The Rich Roll Podcast - Doug Evans On Food Inequality, The Power of Sprouts & Lessons Learned from Failure

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

A recurring theme of this show is deconstructing peak performance. Over the years, I've shared the success equations of. Olympic champions, entrepreneurs, actors, artists and spiritual masters -- all roadmaps to better guide our collective trajectories. But failure is the crucible for wisdom. And the litmus test of character. What happens when you give every ounce of yourself to a creation, only to see it crumble?  Destruction can be our greatest teacher. How we move forward tells us who we are. After an epic public defeat, Doug Evans was confronted with this challenge. Not only did he survive, he emerged better for it. A serial health food entrepreneur, you may recall Doug as the Silicon Valley, juice-slinging mogul behind Juicero -- -- the infamous and futuristic wifi-connected, cold-press juicer start-up that raised $120 million from technology’s most high-powered VC’s before famously imploding in 2017.  What you may not know is that Doug has always been a natural food industry pioneer. He co-founded O.G. New York City juice bar chain Organic Avenue, one of the first exclusively plant-based retail chains in the country. Now writing his next chapter, Doug recently released The Sprout Book, a primer on the power of sprouts as an ultra-food for health, weight loss, and optimum nutrition. Four years from our first conversation (RRP 221), today Doug returns to the podcast to share the valuable lessons learned from his Juicero experience -- and his new focus on getting people excited about the planet's most nutritious foods. Admittedly somewhat asynchronous with the current news cycle, this is nonetheless a conversation about a root cause of socio-economic disparity -- and how to redress systemic food insecurity across impoverished food deserts nationwide. It's about the importance of taking your health and nutrition to the next level -- critical in the age of coronavirus. It's a show-and-tell on the unheralded, superfood benefits of sprouts. The ease and affordability of growing your own at home. And the power of this practice to economically revolutionize your relationship with nutrition. In addition, we of course discuss all things Juicero. What happened. What can be gleaned from its demise. And the lessons Doug learned to better inform the decisions faced by every entrepreneur and business owner. Note: My first in-person interview since the start of the pandemic, this conversation (recorded on June 1 after conducting on site antibody tests) preceded my ability to timely schedule African American community leaders to directly converse on the historic events of the current moment. That said, I can assure you that I will be conducting several conversations with such leaders over the coming weeks. The visually inclined can watch our conversation on YouTube. And as always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If your familiarity with Doug is limited to hyperbolic Juicero headlines, I ask that you set aside whatever pre-conceived notions you may harbor -- and prepare to be delighted.  A dear friend for many years, Doug is a beautiful man. A wonderful character unlike any human I have ever met. And a true example of selfless service to others. May you be equal parts entertained and enlightened by our exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

This is one of the most important conversations about diet and lifestyle nutrition. Sprouting is everything and more. When you think about the power of consuming living plant foods, what that does to the mind, to the gut, etc. I mean, there was a point in time that if you had vegetables, you either grew them yourself or you knew who grew them. And fast forward today, most people have no idea where their vegetables are coming from. And most of America is in food deserts, so they don't even have the quality of vegetables and produce in their

supermarket. This is just the beginning, but this is truly living, enzymatically rich, fiber-rich food. I welcome people to try it. That's Doug Evans, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, this is Rich Roll. Welcome to my podcast. So needless to say, things are quite intense at the moment. The pandemic, compounded by incidents of horrific police brutality that have brought the truth of systemic racism to the surface of mass public consciousness and mass activism in a manner both unprecedented and historic. And I think it can feel like the world is spinning off its axis, but I see a necessary chaos and

great hope fueled by a nation, a world that has had enough, that is united and energized in really striking ways, taking to the streets despite the prospect of contracting COVID in order to catalyze long overdue change and doing so in a manner and at a level I personally have never before seen in my lifetime. And I think it's important to note that indeed history truly is being written as we speak. So now is not the time to be silent. Now is not the time to be complicit. Rather, this is a defining moment in which it is incumbent upon all of us to speak up, to step up, and let our voices be heard so that together we can create a better and more just

