Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #3: Healing Ourselves, Healing Humanity: Jason Karp on our Journey Back to Vitality

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#3: Healing Ourselves, Healing Humanity: Jason Karp on our Journey Back to Vitality · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  I was diagnosed with an incurable degenerative corneal
• 0:03
  disease, and they told me I basically would be fully blind
• 0:05
  by 30. And I developed this naive
• 0:07
  hypothesis around ancestral living and ancestral eating.
• 0:11
  And over the course of, you know, six to seven months, it
• 0:14
  worked. It was really shocking to me as
• 0:17
  an American how many of these chemicals are added to our food.
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  There are about 10,000 ingredients that have never been
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  tested by the FDA. There are hundreds of
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  ingredients that are ban or require cigarette like warning
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  labels in Europe that we freely allow here.
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  They live five to seven years longer than we do.
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  They have significant lower rates of heart disease, cancer,
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  diabetes. They spend half to 1/3 of
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  healthcare per person than we do.
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  One of the greatest crashes was in 2000, 2001.
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  There are a lot of similarities of that bubble to what's
• 0:55
  happening right now with AI. And when we talk about safety,
• 0:58
  AI safety, not only is there no incentive to do that, there is a
• 1:02
  gross, gross disincentive to do anything that slows this down
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  because of how much wealth is being created.
• 1:07
  If technology is consciously guided, it doesn't mean you
• 1:10
  can't make money, but it means that.
• 1:15
  Hey everyone, welcome back to the Love Conquers Fear podcast.
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  This is the podcast again where I'm having amazing spiritual
• 1:24
  teachers on entrepreneurs, investors, scientists.
• 1:29
  Because humanity has 10 to 15 years to really determine
• 1:33
  whether or not we're going to make it to the age of abundance
• 1:35
  for all, there is a chance that it's going to be all over.
• 1:40
  And it really all starts with us, with Team humanity, on
• 1:43
  whether or not we can manifest that ability to allow love, to
• 1:48
  conquer fear and make sure that AI, quantum computing, robotics,
• 1:53
  etcetera, serves us and serves humanity.
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  I'm really, really excited about my guest today.
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  This is one of my very close friends, Jason Carp, and you are
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  going to love his story. What he's overcome in his life
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  and what he's been able to manifest is truly amazing.
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  So, yeah, welcome back, Jason. It's good to have you here.
• 2:17
  Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm so happy you're here.
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  You've been in this room before. I have.
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  We've done it. We've done it several times in
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  this room. We had we had Lauren and John
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  over here showing their amazing company evolved.
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  And gosh, they're they're such good people.
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  I really appreciate you introducing me to them.
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  And I'm a proud investor alongside you in their company.
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  So I would love to start out just your story.
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  The first time actually, I heard your story in full was when
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  we're at Ted together and we were hosting that dinner, which
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  was amazing, that just that whole night was amazing.
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  But you're a rare person who actually cured what was an
• 3:04
  incurable eye disease. And I want to get into that.
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  But why don't we just go back a little bit further and just, you
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  know, where do you grow up? I know that you also went to
• 3:13
  Warden. Yeah, I'm very proud.
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  Warden alum as well. Yeah, I I grew up in a small
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  town in Connecticut called Avon. Went to Warden undergrad where I
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  focused on finance and statistics.
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  I was also a competitive tennis player and squash player growing
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  up. I played Division One squash all
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  four years at Penn and right out of college I went into a
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  quantitative hedge fund in 1998 and.
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  And this was kind of the dream job, right?
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  Because when I was at Wharton, like everybody wanted either be
• 3:54
  AVC or a hedge fund person. I was in a real rare bird trade
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  that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
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  Yeah, yeah, it was. It was kind of the heyday of of
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  investment banking. And I had done a summer at what
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  was then the kind of hot investment bank called DLJ in
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  1997. Most of my peers went to
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  consulting firms like McKinsey or they went to banks like DLJ
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  or Goldman or Morgan Stanley. I had this unique opportunity to
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  go to a quantitative hedge fund and it was a, it was a real kind
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  of gamble for me because I, I didn't fully know what hedge
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  funds did. But I knew after doing a summer
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  of intensive investment banking that I didn't want to be a
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  banker. And I was obsessed with math and
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  probabilities. And the job was for the first
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  few years was quantitative programming and quantitative
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  research, what you would now call a data scientist,
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  particularly around securities and high frequency data.
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  And a lot of the early work that I started on were the precursors
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  to AI. And it was what they called back
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  then were neural networks and genetic algorithms, machine
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  learning, machine learning, very, very early days.
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  I mean, this is 98 and, and a lot of what we were researching
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  were statistical anomalies and we were coding algorithmically
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  ways to trade at a time when very, very few people did this.
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  And so it was actually incredibly lucrative and very
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  kind of easy to differentiate yourself because there weren't
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  many people doing it. And it gave me just a, a, a
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  tremendous perspective on the value of empirical science, the
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  value of data, the value of being able to test a hypothesis
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  with data, particularly around financial instruments.
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  But in, you know, it was a really interesting dichotomy for
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  me because my first few years for me, I, I was, I was very
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  successful early on and kind of did everything I had dreamed to
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  do in terms of, of financial accomplishments and moving up in
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  the, in the ladder. They may be the youngest partner
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  in history at the firm, But at the same time, while I thought I
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  was kind of winning, I started to get really sick.
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  And, and by my second and third year, despite what looked like
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  on the surface, everything was going well.
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  I started developing several diseases that manifested in my
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  skin and my hair and how I felt. And then when things got really
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  bad was when I started going blind and and I noticed it where
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  I started seeing double out of my left eye.
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  And I ended up seeing a bunch of different ophthalmologists in
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  New York City. And I was diagnosed with an
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  incurable degenerative corneal disease.
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  And they told me I was 23 when it started and then it was 24
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  when it got really bad and they told me I basically would be
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  fully blind by 30. Wow, with that.
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  Terrifying. It was terrifying and it was a
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  really dark time for me. And it was, I think it was my
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  first like real mental health test in life because I was, I
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  was very proud of what I had accomplished.
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  And you know, at Wharton, I, I, I won kind of every award you
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  could win. I was an academic, all American
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  and all Ivy squash player. Like on the surface it looked
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  like I was like winning it life, but inside I think I was
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  rotting. I mean, from the materialist
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  perspective, you had it all correct.
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  This is what everybody thinks they want.
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  Yeah. And, and I figured out really
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  quickly that that didn't matter because if you don't have your
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  health, you don't have anything, right.
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  And, and the, the doctors told me that there were some pills I
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  could take that I could put my name on a, a waiting list for a
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  corneal transplant, which was highly risky.
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  And I, I kind of had this intuition that I now believe was
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  divine, that kind of said to me, you can cure this yourself.
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  You don't. This isn't, this is, this is
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  something you can, you can figure out.
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  This is not something that you have to rely on the doctors for.
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  And because I had no hope in the sense that there was no cure, I
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  thought like, why not? And so I started doing in the
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  same way I approached research with, with data, I approached
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  research with this. And, and at the time, which was
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  2001, there wasn't much on the Internet around this.
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  And it was, it was sort of hard to put pieces together.
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  And, and over the course of a couple months, I ended up doing
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  a lot of research into areas around anti-inflammatory diets
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  around indigenous people, which I found the indigenous people
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  research was probably the most fruitful of all the research I
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  had done in that you have indigenous tribes all over the
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  world in different climates and different geographies.
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  And one of the things that they observed, and they've still
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  observed it today, although it's, it's a little bit less now
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  because a lot of indigenous peoples have been infiltrated
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  with Western culture. But the ones that haven't been,
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  they noticed that they had no chronic disease and they had no
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  obesity, no diabetes, they had no heart disease, they tended to
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  have no allergies. And and they also had shockingly
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  low, if not non existent incidences of things like
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  autism. And, and I kind of had this
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  naive perspective of, and I think most Western people do
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  that, that these indigenous people are like heathens.
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  You know, they don't have running water in many of these
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  places. You know, they, they live
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  barefoot. Like I think modern kind of
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  Western society views them almost like Cavemen and yet.
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  We were kind of taught that. Actually, and yet they, they're,
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  you know, on, on, on most metrics, certainly chronic
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  disease metrics, they're far healthier than we are.
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  And so then that made me very curious.
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  What is it about the way they live that allows them to thrive
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  despite all lacking all modern comforts and, and medicine?
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  And, and I developed this naive hypothesis because I'm not a
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  doctor, but interestingly, when I went to Penn, I was actually
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  pre Med before I switched into Wharton.
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  And I was always interested in nutrition and biology and, and I
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  developed this naive hypothesis around ancestral living and
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  ancestral eating. And hypothesis was really about
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  getting as close to nature and, and the least amount of
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  processing of the food and more daily sunlight and more physical
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  movement and more interaction with other people.
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  And there's, there's also a, a, a group of, of, of towns all
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  over the world that have been documented called Blue Zones.
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  Yeah. And the Blue Zones have the
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  highest percentage of centenarians and as a percentage
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  of the overall population of anywhere in the world.
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  And there's, I think, about 10 identified Blue Zones, and most
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  of them are actually in Europe and Asia.
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  There's one in the US And similarly, you know, all these
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  Blue Zones are sort of antiquated villages and they,
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  they eat much more naturally. They spend a lot more time
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  outside, a lot more time walking, a lot more time napping
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  and, and workaholism is like not a thing in the blue zones.
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  And so I started really reflecting on, on all of this
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  research and I decided to try it on myself.
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  And this was living in New York City as a young single guy, you
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  know, in a, in a workaholism job where you know, it, it, it
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  wasn't uncommon to work 100 hours in a week.
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  And, and I still wanted to succeed, but I also needed to
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  see if I could heal my illnesses, especially my eye
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  disease. And over the course of, you
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  know, six to seven months, it, it, it worked.
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  And, and it was so profound that when I finally went into my
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  ophthalmologist who diagnosed and he was actually one of the
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  top specialists in my disease in New York City, I went in and I
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  said, hey, doc, I think I cured my disease.
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  And he said, no, you didn't, that's impossible.
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  And I said, give me the test. And thankfully there's an
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  objective test for my eye disease that this black and
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  white. Do you have it?
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  Do you not have it? And they had the before and it's
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  a set of images that they do on your cornea and the disease was
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  gone and, and it was so profound for me because.
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  And what, what age were you at at that 25?
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  You're 25. Yeah, and and I remember like
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  yesterday is one of those moments in your life that you
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  remember like changes the course of your life forever, where he
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  looked at the at the output of of the scan.
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  And I heard him whisper, that's impossible.
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  And then he called over his colleague and he whispered to
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  his colleague, you got to come see this.
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  And the colleague also said, that's impossible.
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  And then he came over to me and he said, what did you do?
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  And I told him, and he goes, Nah, it can't be food.
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  And then he said, I must have misdiagnosed you.
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  And that was it. And then like, and he was kind
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  of a condescending prick about it.
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  And and instead of asking questions and being curious, he
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  literally was just like, there's no way that worked, I don't care
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  what you say. It broke his paradigm, his
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  teaching. And you know that that I mean,
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  that happens a lot where people don't want to be challenged.
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  They have their model construct and they want someone to
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  puncture it. Yeah, that's right.
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  I would have thought he would have been really curious and be
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  like, tell me everything. And he didn't.
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  And I walked out of that office with a few kind of big
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  revelations. The first revelation was I don't
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  know if I can completely trust modern Western medicine ever
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  again. Second was to follow my
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  intuition and and start to pay more attention to that despite
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  it being completely unconventional.
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  And most importantly, I kind of made a vow to myself that I was
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  going to help others around health and Wellness and that I
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  was going to spend a significant portion of my life in
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  understanding our toxic modern American environment and
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  American food system. And I was going to hopefully
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  help others wake up to the fact that we are living in a toxic
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  soup and that I was a Canary in the coal mine.
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  Because a lot of, a lot of people, and obviously you see
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  this in the data, you know, we're the sickest we've ever
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  been in human history in, in, in, in terms of, of chronic
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  disease, heart disease, cancer rates are all time highs.
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  And, and then on the on the mental health side, we're also
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  the worst we've ever been in terms of depression, anxiety,
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  suicide rates, and. Loneliness.
