Kimbal Musk: The Future of Food, Going to Mars, and Capitalism

And so you just constantly obsess and obsess, obsess. And then either I solve it or a month later it solves itself in a way that I didn't see it. But it's sort of that obsession is it's when you hit a brick wall, you can't accept the brick walls. You just obsess, obsess, obsess, and then eventually figure out a way around it or the world just disappears.

You're listening to Freedom fastlane presented by capitalism.com this is the show about building businesses and the profits so that you can live life on your terms.

Kimbal Musk is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who founded Zip2 alongside his.

Brother Elon Musk, now the fourth largest shareholder of Tesla. He also sits on the board of SpaceX, Tesla and Chipotle. Today he's on a mission to bring healthy organic farm to table food to everyone and is a leader in the entrepreneurial food industry. Listen to this talk with Ryan Moran.

From the Capitalism Conference to hear his vision for the future and how capitalism.

Will change the world.

All right, let's give it up for Kimbal Musk.

Thank you for being here.

It's Kimball Musk, everybody. He's here. You're sitting among greatness, Kimball. Tell us why food. And the reason I ask this is you have been a part of some of the most celebrated companies in the world that have inspired entrepreneurs, have changed people's lives. I'd like to hear about your background in PayPal as well. You saw what was possible. Why go into food? Why is that your life's mission?

Well, food for me has always been, always been my life's mission. I think it's hard to turn down working on the Internet in 1995. So for me, when I came to North America, I've been a cook since I was a kid. I cooked for my friends at university and saw that as my calling. But when the Internet came along, it was just this incredible opportunity to go be part of a world changing technology. And so I went down to Silicon Valley, built a company there. Our first company was quite an exciting company. We built the first maps and door to door directions on the Internet and it was pretty cool. My brother and I were in a little office in October of 1995 and we were literally the first people to ever see maps and door to door directions on the Internet. And we built it and we put it out on the Internet and sort of then sort of took off like a storm. But it's a pretty cool mark on the early days when I sold that company, I went to learn how to cook, went to New York City to train on that. I was involved in PayPal, but I was more involved as an advisor and a friend and obviously a brother and an investor as part of it. But it wasn't my passion. Food was my passion. Then I went to cooking school in New York and had one of the most incredible and awful and amazing experiences. I woke up on the morning of September 11, saw the towers fell through my window, actually woke up to the sound of the planes hitting the building. I had this opportunity to cook for the firefighters after 9, 11, in fact, my mother was invited, my mother's biggest celebrity than any of us, and she was asked to cook for the firefighters. She's like, I don't cook, but my son does. And so I got access to cook for the firefighter for six weeks. And it was a profound experience for me. I never really saw food as a business, I saw it as a passion. And it was quite hard for me to make my passion my business because I didn't really think that was possible. That's not how we grew up. And I decided to take the leap because I just couldn't really not do it. After cooking for the firefighters, they'd walk out of these giant piles of melting metal, come back in, we'd nourish them, feed them. The food we cooked that morning, real food that we knew where it came from, we understood it, we trusted it, it was really good food. And they'd walk right back out into these giant piles of melting metal still melting six weeks after the towers fell. And after that, I just couldn't not do food. So from 2002 on, I did food.

Would you talk a little bit about your involvement at PayPal and some of the tech companies that you're currently a part of, what your role there is?

Sure, yeah. I think basically board level roles at PayPal, I wasn't on the board because it was just I really needed to get out, but I was involved at a board style level. Tesla, SpaceX, Chipotle, at the board level, I find them fascinating and interesting and of course, they are some of the greatest companies on the planet, so I feel very fortunate to be part of them. And I learn a lot, but mostly I learn a lot to apply it to what I'm doing in food.

What do you take away from Tesla and SpaceX that you then apply to food?

Well, there are actually quite a lot to learn, so SpaceX is interesting because it works so much with government and understanding how government works, their priorities, what sort of pushes their buttons, how do you deal with massive, massive bureaucracies, what people don't appreciate? You know, food is a much bigger category of the government's budget than any space exploration is a tiny, tiny, tiny part of their budget. So understanding how federal procurement works, understanding how you can work with the highest levels of government to make an impact in food, whether it's nonprofit work or for profit work, has been, you know, SpaceX has been a profound and very interesting lesson. Tesla is really about a new. It's a disruption of an existing industry, but frankly it's a new industry. It's, we're moving from building cars to building computers with wheels. And that I think is really, really interesting. And I've learned how to take that same idea. You know, people in the past are building restaurants and we're now building computers that serve food. It's really a profoundly. The technology is now hitting the restaurant world in ways that it's 20 years later from when we were doing maps. But it's still the same profound impact as we start to move the power of E commerce, the power of the Internet, the power of the connected world into the restaurant space, which is a $750 billion space just in the US so it's extraordinarily exciting opportunity.

