YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Karp

lines on the record: 91
first: 2023-04-23
most recent: 2023-04-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You knew books just came out actually this month, both by friends of mine who I consider like the best in this space. The first I would recommend would be Outlive by Dr. Peter Atia. Peter's one of the foremost experts on longevity. This book is a dense opus of his life's work, much more, I'd say, for your scientific-oriented listeners. Very scientific, but grounded in real practical reality. The second book by one of my favorite people in the space is called Young Forever by Dr. Mark Hyman, who's the famous, one of the original functional medicine doctors. And that has much more, I'd say, practical, easy to kind of adopt learnings, but both books are fabulous, Outlive and Young Forever.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a good way, which is called hormesis. And our bodies are effectively imploding on themselves. And it's where autoimmune disease comes from because our bodies are turning inward because we're removing all of the stimuli that our bodies need to actually thrive.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You show people videos or movies. If you ever watch movies from the 70s, everyone's thin. It's like weird, right? And like you just watch like taxi driver with De Nero. And by the way, they're smoking. They're eating pizza. It's not like they were that healthy. And so I think when people need to remember like, what are you supposed to do? I think understanding like how did we evolve this hunger gatherers and is what I'm doing evolutionarily consistent or not consistent? And like we don't have the DNA to deal with all these new adaptations. In fact, the primary culprit to a lot of scientists is what they call abundance, not in the abundance that you speak of, in a good way. But we've evolved to deal with the opposite of abundance, which is why intermittent fasting works, and we can go into the science of why that works. But like we would go days sometimes without food. And now we have everything we need all around us. And so we're not actually stressing our bodies.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People, this is that we are supposed to be the most technologically advanced. We're supposed to know more than we ever have. We exercise more than we ever have right now. And we're the sickest we've ever been in human history. We are the first generation in recorded human history that is predicted to live a shorter lifespan than the previous. In 1990, there were zero states where more than 20% of the population was obese. Zero. That's only 30 years ago. Today, there are zero states that are under 20. Zero. 42% of the population in the U.S. is obese. 93% of the US is metabolically unhealthy. 93%. 40% of eligible people for the military cannot go into the draft because of chronic disease. It's a national security threat. All of this happened in the last 40 years. In fact,”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We lived in tribes and communities. And when you think about the amount of evolution and the amount of kind of adaptive behaviors that we've evolved over that period of time, it's staggering. And then the hubris of us thinking in the last, really, really hundred years, right? And this is reflected in all the data, by the way. It's really reflected in the last 40 years, which is unbelievably scary, that the hubris of thinking like, oh yeah, that last two million years, like that doesn't mean anything. Like, we know better. We know better than that. So let's try to go against everything that we evolved to do, right? Like, we never had processed foods, right? We never had sedentary behavior. We certainly didn't have devices, right? We never were isolated because if we were isolated, we would die, right? So we've evolved as social species. And, you know, just some of the stats in the last 40 years are so staggering.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way I've explained it to a lot of people, and it's the reason why both of the health and wellness businesses that I co-founded have the word human in them. And the easiest way for everyone to remember all this is we just have to live consistent with the way in which we evolved. Because if you think about how we've evolved,”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They all prize their elders so their elders have a significant function in their society. They all get a lot of movement every day and they all sleep. And that's the common thread. And so there's just so much that is not controversial and not disputable. But in today's modern society, it's a very inconvenient truth that food and toxins in our environment and toxic lifestyle, sedentary behavior, constant addictions to the phones and the computers, et cetera. no social connection, isolation. It's a very inconvenient truth that this actually is what's killing us, but it's not even disputable and it's not controversial.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From like Arctic to the jungle to Africa to US. And they all have the same attributes. And what's interesting about the indigenous peoples who don't live with any modern technology. They have no allergies. They have no autism. They have no chronic diseases. So no diabetes, no heart disease, no obesity. They have none of our modern diseases. Many of the elders live to 100. And what's amazing is that there's ones in the Arctic that have absolutely no fruit and vegetables. They eat literally whale blubber and meat. There's tribes that live only off of fruits and vegetables and seeds. There's tribes in Africa that consume a shocking amount of cow blood and meat. So you have vegans, you have carnivores, you have all these different types. And what's consistent about all of them is that they all eat as close to the earth as possible with the minimal amount of processing as possible. They all prize community.