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  And loneliness. And it's gotten profoundly worse
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  since. That was, you know, I cured
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  myself in 2004, and now we're in 2025, and it's much worse today.
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  And so that that episode and that journey guided so much of
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  what my life has been about since then.
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  Yeah, wow. What did your parents and
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  friends think about that? I mean, they had to be freaking
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  out that you were going to potentially be blind and.
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  Well, it's a really interesting thing because, you know, and,
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  and I think I'm a lot more vulnerable and I think secure in
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  myself, but I didn't really tell anybody.
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  I didn't want to scare my parents.
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  My mother's like a neurotic mom. And I told her I wasn't well.
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  And I told her I was like trying to heal it.
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  But I didn't tell them what the doctor's family and, and I
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  didn't really tell anybody. It was the kind of thing where I
• 16:53
  was very alone. I was very lonely about it and I
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  think I was ashamed because I wanted to look like this hero
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  and and my trajectory from freshman year up until that
• 17:06
  point, you know, felt like a like a meteoric.
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  Oh yeah? Well, one week.
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  Journey and and. I mean in the material.
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  World in the material world it was and but I think I was
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  ashamed and I didn't want to like, you know, let people know
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  like on the inside I I was really suffering and so there
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  there weren't many people that knew what I had been through.
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  And interestingly enough, like about three weeks after I was
• 17:33
  officially cured was when I went met my wife Jessica, and on our
• 17:37
  first date. I.
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  Told her the story. Oh my gosh, and it was AI didn't
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  I didn't realize it was on the 1st.
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  Date Yeah. And it was a bizarre risk for me
• 17:46
  to take, I think because I was just so, like, proud and happy
• 17:49
  that I was through it. And you know, she will tell you
• 17:53
  that she thought I was like a total whack job, right?
• 17:55
  Right on the first date and was thinking like I can't believe
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  this guy's telling me this stuff on the first date.
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  Right. It's not.
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  It's not exactly the first day of material.
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  But I guess it works cuz you know, we've been together 23.
• 18:06
  Years ago. That's right.
• 18:07
  That's right. Yeah.
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  Elvis lucky enough to be at your anniversary celebration.
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  I'll never forget that. It was absolutely amazing.
• 18:15
  Yeah. So take me through.
• 18:18
  You know how you went from there to Hugh Chocolate, which which
• 18:23
  which you know, we've been big customers if you since long,
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  actually, I mean, since long before we met you, you know, of
• 18:30
  course, Austin native and you know, was so was so happy to to
• 18:34
  meet you and I'd meet so many cool people that are moving to
• 18:37
  Austin. I mean, it really seems like
• 18:39
  we're becoming, you know, Ground Zero for the consciousness
• 18:42
  awakening movement. I mean, there's so many.
• 18:45
  Amazing. I think Austin is like a is an
• 18:47
  epicenter of of the awakening movement and I think I've met
• 18:50
  some of the most amazing interesting people since we
• 18:53
  moved here. So the Hughes story came out
• 18:55
  obviously of that journey where after that I, I significantly
• 19:02
  adjusted my diet and I significantly adjusted how I
• 19:05
  behaved and lived in terms of what I was willing to put in my
• 19:09
  body, what I was willing to put on my body in terms of being
• 19:13
  conscientious of, you know, what kinds of modern poisons and
• 19:18
  toxins are in our food, our beverages, and even our we would
• 19:24
  call kind of personal care and household products, things like
• 19:27
  shampoo and deodorant and, and you know, Hairspray and all that
• 19:31
  stuff. And at the time, you know, so I
• 19:36
  cured myself. It was, it was O2 like I was
• 19:42
  considered a complete crazy like conspiracy theorist around this
• 19:46
  stuff because nobody was talking about how toxic all of like all
• 19:54
  of our consumer products were, right.
• 19:57
  So when I would bring it up, you know, people would look at me
• 20:00
  like, you know, like I was a whacky conspiracy theorist.
• 20:04
  And so it was, it was pretty hard to live in New York with
• 20:08
  those behaviors in terms of what I wouldn't eat, what I would
• 20:11
  avoid, you know, and, and what my kind of detox methods were.
• 20:15
  And I Jessica has a younger brother named Jordan.
• 20:20
  And I obviously told him a lot about what I had been through
• 20:24
  and what I was doing and, and, and I had some.
• 20:27
  Books that I found to be kind of key influences on, on my
• 20:34
  learning along the way. And I recommended a few of the
• 20:38
  authors in a few of the books to him and, and he ended up, and he
• 20:43
  didn't have any of my illnesses or any of that.
• 20:46
  He ended up reading them and he just decided like he was going
• 20:49
  to try it himself and he was going to try more ancestral
• 20:52
  living and more anti-inflammatory diets and see
• 20:54
  what happened to him. And he noticed within a very
• 20:58
  short period of time that he looked better, he felt better,
• 21:01
  he performed better, he was more alert, everything got better.
• 21:05
  And he, he said to me at one point, he said, this is
• 21:09
  incredible. Like why aren't more people
• 21:10
  doing this? And why isn't there a place in
• 21:14
  New York City where we can eat this way?
• 21:18
  Like it's too hard to live this way.
• 21:20
  And he basically pitched me on this idea.
• 21:23
  So I was, at the time, I was at a hedge fund.
• 21:26
  It was before I had started my own hedge fund and I'd been very
• 21:31
  blessed financially at that point.
• 21:32
  So I, I had some resources to be able to, to do something like
• 21:37
  this. But he basically pitched me and
• 21:38
  said, why don't we create a restaurant?
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  That's the manifestation of all these principles.
• 21:45
  And we came up and Hugh, before it was a chocolate company, it
• 21:47
  was a restaurant. And we came up with the name
• 21:51
  Hugh because Hugh stands for human.
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  I love the Brandon. Our guiding slogan was get back
• 21:58
  to human. And because my journey and all
• 22:01
  my research and all the ancestral like intelligence is
• 22:05
  that we don't live in a way that's consistent with human
• 22:08
  thriving anymore. And we have to get back to
• 22:11
  closer to nature to doing so. That's where the name came from.
• 22:15
  And the restaurant was a very risky proposition.
• 22:21
  Restaurants, you know, I was a professional investor for 23
• 22:25
  years. I guess I'm technically still am
• 22:27
  now, but I all I did was research companies and I knew
• 22:31
  the restaurants were very risky businesses, very difficult.
• 22:35
  And I also was humble enough to know we didn't know anything
• 22:37
  about restaurants. We just knew what we wanted.
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  And we hired a few consultants who knew a lot better than we
• 22:44
  did about what to do and what not to do.
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  And it took us a couple years of business planning to come up
• 22:50
  with this restaurant concept, which was a, it was kind of like
• 22:55
  a paleo or ancestral style, almost like a food court.
• 22:59
  It wasn't like a sit down restaurant with servers.
• 23:02
  And I, you know, I, I really give credit to Jordan for, for
• 23:06
  convincing me to do it. And he basically said he would
• 23:09
  quit his job. He was in real estate and my
• 23:12
  wife had had just stopped and we were, we just had our first
• 23:17
  child and they were like Jordan and Jessica would basically
• 23:21
  operate the restaurant. I would fund it and, and, and it
• 23:25
  was the timing of it was terrible, which was I was
• 23:28
  starting my own hedge fund also and, and we had no outside
• 23:31
  investors. And part of the reason we had no
• 23:34
  outside investors was because it was a cockamamie idea.
• 23:37
  You know, it was ultra premium food with, you know, everything
• 23:42
  that needed to be organic was organic.
• 23:44
  All the all the animal products were wild or, or sourced in a
• 23:48
  way that was evolutionarily consistent with how those
• 23:51
  animals. So the beef was grass fed, grass
• 23:53
  finish. The fish was pole caught and
• 23:55
  wild. Same thing with the chickens.
• 23:59
  We had some exotic animal meats and and there wasn't anything
• 24:04
  like it. And so I, I knew that investors
• 24:08
  would basically be like, this is crazy.
• 24:10
  You guys have no track record like.
• 24:12
  And so we kind of took a shot and, and in the beginning, right
• 24:18
  before we launched, we also had a gluten free, grain free bakery
• 24:22
  section that had things like cookies and banana bread and
• 24:26
  scones and muffins. And we needed chocolate chips
• 24:29
  for the baked goods. And when we went to go find
• 24:32
  chocolate chips, that meant our strict ingredient guardrails, we
• 24:35
  couldn't find any. All right, you know, all the
• 24:37
  chocolate chips that you could find for like scaled food
• 24:40
  service had genetically modified cane sugar, had had certain
• 24:45
  chemical emulsifiers in it. And we said, wow, we have to
• 24:49
  make our own chocolate to for the chocolate chips in the baked
• 24:52
  goods, right? And then, you know, through a
• 24:55
  lot of trial and error, we came up with our own version of our
• 24:58
  own chocolate. And Jordan said, this is so
• 25:00
  good, we should turn them into chocolate bars and we should
• 25:03
  sell it in the restaurant, right?
• 25:04
  And it started off basically as handmade chocolate that we sold
• 25:07
  in the restaurant. And and those sold like hot
• 25:13
  case. And we could not believe we
• 25:15
  couldn't keep them in stock. And they were very expensive.
• 25:17
  And they weren't very expensive because we were trying to make
• 25:19
  money off them. They were very expensive because
• 25:21
  it was very expensive to make. All right.
• 25:23
  And there were $10 a bar originally.
• 25:25
  And when I saw the volume in the first like couple months, I said
• 25:30
  to Jordan, I said, I think this is a separate business, right?
• 25:33
  Like we should lean into the chocolate part of the business.
• 25:37
  And then we got a lucky break where one of our chefs, his
• 25:40
  girlfriend, worked at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods
• 25:42
  location, and she was what was called a local forager, which
• 25:46
  was Whole Foods used to have local foragers before Amazon
• 25:49
  bought it. Yeah, it was.
• 25:50
  It was one of the It's amazing. Where they go to these, like
• 25:54
  random local things and they'd say, like, oh, that's a local
• 25:57
  product we wanted in the local store, right?
• 25:59
  And it didn't have to meet the national regulations of a
• 26:02
  national product. And she said, this is the best
• 26:05
  healthy chocolate I've had. Can we sell it at Whole Foods?
• 26:07
  And we said, sure. And that's how huge chocolate
• 26:10
  was born. Right, right.
• 26:11
  Wow, that's so cool. And then obviously huge
• 26:15
  chocolate just took off like a rocket.
• 26:17
  Yeah, at that point, so just just walk, walk me through that.
• 26:21
  Like like it took off and then and then you guys exited.
• 26:25
  So what happened was we had the restaurant and the restaurant
• 26:29
  was profitable after like the first six months.
• 26:33
  The first six months was an unmitigated disaster, by the
• 26:36
  way. Like there were no, no fewer
• 26:38
  than five times where I had anxiety attacks where I would
• 26:42
  say to Jessica in the middle of the night, like, we have to shut
• 26:45
  this down because it was so much more money than I had
• 26:49
  anticipated in terms of the ongoing funding required.
• 26:52
  It was losing a staggering amount of money in the first six
• 26:55
  months and I just couldn't handle it.
• 26:58
  And but for whatever reason, we stuck with it.
• 27:01
  And then the restaurant turned profitable and then the
• 27:03
  restaurant became very profitable.
• 27:06
  And we used the cash flow of the restaurant to finance the
• 27:09
  chocolate. And and then, you know, probably
• 27:14
  about three years in, we realized it was not just a
• 27:16
  family business. We realized like we needed like
• 27:18
  real operators and we hired some real people who came from
• 27:22
  Consumer Packaged Goods, who came from industries that knew
• 27:25
  what they were doing. And you know, we did our best to
• 27:28
  hire great people. And then eventually probably
• 27:34
  around 2017, 18, Hugh became the number one premium chocolate in
• 27:40
  the country. And at that point we started
• 27:44
  getting some inbounds from interested suitors who saw that
• 27:50
  Hugh chocolate had metrics that were that were unprecedented in
• 27:56
  the industry and it was still small.
• 27:59
  But there there's certain KPIs in Consumer Packaged Goods like
• 28:05
  one of them is they call Velocity, which is how many
• 28:08
  units per store per week you sell and that's a very important
• 28:12
  KPI. And we were three or four times
• 28:17
  above anything else and our prices were way higher, which
• 28:21
  was also unusual. And so we had some KPIs that
• 28:25
  were really interesting to the suitors.
