#384 - Jason Karp - Founder of HumanCo - Hedge Fund Mogul Trades Wall Street for Wellness

Chris Powers: Jason, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me, man. 

Jason Karp: Thanks for having me. 

Chris Powers: I wasn't going to start this way, but the markets have been crazy. Today is April 10th, if you're listening. Do you miss the hedge fund world at all? 

Jason Karp: A little. I miss it a little and I miss it during periods of extreme confusion and dislocation. Part of the reason I got out of it wasn't just my spiritual calling to help others, which is the main reason. But when I got into the hedge fund business in 1998, it was far less efficient. There were far fewer machines, far fewer algorithms. Certainly AI wasn't in existence. And the game, if you call it a game, was much easier to beat. And what started happening with the massive increase in competition of humans and then the massive increase in algorithmic and automated and quantitative trading was a lot of the anomalies, both short-term and medium-term, were arbitraged away. And I think any good professional, outside of investing, you always have to look at what is your edge or your advantages in whatever game you play. And you have to be very honest about that. And I can see that my advantages and my edge were systematically getting whittled down as what was happening with obviously every hedge fund. And the amount of true alpha that I think most hedge fund managers provide has become embarrassingly low. And it's basically become a professional video game that extracts extraordinary fees that are not justified from the allocators who are giving money to hedge funds. As lucrative as it was for me, and I'm very blessed with having a 20-year career and being very financially successful in it, I started to feel really gross about what I was doing professionally, not only because I felt like I was literally playing a professional video game and not adding much value to society, but I also felt that the service that I was providing to my investors was becoming less and less worth it. I'm a very principled person to a fault, and I couldn't look in the mirror and say, this is worth the fees. I just felt like that chapter of my life, which again was almost 21 years, was over. 

Chris Powers: I want to stay on this for a little bit, but besides kind of the spiritual calling and what you were going to do next, was there a moment or was it a series of moments or was it a down year where it became very clear, like the edge is gone or you could see it almost crystal clear that what you had- and was that unique to you in how you viewed the world and maybe other people's approach, they still had an edge, or was it just the edge across the industry had been lost? 

Jason Karp: Look, it's still one of the most lucrative professions if you have capital of any scale that exists. And I think most people, and many of whom are still my friends, will get angry that I'm saying this out loud, will rationalize that they still have a lot of edge and that it's still worth it because many of them are still making extraordinary amounts of money, both in management fees and in carry during very high let's call them beta years where they're basically riding the market. I was what was called a pure alpha manager. We were market neutral. We were always short almost as much stock as we were long. And so we were judged on how much true alpha, meaning completely pulling out the market direction, how much true alpha we were creating. And it's very deceiving for most hedge funds because most of them run very net long and naturally get embedded returns by just the sheer upward direction of the markets, which do compound over time. So I think a lot of people aren’t being intellectually honest with themselves about what's happened to the edge. You can see that on- and it's very easy to show alpha for all hedge funds and the alpha for all hedge funds for the last 10 years, there've been a couple of good years in there, but the alpha for all hedge funds has been terrible. And then when you risk adjust it and you build in all the fees, it's kind of hard to justify. For myself, and I'm sorry to all my friends who still run hedge funds, by the way, because that's definitely not what I think they want to hear, I still think particularly in small caps where the quants and the algorithmic trading can't really do much, there's still a lot of opportunity in small caps for alpha. I also think there's opportunity for very concentrated long-term investing with some activism. It's not a coincidence that Ackman went to long only. And frankly, I actually really like the way he invests, where he only makes a couple of bets a year. And I think there's definitely opportunity for true alpha when you have the extremely concentrated portfolios that only have a few bets. For me, it was a series of events where in 2015, which was the peak of my hedge fund career, in 2015, we won several awards, including best emerging manager of the year. The institutional investor award ceremony is kind of like the Oscars for hedge funds. I think I won two or three awards that night. We were one of the top alpha funds in the United States three years in a row. I remember coming off the stage, we just finished another big year. Our assets were four and a half billion. We had a great year. It was basically like the best I ever could have hoped for, three years running. And I walked off the stage with one of the trophies and I felt this real pit in my stomach, and I was expecting to feel like elated and amazing and excited, and I felt terror. And I said to my wife privately, I said, I don't think I can do better than this. And she said to me, she said, what do you mean? And I said, I've been working my whole career for this. Like I just won like the Oscar equivalent for my job. And I had been in it at that point 17 years straight with no break. And I said, I have this really awful feeling like I can't do better than this. This is everything I ever dreamed of. And one of my previous mentors who was never happy and was extraordinarily wealthy, told me an expression one day when he had sort of confessed to me in private, because it was many, many years earlier, but we were together alone and he was like very sad. And I used to think that having a lot of money equated to happiness. And I said to him like, what are you sad about? And he said, I've gotten to the top of my mountain and there's nothing to see. And I didn't appreciate that expression until it happened to me. And at that moment, I truly felt like that. I felt like I had climbed for 17 years up this enormous mountain against all odds, had so many sleepless nights, worked a hundred hours a week, did so many things that were probably improbable, and I felt like I got to the top of this mountain, obviously made a fortune, and I'm not discounting that, but in terms of how I felt, I was miserable. And I sort of realized that everything I had dreamed of and everything I thought would lead to fulfillment and happiness was incorrect. And I don't think it was a coincidence that the following year, 2016, was my first losing year in 18 years. Actually, that's not true. I lost money in ’08, but other than ’08, I basically had this crazy run of never losing money, and 2016 was my first like- 2008 was one trade that was the most bupkis trade in modern history. I got caught short Volkswagen. For the hedge fund managers who've been around a long time, it was like the career killer for a lot of people. It was the most improbable short squeeze in market history. It's a long story. We don't have to get into how it happened. But a lot of big funds went out of business in 2008 because of Volkswagen. Volkswagen became the largest market cap in the world for about three days, and it put a lot of funds out of business. And I can't help but like try to arbitrage crazy things, and I got caught like three days early in Volkswagen. Anyway, it's another story. But 2016 was my first losing year that was like a real losing year where I felt like I couldn't get anything right. And I don't think it was a coincidence that it happened after 2015 when I sort of felt like I was done. And my wife was begging me to retire. And at the time, it felt impossible because I still liked investing. I didn't like, I think, the structure that I was within. But I had 40 people working for me. We were managing four plus billion with multi year lock up. You can do the math on on the management fee of that. And walking away from something like that felt insane, and it also is my identity. Hu Chocolate which was kinda my passion project was very small at the time. I certainly couldn't make like a career out of Hu, and it was, I knew I had other passions, but I couldn't imagine not being a professional investor. And then after that year, 2016, 2017 was also difficult for me and we didn't lose much money in any of the years, but it still felt awful to lose even a little bit of money. It probably took me two years too long to realize I should have left. And I believe with something that's all encompassing and so intensive like professional investing, if you're not all in, like psychologically and spiritually, you can't be great at it. And I wasn't. And I kinda- it took me too long to realize it, but thank God I did. And I just had many moments where I was deeply depressed. I mean, deeply depressed. I also had a very unfortunate incident happen in 2016 as well where my best friend and business partner of 16 years killed himself. He had been my partner in three of my firms that I worked at. We went to college together. And it was an extremely difficult and traumatic time for me, but I buried it, and I hid it, and I didn't talk about it. I was in that kind of macho world of hedge fund managers, and I'd say male vulnerability wasn't really accepted 10 years ago. And I also felt really ashamed about even talking about the fact that I was so depressed because on the surface with superficial metrics like family and money and stuff, I've been extremely blessed. And I felt really ashamed even talking about the fact that I was depressed. And unfortunately, I did have a couple instances with friends that I tried to confide in with how difficult things were going for me mentally. And they actually told me like, how could you possibly be depressed? Like they kind of actually made me feel worse about it. And so it closed me off even more. And it was a really heart-wrenching few years for me, where in kind of the spiritual world, they call it the dark night of the soul, where you really go into the belly of the beast and you have to look at all of your demons and you have to really look at what makes you you and what you really believe you're here on this planet to do. And I had to go through some really dark times, a lot of therapy, psychedelic therapy actually saved my life, literally. And it was the psychedelic therapy that allowed me to see my life for what it really was. And all of my bullshit patterns and my screwed up beliefs and the trauma from my childhood and all of that stuff that I used to think was like woo woo and touchy feely and I shouldn't care about that stuff, and it was very clear to me that all that stuff deeply mattered to me as a father, as a husband, as a citizen, and that I had a lot of patterns and behaviors in my life that were self-sabotaging and were contributing to my own depression. And it was also during that period that I realized I'd basically been depressed for 20 years. And I didn't really get any joy out of life until probably five years ago. 