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was a sleep expert, and it is like one hundredth of a percent of the population that has a weird disorder where they can survive on six hours or less of sleep a night. It's not like 10% of the population. It's like one, one thousandth of a percent. We all need seven to eight hours of sleep a night every night. Good sleep. And then there's like a bunch of sort of obvious things that are automatic life detractors that we know are dumb to do, but people still do them, like smoking cigarettes, drinking soda. Those will shave off five to 15 years of your life automatically if you do those activities. And so for me, a lot of my journey was just understanding what it is about these populations. And by the way, not just the blue zones, but also there's a number of indigenous peoples that still exist as hunter-gatherers all over the world that have lived this way for a thousand plus years. And they have them in every continent.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you study blue zones and these blue zones for some of your listeners who may not know them, blue zones are basically a select group of towns and cities in the world that have been studied by anthropologists where they have multiple standard deviations more of centenarians, people who live to 100 than any other cohort. And they've studied these groups and they're all over the world. Most of them are in Europe, a few in Asia. We have one here in the US, which are the Latter-day Adventists. But there's a couple in Sardinia's one and there's one in Greece and there's two in Japan. And they all have this kind of common thread of having those variables. And most people get nervous that they have to do all this biohacking to live longer. And ironically, all that biohacking stuff is actually on the margin. If you're not eating really well and clean, and we can go into what that means, and you're not sleeping seven, eight hours a night.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cutting edge things that extend your age by five or ten years and you hear about these molecules like rapomyosin and metformin and they're all talking about ozempic now but you can get 80-90 of the way there in terms of living well to the age of 100 with like four simple things that we've known about for like 100”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pioneers at the time, like Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Mark Hyman, who've both written many books on integrative or functional medicine, and their approaches treat the root cause of disease, not the symptoms. And they're like, get processed food out of your diet. Make sure you sleep at least seven hours a night. Make sure you're not eating like super processed junk food that's causing systemic inflammation. And so I had been doing a lot of reading on inflammation, on anthropology and evolution and biological aspects of how the body works. And there was enough science then that most of our problems as humans are related to single causes of things as opposed to lots of little things. And so my approach was I'm going to basically try to reduce my body inflammation. And it turns out that even today with the advances in science that we have, and on all these podcasts, people are talking about crazy.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back then, there weren't many. And back then, there was a burgeoning science that was considered almost voodoo called functional or integrative medicine. And the idea behind functional medicine is that modern Western medicine, which some people call it healthcare, but it's really disease care is what most Western medicine is, which is people come in with sicknesses and we figure out ways to address the symptoms of those sicknesses, but not necessarily the root cause. So, for example, I came in with alopecia. I came in with eczemans psoriasis. I came in with a degenerative eye disease. They're like, okay, here's a cream for your eczema and psoriasis. Here's a pill that will stop your hair. Here is a vitamin that might be an antioxidant to help your eyes from degenerating further. And doctors all thought they were separate. Whereas there were doctors who were”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things and what it genetics may be, you know, and now, thankfully, there's so many resources and books, and I can give you a bunch for your listeners.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In 1999, you know, giving up caffeine. I loved coffee, giving up processed food, giving up refined sugar, giving up gluten, giving up dairy. I tried all these different things to try to cure myself. And a lot of them worked, but they didn't get to the full root cause of, I think, what was troubling me. And so in some ways, while that was amazing and I cured myself, it was a partial cure. It didn't address the demons that we talked about in terms of like why I was so relentlessly driven. And that was something I had to address many times later in my life.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amount of stress and pressure I put on myself. And it was exacerbated because I have some kind of natural autoimmune genetic things where the foods that I was eating made me a lot sicker. Turns out I'm basically celiac, so I can't really eat gluten. And I was eating gluten like eight times a day. I was eating a lot of processed food. I was drinking alcohol at night. I was drinking caffeine in the morning. Wasn't sleeping. wasn't exercising and all of my diseases it turns out were linked to the way I was eating and the way I was living. And I went on this almost year-long journey of like trying to clean up my lifestyle to cure my blindness. And it worked. And my vision came back. And all of my ailments, my hair loss, my rashes, all stopped. But I had to do it by giving up all these things in my life that actually brought me pleasure. Gave up alcohol as a 23-year-old single person in New York was very different.