• 28:29
  And then through some serendipity, we ended up taking
• 28:35
  Mondelez, the largest snacking company in the world, the
• 28:37
  company that owns Cadbury. We brought them on as a very
• 28:41
  small minority investor to help us think about international
• 28:44
  expansion. And then at the beginning of
• 28:47
  COVID early 2020, another one of the other largest chocolate
• 28:53
  companies in the world came in with an unsolicited bid for the
• 28:56
  whole company. And it created a bidding war.
• 28:59
  And we ended up at that point we had, we had outside investors,
• 29:05
  my family and I still own the Super majority of the business.
• 29:08
  But at that point we had a fiduciary responsibility to our
• 29:11
  investors. And it ended up being the
• 29:14
  highest valuation for a food company in history, right?
• 29:18
  So we had to take it. And it was, it was bittersweet.
• 29:21
  You know, I think some people looked at me and we're like, of
• 29:23
  course you're going. To take it, did you just make a
• 29:24
  chocolate chip there? It was bittersweet.
• 29:27
  Oh yeah, yeah, I did. Yeah, yeah.
• 29:29
  Sorry, I couldn't resist. Yeah, no, that was, that was
• 29:31
  that was such a. Fan of the chocolate?
• 29:33
  That was not an intended ton, but it, it got, you know, every,
• 29:39
  there was a lot of luck there. The timing was perfect and and
• 29:43
  as a financial investor like I, I was obviously wise enough to
• 29:48
  to determine that this is a unprecedented multiple.
• 29:52
  Amazing. And so we exited and sold it to
• 29:54
  Mondelez in 2021 and then before but before the sale in 20, late
• 30:04
  2018. So I had my own hedge fund from
• 30:08
  late 2011 until the first quarter of 2019.
• 30:12
  So call it eight years. And at that point, I've been in
• 30:17
  the hedge fund industry for about 21 years.
• 30:20
  And I had noticed I had a great run.
• 30:25
  I had, I had really only two down years in that entire 20
• 30:28
  year period. And, and I, I really started to
• 30:34
  burn out and, and I kind of noticed as Hugh was growing and
• 30:38
  it started probably 2016 that my, I felt like my soul was
• 30:45
  rotting. The hedge fund industry is
• 30:48
  basically a glorified video game.
• 30:50
  And, and, and, and honestly, I think most investing is, and
• 30:54
  there's a lot of ways that I think people rationalize it as
• 30:57
  like something that's adding a lot of value to society.
• 31:00
  And I think if you're actually helping build companies and
• 31:03
  finance, you know, things that help humanity or society, like
• 31:08
  that's a great purpose of investing.
• 31:10
  But the bulk of investing that I was familiar with, which was
• 31:13
  public markets, you know, equities, most of it's just a
• 31:18
  glorified video game. And I got very good at that
• 31:20
  video game. But I felt like I, I was
• 31:23
  watching what was happening with you and I was watching what was
• 31:26
  happening with my hedge fund. And obviously my hedge fund was
• 31:28
  far more lucrative. He wasn't even making money at
• 31:31
  that point. And, and we were getting
• 31:34
  profoundly touching emails and letters and anecdotes from
• 31:39
  people about how Hugh changed their life.
• 31:42
  And I mean, unbelievable letters of people who thought they
• 31:45
  couldn't eat, you know, delicious food ever again.
• 31:48
  And when they discovered Hugh, they realized they could.
• 31:51
  And I never got letters like that running a hedge fund.
• 31:55
  And, and I just felt like this intense urge that I wasn't
• 32:01
  helping people. I was just getting rich or
• 32:03
  getting richer and, and I felt like I was surrounded by a lot
• 32:08
  of darkness And, and you know, they show billions was based on
• 32:13
  where I worked and it was modelled off of the firm.
• 32:16
  Where I worked pretty dark, sure.
• 32:17
  And, and, and it, it's a really dark culture and it's all about
• 32:22
  basically pushing pieces of paper around and arbitraging,
• 32:26
  you know, financial instruments to make money.
• 32:29
  And it's super materialistic in terms of the hedge fund
• 32:32
  lifestyle, in terms of planes and boats and mansions and all
• 32:36
  that stuff. And, and in the epicenter in New
• 32:38
  York City, I felt like it was really gross for my kids.
• 32:43
  I felt like it wasn't who I was. I felt like I was becoming
• 32:47
  someone that I didn't want to be.
• 32:49
  And I, it, it took me two years too long to finally pull the
• 32:53
  trigger and realize that I should retire.
• 32:57
  And it was very hard because, you know, at our peak, we were,
• 32:59
  we were managing 4 1/2 billion of assets.
• 33:03
  And it was an enormously large amount of management fees and
• 33:07
  fees. I had a big firm.
• 33:09
  I had 40 people working for me. It felt very powerful to be in
• 33:14
  that position. Sure.
• 33:15
  And it's very hard to just like turn that off and walk away from
• 33:20
  what's basically like a large annuity and.
• 33:24
  And you're being told that you're winning in the material
• 33:26
  world, Correct. And, you know, in the world of
• 33:28
  form, you know that that constant, you know, feed of like
• 33:33
  I'm winning. Yeah, it's hard to walk away
• 33:34
  from. It's very.
• 33:35
  Hard and, and, but I was deeply depressed and, and I and I, it
• 33:40
  was the, it was the second period after my eye disease when
• 33:43
  I went into like real clinical depression.
• 33:47
  And it was when, you know, my financial outward success was
• 33:51
  peaking and it was another moment to look in the mirror and
• 33:54
  say, wait a minute. Like there was a, there was a
• 33:57
  moment and I, I talk about this from time to time, where at the
• 34:00
  end of 2015, there, there's like an award ceremony for best hedge
• 34:06
  funds. And it's kind of like the Oscars
• 34:08
  for hedge funds. And we won three awards that
• 34:11
  year, including best new hedge fund of the year.
• 34:14
  And you know, you get these beautiful glass trophies and
• 34:17
  it's this huge event and it's, you know, pictures and
• 34:21
  everything. And, and after I won that award,
• 34:25
  I felt this immense hollowness. And, and I, I said to my wife
• 34:31
  privately afterwards, I said, I, I don't think I can do better
• 34:35
  than this. And she's like, what do you
• 34:37
  mean? And, and I had heard from one of
• 34:39
  my mentors before who was a multi billionaire and, and was
• 34:44
  always depressed. And he said to me at one point
• 34:47
  he, he, he said to me, he said I got to the top of my mountain
• 34:50
  and there's nothing to see. And that stuck with me.
• 34:53
  And I, I, I sort of like, I never thought that was possible
• 34:56
  because at the time I was much younger when he said that to me.
• 34:59
  And I was like, come on. But then I got there and I got
• 35:02
  to the top of my mountain and there was nothing up there.
• 35:04
  And I felt this immense like vacuum.
• 35:09
  And, and then shortly thereafter, one of my best
• 35:12
  friends and my business partner of 16 years, he killed himself
• 35:17
  and, and, and it was, I think the darkness of what we did got
• 35:22
  to him and he was very financially successful also.
• 35:26
  And the combination of his death and, and me sort of feeling like
• 35:32
  I kind of peaked and couldn't do better put me into this really
• 35:37
  existential like dark night of the soul depression.
• 35:42
  And and that lasted for years. And it culminated in made my
• 35:48
  decision ultimately to return our investors money, retire,
• 35:52
  which was at the beginning of 2019.
• 35:55
  And then I said to Jessica, I said, if I'm getting out of
• 35:57
  this, I want to really get out of this.
• 36:00
  I don't want to be in the same circles of people.
• 36:02
  I don't want to be in like the same atmosphere.
• 36:06
  And we chose Austin because it was so different from New York
• 36:10
  City and it was also the epicenter of health and
• 36:13
  Wellness. Whole Foods is headquartered
• 36:14
  here and, and I knew I wanted to lean into Hue and grow the
• 36:18
  health and Wellness part of of what I wanted to do in my life.
• 36:22
  And that was the inception of why we created Human Co, which
• 36:26
  was, which is what I do now. And it's a, it's a health and
• 36:29
  Wellness like holding company. Think of it as a mini
• 36:32
  conglomerate where we buy, build and invest in businesses that
• 36:35
  are trying to make the world a better place.
• 36:39
  And so that was the sort of switch into Austin.
• 36:42
  Yeah. Yeah, and the most famous brand
• 36:43
  for that, of course, is True Food Kitchen, which is one of
• 36:46
  our favorite places to eat. Yeah, it's it's amazing story.
• 36:51
  I mean, one, one thing that really resonates in the story
• 36:54
  for me is that you had this ability to really be in tune
• 36:59
  with your soul and get the divine inspiration to A change
• 37:03
  your diet and save yourself from blindness.
• 37:08
  And B, then had that same ability with your soul to say I
• 37:13
  got to get out. Yeah.
• 37:15
  Because if you, if you hadn't have listened to that, I think
• 37:19
  it would have been really dark. I agree, yeah.
• 37:21
  Look, I, I, I, I believe that when when humans feel profound
• 37:29
  psychological pain or depression or anxiety, that's a signal and
• 37:35
  from the universe that you have to change.
• 37:38
  And and I think that pain will persist until you change.
• 37:42
  This is in man's search for meaning.
• 37:44
  Yeah. I mean, this what what Viktor
• 37:46
  Frankel's biggest fear was is that people would medicate that
• 37:49
  pain away, right? And that they wouldn't grapple
• 37:52
  with their soul in terms of what is their meaning in this
• 37:55
  lifetime? What are they supposed to do?
• 37:57
  Yeah, and that's what we do as a society, right?
• 37:59
  Where we overmedicate everything and you know, and, and we don't
• 38:03
  get to the root causes of, of all of the various forms of
• 38:07
  disease. And, and I, I, you know, I've
• 38:10
  been spending a few years on this topic that we call the meta
• 38:14
  crisis, which is, which is the intersection of like probably
• 38:20
  the three greatest crises of, of human history, which is the
• 38:24
  crisis of, of physical health, mental health and planetary
• 38:29
  health. And I think I think addressing
• 38:35
  the root causes of the meta crisis actually have a lot of
• 38:38
  the same answers, but it requires an ability to to deal
• 38:43
  with the pain in a way that requires change instead of band
• 38:48
  aiding it. So.
• 38:49
  I want to, I want to talk about just how significant this
• 38:54
  problem is in the United States, 'cause you educated me on that.
• 38:59
  And I know you, you became famous recently for holding up
• 39:02
  the two boxes of root loops and you know, the red dye ban now
• 39:06
  is, is in effect. But it was really shocking to me
• 39:11
  as an American, you know, as a proud American, you know, born
• 39:14
  and raised here in Austin, how bad this problem is and how many
• 39:20
  of these chemicals are added to our food that are totally
• 39:23
  illegal in Europe and Canada and other places so.
• 39:27
  Yeah. So it's, I'll try to keep it a
• 39:30
  bridge because we could talk about this one for hours.
• 39:33
  And this is where I spend a lot of my time, particularly on some
• 39:36
  of the policy work I've done, you know, with people like like
• 39:40
  RFK Junior. So it's much worse than I think
• 39:44
  most Americans realize. And, and thankfully in the last
• 39:47
  six months, a lot of it has come to light.
• 39:50
  But as an example, there are about 10,000 ingredients that
• 39:57
  are added to our food and I'd call it consumer product supply,
• 40:01
  which includes things like lotions and makeup and and you
• 40:04
  know, hair products, etcetera. That have never been tested by
• 40:08
  the FDA and and that comparable number in Europe is 400.
• 40:14
  So Europe has a much, much stricter set of regulatory
• 40:18
  standards on what they allow into their into the consumer
• 40:23
  products. And it's basically stuff that's
• 40:26
  man made, right. So the US developed a policy
• 40:31
  about 50 years ago called generally recognized as safe,
• 40:36
  which was, which was, it had good intentions and all these
• 40:39
  things like any Frankenstein movie, started with good
• 40:43
  intentions and then ended up as a horror movie.
