the amount of evolution and the amount of kind of adaptive behaviors that we’ve evolved over that period of time, it’s staggering.

[00:44:18] Jason Karp: And then the hubris of us thinking in the last really, really hundred years, right? And this is reflected in all the data by the way. It’s really reflected in the last 40 years, which is unbelievably scary. That the hubris of thinking like, oh yeah, that last 2 million years, like that doesn’t mean anything. Like we know better, we know better than that.

[00:44:37] Jason Karp: So, like, let’s try to go against everything that we evolved to do. Right? Like we never had processed foods, right? We never had sedentary behavior. We certainly didn’t have devices. Right? We never were isolated. ’cause if we were isolated, we would die. Right? So, we’ve evolved as social species and you know, just some of the stats in the last 40 years are so staggering.

[00:44:58] Jason Karp: You know, and I tell people this, that we are supposed to be the most technologically advanced. We’re supposed to know more than we ever have. We exercise more than we ever have right now. And we’re the sickest we’ve ever been in human history. We are the first generation in recorded human history that is predicted to live a shorter lifespan than the previous.

[00:45:16] Jason Karp: In 1990, there were zero states where more than 20% of the population was obese. Zero. That’s only 30 years ago. Today, there are zero states that are under 20 zero. 42% of the population in the US is obese. 93% of the US is metabolically unhealthy. 93%. 40% of eligible people for the military cannot go into the draft because of chronic disease.

[00:45:49] Jason Karp: It’s a national security threat. All of this happened in the last 40 years. In fact, if you show people videos or movies, if you ever watched movies from the seventies, everyone’s thin. It’s like weird, right? And like you just watch like Taxi Driver with De Niro, and by the way, they’re smoking, they’re eating pizza.

[00:46:06] Jason Karp: It’s not like they were that healthy. And so, I think when people need to remember like, what are you supposed to do. I think understanding like how did we evolve as hunter-gatherers and is what I’m doing evolutionarily consistent or not consistent? And like we don’t have the DNA to deal with all these new adaptations.

[00:46:25] Jason Karp: In fact, the primary culprit to a lot of scientists is what they call abundance. Not in the abundance that you speak of in a good way, but we’ve evolved to deal with the opposite of abundance, which is why intermittent fasting works. And we can go into the science of why that works, but like we would go days sometimes without food and now we have everything we need all around us.

[00:46:46] Jason Karp: And so, we’re not actually stressing our bodies in a good way, which is called hormesis. And our bodies are effectively imploding on themselves and it’s where autoimmune disease comes from because our bodies are turning inward because we’re removing all of the stimuli that our bodies need to actually thrive.

[00:47:05] William Green: So, let’s give people a couple of very practical resources to turn to if they actually want to look into this stuff more, I would definitely recommend Undo It by Dean Ornish. I think Valter Longo’s book, The Longevity Diet is good. There’s a lot of really good research on intermittent fasting. There was a very good paper by Mark Mattson in the New England Journal of Medicine, who’s someone I interviewed about intermittent fasting.

[00:47:26] William Green: And there are clearly a lot of different protocols for intermittent fasting, and even here is one of the greatest experts in it doesn’t seem to know exactly. You know, he hadn’t felt along. A slightly disagree, how many hours should you stay fasted or whatever. There’s variety. But if you were to point people towards the researchers you trust most, the books you trust most, and I know you’re on the board of the Tufts School of Nutrition and have studied this for 20 years.

[00:47:47] William Green: Who would you turn to, who you would trust? Who, if you want our audience have a very science-based, very logical, rational, well-researched view of how to adopt these good practices, what would you suggest?

[00:48:00] Jason Karp: Books just came out actually this month, both by friends of mine who I consider like the best in this space.

[00:48:06] Jason Karp: The first I would recommend would be Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia. Peter’s one of the foremost experts on longevity. This book is a dense opus of his life’s work. Much more, I’d say, for your scientific oriented listeners, very scientific, but grounded in real practical reality. The second book by one of my favorite people in the space is called Young Forever by Dr. Mark Hyman, who’s the famous, one of the original functional medicine doctors. And that has much more, I’d say, practical, easy to kind of adopt learnings. But both books are fabulous. Yeah. Outlive and Young Forever.

[00:48:48] William Green: Peter Attia has a good podcast, which I subscribe to, but never get around to listening to, even though it’s expansive. But it’s very good.

[00:48:54] Jason Karp: They all have great podcasts. Yeah. You know, Huberman has a great podcast.

[00:48:57] William Green: Yeah. Amazing podcast.

[00:48:58] Jason Karp: Hyman does. And there’s like too much information today. But you know, I like to come up with very simple, practical things for people to remember. So, one of the things that you have to remember is your body has evolved to thrive on what I call confusion.

[00:49:13] Jason Karp: So, you want to confuse your body as often as you can. And by confusion, I mean random stressors. Right? And this also goes back to Nassim Taleb’s concept of anti-fragile. Right? Which is, your body does poorly when it has the same inputs every day the same way. So, some days you want to fast, some days you want to feast.

[00:49:34] Jason Karp: Some days you want to exercise three hours. Other days you want to take it off. Some days you want a sauna. Some days you want a cold shower. Some days you want to do both. But it’s the confusion. That lets your body thrive ’cause that’s how we evolved. We never evolved with homogeneity and consistency ever. That’s only something in the last hundred years that we’ve figured out how to do.

[00:49:55] Jason Karp: And by the way, this works with muscle building too. Like they call it muscle confusion. So, people, when you want to really put on good gains, you want to do activities that are very different, which is why they advocate for you to get like real robust, usable strength. You should not be like a marathon runner.

[00:50:10] Jason Karp: You should not be someone that just runs linearly on a treadmill for an hour a day. You should do CrossFit, then you should do treadmill, then you should do tennis, then you should do pickleball, then you should do pushups. Like you thrive as a human being with your diet when you mix it up with your exercise, when you mix it up.

[00:50:26] Jason Karp: And so, I just think confusion is the easiest thing for people to remember to keep it proactive.

[00:50:32] William Green: I think there’s also another really interesting principle at play here, which is that we obviously need stressors in some way for our system, right? So, whether you’re doing weightlifting or you’re studying for an exam, or you are saving for the future, there’s something about the deferral of gratification, about the willingness to take pain now for gain later.

[00:50:55] William Green: That’s a kind of fundamental principle that seems to run through everything in life, whether it’s working hard, whether it’s saving and investing, whether it’s intermittent fasting. You can’t just give yourself everything in the instant that you want it. I mean, I wrote about this a lot in chapter six in my book about people like Nick and Zak

[00:51:13] William Green: and how they basically, they were deferring gratification, their secret as investors was the ability to defer gratification.

[00:51:20] William Green: And they would find companies like Amazon that would defer gratification, that were prepared to not show any profits. Yeah, for many years by investing heavily for the future. Or Costco, which would keep its margins low and keep sharing its scale economies with its customers in a way that creates this sort of long-term success because they’re willing to take short-term pain.

[00:51:42] William Green: And it seems like with abundance of the supply of food, you know, this great privilege of plenty in richer countries, we’ve sort of short circuited this fundamental principle of life. Does that make any sense at all?

[00:51:57] Jason Karp: It makes perfect sense, and I can actually translate it into alpha for investing, which is, again, all of this is evolutionary.

[00:52:03] Jason Karp: The reason why deferred gratification works is because the instinctual impulse is to get gratified now, right? And so, the more investors do something, right, if everybody is flocking towards GameStop because it’s running up, and that is our herd mentality, which feels good. It creates dopamine and it’s triggering our reward systems.

[00:52:27] Jason Karp: Alpha can’t come when everyone’s doing the same thing by definition, right? And so, by doing things it, it’s not that being subjecting yourself to pain is good investing. It’s that recognizing something that will pay off later but is very hard for people to do now is what’s the source of alpha? Because the instinctual impulse is to do what feels good now.