Chris Powers: On the psychedelic therapy, is it a one and done, or is it like you go once, you're kind of- the doors are opened and then you got to kind of keep on that journey, it's not a one stop shop, or did you see it all in one get go? I had lunch with a guy the other day. He's like, I think he's on his 28th I guess he calls them a journey. He's a very successful guy, very successful businessman. And I said, what's the difference, what are you getting out of 28 that you didn't get out of 27? And he was like, the first five is where you kind of get the foundation set. And then it's like you're continuing digging. Has that kind of been the same for you or was it a one and done? 

Jason Karp: No, it's in the middle of those two. 28 sounds like a lot to me. I would say for your listeners, and this is really important because I'm now a philanthropist in psychedelic therapy, particularly for veterans. After my best friend's suicide, I had night terrors every night where I'd wake up in the middle of the night with like a horrific nightmare. I would see him almost every night. He would seem like he was there. And then I'd wake up and he wasn't there. And I didn't sleep really well, or I didn't sleep much for almost seven, eight months. And it was debilitating. And I did not want to do psychedelic therapy. I was kind of a boy scout in terms of let’s just called them drugs, even though they're not drugs. When I was a division one college athlete, I smoked pot a couple of times in four years of college. I ate like a handful of mushrooms with my buddies when I was 18 just for fun, but like, well, I didn't do anything other than alcohol. And I was so focused on like my brain health and productivity. I always thought that was like a big taboo. And I was raised in the eighties with the whole like say no to drugs from the Reagan administration. So I was terrified into all things that were not alcohol, which as you probably know now has been completely debunked, that alcohol is actually one of the most dangerous things you can consume. I had a very close friend, very intellectual guy, very successful businessman, who had found psychedelic therapy for some extreme trauma he had. He was a survivor in the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. And he had a lot of PTSD. And he had found psychedelic therapy as a way to deal with his PTSD. And I deeply respected his judgment, and he had convinced me to try this as a way to deal with my night terrors. And in that first session that I did, which was in 2017, and it was with a therapist in New York. And the one thing I'll say also, because this is becoming less controversial now, these are very powerful medicines, like very, and they should not be treated like fun recreational drugs. If they are done in the right what's called set and setting, the set is your mindset and the setting is literally the setting that you do them in. And now this has been explored by many, many universities. There's many nonprofits that are focused on this, particularly for veterans. It's like no pharmaceuticals that are out there. And for me, when I finished that first session or journey, which was only about four hours, I had made peace with my friend in my vision. When I came out of it, my night terrors were gone. I slept for the first time in eight months, and it continued for weeks. It wasn't just once. It was gone. The memory wasn't gone, but the pain of it was gone. Then I became deeply curious and fascinated, how could this be? I was- in my own fund, we did a lot of research on biotech and pharmaceuticals, and I knew enough about that sector to be dangerous. This was so above and beyond anything I'd ever researched or come across that I became really fascinated by how this isn't more discussed, how this isn't like something that the medical community embraces. And when you go down this rabbit hole, you realize why. Some of it is what you would expect, which is really bad for big pharma, because you can cure people in one or two sessions. And then they don't have to be on SSRIs or pharmaceuticals for their life. And part of it is because of the stigma and people just think like, oh my God, that'll mess up your brain for life. And you'll jump off of a building if you're taking psilocybin. And all of that, if you do your research, is thoroughly debunked. And what I have found is that if you do it with reverence and you do it with the right facilitators in the right setting, and you do it once or twice a year, it can be an incredible maintenance and personal growth protocol because what it seems to do, and they don't fully understand the mechanism for how it works even now and it's been very researched now, is every human has the aspects of trauma that that is stored within their body. And there's a distinction that they make in these sort of scientific circles of lowercase t trauma and capital T trauma. Capital T trauma is what you would expect. It's what all the veterans who need this have suffered from. You get a few of your limbs blown off, you go blind, you see people murdered, et cetera, rape, child abuse, those sort of things. Those are called capital T trauma. And most people think that they don't have that. But there's also lower-case t trauma. And these are little things that you may not think were a big deal when you were a child. This could be one time you were bullied. This could be one time you were excluded or picked last on the kickball team. This could be little things that you think are just normal childhood things. And many kids deal with it well but many kids don't. And your body ends up storing those little traumas, and they start to create a sense of armor around your personality that allows you to survive in a modern world. And it's a protective thing, but what you realize is that there's a lot of those protective emotions or protective behaviors that might have been serving you when you were nine but are completely suboptimal and maladapted for as an adult. And with very, very high performance people who are obsessed with never stopping, the workaholics who, whatever they achieve, they want to do more, many of the most successful people I've ever met, financially speaking, are some of the most traumatized people because they're trying to fill holes with money and success that cannot be filled, and they're trying to accumulate power, wealth, accolades, respect because maybe they were bullied as a kid, maybe they were like a nerd and nobody respected them, maybe they weren’t included, maybe they didn't get enough love from their friends and their parents. These are all real things, and I had like all of them. And all of those behaviors were making me a miserable person. They were making me very successful and they were making me very good at whatever I put my mind to, but I was miserable for 20 years. And I think psychedelic therapy, and again I would encourage if any of your listeners are interested, I would encourage, there's a lot of resources out there. The famous New York Times author Michael Pollan popularized this with a book called How to Change Your Mind, and they also made a Netflix documentary out of it that's pretty short, it's only four episodes that are 45 minutes each, called How to Change your Mind. And he talks about the different psychedelic compounds and how they have worked with people who've had debilitating issues. And it's just sort of, like it's truly a miracle how it works. And I think I've seen some people who abuse it and they start using it as a crutch and they do it like a hundred times. But for me, I've done it probably a dozen times over 10 years. And it's been incredibly helpful for me as a person, as a parent, as a husband, and it's completely changed my outlook on life. 