• 40:46
  And they, they created the generally recognized as safe
• 40:49
  regulatory approach to basically allow ingredients that we knew
• 40:54
  were obviously safe to be put into food products without
• 41:00
  additional testing. And this was stuff like salt and
• 41:03
  baking soda where you didn't have to like retest that kind of
• 41:06
  stuff. And then the FDA got very
• 41:08
  overwhelmed and started allowing companies to do something called
• 41:12
  self certification, where if you are an enterprising company and
• 41:19
  you're developing a new food product, you could hire several
• 41:23
  independent experts in quotes who could create in a laboratory
• 41:29
  a new preservative or a new colorant or a new chemical that
• 41:32
  changes the taste profile. And your independent experts
• 41:37
  could rubber stamp it, say it's safe.
• 41:39
  They send that to the FDA. The FDA recognizes that the
• 41:42
  experts are experts, and then they rubber stamp it and then
• 41:45
  boom, it's in our food supply. And it could be as quick as
• 41:48
  three months. Europe, by contrast, has what's
• 41:51
  called the precautionary principle where they assume
• 41:54
  everything is guilty until it's proven innocent.
• 41:58
  And if if a company or a laboratory develops a new man
• 42:02
  made chemical, they require up to sometimes 10 years of testing
• 42:07
  before it's allowed. And, and that, and, and America
• 42:12
  did this as a way to sponsor and encourage innovation so that we
• 42:17
  could basically develop cheaper and cheaper and more accessible
• 42:21
  and more shelf stable foods. But because the profit motive is
• 42:25
  so strong, it, it, it generally didn't comport with the good
• 42:29
  intentions. And there's many, many books on
• 42:32
  this that talk about how like Doritos is incredibly
• 42:38
  scientifically engineered to addict humans in terms of all
• 42:41
  the things that were, that were synthesized and created in
• 42:44
  laboratories, were added to the product that make it, you know,
• 42:48
  more taste better, more shelf stable, and, and most
• 42:52
  importantly, more addictive. And, and this has proliferated
• 42:57
  across every industry. And it, it, it also, it's not
• 43:03
  just the food additives, it's also things like certain
• 43:05
  herbicides and pesticides that are banned in many countries.
• 43:09
  And so there are there are hundreds of ingredients that are
• 43:17
  are banned or require cigarette like warning labels in Europe
• 43:24
  that we freely allow here. And some of them have fairly
• 43:30
  conclusive evidence that they're harmful, carcinogenic,
• 43:34
  inflammatory. Some of them they haven't tested
• 43:37
  enough to know. But what we do know, and, and
• 43:40
  this is really where the Make America Healthy again movement
• 43:44
  has had so much legs is that Europe and, and broad Europe,
• 43:50
  and that includes, you know, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
• 43:55
  they live five to seven years longer than we do.
• 43:58
  They have significant lower rates of diabetes, heart
• 44:03
  disease, cancer, and and by the way, they smoke way more than we
• 44:06
  do. They're also much happier than
• 44:09
  we are. And then most importantly, so
• 44:11
  they have all of the key health metrics that they're far better
• 44:14
  than America on. They spend half to 1/3 of
• 44:18
  healthcare per person than we do.
• 44:21
  So they're healthier and they spend way less money than we do.
• 44:23
  All right. And that, that's over hundreds
• 44:27
  and hundreds of millions of people over decades.
• 44:30
  So the, the, the evidence is overwhelming, right?
• 44:34
  And, and I think what I've been trying to advocate for is they
• 44:40
  care more about their people than they do about profit.
• 44:44
  And we care more about profit than we do about our people.
• 44:47
  And they have plenty of highly profitable companies and plenty
• 44:50
  of public corporations that are doing great.
• 44:53
  But there is an inherently more humane approach to protecting
• 45:01
  its people than we have in this country.
• 45:04
  And, and I think we're finally starting to address it.
• 45:08
  But the, the epidemic of, of cancer and disease in this
• 45:13
  country is so alarming that it's literally existential.
• 45:18
  And we don't, and, and, and the, the healthcare cost is so
• 45:23
  overwhelming. I mean, we, we spent upwards of
• 45:25
  $5 trillion on healthcare and, and, and somewhere upwards of
• 45:30
  90% of that is in self-inflicted lifestyle related disease that
• 45:37
  we know would could be prevented or cured through some of the
• 45:42
  lifestyle changes that cured my own eye disease.
• 45:45
  Yeah, it's really, I mean, it's stunning and and, you know, not
• 45:49
  most Americans don't travel over to Europe.
• 45:52
  You know, actually a shocking number of Congress people have
• 45:55
  never actually been outside of North America.
• 45:58
  But those that that do have the financial resources to do so,
• 46:04
  they always report back. They feel so much better, like
• 46:07
  when they come back here, like the just just being exposed to
• 46:10
  that diet, even for a week will make their bodies start to heal.
• 46:15
  And yeah, it's really, it's really sad in a, in a, in a
• 46:18
  country like this, which has the biggest GDP that we don't take
• 46:23
  care of people. Yeah, and I think it's even
• 46:26
  more, it's even more flagrant than that, because it's not like
• 46:29
  they're eating salads all day. Like you go to France, you go to
• 46:32
  Italy, they eat bread with every meal.
• 46:34
  They eat a lot of like indulgent items and dairy and cheeses.
• 46:39
  They have sweets. A lot of butter.
• 46:40
  You know, like they're not, I mean, they're eating a lot of
• 46:44
  indulgent foods and, and initially, and there's different
• 46:49
  terms for this. One of them is called the French
• 46:50
  paradox. But initially we kind of chalked
• 46:52
  it up to, well, they walk more than we do and they eat less
• 46:56
  than we do. But but we've discovered that
• 46:58
  that's not that most of the answer is actually not that
• 47:01
  it's, it's actually what's in the food.
• 47:05
  And it's not just about the calories, it's about the
• 47:07
  chemical burden that we have. And it's traceable and it's
• 47:13
  detectable in our blood. In terms of glyphosate, which is
• 47:16
  the main ingredient in Roundup, it's the most used herbicide and
• 47:20
  pesticide in this country is highly, highly carcinogenic and
• 47:24
  toxic. There's been billions and
• 47:26
  billions of dollars of settlements of lawsuits already,
• 47:30
  and many countries ban it, but it is allowed here.
• 47:34
  And it is a it's just one of many, many chemicals that we as
• 47:41
  Americans use for better crop yields and cheaper prices.
• 47:48
  And there hasn't been kind of a moral imperative from our
• 47:53
  leaders to say, I don't care if it makes the food more
• 47:57
  profitable, like we shouldn't poison each other for money.
• 48:01
  And that's literally what we've been doing.
• 48:02
  And so I feel like we're in a deep spiritual crisis as well
• 48:06
  because we've lost our way in terms of what matters.
• 48:09
  And, and we have become so obsessed as as as a country.
• 48:14
  And, and I say this from someone who was like at the epicenter of
• 48:18
  one of the most capitalistic activities ever, which was hedge
• 48:21
  fund investing. And we, I think we as a country
• 48:27
  have lost our way in that we value progress in terms of
• 48:33
  money, corporations, inventions and, and things that feel good
• 48:39
  in terms of how we measure progress.
• 48:41
  But I think our our understanding of what really
• 48:44
  matters in, in life has been lost.
• 48:48
  Yeah. This is a really important
• 48:50
  discussion and something I'm super interested in.
• 48:53
  I'm very careful with what I put in my body.
• 48:55
  Deborah is too. And you know, I feel great as a
• 48:59
  result. And I agree with you on on all,
• 49:03
  all, all counts here. Let's let's take a let's take a
• 49:06
  bit of a diversion into this age of abundance for all.
• 49:12
  Let me first just describe it for you how I'm thinking about
• 49:16
  it. So I think that the accelerating
• 49:19
  forces of AI, quantum computing, robotics will create an age of
• 49:26
  abundance even for countries like Chad.
• 49:29
  So one of the things I talked about on the first episode is my
• 49:33
  Uber drive with a really kind gentleman Calibu from from Chad,
• 49:40
  who I started to look on ChatGPT to learn about Chad because I
• 49:43
  didn't know anything about Chad. Yeah, I don't either.
• 49:46
  Chad is #187 out of 189 on the Human Development Index, it has
• 49:51
  AGDP of $660 a person. Ours is around 85,000 or so in
• 49:57
  the US. And it's really, it's really
• 50:01
  impoverished. I mean, really, really
• 50:02
  impoverished. And and and, you know, Callaboo
• 50:05
  was just this beautiful, bright soul who he is.
• 50:10
  He is saving up for the next six to seven years of his life,
• 50:14
  sending almost all of his money back to Chad, to his wife and
• 50:19
  children who live there, his parents to, you know, who think
• 50:23
  that he's rich, right? He's like, I live in this land
• 50:26
  of abundance in America. And he's saving up to get them
• 50:29
  to move here in the future so they can live there.
• 50:33
  And it was during that drive where it really clicked for me.
• 50:37
  And I was like, who's going to take care of Chad?
• 50:40
  That the only way we create abundance in a place like Chad
• 50:45
  is through things like robots. Like then, you know, think of an
• 50:50
  NGO 10 years from now where these technologies have
• 50:53
  accelerated to a point where you could have an NGO go in there
• 50:58
  with $10 million and 10,000 robots and go build the clean
• 51:02
  water pathways, go build electrical supply they need, you
• 51:06
  know, from, you know, obviously it will be solar energy, go and
• 51:11
  you know, build the healthcare systems they need, etcetera.
• 51:15
  And if you can create an Oasis in Chad, like you could create
• 51:18
  an Oasis anywhere in the world. And I think that that's where we
• 51:23
  could go as humanity. There's lots of risk to it, but
• 51:29
  that is what I mean by the age of abundance for all.
• 51:32
  And so I'd just like to ask you, do you, do you think that that
• 51:36
  is even possible for humanity in this lifetime?
• 51:40
  Like I, I, I see that we'll be there maybe 10 to 15 years from
• 51:44
  now if we make it. We'll get into if we make it.
• 51:48
  Look, I, I, I obviously grew up with technology and I'm like a
• 51:54
  techno nerd like you and. Yeah, we've had our share of
• 51:59
  techno conversations. Like all my favorite movies
• 52:01
  growing up were sci-fi and I I certainly believe it's possible
• 52:09
  and, and, and I certainly believe that technology can be
• 52:14
  used as a force for incredible good.
• 52:19
  I I think my concern around around AI is how it can be used
• 52:25
  for bad and and. And I of course have that same
• 52:29
  concern. I mean I'm not looking at this
• 52:31
  with just rose colored glasses. Like yeah, and terrorist will be
• 52:35
  able to use AI to create great destruction, but my bet is that
• 52:40
  many more human beings will fight that great destruction as
• 52:45
  we approach the Asia abundance for all.
• 52:47
  Yeah, look, I, I, I, I think my, my broader concern is, is even
• 52:53
  if 99.99% of the technological evolution is for good, AI has
• 53:01
  the capability, if even that .01% uses it for bad of
• 53:07
  destroying humanity. And, and, and I, I've spent, as
• 53:13
  you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about and, and, and
• 53:16
  look like I come at this from a few different perspectives.
• 53:20
  My, my first, my first job when I started as a quantitative
• 53:26
  analyst and, and kind of researcher was one of my first
• 53:32
  projects was in, in 9899, which a lot of investors today we're
• 53:37
  not actively investing or alive for that period.
• 53:42
  And it was, it was the Internet Boo.
• 53:44
  And, and one of the things that they, and it was also one of the
• 53:49
  greatest financial calamities, which was the long term Capital
• 53:51
  Management disaster. And they wanted me to study and
• 53:58
  there wasn't a lot of research on it at the time because it was
• 54:00
  like the beginning of the Internet was the history of
• 54:02
  manias and bubbles because the Internet created the, at the
• 54:07
  time, what was the greatest bubble we'd ever seen in terms
• 54:11
  of financial valuations, in terms of excess, in terms of,
• 54:14
  you know, people extrapolating that the Internet's going to
• 54:16
  change the world, which it obviously did, by the way.
• 54:19
  And we can't even imagine a world without the Internet now.
• 54:24
  But but. You know you, you and I are in a
• 54:27
  generation. That is the last generation that
• 54:31
  will remember the world. Without the Internet, That's
• 54:33
  right, yeah. And, and there was a time when
• 54:37
  like if in 99, I remember this, where if you were like a regular
• 54:41
  company and you decided to put.com in your name, your stock
• 54:46
  went up 100% like the next week. Trust me, I lived through the
• 54:50
  the the height of that and the pain.