Would you give us a look into the crystal ball into this industry over the next 20 years or so? What changes are coming to farming, to restaurants, and to the technology that is going to feed 10 billion people? What do you see coming?

Yeah, I think it's very exciting. So the biggest use of our land right now, I don't know if you guys know, is mostly corn for ethanol. So we're actually not even growing food. So people are saying that we're running out of food and yet 40% of our land grows corn for ethanol.

40% of farming land.

Of farming land, yeah. So we have this extraordinary capacity to grow more food if we needed to in a case of a food security issue. But I look at it more as an entrepreneur and I say, okay, we're seeing electric cars become the standard ethanol, which is, it can add value in a car. But corn ethanol takes about a gallon of oil to make a gallon of ethanol. So it's really neutral to the environment best. And it's a money losing business. And so if you see the forces coming together, you're going to have about at least 40% of land come available over the next five to 10 years for other purposes and of course will crater the prices of corn itself, because that's, that's a massive subsidy to keep corn prices up, is the corn for ethanol. So as an entrepreneur, I constantly watch farmland. I go, okay, at some point, the prices will crater. The opportunity will come in to start growing real food on America's farmland. That's very, very exciting opportunity. And I watch that very carefully from the sidelines. Then on the restaurant side, what we're seeing is we eat in restaurants, is people want the gathering place. They want to sit down, they want to connect with each other, they want to break bread with friends. They need it to be faster, they want it to be real food. And sometimes they want it at home. And so that changes the fundamental business model of restaurants where if you in the past, real food was not in demand. You literally, and this is most restaurants, unfortunately, today, the chef in the back just takes a pair of scissors, cuts a bag, puts it on a plate, puts it in a microwave oven, and it goes out to your table. That is literally what happens in 99% of restaurants. It's no longer acceptable. And then you start taking the automation that's available out there. We're now able to do real food cooking at scale across the country, distributed, because from home office, we can control the recipe. We can see the food that's coming in. We can drive a particular recipe that is very complicated to cook. The reason why you have to do that sort of the bag and cut it open with the scissors is because you cook it all centrally, because it is complicated to cook. And then you'd send it out and it would just be heated up at your table or at the restaurant. With automation, everything can be done on premises. So food is cooked from scratch that morning. It's delicious, it's fresh from local farmers. You no longer need the centralized commissaries. It's food safe because. Because everything gets cooked at the right temperature and it's consistently delicious. It's considerably better than what industrial food has done in the past, which is more about that sort of processed, cloying flavor. But that's required if you cook everything centrally. And then you have the other thing which has gone on, which is this desire to eat at home, where now with the delivery company technologies, whether it's ubereats or doordash, you're able to deliver your full restaurant experience to serve to the entire family. So mom gets a salad, dad gets a burger, Joey gets a sandwich, and Mary gets a tomato soup within 15 minutes to your dining room table. It's quite extraordinary the changes that are going on in the restaurant space, driven by the advent of the Internet.

Let's go to when you decided to build businesses out of this, because you come from that being your passion and you have entrepreneurship in your blood. But at what point did you actually set the ground floor of this is now going to be the purpose of the businesses that I build. And what did the seeds of that look like? How did you go out and say, I have this problem that I want to tackle through entrepreneurship and then actually start creating? Digging that path, if you will?

Yeah, that's actually. It's quite a personal reason. So as you can imagine, I was part of quite a few exciting businesses. I opened a restaurant in 2004 that was successful and was called the Kitchen. And the Kitchen helped restart the farm to table movement. We worked with local farmers, delivered very simple, delicious food to our community. But I was still involved. I was on the board of Tesla, bought Border, SpaceX, involved in many other companies. I was an angel investor and helping out a lot of other companies. So I had a number of things going on. But I loved food, really, really loved food. And I just didn't see how we could scale it. I had a block in my head. We also supported school gardens. We took the profits from the restaurant and worked with schools and taught kids, connecting them to real food. But again, no scale. And I had this block in my head and I knew I loved it. I knew I wanted to do it, but something just prevented me from doing it. Maybe it was just fear of tying passion to my business, maybe it was just some deep reason I just couldn't get there, but I loved it. I loved the idea of it and I just, I wouldn't allow myself to do it. I went down a ski Hill in 2010 on an inner tube and the tube flipped and landed on my head going 35 miles an hour. Broke my neck paralyzed on my left for about three days. Doctors weren't sure whether I'd be fine or not. And you'd really just get this extraordinary view into your life, this look back on what you have done, what you could have done, what you would do if you could do it, if you were able to restart. And I told myself when I went into surgery, it was a Tuesday night, that if I could walk the next morning or if I could walk again, that I would focus on food and I would figure out how to scale real food. And I woke up the next morning, doctors told me that I would be able to walk. And I never looked back. I just focused entirely on food. My Joke is that if not for the physical trauma, I highly recommend the psychological awakening.