[00:52:48] Jason Karp: And it’s the same thing with food. When we were hunter gatherers and we would go days and days without food, our bodies register glucose, which is a necessary nutrient for our whole body to function. So sugar, we find things like honey and fruit. And when we would find it, by the way, and you see this with animals, we would binge, if we found like a source of fresh fruit, we would binge at like to the point of disgust.

[00:53:12] Jason Karp: And you see this with animals when they find like a bunch of fruit, they’ll just eat it all. But ’cause then they’ll go like a week with nothing. And we would also do this with salt, and we would also do this with fat. Sugar, salt and fat are three of the most important nutrients we can have as animals. And we evolved to crave these things.

[00:53:29] Jason Karp: And now the processed food industry has figured this out over the last 50, 60 years and has made it abundant. And so, we are our kind of animal brain. You know, I use this with my kids ’cause I have to describe to them their impulses. I keep it in layman’s terms, in terms of what I call the animal brain or the lizard brain, which is your limbic system and your thinking brain, which is your prefrontal cortex, which is like the rational thinking part of you.

[00:53:53] Jason Karp: Your animal brain is way stronger than your thinking break. And your animal brain says, I want sugar, I want salt, I want fat, I want immediate gratification. And your thinking brain is like, yeah, we shouldn’t do that. But most people don’t have the willpower to deal with that. And that’s an evolutionary impulse that in 300 years ago served as well.

[00:54:11] Jason Karp: But today is a totally maladaptive response. And that’s the same thing with investing and why the best investors are able to pause that ’cause they’re resisting the impulse, which is what creates the negative alpha and they’re able to delay that gratification.

[00:54:25] William Green: I remember you once telling me an extraordinary thing. I love this phrase that you used where you talked about the pain arbitrage, where there was a company that you owned that you said, look, it’s going to have a terrible couple of quarters, and everybody hates it and they’re all bailing out. Our advantage here is that we are willing to suffer this pain arbitrage to exploit their pain and own it at a time when they can’t bad own it.

[00:54:49] William Green: I thought that was a very elegant phrase and I regretted not actually using it in my book ’cause it’s such a beautiful insight that in some way the trick in investing, or at least one trick in investing is to exploit other people’s lack of emotional control.

[00:55:06] Jason Karp: Yes, very much. Very much. And look, with investing, that’s a noble pursuit. With living like a life, it’s much more difficult. Cause most of the corporations are out there to make money and they are preying upon our instinctual impulses. And I don’t know if it’s pure malice. It is definitely pure capitalism, but most people aren’t educated. Most people don’t have the willpower.

[00:55:32] Jason Karp: Most people, they’re focused on convenience, and so it’s much easier to pick up that Twinkie or pick up that Danish in that street, like food carts than it is to like, make some food at home.

[00:55:43] William Green: When Charlie Munger talks about the importance of understanding incentives, you know, and the fact that very decent people when there are incentives to enrich themselves and keep their own job, this goes for companies as well.

[00:55:55] William Green: They managed to rationalize and convince themselves in many cases that it’s okay. And I think you see this actually tremendously in the investment world as well, where whether it’s brokerage firms or you know, Robinhood or whatever, they’re, all of these ways in which you are handed a loaded gun, you are given the ability to satisfy your desire for instant gratification and the ability in life to defer gratification, whether with the food, the desire to sit and watch Netflix instead of go exercise, or the ability not to sell your stock on trade over trade.

[00:56:30] William Green: That’s a massive advantage in life. If you can, at least once you’re aware of the fact that you are wired to want these things, at least you can start to push against it.

[00:56:42] Jason Karp: I’ve been trying to teach my children this and I think it is one of the greatest life skills that anyone can have, and they don’t teach you this in school, which is really a shame.

[00:56:52] Jason Karp: You know, like they’re teaching all these children STEM today and programming and mathematics and they’re not teaching them basic life skills like executive function and divert gratification and emotional management and emotional awareness. And I think it’s a real shame because I think these are the greatest predictors of life success. Much more so than like how good of a programmer you are.

[00:57:14] William Green: What have you tried to teach them to help them actually to gain control of this sort of instinctual urge to do the dumb thing in the moment?

[00:57:24] Jason Karp: It’s very difficult, you know, and I’ve written down a lot of life lessons you may remember, you know, I’ve always been someone that used to write lessons ’cause I made a ton of mistakes and still do over my life.

[00:57:37] Jason Karp: And I noticed that I remembered them better if I wrote them down. And then when I would see patterns of my own mistakes occurring multiple times. I would realize there was something that was a little bit more kind of deep-seated or pathological, and then I would regularly review my lessons. And so, I’ve taken a handful of those lessons and I’ve put them into a format for them that they can absorb, like for example—

[00:58:01] Jason Karp: And I try to keep it pretty simple, like the concept of animal brain versus thinking brain, you know? And I’ll say like, what would our dog do? You know, our dog would just eat as much chocolate as he could. And as you know, chocolate is toxic to dogs. And it, he would kill himself. And when they’re like, but I just want to eat that instead of that, you know, and I’m like, well, what’s going to happen to you?

[00:58:19] Jason Karp: And what are you going to feel like after? And I really try to teach them the golden rule, which is very difficult for children of like, making them feel like X. How would you feel if they did that to you? And you know, that concept of turning kind of the table and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes is very difficult for young children.

[00:58:39] Jason Karp: And sometimes we actually do role play where I’ll take the role of them, and I’ll have them act out on me just so they can sort of see what it’s like if the roles are reversed. But it’s a lot of self-awareness. You know? I think it’s really recognizing, like if I have a feeling, if I have an urge, if I have a tendency to do something, like where’s it coming from?

[00:58:59] Jason Karp: You know, because I think a lot of people don’t actually think like, where’s this coming from? Like, why do I feel triggered when somebody says something to me that makes me feel bad? Or like, this isn’t something that I should have been triggered by. Where’s that coming from? Like, just kind of digging a little deeper and getting them to talk about it as kids and then getting them to not be ashamed about talking about, you know, things that maybe kids don’t normally talk about.

[00:59:23] Jason Karp: Like, I really feel left out, or I really feel lonely, or I really feel sad when such and such says something to me. And you say, okay, like, where do you think that’s coming from? Why are you sad? You know, and like, and those are the kind of things where I’m trying to build like that muscle in them so that they can be more self-aware, which will allow them to solve problems and communicate better.

[00:59:45] William Green: One of the most practical and helpful lessons I’ve ever learned on this front was from my friend Ken Shubin Stein, who I wrote about in the book I once tried and failed to introduce you to actually, he’s a remarkable guy. He was his fault, not yours. And he was a, he is a really wonderful guy, and he’s a former hedge fund manager and private equity guy who became a neuroscientist, a neurologist, and has gone back to medicine.

[01:00:07] William Green: And he said to me that because he had studied the brain, he’d studied a lot of addiction literature, he said that there are these states in which we’re much more likely to make dumb decisions and slip back into self-destructive behavior. And so, for example, if you were hungry, angry, lonely, tired in pain, stressed, sad, these were great pre-conditions for making dumb self-destructive mistakes.

[01:00:29] William Green: And so, he had this mnemonic Holt PS to remind him of those states. And one of the things that Ken said that’s been very helpful to me is just when you are in one of those states, just slow down and don’t make really important decisions. He said this when he was working in a covid ward at the start of the covid epidemic.

[01:00:46] William Green: He said, you know when I’m exhausted and my PPE equipment is hurting me and my back, he had back injury. My back is hurting. And he had a newborn kid who he couldn’t even see because he had to stay away, and he was living in a hotel. He said, so if I’m in that state and I’m sad and I’m stressed and I’m fearful for my own life, I know that I’ve got to go slow and be really careful to treat people with more compassion because I know that I’m going to be compromised, my judgment is going to be compromised. I thought that was so helpful and practical.

[01:01:17] Jason Karp: It is so helpful, and it is so true, especially with exhaustion and with hunger. Yeah, because you know what I’ve learned, and you’ve probably seen many books on this around willpower and executive function, it is like a muscle, like literally, and you know, if you exert too much willpower over the day, so they also call it decision fatigue, but like it drains.