• 54:52
  Of that and yeah. And then obviously, you know,
• 54:53
  one of the greatest crashes was, was in 2000, 2001.
• 54:57
  And there are a lot of similarities of that bubble to
• 55:02
  what's happening right now with AI and, and, and that's just the
• 55:07
  financial part of it. And the what happened with Long
• 55:11
  term Capital and what happened with, with there was a lot of
• 55:14
  fraud that happened in 2000 like Enron and Worldcom that also
• 55:19
  contributed to the crash. But what financial markets are
• 55:23
  notorious for being terrible at is estimating unforeseen risks
• 55:32
  and and either either grossly discounting them or not even
• 55:36
  imagining what they could be. And that also happened in the
• 55:39
  2008 mortgage crisis. And if you go back in the in the
• 55:44
  history of financial markets, you know, every bubble and every
• 55:47
  crash was the same pattern, but with something new that was
• 55:52
  world changing. And then people realized that
• 55:56
  there were a lot of things that they didn't properly handicap or
• 55:59
  consider. I still don't get how tulips
• 56:01
  were going to change the world. That's a whole.
• 56:02
  Different thing, right? Yes.
• 56:04
  But you know, you know, it obviously happened in the 20s.
• 56:08
  There was a, there was a period in the 70s when it happened.
• 56:10
  There was a period in the 80s when it happened.
• 56:12
  And so there's been a handful of, of times and then, you know,
• 56:15
  you go back to even the times of the Tulip mania.
• 56:17
  And so I became really, really good at trying to understand,
• 56:24
  you know, what Karl Popper calls the black Swans, which Nassim
• 56:28
  Taleb has popularized the book the Black Swan.
• 56:31
  And it's this idea of, of unknown unknowns and, and how
• 56:36
  can you think about those if it's never happened before?
• 56:39
  And how do you balance that with the, the obvious?
• 56:44
  And, and I, I, I, I, you know, I see, I still do a lot of
• 56:49
  investing in financial analysis. A, a, a stat that caught me off
• 56:53
  guard. This was last week, and I think
• 56:57
  I might have sent it to you, but there's 498 private AI companies
• 57:01
  now that are unicorns that are bigger than a billion.
• 57:04
  Dollars, you did send it to me. That collect, these are all
• 57:07
  private companies that collectively are worth $2.7
• 57:10
  trillion and two years earlier that number was like 10 billion.
• 57:19
  And so call it 2.7 trillion of value has been created, most of
• 57:27
  which is not even generating revenue yet.
• 57:30
  There's obviously some amazing examples like like open AI and
• 57:34
  Entropic, but the amount of revenue they're generating and
• 57:38
  the lack of profits and what they're burning doesn't anywhere
• 57:41
  close to account for the $2.7 trillion of value and the amount
• 57:46
  of, of projected profits that would have to be generated to
• 57:51
  justify the 2.7 trillion. It, it is so large that it's
• 57:56
  almost unimaginable. And so we're definitely in an,
• 58:02
  an extreme bubble. This bubble could persist for
• 58:06
  another two years. You know, the thing about
• 58:07
  bubbles is they always go longer than you think.
• 58:11
  And, and I think because of that staggering amount of wealth
• 58:17
  creation, it's created staggering incentives to keep
• 58:21
  going. And when we talk about safety
• 58:24
  and AI safety, AI safety and, and you know, what are the
• 58:29
  things we won't allow and what are the things that we're going
• 58:31
  to constrain? Not only is there no incentive
• 58:34
  to do that, there is a gross, gross disincentive to do
• 58:38
  anything that slows this down because of how much wealth is
• 58:41
  being created. And, and that's just in the US.
• 58:44
  And then when you compare the arms race that we're doing in
• 58:48
  the US to the other countries like China and Russia, nobody in
• 58:53
  the US is going to want to slow down because they don't want
• 58:55
  Russia and China, you know, to leapfrog like what what we
• 58:59
  thought was happening with DeepSeek, to leapfrog above us.
• 59:03
  And so my greatest concern is how do we create some incentives
• 59:09
  to be more thoughtful about this?
• 59:13
  And I think a lot of the risks that that are there have been
• 59:17
  talked about, like the article you sent me for Mustafa.
• 59:21
  And, and obviously you and I have been exchanging really good
• 59:24
  articles on some of the warning signs that a is demonstrating
• 59:28
  where it's lying or where it's, it's reprogramming itself to
• 59:32
  survive, or it's trying to blackmail the engineers or, you
• 59:37
  know, it it, it's already demonstrating self-interest and
• 59:41
  self preservation. And what my bigger concern is,
• 59:43
  is I've also spent a lot of time studying, studying humanity.
• 59:47
  And humanity has in its past a lot of darkness and a lot of
• 59:52
  terrible behavior. And we're training all of these
• 59:56
  models on the summation of everything that we've ever
• 59:59
  written. And within that, that
• 1:00:04
  conglomeration of everything that's ever happened, there's a
• 1:00:07
  ton of darkness, and there's a ton of darkness that actually
• 1:00:10
  worked. For that time, you know, what
• 1:00:14
  Hitler did, what Genghis Khan did, like there's and, and so if
• 1:00:18
  we're training all the models on things that that if the data
• 1:00:24
  sets possess a lot of darkness and humanity itself, as
• 1:00:29
  optimistic as I am in our ability to thrive and survive,
• 1:00:33
  I'm also, you know, pretty reasonable and, and I'd say
• 1:00:37
  like, like pragmatic and understanding that humanity has
• 1:00:42
  some darkness inside of it and has done things from time to
• 1:00:46
  time that are just profit seeking or, you know, or, or
• 1:00:51
  occasionally or, or nihilistic or occasionally or actually
• 1:00:53
  downright evil. And I just don't know if there's
• 1:00:56
  enough things being put in place to protect against, you know,
• 1:01:01
  the very, very small number of people that could design the
• 1:01:05
  greatest bio weapon or could you do something with nuclear or
• 1:01:09
  could just decide that like, you know what, there's too many
• 1:01:12
  oligarchs and there's too many billionaires and I want to
• 1:01:15
  destroy the financial system. And, you know, you were the one
• 1:01:18
  that told me that, you know, you could take a bunch of those new
• 1:01:22
  NVIDIA boxes and take them off grid and jailbreak them and and
• 1:01:29
  kind of just designed some pretty nasty stuff that you
• 1:01:31
  would normally think of would be in a Bond movie.
• 1:01:33
  By the way, we, we now have in this household five open source
• 1:01:40
  large language models running on a computer that allows us to
• 1:01:46
  query things that we should not be able to know.
• 1:01:49
  They would not even be legal on chat GPD, right?
• 1:01:52
  And, and, you know, not that we have a nefarious intent,
• 1:01:56
  obviously, we're, I'm just curious like, like how fast is
• 1:02:00
  this moving? And so I'm, I know that's not
• 1:02:03
  going to make you feel at ease, but, but it's, but you know,
• 1:02:07
  I'm, I'm really exploring this because I'm thinking a lot about
• 1:02:11
  how does the light overcome the dark?
• 1:02:14
  Yes, because the, you know, part of what I believe and you know,
• 1:02:19
  I, as you know, I'm deeply spiritual.
• 1:02:21
  I know you're deeply spiritual is that it is within humanity's
• 1:02:25
  grasp for the ancient prophecies, which you can look
• 1:02:30
  at as mystical or metaphorical or both that heaven and earth
• 1:02:33
  would merge. Like, I think it's this
• 1:02:35
  lifetime. And, you know, I wrote a short
• 1:02:38
  story this week called God's Final Exam, which, you know,
• 1:02:41
  thank you for for reading it and, and encouraging me on that,
• 1:02:46
  you know, where it was an optimistic vision of how we make
• 1:02:50
  it together to that age of abundance for all.
• 1:02:54
  And you know, I'm putting it all on the field.
• 1:02:57
  This, this next, this next 10 years of my life really matters.
• 1:03:01
  And, you know, I'm not alone. And you're not alone.
• 1:03:04
  There's a lot of people bringing the light.
• 1:03:06
  You know, Reid Hoffman's bringing the light, Eric
• 1:03:08
  Schmidt's bringing the light, Mustafa Saliman's bringing the
• 1:03:11
  light, Demycisibus, Dr. Fifi Lee, Mira Murati, And there's a
• 1:03:14
  lot of people that really care. You know Henry Kissinger's dying
• 1:03:18
  book, the. Last chapter.
• 1:03:20
  That last chapter was Henry Kissinger's dying message to
• 1:03:24
  humanity, pleading for us to make it.
• 1:03:28
  I think it's our greatest test. It is our greatest.
• 1:03:31
  History. Yeah, it is God's final.
• 1:03:33
  It's my word. I, I'm getting the chills as I'm
• 1:03:35
  saying it 'cause I think it's our greatest test and I think,
• 1:03:39
  and, and I think there's actually a lot of parallels to
• 1:03:43
  what I've been working on with the food system, but this is
• 1:03:46
  much more consequential whereas. There are parallels for.
• 1:03:50
  Yeah, because we failed the test, yeah.
• 1:03:53
  I mean, here, here's the parallels.
• 1:03:55
  I'll, I'll, I'll give you the parallels because this is, I
• 1:03:58
  mean, you know, I know a lot about tech, right?
• 1:04:01
  And, and you know, a ton about food.
• 1:04:02
  And so you can educate me a ton on that.
• 1:04:05
  And you have, we are poisoning ourselves through social media.
• 1:04:11
  The algorithms are seeking our basest fears to keep us enraged
• 1:04:19
  so that we constantly keep clicking to sell ads to us.
• 1:04:23
  Meta made $45 billion in profit this quarter.
• 1:04:28
  Zuckerberg is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars
• 1:04:32
  on an AI data center that's as big as Manhattan.
• 1:04:35
  All of Manhattan. And these profits are gained by
• 1:04:41
  these algorithms seeking our bases fears.
• 1:04:44
  Yeah. And effectively enslaving us.
• 1:04:46
  Yes. And and so we are, you know,
• 1:04:49
  just like we're poisoning ourselves with diet, we are
• 1:04:52
  poisoning our minds with this content.
• 1:04:56
  And it is like a Matrix moment, you know, I know you and I are
• 1:04:59
  both fans of that movie where humanity has to break out of the
• 1:05:04
  shackles of that Matrix. Now, I think I'm more optimistic
• 1:05:10
  than you. I mean, we, we, we should talk
• 1:05:12
  about this like probabilistically, I'm 95%
• 1:05:15
  certain that humanity does make it to this age of abundance for
• 1:05:18
  all. I'm not being rose colored
• 1:05:23
  glasses in my book on how hard it's going to be like my book
• 1:05:27
  which is which is again, love conquers fear, humanity, AI and
• 1:05:30
  age of abundance for all. I'm being really clear eyed on
• 1:05:33
  how rough it's going to be at times.
• 1:05:34
  I mean, there's going to be a lot of people just freaking out
• 1:05:37
  alone on job loss and all the retooling that's going to be.
• 1:05:41
  Required that's one of my huge concerns actually is the is is
• 1:05:45
  the job loss and people's lack of purpose and and even if and I
• 1:05:50
  don't I don't buy the universal basic income idea like I don't
• 1:05:54
  think we'll ever be able to. Pull, I don't, I don't buy it.
• 1:05:56
  And I don't think it would be necessary because when we get to
• 1:06:00
  this, this when we can see across the horizon, the age of
• 1:06:05
  abundance for all. And I think we're going to be
• 1:06:07
  able to see it. We're going to be able to
• 1:06:08
  glimpse it almost like an astronaut, like see, you know,
• 1:06:11
  seeing on the other side, you know, across across the planet.
• 1:06:16
  We we're going to see on the horizon.
• 1:06:19
  Wow, there's a future available to us where we can choose to in
• 1:06:24
  disease, where we can choose to have infinite food abundance of
• 1:06:29
  the highest quality foods. We can have infinite water
• 1:06:33
  abundance. We can have nearly unlimited
• 1:06:35
  energy, which everything starts with energy that humanity is
• 1:06:39
  going to have to make a big choice and and we have free
• 1:06:41
  will. God has given us free will and
• 1:06:44
  that choice is going to either be let's go ahead and go for it
• 1:06:48
  and grab that future and allow love to conquer fear.