It's really been great. Ever since then I have loved what I do and what I do is building, also building a great business. So the combination of the two is scary because it matters so much to me, but it's amazing because it drives me every day.

In the video there was a line about how the food crisis, if you will, most directly impacts the poor and that farm to table has mostly been perceived as a higher end service. So why do you say that food problems are harder on the poor and how do the coming changes alleviate that and create more opportunities? And, and the reason I ask is because as the owner of the word capitalism on the Internet, right. I hear a lot of about capitalism and entrepreneurship being exploitative to the poor. So what is the solution that you're building doing and how does entrepreneurship actually alleviate the problems on.

Well, I mean I think first and foremost I'll say that I am a capitalist through and through. I believe capitalism solves the world's problems. I believe that the great companies of the 21st century will be impact companies that connect with what is actually needed. Capitalism is this very, very powerful philosophy that adjusts to the needs of the day. 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, impact wasn't a need of the day. If you try and do a company today, you have to assume total transparency. You have to assume people know exactly what you're giving and what you're creating, where you're getting it from, because the Internet is so powerful and that transparency is just an absolute requirement of every business. And as a result, if you're doing something good, that transparency will come through and you will be more successful in your business, as I've seen in all the businesses I'm part of. And so for me, I am a capitalist all the way through. Solving the problem for real food to the less advantaged or the lower income communities is an absolutely critical business opportunity. It is a trillion dollar business opportunity. It's not like, oh, this is kind of nice. This is a trillion dollar business opportunity to go solve getting healthy food, real food to the world. And of course the larger business is going to the lower income community. In the past 50 years ago, that was solved through high calorie, low nutrient food that wasn't good for us, through subsidies and through GMOs. And so which is GMOs are, you know, no matter what you think about them, they enabled a very, very low price for high calorie, low nutrient food. And that was funneled into the lower income communities in America. And it has been a tragedy. Rampant obesity. Almost 70%, I think now over 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. 70%, I mean, that's extraordinary. We now spend double the cost on health care that we spent just 20 years ago. Double. I mean, and you're talking trillions of dollars. And this is not creating a better society. This is creating a sad and difficult and depressed society. So capitalism has its issues, but because it shifts to the, to the needs of the day, capitalism is what will solve it and will bring us out of this as well.

I want to ask you about your brother. And you advise Elon, and you sit on the board of, of some of the most recognized companies in the world. And so I just have this vision that you get a phone call and it's, hey, Kimball, I got an idea. I'm going to dig a tunnel to lax. Can you help me? Or I'm going to make an electric semi. I've got an idea, Kimball, you want to do this? Because that's been my experience when a friend called me, says, I have an idea. Right. So you advise these companies and you advise your brother. And in what capacity do you advise these companies? And when you hear the next idea, how do you deconstruct how you're going to build that?

Well, I think the fun thing about my brother, obviously we grew up together, so I don't have the same view as other people from other advisors or he's my brother. But the last time I worried about my brother being crazy was in 2002. So when the last time you worried about it? Last time I worried. So. So 2002, because we were going to do the Internet, we did the Internet together. Then he wanted to do PayPal and PayPal's fine, but then he wanted to go to SpaceX. The original vision was to take a pot plant to Mars and not even to build a business just to prove that it is technically possible. And.

I was like, okay, I think he's crazy. I think he's lost his mind. And that's when you sort of really have run out of things to spend your money on. You're going to go do that.

And so I thought he was crazy at the time, but then he turned it into SpaceX, which is going to be, and it is today, but going to be one of the greatest companies in the history of mankind. And so since then, I've just stopped considering it crazy, you know, so then when he brought up the boring company recently he's like, hey, look at this. I just bought this machine from dc. They're not using it. We're going to build a tunnel under la. I was like, great, let's go find out how to do this. And so just two days ago, walked the tunnel under. It's a mile long right now and it's actually there. It's just incredible.

You mentioned SpaceX. I think you're a significant investor in SpaceX as well. And there's a lot of those of us who follow the different companies that you've been associated with. SpaceX is interesting, but we don't know a lot of the long term business model behind that. And as I've gotten a little bit more familiar, I see that there's a vision here that I had never seen talked about publicly before. So would you talk a little bit about why SpaceX is going to be one of the most impactful companies of our generation?

Yeah, I mean, it's Christopher Columbus of our day. So back in the 1400s when he wanted to go travel out to what at the time he thought would be East India became America, that is, okay, maybe it was crazier back then, but it's in the same category of crazy, you know, of impossible for people to wrap their head around. SpaceX is going to go to Mars and it's going to colonize that planet.

So follow up question, why is that going to be so impactful?

Well, I think if you believe in the idea that humanity is a good thing, if you believe in the idea that we should propagate our species and as you know, some people might argue not. I personally believe we should. I believe we do good things as we grow and we obviously need to have thought and manage our approach to growing, but for the most part it's a good thing. So that makes Mars the natural next step for our species.