[01:01:37] Jason Karp: And at the end of the day, you’ll notice that like that pastry looks a lot more enticing if you’re starving and tired than it does when you’re not. And I think the same thing goes with like compulsive gambling and bad investments and bad life decisions. Like it’s all the same stuff.

[01:01:53] William Green: You gave me some fascinating examples of this, responding to, I guess it’s Roy Baumeister’s, research on decision fatigue, where our willpower kind of depletes as the day goes on.

[01:02:03] William Green: And you had all of these practical examples where, for example, I remember you saying that you just tried to reduce the number of decisions you didn’t need to make. So, if there was a choice of restaurant to go to or whatever, you’d be like, yeah, you pick between these two. Or when I asked you like what you did in terms of your clothing and stuff, you told me if I find one gym outfit that I like, I just buy six of them, or you had six pairs of sunglasses.

[01:02:27] William Green: Can you talk about that approach of trying to simplify your life, reduce complexity so that you are less prone to make these dumb decisions because you’re just worn out, you’re in a bad state.

[01:02:38] Jason Karp: Yeah, some people take it to the extreme. I’m sure you’ve heard though, like Obama had the same exact outfit every day and Mark Zuckerberg did this.

[01:02:45] Jason Karp: And I never went that far. And by the way, I have not been particularly good at many aspects of this. I still have far too much complexity in my life, and I’ve been desperately trying to reduce some of it. But I’ve noticed that like mundane decisions that require decisions I prefer making at night. Like, what am I going to wear the next day?

[01:03:05] Jason Karp: I find it easier to just, ’cause when I’m exhausted, I’m not making any real decisions. But like, what am I going to wear tomorrow? Like that’s easy. And then when I wake up, I don’t have to think about it. And so, I’m not taxing that part of my brain of like, oh, do I wear white or black? Do I wear these jeans or that jeans?

[01:03:22] Jason Karp: So, you know, And I kind of have been honest with my wife. It’s been easier since I’ve been out of the hedge fund business. But, you know, when I was in the hedge fund business, you know, there were days I’d make a hundred decisions in a day, and I would be just shocked by the end of the day. And I’d come home, and my wife would say like, when do you want to have dinner?

[01:03:38] Jason Karp: What do you want to have for dinner? Where do you want to go for dinner? What, you know, like, like seemingly simple things. And I would just be like, I can’t, like just stop. And we used to get in like little arguments about it because she hasn’t seen me all day. She fairly should be able to talk to her husband and ask simple questions, but I would be shot.

[01:03:55] Jason Karp: And I think it’s just something important to remember. And they have some really crazy studies on this too, particularly with like court judges, where court judges, when they, they’ve looked at the statistics of how many, like guilty versus innocent verdicts are passed in the late afternoon versus in the morning.

[01:04:15] Jason Karp: And like, you never want to be like a 50 50-coin flip with a judge at four o’clock on a Friday. Like it is staggering. It’s like statistically, wildly significant that the judge’s proclivity to be lenient is way worse in the late afternoon than in the morning. And so, this is just something that is well-documented and I don’t have any real hacks around this other than, you know, if you’re going to be doing good creative thinking, do it in the morning.

[01:04:39] Jason Karp: You know, big decisions, do it in the morning when you’re fresh. Don’t do anything late afternoon where it requires like really hard mental process.

[01:04:48] William Green: I wanted to talk more about the kind of what I would regard as high performance habits that you had to adopt while you were managing Tourbillon Capital Partners, because it was, in some ways you were right in the belly of the beast.

[01:05:00] William Green: This was the furnace, it was kind of, you set up the firm in 2012, I think launched the fund in 2013, ran it until 2018. And for people who don’t know, Jason was like this sort of hotshot in the hedge fund business. And Tourbillon had one of the hottest startups in the history of hedge funds and got over 4 billion dollars in assets and had these amazing returns for the first three years.

[01:05:21] William Green: And then sort of had a couple of bad years, partly ’cause things like Valiant blew up, which you’d made lots of money on before and then went back into, and then it fell and then you quit in 2018 and returned all the capital and started this new life and new business, which we’ll talk about again later.

[01:05:37] William Green: And when I went to meet you, you were sort of in the midst of that. I think it was about 2017, probably when we first talked, 2016, 2017. Probably 2017, and you struck me as almost like this extreme athlete. It was like you’d taken all of the stuff from your early life, from your college career, the desire to outrun and outperform everyone.

[01:05:59] William Green: And it was just this really fast, really intense game and you were trying to manage the stress of it in this sort of almost impossible way. And so, you’d come up with all of these life hacks to deal with the sheer intensity, the emotional intensity, the pressure. And one of the things that struck me when I came to visit you in your office at Tourbillon, in midtown Manhattan was that you designed the whole place so that it would promote better performance, healthier employees, more productive work.

[01:06:27] William Green: Can you talk about how you actually physically structured your environment? Because I think that is actually a really, that’s a very cloneable thing most of us can do.

[01:06:36] Jason Karp: Yeah. I mean, I had been in environments, you know, I think the investment business has historically valued intense hours, intense work ethic, and like zero physical health or mental health benefits, right? You know, the ideas of like Buffett sitting around for 15 hours reading Ks and Qs, drinking a Coca-Cola with his big gut, or Charlie Munger with his Coke bottle glasses almost going blind from reading so much. Most of the best investors that we have prized historically don’t really look healthy and probably aren’t to be honest.

[01:07:15] Jason Karp: And so there has been this emphasis of like work as longer than anybody, read longer than anybody, you know, like, and I recognize because there is a linear in many instances, although it’s not linear, it’s a seduction. But there’s the belief that like the more Ks and Qs and research I read, the more hours I spend on Excel, the more hours I spend, you know, researching things, the more opportunities I’ll uncover, the more alpha I’ll generate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[01:07:41] Jason Karp: And so, it’s this sort of like, it’s this Midas kind of myth of, you know, the more I work, the more I’ll start turning things to gold kind of thing. And by the way, I have that proclivity, which is how I got sick in my twenties ’cause I did the same shit except I got really sick in some ways. That was a blessing.

[01:07:57] Jason Karp: And so, I wanted to design a place that was conducive to staying healthy, both physically and mentally. I put a really nice gym in the office. I put a steam shower, I put a sauna, really good equipment. I put a meditation room and reading room in that has soundproof walls. No tv, no stimuli at all. You go in there, you meditate, you take a nap, or you read whatever.

[01:08:22] William Green: Yeah. With blackout curtains. I remember. I mean, it was totally, totally peaceful.

[01:08:26] Jason Karp: Totally like, yeah, like yeah. Sensory deprivation room. We had a fun room that had a ping pong table. It had like video games, and then I allowed no processed junk food in the entire office, and we would have guests come in and ask for like a Coke or a Diet Coke, and we didn’t even have packets of sugar.

[01:08:44] William Green: Yeah. I remember going into the kitchen with you. You gave me a tour and you had like seaweed and grass-fed beef jerky and this great organic chocolate that your company—

[01:08:53] Jason Karp: Yes, yes. It wasn’t all just seaweed. I don’t want to—

[01:08:56] William Green: Yeah. It was like fruit bars with no additives, right? And you had, I remember you were drinking like, you know, sparkling highland water, you know, like, and you were such a maniac that if someone brought in a soda, you would literally throw it away.

[01:09:14] Jason Karp: Correct, correct. There were multiple times that someone, we had a couple times where we had a new employee who didn’t fully know the rules and they’d bring in like a box of Frosted Flakes and I’d just walk over and just throw it in the trash and there’d be no discussion.

[01:09:27] Jason Karp: Like, you know, people that, you know, people thought like I was insane. And obviously I wasn’t insane, but it was in good humor. Like it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t like, I was just like, mean about it. And you know, we had one particular analyst who was very unhealthy, very overweight, had a number of health issues.

