In Search Of Excellence - Doug Evans: Lessons from Steve Jobs, Raising $120M, and the Future of Food | E150

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Doug Evans is a serial health food entrepreneur and author, renowned for his pioneering contributions to the natural food industry. In 2002, he co-founded Organic Avenue, one of the first exclusively organic plant-based retail chains in the United States, aiming to make healthy living more accessible. He later founded Juicero, one of the first at-home cold-pressed juicing system, with the mission of bringing more fresh produce to the home and subsequently raising $120 million to fund the company. An avid sprouter for over 25 years, Doug authored 'The Sprout Book' to educate others on the benefits of sprouts and sprouting. Currently residing in the Mojave Desert at Wonder Valley Hot Springs, Doug continues to inspire others to embrace nutritious, plant-based lifestyles.Timestamps00:00 – Introduction07:45 – Growing Up in New York18:10 – Life-Changing Moment32:30 – Co-Founding Organic Avenue46:15 – Raising $120M with Juicero1:02:55 – Rebuilding After Failure1:19:40 – The Magic of Sprouts1:31:20 – Practical Sprouting1:42:10 – The Simplicity of Nature2:00:25 – Why the Modern Food System is Failing Us2:18:40 – Doug’s Daily Routine2:37:55 – The Role of Mindset2:55:30 – Importance of Resilience3:12:15 – Closing ThoughtsResources- Doug's Instagram- The Sprout Book- The Sprouting Company Want to Connect? Reach out to us online!Instagram | 1-on-1 Coaching | YouTube | TikTok | LinkedIn

From tagging to graphic design to working with Steve Jobs, Apple was terrified. Apple bought Next for $400 million, and they made a preemptive move before, A, someone else would have bought it, or they would have gotten the ample funding. I went to his house in Western Connecticut, and I became a unpaid intern apprentice for Paul Rand for seven years till the day he died. How many times did you actually jump out of a plane? I

jumped out of planes 13 times. The first time was easy but the second time I can't believe a CEO of a company who's raised all this money is basically posing naked. When they want to come after you, it doesn't matter. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers, athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in all areas of our lives. My guest today is my good friend, Doug Evans. Doug is a serial entrepreneur and early pioneer in the health food movement, which has been a passion of his for almost 40 years.

He is the founder of Organic Avenue, the first organic cold press juice and raw food retailer in the United States, the founder of Juicero, a first organic cold press juice and raw food retailer in the United States, the founder of Juicero, a high-tech juicing machine that used fresh pre-packaged fruit and vegetable pouches in which raised $120 million in venture capital funding from leading VC firms including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Thrive Capital, among many others, and which famously went out of business only 17 months after its product launch. Doug is also the founder and CEO of the Sprouting Company, which provides products and information

about the incredible nutritional and other benefits of eating sprouts, and which helps people to easily grow their own sprouts at home. He is also the author of the Sprout Book, Tap into the Power of the Plant's Most Nutritious Food. Doug, thanks for being here. Hey, it's my pleasure.

Randy, let's go. Let's do it. Let's talk about your upbringing. You grew up in New York, the Bronx, Queens, Harlem, and I wanna talk about your parents. What did your parents do? How did they influence you? And then how did those influences

lead to your juvenile delinquency? I think you said you were arrested 50 times. No, 12 times before I was 17. 12 times. You were arrested 12 times before you were 17. Yeah. So I mean, my parents, may they rest in peace. You know, they had their challenges. My father was a combat World War II veteran.

And at the time, we didn't understand PTSD and other trauma. And so he was the sweetest man in the world until he wasn't. And I don't recall like ever seeing my father having a job because he couldn't work because of his raging and the trauma. So he couldn't get along with people. He was very articulate and he was smart, but then he would, like anything could trigger him. Now, I can look back and go, oh, that's PTSD, that's trauma, that's the result of being

in war. By the time, we just thought he raged. I thought everyone raged. So in our household, it was a little chaotic. And for me, it was safer to be out in the street with gang members, with graffiti writers, with other delinquents, because I felt more like I could relate to them. And I felt safer there than being in the house. Nat. What about your mom? more like I could relate to them. And I felt safer there than being in the house. What about your mom?

My mom was sweet. My mom like carried the torch. She was like a secretary and she was the one that was working and she was always putting food on the table. But we lived in a lot of scarcity and we didn't have a lot of food and everything was rationed. So for me, like I wanted to get out and the challenge of being in New York where you could have the poorest people, you know, and the wealthiest and then you wonder like why you can have things. So without being grounded in moral virtues and guidelines, you don't think of like what's

right and wrong. You want your needs. So you'll just go take them. And so a lot of what I was doing and a lot of my crimes were all associated with writing graffiti. So stealing spray paint, breaking and entering, stealing supplies, being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. So breaking and entering, you broke into a hardware store

or somebody's home to steal things? No, no, more into the subway yards to write graffiti. Okay. And the crime was really like stealing spray paint so that you could paint on the train. You would run into a hardware store, kind of grab and run and grab some paint? I mean, you would try not to be so obvious. Putting your pants on.

Putting your pants. Not putting a bag. Just little things. But eventually what happens is you do get caught. Like as Emerson says, every crime will be punished, every truth will be told. So if you get beginner's luck, you get away with it the first time, the second time, then you think, oh, it's easy. And then you get caught and then you think, oh, I just had a bad day and you get a slap

on the wrist. So then you think, oh, I just had a bad day, and you get a slap on the wrist. So then you do it again. And so this whole madness happened, you know, until I was 17. And then I just, like, just woke up and like, God, I got to get away from these people. They're all degenerates. What was it that led you to spray paint?

And did you kind of practice on the wall or you just wanted to deface public property? And then how old were you when you were arrested for the first time? 13. What was that like? You're painting at night and some cop comes out to you, hey, put the paint down. No, I think to answer the first part, in my junior high school, there were drug dealers, there were outright criminals and gang members, and there were the graffiti writers, and they seemed to be the coolest.

They were building brands and they were creating artwork. There were different goals that they had. Some people were painting on the inside, some on the outside, and people wanted to express themselves creatively. You know what's crazy is you drive down the freeway and you see these billboards that are 30, 40 feet in the air, that's like a four story building and there's graffiti on there and there's a little pole up there and sometimes there is wire that you can't

get through and you see these things. And I've always wondered, I mean, they're doing it at night. Some of the painting is actually good. I mean, it's terrible that they're doing it. People are risking their lives to tag all of these billboards or whatever they're doing. Look, I think for them, the more extreme it is, it's kind of like ultra performance athletes and the rare, the parts, there was different angles.

But when I was 13 years old, I have an original Keith Haring piece of artwork that Keith drew for me. And I look back now as I see like, you know, your kids that were 13, and I look at myself saying when I was 13, I was in nightclubs with Basquiat and Keith Herring and Fab 5 Freddy. When I was 13, these guys were 18 to 25 to 40 years old, and I was in that environment. And I felt so at home. And that's just what I did until I decided I needed to change. I mean, what's crazy is talk about Keith Haring, Basquiat.

I think there have been Basquiat paintings that have sold for between 20 and $30 million. And these guys were taggers, and they started out their career that way. Yeah, taggers, drug addicts, criminals. Education, I think, is one of the most important investments we can make in ourselves. It didn't go so well for you.

We were thrown out of high school, kicked out of high school. Every school I went to. Every school. So what did that look like? You sat down in the classroom, you didn't want so well for you. We were thrown out of high school, kicked out of high school. Every school I went to. Every school. So what did that look like? You sat down in the classroom, you didn't want to do it. You said, I don't care about my education. Well, you know, A, just the vanity.

I should have been wearing my glasses since fifth grade and I didn't start to wear my glasses until I got into the military at 17. Because you had to have them on in the military because I couldn't start to wear my glasses until I got into the military at 17, because you had to have them on in the military, because I couldn't see the target. They give you a physical and an eye test. But then, part of your performance is you have to point a rifle at a target and shoot. And without wearing your glasses, I would end up having friendly fire. So not wearing the glasses meant I couldn't see what was on the blackboard.

I couldn't follow what the teacher was saying. And energetically, I just did not... My method of education was not sitting in a classroom. So I would show up late to class. I would leave early to class. I'd be sitting in class thinking of like, how can I get out of it? I remember like pulling a thread out of my shirt and I didn't floss at the time, but

I flossed my teeth until they bled so I could leave the classroom because I just couldn't sit in that room. You didn't graduate high school. I ended up graduating, but not on the most honorary way. They just gave me the grades, the guidance counselor just filled stuff in just to get me out. And I went to three high schools. And then you went into the US Army as a paratrooper. Correct.

Did you just say to yourself, hey, I want to go jump out of airplanes? Well, my friends were all degenerates. And I knew that if I didn't make a radical change, I could end up dead or in jail like they were. And so when I went to the recruiter's office, I knew that I was seeking the most transformative experience I could have. And I knew that I was seeking the most transformative experience I could have. And I knew that I needed discipline. So I said, what is the roughest, toughest thing that you have? And they said, 82nd Airborne, paratrooper, infantry, combat engineer. And I said, where do I sign?

And I was 17, so I had to go back and get my parents' authorization and consent, which wasn't too hard because they wanted me out anyway, but it was still a step in the process. I think it's very important for successful people to always want the challenges and the biggest challenges, and it's cool that you did that. What did the Army teach you in terms of lessons and what didn't it teach you? I think you said that it didn't teach a lot about morality. And I've heard a lot of people actually learn negative habits in the armed forces. I mean, the Army taught me, you know, that I am not my body and that I could work through pain. And I remember going on a 20-mile, 25-mile hike, carrying a rucksack with 50 pounds,

a rifle, extra munitions, and water, and my feet started to blister. And I remember saying, Drill Sergeant, my feet are blistering. And he had the standard response, it's mind over matter. I don't mind and you don't matter, keep going. And the blisters would pop and I would stop again and say, the blister popped, it really hurts. It's mind over matter, keep going. And then the blister would start to bleed and then it would scab and then the scab would

come off. And then the whole body starts to ache with the weight and your knees and your back and you just had to keep going. If you slowed down, the rest of the troops would keep going and then they would keep going further and further and then the drill sergeants would take all the troops and make them go back and go all the way back and all the way behind you. And now you'd have 60, 90, or 120 people pissed at you because they had to walk twice as much

as you were. So the peer pressure was extreme to keep people going along the way. Peer pressure is such a big thing, not only in our personal lives, but in our professional lives as well. I think there's peer pressure to do drugs if your friends are doing drugs and if you're doing bad things. What's your message to all the people out there, either the parents who are looking for jobs or a better future, and to all the kids out there today in college, young professionals

who one way or the other are experiencing peer pressure in their lives. I think the message is that a lot of times parents or people think they know what's right for someone and they try to tell them what to do. And I believe, especially now, that we all know what's good for ourselves, and we need to create the trust with the people that we're communicating to that we have their best interest in mind and explain to them, not tell them, what the consequences could be if they go down this path or that path. And I remember an instance where my car, I had a car, like a muscle car, 1967 Camaro GT, and it was manual. I didn't really know how to drive stick and I flooded the carburetor.

The car burst into flames. It crashed into a wall and burned. And I called one of my friends from a pay phone, to his shop where he was working. I was 17 at the time. I said, dude, my car just blew up. And he's like, hey, take the license plates off the back and take the van off the inner door and get out of there.

And I was like, okay. And then for weeks, I was obsessing on what was I going to do to get a car. And various thoughts came in to mind of like, oh, I'll just find the same car in the same color and put my license plates on it and do that. And that would keep me up at night. Until I had a conversation, I was having lunch with, you know, today you would call the mentor, I called it an older friend, but he was a trust fund kid who was now 40 from like the Carnegie steel era and he had galleries and buildings and he was a graffiti photographer.

And I sat with him over a slice of pizza and he's like, you look terrible. And I was like, yeah, I'm not sleeping. My car blew up, this. And then he described to me that I was experiencing anxiety. And I had no idea what that term was. And he said, I said, well, how do I get rid of the anxiety? Can I take a pill? What can I do?

He said, no, you just need to make a decision that you're going to let that car go. You're going to let the license plates go. You're going to let the value go. You've ridden on the subway for the last 10 years. You go back on the subway and you just forget that. And that night I went to sleep and I slept through the night. The anxiety went away and I started to work again. And soon after I joined the army. But I remember now, like I could never have had that conversation

with my dad. Dad, my car blew up. I'm thinking about stealing another car or whatever. Like they just would have come down on me, you know, which would have made me probably do it. And here someone held space and had love for me and compassion, and I made the right decision because I knew. And so he was wise beyond his years to be able to hold that space for me. And I'll never forget that. How many times did you actually jump out of a plane?

What was it like the first time? You're looking down and say, should I'm up 10,000 feet and this is the coolest thing or I'm scared shitless? And how long were you in the army for? I jumped out of planes 13 times. The first time was easy because of the crazy adrenaline in airborne training. Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door, stand in the door, first guy in the door,

green light, go, go, go, and guys going out both sides of plane boom, boom, boom. This was like a C- C-130. C-130. C-130, non-pressurized cabin, sitting one trooper with their legs in front of the next and the rucksack and the reserve parachute in the front, the main parachute in the back.

No windows either. No windows. No, it's just crazy. But the second time was the most insane because you already know and you're not at 10,000 feet. Like you're dropping about 3,000 feet, Like you're dropping at about 3,000 feet, which doesn't give you a lot of time in case your parachute doesn't open

for the reserve parachute. So it's very intense and you're doing some jumps in the daytime, some at night. We also on the C-130, they would open up the back of the plane and you would run off the back ramp off. So even further insane than on the side doors. So just insane adrenaline rush.

How long were you in the armed forces for? I was in the armed forces for 13 months. And why did you leave? They asked me to leave. Because? Some of my earlier infractions of the law, which were documented to be juvenile delinquencies with a sealed record, turned out that I was such a good trooper in the military. I was so committed to excellence that I did my boot camp, my airborne training, my infantry training, unit armor training, special forces, explosives, demolitions training, training,

training, training that I got nominated to go to officer candidate school. And in the process of going to officer candidate school, they needed a top secret security clearance. And during the course of the clearance, they found all these juvenile infractions. And even though there were no warrants out for my arrest, there wasn't the proper documentation when I joined the military that got me the appropriate waivers to go through because now in hindsight, the recruiter, his job was to fill boots. I had shoes, and so he wanted to fill the boots.

So I disclosed everything, but I didn't know the formal protocol. So at the time, the army was unnegotiable. So any infraction to the Uniform Code of Military Justice required an immediate dismissal. But the irony is, and I'm actually very proud of this, I have an honorable discharge, an Army achievement medal and cause of discharge at fraudulent enlistment. Even though you're perfectly honest going in. Yeah. Just bureaucracy, red tape.

Like my commanding officer thought that I would still be a great officer and wanted me, supported me along the way because I had enormous leadership. I now had the discipline. I had the intelligence. I had the leadership skills and he was disappointed. So you're probably getting paid nothing or close to nothing. Then you get out and then you had a lot of odd jobs, bars, supermarkets and wanted to make money.

Obviously you're motivated by money and you were making money. What was the thought process there? You just were you making money to support yourself and save your future or you just like having money for the first time? Well, I wanted freedom. Like I want to be able to eat. I want to be able to pay rent. I wanted to have my freedom.

And so if I didn't work, and I also knew that I needed to be absolutely in integrity and honest. There was no deviation at the time. So I thought by working, so the army, there's no punching of a clock in the military. So you work a lot of hours. So because I didn't do drugs and I didn't have other vices and I never really had a normal childhood, so I didn't really listen to music and have fun things. So I had nothing else to do but work.

So workaholism was actually something that kept me sane and honest. So it was less about the money because I never bought fancy things. I just wanted to have the freedom. And also, I guess part planning for the future. When you got out, you didn't say, I'm going to go to college and I think college is a good investment in my future? No, I didn't have the grades in high school. My ego didn't want me to go to a community college and I didn't really, like I couldn't imagine after what I'd been through to actually sit in

the classroom and do homework. What I did do on my own was my same mentor, Henry Chalfant, gave me a list of the 100 classics. So I was reading Dostoevsky and Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird and Hemingway and Emerson. So I was reading classic literature, and that really was a whole new world for me. Because before I was watching I Dream of Genie and the Brady Bunch. To go from there to reading complex literature was a big shift. You're making money, you're feeling good,

you can pay rent. You got food. You started going to places like Peter Lugar, which I remember I was in college and I had a girlfriend, Nicole, and I didn't know what Peter Lugar was. I'd never been there. Apparently, it's a big steakhouse in New York. Very, very famous. And then there was a second one on Long Island. She lived on Long Island. That's the one that we went to, but I remember going there for the first time. They were thinking, yeah, this is great. This is a very expensive steak and it's cool. So you started eating a lot of stuff.