So obvious question, how does that become a business?

It never started as a business. We wanted to make a pot plant to Mars.

It was never meant as a business. It will be a great business because humanity does want to expand. And that in essence will be the business. But it was really built initially to prove a point. The point was that, that the government was wasting its money on visiting Mars in ways that was just not useful. And sending something that was living to Mars would be a huge wake up to the American government, Chinese government, Russian government, primarily the American government that we felt was what needed the wake up call. And so it was never meant as a business. And it will be a great business.

Hey, Guys, this is Ryan. We're gonna take a quick break, and we'll return to the show in a second.

I get a lot of questions about what I think of some of Tony Robbins investment strategies, especially the ones where he talks about assets that can go up in value over time, but don't participate in any downside. I don't agree with all of Tony's investment recommendations, but I do participate in investing in insurance, which is one of the things that he's describing in that strategy. Now, I want to give you a warning. When I went into that investment strategy, I got schmoozed over by a slick salesman, and I wish that I had used a sophisticated firm that was actually dedicated to that. That's why I had Wealth Point on the podcast recently. And I'd encourage you to go listen to that episode about infinite banking. Now, infinite banking isn't the proper term to describe what they do. They actually use a modified version, which is called capital warehousing. But what it basically allows you to do is, is park cash like you would put it into a bank, participate in the growth of the market without participating in any downside, and you still get access to that capital so that you can put it into other investments. So if you've got money sitting on the sidelines, you might want to use capital warehousing as part of your strategy. So you can go over to gowealthpoint.com freedom to learn how the strategy works, or you can just listen to the episode that we had with Sam Prentice from Wealth Point here on the podcast. It's called how the Rich Use Infinite Banking for Tax Free Wealth.

So there's an interesting theme emerging, which is that there's a big problem, and you've built something to tackle that problem. You've dug your way through to that problem, and there's a lot of progress happening in food, in space exploration. And these started as kind of impossible, unthinkable goals that are now being carved. There's the other side of entrepreneurship, which is I started this thing to make money.

So my question is, do you just think about it differently and then build a business differently than the bootstrap entrepreneur who wants a different life, or can they coexist?

Well, I bootstrap everything. You did. No, I bootstrap everything.

Would you go into that deeper? Because I didn't know that well, when.

I say I bootstrap everything. So let me explain by that I raise money, which may not mean bootstrapping to you, but to me is like, what is the absolute least Amount of money I can raise to get what I need to get to the next step. The way I describe building businesses is you raise money and you're on this boat and you take up supplies on the island, and you've got to get to that island over there. And if you don't get there, you're dead. But if you get there, then you get to refill and keep going. And that was what I view as bootstrapping over capitalizing businesses. Just never been our thing. We use our own capital as well to build our businesses. Really thinking about it from the perspective of control so that we can keep the vision in line once you lose the vision. Because we've had this in the past, and we haven't. This happened in the early Internet days when we built our first company where we didn't bootstrap it. But I think it was the right thing to do to not bootstrap. We took capital from venture capitalists, and, you know, they drove the business. We were young, so they really did drive the business, and they drove it into a really uninteresting place to the point where, okay, we made a lot of money, but we just kind of didn't want to wake up in the morning and do this. And so since then, I've really focused on, especially since my accident, but even before that, really understanding the importance of tie what I'm passionate about to what I'm building on the business side. Because if I do that, and by the way, that's. That means bootstrap. It means constantly putting pressure on. On the business. You know, Absolutely. What's the least amount we can raise or what's. How can we drive revenue so that we can continually maintain control of the vision of the company so that we can really build something great over time? So that's what I mean by bootstrapping. Obviously, we have other capital sources that come in. We have wonderful investors that work with us in building our businesses. But it's this sort of bootstrap mentality that is. That has never left us. You know, for me, if I. If I build a business, I'm not interested in selling it. It's probably a problem for investors, but it's. It's just the reality. I just. I'm just not that interested. If I wanted to make money when I was 26 years old, I made more money than I knew what to do with. So I could have been on a beach the past 20 years, but I don't want to be on a beach.

And when you say you made more at 26. Was that from the exit of PayPal?

No, that was the company before that.

Which one was that?

It was called Zip2. That was the maps and door to door directions company. It was a backend maps company.

Now you have investors that you work with, but you're also an investor yourself. So would you talk about the types of companies that you're investing in?

Yeah, I'm not a good investor.

You need to meet Ryan Hauser, the crypto guy.