[01:09:45] Jason Karp: And I really don’t try to, push this on people unless they ask for it. ’cause you know I think for a lot of people they have to want to get healthier. And he, you know, he came to me one day and he basically said like, I need to get healthier. Like I’m really, really unhealthy. And he looked really unhealthy and over the course of, I mean six, seven months, like he lost a staggering amount of weight and was like almost unrecognizable and got so much healthier.

[01:10:11] Jason Karp: And there were multiple people in our firm who came in, you know, not so healthy and got much healthier and would come to me afterwards and say, and not only do I look better, which is like the easy to observe part of it, they feel better, they sleep better, they actually perform better. Which is like if you’re a productivity person, like at the most important part, like you can read longer, you can absorb more, you can sleep less like.

[01:10:34] Jason Karp: And so, I was really, really happy to help those people because that’s a life.

[01:10:40] William Green: For me, one of the things that really changed, sorry to interrupt you, but it really helped me during Covid where I’d done so much of this research by interviewing people like Valter Longo and Dean Ornish and these sort of experts on diet and nutrition.

[01:10:52] William Green: And I just thought, I don’t really have, it gets back to stoicism, like focusing on what you can and can’t control. I was like, I don’t have any control over the variants of Covid, anything like that, but I can see that if I’m really heavy and really sedentary, I’m much more vulnerable to all of these different diseases.

[01:11:10] William Green: So, I know that I can reduce my vulnerability to covid, my vulnerability to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, all of these things, high cholesterol by exercising more and improving my diet. And I was living with my kids as well at the time, and I wanted to be a decent example to my son in part. You know, who has the same proclivities as me to sit around and just read and think—

[01:11:33] Jason Karp: We all do, by the way. Like, we really do like the people who listened to this and read your book, like we’re all wired that same way. You know, so it’s hard.

[01:11:43] William Green: But I think having A, the knowledge was really helpful of how it would help me in all of these different ways. But also, B, having the incentive of wanting to model good behavior for my kids.

[01:11:54] William Green: That was huge. That kind of actually overcame a lot of my own resistance ’cause there was stuff that I wouldn’t do for myself that I would do for them. And so, we got a Peloton in the house and I got weirdly obsessed with it. And then my kids did. And then when my son graduated from college and moved into his own apartment in New York City, one of the great joys was he bought his own Peloton.

[01:12:15] William Green: And it was such a joy to see that if you modeled good behavior yourself, it sort of helps everyone around you. Whether it’s your employees, your colleagues, your kids. Can you talk a bit about that? ‘Cause that for me was just, that was a huge help.

[01:12:31] Jason Karp: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we try our best to model good behavior to our children.

[01:12:35] Jason Karp: You know, I think for me, because I was so sick and I felt so sick and I had, I mean, I literally thought I was dying when I was 23. That was such a terror and trauma for me that it was very clear and motivating that I never wanted to go back there. The problem for most of humanity, because I’m more like a canary in the coal mine, where I just get sicker faster from these things than most people do, but everyone gets sick.

[01:13:01] Jason Karp: As is clear from the data is that it’s kind of like global warming for most people. It’s like not a right now problem. You know, like you put on a little weight every year. You feel a little shitier every year. You start going to the doctor more every year, but like, you don’t like to wake up and you’re like going blind like I did.

[01:13:17] Jason Karp: Like that doesn’t happen to most people. And I think for my children is it’s all about creating early habits because habits are really hard to change. And the other thing that very few people talk about, and I don’t want to go too deep into this ’cause it’s a controversial topic and you’re hearing a lot of pushback on it recently, but in the last few years there’s been this sort of concept that’s been connected to some of the woke movement called body positivity, where there’s been a lot of over acceptance of unhealthy behaviors and they’re trying to make it more about like, it’s okay if you’re 50 pounds overweight and like, that’s just what you look like and that’s just how you were born.

[01:13:56] Jason Karp: There’s one thing, of course, everyone has different shapes. Every, you know, everyone has different kind of normal evolutionary weights. That’s true. But if you’re 50 pounds overweight, which is something that’s objectively measurable, it creates the beginnings of all of the most problematic diseases that we know about with certainty, by the way, not like probabilistically like certainty, it’s just when.

[01:14:18] Jason Karp: And I think for people who listen to your podcast, one of the worst that scares me and scares people who are like us is dementia. You know, they now call in many scientific communities. Alzheimer’s is type three diabetes, and there is a very, very strong correlation between processed food and how you eat and your weight and whether you’re going to develop dementia or not.

[01:14:39] Jason Karp: And I think it’s really important to develop early habits because the other thing they don’t really teach you, and I’m sure you’ve seen it, but when you get fat, and let’s just call it very overweight, let’s not use the word fat, let’s call it very overweight. So more than 20, 30 pounds over what is considered kind of like metabolically healthy, it becomes much harder to stay thin.

[01:15:01] Jason Karp: And that is a biological fact of how your adipose cells multiply. When you get fatter, your fat cells increase in size, and they multiply. As your body starts taking in more glucose and fatter and more insulin, and then when you get thin again, the fat cells shrink. But the number of adipose cells don’t fully go back to where they were.

[01:15:21] Jason Karp: So, you have, as a thin person who was fat, you have more adipose cells than a thin person who was never fat. And that is going to set you up on a life of yo-yo dieting and make it much harder for you, for the rest of your life to stay thin. And that is something that I think is really important to teach children young because it’s, you’re going to make your life so much harder for the rest of your life if you allow yourself to do that.

[01:15:45] Jason Karp: And the answer is not all of these shortcut weight loss drugs that you’re hearing about, which have loads of side effects. So, I think teaching habits young and modeling good behavior is really important. And I just think like we’re in this weird moment in time where we’re happy to talk about like, you shouldn’t smoke cigarettes ’cause they’re going to give you cancer.

[01:16:04] Jason Karp: But like people are afraid to say to people like, being 40, 50, 60 pounds overweight is really unhealthy for you.

[01:16:10] William Green: I think there’s so much shame and self-hatred and there’s been too much emphasis on the aesthetics of these things. And so in some ways there’s been a reaction against that.

[01:16:21] William Green: But I think it’s helpful if you don’t think of it in terms of the aesthetics. And you think of it in terms of—

[01:16:26] Jason Karp: You think about it as health, as physical health.

[01:16:27] William Green: Yeah, just feeling better and, you know, I’m no great role model in this area. It’s always been a struggle for me. But one of the things that was striking to me was that when I started to exercise regularly, I discovered that a lot of my existential angst and worry, just generalized anxiety about life kind of dissipated, and my mood just got better.

[01:16:47] William Green: And it was like, here I was thinking that I was like this profound, deep thinker, and it was like, no, all of those problems were actually just, you know, tamed by exercising more and meditating more. And here I was, you know, it was kind of shockingly banal, but incredibly profound to see the difference that just getting on the peloton several times a week made to my mood.

[01:17:08] William Green: Can you talk about your mental health journey? Because I think one of the things that was extraordinary to me, given the level of success that you’d had at, to beyond the fact that, you know, as you said to me at one point, look, I’ve earned enough money that I could retire many times over. But you said to me, look, it always felt a bit hollow.

[01:17:25] William Green: I felt my soul was decaying. And you’ve been very open about the fact that it wasn’t, it was kind of a great morality tale about like the degree to which all of the accolades you dreamed of and all of the influence and fame and success and money and toys and bobbles didn’t really do it for you. Can you talk about that process of becoming, kind of disillusioned, getting depressed at Tourbillon and that being a prelude to you quitting and going in this new direction of creating a kind of more mission-driven company?

[01:17:57] Jason Karp: Yeah. You know, it happened to me many times over my career. You know, where I had these, you know, I’ve struggled with mental health and depression since I was probably 14 or 15. And it was really bad when I was sick the first time when I was 23, I had like a few relapse periods along the way, and by the way, I was always very ashamed of this and didn’t really talk about it because, you know, some of it was I wanted to feel strong and like macho and sort of classic patriarchal, you know, like alpha male.

[01:18:32] Jason Karp: And some of it was also that I did have a lot of optical superficial success. And I had tried to be vulnerable a few times with some people who were the wrong people, where I basically got the message of like, how dare you talk about that? You’re like, sad when you have this and you have that, and there’s people who are starving and there’s, you know, and I would get a lot of shame and guilt from people who I tried to talk about if I was going through some challenges.

[01:19:00] Jason Karp: And that taught me a very bad lesson of like, it’s not okay to talk about it. And if you’re more fortunate. And of course, I was super blessed with the family I was born into and the college I went to. And, you know, the fact that I was born white and the fact that I had two parents and I understand all those things, but they, you know, I had real suicidal depression multiple times and I was too ashamed to seek help about it or to talk to people about, And I always kind of thought like, well, if I got that next toy or that next accolade or that next victory, like maybe it’ll go away.

[01:19:37] Jason Karp: And so, I was on this ascent in my hedge fund career where, you know, I went from smaller hedge fund to bigger hedge fund to bigger hedge fund and bigger job to finally starting my own hedge fund. And then in 2015 was our peak year of Tourbillon where we won best new manager of the year. So basically, best new hedge fund of the year.

[01:19:57] Jason Karp: We had peaked at like four and a half billion in assets. We had three, you know, 99th percentile returns in terms of alpha. I was like written up many times in the press as being this like second coming whatever BS and at the award ceremony for the new hedge fund of the year award. Right after I got the trophy, I had this horrible, empty feeling and I said to my wife, I said, I don’t think I can do better than this.

[01:20:24] Jason Karp: Like this is literally like winning the Oscar for what I had done for the last 17 years. I’m like, this is the pinnacle of what I thought I can do. I had my own hedge fund. It’s very big. I’m winning awards. I just made an outrageous amount of money and I feel disgustingly hollow and then the real shame kicked in and over the next, you know, few months, I just felt absolute despair and this sort of like everything I thought I wanted to do for 17 years did not produce this sort of result that I was hoping for in terms of fulfillment and happiness and what you call abundance and you know that you may remember the metaphor I used that one of my wise mentors told me, you know, I got to the top of my mountain and there was nothing to see up there, and I felt like I’d been climbing that mountain for 17 years. And at that point, you know, I had this burgeoning relatively young health and wellness business, which I did almost entirely out of passion.

[01:21:24] Jason Karp: I had no idea it was going to be successful or make money. It was with my family called Hu Kitchen. It started as a restaurant. Hu stands for human and out of our health and wellness restaurant came organic, really simple ingredient, chocolate bars. And we were getting messages from people who had sicknesses or illnesses, or food restrictions like me.

[01:21:46] Jason Karp: And we’d get messages from people that would say, you’ve changed my life. I didn’t think I could eat a cookie again. I didn’t think I could eat chocolate again. I didn’t think I could find a restaurant where I could take my children who have this disorder or this issue. And your food is amazing and it’s delicious, and you’ve given me hope again.

[01:22:01] Jason Karp: And those letters and messages from people brought me a level of joy that I didn’t get from the hedge fund industry. I never, I joke, but I never got letters from my investors, like those letters from people that I changed their life with my returns. And I started developing a much clearer internal compass of like, what am I doing?

[01:22:24] Jason Karp: And, you know, like, yeah, I got financially wealthy, but like, I haven’t been happy for 20 years. And I mean, I was deeply, deeply depressed. And I was suicidal on many occasions. And on the surface, I looked like the pinnacle of success. And underneath I was an absolute wreck and disaster. And I had made the hard decision that I wanted to basically close the fund early.

[01:22:50] Jason Karp: We still had, you know, substantial lockup and substantial capital. And so, I had to walk away from what was, you know, multiple eight figures of literally guaranteed money. To basically tell my investors like, look, my heart’s not in it anymore and I don’t want to do this. And I don’t know if my heart was ever fully in it.

[01:23:06] Jason Karp: I just happened to be good at it. And I went through just a lot of soul searching about like, what do I actually like? What do I actually want to do? And how much of my life has been me trying to prove other people wrong or me trying to quiet the demons that I had from my childhood? And so, I wanted to create a second business.

[01:23:26] Jason Karp: Hu at that point had become much larger, and I thought what we were doing in Hu, primarily in the, in what was chocolate, where we created a standard of ingredients and a quality of products that wasn’t really available for healthier food. Most healthy food for my whole life was gross and wasn’t something that people actually loved or talked about.

[01:23:46] Jason Karp: It was sort of considered like a health food. And I thought, well, there needs to be more of these things in other categories that aren’t just chocolate. And I had this idea of creating a health and wellness conglomerate of multiple brands all under one umbrella that have the same standards that we used at Hu, the same fanatical standards of how we source the ingredients, how we make the product, you know, really caring about people and planet before profit, which all of the large food companies do not do.

[01:24:14] Jason Karp: And that was the kind of germ behind HumanCo. And I started it with one of my closest friends and business partners, a guy named Ross Berman. And it was just an idea, you know, and it was just that we would buy other brands and we make them better, and we would create new brands similar to how we created Hu.

[01:24:31] Jason Karp: And we called it HumanCo for the same reason, which is like, I think we need to live more like humans, and we don’t thrive the way humans have evolved.

[01:24:39] William Green: So, you have an array of products, right? There’s Snow Days Pizza Bites, which are, you know, using grass fed dairy. You have Cosmic Bliss Ice Cream, which comes in as sort of a vegan version or a dairy version that’s with grass fed cows and healthier.

[01:24:55] Jason Karp: And it’s organic.

[01:24:57] William Green: Yeah, organic. Against the Grain is this gluten-free pizza and bread company. You have Monty’s Cream Cheese Spread that you invested in, which Monty’s, which does this sort of cashew based cream cheese. And then you’ve invested in other companies like, True Food Kitchen, and Andrew Weil’s healthy restaurants. How did all of these businesses kind of embody the philosophy that you’d come round to in your own early journey of discovering that the problems with your own eating.

[01:25:25] Jason Karp: Well, it’s pretty simple, which is, and it comes back to your whole points about deferred gratification and impulse control, which is, we have known as a society for probably 70 years that things like Twinkies are significantly less healthy than fruits and vegetables.

[01:25:41] Jason Karp: And we’ve been teaching that in schools, we’ve been teaching that every chance we can from a public policy perspective for at least 60, 70 years. And yet, we are the sickest and most diseased population in human history despite knowing all this. And the reason is because of everything that we talked about in terms of most people can’t control their impulses and the food industry is out to make it harder for us.

[01:26:04] Jason Karp: Right? The food industry is effectively, it’s like taking compulsive gamblers and forcing them to live in casinos is kind of like what the food industry’s doing to us. And I noticed when I was sick, and I had to give up all these foods that I loved. Food, if you study human culture, food has been an integral part of human culture for as long as we’ve known about humanity.

[01:26:24] Jason Karp: And it’s supposed to bring people together. It’s supposed to bring happiness, it’s supposed to be nourishing, but it brings people joy. And all the foods I had to give up were the foods that made me happy, right? I had to give up ice cream, I had to give up chocolate, I had to give up pizza, I had to give up cookies, I had to give up bread.

[01:26:38] Jason Karp: I had, you know, like these are all the things that I loved as a kid. And so, I wanted to focus on foods that bring people happiness, bring people joy. And our foods that historically are associated with positive occasions, except that most of the foods that people in this country sometimes call comfort foods are the ones that are filled with the most amount of crap.

[01:26:59] Jason Karp: Synthetic ingredients, highly processed shit, things that literally make you sick. And so, I didn’t want to create like a vegetable based protein bar because nobody’s going to eat that. And I’m very pragmatic about that. Like, I want to create things that I want to eat, that my kids want to eat. And that you don’t, you might know afterwards is like, okay, this is an amazing pizza bite.

[01:27:20] Jason Karp: It just so happens that it’s healthy. It just so happens that it has a nutritionals of a meal, but it tastes like an amazing pizza bite. And so, my focus at HumanCo and our focus in terms of what we invest in and what we focus on are things that allow people to live a healthier life without sacrificing.