And today we look at our family. I mean, health is just a big thing today, right? You proactively, we're going to talk about this is what your life devotion and passion is. Back then, no one was really thinking about it or really talking about it. If you were fat, you were fat. You knew you needed to lose weight. Today, it's a whole other thing. And at some point, you had a lot of family health issues.

So I think your mom, dad, aunt. Uncle. Uncle. Brother. Brother. And so you gained, I think, 36 pounds very quickly. Yeah. And so what was the thought process

and one of the life-changing moments in your life? I mean, for me, growing up in scarcity and then having money, money was the ability to buy food, you know, fast food, processed food, various cuisines. So I was buying whatever I could, whenever I could. And then when my aunt developed type 2 diabetes and they had a double amputation of her feet, that was traumatic. I remember going to the hospital and trying to envision what it would be like not to have the use of my toes and my ankles. And then my mother and my father, you know, both passed from chronic illnesses.

And then my brother became overweight, obese, diabetic, and has had three strokes and three heart attacks. At what age? It started when he was 35. So for the last 25 years, his health has just continued to degrade, and really complex. But for me, when I was 33, I met a woman and she looked me in the eye and said... Because I thought I was genetically cursed. And she lost her sister and her mother to cancer.

Are we talking about Megan right now? This is Denise. Okay. This is Denise. Okay. This is Denise Mari. And Denise said to me, you're living a carcinogenic, diabetic, heart disease-laden lifestyle, and that's not your genes, it's your lifestyle. And like, I couldn't imagine there was a connection. Like I just thought like, hey, we need to eat meat, chicken, fish, dairy, pizza, pasta, bread,

candy, soda. These were all nutrition. This was all nutrition. What I realized was that it was actually killing me. Once I realized that it was dangerous, I made the same leap like I did into the army, out of the airplane, and I said, I'm going to go far away from that food as possible. And literally, the furthest thing away from that was to eat fresh, raw fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, seaweed, and sprouts.

We all meet very interesting people in interesting places in our lives that have huge influences on our future. One of them could be a nightclub. So you're at a nightclub, 2 a.m. What happened from that point forward and take us through the start of your first company. Yeah. So I met this woman. She was there. She was with a bunch of other women. And we started to talk. You were not trying to hit on her? I was definitely trying to hit on her. I was definitely trying to hit on her. Did it work? I mean, we were together for years.

Okay, I guess it worked. The most important thing for me was what I learned from her and what I learned about myself. But we're there and we're just talking. And then instead of talking about partying and dancing or the thing, here's two sober people in a nightclub talking about death, talking about cancer, talking about loss. And we had this connection that cut through all of the superficiality that was in that club into something really, really deep.

And our first date, right, and it wasn't even necessary whether it was platonic or sexual. Like our first meetup, we went to the Big Apple Vegetarian Society to go to a battle of the diets. And just so happened that was the next activity that she was doing and she invited me and we went and I'd never even... Like I thought a diet is when someone doesn't eat, right? And here, people were talking about the nuance of the plant-based diet. So all extremes of the plant-based diet.

And there were speakers, people who I'm still in touch with today, and I sat through that, mesmerized because I thought it was incomprehensible that these people were functioning. Because I thought we required meat, chicken, fish, dairy, pizza, cheese. I thought these were requirements. And there was one guy there, Paul Nissan, who was living a raw vegan lifestyle. And he was just eating fruits and vegetables, raw. So what's interesting is she was the first person who taught you or mentioned the term vegan. You'd never heard the term before.

I think it's a commonly misunderstood thing. I didn't know what the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian was until I prepared for the show. Tell everyone what the difference is. Yeah. Yeah, I think a vegetarian for predominantly moral reasons does not eat meat or flesh, but they'll still eat dairy or eggs or honey. And a vegan consumes no animal products and also is under the belief that they want to do no harm. So part of veganism is nothing that involves the exploitation of another sentient being.

So like even the horse and carriage in Central Park, that is a non-vegan activity. Wearing like the wool, you know, which technically they don't have to kill the sheep to get the wool, but it's exploiting the sheep to get the wool, so there's no animal products. People talk about leather being a neat byproduct when in fact it's a whole industry in and of itself. So nothing that involves the exploitation of a sentient being. And then there's plant-based, which is very similar to vegan on the dietary part. And a lot of people will choose to use the term plant-based because they don't want to

discuss the geopolitical moral issues. They just want to keep it very simple and say, hey, I eat plants. They're vegan, but they don't want to get into the stigmatism of a vegan in the political part. At some point, you register the domain name, Still Raw. And I think that sounded like you were very early in the domain name, entire universe, because it was a long time ago. So what was the thought process there?

What was the first time you heard about the internet and that you could actually go and buy a domain name? Probably in the mid-90s, like mid-90s, 1994, I remember having access to a browser, and early Netscape. Prior to that, I was using dial-up. In 1991, I actually negotiated a deal with Apple and Monotype to create typefaces for the Mac operating system that are now on iOS and they're now in Windows as well. So I was using early technology pre-web and then I was on Apple Link and then I was on

DARPA net and then ultimately went into the web. But I didn't like the technology as much as I liked it as a platform for creating things. Right. So let's go from tagging to graphic design to working with Steve Jobs. Tell everyone those stories and your relationship with Steve. Yeah. So, you know, life is, you know, filled with synchronicities and doors open and opportunities happen. You have to make them happen. You have to make them happen.

You have to make them happen. But I was having lunch with my same mentor who saved me from stealing a car. And when I was working all this time, he had said, Doug, you're working, but do you like any of the things that you're doing? And I said, no. Like, I'm just doing it to make money. And he said, well, did you know that you have great artistic design skills that why don't you do something in your category? And I'd never heard of commercial art or graphic design or advertising. So I remember going to Barnes & Noble and

there was like books and books of all these things and there was one book called A Designer's Art by Paul Rand and Paul Rand almost single-handedly transformed commercial art into fine art And he designed the logos and corporate identities for IBM, ABC, UPS, Westinghouse. And he had a new client who was doing a new computer company called Next Computer. And this was in the mid-90s. And so I saw his book. I got out of the army. I'm fearless.

I called him up. I went to his house in Western Connecticut. And I became an unpaid intern apprentice for Paul Rand for seven years till the day he died. I was at his bedside in the hospital when he died of stomach cancer in 1994, 96.

And so being with Paul, I still had to earn my own keep. So I was still doing my side hustles along the way, but I got to go work with this master. And so one of his clients was Steve. And so I got to work on the next corporate identity and being on late night calls, early calls, discussions about the nuance of what Steve wanted in the corporate identity and how Paul worked. And these were two people that were extremely strong-willed. And I was in the middle on quite a few of the interactions.

So how much time did you spend with Steve and what's your impression of, if you could tell people listening and watching today that Steve Jobs is a that Steve Jobs is a... Steve Jobs is a visionary and Steve had wounds and Steve had clarity of what he wanted. And the thing that was really powerful about Steve is that he knew what he wanted and he would move mountains to get what he wanted and he would move mountains to get what he wanted. Like, so in the course, I had never seen anything

like that before. I never experienced anything like that. So I remember being in a meeting with Steve and I opened my mouth and he said, get to the point. and I opened my mouth and he said, get to the point. He didn't want to hear any stories, any digressions, and I didn't know much. We didn't have the Internet. You couldn't Google someone

before these meetings with people. So you had no idea. I didn't know the whole journey of Steve and Apple beforehand. I had no idea. He went public, he got fired. All I knew was this was a guy, he was coming out with a new computer company. It was black and the logo was in a cube and he wanted it a certain way.

And Paul could not be manipulated by Steve. So Steve would give his feedback and Paul would just listen and Paul would do whatever he wanted. I don't want to cut you all but I we need to give context to what you're talking about because 99% of people listening and watching the show don't have any idea what next computer was and if you could take us through the story of what happened, a lot of people may know that he got fired. They don't know names like John Scully and people who came in afterward. And they have no idea how he actually came back to Apple and what Apple bought

this company to bring them back to Apple. So I mean, we could talk about this for two hours, but let's simplify it for people. What was the company called and what happened? So Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple. Steve Wozniak drifted into the back end after the Apple II. Steve created the Macintosh after the Lisa, and the Macintosh was not as big of a success as they thought it would be right out of the bat. The Lisa was, I think, the first or second computer that Apple had. And then it was the Macintosh. It was like a can box like this.

Little box, self-integrated floppy disk. Floppy drive. And the Apple was a very successful company, billion-dollar valuation, and the board of directors of Apple brought in John Scully, who was the president of Pepsi Cola. And John and Steve had a love affair, and then basically John felt that Steve was too disruptive and moved him to a side building. And then in a board struggle, forced Steve out of the company. And Steve sold all of his Apple stock and saw that he felt that there was a market using

a graphical user interface for the education market and decided to start a new computer company called Next Computer Company using Linux as the operating system. And today, all of our iPhones are using the Next operating system. And so Steve starts Next, raises $400 million from Ross Perot and Cannon and other people. But this... Plus by back then, that'd be like raising $120 billion today. I mean, it just... People didn't really raise those kinds of rounds.

It was enormous. Next shipped product, but it would end up being more expensive, took more time to ship, and never got the adoption that they wanted. And Apple continued to flounder, creating more and more products without innovation. So then they brought Steve back in. Well, before that, there was a guy named Gil Amelio who came in after they fired Scully, who was the savior to Apple. And Gil didn't do anything great there either.

No. And so, you know, after Steve got back into Apple, you know, that's when, you know, I lost all contact. But explain the acquisition, because that's... Steve wouldn't have come back but for the acquisition. Basically, it's pretty interesting. Apple bought back, bought next for $400 million and they put, you know, gave, you know, in stock, Steve worked as interim CEO for a dollar a year and then saw the potential of everything that he wanted to do the first time with the lessons of being fired, starting another company, the humility, and along the way, Steve bought

Pixar. And so Steve was way ahead of what's happening with AI, with his render man and computer imaging and Pixar. So it was an amazing part that here was a guy who just wanted to create excellence along the way in design and engineering and education and products. So for me, I knew nothing here. Like I was working, like Steve was dealing with technology and I was dealing with the two-dimensional aspect of design, but I had to get this design so perfect

that it would meet the criteria of both Steve and Paul. What's so interesting too, I mean, Steve was a visionary in marketing and design and color, and people look at all these matte black cars today, I mean, Steve was a visionary in marketing and design and color. And people look at all these matte black cars today. Next was a matte black, cool as shit looking computer on your screen. Everyone said, you know, this black thing, does that really work? You know, black computer wasn't a thing back then, but it was a very cool looking computer.

Yeah. And it functioned. And literally, it's all part of the process. There wouldn't be no Apple today had Steve not have been fired, not have started Next, not have had gone to India, not have done his trips of acid, not have walked around barefoot drinking carrot juice and raw food. Like this is all part of the divine process of where it is. The saddest part is that Steve, you know,

passed away at 56 years old. He believed too much in the raw product. No, no, no, no. He was exposed to toxic chemicals. No, no, instead. He was exposed to toxic chemicals. No, no. Instead of getting traditional medicine that people said would have matured him or made him healthy, he said, I'm only going down Western medicine.

I'm biting my tongue on this part of the conversation because the people who say, most people who say, have no, no one knows like what's really going on and I don't know. So I have no opinion on that. Okay. That's fair. One footnote to the next story then we're going to move on.

Next was failing and was going to go out of business. And what's so crazy, yes, he started Apple, he gets fired, he raises this money, he starts Next. Next raises this money. Next wasn't going to make it. Their projections weren't... It's so interesting. I have a totally different view of that. Okay.

So what's your view on that? I think that Next was going to raise a fortune from like Larry Ellison and other people in the valley. And Apple was terrified and they made a preemptive move to buy Next before, A, someone else would have bought it or they would have gotten the ample funding. So it was positioned as a position of like weakness and they were going to go off the rails. And I think it was very strict because $400 million acquisition at the time also, as you were saying, was not a fire sale. It was a very strategic acquisition.

And Steve had already made the decision at Next to stop making hardware. So originally, he was making hardware, and then he realized that he had this Unix kernel that could go anywhere, and that was a threat. And there were people like Vinod Khosla and Scott McNeely that had Sun and Java became one. So no one really... It's so funny when I hear that because that's what people say, but having been there at the time, there was more optionality because as you know, there's no shortage of money in the world, but Steve knew that this would probably be the best thing to get his creation

out to the most people fastest. So it was a very humbling move to sell and to be on the sidelines along the way. You mentioned Steve's fascination with raw foods and raw juice. Tell us about Mary Strong and Duke University and walk us through the Organic Avenue creation of that and what happened in those years, doubling sales and not making any money. When you have really high standards and you don't have a business background, you can make decisions that are seemingly irrational. So at Organic Avenue, everything that we made

was made with fresh fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, seaweed, and sprouts. We used no additives, no preservatives, and everything had a maximum shelf life of a week. So my desire was to have as many people consuming our products as possible, right? So we were making a lot of products. But it's hard to predict when you have a dozen retail stores and a short shelf life, who's going to buy what on what day?

And so if you make too much product, you have a lot of waste. And if you don't make enough product, you sell out. And if you sell out and Randy Kaplan comes in and his product isn't on the shelf, then you're training Randy not to come in the store. So these conflicting factors resulted in a business that at best was breakeven, at best was breakeven, doing a lot of volume, million dollars plus a month in revenue, but hard to measure. Fortunately, that experience helped me today with...

We'll talk about sprouts later, but it helped me understand how important it was for pricing. Everything that we sold at Organic Avenue in hindsight should have been priced the way Air 1 prices things today. We didn't have the audacity or the chutzpah or the vision to charge what Air One charges today. You go into Air One, have you been to Air One? I was there this morning for breakfast. Okay.

That best store, there's people who hear about it, who come fly from New York just to the Air One. That's how big of a call it fell in. And by the way, it's amazing. But we didn't know. We were just trying to price things as low as possible so people could afford to buy them. But we didn't realize that what went into it and the value of it.

So those lessons didn't apply to me until year, but you look at Air One and Air One is saying, you want a premium clean store to go into, you want food that's made with conscious, organic, prepared ingredients, they'll charge $25 for roasted vegetables per pound because that's what it costs to run an infrastructure where you have valet parking and you're in premium real estate and you want workers that show up on time and they're doing things safely.

And that was beyond my comprehension at the time. So many entrepreneurs build these businesses and they think, all right, these private equity firms all call. So they have biz dad people who just call, hey, you want to sell your business? It's not just the hundred million dollar, billion dollar companies. It's the small businesses now. There's lots of private equity firms calling and then they do these roll ups. And then what usually happens is the founder can stay on for a little bit, but a lot of them get screwed. Yeah.

Tell us about your experience as well as North and what happened and what's usually happens is the founder can stay on for a little bit, but a lot of them get screwed. Tell us about your experience as well as North and what happened and what's your advice to all the entrepreneurs out there listening who get calls from private equity firms and say, hey, I'm going to give you some cash and we'll let you keep some of it, but here's a good way to cash out. I think the important thing is to really know what you want, like what's motivating you and to really be honest with yourself because these are all history repeats itself. There's no surprises.

In my own world, having seen executives and founders being fired, I deluded myself to think like, oh, I'm different. Like that's not going to happen to me. And I had a private equity guy who was advising me on the transaction. And he looked at me and he goes, Doug, you understand that as soon as they have control, you're going to be out. And I was like, well, there's no way. I'm too valuable. I know everything.

I'm doing everything. And he just laughed right in my face. He just laughed. And he's like, you have no clue. And he was right, and I was wrong. And what did you do when you got fired? Yeah, when you got kicked out of the... I started another company two weeks later. Yeah, one thing that I think we should also talk about is,

this is a great thing. Private equity firm comes along, they pay you a ton of money, and then they mess it up, and then you can buy it back for pennies on the dollar. You look at Quicken Loans. Quicken Loans, Intuit bought the company for, I don't know, some crazy price, billions of dollars.