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the inner kind of trauma and fight that I was having. And what I did was I decided, which also worked. So it turns out that I also had a variety of autoimmune diseases that were effectively epigenetically triggered from all of this immense amount of stress. And if you saw, there have been like kind of several movies that kind of touch on this, but if you ever saw the movie Deadpool with Ryan Reynolds, it's a fabulous movie. It's a fun Marvel movie, but basically they turn Ryan Reynolds is dying of cancer and he's a normal person. And they come to him with this sort of promise that they could basically stop the cancer, but they didn't explain to him how. And they basically threw massive amounts of stress and were able to kind of epigenetically turn him into a mutant. But it comes with a lot of downside. Like he totally changes how he looks in a not a good way. In some ways, what I did to myself was I brought out all these diseases over the course of a couple years through the intense.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was brutal for me. And, you know, I think I had such self-hatred for who I was prior to college that I did everything I could to not allow that kid to come back. And so I was brutal to myself. And I had zero self-compassion. And I also think now that I've been studying a lot of what they call kind of somatic disorders, which is how, you know, the term psychosomatic comes from how certain things in your mind can manifest physically in your body. And there is very strong scientific evidence. It's not like woo-woo that your body manifests a lot of what is in your brain and that if you are living a life that is deeply inconsistent with your values or what your inner soul wants, you will get sick through physical sickness. And I think a lot of my physical ailments were manifestations.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really hard for me to engage in something that was supposed to be for human enjoyment with no measurable productivity benefit. And I'm actually probably sure that you have many listeners right now who will understand this, that the idea of having like watching a dumb movie in the middle of the day feels more indulgent than like most things they could fathom.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. And I started doing a lot of research. So first and foremost, this shrink who saw mostly people in their 40s and 50s. He said he'd never seen a 23-year-old. He's just like, I specialize in type A personality overachievement kind of disorders. And he basically told me I had to spend at least two hours a day on activities that had no observable benefit to me. So he's like, you can't watch a documentary. You can't read a book that's nonfiction. There can be no objective of learning or bettering yourself in any of this two-hour window. So it has to be dumb stuff. Watch sex in the city, play a stupid video game, but if you play the video game, don't try to beat it. Like he was very specific. And my girlfriend at the time who also thought I was nuts was thrilled that like this was now part of my protocol. And it was really, really hard for me to do that.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was an information hoarder. So if there was information, I wanted to read it. I couldn't delete emails. I couldn't throw away magazines or books without reading them. And I kind of realized at that moment like, wow, I'm like really sick. But I was only 23. And I didn't view it in an enlightened like way. I viewed it as an impediment to my productivity. So the way I tackled my problem at that age worked, but it wasn't coming from the right place. It was like, I need to get healthy so that I can like continue, not like I'm not happy. Yeah.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's like a fuel. And cortisol is the number one excessive cortisol is the number one determinant of kind of early death in people. It's like redlining an engine is the way he described it. And he referred me to this book that was written by a psychologist probably 20 years ago called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And it's the same principle of basically animals in the wild. And he's like, I don't know what you do. I don't know what you're doing to yourself, but you won't live past the age of 40 if you don't figure out how to get your cortisol under control. He said, you have the highest level of cortisol I've ever seen in a human being. And I said, okay. And he referred me to a psychiatrist and said, you should go and really start to sort out like what's causing this. And I had real clinical shit that I had to do. I had obsessive compulsive disorder. I was a hoarder of information. Some people hoard like things.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Run on the treadmill, and you know, you wear the mask and that whole thing. And he came back and he goes, Jason, do you know what cortisol is? And this is before all this movement. And I said, no, and he said, well, cortisol is like, he explained it in a very layman, dumb way to me. He's like, cortisol is like the sister to adrenaline. It's your fight or flight hormone. And we secrete it and we've evolved to secrete it when we are in danger. And so like if a saber-toothed tiger was chasing you, you would secrete a lot of adrenaline and cortisol and you would have super strength and super speed and then it would go away. And all animals have this when they need to fight or flight. But humans have evolved to be able to secrete this in their mind when there's no actual threat. And people who are very type A or neurotic or if you're sleep deprived or if you're too focused on winning all the time, you can teach yourself how to secrete too much cortisol.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I was ashamed of it because I was like, look at all this shit that I'm accomplishing. I can't be sick. Like, I'll just ignore it. And it just kept getting worse. And it got to the point where I started seeing some other kinds of doctors who weren't specialists in vision. And I was really starting to get very depressed because I also wasn't hanging out with people other than at work. I told nobody about how bad this was, including my parents, because again, there was this source of shame, like maybe this means that I'm mortal. And right now I was in this mode of not feeling like a mortal. And I finally, I saw like four or five doctors. They just kind of kept saying, like, we have no idea what's wrong with you because I had all these different diseases that were seemingly unrelated. And I was smart enough to realize like, there's no way these are all unrelated. And I finally saw a guy who's more of an endocrinologist. And he did all this blood work on me. He did all those kind of tests where you're like.