[01:27:38] Jason Karp: Because if I have to, the only people who are going to eat the way that I had to eat when I was sick are the people that are literally like the most disciplined people you can find, or they’re people who were sick like me. Nobody wants to eat like that. And the problem is that it’s very hard and much less profitable to do it this way currently.

[01:28:00] Jason Karp: So, I have intentionally chosen what I’ll call bad business, where we’re using ingredients that are significantly more expensive and I can’t charge under the current environment what these things should cost. And so, a bit of what we are doing is philanthropic because all public companies and most companies that have regular investors would never support what we’re doing because we’re effectively funding or subsidizing the future by doing things that are much better for people, much better for the planet, much better for animals.

[01:28:32] Jason Karp: But we don’t get enough credit for it in terms of what we should charge, because we have taught people in this country that food should be really cheap, and it shouldn’t be. And it’s a complete myth that you have to be wealthy to eat healthy. And I could go into why that is, but all you have to look at is where people, even people in the lowest socioeconomic demographic where they’re spending their money and they’re spending it, you know, depending on who it is, but basically, they’re spending it on things like Starbucks and streaming apps like Spotify and Netflix and beer, and soda and cigarettes.

[01:29:08] Jason Karp: And basically, what the research shows is that anyone who can afford a smartphone, which is 99% of the us, anyone that has a smartphone, can afford to eat healthier. And that if you look at people’s behaviors, they’re choosing to spend money on these other things which are immediate gratification, things that are not necessarily helping themselves or their families.

[01:29:30] Jason Karp: But it’s easier and it’s feeding that animal brain to do so.

[01:29:35] William Green: One thing I would point out though, just for the interest of our listeners is that you’re clearly riding a long-term wave here of greater and greater interest in this stuff. And it’s striking that the backers of HumanCo, some of the investors that people like the actor Scarlett Johansson, the author and physician Mark Hyman, who we mentioned before, I think Indra Nooyi, who was the CEO of Pepsi, Walter Robb, who is the CEO of Whole Foods, Venus Williams and Andy Roddick, the tennis players, Cindy Crawford and Karlie Kloss, the supermodels.

[01:30:05] William Green: And I think the singer Nick Jonas and the actor, Priyanka Chopra have also partnered in some of your investments. So there’s something really powerful here going on that’s drawing all of these people who I think have some sense of mission, but also wanting to make a profit. And, and I would also—

[01:30:20] Jason Karp: Oh, yeah. And to be clear, I’m not just a philanthropist. The outcome of Hu, we sold Hugh two years ago to Mondelēz. We didn’t have a process, we weren’t expecting to sell it, but we got a very, very large evaluation for that business.

[01:30:35] William Green: I mean, the reported prices that it was valued at around 340 million dollars.

[01:30:41] Jason Karp: Yes. I can’t comment on the exact, but our, we did have outside investors who came in after the first many years that my family and I had created it, and they all had a substantial multifold return over only a few years. And so, if you do this right, there is obviously a profit motive and benefit, but it’s not something that’s like a cash cow while you’re doing it.

[01:31:04] Jason Karp: And it’s something that does require some deferred gratification because it’s not nearly as profitable as selling junk food.

[01:31:11] William Green: And I think there are some really valuable lessons for investors in a way here, right? That in a sense you were investing in an area where it was a niche, it’s a specialized area where you actually happen to have a competitive advantage because you know a hell of a lot about it, and you care about it.

[01:31:26] William Green: You, there’s a sort of timer arbitrage element of it, because you are a big investor, and you have plenty of money yourself. You can afford to wait and defer gratification. There’s a sense of, you know, you’re always kind of an entrepreneur and so there’s a willingness to invest in stuff and build it.

[01:31:41] William Green: There are a whole bunch of things at play here that I think are sort of broader lessons about what actually works in investing. And then another thing that strikes me that it seems like there was some influence of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway in you structuring it as a holding company.

[01:31:57] Jason Karp: Totally.

[01:31:58] William Green: Can you talk about that? Because in some ways the big difficulty that you had at Tourbillon was you were riding this whirlwind where there was a kind of mismatch between, you know, your desire to be a long-term smart, fundamental investor, and you’re a shareholder’s desire to make money every quarter, every week, every month, every minute.

[01:32:17] Jason Karp: Yes. Well, there are a few interesting elements in that, in what you just said. The first, I would say I’ve learned so many interesting lessons from the Hu experience. The most important thing I’ve learned with consumer products, particularly mission-driven consumer products where people respect or value or care about what’s behind the brand, like why you do what you do.

[01:32:37] Jason Karp: And what made Hu so special is that my family, particularly, you know, my brother-in-law, Jordan and I were so unwavering in our discipline and approach of we will never use these ingredients, even if they’ll make us a lot more money, and we will only do it this way. And we had so many customers who could see that, and they could see that no other brand was doing that because all these other brands had investors who were like, you know what? Use this shitier ingredient. We’ll make more money. Do it. No one’s going to notice it. We never did that. And I think having authentic values is one of those hard kind of deferred gratification principles that customers actually can perceive. So that was the first thing. And then in a sort of weird, related way, I saw a lot of brands that had great values but had were parts of the investors were from funds and their funds that were, the investors in those businesses had five year, 70 year time horizons.

[01:33:32] Jason Karp: And those funds only would make money if those brands were sold. And so, I saw very suboptimal behavior with a lot of brands that I respected because the investors were driving the mission and the investors themselves did not have a mission. And they either sold them too early or they corrupted the brands, or they turned the brands into something it wasn’t. And so, I wanted to create a holding company structure for permanent capital so that we didn’t have that incentive of having our investors basically say, you know what? You know this like healthy ingredient stuff and this sustainability stuff, like it sounds great, but you’re not making money.

[01:34:06] Jason Karp: Change it. Like I didn’t, I never wanted that conversation because part of why we are here today in terms of how sick society is, is because so much of the food industry has been driven by financial investors, and there are other variables and KPIs that are not profit.

[01:34:24] William Green: You once told me that part of the torture of managing a fund like Tourbillon was that you had this psychological pressure of being judged weekly on something that you have no control over.

[01:34:35] William Green: And you said, look, you’re right about 55% of the time if you’re great. So, you have this existential fear that you are not going to be around long. And so, you said it, I mean, it’s a wonderful quote. I think I quoted it in my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, where you said it requires a certain type of masochistic, weirdly wired human to do this for a very long period of time.

[01:34:52] William Green: When you are this active and you’re being judged all the time. And you said it’s just the feeling of being constantly under scrutiny and compared to everyone else in something where there’s so much randomness that it can kind of drive you insane. It’s like being, you talked about those experiments where, you know, vermin would pull a lever and they’d either get a cookie or they’d get electrocuted, and it was random and it induces insanity.

[01:35:14] William Green: And I felt like in retrospect when I was visiting you back in probably 2017, you were sort of saying to me, in a veil way, I am going insane, and I need to get out of this.

[01:35:23] Jason Karp: Yes, I was, it wasn’t so veiled. I’m glad you picked up on it. I was really, look, I was really tortured, and it was, now that I’ve been in so much therapy and I’ve worked with, you know, I’ve done a lot of deep, deep introspection.

[01:35:36] Jason Karp: I’ve also done a lot of psychedelic work on myself, and I had really significant trauma from this. And I happen to have this bizarre kind of balance where I have very high empathy, but I’m also like ruthlessly competitive and it’s a terrible combination because I feel all the kind of pain of being judged.

[01:35:58] Jason Karp: And, you know, I think a lot of the best investors actually are slightly sociopathic and they can compartmentalize and not like, feel the pain of people judging them. I feel immense pain from judgment and so it was a really, really poor career choice for me in terms of my psychological makeup. Even now I’ve spent the last four or five years still kind of unraveling some of that trauma that I went through. And only in the last four or five months have I really, really gotten to the other side of it. You know, the last kind of eight months for me have been some of the most difficult months of my life. And the last kind of four or five, when I’ve had my biggest breakthroughs in terms of where a lot of my demons come from, why they’re there and how I finally made peace with them.