• 1:06:53
  And it's a tall order because you know, we've been locked into
• 1:06:57
  a scarcity mindset for millennia and this fear based mindset.
• 1:07:01
  And this is 0 sum game of like, if we get AGI before China,
• 1:07:05
  we're going to subjugate them. If they get AGI before us,
• 1:07:07
  they're going to subjugate. I mean that that is fear is a
• 1:07:12
  powerful motivator right now. There is a lot of fear around
• 1:07:16
  that and most people don't really realize, you know, I, I
• 1:07:21
  agree with you on some of the aspects of the bubble.
• 1:07:24
  I think like 95% of AI companies are probably going to go out of
• 1:07:27
  business because most of them are just not going to make it.
• 1:07:30
  And I, I think that maybe for a different reason than you, I
• 1:07:33
  think this space has a Microsoft Windows problem or it's like,
• 1:07:37
  hey, Jason, nice app you have there.
• 1:07:38
  Sorry, it's just part of Windows now.
• 1:07:40
  That's that's what open AI and Anthropic, they're going to grow
• 1:07:42
  to a point right where they're going to make most of these apps
• 1:07:45
  totally irrelevant, but some of them are going to have
• 1:07:48
  durability. I've got a thesis on which ones
• 1:07:51
  will be. Durable, definitely.
• 1:07:52
  Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that.
• 1:07:53
  And so, you know, we're we're going to be able to hopefully
• 1:07:58
  grasp that and it is going to be our biggest test.
• 1:08:02
  And you know, if we make the choice of just death and
• 1:08:06
  destruction, then it is all over.
• 1:08:07
  And it's sad because it's all over in this lifetime.
• 1:08:11
  I. Mean it's really faces.
• 1:08:12
  I don't I don't think the reason I think that that let's just
• 1:08:16
  call them for for simplicity, the dark forces.
• 1:08:20
  I I don't think surely there's going to be some bad people.
• 1:08:25
  There always are and, and I'm sure we're going to have a
• 1:08:28
  couple like, like real wake up moments.
• 1:08:32
  And unfortunately, history usually requires pain for us to
• 1:08:37
  learn right? And, and, and requires some
• 1:08:42
  forms of regulation to alter incentives and alter behavior.
• 1:08:49
  I, I, I think the, the, the bigger issue and, and I know you
• 1:08:52
  are also a big fan of John Mackey and conscious capitalism.
• 1:08:57
  I think if, if technology is consciously guided and the way
• 1:09:02
  I, I kind of think about what is the definition of that?
• 1:09:05
  It's putting people first. It doesn't mean you can't make
• 1:09:09
  money, but it means that you're not going to make money at the
• 1:09:13
  expense of people, which means that there are a lot of
• 1:09:15
  businesses that wouldn't exist, like social media the way it is
• 1:09:20
  because we know how deleterious it is, particularly for kids.
• 1:09:25
  And that would entail A shareholder revolt, right?
• 1:09:28
  If Mehta came out and said, you know what, like Mark said, I, I
• 1:09:32
  now have a conscience, conscience.
• 1:09:35
  I no longer, I'm going to do this because I know I see what
• 1:09:37
  it's doing to humanity and I'm going to completely like turn
• 1:09:40
  down the algorithm and it's not going to be optimized for time
• 1:09:44
  anymore. Like, and the stock went down
• 1:09:47
  50%. Like he would get fired.
• 1:09:50
  Yeah, right. And then the board would get
• 1:09:51
  fired and then they would hire people who wanted to make money
• 1:09:54
  again. And This is why we're here with
• 1:09:57
  the food industry is because there have been, and I've met
• 1:10:00
  some of them, like Andrew Nooyi, who is this chairman of Pepsi
• 1:10:04
  and considered one of the greatest female CEOs of all
• 1:10:06
  time. You know, she told me and, and,
• 1:10:09
  and talks about it in her book that she tried to make Pepsi a
• 1:10:12
  much healthier company, but when they started going into lower
• 1:10:15
  margin products that didn't make as much money, the board
• 1:10:20
  revolted and shareholders revolted.
• 1:10:23
  And then people get fired. And then when people get fired,
• 1:10:26
  they hire people who will do it. And, and that's the same
• 1:10:30
  conundrum with tech. And, and I, I think what we have
• 1:10:37
  to figure out is how do you get, and it almost has to be like,
• 1:10:41
  like a collective agreement that we're going to prioritize
• 1:10:48
  humanity first. And it might slow down the
• 1:10:53
  profitability of these companies.
• 1:10:54
  It might slow down the pace of innovation.
• 1:10:58
  But I, I think it's necessary because what I have witnessed
• 1:11:02
  first hand is the profit motive is, is too, too strong in this
• 1:11:07
  country. And there's such a glorification
• 1:11:11
  of the Elon types of the the multi billionaire who works 100
• 1:11:17
  hours a week and doesn't spend time with his family and builds
• 1:11:20
  multiple companies and develops a lot of cool shit.
• 1:11:25
  And obviously he's done some really amazing stuff.
• 1:11:28
  But that's the hero right now. And as long as that's the hero,
• 1:11:33
  then kids aspire to be like that hero.
• 1:11:36
  And it creates this positive feedback loop where it's really
• 1:11:40
  hard, you know, to to give weight to the heroes that are
• 1:11:45
  maybe being a little bit more conscientious, but they're not
• 1:11:48
  building stuff as fast. It's not as profitable.
• 1:11:50
  It's not worth as much because we don't have enough things that
• 1:11:55
  we're measuring, right? Like money and, and market caps
• 1:12:00
  are quantifiable. Whereas, you know, people's
• 1:12:03
  happiness is a much more fuzzy metric.
• 1:12:07
  And even people's health seems to be a much more fuzzy metric.
• 1:12:10
  And, and So what concerns me is that is that the the economy and
• 1:12:17
  ecosystem that we're in is so money focused and so profit
• 1:12:20
  focused. And I don't think Donald Trump
• 1:12:22
  is helping that, that it's really hard to to become more
• 1:12:27
  conscious about how we guide technology.
• 1:12:29
  Because I think what Mustafa said that was so on point was
• 1:12:33
  that we shouldn't be building AI to become like a person.
• 1:12:38
  We should be building AI to help people and, and that's a very
• 1:12:44
  important distinction. It is.
• 1:12:46
  And it's probably less profitable in the near term if
• 1:12:51
  it's just to help people than it is to do all the other things
• 1:12:54
  that's happening. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:56
  I mean, I, I, there's a lot to unpack in that.
• 1:12:59
  I mean, you know, first of all, we don't know what consciousness
• 1:13:05
  actually is, right? I mean, we just don't.
• 1:13:07
  I mean, trust me, I have read so many books at this point trying
• 1:13:11
  to figure out what consciousness is.
• 1:13:13
  And I've watched so many videos by people that purport to have a
• 1:13:17
  theory of consciousness. We don't know what it is, right?
• 1:13:22
  I, you know, really believe both through, you know, psychedelic
• 1:13:26
  journeys, through meditation, that we for sure have a soul.
• 1:13:30
  Yeah, I agree with that. That there is a there is a Brett
• 1:13:34
  and then there is a deep soul that is eternal that has been
• 1:13:39
  here for many lifetimes. And I know that I was born with
• 1:13:42
  this purpose to do everything I could to help humanity with
• 1:13:48
  technology. I've, I've known my purpose
• 1:13:50
  actually since I was 7 years old.
• 1:13:52
  And I can't tell you how lucky that makes me feel to have had a
• 1:13:55
  mom to help me find that at that age.
• 1:13:58
  Yeah, that's amazing. And, and you know, I honor what
• 1:14:02
  you're doing, brother. I mean in terms of your purpose.
• 1:14:04
  I mean really to stop poisoning ourselves, right?
• 1:14:07
  Stop poisoning. It is our purposes are
• 1:14:09
  intertwined. Yeah, they really are.
• 1:14:11
  I'm trying to make sure we stop poisoning ourselves in a
• 1:14:13
  different in a different way. Yeah, they're different vectors
• 1:14:16
  of the same. Problem.
• 1:14:17
  They're different vectors of the same problem, and they're both
• 1:14:19
  rooted in your and my deep love for humanity.
• 1:14:23
  Yeah, I you know, to to want to help put it all on the line to
• 1:14:29
  save humanity, you have to actually love humanity.
• 1:14:32
  And I had a dinner over here. And you?
• 1:14:34
  Have to love humanity more than money.
• 1:14:36
  You have to love humanity more than money.
• 1:14:38
  And I had a dinner over here actually with Mark Gober.
• 1:14:42
  I was talking about this with Mark on the podcast where, you
• 1:14:45
  know, one of the participants at the dinners we got in this big
• 1:14:48
  debate about could AI ever become conscious?
• 1:14:51
  And I had some of the most amazing entrepreneurs, amazing
• 1:14:54
  technologist over here to discuss that.
• 1:14:56
  You know, one of them said, well, I've seen what job
• 1:15:00
  humanity's done. And it made my heart hurt.
• 1:15:02
  It literally, I felt it in my heart because that person, it
• 1:15:06
  felt like they had given up on humanity, you know, let the
• 1:15:10
  machines take over. Like, you know, we've done a
• 1:15:12
  horrible job. And you know, one of the things
• 1:15:16
  that also made my heart hurt was when Elon Musk put out that
• 1:15:20
  tweet where it went something like humanity is nothing more
• 1:15:26
  than a biological bootloader for the future of digital super
• 1:15:29
  intelligence. Right.
• 1:15:31
  And I just couldn't believe that I couldn't.
• 1:15:32
  Believe that like that, that that's basically saying we're
• 1:15:36
  nothing but a stepping stone. We don't matter.
• 1:15:38
  Yeah. And it's, it's just it, it
• 1:15:40
  really just takes all the divinity away from what humanity
• 1:15:44
  actually is. Well, that's symptomatic.
• 1:15:47
  Of virtual traditions. It's symptomatic of the bigger
• 1:15:49
  problem, you know, the fact that he said that, because I think a
• 1:15:52
  lot of people would agree with that.
• 1:15:54
  And I, I think there's two things that I wanted to bring
• 1:15:56
  up. The 1st that we'll come right
• 1:15:59
  back to is how do we define abundance, which I think is a
• 1:16:02
  really important question. And, and to make sure that we
• 1:16:05
  don't define abundance in terms of just GDP, right.
• 1:16:09
  And, and the second one, which is a thought experiment I've
• 1:16:13
  posed to a lot of people and I'd love to do this on a very large
• 1:16:16
  scale where if you pulled in America anonymously, so nobody
• 1:16:21
  would actually have attribution. And you said to, you know, let's
• 1:16:25
  just say a million Americans that were adults or college age
• 1:16:30
  and say you could develop a chemical that upon the
• 1:16:36
  development of it, you would be granted a billion dollars into
• 1:16:39
  your bank account tax free. But you knew that it was slowly
• 1:16:42
  poison humanity over 20 years. Would you take the billion
• 1:16:46
  dollars? And I've done this in groups and
• 1:16:51
  unfortunately, I think a lot of people would take it.
• 1:16:54
  And, and I think like that's, that's like a really interesting
• 1:16:59
  thought experiment to test part of the problem, right, which is,
• 1:17:02
  which is so many people and companies, whether it's the big
• 1:17:06
  food companies or it's Mark Zuckerberg, what they're
• 1:17:09
  effectively doing is they're making profits today and the
• 1:17:14
  social costs they're not bearing directly.
• 1:17:17
  And it's the same thing with the food companies.
• 1:17:19
  Like we talked about this with Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
• 1:17:21
  You know, we know without doubt that soda is extremely harmful
• 1:17:25
  to people's health, right? But they don't bear the cost of
• 1:17:28
  diabetes and they don't bear the cost of the healthcare burden
• 1:17:31
  and they don't bear the cost of the cancer rates.
• 1:17:33
  And they know now similar to the cigarette companies that it
• 1:17:37
  actually causes all those things, but they're still going.
• 1:17:40
  And it's kind of like how and, and so now this dovetails into
• 1:17:44
  abundance, which is, is there a way?
• 1:17:47
  And I know John Mackey's tried to do this.