Dan Gilbert bought it back, I think for $200 million. Got to keep the, he sold his mortgage company and then they got to keep the name. Quicken, which obviously is a brand name. And at some point that company was worth, I think it's the second largest mortgage company in the world. The first is National Wholesale Mortgage, Matyshpia, who owns the Phoenix Suns, Detroiter, Coalines by the way,

has the number one mortgage company in the United States, the most valuable, but it's amazing how many entrepreneurs sell out the private equity firms. Oh, we know more than you do. We got consultants who worked at McKinsey, whatever, and they fuck it up, and then you get to buy it back. Yeah. I mean, it's all part of just the process. So I think you go into any business, any transaction, and you have to go with your eyes open. Let's switch gears to your next company. And I want to read something from a famous interview you gave to Recode Magazine.

At the time this happened and you essentially got booted from your company, you said, what happened is I knew too much about quality. Like at that point, I knew too much about quality. What did you mean by that? Well, it's in the current zeitgeist today, right, with RFK coming in, the protests against the major food companies, the additives, the preservatives, I knew that all these additives, all these preservatives, all these processes were denaturing the food, rendering it nutritionally void.

And all juice that was in a bottle was pasteurized. And it's different when you're pasteurizing dairy, right, where you're just killing the microbes than when you're pasteurizing fresh juice, which you're killing the phytonutrients and the vitamin C, and all of the elements are shifting. So I wanted to do with... I wanted to keep things real and fresh. Like I liked fresh. I'd been eating fresh. And everyone wanted a shortcut. So everyone is saying, Doug, we should freeze things. We should pasteurize things. We should put them in cans and bottles. And I was like, no, no, no. If you do that, it's not going to be,

it's not going to taste as good and it won't be as nutritionally viable. So that's the essence of that part of the interview. You said that you wanted to do what Steve Jobs did, take a mainframe computer, make a personal computer, doing it for juicers, which is taking a mainframe juicer and making a personal juicer. So tell us about the impetus for Juicero and what the idea was and the years you developed and talk about the prototypes as well, because we have to do the research and there's something people do not understand when they see a consumer product, how long it could take.

They four years. So tell us about the impetus for the idea and then the development of the product itself. So all home juicers are based on a centrifuge. And so they spin the juice around and that high speed and the single blade creates oxidation of the juice, which rapidly causes it to perish

and green will turn brown. In professional juicing environments, it's a two-stage process where they dice, slice, chop, shred the produce, but they're still keeping the water molecules inside the cytoplasm, inside of the fiber. And then they put it into cheesecloth and then they press it. So commercial juicing, which I was doing for 10 years prior, we were using a juice press. And so... What does that look like?

A juice press is basically two large plates, either horizontal or vertical, and you put the produce into a mesh bag, the chopped produce, and then the press slowly extracts the juice from the fiber. And that's a juice press. So all commercial juice presses work in that two-step process. So I had started with a small juice press that did 12 quarts per hour, and then I had a commercial juice press that did 15 gallons per hour. Then I bought six of those, and then I bought a commercial press that did 50 gallons per hour, and I bought six of those, and then I bought a commercial juice press, which was like a monster the

size of this room that had 24 consecutive plates that did 500 gallons an hour of juice. And so that was like my vision of the mainframe, and that created really great juice. And so my thought was when I realized that people who had a home juicer were only using it once or twice a month because they had to go buy the produce, make the juice, clean up the juicer, all the waste. They didn't always have the ingredients, so they weren't using it. And that all juice that was in a bottle was pasteurized, and all the life force, the enzymes, the vitamin C, all of these things were denatured so that it could have long

shelf life and not taste very good. So I said, if I can bifurcate the juicing process as I know it and take fresh organic produce, slice it, chop it, keep it fresh, keep it raw, keep it unpasteurized, put it into a little pouch, and part of the patent was having the cheesecloth inside of an outer carrier, so when you put that pouch into the machine, it didn't make a mess. All the juice went into the glass.

So we built up a supply chain. And so I started off my first prototype was literally an airbrush compressor, filling up a hot water bottle, pressing two cutting boards together to make a little manual press. How big? What's the size we're talking about? It was a countertop size, like a little bit bigger than an espresso machine. And that thing blew up in my lab because I didn't understand... Caught fire. No, no. Blew up because of the PSI of the 150 PSI was more powerful than the structure in the frame that I built to contain the bladder that was

inflating. So, if you just think it up, the pressure as you blow up a balloon is a lot of force. So if you blow up a balloon or blow up a bladder, it turns out that there are presses made out of bladders and moving things in and out and they filling the bladders with air or with water. Turns out with air is the most dangerous because it can explode. Water or oil is less. So I built prototypes and I wasn't a mechanical engineer. So I went and had to find mechanical engineers, welding shops, and I built a prototype that worked. And I was taking this little prototype around, and I'd take my little cooler bag, and I still

travel with the cooler bag. I took my cooler bag with these homemade packs of fresh produce, and I would go show them to people and make a juice for them. And they would drink that juice, and it was like nothing that they ever experienced in their whole life because it was fresh. And so people had fresh juice before, but they never had fresh cold pressed. So the flavor profile, I have an interview, a video I could show you with Chef Jean George, Michelin star chef, that I was making juice for his

restaurants. And I said, does this meet your quality standard, your excellence, Jean-Georges? And he goes, Doug, you've exceeded my quality standards. You've exceeded my excellence. So I built something that was so good. And then the challenge was, you know, why Combinator scale the unscalable? How do you scale something where the original prototypes, I was making every one of those packs of produce, I was building the machines locally by hand, how can you scale that up

to meet the numbers of George Foreman grills, 100 million grills? Right. So this is a part of a story that so many people are going to be interested in. How did you approach VCs, sell them on the idea, and how in the world did you raise $120 million from some of the leading most successful firms in the world to create a juicing machine? The whole thing is, like, I'm not about the money today. I

wasn't about the money then. I was focused on the excellence on the product. So when I would go there, and I would have them experience the product. Well, take us back. Yeah. Hey, Google Ventures, this is Doug Evans. I had a 10 store juice company that didn't make any money after certain amount.

But I did have a nine figure, eight figure exit with it. Okay, well I had some credibility with it. Okay, you're cold calling Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins? Yeah. Do you pick up the phone or you shut up in the lobby? No, no. I think you have to network your way through.

Yeah, and so explain it. And then what's your advice to everyone else who wants to get into Kleiner Perkins? You need to find someone who knows someone who either works there or who's been funded by there or who advises there or who somehow does business there. Like where there's a will, there's a way. My original path into Kleiner Perkins came through the universe through a compassionate compassionate approach because I was helping a young, organic, vegan fashion designer who

I met through Alicia Silverstone, said, hey, Doug, I'm looking at this company that's doing vegan clothing. Could you meet with her? So I'm meeting with her and she's showing me her designs and then she tells me that she has a meeting coming up with Kleiner Perkins. And I'm saying in the back of my head, why is Kleiner Perkins meeting with you? And she said, oh well Kleiner Perkins funded Beyond Meat

and Beyond Meat was started with a guy that was at the Humane Society, and I know that guy, so I got this connection. And I said, well, would you introduce me? And similar to when you asked me to introduce you to somebody, she was very open, saying, sure. So she gives me the name and the contact person of who she was at Kleiner Perkins, I call up and I said, hey, I'm going to be in San Francisco on Thursday, and I'd love to meet with so-and-so. I was referred by so-and-so. Were you really going to be there or you just made it up, I'm going to be there?

Well, no, if I had the meeting, I would be there. Right, but you didn't have the meeting. No, no, no. We had a brilliant idea. I've heard this so many times, hey, I'm going to be there that day. Will you be there? In my mind, just so you know, we were clear. I knew this was happening. So I was going to be there. And so I was going to be there. So they set up a 15-minute meeting. And the

night before, I pack up my prototype. I go to the airport, I have to check it, it's in a Pelican box. I land an SFO like 11 o'clock, I'm waiting, I'm waiting, and the thing never comes. And my meeting is the next morning on Sand Hill Road at 8.30 in the morning. So now I have to make a decision. Do I go to the, so first of all, TSA confiscated my machine because they thought it was a bomb. So it never came.

And I have to decide, do I postpone the meeting or do I go anyway without a PowerPoint and without my demo? And so what do you think I did? You went. Of course, never turn down a meeting because it may not happen again. That's right.

That's right. So I went in the meeting and I had to describe, you know, what the excellence that I had. No visuals. No visuals, no presentation. And you know, I connected, you know, with the partner there. Is a lesson there that people fund founders they believe in and like? 100%.

Well, it's not that they believe in they like. Like I was an expert on this category of juice. I knew a lot about juice, and I was able to describe the mechanical infrastructure. My partner at Kleiner Perkins is the guy that funded Tony Fidel at Nest. Tony was on my show. Yeah, so he was the first check-in. So Tony, for those people who don't know, Tony is considered the inventor of the iPad. Of the iPod. Of the iPod. Of the iPod and then the architect of the iPhone and early General Magic, legendary guy and then co-founded

Nest computer, Nest Labs, the thermostat. Which was sold to Google for $4 billion. Yeah. So, but when Nest got funded, Randy, Tony Fidel went with a hockey puck and put it up on the wall and said, this invention is going to save energy. This is going to use AI and machine learning to see the habits, to make sure that the room is always optimized to the right temperature, and we're going to save trillions of tons of CO2 and lower electric bills and do all this. And he described it that it was going to be like the iPhone and iPod of thermostats, et cetera, and how they'd be able to compete with all of the big thermostat companies. So he felt that they would be able to do that.

And I didn't know that at the time that that meeting was, but that was the power of being able to... I think the point of me telling that story, there's another example that the founder really has to know their stuff. It's not about having the idea, it's about understanding what's involved on actually going from concept to execution. And in the case of Tony Fidel, he obviously built product and knew how to do that, so it was low risk. For me, I knew how to make juice. The big risk was, could I actually make hardware? Could I build a supply chain? Could I build a manufacturing process to fill millions of bags? And I have to say I'm so proud that Juicero shipped over 1 million packs of produce that the people who

had a Juicero, forget about all the haters, because there's going to be a lot of haters, the people who had the machine loved it and used it 9.2 times a week. Statistically accurate data of thousands of people using this machine 9.2 times a week and loving it. Let's back up because we got to go through the VC process more. I mean, one thing, if you read about it, and this is lore, and it's a famous story that a juicer, I mean, people think today of NutriBullet, right? I think that's common.

You can buy one for 59 bucks. I think the fancy one's 149 or whatever. You raised $120 million for a juicing machine. And a lot of people thought how in the world did that ever happen? And so walk us through the Kleiner Perkins, did they give you a term sheet? And then how did you scale? Cause one round was 14 million,

then you had a $70 million round. And we will definitely get into the numbers in a little bit because I think the numbers tell a lot of the story. So what was the business model? So first of all, it was more than a juicer. It was a whole ecosystem and a whole platform around delivering fresh raw nutrition, you know, at large scale. So the process was I built a prototype and I raised a $4 million seed round

where I went and there were checks in that seed round from $25,000 to $500,000 checks. What was the valuation? Um, 15 million, 16 million. Pre- the valuation? $15 million, $16 million. Pre-money. Pre-money. So for those people who don't know what that means, you set a valuation for a company, it's pie in the sky. They basically base it based on future projections of what size of the market and the profits

will be in the future. That's called the pre-money valuation. Then you raise money, raise $4 million. It's 14 pre-money, four is 18 post-money. Yeah, something close to that. And I had some really great people in that round. And I got those people because I heard a lot of nos, but I also... When someone experienced the product and they saw it, they said, we could see how this can become ubiquitous, how you could sell tens

of millions of these juicers and hundreds of millions of these packs. They just felt and saw that. We did that, and then the next stage, and you were in the hardware business, right, or supplying technology to hardware hardware is hard like when you want to build anything hardware and I had Experts around me that mapped out the path that people think like you make a tool to make a piece of hardware and And no one understands these are all abstract terms. And I remember teaching a class at Harvard Business School.

And all of these lovely students were asking, you're saying, well, why did it cost so much? And why didn't you do this? And no idea. Like if you wanna make something that's custom and that's pretty and that functions and in small quantities, it's very expensive, just very expensive. To make the Gocero V1, it's over 400 parts and almost half of them were custom. So there was no, you couldn't just go to a McMaster catalog to get it, or the machine

would have been this big. So if you want to create something that's small and that's pretty, it requires a lot of engineering to make. So how we got to how much money we raised was predicated on how much money we would need in order to build out the manufacturing process, the supply chain, get the team, do the quality, do the food safety, do the recipe development, do all the administrative, managing the IP, doing the testing, like doing the app. Like this was a lot of moving pieces in order to do this.

So it wasn't like, Hey, I want to just raise a hundred million dollars because it's a big number. It was like, how much money do we need to execute on this business? And to raise money, everyone needs a financial model. And you must have had a very complicated financial money. I mean, I've gone through the numbers. So talk to us about the two-part model. You got the machine and the hardware that you buy,

and then you have something called SaaS. And talk about what SaaS means, software as a service, and why VC firms like that so much. And then let's go through some of the actual projections. Cause no way on earth, anyone can ever raise a hundred million dollars without giving some seriously complicated financial model that people believe in. Yeah. Well, the thing is the, the most important thing, like really, if you

look at Tony Fidel, you look at Steve jobs, you look at any of these Tony Fidel, you look at Steve Jobs, you look at any of these entrepreneurs, they were focused on solving a business need, right? So there was a need that was being solved, and they had something that was innovative that could have a moat around it that was practical that could scale. And there's a lot of nuance into that. But basically, if you want to raise venture capital, you have to show something that could actually scale to five years, $50 million or greater in revenue,

so an investor can get a 10x, 20x, 100x return. So there's two ways. You could just make numbers up, or you could be very rational and very practical in having a command of every dollar required to acquire a customer, what the acquisition cost is, what the value of the customer is, what the churn, what the cost of manufacturing is, what the tooling cost is, what the scaling cost, and then what does the team and the organization need to look like in order to have it? And what kind of waste will you have?

What kind of turnover? What's the taxes administration and rent? There's so many insurance. There's so many variables that you need to have to build an organization. But what gets funded in Silicon Valley is something that has the potential to become a multibillion dollar business. Otherwise you go to your rich uncle or you go fund me or you do a Kickstarter. But there's a degree of discipline you have to have when you're raising venture capital.

And there's also a process that's extremely hard for outsiders. So I think one of the reasons I experienced so much love and so much vitriol is because I was an outsider. And what I didn't know was how treacherous it is in that world. Like I'm a raw vegan yogi. you know, like I was on the product. I had no idea of like what it was like in that world. Like it was so beyond me because I was an outsider to it. So I came in and it looked like I was doing really well, but I didn't have my guard up. I didn't understand the complexity. It was so far from me riding graffiti on subway trains, so far from me jumping out of planes

in the army, so far from me making juice in a lemonade stand in New York City. This was like an entirely different world that was incomprehensible. So I think for my first time of going into the cage in MMA, I think I did great. And now I could step back and I can describe it and I see it. And the thing is, you can go back into the ring at any point in time. Most people, when they get their head stuffed between their legs along with their tail stuffed down their throat, they don't want to go back into the arena. They want to kind of cower off. But the true entrepreneurs aren't doing it for the money.

They're not doing it for what other people think. The idea comes through them and they have to do it. They just have to do it. So Juicero, I had to do it. They just have to do it. So, Juicero, I had to do. And what I learned was that entire process and journey was a hundred and twenty million dollar education into Doug Evans, the entrepreneur, the father, the founder, the CEO, the philanthropist. It was just part of my journey and it had to happen. If you're a founder and you're going to seek money from somebody else,

you better know every single ingredient that goes into your revenue and your expenses. You must know everything about the financial statements, the financial model. You must know things like gross margin and profits. I can't tell you, Doug, how many founders have been in and into my office, and you go through and you ask simple questions. What's the average salary? What are you going to make, which is a fastball down the middle, right? You warm her up, and you say, okay, you know, you're going to raise a million dollars seed round.