world, a world that actually lives up to the promise of justice and equality for all. justice, and equality for all. Beyond attending local protests, I am doing my best to listen and to learn. And towards that end, I'm actively booking some African-American thought leaders for the podcast to share their perspective on our current moment. On Monday, I'll be talking with my friend Byron Davis, along with Pastor Phil Allen Jr. Next week, I have John Lewis, who you might know as the Badass Vegan, joining me. And I'm also endeavoring to schedule people like Shaka Senghor, who's been on the show before,

my friend Neil Phillips, Knox Robinson, who's a past guest, and many others. So you have those conversations to look forward to in coming weeks. Shifting gears though, today, cereal health food entrepreneur Doug Evans, the Silicon Valley juice slinging mogul, you may recall from episode 221, returns to the podcast for an exchange that, although admittedly somewhat asynchronous with the current news cycle, does get to a certain particular root cause of socioeconomic disparity and unfairness, specifically food inequality. For those unfamiliar, Doug was a co-founder of Organic Avenue,

which was the OG New York City juice bar chain. And he was also the founder of Juicero, the infamous internet-connected juicer and platform that famously imploded in 2017. So if you're new to the show or all you know about Doug, our Juicero headlines, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by this conversation. He's an absolutely wonderful guy. This is a really good one about which I've got a few more things I want to say, but before we jump in, we're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices.

It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful,

and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, back to Doug. So when Doug first graced the podcast, it was right before the debut of Juicero, which for those who don't know, was Doug's startup that attracted $120 million in financing from tech's most high-powered VCs,

including Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures. But the thing is, a lot has changed since I last spoke with Doug on the show. To put it plainly, Jussero failed, and the narrative around that failure was quite vicious. And look, a core tenet of this show is human achievement. I've had Olympians and actors and artists and spiritual masters all share their path to success with the idea that it can serve as a roadmap to better guide our own trajectories. But there's also a lot to be learned from failing, from risking everything, from giving every ounce of yourself to something only for it to crumble. Because it is in

this destruction that we learn the most about ourselves and it's how we pick up and ultimately move forward that reveals character. I've been friends with Doug for many years. I've seen his high highs and his low lows up close. And I'm very happy to say today that Doug is back doing what he does best, which is evangelizing the power of healthy eating. And he's doing it by way of this new book that he just put out. It's called The Sprout Book. So this is a conversation about that book. It's about the importance of these incredibly economical yet super nutrient-dense foods, sprouts for health, for weight loss, for optimum nutrition. It's about the ease of growing your own

and the power that they wield to help solve systemic food inequality. Finally, we also talk about Juicero, of course, what happened, what can be gleaned from its demise and the entrepreneurial lessons that Doug lifted from that unbelievable experience that I think every business owner can learn from. I absolutely love Doug.

His heart is immense. His message is powerful. So without further ado, this is me and Doug Evans. So good to see you. Always a pleasure to spend time with you, my friend. We had planned on doing this podcast, I think maybe the end of February. When did the book come out? Book came out April 7th. But we were going to get together. It was in the very beginning of the quarantine era, right? And we decided we should push it. So here we are. You were the first person that said to me, I'm going to honor the social distancing. I'm going to go home and I'm not going to have any guests.

Yeah. And this is the first, you're the first in-person interview, other than a podcast that I did with Julie since February. We brought in a nurse to check temperature and to administer an antibody test. So we're both, according to this test, coronavirus free. So we can be together, although we have a long table. So I think we're still maintaining some level of social distance, but I got to tell you, it's really nice to be able to just do a podcast with somebody sitting across from me as opposed to on a computer screen.

Yeah. I feel it's so different to be in person. Like I'll travel anywhere to be with someone in person. I know, and you drove here from your compound, which we're gonna get into in a minute. But I think before we launch into all the fascinating things that we're gonna talk about today, it's important to just acknowledge this very strange moment that we're in right now. Today is Tuesday, June 2nd.

There are cities on fire right now, protesting. Now, across the globe, protests across the globe, there's a lot of social unrest at the moment. And there is sort of an awkwardness of having a conversation about anything but that right now, which we are going to do. We're going to talk about other things that I think are also, as you'll find out, tangentially related to at least coronavirus immunity, things like that. But I just wanted to acknowledge that we're in a very strange moment right now. And it's also difficult to figure out how to appropriately communicate around that. Yeah. I have to say, yesterday was the first protest I went to since I was 13 years old. And like, I was on the phone with our mutual friend, Mike, and like, what can we do?

And like, I thought about like, I need to show up. So again, another multi-hour drive to Palm Desert. And the strange thing, like in the car going there, I'm thinking like, wow, this, who knows what could happen there, right? Just who knows? So it was just something that like the world is dealing with that's just been around, you know,

from like long before and I'm far from a historian, but it's just like, I don't cry often, but I look and I'm just feeling feelings that just like no longer can just sit on the sidelines. Yeah. There's a heaviness to all of it. I found myself despairing and also feeling a little paralyzed as to what to do and how to respond to what's happening. And also knowing like this is, you know, on some level, like this has to happen in order for us to grow and mature and evolve and, you know, raise the level of conscious awareness on the planet. And it's not that I condone violence, but to provide space for those important voices to be heard is super important and it's long overdue. And we're seeing a lot of people right now who are and have

been for generations disenfranchised and muffled. And this is a tipping point right now. And I think what America will become is going to be defined by what transpires in the very short term. Yeah, this is part of history. And it's a time like we've never experienced before. What was the protest like? There was probably a couple thousand people. It was relatively peaceful, but kind of mixed, a lot of mixed race and a lot of loud chanting. a lot of mixed race and, you know, a lot of loud chanting. And it felt really uncomfortable for me, you know, to say, you know,

hands up, don't shoot. Like, because that was something like I never, you know, had to think about before or to experience on a physical level as part of a protest. So some people had some words, there were some signs, but relatively protest in Palm Desert. So it was there for, and there was curfew and there was a lot of police. There was a lot of military. There were like tanks and Humvees and other things, you know, just in the area and the helicopters. So it was very like very tense time. And it's evolving and changing so rapidly, you know, by the time this goes up in a week, things could look very different. And I think there's a sense of just precarious uncertainty about the whole thing and an

awareness and an acknowledgement that literally anything could happen right now. Yeah. I mean, the one thing that I took away is that there's nothing funny about this. there's nothing funny about this. Like there is no joke that can be uttered whatsoever under any circumstances right now. No, 100% not. And I was hearing like parts of jokes or other things and not being malicious, but like one woman had her mask on and she

saw a sign that said you know um i can't breathe and you know she's like i can't breathe in this mask and and like i'm cringing because like like her level of uncomfortability was disconnected with the fact that life and life were lost. Yeah. And so it's just there's a seriousness and a darkness that will invariably turn into light. Like I think it has to turn into light. You're optimistic. I have to be. I mean, you're a very energetic,

optimistic guy by nature. Yeah. But if anything was going to temper that, I would suspect it would be this. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't tempered by the COVID, right? I mean, I took it seriously. I honored it because people were legitimately scared, but I wasn't. But this is a whole different level from generations of oppression and unfairness that caused me to really recognize white fragility, white privilege in ways that I had never thought about before.

Yeah. One of the big lessons that I'm taking from this as, you know, look, a privileged white male is that it's not really for people like us to say that much. It's more important that we listen and allow ourselves to be open and to be educated. Right.

Unequivocally. Because I don't know what to say. But I think the things are that there are people that are privileged that are focusing on giving them more superficial, material, inconsequential things. And there's people like you that may have privilege, but that you are of service and that your voice is very powerful and the impact that you're having in the world is very powerful. It is difficult to figure out where and how to direct that right now, though.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I look at my purpose and after everything that I've been through. And ironically, two months ago, I did a podcast with Marianne deserts, because so many of the underprivileged, underserved are malnourished and their options for nutrition are fast food and processed food and refined sugar. And those things are the planting of the toxic seed that can affect their health moving forward. So that independent of what's going on with the other kind of main topic,

that's a very big topic that just needs to be addressed. And I think you're addressing that in many different ways with your work. And that's what I feel compelled to do with mine. Yeah. I mean, that was a big reason why I wanted to get you back in here, not just to celebrate the fact that you wrote this amazing book that we're going to talk about, but the manner in which this book speaks to the underlying cause of so much ill in America and across the world, which is the fact that the people who need access to improved, better nutrition more than anybody are the people that are most deprived of it. And there's a sense in

the kind of, you know, quote unquote wellness community or even the vegan community that this is a privileged lifestyle. time-consuming and simply out of reach for the average middle-class person, let alone the person who's living in a food desert or in an inner city or on food stamps or just basically trying to, you know, get through the day with two jobs and put a little bit of food on the table for their kids. And right in front of us is this beautiful solution that's been here all along. And I will admit, and we talked about this when we did an Instagram live not too long ago, that despite the fact that I'm steeped in this community and in this movement, that I myself knew very little about how to actually produce sprouts and what they could do for my health and how simple and cost-effective it is. So why don't we get into that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. What drove me

to eating and living a healthy lifestyle is my mother died of cancer. My aunt got diabetes and they chopped off her feet below her ankles. And my uncle got heart disease and died. Then my father got heart disease, died in the same hospital as my mother. And my brother has had three strokes and a heart attack and is obese. So, and that's the beginning. And I'll just stop it there

that I thought that I was genetically cursed. I'd never heard of microbiome. I'd never heard of vegan. I just thought like, oh, I'm genetically cursed. And I was 36 pounds overweight. And in a two-week period, I went from eating anything to vegetarian, vegan, then raw vegan. How long ago was that? 21 years ago, 1999, April.

And so that, I was living in dual worlds. Part of my world was working, making money. And then the other part was, how can I eat the healthiest food? What can I learn? What books can I read? What seminars can I go to? What speakers can I hear? And that was my first exposure to sprouts. I'd never thought about before. I was like, what are these little things? And I had some alfalfa sprouts and I had some mung bean sprouts. And then I started juice wheatgrass and that was 21 years ago. And in the back of my mind, I was always thought like, oh, if I'm ever hungry, if I'm ever homeless, like I wanted to be away from everybody and everything.

and everything and I want to be in nature and I want to like watch the sunrise, watch the sunset and connect with stars and not have noise pollution, light pollution, kind of smoke pollution, break dust and all those things. So I moved to the desert and I might as well have been homeless because I was living in a tent and I was an hour and 15 minutes away from Whole Foods. So this was a food desert. Yeah, quite literally. Really was a food desert. And so I went back to that thought that was planted, that seed that was planted in my head 21 years ago about sprouting. And within a month, I was sprouting a dozen different seeds

and about 50% of my calories were from sprouts. And just, I did the math and I had eaten about $12 worth of seeds. And that was like this aha moment and said, wow, like why isn't everyone sprouting? And I got criticized in my last world because a cold press juice was $7. And same price, if you bought, went to a juice bar or Air One, you'd spend $7 for a juice. But if you bought went to a juice bar or air one you'd spend seven dollars for a juice but if you made it home it was still seven dollars but if you to go buy one ounce of broccoli sprouts in the farmer's market or three ounces in the health food store you're going to spend five

dollars and i had now firsthand experience that that was about 30 cents worth of seeds. And I was like, wow, people may not be able to afford $5, but they can afford 30 cents. Yeah, my experience with sprouts, and this is also something that came up when we did our Instagram Live. My experience is going to the fancy grocery store and buying those plastic containers of

sprouts where it's literally could fit in the fist of your hand and it's freaking expensive. And you have to eat them pretty quickly or they go rancid. And so the appearance is that this is a very costly endeavor. This is a luxury to be able to eat these things. What I didn't realize is how simple it is to make these things at home and how incredibly nutritious they are for so many reasons. I think my first kind of aha moment was watching a video that Dr. Michael Greger did a while back about broccoli sprouts and how amazingly, like they're the, you know, like this is the king of the sprouts. So I started building those into my routine,

but I never, it never occurred to me to try to make them at home. Like I would just go to Arowana Whole Foods and buy them, but I always felt weird because they are so expensive and I never wanted to buy too much of it. Well, I mean, that's the amazing thing is two tablespoons of broccoli sprout seeds will yield a minimum of six cups of broccoli sprouts. So just like do that math.