Honestly, I think the investments I've made in my life, including PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, all seem very crazy at the time. You know, just for years we talk about building an electric car company and people would just have a little giggle and you'd be like, ugh, kind of sucks. Like, everyone thought that electric cars were the dumbest idea on the planet. And this is for years. This wasn't the first couple of years. This was probably till 2012. So now, of course, it's well respected and people get it, but for eight years or so, maybe even nine years, it was just considered a really stupid idea. And so while as an investor that may not sound like a good investment, from the outside, we kind of knew it had to happen. And the only sources of capital were the people around the table who cared about what we were going to go do. And so that's where we got the money from. Whether it's my money or my brother's money or that we built in previous businesses. That's how we built businesses. When I build the restaurants, restaurants are considered by most people to be a pretty tough space and tough investment. I look at it and go, it's a trillion dollar industry. Let's go figure this out. Is it a good investment or a bad investment? My track record's pretty good, but every single time we do an investment over a new company, it sounds like a crazy idea. We just did one in New York, Square Roots, which is an indoor farming company. Super crazy idea. And I think it's going to do great.

Do you fear failure when you're going after something that seems crazy?

I think entrepreneurs fundamentally fear failure. I think that's just what drives us. I think, yeah. Feel failure all the time.

Do you talk about that more?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to talk about it. It's very.

Your muscles are pretty well built in terms of impossible things that you've been a part of. So why do you think you still feel it and how do you deal with it?

I mean, I think it's just primal. You know, you just I think that maybe it comes from two sides. If they didn't fear failure, I probably wouldn't do it. If it was, I'm going to build a widget that I can sell for 10% more than I can buy it for. I think I'd rather be on a beach.

You know. So do you think you would still.

Feel that way had you not made more money than you knew what to do with at 26?

Yeah. I mean, I built a business even before Zip2, just in university. And I remember that extraordinary fear of failure even back then. And as I've built one business after the other, I kind of. I wish I didn't fear it. But again, I think that's what drives me and keeps me awake and aware of the opportunity as well as the challenges. I'd like to learn how to not have it. Has anyone figured out.

I have a dangerous question that I'm nervous to ask you. So here we go. I have a theory that anyone who is highly driven is usually driving as a result of some sort of a wound or a fear that they've built muscles to deal with and that gives them the ability to drive forward. And you come from, I mean, we might call you the modern day Rockefeller family. You are known for creating impossible things. So I'm curious, when you're at that level, is my thesis correct? Do you think that there.

I would say that the one thing that is correct about that is the total fear of being sent back to South Africa.

Really? Yeah.

So we're immigrants here and this country's great and South Africa is not great.

It's great or it's great again.

It's already. It's always been great.

I know. Exactly. Jesus Christ.

This is the greatest country in the world. And it is, again, so awesome. Exactly. It is so awesome to be able to call this my adopted country and be such a proud American. The fear of being sent back is extraordinary and it's still. It's an irrational fear. We're a citizen, we're safely here. But that, I think has been a huge driver for us.

How old were you when you moved here?

I was 18.

You were 18. And when did you become an entrepreneur?

Arguably even before that, but I started when I first got here.

So was there a sense of. Of I gotta go all in and make something work so that I don't have to go back? Was there a sense of kind of burning the boats and you had to go all in and that continues to drive you?

Yeah, we didn't really burn the boats. We had no boats to burn. Like, we came over here with nothing.

I thought you were going to say we came on an airplane.

No, but I mean, we just came over with nothing. So going back would have been.

Just an unacceptable answer.

So what's the fear then? You said you have an irrational fear of being sent back there or having to go back there.

It's a very conflicted place from just seeing multiple deaths. I mean, it's like a bad place to grow up. I mean, we grew up in the heart of apartheid that was collapsing at the time. We were part of the rallies to help it collapse. But in that process, this is not a pleasant time. You know, this is. People are blowing each other up and killing each other. And you see that physically, you don't hear about it. You actually see it.

So what I'm curious about is where and how does that drive you? Now, you said that it's an irrational fear that you feel drives you in some way.

Well, I think to you, what you said is like, is there something that sort of planted a core seed in it? Yeah, that would be it. Like this constant irrational, but there fear of something just kind of breaking. And then I was also there for 9, 11. I mean, that was also another sort of reinforced the fact that even though you're in America, the rug can be pulled out from you in a second. It's just quite intense. My daughter's school just burned down two days ago, and that's. She's 15, and for her that's going to be a traumatic experience. All her possessions burnt, and she was a boarding school. Those kind of things just. Just mark you.

So I wasn't going to bring that up, but since you did, I fully expected to get a call from Kimball saying, we're not. We're not going to make it because of that happening. And he made a point to be here. So would you say thank you to Kimball for making it fire?

You've worked with your brother, but you've also built separate businesses. What have you learned from each other that you either glean from one another or other lessons that you say, I don't think I'm going to do that. I'm going to avoid that.

I mean, the great thing about my brother and I, we've just worked very closely together forever, I mean, since we were born, you know, so. So I would say there's a lot of back and forth on what we do. The difference, though, I think we're also fiercely independent. So he helps me with what I do, I help him with what he does, but we don't. I don't feel like I'm doing a Tesla with Elon. I'm doing Tesla for Elon Musk, you know, or if he's helping me on the food businesses, he's helping me, he's not doing it with me. You know, I think that's important difference and that part has been we learn from each other, we advise each other, but we also respect each other's independence and to do what's important to us.

You've said that whenever you start a business, it sounds crazy. And I have a perception of you that because you have built and grown up in an environment where there is no such thing as crazy, there is no impossible. Is there anything that you say still that you feel challenged or afraid by, where you say that would still be impossible for me? Or when you feel that, do you go into it? So I think that kind of our perception of what's impossible changes as we grow. I kind of see you as, what other limits could there be? If we colonize Mars, we change the food industry and we have self driving vehicles all over the world. What else could possibly be impossible? So is there anything that I don't.

Think of things as impossible. I think of things as improbable and crazy. So improbable would be, let's go change the food system. It's improbable and you'd have to be crazy to take that on, but it's not impossible. We built the system we have and we could change it. That just would take an enormous amount of time and energy and effort to do that. And it's hard along the way. And when I get stuck into a problem that I think is impossible, I usually discover a month later, after obsessing on the problem, that the way I was thinking about it was wrong rather than it being impossible. But it does take a lot of obsession. I think coming back to the fear of failure is like you just, you have to solve it. And so you just constantly obsess and obsess, obsess. And then either I solve it or a month later it solves itself in a way that I didn't see it. But it's sort of that obsession is it's when you hit a brick wall, you can't accept the brick walls. You just obsess, obsess, obsess, and then eventually figure out a way around it. Or the wall just disappears.

It cool if we take a few questions from the audience. All right, so if you have questions for Kimball and You want to line up. There's mics at each break here. Feel free to hop out and get in line. But, Kimball, as far as I know, there are no hot tubs around. So I have to ask. Are we living in a simulation?

Right. I was like, where's the hot tub reference? There are reasons to believe that we could be. I prefer not to think that way.

You prefer not to think that way? You prefer not to think about it? You prefer not to.

Not to think that we are an assimilation. But to think that we are really. This is real.

Okay. Could you comment further?

Well, this is too. I don't know if you guys know the laws of physics. But they're just too convenient. If you study quantum physics. It's just so profoundly obvious that it's a simulation.

Profoundly obvious that it's a simulation.

It seems to be the only answer. But that isn't something I choose to subscribe to.

I did not see that coming.

But look up quantum physics and you guys will. I don't want to take the time away from the questions.

But you guys are going to be standing for a while.

What is it that makes it seem like it's obvious that it would be a simulation? Because I observed it as the opposite.

So quantum physics is this idea that. Well, not this idea that with this proof, we've discovered that if you. If you look at something. Its state materializes only when you look at it.

So it's not actually there before you look at it. Which implies that it is reacting to the observer. Which is a simulation. So it doesn't exist unless you look at. It is a simulation. So if you just extrapolate that back, you've got. The whole world's a simulation.

So we're about to go into the woo here.

Fine with me.

I love the woo. But I. I have just interpreted that as there being reflection of their being consciousness. Not necessarily there being a reflection of an outside.

That would be a great answer. And. But a consciousness that builds the simulation. I mean, a simulation can be used in different terms.

I see.

Okay. But it's created when you look at it. That's a simulation.

Okay. So we could hang out here for a while.

Don't quote me on any of this stuff, please.

But I choose not to believe in any of that stuff because it's a waste of my time.

Speaking of simulations, I would like to know. From your perspective. Seeing all the change and the speed of change in the world. What do you think are going to be some of the most impactful, disruptive or the biggest changes that we'll see in the next 10 to 25 years.

You mean in the industry, the world.

Or in the simulation?

Exactly.

How many simulations? What industries do you think will change the most? What do you think will change in terms of how entrepreneurs approach what they do? Where do you think that the biggest sectors will grow? What changes are we?

Yeah, so I would actually look at it. We're in the information age, right? So we're. The information age is upon us. The industrial age before it, you simply just look at which industries are being tackled and which ones were tackled first. And so the early days, it was literally information. Getting content, news, the ability to connect with each other, that was first. Finance was tackled next. PayPal is a good example of that. Tesla, here's an example of the car industry, multi trillion dollar industry. Health care is, but will be next. Food will be next. So I like to think about it in terms of the information age, tackling one industry after the other. Not a single industry will be left untouched by the information age. And so it's just a matter of how will it be touched, when it will be touched, and what impact will it have? And the impact will be profound in every industry.

How do you think entrepreneurs need to approach this environment where change is happening all of the time, and we all know that things are going to change faster and faster? How do you think entrepreneurs need to adjust or approach what they do?

So I like to think about it. You look three months out because you need to really tackle the business at hand, the problems at hand. And, and they are not the sort of giant vision stuff. They're literally often just, I gotta make that sales call, I gotta close that deal. Those are critical. The next three months, problems to solve. And then you have to think, 50 years out, am I doing the right thing? So if you're tackling a problem that you look at 50 years out probably won't be a relevant problem or solution, then maybe you should adjust what you're doing. But you never want to forget that. What happens today, in the next few days or the next couple months, if you don't get that right, you don't get to do the rest.

Yeah. All right, let's go over here. To start.

The world of work has changed. And I'm trying to figure out what, like, the new recipe is for work. So when you start a job, you don't keep it for 30 years. You typically have a career path that kind of zigzags. And you might have a job, you may have a side hustle and I work with kids in foster care, so it's a social enterprise. For every one that we sell, we gift one to a child in foster care and have them pay it forward. So they don't get it for free. They have to pay in some way. They have to invest. My struggle is to move from concept to where I'm actually doing this. I sort of see parallels with what you've done, and you've taken on the food industry. And I was fascinated because putting farms in schools, things like that, I never thought would be a business model. I thought it would be charitable as well as what you're talking about on the restaurant side, which is a very hard industry. So I'm facing similar issues in that I get called crazy a lot. I get the look of your nuts. And I want to understand if there's a way or a strategy used to kind of get past that, to get.

Past being called crazy.

Yeah. So I don't actually just talk about simulations.

As you can tell, I haven't succeeded in not being called crazy.

I think my struggle is more like it affects me. And I'm trying to figure out it's a mental mindset issue where I want to be called crazy and get fuel from it instead of getting setback.

That's interesting.

I think that is a very good question, and it's very hard to answer, because the reality is we wear our heart on our sleeve when we build our businesses. And when people might call you crazy or they might knock it, they don't appreciate how much that actually impacts you as an entrepreneur. I would say a good way to do it is to surround yourself with other entrepreneurs that are doing also as interesting stuff that you can kind of relate to. You cannot feel alone in the process. But it never really goes away because in the beginning, people call you crazy and they write you off, and then they call you crazy and they're like, oh, they gotta stop paying attention. But then when you get to a point where you're actually successful and you're showing that there's a business here, that's actually when the real noise comes and the real pressure and the real knocking happens. You know, if you look at our businesses and what we're doing, the criticism doesn't go away. It gets higher. And I don't think that's ever going to go away. I think that's just the reality. When you're trying to disrupt something, you're gonna collect naysayers along the way. But the reason you're doing it is not because of Those guys, you know, the reason you're doing, because what matters, it matters to you. It matters to the world.

So I have a dream that when I was a kid, was crazy to me and everybody in my family, which was I wanted to buy the Cleveland Indians. And when I was a wonderful family, wonderful parents who encouraged all my pursuits. But I said to one of my family members once, do you think it's possible that I could own the Cleveland Indians? And I was probably 21 at the time. And she said, I can't. That's not real to me. And I said, well, I need you to believe it more than I do. I need you to give me the validation. And she said, I support you in whatever you want to do, but that's not a real thing to me. And I had heard once that you need to hear 17 affirmations in order to overcome one no. So I made a list of 17 people who I knew would remind me that they believed that I could own the Cleveland Indians. And I texted all of them. And that's when I started publicly saying, I'm going to own the Cleveland Indians. And that's when it started to become kind of my thing where I would very publicly say it, because I needed to hear other people say, I think you're going to own the Cleveland Indians. And the closer I get to that, the more I believe it. Now I'm starting to see what I thought was impossible as a kid. It's like I can kind of see the path to get there. Let's go over here.

So I got into farming about two years ago by building a farm to food truck model where I could basically harvest, prepare and serve customers all in the same day. And I was running this by myself and realizing I could only do this in my local community, I came to this event last year frustrated, basically looking for answers. And it was Tom Bailou of Quest Nutrition who asked me a question that I had never considered. He asked me, if you had all the money in the world, what would you do differently? And I realized through that question that I didn't need any of the money. I realized I would just tell other people about it. So from that point, my business evolved from running the food truck day to day to telling other people about it. So now I have a business where I'm sharing business models for farmers that are looking to make changes in this type of economy, because there's a lot of market farmers out there that only know one way and they're all really nervous. So my question to you would be what would you tell a farmer that doesn't live inside of a big city, that doesn't, it doesn't make economic sense for a square roots or they're worried about companies like Plenty. What would you tell them to be thinking about in the next one to five years and what they should be doing to remain as a like a family farm?

The challenge of what to do with today's, with farmland today is very, very interesting. It's an amazing opportunity and for the right people, it'll be exciting. Real food is the business that people want to be in. It's the opportunity where you can sell product that's not a commodity that supports your family, has a great lifestyle. If you live close to a city though, the problem is very different than if you live in the middle of Iowa. And so if you live within driving distance of Chicago, so just on the eastern side of Iowa, you've got a really great potential business to converting corn and soybean commodity cropland which are money losing, maybe might earn 20 grand every 100 acres. I mean it's really, really, really, really low earnings and converting it to real food. We have farmers in Colorado that Service Denver on 20 acres and they make more money than someone with a thousand acres in Iowa. And they live on their farm, great lifestyle and they serve to their local community. They're part of the community, they're connected to their community and it's a wonderful, wonderful business for them. And so I think if you're a farm owner that is within driving distance to a major metro area, you should be converting to real food as quickly as possible. Getting off the government subsidized systems.