What are you going to pay yourself? $200,000. All right. Well, that meeting's over, right? You're not going to, you know, we're not paying someone $200,000. But I can't tell you how many people, even who have revenues coming in after a while, what were your gap revenues last year? And you know what they say? I have so many blank faces. They can't tell me what their actual... The only thing that matters in these companies is cash in the bank, right? So if someone talks about monthly recurring revenue and growth rates, and they talk about the projections,

I don't, sure, that's helpful. I care about how much cash do you have in the bank? Are you profitable? What your margins are? And it's shocking to me how many entrepreneurs come into the office and cannot answer these simple questions. If you are going to raise money, you better know the answer to every single question. You are a fiduciary of my capital.

That's right. Well, the point is, how can they possibly know when they've never done it before and they haven't surrounded themselves with people that have done it. So in a way, the culture of Silicon Valley, especially with the incubators and the accelerators, it's really about getting something out to market quickly, minimum viable product, and seeing is it going to work, and then figuring out things along the way. And that model works sometimes, but most of the times it doesn't work.

And so there's a lot of collateral damage. There's a lot of people dead on the side of the road. And it's hard. It's just, it's just hard to do it. And most deals don't get funded, you know, for those reasons. If you're a founder and you do not know what you're doing, and most founders do not know what they're doing, you're a first time founder, that's fine. Everyone's a first time founder at some point. But it is essential to your success to go out and find either a mentor, someone who's been through it before, someone who can tell you what to do and what not

to do, there's some cardinal sins when you're trying to raise money that you don't do. And there are some essentials that you have to do to help yourself get the funding. And it's critical, every entrepreneur out there needs a mentor or needs to go seek advice in fundraising and not only fundraising, once they launch, on how to keep going

and how to sustain and build a profitable company. It doesn't take up the phone and call somebody. Or go out and socialize and meet people. Like you can't, I think today people aren't answering their phone. So you have to go out. Like when you and I met, right, I drove four hours to Vegas for that event, right? Because a friend introduced me and said, hey, this is a worthwhile thing. And I met you and I met a bunch of other people there, but that wouldn't have

happened had I not taken the initiative to go meet people in person. We did the same thing. I mean, I was invited. We went to this. I wasn't even sure what it was, Doug. I have a friend, he invited us. I couldn't tell if it was going to be 10 people or 100 people. I thought we were going to a 25-people dinner. Steve Wozniak was there and

some other people. I'd met Steve at a conference. He said he's going to do my show, which I'm excited about. But you do meet people and I wasn't going to network. I was going to hang out with Steve Wozniak because I want to talk to Steve about my show. And you ended up hanging out with me. It wasn't hanging out with you, but I see this, you know, cool guy at the end of the room. We're standing there, kind of people are wandering out. And we're both successful people, right? I'm not out networking now just to meet people,

but I love meeting talented, smart, motivated, similar-minded people who want to do good, want to build companies. I find it exhilarating. Yeah. Yeah. But you have to be out there. I mean, the thing is, you're this apogee of success already, right? You've had exits, you've had your funds, and you're out in the world. In that event, like people in two seconds,

like all I did, you said Randy Kaplan, I look out, I go to the bathroom while I'm doing my P-mail, Randy Kaplan, founder, you know, venture capitalists, et cetera. I was like, oh, this is a meaningful guy. I'm just, you know, making that up. But the point is, like... I do do that, by the way. I suggest just to... But in that context, we never separated until we separate.

Like I met you and Madison, and then we just hung out until we didn't. But there were some very important opportunities there for other people. And other people were busy literally thinking how they could get another drink before the bar closed. How could they eat one more shrimp from their thing as opposed to looking at that platform in that room to see how could this help me become a better entrepreneur, better founder, better whatever. Let's talk about marketing, which is important to sell yourself, sell your company, sell

your product. And you did, there's two things that I want to talk about on the marketing side that you did that struck out to me as I was learning more about you, Ciro, and the story, and the rise and fall. And we'll talk about some of the lessons that we've learned as well when things don't really go our way. You mentioned as you were pitching the product that the metal was aircraft grade aluminum that could lift two Teslas.

Was one thing that you said. What I love better than that was Juicero's juice is so good that drinking it is like getting kissed by the juice. People drink it and all of a sudden they want it. I mean, this sounds like you should put some kind of a warning label on it for the kids. I mean, literally, the product was so good. Like literally, there was nothing like it at any price available anywhere in the world. Like literally, it was that good.

And the problem was the people who attacked it, like some lost person who need a lot of love at Bloomberg, who's getting compensated for her clickbait, is looking for some hook angle to bring somebody down. And in the world, you know, prior to, you know, the term fake news and calling things out, like, they're able to get spiral dynamics and get things to go. But for me, it was always about the product. And that's what you want to... As an entrepreneur, you want to create a product that people love, that people are obsessed over.

And I can tell you, like the the people who had you, Sarah, were obsessed with it. The people who didn't, it's easy to hate on it if you've never experienced it, because trying to describe something that's indescribable. So I try to use poetic words, but some people just never got it, and it's easy to hate on.

And then you have the pylon, which is really just a sad thing about society. It is. And that's what really hurt the business was that the pylon caused some of the investors to feel shame. And they just were like, oh know I don't like being associated with this I don't even know what really happened but I'm done. Let's talk about it because you you skipped ahead and let's stay there for a second. Sure. There was a Bloomberg piece that came out shortly after product was launched.

Yes. And it said it would basically ridicule the machine where you're spending $700 initially, and then you decrease the price to $400, then you buy these juice packs, and that was part of the SaaS model. Software as a service revenue, you had to keep buying the packs to use the machine. And the thought there was that it's a one-time purchase for the machine, so you have to determine if people are really willing to pay that for an espresso machine. Today, by the way.

The one I bought was $1,200 in my home, right? And it makes pretty good lot of days every day. The original one was $2,500. So they went from about $2,500 down to $100 and came back up for the premium value. Right. So this Bloomberg piece comes out and they basically said, rather than spend this, you could squeeze the juice by hand, almost as effectively, I think there was a 0.2 ounce difference between squeezing the juice by hand, then what the

machine could actually do itself. And that ultimately was the beginning of the end. Yeah. And Bloomberg, you know, the backstory is Bloomberg wanted to speak to the company. And the company, the new CEO didn't want to speak to Bloomberg. So then Bloomberg is like looking for something. Like these same reporters at Bloomberg had done a hit piece on a different food tech company prior. So there was like weariness around talking to them. And then they found that the fact that you could squeeze the pack by

hand would be like saying you could pour hot water over an espresso pod and you don't need your $1,200 machine. And so Bloomberg came up with this story. And then they went down the cap table and they called 100 different investors, two investors who I don't know, whether they invested $25,000 or a million dollars. But Bloomberg said to them, hey, did you know that Juicero is a fraud? Doug is a charlatan. you don't need the machine, you could squeeze the pack by hand and we're writing an exposé around about the company. And they got a quote from the investor that said, if I knew that Doug was selling bags of juice, we never would have met with him.

And obviously they did meet with me, they opened up the packs. They went to the lab. People did diligence. So they got that quote. So then Bloomberg writes an article that says, Juicero feeling the squeeze, investors unhappy. And I swear on my life, the reason why investors were unhappy is because Bloomberg was bullshitting to them for the clickbait. And then without any challenging, without any fact-based behind it, that article got then picked up by other people.

No one did primary information. No one did follow through. And all of a sudden, it's so easy to hate on, it's like they bring you up and then they just hate you and bring you down. I don't think anyone thought that the company was so fragile that this one article would tear down. There are people, food companies that kill people. I'm proud we served a million servings, no one

was sick. I'm proud that we raised the capital, we built the machine, and we sold out a V1. Sold out a V1. So there were so many things to celebrate, but it's such a fragile part because when you're moving at 500 miles an hour, the slightest deviation from plan can cause you to go off the rails. And for me as the founder, my biggest mistake was not knowing that I should have stayed in the horse seat, in the jockey seat, that I should not have given up and let a new CEO come in. So this guy, Jeff Dunn comes in, he's the president of Coca-Cola North America. I think he ran Campbell Soup as well, a billion dollar, several billion dollar company. In getting funding from a venture

capitalist, one of the questions that I always ask, everyone always asks is, are you the right person to lead the company forever? And if somebody else comes along who's better than you to take the company to where it needs to go through an acquisition or public offering, are you willing to give up control of the company to let somebody more talented than you? We recently had a guy come into the office, Doug. This guy was one of the most offensive people I've ever met in my life.

He was arrogant, conceited, and it was clear to me he was not the right person to lead any company, let alone his company. I gave him some critique, some advice. You don't know. You don't know enough. We're just meeting for the first time. And I said to him, I said, you have the kind of personality

that is irascible. People are not going to work with you. You're not a leader. You may be the idea, but you're not going to lead this company. And I said, you are not the right person. And he said, you don't know what you're talking about. But I do know what I'm talking about,

and that's a common question. Yeah. What happened? I mean, what happened to me was the board, you know, after I raised, because I raised all the capital, like as the founder and CEO, I raised all the capital, we had over $100 million in the bank and the board had a, someone on the board had a connection to Jeff. And Jeff came in and he's like, I love the product. I love you. This is great. We can do things. And I'm very open, loving, trusting. And I remember every conversation. And then one of the board members were like,

Doug, this would be great for the business. Like if Jeff comes in, he knows about juice, he knows about raising capital, he knows about scaling, he knows about managing thousands of people. And we have a rocket ship and you are doing too much. You're running sales, marketing, product development, capital raising. Like this would just be great. You know, you can design the trains. He can make them run on time. And I was like, if you guys put up all this money and you think this is the right thing to do, like I'm not going to be obstinate.

I'm not going to block what you guys think because we had a strong board, smart people. And I was like, if this is what you think. And I was like as committed because when I talk about the things, like I literally organized meetings with all of my direct reports and all the teams and made sure that everyone knew that I was 100% supportive of bringing Jeff on and doing all the parts and all the transition. But it's so different running a big corporation versus running a startup that's scrappy. It's huge. We had a startup in Los Angeles where it was clear the founders were not the right person. They just didn't have leadership qualities. It

wasn't going to work. I went out and find someone at Accenture who was on the management committee, which is a big deal, was on the board, which is a big deal, who had been there 40 years. There's a guy named George Sheehan who had left Accenture to run a company called Webvan. That was a huge hire, made the Wall Street Journal.

I remember I got this guy, I found him, he was a friend of a friend. He comes to work at the company. He was a friend of a friend. He comes to work at the company. It was a disaster. Just because you're on the board of directors or help run a billion dollar business does not mean that you know how to build a startup with 10 people. You don't have a culture.

You're in some ivy tower at this huge company. You haven't been on the front lines. You're not cold call. You're not dealing with customers. You can't deal with young employees if you're 65 years old and haven't built teams like that. It's a different culture, different people, different leadership style. And it was a company killer.

It's amazing when you hire the wrong CEO, things can go that. And, you know, there's a lesson that we learn as well, hire slow, fire fast. And at some point you've committed to the wrong horse, the wrong leader, and it's too late to shift. The company is in such a downward spiral, at that point it's game over. Yeah, I mean, it was very unfortunate,

the whole thing, especially the people who worked there. I worked so hard on recruiting this team to build this product. I really feel like, aside from the customers that are disappointed they have the product, these people who came from the greatest companies in the valley and in the world to come build a product. That all of a sudden, I realized afterwards when I stepped down that it was the beginning of the end for me, for them, for the company, and for the clients. And that was the hard part.

And I'm still so close with so many of the key Juicero people because in a way we're still in shock because the product was so good. And especially with the new administration and everything that's happening now, like the Juicero...you talk about clean ingredients. It's like you pick up the pack of Juicero. It was like orange, carrot, lemon, kale, spinach, like five ingredients. We had one product that was 100% pomegranate. No additives, no preservatives. It was fresh pomegranate. And we had to create a system to open up pomegranates and knock out the individual arils and then put them in the pouch.

One of the things that every venture capitalist looks for when funding any company in the technology space is proprietary technology. What intellectual property do you have that serves as a mode to prevent competitors from coming in? Yeah. I want to talk about the patents you filed. Yeah. So we're going to go through these and I think the details really matter. You filed 34 applications, six were granted. I'm just going to read them right now because I find this incredibly fascinating and interesting. Three of the patents that you were granted were for pouches.

D787341, D789799, D 790361. The details matter. And I think if you're an entrepreneur, you should go look up all these patents on the USPTO website. You file two patents for food press, D 793820, and D 796272. And then you file the patent with this title,

Juicing Methods and App apparatuses for extracting juice from food matter using juicer cartridges. That patent issued was D493-298. Really? Patents were issued for a juicer for pouches in a press? How did you get those patents issued? And how important was it for you to get funding? Really? Patents were issued for a juicer for pouches in a press? How did you get those patents issued? And how important was it for you to get funding? I think that the there was a lot of novel ideas and engineering

that went into this. And that created a very powerful mode. Pouch? A pouch? How do you pat in a pouch? Well, the pouch was actually multiple layers. We had, if you were to take a normal plastic bag, Ziploc bag and put produce in it and seal it, it becomes anaerobic because the produce is alive, so it's respiring and needs to consume oxygen and release CO2. So we had to work with creating a membrane that was like Gore-Tex,

that allowed air to come in but liquid not to go out. And then on the pouch, we had to make it so it could support the produce and then release it on demand, where it was just such a beautiful detail that originally when I was doing my demos, I would have to take a scissor and I'd cut open the pouch and a few drops would come out and then you'd put it in the press. And then we created a... The technical term was frangible, that the force of the press would cause just that one part of the pouch to open. And then we had a membrane inside that would contain the fiber but allow the juice to go

through. So it was all of these things that were constructed into this pouch because the idea was that A, we needed to fill these at scale and needed to work. If you just tried to do it manually, it just wouldn't work. I didn't want to do all this work so that someone could easily copy it, but I actually had the CEO of Nestle fly from Vive, Switzerland to come to my office. I had the chairman of Nespresso come to my office several times. And he said they had been working on trying to crack this code for 10 years, over a billion dollars funded and they couldn't do it. And they were so impressed with what we had done with seemingly a fraction of the dollars

that they had applied because it was really difficult to do anything at scale. So we were on the way for success with this product and the IP was something to support this. So all these systems were very important. And I can tell you, I would stay up after working a full, you know, eight hours on sales calls, four hours on investor meetings, and then manufacturing meetings with China and Asia. And then I'd spend the remaining time until my next call reading and working and editing on the patents.

One of the things that founders do when we ask them about proprietary technology, it often comes up, oh, we have a patent. There's a difference for founders coming in, explaining that you file for a patent and a patent that's been issued, a grant and patent. So for founders coming in, there's a difference, they have to know the difference. Number two, they also have to hire the right attorney, a patent intellectual property law firm. I see another mistake happen, Doug, all the time,

which is you hire someone who doesn't have the expertise because the lawyer is too expensive to do it. And they just went with someone who's a corporate lawyer, doesn't know what they're doing. Hiring the right IP counsel is critical. And the third thing is a lot of people don't understand when they're have a proprietary product that are competing with someone like Google or Microsoft or Apple, who has billions of dollars of resources at their potential, that patent lawsuits, when you go to trial, are typically a minimum of $10 million.

An Akamai situation, we had proprietary technology. There was a really novel way, revolutionary way, to serve web traffic. A company ultimately, I think today still serves 30% of the world's web traffic. Another competitor copied our patents, issued patents, and Occamized spent somewhere between 200 and $400 million in lawsuits to go to trial. We won. It was the appeal by the other company we won again. trial, we won, it was the pill by the other company, we won again. It's hugely expensive to get the IP and it doesn't mean that you're done. It doesn't mean that someone's not going

to come copy your product anyway. Yeah. But I think if you have something that's novel and clear and you've got good claims on it, then it's important to do. And it was an important part of the process. I don't think it was a requisite for the financing because it was very hard to do what we were doing. And people would only copy you if you were very successful. And what we did from an IP perspective

is we did make it meaningful for the large companies that were looking through our IP portfolio that they were like, wow. And we started to file those patents very, very early on, even before we had the money to do that. What was the biggest mistake you made in the downfall of Juicero? Stepping down as CEO. What was the biggest mistake you made in the downfall of Juicero? Stepping down the CEO. What was the second biggest mistake? Probably attempting

to grow too fast. And is that the problem? So let me give an example that we were running this plant that had 150 employees in the fresh produce operation plant, and we were running the plant six days a week. It was 110,000 square feet. Yeah, 110,000 square feet on four and a half acres in right over here in Commerce, LA, right near city of industry. And had we gone slower and said, okay, we're only going to produce the packs one day a

week. So, we'll have one day of setup, one day of production, one day of cleanup, as opposed to running those extra days, that would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in payroll. Another kind of key thing was wanting to scale faster outside of like LA. We could have just stayed in LA for a while. There was so much business here. And instead, we tried to go national early. And that required resources and engineering and packaging and distribution where it would have made more sense to stay local sooner.