• 1:17:49
  And the basis of conscious capitalism is like, how do you
• 1:17:52
  define returns that aren't just stock returns that are
• 1:17:55
  stakeholder returns or, and, and how do we define abundance as a
• 1:18:00
  society so that it's not just, you know, do you have a big
• 1:18:04
  house or can you even, can you afford to put food on your
• 1:18:08
  table? You know, which of course is a
• 1:18:09
  basic human need. And I'm not, I'm not minimizing
• 1:18:13
  that, but we need to start defining abundance in terms of
• 1:18:19
  happiness and in terms of connection.
• 1:18:22
  It's. More like a Bhutanese
• 1:18:24
  definition. That gross domestic because
• 1:18:26
  ultimately I always ask like, what are we optimizing for?
• 1:18:29
  Like the reason I think people want to get rich and want to get
• 1:18:32
  power and want to build stuff, I think they ultimately everyone
• 1:18:36
  wants to ultimately belong and they want to be happy and they
• 1:18:39
  want to feel at peace. Well, they're also, you know,
• 1:18:43
  when, when we're born as babies and we're those beautiful little
• 1:18:47
  divine souls that, you know, you put you put in a crib.
• 1:18:51
  If you put two babies in there together, they don't care if
• 1:18:54
  you're Muslim, Jew or black, white or male, female or
• 1:18:59
  whatever. This family or that family or
• 1:19:01
  that cast or this cast, all they, they, they just, they're
• 1:19:04
  just beautiful divine souls. And part of what I'm addressing
• 1:19:10
  in my book, part three of my book is on transformation.
• 1:19:13
  How does humanity transform? And part of what I'm addressing
• 1:19:17
  in there is we, there's a lot of deprogramming that we have to,
• 1:19:21
  we have to have and unlearning, yes, unlearning.
• 1:19:24
  And a lot of our suffering is from programming.
• 1:19:29
  And we are programmed from a very young age in this world of
• 1:19:32
  form, especially, you know, here in America, which again, I love,
• 1:19:36
  I love many things about America.
• 1:19:39
  We are programmed at a very early age where it's like you
• 1:19:41
  got to have this type of body and you got to get, you know,
• 1:19:43
  this, this type of money. And, you know, it's all about
• 1:19:46
  like having that type of car and that type of house and, and you
• 1:19:50
  know, the the only true happiness, like the only lasting
• 1:19:54
  happiness only comes from the inside.
• 1:19:56
  And all the ancient scriptures agree with that.
• 1:19:59
  Yeah. It's Christianity.
• 1:20:01
  The Kingdom of God is found within you.
• 1:20:03
  Whether it's some Judaism, whether it's Buddhism, Buddhism,
• 1:20:07
  Hinduism, everything. I just actually finished the
• 1:20:09
  Gita, which was amazing. The version with Stephen
• 1:20:13
  Mitchell as the master translator and spiritual
• 1:20:16
  teachers. Incredible.
• 1:20:18
  I need to read that. I mean, it is.
• 1:20:19
  I read, I read that in college, but yeah, I wasn't it.
• 1:20:22
  Has it. It does have the caste system
• 1:20:25
  kind of right up front and chapters one and two of the
• 1:20:28
  Gita, which I completely reject. But there's so much in it that's
• 1:20:32
  very divine. And it really was the original
• 1:20:34
  exploration of self, right? Of of the self, the seed of the
• 1:20:38
  soul, as Gary Zukov would call it.
• 1:20:40
  So in terms of waking humanity up, you know, there's definitely
• 1:20:47
  a lot of there, There's definitely a lot of techniques.
• 1:20:50
  I mean, one of the things we talked about in Austin is there
• 1:20:53
  is this consciousness awakening going on and we're kind of
• 1:20:57
  ground 0 for it. How do you see that kind of
• 1:21:02
  playing out? Like what do you think humanity
• 1:21:04
  could do to collectively wake up from the world of form?
• 1:21:08
  I think about this all the time. I sometimes it's so overwhelming
• 1:21:14
  that you, you almost want to like give up because it seems
• 1:21:16
  like such a huge, huge problem. And, and, you know, the way I, I
• 1:21:23
  think about it in a few different ways, But, but one of
• 1:21:27
  the ways is I think we have to get to a, a, a lot of people of
• 1:21:33
  power and a lot of leaders, because the people of power and
• 1:21:38
  the leaders have the most like, if you think about it in terms
• 1:21:45
  of like nodes and cascading effects, the people of power
• 1:21:51
  have the most influence to change society the fastest.
• 1:21:57
  And, and just imagine, for example, if the kind of
• 1:22:02
  awakening that you went through or the awakening that I've gone
• 1:22:05
  through, if you took, you know, Putin, Trump, Elon Zuck, you
• 1:22:11
  know, Xi Jinping, and you put them through that awakening.
• 1:22:16
  And then you took, call it, the top 20 CE OS in the United
• 1:22:22
  States. And you put them through that
• 1:22:23
  awakening. How that would then trickle down
• 1:22:26
  and manifest into the, into the world, both into the economy as
• 1:22:30
  well as into public guidance and, and regulatory approaches
• 1:22:36
  and you know, how to conduct society.
• 1:22:40
  I think getting to the leaders and the people of power is of
• 1:22:43
  paramount importance because I don't think we have time to do a
• 1:22:48
  completely bottom up. And, and, and there is indeed a
• 1:22:53
  grand awakening that is happening.
• 1:22:55
  And, and it's, it's slow, but it's accelerating right now.
• 1:22:59
  And it's happening in, in a lot of the areas that I'm watching.
• 1:23:03
  It's obviously happening with health right now, which is kind
• 1:23:06
  of what the Maha movement trying to do.
• 1:23:09
  It's happening in some areas that used to be called
• 1:23:12
  conspiracy theories, but you know, in areas about like the
• 1:23:17
  JFK assassination and the RFK assassination and you know, what
• 1:23:23
  they attempted to do with the Epstein files and what, what I
• 1:23:27
  think what's happening. And it's also happening with
• 1:23:29
  UFOs, as you know, or what they now call UA PS, where there have
• 1:23:34
  been a lot of lies that we've been told for decades that many
• 1:23:39
  people used to think were conspiracy theories.
• 1:23:41
  It turns out to be true. And as people start to realize
• 1:23:46
  that we shouldn't just accept what we're told and assume it's
• 1:23:50
  truth and they start thinking for themselves, it causes this,
• 1:23:54
  this sort of broader awakening around like, am I doing what I
• 1:24:01
  should be doing in life? And, and you know, am I, am I
• 1:24:04
  doing what brings me fulfilment? And should I just trust what,
• 1:24:08
  you know, what my daily activities are?
• 1:24:11
  And, oh, my God, I've been enslaved by social media.
• 1:24:13
  And, you know, I think that's happening slowly, but it's not
• 1:24:18
  happening fast enough because, as you know, most people have
• 1:24:21
  very busy lives. They have to pay their bills.
• 1:24:24
  They have families, you know, they have to pay their mortgage.
• 1:24:27
  They have to go to work. And so most people, whatever
• 1:24:30
  little time they have left for thinking has been consumed with
• 1:24:35
  media and, and kind of mind numbing entertainment, you know,
• 1:24:41
  whether it's Netflix or it's social media or it's, you know,
• 1:24:46
  a football game. And, and people don't spend time
• 1:24:50
  really talking and thinking anymore about like, what is the
• 1:24:54
  purpose of life and what's going on and how did we even get here?
• 1:24:57
  And like, what the Hell's going? You know, it's so it's, I would
• 1:25:01
  approach it from starting with what I call the hypernodes,
• 1:25:07
  which are the people that have the greatest kind of cascade
• 1:25:10
  ability to propagate and, and trying to find those hyper
• 1:25:16
  nodes, trying to get them to see what you've seen, whether it's
• 1:25:23
  through psychedelic work or through deep meditation.
• 1:25:27
  Unfortunately, if I were a betting man, and I usually am, I
• 1:25:31
  think it's going to take some shock and awe bad things to
• 1:25:34
  really wake people up. And that's if you look at the
• 1:25:37
  history of financial markets or anything catastrophic that's
• 1:25:41
  happened, it's usually those kinds of things, right?
• 1:25:45
  Where we realize like, oh shit, like we needed, you know,
• 1:25:48
  Nagasaki and Hiroshima to see what that did for us to realize
• 1:25:53
  like, oh shit, like that's a lot worse and more powerful than we
• 1:25:57
  thought. Like we need to regulate nuclear
• 1:25:59
  in a very strict way because had that not happened, you know, who
• 1:26:04
  knows what what would happen to the world.
• 1:26:07
  And I think we are in store in the next 10 years for this, like
• 1:26:13
  this gradual ascent into abundance, but but punctuated
• 1:26:19
  with some horrific incidents where, you know, like COVID, you
• 1:26:23
  know, where we realized like, oh shit, we don't have the
• 1:26:27
  infrastructure, we don't have the policies to be able to deal
• 1:26:31
  with, you know, if somebody decides to code a robot that
• 1:26:37
  goes rogue, you know, and takes out like a group of people or
• 1:26:41
  God forbid someone develops a bio weapon using AI like, and,
• 1:26:46
  and I think unfortunately, we're going to be tested with some,
• 1:26:49
  with some significant catastrophic events in the next
• 1:26:54
  5 to 10 years. And I think we should just be
• 1:26:57
  prepared for it because I think it's almost inevitable if you
• 1:27:02
  just look at the history of humanity, like we are now
• 1:27:05
  endowing the bad people with the greatest weapon of in human
• 1:27:10
  history, which is AI. Yeah, it's the greatest producer
• 1:27:14
  and the greatest. Weapon at the same time, yes,
• 1:27:17
  yes, yeah. And, and I think that's going to
• 1:27:21
  be necessary, unfortunately, to really wake up the global
• 1:27:26
  leaders to come together and be like, oh, wait, like we went too
• 1:27:30
  far. Now we got to like, you know,
• 1:27:32
  put some stuff in place, you know, and, and, and I just think
• 1:27:35
  there's going to be some more wake up moments that are coming
• 1:27:38
  where the government reveals just just as we're revealing now
• 1:27:43
  on some of the stuff with food and chemicals about how toxic
• 1:27:48
  they actually have been. And the data is there to support
• 1:27:50
  it. Now where people are now, like
• 1:27:52
  again, I'm using my background, but when when I first started
• 1:27:58
  talking about the fact that all these global food companies make
• 1:28:03
  a safer, cleaner ingredient version and of the same product
• 1:28:08
  in other countries. So they sell a much more toxic
• 1:28:12
  version of Fruit Loops here in America than they do in Europe.
• 1:28:16
  Like the Super majority of Americans didn't know that.
• 1:28:19
  They didn't even know. So now they're like, wait a
• 1:28:21
  minute, they sell a better, safer version of all these
• 1:28:23
  things in Europe, and we don't have access to that version in
• 1:28:26
  America. That's a little form of waking
• 1:28:29
  up. And I just think we're going to
• 1:28:31
  need a lot of those kind of things collectively.
• 1:28:34
  I mean, one of the things I explored in that short story,
• 1:28:39
  God's final exam, is that the collective wake up actually
• 1:28:42
  could happen through humanity glimpsing the divine that you
• 1:28:49
  know, one of the things. I well, that would certainly do
• 1:28:51
  it. Yeah, well.
• 1:28:52
  That's why I posed right with Doctor Alexander Bliss was the
• 1:28:56
  was the main protagonist and he had this crazy idea to basically
• 1:29:02
  hook up people to a brain to computer interface type
• 1:29:07
  technology, which I called neuro fire in the in the short story
• 1:29:12
  to record like, you know, everybody from the Dalai Lama to
• 1:29:17
  deep meditators to people doing psychedelic journeys and put all
• 1:29:23
  of that data together to create a picture of source of heaven.
• 1:29:29
  Yeah. And then he had this big reveal
• 1:29:31
  the Telluride, you know, documentary festival.
• 1:29:34
  It's called the mountain Film Festival to show it to humanity.
• 1:29:39
  And the awe was it was just like, wow, this is actually our
• 1:29:44
  reality. Like we're not just in this
• 1:29:46
  world of form. There is something you know, to
• 1:29:49
  you know what when I think about your story when you were
• 1:29:53
  starting, I just finished this book Journey of Souls by Michael
• 1:29:56
  Newton, which is incredible, incredible book.