It's like exponential growth in like five to seven days. to seven days. So if you're thinking one cup of broccoli sprouts has about 60% of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C and it has soluble and insoluble fiber and it's green. So it has the antioxidant chlorophyll and no rocket science required. Like you can take a glass jar, No rocket science required. Like you can take a glass jar, add the two tablespoons of seeds, add water, and then just rinse them twice a day.

And you will have your bounty of broccoli sprouts in under a week. Right, it is that simple, which is amazing. Cause I always thought, well, yeah, you soak them and you rinse them, but this is gonna be like a whole thing. I'm like, I'm just not interested. But then I saw you do it. And now, you know, this, some interesting people have cottoned onto your book and they're sharing it on Instagram. You've been reposting it. This guy, what's his name? John call it like the Jujimufu guy. He's got like millions of followers on Instagram. He's like a body. I don't know who

this guy is, but he's like- He was on America's Got Talent. Oh, is that? Oh, really? He's like a, he's super jacked. And he's flexible. He did a chair split while holding like someone over his head. So he's flexible, acrobatic. Is that what he did on America's Got Talent? Because I was like, I've never heard of this guy. He's got like 1.6 million people on Instagram, but now he's making sprouting videos and like shouting out your book. He's like a very unlikely ambassador. I mean, he's super healthy, of course, but it's been cool to like kind of watch all these people take what they're learning from your book and then sharing it and seeing some

of this stuff like go viral. Well, the thing is that at one point, if you had vegetables in your life, and maybe it's too, I'm not a historian and I cheated my way through high school. So I really don't know when, but there was a point in time that if you had vegetables, you either grew them yourself or you knew who grew them. Fast forward today, most people have no idea where their vegetables are coming from. They're getting them in the supermarket and most of America is in food deserts, so they don't even have the quality of vegetables and produce in their supermarket. So now we live in a convenience culture. So when I was living in New York, San Francisco, LA, there was always access to fresh produce, either in a farmer's market or a health food store or

supermarket. I could always get fresh produce. But when I went back to nature, and in my community, there's 600 people in 100 square miles, and there is no health food store where we live. This power of empowerment and sovereignty around sprouting was something that I couldn't believe it. Like when I came up with this like idea, I thought that it was flawed.

Like I must be missing something. And that kind of led to me, you know, calling up Dr. Michael Greger and calling up Dr. Oz and calling up Mark Hyman and Dean Ornish and Joel Fuhrman and Joel Kahn, calling these people and saying, hey, talk to me about sprouts. And, you know, I even talked to Dr. Josh Axe, you know, who wrote the keto book. So some of these people were keto, some were paleo, some were functional medicine, some were plant-based. And the thing that they all had in common, they all love sprouts

and they all had good things to say about sprouts. And that was after those, that part of my research was done. I even spoke to Andy Weil, right? Who was hard to get a hold of. And he loves broccoli sprouts. And it was just like, wow. Nobody's shit talking the sprouts.

And there was nothing. And I couldn't believe, and Juji Mufu like adds sprouts to every meal. Like he's growing more sprouts than he can eat, which is a big feat because he eats 4,000 calories a day. But he adds sprouts every meal. And like I envisioned, you talk about manifestation, like I manifested like in my mind, like there would be a guy who you'd never in a million years would eat sprouts like this was a guy who you'd expect to eat a cow alive um and um like now the guy is like eating sprouts every super sprout guy i think that that uh sprouts sprouting is in dire need of like hiring a new publicist

because in my mind, you know, at my age, when I think of Sprouts and Sprouting, I think of the, you know, wiry haired, you know, old woman who might have a penchant for the Grateful Dead, like wandering around the health food store and her Birkenstocks talking about Sprouts. And it's not that, it's like, it's not that appealing.

It sounds like, oh, this is a hippie thing. This is not gonna be tasty. And it's certainly not going to save my appetite, like as an athlete. And you're somebody who, you've helped educate me because you're just eating this stuff like all the time and telling me that you're getting full. So I've been experimenting with this because I didn't believe you. But it's actually true. Like you're getting, you can get quite a few calories, but

more importantly, the nutrient density of what you're eating is so profound that I found that it tampers my appetite when I'm eating these things because my body's actually getting so many nutrients that there's some signal that gets switched where it's like you're good. Well, here's the thing. I don't think it's possible to overeat sprouts. Even today, like if you gave me like fresh cut, like French, you know, potato wedges that were deep fried with salt, like there's part of my brain that says, no, I won't touch them.

If I have one bite, I'll end up like eating- Game over. Game over, I'll eat everyone on the tables. But with sprouts, like, you know when you're done. Like, you're just done. You'll eat as many sprouts as you can eat, and then you're done. But the insight that I had was people just looked at sprouts as a garnish. You know, maybe have some mung bean sprouts and some miso soup,

or have some alfalfa sprouts on a sandwich. sprouts and some miso soup or have some alfalfa sprouts on a sandwich. And that's when I went to this Michelin star chef in New York, Jean George. And I said, do you use sprouts? He's like, oh, I love sprouts. I said, can you give me a recipe that uses sprouts? And then I found a recipe developer who did Layla Ali's book and she did Oprah's recipe book. And I said, here's a challenge. I'm doing a book. I need 40 recipes that are all raw, 100% plant-based, that are 50% made out of sprouts. It's a tall order. And she said, are you serious? And she said, are you serious? And I said, I'm serious as a heart attack.

Will you do this? So I literally took the entire advance from the publisher and paid her to do these recipes and to like edit the book. Uh-huh. walk me through the process of sprouting like educate me about how how you do this like where do you get the seeds what exactly do you do is this really as easy as you say it is like talk to me about so i'm'm going to grab a prop. This is like show and tell. Doug brought all kinds of jars of stuff. And these, we should say,

for people that are watching on YouTube in the middle of the table here, you brought this. This is not a prop. What is this? Those are sunflower sprouts. And how long did it take for those to grow? One week.

Wow. And this was literally... I'm going to show you in a second. This is my measuring cup. So these are like? These are a third of a cup. And these are sunflower. These are sunflowers. And these are, for people that are just listening on audio, they're dark, they're black, essentially. So they look very different from the sunflower seeds

that you would get at the convenience store that are covered in salt. Yeah, I mean, I think that was another, let me get back over here. That was another insight that I had is that there's a lot of varieties. Like people think of, when I grew up, there was red delicious apples and golden delicious and maybe a Macintosh.

And now we know there's hundreds of varieties of apples. There's probably a hundred varieties of sunflowers. And that's just a black oil, organic sunflower seed. Yeah. It's different than anything I've ever seen before. And when you think of sprouts, I mean, most people just think of alfalfa sprouts. Yeah, there's so many sprouts. And the reason why I wrote the book is really for myself because I was confused as to how do you handle two things that look identical,

but have an entirely different sprouting protocol. Like the, you know, I'll walk through the sunflower sprout process. So you take those sunflower seeds and you immerse them into water and you let them soak for eight hours or 12 hours overnight. So you just put them in a jar like one of those in front of you right there. That's right. And then you let them sit. You can put them under the counter, just not in direct sunlight. And then 12 hours later, you rinse out the water.

And then you add some fresh water. And then you strain them and you let them sit like this at a 45 degree angle. And these are literally two days old and you can see how those same seeds are just starting to germinate. Right, so you see the germination here and you've got a lid on here with a wire mesh

so it allows it to breathe. And you essentially put it on a rack that kind of tips it with the wire mesh down so any moisture just evaporates out that way. Yeah, gravity will cause it to strain. And this is just two days. Two days. And if you didn't have the special wire mesh screen, you could just use cheesecloth, organic cheesecloth and a rubber band.

And so these tools were just so simple. And so you soak them. And then once they start to generate the tail and they germinate, then you can lay them out. And the modalities for sprouting, the methods of sprouting, you can use a jar, you can use a bag, you can use soil, or you can use an unbleached paper towel, or they make these sprouting mediums that are like coconut husk or jute. sprouting mediums that are like coconut husk or jute. And it's almost like the seed wants to sprout in any environment.

Like its definite purpose in life is to sprout. And so these seeds that look just like a little pebble or something are a complete living organism in a dormant state. And with a little, like in nature, they go into the ground and it rains and it's moisture, and then they sprout. In our environment, they will sit dormant until you decide, oh, I want to be able to eat these, and then you can sprout them. And I you're like i know i've heard you say um you know about protein and you don't use protein powder do you use protein powders i mean

very sparingly so this is a um green pea you can take a look at these these are this is a mix of mung beans, green peas, garbanzo beans, and it's a protein blend. And lentils in here too? Are the green ones lentils or these are the green peas? Those are the green peas. I don't have lentils in this batch. But these, you can soak them and strain them. And in three days, they're edible. It's just like that.

And one cup of those is seven grams of protein and has soluble and insoluble fiber. It's crunchy. And it will almost adapt to any flavor of any sauce. You put lemon on it. You put salt on it. You put an oil on it, you put a marinara sauce on it, whatever you put on it, this just becomes the texture that you're eating. Or you can just take handfuls of it and eat it the way that you do, right? That's basically your program. Yeah, I do that. But the reason why I did the recipes is because I'm not normal. To thine own self be true. Definitely not. Definitely not.

So I know that for me, I am definitely eating to live. I'm eating to live. Like I'm eating to live. And I realize as Joel Fuhrman wrote and many others, most people are like living to eat. Like when can I eat next? What do I eat next? And their food pornography and other things. To me, I've gotten to the point that I realized that food is a necessity. I realized that I can be prone to tripping on addiction, which is why I eliminated added salt, added sugar, added oil, because I will eat when I'm not hungry and I will overeat. And that's where like the insight of eating the sprouts, like raw sprouts, there's no compulsion whatsoever to overeat the sprouts.

Like I'm not getting off on eating the sprouts. Like I'm eating them, I'm enjoying them and then I'm done and I'll go on to the next thing. Right. How do you know when they're done? So you said three days. know when they're done so you said three days i mean part of in the in the book you know that every seed has its journey and like you can take these are really pretty he's getting more stuff out like these are these chia seeds those are chia seeds so the chia seeds will literally grow 20 times the size. And so if you think about getting your omega-3s, you could get them from chia seeds. If you soak the chia seeds and you

put them literally like on a chia pet or on an unglazed clay pot or saucer. In about a week, they will grow 20 times their size. They'll increase where right now they're really concentrated, hard, almost like the size of a poppy seed. They will grow soluble and insoluble fiber, the omega-3s, and you'll have chlorophyll. And it'll be like a little leafy green accent.

And you can eat the whole thing, the root, the stem, the leaf. Everything is edible. So why is the germinated, sprouted version of the seed more nutritious than just eating the seed itself? Like I could put these chia seeds in my smoothie or any of these sesame seeds, whatever kind of seed on my salad, et cetera. when they're in that germinated state that suddenly makes, they become more nutritionally dense and also those nutrients become more bioavailable. Yeah, I'm gonna do my best to unpack this with the caveat, not a scientist,

not a nutritionist, not a doctor. But you're the sprout book author guy. Yeah, so that's why I'm gonna do my best. So the seed itself, like if we talk about broccoli seeds, and I have some broccoli seeds here too. So if you look at the broccoli seeds, right? I'm just keeping. So the broccoli seeds, you know. I don't know that I've ever seen broccoli seeds before. So the broccoli seed has the plant intelligence

and the programming in that seed that if it's in the right environment, which is moisture and darkness, it will germinate. The amount of glucoraphanin, which is the precursor to sulforaphane, in that seed is what that is. There will be no more. But as that seed sprouts, it will increase the fiber content. It will increase the vitamin C content. It will increase the protein because it's able to transmute and transform the elements of water and air and light into an entirely more developed structure. And every sprout is the manifestation of the seed