Chris Powers: There's a lot of wealthy people, a lot of hard charging entrepreneur investors that listen to this. If you were to say like, if they were interested, where do you even go? Cause even when I've talked to people, like you go to this place in the jungle and there's these resorts and there's all these places, like how do you know you're picking the right one? 

Jason Karp: That's a great question and I will say there are a lot, there's a whole industry that's come out of this called psychedelic tourism and it's definitely fraught with snake oil salesmen and fake shamans. You definitely need to do your homework. I don't believe you need to go to the jungle and do- most of the jungle excursions are for one of the psychedelics called ayahuasca, which is a South American indigenous, it's actually a compound that they make as a brew that's been around for probably thousands of years. That's a very heavy first foray. With probably your listeners, there's probably one degree of separation from finding some reputable places. Many of them in the US are still a bit underground, but they're not that hard to find anymore. You want to find a facilitator who has done hundreds, if not thousands of people. It is very important when you're in it that they have seen a lot of different things happen. Because they can ensure that you don't have what's commonly referred to as a bad trip. A bad trip is not what you think of. A bad trip really happens, well, let me take a step back. You want to make sure you work with a facilitator that's using medical grade compounds and using consistent kind of medical level dosage. And there are very defined protocols that many universities now have established on how long it takes, what kind of conditions you set up, what kind of music you play. But the bad trip typically happens when you are confronted. So, when you go into these journey spaces, you're typically blindfolded, you're typically listening to music. And what it's like is it's like lucid dreaming. So, your eyes are not open in almost all of these therapy sessions. And you basically are shown, like a lucid dream, you are shown things that you may perhaps not want to address. And sometimes what they show you can be very difficult to see. They could be, I mean, I didn't used to believe in what are called repressed memories. This obviously goes back to even before Freud. This is a real thing. If you are traumatized when you're very young, the human body has this protective mechanism where it actually creates like a bifurcation in your brain and it will store the memory, but you will not be able to recall it, but it's in there. And I had such a repressed memory from when I was a small child, and I was able to then confirm that it was real, but it was a really, really difficult memory to be shown. And if you have the right facilitator who has seen how to deal with this, they can ensure that you address it, deal with it, and what's called integrate it, where you don't forget the memory, but you just don't- it doesn't affect you anymore. And if you don't have a proper facilitator, some people can literally be re-traumatized. And that's why this has to be approached with very good reverence, because it's a very powerful way to address what you haven't or should be addressing. And me, when I went through it, I didn't have the tools on how to deal with it. And thankfully, I had this amazing facilitator who's seen everything, helped me deal with it. So yeah, I would say that there are plenty of resources online and you definitely want to have firsthand references with people you trust to vouch for a specific place or a specific facilitator. And like I did in investing, I asked a lot of hard questions when I first went in, even though I had a very strong reference, and this particular facilitator was brilliant. And I had a lot of scientific questions about like, how does it work and how long does it take and what's happening with my brain? And he had answers for everything. And so I ultimately got comfortable with it. And then the results spoke for themselves. 

Chris Powers: Last question on this. And then you already tripped the wire. You said Big Pharma doesn't like it. We're going to talk. Big Pharma doesn't like a lot of things; they're trying to prevent a lot of good things from happening. But do you have to, like when you're doing these, it kind of shows you who you are. It shows you the trauma. Everybody I've talked to, it really is the one thing that I could actually go to somebody like, man, you really changed like in the most- And it was actually like a permanent change. It's like, I've been to a counselor before and they tell you like, whatever, you’re ADD or you're a jerk or whatever. And to actually fix it is not very easy. It's like maybe it really never gets fixed. It's like, you're kind of aware of it and you kind of battle it, but it's never really fixed. But when I talk to people that have actually done psilocybin or ayahuasca, or there's that toad venom, I don't know what they call it. 

Jason Karp: It's 5 M E O D M T. And that's an incredibly powerful compound. Like do not start with that one. 

Chris Powers: But I will tell you the one friend I have that's taken it, I won't mention his name, but it's such a profound difference in his life that's lasted now five, six, seven years. So, you know it's not a quick change. I guess I'm trying to figure out how to ask the questions. Are you just changed, so you don't even really know that you're changing? Like, why does it cause the permanent change that non-medically driven, just going to a normal counselor down the street for an hour can't do, does that make sense? Like, is it just hardwired into you or do you have to go do something? 