• 1:29:59
  It's about this is this guy who takes people through deep
• 1:30:04
  regression and hypnosis to find out what is the source of their
• 1:30:07
  suffering. And it's usually in a past life.
• 1:30:11
  And he then takes all these case studies and looks for the
• 1:30:15
  commonality to create the pattern recognition for what is
• 1:30:20
  what is source and how does the reincarnation process work?
• 1:30:23
  And the whole time you were talking, I was thinking about
• 1:30:28
  Wow, Jason Soul decided to Incarnate in this lifetime,
• 1:30:34
  knowing that you would face this, this disease that people
• 1:30:38
  would tell you is incurable. And then you would have the free
• 1:30:42
  will to make a choice in terms of how you dealt with that.
• 1:30:45
  And you made the right choice clearly and cured the disease
• 1:30:49
  and got the dream girl and all the things.
• 1:30:52
  I mean, you know, you know, had had a home run with you.
• 1:30:55
  And you know, now we're on this mission to really help the world
• 1:30:58
  and help heal the world through through the poisoning that we're
• 1:31:01
  putting in our bodies. And I don't know.
• 1:31:06
  But I mean, do you, do you have, do you have a thought on that?
• 1:31:08
  I mean, in terms of reincarnation, I'm sure you, I'm
• 1:31:10
  sure you've thought about that too.
• 1:31:12
  Have you, have you thought very deeply about?
• 1:31:14
  Yeah, look, I think. That you were incarnated for
• 1:31:17
  this purpose. Oh yeah.
• 1:31:18
  And in fact, you know, in, in some of my journey work, I've
• 1:31:21
  been told as such. And you know, I think and I I've
• 1:31:27
  been able to access what some call other realms, if we can go
• 1:31:33
  a little woo here through meditation.
• 1:31:37
  And you know, I spent a week at the Monroe Institute where and a
• 1:31:43
  lot of them in raw material is accessible online where they
• 1:31:47
  show you how to get into these altered states without medicine,
• 1:31:51
  where you can experience some of what people experience in their
• 1:31:54
  near death experiences and all the books and all the
• 1:31:58
  literature. And I think a lot of people
• 1:32:00
  underestimate how much evidence and how much science there is
• 1:32:04
  around the the reincarnation and souls and what people see and
• 1:32:09
  witness. And Mark Gobert talks about this
• 1:32:12
  a lot. But one of the things I always
• 1:32:16
  think about is how do we get more people to experience that?
• 1:32:18
  Because as you and I have experienced directly, when we
• 1:32:22
  try to talk about this to the hardcore, let's call them
• 1:32:27
  arrogant scientists, they're not even open minded.
• 1:32:31
  And, and, and it, it, it's so opposite to their world view
• 1:32:35
  that sometimes when I even try to talk about it to those types,
• 1:32:38
  they speak to me with disdain that like I'm crazy.
• 1:32:42
  And, and So what I've kind of come to the conclusion is, is it
• 1:32:47
  a lot of people need to experience it themselves.
• 1:32:50
  And there's no way that we can convince them with words or
• 1:32:53
  convince them with narratives or stories or even film that this
• 1:32:57
  is real. And and so then I wonder, well,
• 1:33:00
  how do we provide them an opportunity if they're not
• 1:33:04
  willing to do psychedelic work or go to Monroe for a week, how
• 1:33:08
  do we provide them with that opportunity?
• 1:33:10
  And one of the reasons that I invested in Evolve, which for
• 1:33:16
  your viewers is, is still in early days, but it is a headset.
• 1:33:21
  It's AVR headset with more biometric sensing equipment than
• 1:33:24
  anything that's ever been developed as a consumer device
• 1:33:28
  that will effectively train you in a accelerated way to do what
• 1:33:35
  the Zen Buddhists have done, where you'll be able to reach
• 1:33:40
  some of those altered states without medicine using almost a
• 1:33:45
  gamified set of meditated practices that the device will
• 1:33:50
  enable. And if that device becomes
• 1:33:56
  accessible to many and there are modules in that device that just
• 1:34:02
  take 1/2 hour, 20 minutes, that will allow people to achieve
• 1:34:05
  that. Now all of a sudden when we
• 1:34:07
  speak to those skeptical folks who've never experienced the
• 1:34:11
  divine, you can say, hey, I have a red pill for you.
• 1:34:16
  And it doesn't require you doing a psychedelic journey.
• 1:34:19
  And it's this device and go just do it.
• 1:34:22
  See for yourself. And I feel like, you know, if if
• 1:34:25
  you study, you're familiar with Brian Murescu and his milk, the
• 1:34:30
  immortality Key. And I think that book, which was
• 1:34:34
  a New York Times bestseller, has some of the most important
• 1:34:37
  principles around this, which was that, you know, he with
• 1:34:42
  extremely thorough research and support, basically proved that
• 1:34:48
  through actual rkao chemistry where they went to some of the
• 1:34:52
  archives and tested some of the ancient chalices that were used
• 1:34:58
  in what was called the Eulusus, where the ancient Greeks, they
• 1:35:03
  the they would have an initiation ritual and it was for
• 1:35:08
  the leaders and the leaders would have to go through this,
• 1:35:12
  this fairly long ritual and initiation process that
• 1:35:16
  culminated with a trip to Eulusus.
• 1:35:19
  And at Eulusus, they would drink out of a chalice and it was a
• 1:35:23
  special potion that they called the kooky on.
• 1:35:27
  And the kooky on which they were able to prove had elements and
• 1:35:32
  residual of ergot. And ergot is, is the the fungi.
• 1:35:36
  That's the basis of LSD. And the purpose of the
• 1:35:41
  initiation wasn't for them to hallucinate.
• 1:35:43
  The purpose of the initiation was you're going to be a leader
• 1:35:46
  of some kind. And, you know, Plato and
• 1:35:48
  Aristotle and Socrates all went through this.
• 1:35:52
  And we need you to see the divine before you're a leader.
• 1:35:56
  You need to witness what human life is really about before you
• 1:36:00
  are put in a position of leadership.
• 1:36:03
  And for millennia, this was a tradition that was practiced in
• 1:36:08
  a bunch of cultures that required this kind of
• 1:36:10
  initiation. It's still done by many
• 1:36:12
  indigenous communities, but because of our modern society,
• 1:36:16
  that's never going to happen in this in in like today where
• 1:36:20
  people have to go through like proper initiation rituals.
• 1:36:23
  And so then the question that I grappled with was, is there a
• 1:36:26
  technological way that we can create initiation?
• 1:36:30
  And I think Evolve could be one of the ways to do.
• 1:36:31
  Yeah, Yeah. I, I have great hope and faith
• 1:36:35
  that you know, whether it's evolve, which you know, thanks
• 1:36:39
  to you, I'm an investor as well, or it's other companies that AI
• 1:36:45
  will actually accelerate our ability to know how to do this
• 1:36:50
  without medicine. Great AI could be a great use I.
• 1:36:53
  Really think, I think that we are going to have an explosion
• 1:36:56
  in material science. I mean, if you look at what
• 1:36:58
  Google has done with DeepMind with Alpha fold and alpha fold 2
• 1:37:03
  in terms of the solving the protein folding problem, we are
• 1:37:07
  just scratching the surface in terms of how much humanity is
• 1:37:12
  prioritizing this, this, this race, which again, we agree it's
• 1:37:16
  out of fear. But there are good things that
• 1:37:19
  can come out of the race. And one of the things that I
• 1:37:22
  think will come out of the race is the understanding of exactly
• 1:37:27
  how these compounds work to allow you to see the divine.
• 1:37:32
  And I think, I think it's just a matter of time where we we
• 1:37:36
  can't, we can't treat it as taboo anymore, though, because
• 1:37:39
  the studies, I mean, it was a big deal here in Texas.
• 1:37:42
  And, you know, I'm hosting a a dinner for former Governor Rick
• 1:37:47
  Perry on this front. It's a big deal in Texas.
• 1:37:49
  This ibogaine huge, you know, research passed to save our
• 1:37:54
  vets. Yeah.
• 1:37:55
  Well, what is would be a much bigger deal is like really
• 1:37:58
  understanding like fundamentally why this plant that grows in
• 1:38:03
  West Africa works to reset the brain to permanently cure a
• 1:38:07
  suicidal vet or an opiate CPI edict, right?
• 1:38:10
  Like let's figure that out. That seems like a good
• 1:38:13
  pharmaceutical like focus. Now they're not, they don't tend
• 1:38:16
  to be in the cure business, but I think that that we will get in
• 1:38:22
  the cure business whether or not, you know, pharmaceutical
• 1:38:26
  companies want us to get in the cure business because of how
• 1:38:29
  much is going to progress so fast.
• 1:38:32
  So I think, I think another related use of AI, which is what
• 1:38:37
  Evolve is going to try to do is we have a lot of brain imagery
• 1:38:43
  that's been done in laboratories.
• 1:38:45
  There's a, there's a great research lab out of Harvard
• 1:38:49
  that's been studying lifelong meditators who are kind of
• 1:38:54
  always in the other realms. And they can't quantify what it
• 1:38:59
  means to be in the other realms. But, but there's very specific
• 1:39:02
  brain and physiological markers in terms of your EEG and what
• 1:39:07
  they call functional MRI of what happens to your brain when you
• 1:39:11
  move out of kind of waking consciousness.
• 1:39:13
  And they know what that looks like and on, you know, in terms
• 1:39:17
  of studying all these lifelong meditators.
• 1:39:21
  And I think AI will be a really useful tool to reverse engineer
• 1:39:25
  how do we get into that state in a faster way without having to
• 1:39:29
  meditate for 10 years. And, and that will be another
• 1:39:33
  way that people will be able to kind of move out of the material
• 1:39:36
  temporarily without psychedelics.
• 1:39:42
  And, and my wish would be that if, if, if this gets developed
• 1:39:47
  in a way where it's it's more approachable that all future
• 1:39:52
  leaders, whether it's leaders of corporations or leaders of
• 1:39:54
  countries or leaders of states have to go through this.
• 1:39:57
  And they have to just see like what you and I are talking about
• 1:40:02
  and not view it as just mystical mythology.
• 1:40:05
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, 'cause I mean, it's the most beautiful
• 1:40:07
  discovery of all in that we're not just locked in a world of
• 1:40:10
  form. How amazing is that?
• 1:40:13
  Well, this was this was amazing, my friend.
• 1:40:16
  I just love your soul. I really appreciate all that you
• 1:40:19
  put in the world. I love how you've really
• 1:40:21
  inspired me over the years. You know, the the path I'm on
• 1:40:25
  right now is in no small part to you know, you're you're you
• 1:40:29
  inspiring me and putting that in me and leaving in me.
• 1:40:32
  Yes, and it really means a lot to me.
• 1:40:34
  And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
• 1:40:35
  Oh well, it's been, it's been. I really treasure our friendship
• 1:40:40
  and I treasure you coming into my life, and I've been so
• 1:40:45
  blessed and fortunate with the beautiful people that I've met
• 1:40:48
  in Austin who are all finding their own path to the same goal,
• 1:40:57
  which is what is life really? About it's, it's so, so cool.
• 1:41:00
  I mean, I feel so lucky because, you know, being born here and
• 1:41:04
  seeing the city I grew up in become this, it's just, it's
• 1:41:08
  just a it's just outstanding and really so happy you and Jessica
• 1:41:13
  moved here and your beautiful kids and really looking forward
• 1:41:16
  to the next 10 years together. It's going to be intense, but
• 1:41:19
  here we are. It's.
• 1:41:20
  Our greatest test, but it's our it's our opportunity to survive
• 1:41:24
  and thrive through the test. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:41:27
  Well, thanks everybody for joining for another episode of
• 1:41:31
  Love Conquers Fear. This was a fantastic episode.
• 1:41:35
  There was so much that we learned and I really appreciate
• 1:41:38
  all the energy Jason's putting out there to really help
• 1:41:42
  humanity. I usually ask the question at
• 1:41:44
  the end, you know, what are you doing to really put it all on
• 1:41:47
  the line to help that? I think that's pretty obvious
• 1:41:49
  from listening to him. And stay tuned for a lot more
• 1:41:53
  episodes. There's a lot in the queue and
• 1:41:57
  it's pretty incredible who's going to be joining the podcast
• 1:42:00
  very soon. So thanks everybody for tuning
• 1:42:03
  in.