And then the other part was we had a subsequent design for a lower cost machine. And after we did V1 and we sold out of V1, we should have said, okay, that's it for this. Instead, we did two concurrent engineering projects. One was trying to work on V1.5 to cost reduce what the V1 machine looked like. And that took resources and time and capital as opposed to the leapfrog product, the V2 product. And that, I think, was a mistake that was very costly. Another common mistake that, Audra, put it on the back.

There's some prevailing mentality in Silicon Valley that you have to raise these massive rounds, $100 million rounds, and that's a method of accomplishment. You've done what all these other companies are doing. And I think there's two problems with that, two big problems with that. First, you feel compelled to spend the money. If it's in the bank, you almost feel the pressure to spend the money. There used to be this pressure from VC firms, grow at all speed. They don't care about the profits. Now

things have tightened up a little bit as all these huge massive failures. The second thing founders raise a ton of money don't realize is you are materially shrinking the possibility and probability of you having successful exit and outcome, because at some point you've raised too much money. You're raising $100 million, probably going to have a $500 million minimum acquisition, or a $500 million minimum valuation. All these founders said, oh, God, I want to have a $2 billion, $3 billion valuation.

At some point, there's more room for downside decreased valuation than then upside appreciation. And we've seen it so many times. I mean, the WeWork example, what do they have a $38 billion valuation, and then ultimately had under a $1 billion valuation. How can you be, the growth rate that you have to have to sustain increasing valuation

when you get to the billions and billions and billions of dollars, if you're not going going public there's only a handful of companies that can afford to buy you. Yeah look I think that you know there's so many it's such a complex you know part when you when you start a company and what motivates you and part of it is like you really want to raise the capital that you need and not more, not less. And the need is a very subjective part because you can do a lot with a little if you're creative and scrappy.

So another...you asked about another mistake that I made was if no one knew how much capital we raised at Juicero, no one would write about it. We know, like no one would care. Right. So what happened is like, why is Bloomberg writing about like a juice company, like a juicer company that's not public, that's not going public anytime soon. They only wrote about it because that hook of the $100 million gave them something that

they figured that they could turn into clickbait. And I don't know this for a fact, but I've heard that Bloomberg incentivizes and motivates their writing and editorial staff, not only just based on clicks and traffic and volume, but if they can make a stock go up or down, or they could cause a change of control in a company. That's their culture of how cutthroat is. And the funny thing is about Bloomberg is, since this is a business-oriented podcast, Bloomberg is software as a service, the Bloomberg terminal. At $2,000 a month, where 90% of the data that's on the Bloomberg terminal is available for

free on Yahoo financing and Google and AI. So you talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Bloomberg is attacking someone that someone should go do an expose on Bloomberg, where they even force the secretaries to get the Bloomberg terminal, even though they'll never use the advanced complex financial models, et cetera, because that's their shtick. But for me, if no one knew how much money we raised, no one would have cared. We could have been happily on our way to just building a park.

What is it about the human condition that you do well and you raise all this money and people are reading about it and they're jealous about it? And it's amazing. When I learn it is very disappointing, Akamai goes public. And there's a lot of people who you think are in your corner. People are not happy for you.

I remember someone who I respect a lot, an investment banker, someone I like, saying when the stock decreased in value from whatever was $345 a share to $100 a share, he said, yeah, it was too much money for you beforehand. And I'm thinking, what kind of comment is that? And then when the stock goes from $345 a share to 49 cents a share, I think people were happy. People were jealous, oh, you didn't deserve it,

you got lucky, whatever the case may be. Why aren't people happy for others who do well? I think it's very clear because the way that media works, both paid media, social media and the like, it's creating more separation between the haves and the have-nots. And when someone sees this, like it's trying to, that old adage of trying to keep up with the Joneses, that the media creates such an artificial perspective of what someone's life is like, that it creates self-hate and self-contempt in someone's own life. So what happens is the media is making people feel inadequate.

So if someone feels inadequate, like I celebrate your success. Like I see your success. I see your beautiful family. Like I see the world and like I was like, wow, that's beautiful. I love that. And so that's because like I'm feeding my mind with information that's about love, that's about contribution, that's about generosity, that's about the animals, the environment. Like in my world is I want everyone to win. I'm coming from an abundant perspective. If people are living in scarcity and they're living in lack, then everything is about not

enough, not enough. What am I going to do? Fear-based. That comment, that person, basically what I would do, like in that instance, and I do this all the time, and I call people, I was like, can I ask you something? Like what motivated you to say that? Like I want to unpack, like what wound they have that would cause them to say that? Because it's like, look, I mean, I want you to know you're running the bank, you're doing

this. Like, I celebrate your success. What would prompt you to think, like, not celebrate my success? Maybe my evaluation was 20% higher than market because I did something that you don't know about. Maybe other people know, but let's get people to support other people on their mission and journey and not be jealous, not constrict. And I think the only way to do that is literally by giving more love to these people. When this happened, I was walking through an investment bank at the time where a good friend of mine worked, who I've known most of my life.

I'm walking through and one of his colleagues said to me, so-and-so's never gonna catch up to you. And I look at the guy thinking, what on earth are you talking about? Yeah. It was such a common, even today as I try to unpack it, that's sad to me. I wasn't in a competition with anybody, my friend, anybody else. I couldn't be more happy or proud of my friend who's gone on to have a massively successful career.

Massively. I'm happy for him, but such a weird cup it no one's in competition with anybody else Yeah, or if they are they shouldn't be and I think it's it's something exactly what you said Maybe they should examine internally what that what where's that coming from? Let's let's move on because I really want to talk about your future yeah, and all the great things that have happened to you in your life and talk us through the post-Juicero story and journey. And we'll talk about kind of how you ended up in a tent essentially down in Palm Springs

in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, so it's an interesting thing. So the Juicero journey for me was an incredibly interesting chapter in my life. It was like a five-year journey. And so I'm 58 years old. So it's like 10% of my life was there. And it was so beautiful.

Like I learned so much. I made great relationships. I created things. My neuroplasticity of my brain expanded. Incredible because I pushed in all levels. So I learned so much. So the Jusera experience did not have the desired outcome. I won one thing because I really felt like during COVID, like, Gissara would have done extremely well, and it would still continue. But it was so way ahead of its time. And it was just like, okay, so what did I learn from that? And I taught my class at Harvard Business School with Len Schlesinger and Matt Higgins, and I learned a lot from there and really being vulnerable on my blind spots and being humble. And so how I ended up in the desert was I was doing

during Juicero this New York LA San Francisco triangle. I called the A-hole triangle. And I just going from one asshole to the next one to the next one. And then, like, all of a sudden, I didn't have to be anywhere. Like, as a matter of fact, not only did I not have to be there, certain people, when you're on the up and up, they want to hang out with you, they invite you to things. And then all of a sudden, you become radioactive. I then all of a sudden you become radioactive. I've been there. Right?

49 cents. Yeah. So you become radioactive. And so people don't want to talk to you. You're not invited to stuff. So I said, I don't need to work, at least not right now. I don't need to work. What I want to do is I really want to experience what happened.

I want to learn from this. I want to journal. I want to be in nature. I don't want TVs. I don't want people. I don't want to chase unavailable women. I want to just be. So I went to Burning Man.

And in Burning Man, I saw the desert. And I saw a just be. So I went to Burning Man, and in Burning Man, I saw the desert. And I saw a dune, and I saw the desert, and I'm like, whoa, you can live in the desert? Then I read The Alchemist, where he's on the oasis and with wells and palm trees. And I was like, I think I'm going to find land with hot springs on an oasis in the desert. So in a typical entrepreneurial way, I hire geologists, I hire well drillers, I hire realtors, and I find Wonder Valley hot springs near Joshua Tree. And I buy a little five-acre lot that had ramshackled cabins, but it had a geothermal mineral well that the water was coming out of the ground 135 degrees Fahrenheit. So beautiful hot springs.

I go to Bali to buy furniture, and I discovered these 5,000 pound monolithic boulders made out of granite, onyx, or marble. So I buy a container of six of these and I ship over 58,000 pounds. How much did that cost? I mean, you know, relative to you, just not a lot of money. £50,000? Yeah, to ship the containers, like $20,000 to buy them. But there's a lot of things, like finding the boulder, having it carved, transported, forklift, polished, the whole thing.

But I have to say, I didn't even think about the money. I just thought these things are so beautiful. And my vision was I wanted to be able to soak in this tub under a billion stars on a dark sky and just see the universe and see galaxies and see the Milky Way and see sunrises and moon rising. And so that was my vision. So I bought the tubs, I found the hot springs, I figured out the hydrofluidics, I pumped it up. And then like there was no place for me to live, so I took my Burning Man yurt, which was a 13-foot diameter, 176-foot yurt, that was a wooden lattice wrapped with an L.A., recycled L.A. billboard over the lattice that

I felt like a sail when the wind would blow, that it was going to blow away. So I moved into there, and then I I got a mattress and I was so content. No running water in the yard. And so I'm living there and everything is beautiful except for one thing, that not only was I in an environmental desert, I was in a food desert. And there was no Air One, no Whole Foods, no farmers markets, no restaurants. Like there was one bar in the entire

100 square miles of Wonder Valley. And so I'm now like eating out of my Yeti-like cooler filled with gourmet raw food from Air One and produce from the Santa Monica Farmers Market, and I'm eating it. And as the cooler was going down, my cortisol levels were going up because I was wondering, what am I going to do for food? And then while staring at the stars, I, the universe, like whispered in my ear and said, Doug, you know how to sprout.

Because I'd been sprouting for 25 years. Sprouts were part of my life. They were part of my life. They were part of my diet, but they were always a garnish or a side dish because I had this abundance of other food options. So before living in a food desert, I lived in LA and San Francisco and New York, and that's a food swamp. There's more food than you could possibly eat. So when I got the insight and the download from the universe, which I ended up taking

the download and I wrote the book, right, the Sprout book, I wrote the book, and there were three simple tenets in here. Was number one, sprouts are vegetables. They're not just a garnish. They are full vegetables. They're not just a garnish, they are full vegetables. Number two, sprouts are vitamins and minerals. And number three, sprouts are medicine. Like there's more than 2,000 peer-reviewed published studies on sulforaphane, the medicinal compound that's found in cruciferous vegetables, but at the highest degree in broccoli sprouts. So I saw that and I was like, wow,

how come no one knows about this? I never would, I mean, I've told people about you, oh, what is Doug doing now? Sprouts? What? Like the sprouts you eat? Yeah. Nobody eats sprouts.

But you're changing that. I literally- You invented sprouting as a verb. I have no idea. I have no idea. What I will tell you is in anticipation of this podcast, I was looking for an analog of what I could compare sprouts to.

And one was like, oh, like cotton candy. You take a little sugar, you go to the fair, and you get a big Lucille ball, you know, ball of cotton. But that's all poisonous and it's manufactured. Right, another analog I was thinking of is like a stick. You want to move a big boulder? You need a stick. It doesn't do anything.

You add a fulcrum, and all of a sudden you have leverage, and you can move something bigger, but you're not really creating anything. And you look at all the juicers, blenders, toasters, dishwashers, they're all performing something, but they're not making something. So what makes sprouting so magical is you take, you take one quarter cup of seeds, these are broccoli seeds, one quarter cup of seeds, and you put them into the jar, and in five days,

you literally fills the entire jar. So you go from a quarter cup to six cups. So this is exponential. And these vegetables that are in here are 20 to 100 times more nutrient dense than mature vegetables than you can buy in the supermarket or the farmer's market. And the average leaf of lettuce in the United States has traveled 2,000 miles.

This has traveled two feet. So this is so much fresher, so much more nutritious, and so much cheaper because you're taking seeds. And the only outside input that you're adding to this is you're adding water. And the seeds are a complete living organism in a dormant state. And when you add the water, you trigger a germination process. And I came to the perfect analogy. It's like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, which not only is beautiful, but can fly. Like it goes from this little thing into this magnificent thing

with the power of flight and beauty. And so the reason why people are not sprouting and they don't know about sprouting, they're not eating sprouts, although the Sprout Book, you know, is now in the 10th edition and it's now translated into Spanish language and we're working on Japanese next. Love it. The reason why sprouts, no one knows about sprouts, John Nacky, who I introduced you to, the founder of Whole Foods, says, sprouts are a shit business. And I said, what do you mean, John? He goes,

short shelf life. Sound familiar, right? You say organic Avenue? Refrigerated transportation, because everything is fresh. Shipping mostly water weight and low margin. So there are no national or international sprouting companies. Like it's just a small niche business, except in Japan, where there's a billion dollar business focused on broccoli sprouts. Because in Japan, you know, their levels of cancer, levels of heart disease.

They're tuned in that 20,000 little retailers across Japan, like 7-Eleven, you can go in and buy broccoli sprouts there. Explain to people the cancer research about broccoli spouts. So it's very well known that cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, clover, kale, bok choy, wasabi, have anti-cancer properties to them. They have glucosinolates in them. It turns out that broccoli had the most of this anti-cancer compound called sulforaphane. Broccoli had the most of it. In the research they were doing at Johns Hopkins University that they were researching all

the vegetables to see which had the most of the anti-cancer compounds, broccoli had the most. But you couldn't grow broccoli 365 days a year. So they were grappling with their research, so they had seeds, so they grew broccoli sprouts just for doing the research. And that's how broccoli sprouts became a thing, right, 25 years ago. It turns out that every seed has a finite amount of this compound glucoraphanin, the precursor to sulforaphane. Every seed has a finite amount. As the seed turns into a sprout and a microgreen and garden vegetable, the amount of the sulforaphane gets diluted. So the sprout has 20 to 100 times the nutrient density and the levels

of sulforaphane of the mature vegetable. So what people were thinking was a trivial little garnish or side dish turns out to be the stem cells of the plant. Like this is the golden ticket right here in the sprouts. And so I, living in my tent with water from my well that I figured out how to desalinate, I start to live on sprouts. So the next 30 days, I'm living exclusively on sprouts. Nothing else.

Nothing else. Nothing else. Just sprouts. You're taking this and you're... Just eating the sprouts. Just eating it. Can we open it? Of course.

So you're... We wanna do this at some point during the show, so I'm gonna... Yeah, knock yourself out. So I'm going to. Yeah. Not to do that. So I think one of the issues, Doug, with Sprouts is people look at this and say, God, that looks gnarly. And I think another issue is they think about it as parsley. Cause when you told me, and we were talking about Sprouts, like I said, I walked away

thinking like, this guy's nuts. Like he's, he's created a company where people are already not sprouts. No, I mean, we're going to talk about nuts in a second. I mean, actual nuts. We're going to talk about the environmental benefits of sprouts as well, which I think is huge. But I thought, gosh, you know, how can you build a company on this? And then I went back and I tasted some. I thought it doesn't have a lot of taste.

I still don't think it has a lot of taste, but a lot of people eat a lot of different foods, even though it may not taste like cotton candy because it's good for you. Yeah. Kal and self, I think tastes like shit. Randy, these questions I I feel like they're softball questions, but I will say well, they're softball questions I mean you're an expert on this right right and so I view myself as average consumer, right? Right? I've raised this

sprout Company to 25 friends and everyone looks at me the same way that I did it for like, huh I say yeah, you should really check it out. My friend Ricky Horowitz is a very smart guy I told him I was meeting you know, what's his background? I told him about your kit You just sent me this amazing sprouting kit. Everyone should go out and buy one on the sproutingcompany.com It's cool. You go in at home. It's fun. I can't wait to use it. But Ricky said, oh my god, that's amazing. I'm telling you about the benefits of sprouts. I'm going to go do that.

That's something that I'm going to do. But I understand, too, as you know, I interviewed Tony Robbins the day before yesterday, a friend of yours. Thank you for that. You made that happen. He loves sprouts. He does.

And he made some joke. Yeah, Doug is sprouting all the time. And he said it doesn't hurt to put some stuff on it to make it taste a little better. Yeah. So I am a little bit of an extremist, just a little bit. But the point that I want to make is that sprouts are vegetables, and it's well known that vegetables are good for you. Right? So these are simple, single ingredients.