Jason Karp: There's a few explanations for it. So, the first I'll give are for people who have debilitating PTSD, so let's say you're a war veteran. I've been part philanthropically of a few organizations that supply psychedelic therapy to SEALs and war veterans. And there was one war veteran that I remember speaking to who, anytime he'd hear a loud sound, even if it was like a car exhaust or just a loud bang that just happens to be in the intersection, he would break into cold sweats, he would crouch down involuntarily. This was not like a voluntary intentional thing. Like his impulse, which was completely instinctual, would debilitate him because the limbic system of your body, which is instinctual, you can't control with your prefrontal cortex. You can't control by using logic and rationality. After he did psychedelic therapy, that impulse was gone. He'd hear a loud bang and he wouldn't react. And again, he had no control over the reaction. And so it's incredibly powerful for people who have what they sometimes call like true debilitating PTSD. Because what- I've heard a lot of metaphors for how the psychedelics work in terms of your brain chemistry. And the easiest way, the best metaphor I've heard was the way your synapses in your brain, the connections between your neurons, when you repeat something over and over again, if you think of it like a ski slope that has fresh snow, every time something keeps happening in your brain that's repeating the pattern, it's like skiers going down the same trail, the same pathway. So, there's grooves in the snow. And when you have something incredibly traumatic that your body registers as this is a survival moment, even though it might not be a true survival moment, it could be a psychological trauma, it makes those pathways so deep as if somebody had gone down those pathways a thousand times. And so as soon as you get on that mountain again and you try to ski on other paths, you can't because your skis immediately go into those grooves and you can't get out of it. And what the psychedelic therapy tends to do is it's like it Zambonis the slope and makes the powder fresh. So those pathways are removed. So even though the memory is still there, you don't have to ski down that same exact way. And that's one of the ways. The more subtle way, because I didn't have true physiological responses like that, but like the classic example with alpha men or really alpha people, tends to be more often men than women, where somebody says something slightly obnoxious to them, or slightly demeaning, or slightly condescending, and I'm sure you know these people, and then they just immediately trigger and become like complete assholes immediately, that's coming from somewhere. And if you do something that they call meta cognition, where you actually try to look at why you're thinking the way you're thinking in a meta sense, and you go, why did I react so strongly to this random person cutting me off in the street or not turning on his blinker and cutting me off when I'm in like an intersection or that one guy who I've never met since something slightly condescending to me. Why did I get so angry? I don't even know that guy. That guy doesn't even know me. You realize that there might've been things in your childhood where you weren't included, you weren't taken seriously enough, you wanted to have respect, and you kept not getting respect. And so you developed this sort of armor where you built up this internal rage about people disrespecting you. And so now when somebody says something that should be meaningless, you are filled with rage. And what the psychedelics also allow you to do is realize where your problematic behaviors are rooted. Where do they come from? Like, why do I react that way? Like, when I was in high school, as an example, I was very gifted at insulting people. I was very good at saying things that were very hurtful. And I was like that guy that if somebody would get into an argument with me or try to make fun of me, I would say something that would actually like not only end the argument but would ruin the relationship forever. And there was a short period of time where I thought that was cool. And I'm like, oh, I just won that argument, and I just showed him, and like then that person would never talk to me again for the rest of my life. And then I realized like, this is awful. Like, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to have to say something that is so bad and so hurtful that, yes, it might win the argument, but like I'm literally hurting another person. And there is an expression in this kind of work of hurt people hurt people. Hurt people hurt people. What it does is it breaks the cycle and it shows you like, oh, you were excluded a lot as a kid, and you were made fun of a lot as a kid and you were bullied as a kid, and that's where all of this stuff comes from. That's why you care so much about what other people think of you. That's why you're constantly trying to prove yourself and show everybody that you're like enough. And it always comes down to something like we all want to be worthy of respect and worthy of other people's love. And there was something in our youth that taught us we're not worthy. And we have adopted all these behaviors with external accomplishments to try to be worthy of other people's respect and love. When in reality, all we want to do is belong and be accepted for who we are. And the psychedelics have this amazing way of showing you where all your problematic behaviors come from. And it's like a light switch. You don't even have to like think about it. You just, the next time that person that you meet at a conference that just says something condescending to you or something obnoxious, you just don't care anymore, and you're like, all right, that's his problem, that's not mine. And it just makes life a lot lighter, and it also makes your interactions with other people much more compassionate and loving. And then there's one other thing that I should point out that happens sometimes, and I'm sure some of your friends have told you this, and this may be a little too much for this podcast, but I'll go there anyway. Many people discover in psychedelic therapy God, and they discover something, you could call it God. You could call it source. You could call it some creation force that's responsible for life. But many, I mean, I'm talking like tens of thousands of people going back thousands of years, they've used psychedelic therapy in all, not there, they've used psychedelics and psychedelic compounds in all cultures going back thousands of years. And there's a wonderful book on this called The Immortality Key that is a very dense, incredible book. It was a New York Times bestseller written by an author who's now one of my good friends named Brian Niererescu, who's been on Joe Rogan a couple of times. And he talks about how the ancient Greeks used a form of psychedelics, and they've proven this, with what they call archaeochemistry, where they've actually gone to the sites of some of these ancient Greek rituals, recovered chalices, done sampling on the chalices and showed that there was actually psychedelic compound residue on the chalice. And the ancient Greeks created a lot of modern things that we take for granted like philosophy and democracy and science. And the reason in which it was posited that they did this is because it allowed them a sense of their place in the universe. And it gave them a perspective on how to be humble servants and good people. And they required the leaders to go through this process, including Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, there is just this profound aspect to this form of therapy where you might think, and this is what I thought, I was an atheist for 20 years, and I was trained as a data scientist, I just sort of thought like, you're born, you have to make a bunch of money, provide for your family, do your life thing, and then you die, and it's all nothing. And there's something about this for many, many people I know who've done it, where they see that there's something bigger than us. And they see something that is not a hallucination. And it changes the way in which they behave forever towards, and always in a positive way, towards how they respect mother earth, how they respect each other, how they respect their family, how they respect work-life balance. It tends to make people more spiritual. And so that's a really nice side effects that happens off it. 

