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Jason Karp

Founder and CEO of HumanCo, a health-focused holding company, and co-founder of Hu Kitchen (acquired by Mondelēz); former hedge fund investor turned clean-food advocate.

Sep 3, 2026

74:48
Is that... a relatively accurate generalization? Is it impossible to get to purely clean food because of the world we live in? Or what are the difficulties when you are trying to source for the companies that you are starting and working with?
75:05
I think the scale matters.
75:06
So I think it's totally possible when you're at lower scale.
75:11
I think if you get to the level of Smithfield Foods, With the way the current agriculture works, I don't think it's possible.
75:25
I think if you're getting to the level where you're doing $50 billion of revenue, I think the American food supply is too contaminated.
75:35
to get to that level.
75:37
I think when you're in smaller scale, which by the way, smaller scale is still a gigantic business, right? Like a billion, two billion, three billion kind of revenue levels.

10 MINS LATER

85:28
So bringing this all the way around, what would you recommend when we see a study like this, this avocado oil, what should a consumer, how should we take in that information? What would you like people to think about when we're looking at that?
3:21
Yeah.
3:22
Um, and, uh, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, uh, An Omnivore's Dilemma.
3:29
And there were a bunch of these things that I just kept finding and, and eventually my brother-in-law, Jordan, started reading them with me.
3:35
Uh, and he wasn't sick like I was, but he started noticing how much better he felt and how much better everything in his life got.
3:41
And he said to me one day, he was in real estate at the time, I was, uh, managing a hedge fund, and he said to me, he said, "There needs to be the manifestation of all this stuff that we're doing as a restaurant.
3:52
Like, we need somewhere to eat every day." And I was like, "Dude, I'm a professional investor.
3:57
Restaurants are not easy businesses.

12 MINS LATER

16:14
That's so amazing.
8:02
[laughs]
8:02
Yes.
8:04
Um, chocolate's like a magical food.
8:05
It really is.
8:06
And, and there's actually a lot of studies on this, and I'm not even involved in Hu anymore, so I'm not even, like, pitching my own thing.
8:13
I'm just saying that chocolate's an amazing, like, superfood if you do it right.
8:17
The story of how my fa- um, my family and I came up with Hu, Hu stands for human.

38 MINS LATER

45:58
[gentle music]
15:42
Thank you so much for everything you've been creating to give people the option to have healthier foods, and welcome.
15:50
Hey, Tony.
15:51
Yeah, I was, I was there on Monday.
15:53
Uh, it was...
15:55
I was, I guess, one of the final speakers.
15:58
Um, and I took a, a very different approach, uh, to the, to the speeches, which I felt like was important.
16:07
I was, I was really happy to see that the turnout was pretty bipartisan.

55 MINS LATER

speaker_1SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
71:41
[phone ringing] It's reaching Congress, and that energy, these chain reactions are working.

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