Yes. So in my world, you can replace normal vegetables with sprouts that you grow on your own. So there's financial advantages to that. There are freshness advantages to that, and now there's nutritional advantages to that. So you can add whatever dressing you would normally use on a salad, you can add to the sprouts. So whether it's tahini dressing, ranch dressing, balsamic, oil and vinegar, whatever you want to add to it, you can add to the sprouts. So one insight that I had was instead of adding sprouts to a salad, was making salads out of sprouts. So that was one.

The next one which was incomprehensible, but it's proving to be huge, was imagine replacing white rice, which is high glycemic, with sprouts, and you're making sushi and wraps and mixing it with beans with sprouts. It's a whole different level. You're increasing the nutrition by a thousand fold

if you replace sprouts, rice with sprouts. Now, when we talk about the power of sprouting for a second, lentils are the staple of the plant-based diet around the world. People are eating lentils everywhere. When you sprout a lentil, you increase the vitamin C by 300%. You quadruple the antioxidant levels and you're eating something that's enzymatically alive. So it has living enzymes which make it bioavailable for your nutrition, for the consumption.

So, and you're getting soluble and insoluble fiber and in this tender form. So another thing that you could do, and we could do this as a separate thing, this is what's happening when you bring Madison and the girls over to my house. We're gonna eat sprouts as the salad, as the appetizer, as the entree, and as the dessert.

So you're gonna get a seven course sprout meal in every aspect. But when we do like the main course with sprouts, they're going to replace the pasta. But my wife will make a beautiful marinara dressing with sun-dried tomato and fresh tomato and garlic and lemon and you're just going to pour it over the sprouts and mix it and all of a sudden you're going to have something that will have texture it'll have flavor it'll have aroma and it will feed your microbiome. So people don't understand the microbiome, your gut bacteria, contains 38 trillion non-human microorganisms, yeast, fungus, mold, parasites, living in your gut. And if you feed them healthy things, you get health. If you put in refined food, processed food, refined carbohydrates, artificial flavors,

glyphosate pesticides, you basically get chronically ill. Like you cause your whole immune system, you cause your digestive system to basically malfunction, which is why in the United States, we have 266 million people are overweight or obese. And I guarantee they're not eating sprouts, right? You have 100 million people that are diabetic or pre-diabetic. And those that are eating sprouts are able to regulate their insulin levels and reverse their type 2 diabetes. So if you think about what's happening right now with air quality, right, that broccoli

sprouts and just everyone here, they're all on AI. You got your Claude, you got your Gemini, you've got your Chachi BT. Talk about sulforaphane and detoxification of benzene and air pollutants from the lungs by the consumption of broccoli sprouts. So whether you've got the firefighters or you've got people living. So that's why in Japan, they're consuming broccoli sprouts every day. There's more than 2,000 peer-reviewed published studies on sulforaphane alone in there. And now we have another epidemic going on on the obesity where everyone, and now I guess

we're in LA, so people aren't even obese that want to be on Ozempic and the weight loss drugs because they want to lose 15 or 20 pounds for a photo shoot for a wedding or bachelorette party. But the fact is, they're planning on 47% of the population being on weight loss drugs for the rest of their life because as soon as they get off the weight loss drugs, they will gain the weight back. And my hallucination is if they're eating the sprouts. Sprouts are the number one weight loss food in the world because they are high fiber, low calorie, low fat, and you can grow them.

So normally you go into Air 1 and if we had a bowl and we pour this out, this would be an enormous bowl. These would like expand out. If you went to Air 1, this would be $35 to $45 worth of sprouts. And you could grow them for like $4 worth of seeds and a little water. In your kitchen. In your kitchen. In your kitchen.

So I was living with six jars in one cubic foot, six jars, and I was generating thousands of calories a day of the freshest, most nutrient-dense food on the planet. Okay. So let's talk about the Sprouting Company itself. And I want to talk about the product now, because we just talked about, you can grow this in your house. We're not talking about a room of sprouts. We're talking about what you said to me was a sprouting kit. It looks to be about a foot, foot and a half.

Well, inside, when you put it, when you put it together, you know, it literally takes up, you know, five and a half inches on your countertop. Like that's it. And then how long does it take? Once you put the sprouting seeds in the sprout container, how long does it take to get? It'll go from this to this in five days. And how long is that container, how many meals is this going to give you? And how long is that container, how many meals is this gonna give you? And how long is that gonna take?

One of my problems is when I eat, Doug, is it takes a while for my stomach to fill up. Yeah. And so it's a feel full. So I'm just chowing down. And then I chow down two months, I said, oh God, why did I eat all that? How much of this container is it going to take

to make me full? Well, you know, you're a beast, right? And our mutual friend, Mike Posner, he will eat a whole jar. As a whole jar, he'll put that into a bowl. He'll make a dressing with tahini and avocado and he'll put in some other gadgets, you know, other things into it, and he'll eat the whole jar. And he has six to eight jars growing on his countertop

at every time. Yeah, he's jacked, by the way. I mean, he looks amazing. Yeah, I mean, he walked across the country. He summited Mount Everest. He did a 50K with Jesse Itzler. I was feeding him sprouts on the track. I was just talking to the running man team

because he noted there, I was literally gave out 600 servings of sprouts. Like I was practically an obstacle on the track. As people were running, as opposed to having the gels, I'm giving them sprouts. Okay, so tell me, how much is this gonna fill me up? Like how much will it take is this gonna fill me up? Like how much will it take for this to make me have a dinner, for example?

So if you understand how your reptilian mind works, programmed for scarcity, that you, reason why you eat is because you don't know where your next meal's coming from, right? And if you add salt and oil and sweet things to the food in the form of dressings and sauces or refined food, you will tend to just eat, eat, eat. No, but I do know where my next meal is coming from.

Thankfully, I have the money. Most people don't. Again, we're gonna talk about this. You know, there's some- So you don't overeat? Oh, no, I do. But I know where my next meal is coming from. But at the moment when you're overeating, you forget where your next meal is coming from.

I don't think about it. I feel- Well, you're there and you're eating. And all of a sudden, you trip into your reptilian brain that says, oh, there's food here, I better eat this right now. Because if you really knew where your meal was coming from, you could have a little dose, you could chew it, eat it, and then go onward.

But what happens is it's so easy to trick your brain and get the dopamine release to say, hey, this tastes good. It feels good, I'm gonna eat, and I'm gonna eat, and I'm gonna eat. And if someone wants to, like you're in good shape, so I don't know what quality of food you're eating. Terrible.

Right, so you're eating, but you're not overeating, and you're exercising, and you're aware of what you're eating But if you were authentically hungry Like I was hungry. I'm living in the desert. There's no other food. I'm not gonna go to 7-eleven I'm not gonna need gas station food. I'm gonna eat this like it all depends on where you are So if you were like me and there's no other food, and you want to survive, sprouts look like a Michelin star meal, right? If you have other choices, and you're living here, like, you know, Mike Posner's a rock

star, right? He could eat anything, anywhere. He went to lunch at Sweet Green here, and I swear, he brought his own sprouts in a Tupperware, and he's sitting at the restaurant because he knows that these are fresher and more nutritious, and he wants to control everything that he's eating. So when I look at the sprouting component of this, that a revelation that I had

component of this that a revelation that I had was that sprouts contain every single amino acid to form complete protein. Sprouts contain micronutrients, phytonutrients, polyphenols, bioflavonoids, antioxidants, soluble and soluble fiber. So this is magical food. You can decide if you want to eat any sprouts at all or how much sprouts you want to eat. Now, I saw that you had Gary V on your podcast. Mike and I met with Gary in New York at VaynerMedia. And turns out Gary is a foremost expert on sprouts, and he went to a facility near Tony's in West Palm Beach called Hippocrates, where they treat major chronic illness with sprouts. So people are going there, and they're feeding them sprouts for $500 a day to go eat sprouts. So the fact that affluent people can eat sprouts,

and poor people can eat sprouts, and foreign people and other cultures, all of a sudden, sprouts have not been on the map because there hasn't been any money in sprouts. So my insight was saying, hey, I am not going to go through the Juicero organic avenue experience again. I want fresh. I want raw. But I don't want to be in the business of fresh. And sprouts turned out to be like the magic secret, because seeds are shelf stable.

Like in my book, I found seeds that were 1,200 years old that still germinate. So seeds have a protective coating around them. And when you soak them in water for the five hours or the eight hours, you remove the lectins, you remove the phytic acid, you remove the enzyme inhibitors, and you trigger a germination process

that causes that seed to sprout into the most nutritious food on the planet. And you can watch it happen in front of your eyes. It's fun. It's fun. It's practically free. And it is more nutritious than anything you could buy anywhere in the world. And it's environmentally friendly.

Let's go through some statistics on that as well. Sure. So let's talk about nuts as well. Nuts have a lot of nutrients in nuts. I wanna compare nuts for a second to sprouts. Today, one pound of almonds, you need 1900 gallons of water. Cashews, one pound, 1700 gallons of water per pound. Pistachios, 1100 gallons of water per pound. Walnuts, 1,100.

Peanuts, only 300 to 500 gallons. I mean, we're talking about gallons. For meat, and we talk about meat, you're talking about feeding the crops and feeding the cattle. Beef, 1,800 to 2,500 gallons of water per pound. Chicken, 500 to 750. Sprouts, one gallon of water per pound.

Yeah. Per pound per serving. It's just unbelievable. Tell us about your kit and then tell us what it costs and then how much does it cost to get a jar like to grow the sprouts like this? They're buying the seeds from you as well? Yeah, they're buying the seeds. So what does it all cost? So the sprouter itself is $69.99.

That's the one that... Yeah, it comes with the jar, with the filter, with the collar, stainless steel filter, the stand, and the drip tray. And anything, you know, there's a big discussion today about microplastics and the like. Anything that touches the sprouts or the seeds in here, once they're activated, is glass or stainless steel.

Very important part. The sprouter is $69.99, and bags of seeds range from $13 to $50. You can get a small bag of seeds range from $13 to $50. So you can get a small bag of seeds for like $13 and a big bag of the Ultra Premium. These are the high glucoraphanin top shelf seeds. These were the seeds that I researched that they were using for making basically supplements.

And so I found them for the supplements that had the highest level of sulforaphane. So if someone wanted to treat some chronic illness and they couldn't eat a lot but they wanted the high concentrations of the medicine properties, I got those. Let's say they're not going full stem. Because I think it's going to be hard to convince people to sprout

like you all meals. Let's assume people are going to eat for lunch. Let's assume. So I'm going to try to sprout, one, because... No, you're going to sprout. There's no try. I'm going to sprout, and I'm going to do whatever I can to keep eating sprouts, because I've learned through you as a great friend and through the research, this is going to do whatever I can to keep eating sprouts because I've learned through

you as a great friend and through the research, this is going to be great for me. And I'm going to start with the broccoli sprouts. I'm one of the ones that love broccoli. And number two, it seems like the most healthy kind of sprout given the anti-cancer agents in here. How many meals am I going to be able to generate from this $50 bag? I would say, I wouldn't think in terms of meals. I'd think in terms of servings.

Servings. Right? US dietary guidelines recommends today between four and 13 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. So one bag of this will give you easily 48 servings. One pound of the seeds will give you 48 servings of the sprouts. So we're doing the math. $50. So under a dollar a serving.

Under a dollar a serving. And if you were to buy them, like the ones you bought in the clamshell, $5 a serving. $100 a serving. And if you were to buy them, like the ones you bought in the clamshell, $5 a serving. So you're basically saving 80% of the cost of buying them retail. Plus you're not using the extra plastic. Plus you're getting them on demand and they're convenient and they're fresher. And is the business model to keep buying the seeds from you? It's kind of similar to the Juicero model?

Yeah. So we have subscription seeds. But also, there was many things that I did different on here with Juicero. One is we created our app at Juicero was a closed app. Our app at the sprouting company is open app free. Whether you buy our seeds or buy our sprouter, you can benefit from the recipes, from the alerts, from the guidelines and the schedule. It's a free app, just public

service. I want everyone to sprout. The second thing is you can buy the sprouter. And if you want to buy seeds elsewhere, they work in there. So it's just open. There's no digital piracy preventing you from putting things in. The reason why probably 95% of our people buy our seeds is because they're priced competitively and our seeds are tested for pathogens, they're tested for high germination rate, and they're tested for glyphosate. So literally the endocrine disruptor, the number one used pesticide in Roundup is glyphosate and there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars of lawsuit for that. So I wanted to make sure that here people are eating this to be healthy. I wanted to

make sure that there's no residue of the toxic pesticides on them. So your seeds are different than the seeds that different consumers could buy elsewhere, sprouting seeds, similar to Danger Coffee has taken out a lot of the mold and different things as is to coffee. So this is just like this, everything that's being sourced here is designed for sprouting top shelf because this is what I wanted to have myself. So I was sourcing and really this is a mission based business because I think that sprouts create food equality, food justice, and can be the most effective defense against

processed food is growing your own food because kids will love to grow this. I love seven-year-olds growing their own sprouts. I'm excited for my kids. I showed them the kit and by the way I think that's genius. You get the kids sprouting early. It's like they come home from second grade, you put the seed in there and they grow something. I think it's genius. Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I'm very proud of this. Without showing flesh, I have over 240,000 followers

on TikTok with over a hundred million views of my content and it's predominantly young people. Is this device patented? There's a design patent on it and there's some unique parts of this that do have a patent pending on it. But my next gen, my V2 Sprouter has an issued US utility patent with 23 claims on it and it's issued in the US.

It's an issued US patent and it's pending in Hong Kong, EU, UK, and South Korea. Those those are the markets that I was most concerned with. And Japan. I think everyone listening to this show now is convinced of the benefits of Sprouts. They didn't know about it. I think they're gonna learn about it. I hope a lot of people go out and buy the product. I'm excited to try it and to Sprout.

I wanna go back to the business now of raising funding After you've had a failure. Yeah, and I want to talk about things that are Unfair so there was criticism of you For posting photos at Burning Man And people didn't like a founder posting photos of Burning Man Burning Man is this very interesting thing that a lot of people don't understand, including me when I first heard about it. And I'll just tell you a story, a couple stories, one in particular. We have a friend who's a well-respected person in the media who is in a committed relationship and will go to

Burning Man and will have sex with seven other guys. And that's what happens there. We have another friend, I remember going to this self-selected, high-ocain group of founders and entrepreneurs. It was this dinner, there were 12 of us there, and this amazing woman sitting next to me said, yeah, I'm going to Burning Man, and I just fucked 10 guys in two days,

and we did a lot of drugs. What is happening with that subset of Burning Man? I know it's not, I mean, you've heard these stories too. Say that is happening at Burning Man, I know it's not... I mean, you've heard these stories too. Say that is... It's happening at Burning Man where this is a thing. I will say I've been to Burning Man many times. I've never even had sex at Burning Man. I've never kissed anyone at Burning Man.

I've kissed people and I've had sex outside of Burning Man, just to be clear, but never at Burning Man. But you know about this. What you're describing are great stories, but it is so far from the Burning Man experience that I have. The way I look at Burning Man, it's an economy of 70,000 people where there's no exchange of money. So that's first of all, there's no exchange of money. You could have a porta potty. Like everyone has to either poop in their RV or poop in a porta potty.

And yes, there are people that have fancier RVs and the like. But if you're out on the Playa, which is huge from four miles from one side to the next, and you got to go, you can't poop on the Playa, you have to poop in a porta potty. So I swear you have billionaires pooping next to starving artists. So there's a level of equality. The other thing is the level of creative expression is beyond. I have a friend who is a aerial artist who

choreographed 1,500 drones to create art in the sky magnificent. Took him a year to prepare the show with the most advanced keeping the drone steady to within three millimeters. It's just unbelievable color, art, show, amazing as an alternative to pyrotechnics, which are more dangerous and explosive and the like. And they're investing that. The level of sculpture and art and color.

And what I found, there are people, like maybe the people that you're talking about who are having sex, they could have sex anywhere. They don't need to go to Burning Man to have sex with 10 people. I'll give you a list of seven places they could go within three miles of here to have sex with 100 people. I'll give you a list of seven places they could go within three miles of here to have sex with 100 people. Four different glory holes with the name Randy K. Come put

it in where you don't need to go to Burning Man to have that. To be clear, that's something that's not going to happen, but... I get it. I get it. I'm just saying that you don't need to go to Burning Man to have sex and play parties and the like. The art that are there and the convergence that let's say there's some people, and this is for real, you could walk through, and there's some that really like spanking people. And they're there out in the sun all day long, and they've got their hand, and they'll ask you, would you like to be spanked?