Chris Powers: Yeah. I tell my atheist friends sometimes, I'm like, it takes a lot to believe in nothing. You believe in something, believing in nothing is believing in something. It's a belief system. That was fricking fascinating. I didn't know we were going to go there. I want to talk about what you're doing now, but I want to wrap this with a bow. So, you had two down years. Maybe if we do another podcast, I'll ask you about what made 2015 so successful, but you had to make a big decision, leave a lot of money on the table, leave 21 year momentum on the table, your identity on the table. You were where you'd won the Grammys. Like, how did you get to the point, and I guess anybody could be at this point in life, where like I'm going to get off the ship that nobody on this planet wants me to get off of. How did you get to like the decision that I'm going to do it? And for you, that was a big ship to get off of. For some people, everybody's got a metaphorically big ship, but yours came with a lot of people's money and employees and career. Like, was it a moment where you're like, I'm doing this? 

Jason Karp: I don't think there was one moment. I think there were a bunch of moments. And I've actually become like almost like an alcoholics anonymous mentor for other professional investors. Because this does not seem to be as unique as it sounds where I've had some people who are multi billionaires, incredibly successful professional investors who’ve called me privately and said like, how did you do it? Like I'm miserable, like I don't know what to do, I have no hobbies, I have no life skills. Like, this is all I know. Like, walk me through how you did it. I've had like probably five of those with people that you would never expect would call me and some of the most successful investors you could imagine. So this is not as unique of an epidemic, I think, as it seems. And I think a lot of professional investors, particularly the ones who aren't actually creating anything, there's some professional investors who are building businesses, creating a lot of jobs, like there's activist investors who are actually creating things, building things, but most of professional investing on the equity side is really just a big video game. You're pushing pieces of paper around. I would try to rationalize to myself, well, I'm doing a service for my investors and many of my investors were endowments and widows and orphans and those sorts of things. And I would rationalize to myself, I'm creating wealth for them and that allows them to do more things, but it's bullshit. It really is. And I would appeal to all of your listeners that if you are smart enough to be an extremely successful investor, you need to really look in the mirror and think, how am I helping my fellow humans? How am I leaving this planet a better place than when I arrived? And I truly believe now that we all have a duty to serve each other and that we all have a duty to leave the planet better than when we found it. And that's not with just wealth generation. And for me it was a combination of a really dark depression for a couple years, a lot of conversations I was having with people who I considered happy. And I had many friends who were not in our industry, many friends who actually you wouldn't consider wealthy, who were far happier than I was. And I was very curious, like how are they happy? I don't understand. It didn't make sense to me because everything to me, man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, to me, it was like, they're not wealthy, how can they be happy? Which is an absurd statement, by the way. But that's what I used to think. And I started realizing that these people were happy for reasons that were intrinsic to being human, that weren't things money could buy. They had really good relationships. They had good families. They had good friends. They spent time in nature. They spent time doing things that you would think of as recreation, not hedonism, but recreation. And they were living the way that I think a lot of Europeans live. And I think we used to, I used to have disdain for the Europeans because they worked 60 hours a week. They didn't have the kind of money that a lot of the people around me had. But it was very clear, these Europeans, and now this also dovetails into what I do now, they live longer than we do. They're far healthier than we are. They have much less mental health disorders or disease. They have much lower suicide rates, less chronic disease, less heart disease, less obesity, and they live longer. And then I'm thinking, well, what am I optimizing for? Like if we don't live as long, we're not happy, we're much more diseased. Like who gives a shit about the money? And I just started having like a lot of slow realizations. And then what ultimately really put the nail in the coffin for me was Hu, my kind of family passion project, which was a restaurant in New York City and had become an organic chocolate company, was starting to take off. And we were getting letters from people who came into our restaurant or ate our chocolate. And these letters were crazy. Like these were letters like, I didn't think I could ever eat sweets again. Or I had to give up all the foods that I loved and now that I found your restaurant, I can eat what I want and it's delicious and you've saved my life. And we get letters literally that said like, we've saved your life or like, we've made you happy once again. And I never got letters like that running a hedge fund. Ever. I never got like, thank you for your returns. And I started noticing like how much personal joy that would last, I would receive from those letters. And how much satisfaction I got from helping others was unquantifiable. And I think I'd been ignoring it for too long because I was on this just like straight line to being, quote, successful. And the combination of those things ultimately led me to the place of, I'm done. I need to retire from professional investing. I need to spend- I don't want to retire. I have a lot of energy. There's a lot of things I want to do in the world, but I want to create things that help people live healthier lives. I want to make it easier for them. I want to make it less confusing. I want to show them how poisoned our food system has become because that's how I cured my eye disease when I was 23. And all of those things together culminated in this moment where I just said like, enough's enough, I have to stop. And my wife was incredibly supportive. I had a few close friends that were very supportive. And I also decided that when I retired, I needed to leave New York City because I felt like I was still in all those circles of big money, big competition, big materialism. And i knew that if I had gotten out of the industry but still stayed in all those circles, it would not be good for my mental health, and so we decided fairly impulsively to move to Austin, Texas, and I wrote my final letter of my hedge fund in October of 18, 2018. And we started looking for houses in Austin a week later. 

Chris Powers: Wow. All right. Why are we so poisoned in America? Like what happened along the way that we decided that we were going to be the unhealthiest country? That's a big question, but like...

Jason Karp: No, look, I think it's a combination of two factors, and I don't know, maybe you include these in your show notes, but I gave an eight minute testimony to the US Senate back in September. The Senator Ron Johnson hosted a Senate round table on chronic disease at the end of September and invited, I think it was like 12 people. And I was invited as the businessman and entrepreneur because I had written a shareholder activist letter against Kellogg's in March of ’24 for they sell a safer, cleaner version of all their identical cereals in other countries than they sell here. So Fruit Loops, which is the one I picked on, in this country has four different artificial food dyes, red 40, yellow five, yellow six, and blue one. And they have a carcinogenic preservative called BHT. And if you go to Canada or UK or Australia or Europe or Japan or even India, they have colorants that are derived from fruits and vegetables and they don't have BHT. And in all of these countries, these synthetic chemicals are either banned or they require cigarette like warning labels. And so, all these big food companies make a better, cleaner version of every product that you know of in these other countries. And most people didn't know about this, including the senators that were there that day, and they were, like you could see it in the video. Like they gasped when I explained it and I showed, I held up two bags of cereal in Congress, the Froot Loops from the US versus the Froot Loops in Canada, which are very different colors because the Froot Loops in the US looks like neon. And amazingly, like the members of government didn't know that they made a better version in these other countries. And so then I explained how we got here. And I think there's two reasons. I think the first, which is obvious to your listeners, is incentives. And the example I think I gave when I was at the Capitol Camp was about McDonald's and how McDonald's started as like a tiny burger shack in the forties, where it was a grass-fed burger from a farm and it was potatoes from a farm and they fried it in beef tallow and it was very simple and it only had the fries said salt, tallow and potatoes as the ingredients. And today it has 11 ingredients. And I think if you study the history of capitalism in this country, the focus has been solely on maximizing margins, cash flow, earnings per share. And the way to do that is you have to widgetize and commodify the food and the ingredients that goes into the food. And we used a food chemistry Henry Ford approach to taking a natural substance that comes from the earth and try to turn it into a factory lined synthetic laboratory produced thing. Our hubris, as scientists in this country, assumed that taking what is God made and comes from the earth and making it in a laboratory would be just as fine. And we're figuring out now the hard way, and science has shown this, which is why it's banned in all these other countries, that this stuff is not fine. It's very toxic, depending on the ingredient, to our systems. It disrupts our microbiome, it disrupts our metabolism. In many cases, these ingredients are carcinogenic. But these big public companies that were incentivized to scale, scale, scale, scale, never were penalized for the longterm damage that they have created for people. They have only been rewarded for growing profit and earnings per share over 20 years. And so, the incentives had driven a lot of this. And then the secondary part, which is where I've recently gotten involved with the government, is there's been a lot of policy problems that has allowed this to happen. And other countries have had far stricter policies on allowing random synthetic manmade chemicals into their food supply. And I used to think that these were honest mistakes. And as I've gotten more and more involved with the regulatory agencies, there actually has been a fair amount of true corruption, corruption like you would expect in countries that we think are corrupt, except that we as US, we've hidden it much better. And so during the period where RFK was becoming prominent and getting into the spotlight and the Make America Healthy Again movement became kind of popular and the MAHA movement really started with that Senate round table in September, a lot of data started coming out on how much these regulatory agencies are actually paid for by food companies. The FDA receives close to 50% of their budget from public companies. The FDA gets half of their budget from public companies. And 95% of the researchers at the National Institute of Health, the NIH that is supposed to do objective peer review research, are compromised with massive conflicts of interest that come from companies that are paying them. And then the more you dig, you sort of think like, ah, this is all conspiracy theory. It's not possible. It's all true. And it's fucking terrifying. And the most recent case in point, I'll just get to it because it's hilarious and you can find this, it was only two weeks ago. There was a bill, I've testified for the Texas Senate and the Texas House three times in the last few months, and there was a bill in the Texas Senate for getting soda off of what's called the SNAP program. The SNAP program is the new name for food stamps. It's a supplemental nutrition program. And soda is the largest line item for people who receive SNAP funding. It's the largest line item, and ultra processed food is 70% of all SNAP. And all these states are now trying to pass bills to stop soda from being funded by our taxpayers for people who are nutritionally deficient. Makes sense. Soda has no nutritional value and it leads to diabetes. And in the hearing, this is all recorded, you have to find this, it's unbelievable that this happened. 

Chris Powers: We will put it in the show notes. 

Jason Karp: It's unbelievable. They were having a hearing and it looked like it was gonna be a unanimous thing to get rid of soda. The American Heart Association showed up to give testimony and they spoke against the bill. They said, it's not our place to tell people what's healthy and what isn't. And the chairwoman of the Senate, this is all recorded, the chairwoman of the Senate goes, is this really the American Heart Association that's speaking against this bill? And you could tell the guy who's clearly a paid lobbyist, you could tell the guy like felt really bad about the fact that he had chosen this job and had to speak up in front of all these people and basically argue against this bill. Over the next two days, the internet lit up. People started posting how much the American Heart Association is funded by Big Food, which is humongous. And two days later, the American Heart Association retracted and they published it. They retracted. They said, sorry about that. We don't oppose the bill. And this is the kind of stuff that actually happens. And you realize how much the incentives have driven the behavior. And so that’s a long way of answering your question. This is how we got here. We got here from deeply flawed incentives and a regulatory policy that has not protected our citizens. 

Chris Powers: And none of these public companies can really be held legally liable for poisoning people? They get a free pass, basically?

Jason Karp: Good question. So three days ago, I guess it's five days ago on Saturday, the attorney general of Texas, Paxton, filed a formal investigation against Kellogg's. So, they're being, Kellogg's is now being sued by the state of Texas for exactly the letter that I wrote a year earlier. We helped with this process. And so now they are starting to get sued and investigated for misrepresentation. What I will say, unfortunately, is that they're not breaking the law. They're just working around the current policy provisions that allow them to do this. 

Chris Powers: And real quick on the Europe thing, and you said it's maximizing cash flow, and obviously Europe has stricter guidelines. Would it also be fair to say though that because their food is healthier in Europe, probably their margins are also thinner than they are in America, or could both be true? Okay, so they're not making as much money on the fruit-

Jason Karp: The margins are a little lower and it is slightly more expensive for them to use these more natural ingredients. But what I pointed out, because the opponents will always cite like, oh, this is going to lead to food inflation, food's already so expensive. It's a gaslighting trope that they use. These big food companies have 40 to 60% gross margins, which is extraordinarily high. They can suck up a five point margin hit without raising prices to the consumer to do this better. 

Chris Powers: Who's the worst perpetrator? The food companies or big pharma or are they just in bed together? They're just all kind of intertwined? Because you had a comment, but I've heard it from lots of people, something to the degree of they want to keep you sick. If you're unhealthy, you need more medicine from big pharma – the more diabetes, the better, the more cancer, the better. 

Jason Karp: Yeah. I think it's all of them. I also would include big ag and big chemical in there. 

Chris Powers: What's big ag? That would sound good to me. 

Jason Karp: Big agriculture would be like Smithfield foods, Tyson foods, the industrial animal production and the industrial crop production. So I would also include Behr and Monsanto are kind of big ag and big chem in one Monsanto is what makes glyphosate, glyphlyphosate is Roundup. And we don't have full time to go into the whole business model of Monsanto, but it's a diabolical business model. They've been sued for tens of billions of dollars. They've already settled for, I don't know, $8 billion for poisoning people and giving them cancer. But look, what I'd say is I think a lot of the big companies are not malicious. I think their business model and their incentives are certainly to sell as much product as possible. I think there are a few companies that are malicious. I think Kellogg's is malicious and their behavior is demonstrated. I think Monsanto is malicious and they have done things that have proactively harmed people for more money. I think most of the companies that I've interacted with, and I've interacted with a lot, I think the people are actually decent people. They're people with families, and they just don't want to get fired and they want to maximize their bonus and their shareholders are incentivizing them just to hit quarterly earnings and grow their dividend. And they're just doing what they know how to do, which is just sell more stuff. And they know that if they make the food cheaper and more appealing and they engineer it to be more addictive, they will sell more stuff. And I think if you said to them, do you want to intentionally harm people, I think most of the people would say no, but that's their job and they currently get no reward for doing something that's better for people. 

Chris Powers: So I think it would be fair to say like lab grown anything. I know like Bill Gates is on this big push for like lab grown meats. But is it fair to say, like if it's grown in a lab, the odds are probably not going to be great for you, or could there be some stuff that's in a lab that's good for you? 

Jason Karp: I don't think it's safe to say that everything made in a laboratory is negative. And by the way, I'm not anti-pharma. There are certain medications that are life-saving that there's no substitute for, but I think our modern medical system has done an incredibly good job at what are called acute problems or acute illnesses. So you break a leg, you need a hip replacement, you need to do an emergency C-section, you have a bad infection and you don't want to get gangrene, those are things that we used to suffer from a hundred years ago. We don't suffer from those anymore. That's amazing. That's modern medicine. Great. Chronic disease, by contrast, versus acute, we're at the worst we've ever been. These are slow building, compounding, five to 30 year diseases of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, metabolic disorders. We are literally the worst we've ever been in human history today. And so in terms of chronic disease, our medical system has been an abject failure. There has never been more diabetes medication. There's never been more statins. There's never been more ADHD medication. And all of these diseases are at all time highs. So, if you're just being honest and rational, like it's the worst it's ever been, and we've never spent more money than we have today, like it's not working. And so I think when it comes to the laboratory produced stuff, what we have seen in a lot of studies, and then also if you ignore the studies and you just look at populations who don't eat on a modern processed diet, these are like the blue zones. These are indigenous peoples. They have no chronic disease, zero, and they're far healthier than us. And so it does stand to reason that the closer you live and eat to nature, the healthier you will be from developing any chronic issue. 

Chris Powers: So the question then becomes like, what are we doing about it? And you've been at this a little bit longer than it became mainstream. Obviously, I think Robert Kennedy did bring a good light over this in the latest campaign, but like if you're successful in what you're doing now with HumanCo and just maybe not even through HumanCo, just the network that you're going to build and the crusade that you're on, can we get out of this or is it-? It seems like a bipartisan, this is probably a bipartisan agreement or are we even- I'm not trying to be political, but are we both, is everybody agreeing this needs to happen? 

Jason Karp: So great question, because I think when RFK, who was a very, very democratic person and comes from the most democratic family of all time, when he joined forces with Trump, it messed a lot of people up psychologically because a lot of the left hates Trump and everything Trump stands for. And a lot of people who used to love RFK immediately kind of disowned him because now he was part of the Trump administration. And the Make America Healthy Again movement became political when it should not have. And it was really sad to watch. In fact, I have friends who are fairly left and progressive who've sent me hate mails, like accusing me of, and I've always been fairly independent and fairly kind of down the middle on a lot of topics, but I had people literally like send me like the most obnoxious messages because I was helping RFK and that by default means I was helping Trump. And then that angered all these people. And I believe obviously that getting poison out of our food system, helping people reverse this chronic disease epidemic should not be a political topic. But it kind of has become that and it's sad. And I would encourage any of your listeners who are on the left to listen to the messages and not the messenger. There's plenty of things that I love what RFK says, and there's things I disagree with him on. There's plenty of things I like what Trump says, and there's plenty of things that Trump says that I think are insane. And like, I'm objective enough to look at the message and not the messenger. And I think what RFK is trying to do immediately and what the new kind of group underneath him in what's called the HHS, the Health and Human Services, is bring back some common sense. And like, for example, one of the top priorities is to change our policy approach to the way it is in Europe. And basically they have all these ingredients that are already banned and they've done their research and they ban them or they've required regulations or warning labels on them. And in every metric that we observe, they're doing better than us. So instead of having to spend 20 years testing every single thing and saying like, oh, we have to test this and we have to test this artificial food, let's test this, let's actually take a common sense approach and say, hey, these developed countries are big countries. We respect them. Some of them have nuclear weapons. We respect them enough to have nuclear weapons. So they're obviously not dumb. And if we respect them enough, let's... And they're doing way better than us in the health of their citizens. And by the way, they're spending half to a third on healthcare per person than we are. And they're living five to seven years longer than we are. So let's just take their playbook. Let's take their regulatory policy. Let's take the list of banned ingredients and regulated ingredients. Let's bring it over here and just say, we're just taking what they have. They've already done their research. We see the outcomes in their people. They're doing better than we are. We don't have to debate, was it this ingredient or this ingredient or this or this or this? We know the only reason for these ingredients is to pad the bottom line of the corporations because you don't need them. And the way Europe's doing it is working. They have companies that are succeeding over there. It's not like they're all nonprofits. So let's just take their playbook. And I believe, based on my knowledge today, that that is the top priority of the new HHS, which is to adopt some of those standards. And some of the bills that I have testified on recently in Texas are to get rid of synthetic chemicals out of school lunches, to get rid of the artificial food dyes, and to adopt more of the same policies that Europe uses. 

Chris Powers: If I'm sitting here, the common person sitting here and obviously people that have a lot of resources can generally have, in today's world, have a better shot of living a, it's affordable to be healthy. Let's put it that way. But if I'm sitting here and I'm going like, what's the next best step? Like, how do I- knowing that I- this isn't fixed yet, but I live within a world, you figured out some systems and some formulas. Like if I wanted to say it 30 days from now, if I wanted to kind of change my trajectory, what would be the low hanging fruit that I would go do and implement into my life? 

Jason Karp: Well, it is a misnomer that you have to be wealthy to eat healthy. You do have to spend more time though. That's true. So if you have the ability to go to a grocery store, food is actually not expensive if you make it yourself. You can get grass-fed, grass-finished beef from a regenerative farm, feed your whole family for the price of four people at Chipotle. You can shop in a way that is highly affordable if you make it yourself. If you have to buy stuff that's on a shelf, what I would say is there's some very simple rules. First off, if you can, try to avoid the sort of what... And you can Google the definition of an ultra processed food. These are foods with very long ingredient labels. These are foods where you don't recognize most of them. They read like chemicals and they don't read like ingredients. There's a very simple rule of thumb, which is if you don't recognize an ingredient, your body probably doesn't either. It's a good rule of thumb. Another rule of thumb that I find helpful for people is if your grandmother or great grandmother wouldn't have cooked with this ingredient, don't use it. And so when you're reading the back of an ingredient label, some ultra processed food that you would find in a gas station, you'll see there's a lot of things on there that you can't pronounce. And you're like, what is this? And you don't even have to Google it. You can just know that if it's a food that was around a hundred years ago or 200 years ago, it's probably less of a problem than some synthetic man-made chemical. Obviously, there's a move towards reducing people's sugar intake. I would say if you can eat organic when- organic is more expensive than conventional, which is another thing that pisses everybody off, because you literally have to pay more money to not be poisoned. You have to pay more money to not be poisoned, which sounds insane. But creating crops with a lot of synthetic chemicals and pesticides allows the yields to be higher and allows them to make more of them, which is why they're cheaper. So I would say go organic when you can, cook at home when you can, and avoid things that are in the center of the grocery aisle in terms of the ultra-processed food with long ingredient labels. I would really like to try to get you off Diet Coke. There's so many alternatives for caffeine that you can have. Caffeine's not bad. Diet Coke's pretty bad. And there's much healthier forms of caffeine. There's actually healthy forms of nicotine, which surprises a lot of people. Nicotine by itself is not a toxic or problematic compound, but nicotine in cigarettes is bad. And so, one of the trends that's happening in the health and wellness world is clean nicotine. And nicotine is a very powerful nootropic. It's the most studied substance we have, actually more than caffeine. And in low doses, assuming you don't, it is addictive, but assuming you don't get addicted to it, nicotine could be a really good productivity enhancer. But my point of all this is there's clean ways to get caffeine. There's clean ways to get nicotine. You don't have to use the garbage to get... Most people are drinking Diet Coke because they like the caffeine. And there's so many issues with Diet Coke, not to mention that all canned beverage, there's a plastic liner in every can. And you may have heard about microplastics, which is becoming a hot topic, all cans have plastic in them, and when you drink out of a can and you drink and acidic liquid out of a can and soda is acidic, you are consuming a lot of plastic every can you drink. 

Chris Powers: Damn, alright I'm going to try it. What's the best way to drink caffeine? 

Jason Karp: I’ll give a few recommendations for clean caffeine but like, matcha is great. You can get organic espresso, organic coffee. If you're going to get it in a package, make sure it's in glass. But like there's plenty of cheap ways to get caffeine that are not soda. 

Chris Powers: We, a lot of people drink- So why don't you just bring a lot of people- Why don't we just shoot a hole in- why don't we bust a lot of bubbles right now? How bad is alcohol for you? 

Jason Karp: Bad, but it's not as bad in other countries as it is here. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So same thing. 

Jason Karp: Yeah. So first off, alcohol is a toxic substance. Alcohol has what's called an LD50, which is a medical chemical term for what is the lowest dose that kills you. And a lot of things have LD50s, Acetaminophen, Tylenol has LD50s. What's the minimum amount you have to have to kill you? Alcohol has an LD50. Psilocybin does not have an LD50. There is no amount of psilocybin you could consume that will kill you. Same thing with cannabis. And so one of the ways to measure toxicology is does it have an LD50 or not? Alcohol for a whole host of reasons was legalized, obviously, after the prohibition. And there's a whole history as to how that happened, and we don't have to get into that. But alcohol in high doses and consistently is one of the more toxic substances you can consume. And it was a surprise to me to learn that a lot of the, quote, drugs that we were told to fear are far healthier than alcohol. None of them are healthy, to be clear. But the thing about alcohol in the US is that the alcohol industry in the US is not regulated by the FDA. It is regulated by the Tobacco and Firearms Division. And this is also a weird thing that you'd have to research to understand how this happened. But that is why when you get any alcohol, including a beer or an alcoholic spritzer, like White Claw or wine, you'll never see an ingredient label on alcohol in the US. You'll never see ingredients. You cannot believe the shit that they put in to American alcoholic beverages because nobody sees what's going into it. Some of the most toxic things you could consume is American alcohol, including Napa wine. Even some of the top Napa wines that are rated like 99 are filled with synthetic chemicals to make it taste oakier or more cherry or more whatever. Whereas if you go to Europe, you go to France and Italy where their wine consumption goes back thousands of years, they don't do that. And so I think some of the studies that have come out recently on cancer and other diseases that are related to excessive alcohol consumption are significantly lower in Europe than they are here, even though that those countries drink more alcohol, particularly more wine than we do. And so I wouldn't say never drink alcohol. Japan is also another great country that has extreme pristine conditions for what defines sake. If I go out to a nice sushi restaurant, I'll have a high-end sake. If a friend of mine brings out a big old world bottle of wine from Italy or France, I'll have some. And then in the US, if you want to drink that, always look for organic or biodynamic, which is a distinction which means that they can't use all that synthetic crap that they add to it. There's a few websites that are devoted to biodynamic wines in this country. Whether or not they are bad for it. I would say a couple of drinks a week is fine. But there's this movement happening all over the country. They call it California sober where people are giving up alcohol and using things like cannabis and mushrooms and things for social settings because they noticed that they don't have hangovers the next day. Obviously everything in moderation and I would never encourage consumption of any of this stuff in large amounts, but alcohol is definitely one of the worst. 

Chris Powers: Mushrooms has taken off. I mean, you see it everywhere now. It's crazy. All right, man, we've been going for a while. You’ve been super generous today. I'm a real fan and I want to meet you in Austin sometime soon. I really appreciate you joining me today. 

Jason Karp: Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. And definitely give me a shout when you're in Austin.