Amen. Hear, hear.

Yeah, exactly. And it's a subsidy that is like a slow drip. It's not you don't living high on the hog. So I don't think the farmers who are receiving these subsidies are in a good place. They're actually small, like a pension or welfare system. So we really need to help them get off that system. But if you are located in a community that is, or an area that isn't near a major city, then I think we have to really figure out how do we create infrastructure that enables them to build businesses that do get their food to major cities in a relevant time. If you've got fresh real food, it has to be, you have to have a cold chain which is ability to keep it cold all the way to the major cities, get it on the trains in a way that gets to the city within a few hours or at the most a day, otherwise it becomes not interesting. If you're competing, you're still taking two weeks to get the food to your customer, then you're going to compete with Mexico and Australia and that's not a good business. So I think that the problem of tackling.

Farms near metro areas, no problem. Do real food as quickly as you can. The problem of, let's say, take 10,000 acres in Iowa and convert it to a real business, growing real food, that is an interesting problem. And I haven't figured out the answer to that.

Thank you.

Sorry, gang, we've only got time for one more, so we're going right down the middle. Hello. Hello.

I have a company in New York where I am looking to transform the way healthcare is done. And sometimes I feel like I'm trying to put a plant on Mars, you.

Know.

And the whole New York structure is very difficult to do healthcare in. But the entire thing is focused on the management of chronic disease. And there are some innovative doctors and companies of technology that are looking to optimize the human experience. And it's a very different approach, very different paradigm. So as someone who has done the impossible numerous times, I was just wondering, and you mentioned health care and you mentioned your passion for food. Where do you see health care, the opportunities in health care, and how would you approach transforming it on the larger scale?

That's interesting.

It's a great question. I do think it'll be one of the great industries that'll get disrupted over the next few years. I'm not an expert in healthcare, so I'll just give you my 60,000 foot view. We have an aging population, so what I would do in healthcare is I'd go to Japan and I would look at how their healthcare system works where you have an aging population, not that many kids, people are not retiring, but they're not super productive either when they're that old. And so how does that change the economy and how does that change how they get looked after? What does the government do? I would say that the US is on a path unless we change it, which I think would be good for us to change it on a path to being a much older community in the next 20 years than we have been ever. And that will change healthcare. And then I would also look at how the Internet is changing healthcare and trying to understand how the connected world changes the way we think about privacy, how we think about sharing the nature of disease. There's some amazing innovations going on in medicine that I can't speak to. That'll also be really Powerful. But the macro forces to me are the connected world, the information age and the aging population that fundamentally will change how we even think about health care. So that my best, very high level advice. Thank you so much.

Do you see innovations and breakthroughs coming in terms of longevity and human lifespan?

Yes. I don't love the outcome of sort of being a lonely AI that lives in a machine. And I think that is one of the paths we're on.

Meaning like uploading our brains to the cloud and just being. Yeah.

And I think that that is a path we're on. I prefer this idea of creating a joyful life.

Yeah.

And I would much rather pass away at a younger age, having had a wonderful life than obsess over. And I believe people are obsessing over this extending life when life isn't necessarily that interesting.

It's. It's in a machine. Right, exactly. Do you share the concerns of AI and what it could mean for.

Yes.

For humans?

Yeah.

No.

AI will be. Is a very dangerous technology. And my biggest fear with it is the folks that are working on AI believe that it's not dangerous. That's my biggest fear. It's not actually that we couldn't work around it and create wonderful technologies out of it. It's an innovations and how it could change the world. It could bring on a new age. You know, the AI age in a very, very interesting way. It's just that the people working on it are bright eyed, bushy tailed over this. And it's as dangerous, if not much more dangerous than nuclear because it is not. You can't control it as well as you can control nuclear.

What do you think we need to do or will do about that?

Yeah. There are some efforts underway to educate government on the fact that this is. This needs to be a regulated industry challenge. We always have with government and it's not their fault. It's just they're always 20 years behind, 30 years behind. In the world of AI, that may be too late. So we need to educate them sooner and I think that that's critical.

Well, Kimball, I love what you're up to in the world. I'm very excited by the changes that you're spearheading. So thanks for representing what capitalism is all about. Give it up for Kimbal Musk, everybody.

Hey, fast laners. Hope you enjoyed this talk.

If you want to learn more about.

Our next event, the Brand Builder Summit in Austin, Texas, August 24th and 25th, visit brandbuildersummit.com this event is geared towards.

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