And they're not forcing you. Like, there's almost no bad activity, bad actors at Burning Man. You don't get, there's not rapes happening at Burning Man. There may be, you know, drug overdoses, but there's not like aggressive behavior in that community. But if you go, do you want to get spanked, Randy? No, thank you.

You just keep going. Someone else likes pickles, and they bring a van with 12 barrels of pickles, and they're just handing out their pickles for free. So if you get to the level, like I go, and in my camp, my gift was I talk about sprouts, right? So they build a 5,000 square foot theater, they create programming, and someone's talking about, Brock Pierce is talking about crypto there, and he's in Blue Lightning, Red Thunder,

and people are talking about different, I'm talking about sprouting, and someone else is talking about permaculture and someone else is talking about animal rescue. So people are just talking. And then there's yoga classes. And unlike going to wearing your aloe outfit and spending $50 for class, everything's free.

You can go to any class. And then like Mike Posner, who's Grammy nominated singer songwriter, is walking around with his guitar. No one knows him from the next homeless guy, except he's playing his music and sharing. Someone came up to him and goes, hey, you know, you've got a good voice. Maybe you should consider doing this for real. Right?

Real stories. So people are going there to celebrate freedom. Now, there are people walking around naked. There are all these different consortiums. But you find like, I never went into any... I never saw any physical engagement of activity in my Burning Man experience. Like I never saw any people humping on an art car, never saw that. One of the important lessons to founders, again,

I think people just don't go through the normal, easy, common sense checks. And one of them is they don't look at their social media and understand that what they're putting out is something that every potential venture capital angel investor is going to look at. I can't tell you how many times we get these business plans. They're great. And then we do the social media research.

And it's like, I can't believe you've got some photos on Instagram of flipping a double bird at somebody. Or they're doing smoking a joint somewhere. And yeah, marijuana may be legal, but we don't want to be funding people who have the stupidity of putting a joint out. And there was a company, Doug, that we were going to fund, frankly.

And again, we're doing our search at the last minute. I had the documents, they were signed on my desk, and I was just about to send them in. And someone had sent me, oh yeah, you know, this couple, they go to Burning Man. And the husband had a company we were interested in finding very talented people. So I look at this photo and the woman is basically naked.

Where this is on Instagram, almost full nudity. You could see her breast. And again, I'm a proponent of people for having free expression. If she wants to be nude, she wants to be nude. I personally did not think right or wrong, people are gonna, I may get hate comments on my social media because of this.

I did not think that that was appropriate for somebody who is going to lead a company. If it struck me in the wrong way, my guess is it may strike customers in the wrong way, employees in the wrong way. And when I looked into some of the comments, the comments reinforced some of my beliefs, which were, I can't believe a CEO of a company

who's raised all this money is basically posing naked on her social media. There were a lot of hate comments on that. Again, it's like, I can put aside my personal judgment for the personal judgment of different people. Maybe I have a one-off view and I can be convinced, all right, maybe I'm a little too conservative here. But it was the reaction from a lot of people,

one, and two, there was a picture of her smoking a joint. And I said, you know, Elon Musk, this is before he came out and smoking a joint and he can do what he wants to do, right? But I said, you know, Elon Musk, this is before he came out and smoking a joint and he can do what he wants to do, right? But I think if you have the CEO of GE or Ford or GM smoking a joint, that person's done. I love this conversation. So for one, like I'm pretty active on social media. I don't have any pictures on social media that I have any shame of or any fear of, period.

And like I have hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms, nothing that I'm ashamed of. When I was at Burning Man, right, and the TechCrunch article said, Jussero founder at Burning Man while Jussero burns, I hadn't worked in the company for six months. Right. Right? So the TechCrunch troll who wrote that article is just looking for clickbait.

Now, they will, when you're in the target of the media, it doesn't matter what you do. They took a picture of me in Air 1. They took a picture of me, you know, I'm doing a water fast, right? And today, water fasting is cool. Like it's, you know, biohackers are there. I'm doing water fast seven years ago and they're thinking it's crazy. And you know, Vice, you know, writes about that.

So no matter when they want to come after you, it doesn't matter. I go under the belief that anything that I do, I should be prepared to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or anywhere. So I'm very conscious of it. The picture of me at Burning Man was walking into the dust. There was a dust storm and I took a picture of me going into the dust storm. And no shame, like I have no inappropriate part. And like I have a daughter, right? Like I'm concerned and aware of it. But I think that the notion of where things are in terms

of judgment and people having a community. One of the reasons I go to Burning Man is there's people that I know around the world, from Singapore, from Asia, from Australia, from Europe, even in the United States, that I never see except at Burning Man. Like it's just the convergence of these people where there's no place else in the world that they converge. One of the common misperceptions that the average person has is that once you fail, you're not gonna get funded a second time.

We believe that failure sometimes is a great thing because you learn more sometimes from your failures than your mistakes. And we happen to love second time founders even after they failed. How hard was it for you to raise money after such a high profile financial failure when you were raising money for a sprouting company? There's a lot of investors that are extremely gun-shy and they are followers. So if they hear that Randy Kaplan invests, they'll want to throw money in, doesn't matter. Which is a stupid way to invest, by the way. Never rely on someone to do your own due diligence for you.

100%. One of the biggest mistakes I've made in my career. But you know that that happens. So to answer the question, I was able to raise as much money as I needed in order to do this. And I would say out of my first investors, probably a third of them were in Juicero and still funded in and they take a very mature approach to saying, hey, that was great. What did you learn? What was the issue?

What happened? Explain it. You don't try to hide. You and I are very responsive on communication. I'm pretty much like that. I respond. So there's no hiding. And I think you have to...explaining to do, like that's real.

But I think that I raised a lot less money. I raised it after I did a lot of de-risking. And I also reinvested 100% of my founder CEO salary. So I've drawn no salary from the business because I wanted it to go towards R&D or marketing or the like. But it was the hardest thing, and this is good for the founder, was for me to feel worthy, confident, abundant to go out and ask for the money, because that was the hard part. The money's there, and if the idea is there and the experience is there and the vision

is there and the numbers are there, people have money that they want to invest. Some people really like this. And some people, you know, want to just do crypto and some people just want to do, you know, AI. But there's people that really care about this. And they're like, oh, we think that this is great. I'm not going to ask you how much you raise for the simple reason that there's still the haters out there who are going to say, Doug raised this much money. So I'm not going to ask you how much you raise for the simple reason that there's still the haters out there who are going to say,

Doug raised this much money. That's all right. So I'm not going to ask that question. Thank you. Or anyone else, and I would ask that question. I do want to ask the question, what's your goal for the company? I mean, my goal is to help mitigate the consequences of toxic environment for food, diet, nutrition, and lifestyle. So my goal for here is I believe, you know, we had a great year one. 2024 was an outstanding

year, exceeded my expectations. You beat your written projections that you gave to investors? Yes. Amazing. Yes. And for year two, like now we have a whole new products that we're rolling out, new software, new upgrades, new testing, new content. I cannot wait for you to go to New York and for us to sit in a Michelin

restaurant and be able to order a broccoli sprout avocado toast and a sprout salad and the like. And so we just had a functional medicine doctor put a post out and sold like one-third of the units in that day were sold by one post from one doctor. We had another influencer, health influencer, sent out like a little note in their newsletter to 300,000 people, generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue in one thing. So we're seeing that this awareness, my biggest challenge literally is to be able to define how we can articulate this so that it's really simple that you could tell someone in under a minute and then make it easy for them to have access to try it.

I think it's great that you are branding sprouting, sprouting company. I think is a great name. I branded the term extreme preparation and extreme preparation, which means preparing 10 hours for a meeting where the average person prepares 15 minutes for a meeting that's shocking to me. When you think about that, how important has extreme preparation been to your success? And can you give some examples? I literally binged listen to your podcasts, with Dave Asprey and Gary Vee and Mike Tyson

and going through so I could understand what to expect. So I'm not coming into a lion's den and I understand like how deep you go and how much you care and how much research you do. So preparing for a podcast, because this is a major thing, like this isn't just, you know, for me I drove four and a half hours each way to come here. I'm grateful. To do this. Yeah, I'm grateful.

And how much better is this than like, I wouldn't do it on Zoom. Like I'm the guy, gets on the plane, gets in the car, goes wherever. So in terms of preparation, you know, I keynoted Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within in New York, his largest live event that he does all year. I was the closing keynote speaker. What an honor. Yeah.

It was incredible. It was incredible. I spent easily, and I only had two weeks to prepare for that. So I easily, in the two weeks, 168 hours per week, I was easily spending 80 hours a week. The equivalent of two full-time jobs. Writing my speech, rehearsing the speech, thinking about it, incorporating jokes into it, and then bringing in a voice coach. So I reached out to Tony's voice coach, Roger Love, came to LA, had a one-on-one session with Roger Love, and then I hired someone else to help me with my stage presence and

my gravitas, who is a professional actor, speaker, producer, comedian, and I had referred him to Mike Posner. And he did a great job on Mike. And then I referred him to someone else who prepared their TED talk. And I was like, God, I'm worthy of this. So then I went to work with him on this. So in terms of extreme preparation, I had 15 minutes to rock this stadium of people that are used to seeing the big guy on there. And I got a standing dancing ovation from that audience, thank you. You tear up when you say it, I can see it.

Yeah, I put in the work. And the reward from that was like countless. Like now, I mean, so many things are happening. And I, as a result of that, I got invited to Keynote, the largest food expo in the world next month in Dubai. So 100,000 people go to that show. I'm giving a masterclass on sprouting and and I'm on the big stage giving a keynote. So two things are happening.

So all of these things, you have to do the work. And no one saw the opportunity for sprouting. Literally no one saw it. Sprouting has been around since the beginning of time. And I can mark my words. And I could say this, when I wrote the Sprout book and I went to New York, like, you know, I got an in with one of the largest publishers in the world. She took my meeting.

She was like, Sprouts, like, you know, there's a few self-published books on it, like, what are you gonna write that's new and different? And I hired Oprah's recipe developer to create 40 recipes with sprouts. I hired a local chef to make those recipes and prepare them with the sprouts. I go into the meeting and I had to get in the conference room an hour early for a 15-minute meeting because I wanted to prepare everything.

And I had the editor of St. Martin's Press, Macmillan, eating sprouts out of the palm of my hand. One meeting, I got a book deal. And I'd never written anything other than graffiti on a subway train in my life. So the ability, extreme preparation, I did a lot of preparation when I decided that I wanted to write a book. I did the preparation, do the work.

There are so many qualities that make people successful. One of the qualities that I know has made you very successful is your authenticity and generosity. When I started my show, almost four years ago now, you have to build it with certain guests, right? You have a wish list of people. And sometimes people will refer people to you where you say, all right, you know,

I'm not sure I want that guest on the show. And my goal was I want very well-known people who are the most successful, or and or the most successful people in the world at what they do. And it was really, this isn't a business podcast. I don't see it that way. It's an inspirational and motivational podcast.

I have a business background, but we've had all kinds of people from the show, from music, acting, athletes, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, public speakers, motivational speakers. And someone introduced this guy named Rodney Jerkins. He said, Yeah, I talked to Rodney, he'll do your show. I said, I never heard of Rodney Jerkins. He said, he's one of the biggest music producers of all time. He's a legend in the business. Said, ah, I'm really looking for some more high profile people. And this person said, you should ask someone in the music industry about Rodney.

And so I did, we have friends in the music business and so Rodney Jerkins is a legend. You should have him on your show. I thought, okay, here you go. He's an interesting guy. He heard Michael Jackson on a song playing in a mall in Indianapolis when he was 10 years old. And he decided right then and there, I'm going to produce songs for Michael Jackson,

which he was doing when he was 19 years old. And he's produced everybody, Rihanna, Beyonce. He turned down very famous person, I'm not gonna say it was, to do SZA and produce her last album, which went to number one. Wow. And when we were done with the show, he said to me, would you like Mike Tyson on your show? And I said, obviously.

You know, yes, and I'm saying to myself, and this is on a Zoom because it was during COVID, I'm like, fuck yeah, I want Mike Tyson on my show. And I was mouthing that as soon as I hung up and I was like, Mike Tyson, but you can't get too excited because I can't tell you, Doug, how many people have offered to help introduce me to this person or that person, right?

And sure enough, I'm expecting nothing, right? I don't want to get too excited, but I can't really sleep. Mike Tyson, you know, I might, you know, interview Mike Tyson, and Ronnie calls me back the next day. Hey, I spoke to Mike, and he loved to do your show. I thought, you know, this is just absolutely insane. Tony Robbins was the number one guest that I wanted on my show. When I started my show, I ran out of the power.

As I shared with you, I was a freshman in high school. It changed my life. I've been a huge fan of his forever. And we had lunch four weeks ago, probably like that. And you were telling me organically- It's four weeks ago to the day. Is it four weeks ago go to the day? 15th, because I flew to Asia.

You were telling me organically, not a name dropper or nothing. It just came out in conversation. We're catching up with one another. You know, we met, I don't know, a year ago now. And this was the first time we really sat down together. And we shared each other's background. You mentioned Tony Robbins. And I said, well, you know, do you know him well?

Because I can't tell you how many people I, even when I posted Tony was doing my show on Instagram, oh, I met Tony here, I met Tony there, I know Tony, and you know, all these people, and I'll introduce you to Tony. And you said, yeah, I know him well. And I said, you know, he's the number one person that I'd like to have on my show. And he said, well, I know him well. And I said, you know, he's the number one person that I like to have on my show.

And he said, well, I'll call him. And I think if I recommend you, he'll do your show. And sure enough, Tony that night left me a voice memo. You know, Tony Labner is just motion Doug Evans. And you know, you're a very impressive guy. And normally, I do these things on Zoom, but he seemed like a very special guy. And I'd, you know, you're a very impressive guy. And normally I, he'd do these things on Zoom, but he seemed like a very special guy. And I'd, you know, love, love to be on the show. And sure enough, yesterday I went and I interviewed him at his house for my show and

it was a huge thing. And you know, I'm so grateful to you. You're a generous guy. We live in a world, Doug. And by the way, I've had 10 famous people, some who've been on my show, who said, yeah, I'll introduce you to Tony. Come, there's a mastermind, you know, for those people who don't know what a mastermind is. And I didn't know what it was until I got on the podcast. I think it was a mastermind is where you have all these speakers, noteworthy speakers, some are paid and you go to

this conference and you know, it could be a $25,000 Mastermind. People pay, you know, lots of money to be inspired and go. And you do learn lots of, lots of things. And it said, you know, Tony's coming here to the Mastermind. By the way, I don't think he even does that many Masterminds, but you know, you could pay $40,000 and Tony will be there and I'll introduce you. And I've never, I'm never going to pay for an introduction to someone who I want on my show.

I'm never going to pay a single person to be on my show. And I'm not going to pay. It's just something that I won't do. But you said you could do it. You did it. I'm grateful to you And I think so many people out there if you're not gonna follow through with something Don't offer to do it. I think that's such an important ingredient of our success Do it just say say what you do and follow through on on what you're gonna offer to people Yeah, and look it it takes work, right? on what you're gonna offer to people. Yeah, and look, it takes work, right? It takes work because everyone has things on the agenda,

but I believe in one of the values. I think afterwards I'm gonna send you, going back to Burning Man, what the principles are of Burning Man, and one of them is immediacy. Like literally, like immediacy, and action, and community community and inclusiveness. So a lot of values that most people like know of, but they don't live.

So for me, like, you know, the generosity, the inclusiveness, and the immediacy, like, we had that conversation. And I think what I showed you was that I was impressed that these months are happening on October 17th. We had a big milestone event at the Sprouting Company. I keynoted for Jesse Itzler at Running Man. Jesse's a stud and was also on my show. Yeah. So Jesse's a stud and was also on my show. Yeah, so Jesse's incredible. He

had me back two years in a row and I was on the stage a thousand people talking about sprouting. And then I had introduced Mike Posner to Tony and so Mike is now deep into that world and Mike is planning on being on the big stage. And I said to myself, I said, I think that I'm ready to go on the big stage and share this. And so in 2024, I spoke at Summit at Sea to 50 people. I spoke at Rip Esselstyn's Plantstock to 300 people. Then I did Jesse Itzler a thousand people. And then I jumped to over 20,000 people at Tony Robbins.