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And while this was happening, I had all my other health symptoms, the hair, the rashes, I had a few other things that are probably not worth going into. But I felt awful. And yet in what I thought mattered, I just kept ringing up more points at work. Had no idea.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Felt like it was just around the time that Goodwill Hunting had come out. And I was like obsessed with that movie and I kind of felt like maybe I could be like him, which obviously is a fictional character. And I always had these, you may or may not remember, I have a mathematician uncle who was a child prodigy and was kind of like Goodwill Hunting, you know, and graduated high school and college three or four years early and just went on to do crazy things in the mathematics world. I always kind of looked up to him and wondered, like, you know, was I anything like him? Could I be like him? And so I had that kind of fueling me. And then I noticed that I started getting sick and it started with some weird symptoms. And I started developing these rashes on my body. I noticed my hair started falling out in like clumps. And then what was really acute was my vision started.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Realize how beneficial that was for me, both mental health and physical health. And then I get into this kind of work hard, play hard environment in New York City, 1998, 1999, 21, 22 years old. And everyone's like, you know, caffeine in the morning, crappy lunch, you know, work till nine o'clock at night, go out for cocktails, get five hours of sleep back again. And I started doing that. And then I realized, well, wait, like a lot of this is not helping my productivity. So I'm going to teach myself how to sleep less. I'm going to basically stop hanging out with people because hanging out with people didn't have a tangible benefit for me. I'm going to teach myself how to speed read. And so I started reading. I got so fast at one point I was reading a book a day. And that was outside of work. And I gave up exercise because I didn't see how that fit into my goals. And for a couple months, it was working if your objective function was like get more productive. And I kind of.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These things, I was really obsessed with how do I improve my efficiencies. And it wasn't just for business. I was so curious and so interested in knowledge acquisition. And I had sort of delusions of my own grandeur at the time because I had been so everything I put my mind to in college, I did. I sort of thought, oh, sky's a limit. Let's keep going. And I taught myself how to speed read. I taught myself how to go on less sleep. And I started taking a very myopic approach to productivity and efficiency. And if it didn't fit into my rubric of is this going to make me more productive or better, it didn't fit into my life. And over, you know, in college, primarily because I had an athletic schedule, I was working out, you know, an hour and a half to three hours a day. And I didn't.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I didn't fully know why it was happening at the time. I think with the benefit of time and hindsight, it looks a lot clearer in terms of what happened to me and how I did to myself what I did. But I was hell-bent on this continued path of overachievement. I got this very coveted job right out of college. I wanted to be great at it, you know. And I obviously wanted to make a lot of money, but I also wanted I wanted the accolades. I wanted to feel impressive. I wanted to quiet all those insecure imposter demons. And I was very good at my job. And in the second, third year of working, I think it first started about a year into it. I had continued to evolve my own different forms of efficiency hacking. And this is before podcasts and before, you know, four-hour work week was out and all.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've known many people like that. And those are people you probably want to give your money to to invest. But if you could be long their fulfillment and happiness, you would not want to own stock in that part of their life.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like that and the time off, and yeah, and I don't want to minimize the value of having some money. Which affords you freedom to do certain things. But I think what a lot of people miss, and I'm sure you've seen this with all the people you interviewed for your book, what a lot of people miss though is that there's very marginal utility once you reach a certain level and all the sources of abundance and fulfillment are not solved with money.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And have power. And I was talking with somebody about this. For the privilege to mate. And we had a biologist on our boat who was explaining to us, you know, how this works in nature. And I knew a lot of this because I love animals and I love nature. But like for my kids to listen to this and they were describing, well, you know, the male that's bigger, the male that fights harder, the male that dominates he's the bigger, better, like basically source of continuing the bloodline was the one that would get to meet with the female. As this biologist is describing it to me, it was just like, this is what we do, you know, in overachievement. Like all of this is for the same kind of crap. And it's amazing how it's hardwired into us.