[01:36:42] William Green: What’s helped in particular that you could share with other people who are going through similar things or who are close to people who are going through similar things? Because it, it seems like part of my sense of what’s gone on is because of the somatic work that you’ve done, you become much more aware of your emotions and how this stuff is manifesting itself in your body.

[01:37:01] William Green: And you’ve done more breath work and the like, and more meditation. Can you talk about what’s been really helpful to you?

[01:37:08] Jason Karp: Yeah, the first thing I would say is make sure you have one or two people in your life that you can talk to about this. Whether it’s a therapist that you pay or whether it’s a family member or your spouse or your partner.

[01:37:19] Jason Karp: My wife has been amazing. I’m getting a little choked up ‘cause she’s been so amazing for me, but I was so ashamed I didn’t really know who to talk to about it. And I think having someone that you can freely vent to, and share is the first step. I think it’s really important to realize that you’re not alone.

[01:37:41] Jason Karp: I thought I was very alone for a long time, and then I realized that a lot of people struggle the way I did, and a lot of people who are far more successful than I am or far more accomplished than I am also struggle with this stuff. And I think, I thought I was kind of like a freak and learning that, and I hope that my story can help some of your listeners if they feel this, because I think a lot of people don’t fully know that they have it until they hear me talk about it.

[01:38:05] Jason Karp: I’ve had a number of people come up to me and be like, oh my God, I realize like I have a lot of these same things. I think there’s some great resources now online. There’s some great podcasts, there’s some great therapists, and there’s a woman named Tara Brach who has a podcast. She wrote a book called Radical Acceptance and she’s, you know, she’s like a therapist.

[01:38:24] Jason Karp: And it was very hard for me to get into this stuff originally. I wasn’t that spiritual of a person five years ago, but you kind of realize the human condition’s been the same way for thousands of years. And a lot of what I’m dealing with is things that people have been struggling with and her teachings.

[01:38:39] Jason Karp: And some of what I learned is just having compassion for yourself, realizing that there are a lot of good people out there who can help you. And finally, acknowledging like the end goal of why we’re here is to be fulfilled. It’s not to make a lot of money or to put up a bunch of points on the board or have a bunch of returns.

[01:38:59] Jason Karp: And I’ve just been doing a lot of spiritual reading also. Like I’ve read some books on people who are dying, and you know, what they think about when they’re dying and what people say on their deathbeds. And not a single person ever has said, I wish I worked more. Like, I wish I put up better returns. I wish I had more in my bank account.

[01:39:17] Jason Karp: Once you die, that money isn’t yours anymore. And there’ve been a couple books that have come out recently that have really caught my attention. You’ve probably heard of them. One’s called Die With Zero and one’s called 4,000 Weeks.

[01:39:28] William Green: Yeah.

[01:39:29] Jason Karp: And they’re all about reframing how much time we have left on the planet and what are we going to do with that and what do we want to be remembered for.

[01:39:37] Jason Karp: And so, a lot of contextualizing has helped me a lot and just, you know, and forcing the kind of prompts and the hard questions about like, why are we doing all this? And so, you know that. And then for those who can do it, and it’s also controversial and it’s only legal in a few places now. Psychedelic therapy has helped me more than anything, of all the things I’ve done.

[01:39:59] William Green: Is that like psilocybin or ketamine? What sort of, where do you go if you want to learn more about that in a kind of responsible way where you’re going to be guided by people?

[01:40:09] Jason Karp: There’s some great resources online from Michael Pollan wrote a very famous book now, A New York Times bestseller called How to Change Your Mind. He chronicles his journey. Tim Ferriss talks about this regularly. It is now legal in Portland, Oregon. It’s legal in parts of Colorado. There’s certain countries where you can do this. There’s an underground community of this, but it is, you know, it’s a very safe, you know, psilocybin, what they used to call magic mushrooms have been around for thousands of years used by indigenous communities and I used to think it was a kind of like horseshit, for lack of a better term.

[01:40:41] Jason Karp: And I had a few friends who both also experienced significant trauma and told me about how it helped them, and it has a mechanism for your scientifically based listeners. It has a mechanism that’s very well established, which is why they’re beginning to legalize it. Now, that causes a flood of neurotransmitters in your brain that creates a level of plasticity in your brain where synaptic connections that used to be there, reconnect, and in many instances, connections that weren’t there.

[01:41:10] Jason Karp: Connect and allow you to see yourself and to see where your proclivities and tendencies come from without judgment. And so your ego of the armor that we’ve all created, we all have armor from years and years of how we’ve grown up. The armor comes down and you sort of look at yourself without judgment and say, oh, this is why I care so much about what people think of me, or this is why I’m so obsessed with performance, or this is why I can’t handle mediocrity or, and you’re able to look at it in a very clear, objective way without judgment and it allows you to have compassion for yourself and it allows you to have acceptance without complacency. And then you don’t feel the demons anymore.

[01:41:54] Jason Karp: And so, there’s a lot of resources about what they call guided psychedelic therapy online. Ketamine is another way that people can do it that is fully legal. There’s a lot of places that will do guided ketamine sessions. And that has been also very helpful for me in kind of, ’cause my armor was so thick that it was very hard for me to penetrate, like where these demons come from.

[01:42:16] Jason Karp: And I’ve done, I don’t know, thousands of hours of therapy and I would say 15 hours of psychedelic work have done more for me than thousands of hours of talk therapy.

[01:42:27] William Green: I’m no expert on this. I would just caution people to go carefully because I have a friend who did ketamine and had a bad response to it. It made him worse. And so, I’m not in any way saying that to be a naysayer. I’m just saying this is one of those areas where you want to be dealing with people who are really responsible. Like it isn’t, you don’t want to be playing with stuff.

[01:42:48] Jason Karp: Just for, for, just for disclaimer, I’m not a doctor, this is my own personal anecdote to explore all of your own research online.

[01:42:56] Jason Karp: There is a lot from very real published scientists. There’s some great stuff on Tim Ferriss’s podcast and great stuff on Huberman’s podcast about how the mechanisms of these work and how to be careful. ‘Cause to your point, there are ways to abuse these. There’s ways to not use them and they are very medically safe when used in the way that they are meant to be, but they can also be abused like any medication can be.

[01:43:22] William Green: You’ve also found it helpful over the years to do things like transcendental meditation, and you were saying to me that you found certain activities like squash and tennis that don’t allow you to indulge in rumination have also been really helpful, and exposure to light. Are there a couple of other things that you’d want to just highlight that have helped you, that might help others?

[01:43:41] Jason Karp: There’s many different forms of meditation. I had a really hard time with some of the forms. Tara Brach has a lot of tips on how to do it well, her last name’s spelled Brach, by the way.

[01:43:53] William Green: Yeah. I’ll include this in the show notes. And I’ll second, I think her Radical Acceptance book is a really beautiful book and she’s just great.

[01:44:00] Jason Karp: She’s great. You know, I think spending more time with friends and family, it really helps, laughter helps, I mean, very simple things that I just wasn’t doing enough of, are immensely or have been immensely valuable to me. Physical activity outside. Again, this is an evolutionary thing like getting morning sunlight, getting afternoon sunlight, walking outside, being in nature.

[01:44:23] Jason Karp: These are all things clinically proven to improve how you feel that are all based on simple evolutionary principles.

[01:44:31] William Green: You once told me in terms of work-life balance, you said, look, a lot of my most successful peers don’t have a good relationship with their children. They’ve been divorced several times. They don’t have a lot of close friends and you said to me, I always vowed when I saw that, that I’m not going to sacrifice those things for the sake of more financial success. And you said, I have two children and there’s no amount of money in the world. I would have to get paid to destroy those relationships.

[01:44:54] William Green: Can you just talk a little bit about how your attitude has evolved over the years from the I must succeed at all costs or else I’m totally unlovable and will feel totally hollow to seeing that there are these other sources of joy and fulfillment that are more likely to actually work.