But so I had just, I was very proud and just talking about like, hey, I reached out to Tony on October 17th, November 17th. You know, I was on the big stage, just crushed it. And then I was telling you, and part of it was my auditioning to being on your podcast. But I can't wave something out there that I have a relationship, but it's only for me. So to me, I want to say, like, hey, I'm doing this. And you expressed with earnest desire that that was something that was important to you. And if this were your first episode, like if you're just some rich guy that says, hey, I want to do a podcast and can you get Tony on my podcast, it would be a non-starter. I'd say, look, I'm happy to send it to Tony, but you haven't done the work.

You're not prepared. But I felt your podcast, you have done the work. You've invested so much of your time and your money and your energy and your relationships that I felt like, hey, this would be a great fit. And I think it was a great fit. I saw the tears in your eyes and Tony's eyes afterwards, and it felt beautiful to me to be able to help someone who was extremely prepared. And I have no problem. Like, other people have asked me for introductions, and I'm like,

no, I don't feel comfortable. My relationship's not that strong. I don't think it's a fit. You know, if you ask me something else, I can introduce you to someone else, but I have other podcast people that I've been on some big podcasts where people want to go on the podcast and nine out of 10 people I've referred to this person, they've said no, and the other person they didn't even respond to. So I'm like, batting zero. Zero. So you just have to know who's got the juice.

All the people out there, I don't want 100,000 people hitting up Doug Evans to be introduced to Tony Robbins. The answer, as much as how amazing you are and how great you are, the answer is 99.999%. It's gonna be no. So you have all these random people are gonna... I have to say... After these random people are gonna contact you.

This is easy. You have to be more prepared, more experienced, more credible than Randy fucking Kaplan. So if you've got a bigger platform, you're more prepared, your resume pattern matches to Randy Kaplan or better, I'm happy to introduce you to Tony. But that's the criteria.

You gotta be Randy Kaplan or above, which is very, very few people that high on the mountain. But if you're like there, I'm happy to use my platform to do it. Otherwise, you know, no thank you. Amazing. The ironic thing, Doug, is you start your show and I wanted Tony right out of the gate and I'm glad I didn't get him because I wasn't ready. I go back, I'd be horrified to listen to my first six episodes, 10, maybe even 25.

I mean, I wouldn't, that's probably too harsh, but I become such a better interviewer and my relationships and my level of comfort. So to all the people out there, you know, it's like you start a company and it's the same thing. You know, you want to get right out of the gate. You want to Costco as a customer. That's not a good idea. And for me, I'm very grateful that I'm just about to hit my fourth year and it was a perfect time. And once again, you remember all the people that got you there. I remember we were starting our company, Akamai Technologies.

We didn't have any money. And I remember every person's couch I slept on, we didn't have any money. And I remember every person's couch I slept on, we didn't have any money. I remember everyone who did everything for me. And you never forget where you came from. And this is a huge moment for me with Tony, and I've already seen it on my social media, and people who I never thought would be on my show. Suddenly, Tony is going to be on your show. Andy Elliot just dropped

like a hat. I couldn't get Andy. We've been trying to get Andy for two years. I think the quote was, he's excited to hear your show. And it's great. Let's end the show. I always end the show with... Before you do that, I just want to use that part of extreme preparation again, because people are interested in raising capital. So some people may want that immediate meeting, intro to Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz or the like. And I would say that you want to be immediate, but you want to pitch a lot.

You want to get the feedback and you want to like not... One mistake that entrepreneurs make is that they think... They have a level of entitlement that, oh, I pitched Randy and he gave me 30 minutes and now after the meeting, I expect him to come back and give me a debrief and give me the comments and tell me why he's investing or why he to come back and give me a debrief and give me the comments and tell me why he's investing or why he's not investing and give referrals? No. You have 30 minutes with him. Save some time in that meeting, so you're not talking the whole time, to get the feedback,

like even five minutes in. What do you think? What's your feedback? What's the direction? Who should I talk to? Because you may never speak to that person again. They owe you nothing. They're not getting there.

And if they don't like the idea or they don't like your presentation, you still have time to take copious notes and to take feedback. Because to me, I hadn't raised money before. Like I was a novice. And so every person that said no to me, every nay brought me closer to a yay. And I took the notes, I did the work, and I constantly shaped myself, my pitch, my deal, my business, my model until it got correctly. And then when I did have the meeting with Kleiner Perkins, even without the demo, even without the deck, I was able to communicate because I had a command of the business and

I knew. It was literally like boom, shake, done. I get a lot of proactive incoming email on LinkedIn. Oh, Randy, I'm interested in venture capital. I'm a student, you know, could we meet for coffee? The answer, unfortunately, is no. But if you want to spend time with me 12 weeks a summer, you can apply for my summer internship program.

It's 12 weeks, formal internship program, teaching internship. I spend 60 to 90 minutes a day with the interns. We have guest speakers every week, CEO of Dell Carnegie, venture capitalist, CEO of founders of investment banks. I'd love you to be a speaker this summer, putting you on the spot. Count me in. But I'm here, founders of investment banks. I'd love you to be a speaker this summer, putting you on the spot. Um, count me in, but I'm here.

I'll do it. But, but it's, it's, and I'll give the advice, you know, that's one way to get it. And two is now I'm doing paid coaching. So if you want to sit down in time with me, you know, we can, we can do one-on-one session as well, these entrepreneurs will come in and they'll pitch and I'll say, gosh, you know, I can't even believe I'm sitting here, you know, it takes, it takes going to be a relationship where someone knows somebody to get a meeting with me. It's rare, although it happened, where I will take a cold pitch meeting, but they have to do the preparation in advance.

It's what you said. I mean, you can easily eliminate low-hanging fruit by going in for practice pitch meetings. So you can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. in advance is what you said. I mean, you can easily eliminate low-hanging fruit by going in for practice pitch meetings.

When someone comes in, and it's the same thing, when someone comes in and they say, okay, I'm coming in for a meeting, Randy, to fund the company. I may tell them in advance, and again, this is a friendly referral, I'll still spend time with you because I want you to learn. I've done well, I'm grateful, and I want to give back. But what I tell people, Doug, is that if you're coming in for a meeting with me and that meeting is intended for me to

somehow give you advice and benefit something that is going to be your baby, you have to be able to take direct advice. And I'm going to be extraordinarily blunt to the point where a lot of people don't like it. But I've had people come in and I just don't believe and say, oh yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. You don't offer me, it's sort of like Shark Tank where the judges will explain to people briefly why they wouldn't fund this company or not.

But I will tell people extraordinarily bluntly and give them advice. I've had people walk out and be like shell shocked before. But I tell them, if you don't want the blunt advice, don't come in for a meeting because here I am and I'm trying to help you. And it's sort of the same thing. You know, you have to, what you said is exactly right.

You've got to practice that pitch meeting before Sequoia when we were raising money for our tech company a long time ago, we walked in and we were just floundering. Right? And then we walk out of there and we say, okay, what went right, what went wrong? And we could see people's reactions. And one of the first thing is I worked at Sun America,

Eli Broderson, our boss, assistant to the chairman of the Forge 400 guys, one of only two people at the time who had started two Fortune 500 companies. One of only three people at the time who had started two Fortune 500 companies. And man, I was wearing three-piece suits. I had ties. Of course, I bought them for 40% off at Boone Valley when I went on sale. And then you're going to Silicon Valley.

By the way, you're in awe, right? Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road, you're there, you're like, oh my God, I can't believe I just wear Apple and all these other companies are funded. I remember we're in a suit to the first meeting and they looked at me like I was an alien. It's like you learn all this stuff. Then I remember we're there and I remember we're walking out of a meeting with, I won't even say what firm and we're gonna give you a offer to, well it was Sequoia, probably the best or one of the best VC firms in the world. I remember in the elevator on the way down, we're like, fuck

yeah, we're getting an offer from one of the best VC firms in the world. And it wouldn't have happened if that was the first meeting. I mean, it's just you got to do the work. And also, their no doesn't mean anything. Like the idea for me, like so many people, like the way I look at this is that people don't see it until all of a sudden they see it. And so it's incumbent upon the entrepreneur to have the tenacity and have the endurance to get through.

This is an endurance game. And like a lot of people have no idea. And you have to choose something that you're really, really passionate about, that you're willing to do the work for free and to make the sacrifice. So that's been a common theme for me, that I'm willing to do the work, delay the gratification, and focus on the mission first. And that way I feel great about like, literally, I went to bed last night, you know, one o'clock in the morning, got up at five, exercised, did my sprouts, packed things up, got in the car and drove

four and a half hours and got here, you know, right on time. Yeah. So, this is what you have to do. Entrepreneurship is an endurance game. And if you're doing it only for the money, you'll probably quit too early. But if you're doing it because you really believe that this will impact the world in a positive way, it's just a matter of your willing it to happen. The will really will make the difference. And there are entrepreneurs, and we know them, that they are so successful in their mindset

that they could go, you know, and you would believe and they would believe that they could go do anything. If they wanted to go do something, they could go do it. And I think there's examples everywhere. And it's the self-doubt and it's the laziness and that causes people to not get up the hill. It's the syphosis, go up the hill, get pushed back down, get up, get down. And so you have to have the mindset, like, you know, that entrepreneurship's a long journey. And you just have to be in the moment and be present to what you can do today. And so what could I do today? I'm doing this podcast, I'm doing another podcast, I've got two calls in

between the things. And, you know, that's about all I could cram into today. I appreciate you coming during a very difficult time in LA where so many people are suffering here. So another thing we should just add into kind of where we are right now. I would say nine out of nine people I spoke to said, why are you going to LA? I said, I got a meeting with Randy Kaplan.

You know what the fuck Randy Kaplan is? Like I'm going on Randy's podcast. I am not going to postpone this podcast. There's no way. And I'm grateful to you because we did talk the other day, you know, my house was and remains at some risk of being burned down. And for me, it was the same thing. You know, Doug was coming on my show and I was going to be here no matter what. And we were going to stay in Florida to try to pick up some more shows. While we were there, you know, we did Tony and then we got this show with his

amazing guy named Garrett White. I'm super pumped for that show is one of the best shows I've done. And then we said, all right, well, we can get maybe one or two more shows here. And it was the same thing. Now I committed Doug. We're coming back for Doug. And I'm grateful as one of the best shows I've done. Yeah. Thank you. At the end of every show, I conclude with a we're coming back for Doug and I'm grateful, it's one of the best shows I've done. Yeah, thank you.

At the end of every show, I conclude with a game called fill in the game to excellence, are you ready to play? I'm ready to play. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is? Believe in myself. My number one professional goal is? Professional goal is to make sprouting as ubiquitous as coffee.

My number one personal goal is? Be the best father, a husband, friend that I could be. The one thing that everybody should say to themselves when they wake up is? I am nature's greatest miracle. I was gonna ask, what's the one thing that they should say when they go to bed, but I think you're gonna give the same answer.

I think when they go to bed, they should go to bed with gratitude and they should literally make a list of not one thing. And my wife has me do this. I have to actually post it on her site. But all of my successes in the course of the day. So I have to list 20 things that I did successfully in the course of day forget about anything I didn't do but I have to make a list of the 20 successes I do I did every day my biggest regret is not being kinder to my parents

but We can keep going. I'm on. Yeah, that's a heavy one. My biggest fear is... Like literally that... Do you know what the first symptom is of what the first consequence is for a heart attack, like for heart disease. Like, the first symptom of serious heart disease is? Is it pressure on the chest? No, it's called death. Like, heart disease is a silent killer. So, like, that's the first symptom of serious heart disease is a silent killer. So like that's the first symptom

of serious heart disease is death. So I'm like, if I'm concerned with anything, it's just, you know, early death. Not scared of dying, but there's things that I wanna do. You know, so I wanna make sure I live. The most prideful moment of my career is? Prideful moment? I think when we shipped Juicero.

The craziest thing that ever happened to me in my career is? God, I think my whole life has just been crazy. Craziest thing that ever happened. Oh, craziest thing was, you know, the board asked me to step out and I come back and I was no longer employed. It's like, what? Like incomprehensible. The funniest thing that ever happened to me is...

I think the funniest thing was like when I went to the Juicero meeting without the machine, because I had sold them on like, oh, you're going to taste the best juice. You're going to have the best meeting, et cetera. And they're like, where is it? I was like, oh, TSA confiscated it. We're just going to talk today. The best advice I've ever received is? I think your extreme preparation is probably about as good as it can get.

The worst advice I've ever received is? The worst advice is, listen to the board. 10 years from now I'm going to be? Oh, I'll just be expanding, sprouting, intergalactically. If you could pick one trait that would make anybody successful, what would it be? Persistence. The most important thing that's contributed to my success is?

My heart. The one thing I've dreamt about doing for a long time, but haven't is? Taking a vacation. I really have not given myself, like, the gift of music, of vacation, of leisurely. I'm so anxious about time that I, other than my time with my daughter, everything is productive. So I don't really watch movies, I don't go to concerts,

I don't vacation. So at some point, I want to get to a point where I feel there's such an abundance of time that I could actually take some time and do a vacation. If I could meet one person in the world, it would be... It's so bizarre because I feel like everybody is accessible. So I feel like I've met the people that I want to meet. So I think I don't have an answer. I have, like, no craving to meet any person.

If you could go back and give your 21-year-old self one piece of advice, what would it be? That you could achieve your dreams if you do the work and if you plan. Like, anything is possible. can, you could achieve your dreams if you do the work and if you plan, like anything is possible. If you were President Trump, you're sitting down at the desk on his first day, the first thing you would do is? I would eliminate alcohol, eliminate processed food. You know, I would put the tariffs and the taxes on like all processed, ultra-processed food.

I'd change the farm bill and I would get more people focused on healing themselves through a lifestyle. The one question that you wish I had asked you but didn't is... How much money do you want, Doug? Well, it's interesting because I was thinking about that and thinking about the time we've gone way over the time. Yeah. And I was thinking about you and your simple life that you live and know to you know, radio. And one of the questions that I was going to ask you was your motivation.

I know you said if you're motivated for money, it's not gonna work out as a founder. I'm not sure I agree with that, but that could be a whole nother topic for two hours that we could talk about. But what are your goals for money? And if the sprouting company sells for $10 billion one day and you've created this massive market,

are you gonna get yourself a jet? I am like set for life. I work out of pure joy and pure mission. It's very, very clear that the stuff that I'm doing right now is because it's coming through me that I feel compelled that I have to do this, but I'm not doing this at all for the money. Like this is just pure, pure mission because I will not feel good. Knowing what I know and not doing it will not make me feel good.

So I have to feel good that I have to make a contribution and a difference. My last question is, are there any questions that you want to ask me? You know, what, what's motivating you? You're a young guy. What do you want to accomplish in this next 50 years? What's your legacy? I hope my legacy, my stated goal and the reason I started my podcast was to inspire and motivate people to overcome the challenges that we all face in our lives.

And my goal as I started thinking about it is I want to positively influence the lives of 100 million people. I want to do it for my podcast. I hope as my podcast continues to grow, more people will listen and more people watch it. I'm eventually going to be doing classes online. I'm going to be doing public speaking large. I'll start small like you did, like Tony did, and hopefully I'll get to a level now at some point where I'm speaking in front of 20,000 people. And I have a book, Extreme Preparation, that I'm working on. That's one. Two, I want to be a great dad to my kids and great husband to my amazing wife

and be great to the rest of my family and my friends. And then three is I want to give back to society. And I think there's a misconception about if you have money, you can do that by giving money. I think giving your time is a lot more valuable than giving your money. So, um, and all that is kind of encapsulated is my desire to make a difference and make the world a better place. Beautiful. Beautiful. You're a beautiful man, Randy.

Thank you, Adriaan. I'm grateful that we're getting to know each other. Likewise. This was awesome. Excited for your future. This is gonna be a huge hit. Yeah. I hope this show results in everyone going out,

buying a kit from the sprouting company, thesproutingcompanies.com. You could pick up Doug's book as well, the Sprout Book, it's on Amazon. I bought one, unfortunately, I didn't bring one. Doug brought one here, but I can't get into my office right now because we're evacuated. I brought you an extra one.

Awesome, I love it. Thank you. Thank you. Amazing.