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, look, I mean, I've studied a lot of the kind of wiser older people, you know, some of whom like the Buddha go back thousands of years. And it's amazing how the human condition has basically always been the same. It's just that we have much fancier, newer toys today and things to acquire that weren't as available then. But it's the same arc that humans go through. And I think a lot of it is unfortunately why you see this just keeps happening and happening with everybody is that we're instinctively hardwired to do this. If you go back to how we evolved when we were hunter-gatherers or even in the beginnings of when we were hominids and like half apes, it was all about procreation and it was all about having like the bigger cave and more food and like that's what got the mates. And we have this so deeply hardwired into us to achieve and die.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't from necessarily a good place. And where I've derived the most amount of satisfaction and fulfillment in my life has been in helping people. So I think that's a very powerful and important point you make.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is. And I'd say in the last year in particular, and we can get to this, I meet a lot of people who have read your book or have followed parts of my career and they're in that early period of their, you know, what I'll call material or extrinsic or externally motivated part of their ascent. And I'll tell them, I'll say, look, I might be one of the greatest, and this sounds ridiculous, but I'll say it anyway. You know, I might be one of the greatest overachievers that you'll ever meet, I'll say to somebody, in terms of, you know, things that I've done that were six standard deviation things, whether it's in sport or in school or in business or in entrepreneurialism. And yet, I've had massive mental health issues. I've had massive physical health issues. And you have to be careful what you wish for and how you get to it. Because what got me here was a corrosive, toxic source of fuel that”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was told I was disappointing for most of my youth, and that created a lot of insecurity, trauma, chip on your shoulder, imposter complex, all the classic psychological traits that fuel probably many people in your book. And I'm sure we're going to get into it over the next hour and a half. But for a while, that was an unbelievably powerful source of fuel for me to do things that most people thought weren't humanly possible in terms of work ethics, sleep deprivation. you know, doing things that just were unthinkable to a lot of people because that fuel had no limits to it because it came from a really deep protective place that was almost trying to prevent annihilation, for lack of a better word.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. And look, it also marked the beginning of my approach to things as an outsider. You know, most of my adult life has been approaching and tackling things as an outsider, as someone that people said, you can't do that. Here I was a pre-med student taking the Wharton version of Econ, which I thought I had no business being in. And based on one data point of the first test being told you're the best student in this class. And so for me, you know, it was a, I think it was a very powerful but dangerous first lesson for me as a college student.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“didn't really study for the first exam And when I got the test back, I got the highest score in the class out of probably 200 kids. And there was a kid behind me who was very nosy. And looked over my shoulder and said, that's the kid who got the highest score in the class and pointed at me. And I had never been in the position where I was somebody who got the highest score on anything. And I blushed at first and I felt unbelievably nervous and then I felt really proud at the same time.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of my athletic schedule, I could not take the College of Arts and Sciences Econ. I had to take the Wharton. Econ. Which had a strict curve on it and also had a caliber that was significantly higher. Good as pen is as a school, the Wharton school has the highest selectivity of any university in the United States in terms of an admit rate. And I was deeply insecure and sort of nervous about why I was even there in the first place. But nevertheless, I took this econ class. And for some reason, econ came to me like a second language. And I still had my old habits when I got to pen. didn't really know how to study. I didn't really have a strong work ethic. Was just pretty happy that I was at that school in the first place, frankly. I don't quite know exactly how it happened, but it felt like a miracle.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I miraculously, for a variety of reasons, whether it was my tennis. Some of my extracurricular activities. Or some of my testing scores. I don't know what it exactly was, but I miraculously got into pen. Against the advice of all my guidance counselors who told me it would be impossible for me to get into that school. And when I got there Decided in almost an act of self flagellation, decided to take on a completely new sport Was squash having been a tennis player. And the reason for that was I was very burnt out in tennis I didn't think I actually wanted to play college tennis and I had a dislocated shoulder at the time The short version of the story is I was taking an econ class that was reserved for the Wharton students. I was pre med actually when I got to Penn.”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it's interesting from the first time we spoke because I actually have a little more insight also into the biological kind of basis. So for my whole youth, I was regularly described as the class clown. My nickname as a kid was Dennis Jimenez. I always got into trouble. I realized once I had my own children that I had undiagnosed pronounced ADHD and still have aspects of it, by the way, but it's much, much better, and we can go into how I reversed some of that. But I think the narrative for me in middle school and high school, well, I actually got by pretty well in middle school when things were easy. And then I went to a very rigorous, difficult high school. Where my kind of just being smart and kind of hacking oriented didn't cut it. And I didn't do particularly well in high school”
2023-04-23 · We Study Billionaires · RWH026: Wealth & Health w/ Jason Karp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT