Organic Revolution Kimbal Musk’s Mission to Take Down Big Food #504 Full Episode

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Today's guest is a well known guy, guy who has started three different companies disrupting big food. And I realized I had to have him on Bulletproof radio when I was giving a talk on hacking your brain at south by Southwest and, and the room was entirely empty. And I'm like, what just happened? There's almost no one in the audience here. And what happened is this guy held an impromptu, we'll call it a sing along and speech with his brother Elon Musk on stage at the same time as my talk. So of course I'm talking about Kimbal Musk who's doing some amazing things that I was unaware of until he gave that talk at South By. So Kimbal, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Sorry about that. At south by Southwest.

I mean it was hilarious.

It was too hard to turn down. We got offered space on the stage, but we what the requirement was that we were they would allow us to sing My Little Buttercup, which is a song from the Three Amigos, which is the silliest song in the world. And people literally lined up 2:00am, you know, talk was at noon the next day and we got the whole audience to sing the song with us on the main stage of south by Southwest. It was a peak life experience. It was amazing. So I apologize. But sometimes we just got to do what you got to do.

It was well worth it. No apology necessary. And I loved it that you and Elon just showed up just as real, kind of humorous people like that. One of the things that you talked about though at south by wasn't going to space and building amazing cars, although that's clearly what Elon talked about. You talked about your work with disrupting big food, your charitable work and making farming something that's as distributed as say power generation should be. How did you go from being a tech entrepreneur investor in the 90s into being a food guy? Now walk me through your story.

Looking back, Steve Jobs has this quote. When you look back on your life, the dots are connected. But in the moment, it truly was one life changing event after the other. My brother and I had great Success in the 90s Building an Internet company first to do maps in door to door directions. And I watched how technology just massively disrupted the yellow pages which most people today don't even know what the yellow pages is. But it was a multi billion dollar industry in the 90s that the Internet just took away. And it was so powerful to see the impact of technology. And when we Sold that company. I had the freedom to do what I wanted. So I went to New York to learn how to cook, which was not intended as a career. I went in and I said I'm going to go, I love food so much. I'm going to go do this for real. I'm going to go do a career level course in, in at the French Culinary Institute in New York. And while that was a wonderful experience, it was intense and you know, it was like, like Full Metal Jacket kind of, you know, screaming at you for six to eight hours a day. Like really? I really do. You need to scream so much. But it was, was an incredible way to, to learn how to cook. Just before I graduate, just after I graduated 911 happened and again I wasn't really thinking about food as a career. But this one of the most powerful, awful or wonderful experiences that could ever happen to a human. I was right by, I live very close to the Trade Centers. Woke up to the sounds of the planes hitting the building. So that close looked out the window, saw the towers fall. Which if you people who there I think can relate but people who weren't, it's literally like seeing the Rocky Mountain range just collapse. It just breaks reality. It just wasn't a human thing to experience. And the wonderful part about it was because I just graduated from cooking school. My mother's well known nutritionist and dietitian. Through her I got to volunteer for the firefighters. And I cooked for them. And every day we'd cook real food, cook that day nourishing them. They go into these giant piles of melting metal still melting six weeks after the World Trade Centers fell. And they'd come in and we'd feed them with food we cooked that day. They'd connect with each other, converted a gymnasium into a dining hall and they'd go right back out to save American lives. And just watching what real food can do for community, to bring it together. It was kind of then I said, you know, I can't not do food. Tech is neat. It's kind of a way to do something. And of course you introduce tech into everything you do. But food is a gift we give each other three times a day. It's such a powerful way to connect with the world and with each other. And I saw that in 911 and I just never looked back. So that's when I transitioned to food and came out to Colorado, opened the kitchen and our goal there was really just a world class neighborhood restaurant. I didn't have a concept of, frankly I was avoiding tech More than I didn't want anything to do with tech. I was like, this is about community. This is about, yeah, you can get tired of tech and you know, as things progress, of course you can't avoid tech and tech has this wonderful applications. But what we struggled with in Colorado was back in 2004, we didn't have access to the kind of food you get in New York. We only had access to the industrial food. You know, it's the stuff you talk about that causes rampant obesity and diabetes. High calorie, low nutrition food destroys the chemistry of the body, creates tragedy amongst our especially low income community. And it's something we've done to ourselves. You know, it's something we could, we could fix. But back in those days we didn't have a choice. It's just the industrial food system. And so we started reaching out to local farmers. This is many years before the farm to table became a term. And we asked the farmers if they'd supply us. And, and there was a skepticism. They weren't very trusting of restaurants. But we tried and we worked hard and we built that trust. And we have a restaurant called Hedgerow, which is the first farm that would ever agree to work with us. And so we celebrate their name. Hedgerow is our bistro in Denver and Indianapolis. But it was about getting the food to taste good and trusting the food and industrial food is not about it tasting good, it's about shipping it for thousands of miles. It's mostly fried so that you can fry cardboard and make it taste good. So it really is for us, real food at the time was about just getting it food that you trust and for it to taste good. And when we started working with the farmers, we really hit a nerve and as a result we're one of the credited as one of the sort of the founders of farm to table meal, whatever that's called, whatever the term is. But we saw success because it just tasted so much better.

Speaking of starting restaurants, we're actually doing this interview at Nextdoor, which is your restaurant down on Pearl street in Boulder, which is why people might be hearing dishes in the background and all. It's an amazing thing because I checked out the menu. It's all real food, as you'd expect, and it's very affordably priced. Something that you've talked about is you would like to have 1,000 of these around the world in order to make food that's good for you, that tastes good and is affordable. Because not everyone can drop $50 on a meal. In fact, no One should have to do that to get real food. How are you going to get this concept into a thousand locations? That is mega scale.

That sort of leads me to another life changing event for me. So the kitchen was today well respected, very successful restaurant. But it wasn't quite moving the needle for me. It was we need the kitchen because what it does is it helps build a local farm supply chain. It works with farmers in a very flexible way. But the price point is just simply too high. It is a $50 average ticket per person. And I was really frustrated with this. And in 2010, while I was tackling with this challenge, it was like an existential challenge. I'm here to just make food for wealthy people. I feel like I have a greater purpose in life. And I went down a ski Hill in 2010 in Jackson Hole on an inner tube and the tube flipped. I landed on my head going 35 miles an hour. Broke my neck at C6 and C7, ruptured the spine. Paralyzed on my left for three days. It's hard to describe paralysis. It's like a non feeling. There's no pain, right?

There's nothing there.

There's just nothing. And the doctors were telling me, we can fix this. This break is a particular kind of break. Very lucky that with surgery they can remove the paralysis. And I'm like listening to them and nodding. My head is the only thing that moves and tears are just streaming down the side of my face. I mean, it's just not. It's an inconceivable thing to describe. And I just kind of told myself, because the doctors kept giving me courage like, we can't fix this. Just give us a few days. Get the surgeons in from around the country to fly in for this surgery. I went into surgery on a Tuesday night and I just told myself, if they do fix me, I'm going to work on bringing real food to everyone. Whatever that meant. I didn't have a definition of what it would mean. I woke up the next morning and they said the surgery was successful. It's quite anticlimactic because while it was successful, I had to be horizontal for two months.

Oh, God.

They didn't tell me that when I was going into surgery, but for that two month period, I sat with my wife at the time, Jen, to design school gardens that would scale and reach many, many schools. We were doing school gardens at a small scale before, but they didn't scale very well. And then I started to work with Hugo, my co founder at the restaurants on next door, which was to take the same principles of the kitchen and make the price $15 instead of $50, which is really a Chili's and Applebee's price point. What would it take for us to deliver food at that price? Could we do it? Could we get farmers to sign up for it? And we, you know, literally, while I'm in the hospital, you can imagine with my mind, it spins a lot normally, but if I'm, like, locked in a horizontal position, it spins like 30,000 miles an hour. And I came out of the hospital, and we said, you know, I think we could do this. And we got some farmers to support us. And so next door is same principles of the kitchen. Work with local farmers. Real food that we trust, Real food that we trust to nourish our body. Real food that we trust to nourish the farmer. Real food that we trust to nourish the planet, and to do it at prices that normal Americans can afford. So our goal is to replace all the Chilies and Applebee's in the country.

Now, the people, I think, hedge funds, probably, who own Chili's and Applebee's at this point are probably not so happy about that. There is a big food industry that's just well entrenched. The processes, the ways we've been doing things, the ways we think about food, how cheap can we make it? Can we make it taste good enough? Right. And hopefully be a little bit addictive so you'll come back really often. How are you going to break that?

Well, you know, I've watched industry after industry be disrupted. You know, I happen to have lived, you and I both live in a very interesting time. The information revolution has. Has disrupted one industry after the other. And there's no doubt in my mind food is the current one and is being disrupted as we speak. But the consistent thing is that the existing players just never figure it out. Even in Tesla with electric cars, GM still hasn't figured it out. Yeah.

How could they miss that?

I mean, how could they miss that? But they're working on pickups, because that's pickup trucks, because that's in their mind, the future. And you're like, wow. And so it's never really a case of the existing players and how they feel, because that really doesn't matter. What matters is creating a product that meets the customer and the guest where they need it. Creating real food that truly nourishes the guests, that they connect with at a price they can afford. That's what matters. And that has been a great success for us.

There's two things you talked about there. One is supporting farmers. The other one, though, is like nourishing the planet with the food that we eat. How do you see the system of food? How does that work in your mind? Experience.