[01:45:12] Jason Karp: Yeah, you know, I think you kind of have to find it. I’ve been very good at observing people over my life and I’ve just observed enough people who are rich and miserable and enough people who are not rich and happy to recognize that like there’s a lot more to life than money and returns. And I’ve tried really hard to sort of be aware of how these intangible things that are the essence of life, like relationships and love and connection, how they bring me joy and fulfillment.

[01:45:47] Jason Karp: And I’ve also, and this is not fortunate, but you can read, you can learn this through reading. I’ve had a lot of death around me in the last 10 years. I’ve had many peers who are my age die, and two of them were my two of my closest friends. And you just kind of realize life is short and like that could be me.

[01:46:08] Jason Karp: You know, that could be you. You know, and do you just see enough of this when you’re like, wow, like Steve Jobs was 54 when he died. Like, that’s not old. You know? And the way Elon Musk is living right now, like I’m not optimistic on his longevity. And these things that we revere in society are tangible, accomplishment things and not, you know, things that are the essence of what makes a good life worth living.

[01:46:34] Jason Karp: And so, I’ve just become much more observant in the last probably 10 years about how precious and short life can be and how there’s many things, particularly experiences that are priceless. You know, like my son is nine, he is at that perfect age where he still adores his dad and he thinks it’s really, like our time is amazing.

[01:46:53] Jason Karp: Like when he’s 15 and he’s a teenager and he thinks I’m, he will think I’m lame and annoying and whatever. Like, I’ll never get that time back no matter how much money I have. And so, there’s these kinds of thoughts about like experiences at a moment in time and what are those worth? And those are, there’s no money for those things.

[01:47:11] Jason Karp: And so, it’s those kind of thoughts that have really influenced me.

[01:47:16] William Green: I also noticed recently you shared something on Twitter, a lovely quote from the Gospel of Thomas that I’d never seen where you said, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

[01:47:32] William Green: And my interpretation of that was just that part of your journey has been to become much more true to who you are in your essence. And there was something where even though you were immensely successful in your life, working at, you know, SAC and Tourbillon, Weiss Associates, there was some way in which you were misaligned.

[01:47:50] William Green: And that now, now that you are doing this different game where you’re creating something and it’s more purpose driven and it’s actually going to have an effect on people’s lives, that’s beneficial. There’s some way in which you’re much more deeply aligned with your soul and your purpose and the truth of who you are. Is that a fair observation?

[01:48:09] Jason Karp: I’m certainly trying. You know, I definitely feel much more in harmony with, I think, how my inner soul feels than I used to be. I’m not there yet and I’m not sure anyone ever gets there, but I’m certainly much more aware of what feels wrong and am I doing something that feels at odds with where kind of my kind of, I know the word soul sounds very woowoo, but like, you know, everyone kind of knows when something feels wrong or feels right.

[01:48:38] Jason Karp: And like, I didn’t used to have that compass. Like, I think I, I had such self-hatred and such desire to just like win in what I thought mattered, that those like signals that were coming from me, I just would like bury them and like not listen to them. And they would kind of like try to like reach out and I would just be like, shut up.

[01:48:59] Jason Karp: Like, I don’t care. You know? And now I’m listening. Yeah. And I think now that I’m listening, it’s very clear that the direction I think that makes me happy is drastically different than what I thought it would be.

[01:49:13] William Green: I had a great spiritual teacher, one of the most remarkable people I ever encountered, who would just say that every day of your life you should be asking what’s the purpose of my soul?

[01:49:23] William Green: And I think, you know, whether you believe in the soul or not, it’s whether you regard as metaphorical or literal or whatever, it’s a really powerful question to ask, just to keep trying to be more true to who you are because I think when you live by an outer scorecard, as Warren Buffett would put it, you know, where a lot of us are trying to please other people because we are hyper-competitive and it doesn’t ultimately work.

[01:49:45] William Green: It doesn’t really make you happy. And so, you end up, you know what’s that line from the Johnny Cash song about my empire of dust? You end up with this empire of dust, like, yeah. So I hope our listeners are really inspired by your journey and your integrity and your honesty and talking about these struggles and that it’ll help them to see, to ask these questions in their own life about how to be more aligned, how to have more purpose, and also just an awareness that, you know, there’s a great deal of struggle along the way and that I, you know, this is one of the things I wrote about in the epilogue of my book where I wrote about you and I wrote about Bill Miller, that one of the great Buddhist truths is that everyone suffers.

[01:50:22] William Green: It’s difficult. And I love the fact that you always emphasize the importance of resilience and teaching resilience to your kids. And, you know, so I don’t know. I’m full of admiration for how open you are in talking about this, and I thank you so much for being here, and I wish you much strength on your journey.

[01:50:40] Jason Karp: Thank you. And I wish you the strength and you’ve always been such a great companion to talk to. And I also really value how much work and research and preparation you did for this; it does not go unnoticed. And I’m so grateful for that. And I just wanted to tell your listeners that, like, if you’re feeling this at all, you know, I hope that my story and my journey can help you.

[01:51:05] Jason Karp: And there are lots of resources out there and it’s very painful because if you believe that the key to happiness is acquisition and money and accomplishment and returns, this is a painful message for you because it’s kind of like at odds with what you think is what’s going to work. And for me, you know, for so many years, I wanted to ignore it because it felt like it was at odds and it’s not, you can actually do both.

[01:51:29] Jason Karp: So, thank you for allowing me to talk about this because I do hope, you know, to give some other people who have gone through what I go through some freedom to be able to feel this.

[01:51:42] William Green: Yeah. It’s incredibly helpful and it’s brave on your part and I know, it’s inspiring. So, thank you. I really appreciate it, Jason, and I’m always going to be happy to talk to you about this and many other things. So, I’m looking forward to your ongoing journey and to watch more and more success, but also more peace of mind and happiness and contentment.

[01:52:01] Jason Karp: Thank you.

[01:52:03] William Green: Thanks so much.

[01:52:04] Jason Karp: All right. Have a good one.

[01:52:06] William Green: All right folks. Thanks a lot for joining me for this conversation with the remarkable Jason Karp. I’m so grateful to Jason for his candor in talking about the challenges he’s faced and for his generosity in sharing what he’s learned that can help the rest of us. Personally, I found this one of the most valuable conversations I’ve had on this podcast. Since speaking with Jason, I’ve redoubled my efforts to eat more healthily and exercise more regularly on my Peloton bike, which I have to say has been a real life changer for me in the last few years.

[01:52:41] William Green: Speaking with Jason was a timely reminder for me that I can’t really afford to neglect my physical health as it’s such a central aspect of a rich and happy life.

[01:52:51] William Green: So slightly grudgingly, I’m back on the bike. If you’d like to learn more about Jason, you may want to read the section that I wrote about him in the epilogue of my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier. Speaking of books, we mentioned a slew of them in today’s conversation, and I’ve included links to a bunch of them in the show notes for this episode.

[01:53:12] William Green: I’m no expert and I’m not the greatest physical specimen on Earth, but I’d strongly recommend Dr. Peter Attia’s new book, which is titled Outlive and also Dr. Mark Hyman’s new book, which is titled Young Forever. I’m also a big fan of a book by Dr. Dean Ornish and Anne Ornish titled Undo It, which is about simple lifestyle changes that can reverse chronic diseases like heart disease, type two diabetes, prostate cancer, and high blood pressure.

[01:53:44] William Green: For me, that book was really a huge eyeopener. I also like Valter Longo’s book, which is called The Longevity Diet, and there’s another good book in this area by a doctor called Michael Greger, which has a fantastic title, How Not to Die. In any case, I hope this episode gives you lots of food for thought and helps to point you in a good direction in your own quest for health and happiness.

[01:54:11] William Green: Needless to say, please don’t hesitate to share this episode with anyone you care about who you think it might help. I have this feeling that there’s someone out there who really could have their life totally changed by listening to Jason speak. I’ll be back very soon with some more terrific guests. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on Twitter @WilliamGreen72 and do let me know how you are liking the podcast.

[01:54:37] William Green: Until next time, take good care of yourself.

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