will grow without fertilizer, without other things up until a certain point. And then after that point, it's done. Like either you eat it or you plant it in soil or add some sort of fertilizers to it because it will expend its life. So the reason why broccoli seeds have 50 to 100 times the amount of the precursor to sulforaphane

is because as the broccoli gets bigger, you're not getting any more sulforaphane. You're getting more broccoli, but you're not getting more of the sulforaphane. So in the efficient stage, the fledgling stage of the seed, so you actually, if you were just looking for sulforaphane, you could grind those broccoli seeds up, chew them, grind them, because you want to grind them, chew them to mix the glucoraphanin with the myrosinase,

the enzyme that activates them. So they're almost, imagine they're in like separate little pockets inside. And when you mix them together, that's when the mechanism activates it and the sulforaphane compound is created with like, it's a science project all happening in nature to protect the seed and to protect the plant.

I keep hearing about sulforaphane all of a sudden, like I hadn't really heard much about that. And I just did a podcast with Dr. Will Bolzewicz and he just goes on and on about sulforaphane. So why is that such an important nutrient? I think, and it's interesting, I just read Dr. B's book. Fiber-fueled, yeah. I just read the book, phenomenal. And I also just interviewed Dr. Jed Fahey, who was the professor at Johns Hopkins University, who 20 plus years ago went on a search to find which vegetable or which broccoli had the most sulforaphane. And so sulforaphane or the

precursor glucoraphanin exists in all cruciferous vegetables. So kale, bok choy, cauliflower, broccoli, even wasabi fits into this cruciferous vegetable family. So the mechanism of sulforaphane was just proven to be able to cause a biological reaction in the body that they call it anti-cancer. It's not a cancer cure. But in the case of ASD, autism- Spectrum disorder. Spectrum disorder, in that case,

the sulforaphane kind of creates the heat shock proteins. So it's simulating what's happening with the heat and causing the body to shift. So all of the research, why people are over the moon with this is there's probably 1,500 research papers produced in the last 12 months on the powerful potent factors. So there's money

behind sulforaphane. There's money behind the testing. They're doing all sorts of testing and getting very positive results that although there's no cure for autism, the most effective treatment, and this is like National Institute of Health, peer-reviewed papers, are the benefits of treating with sulforaphane. And so they're trying to figure out, like sulforaphane supplements, very expensive, like $60 for a bottle with 30 capsules but the efficacy of that is super low right that's something i talked about with dr b as well well the i don't even know about the

efficacy versus the financial inaccessibility versus just buying the the broccoli seeds, soaking them, and getting your own sprouts. And so the cancer research is the mechanism that prevents the survival mechanism for the plant. Somehow in nature, this was designed to ward off pests. And so that reaction ends up having the positive effect on the cell, on a cellular level, and within the stomach. And you've had more experts on the microbiome and the gut. this fresh, raw, living, super concentrated, nutritious, fiber-rich plant that has compounds and molecules that have now been tested, right? It's not subjective anymore. There's been enough testing to talk about the impact of these on this whole slew of very serious health issues. But the kicker, to bring it back to sprouts and not to bury the lead here,

is that if you look at the kingdom of cruciferous vegetables and the foods that are rife in sulforaphane, like broccoli is, if I'm not mistaken, if not at the top, close to the top. But the comparison between broccoli and broccoli sprouts is like a non-starter, right? Like the sprouts have something like 10 times the amount.

50, 50, 50 times. Wow. Yeah, and for pennies, you can be eating this stuff. I mean, it's such a no-brainer. I mean, literally, you can get the calories. Let's just talk about lentils for a second. I'm just shifting from broccolis and sulforaphane to lentils. If you were to take a cup of lentils and sprout them, you get two cups of lentils, right? Because they're growing, right? They're absorbing the water.

They're increasing the fiber. They're growing a tail. They're growing volume. If you were to compare one cup of sprouted lentils versus one cup of cooked lentils, and I'm all for lentils of all signs, so I'm not judging. I'm just stating the facts.

When you sprout the lentils, you double the antioxidant levels. You triple the vitamin C. So like, why wouldn't you just take water and then you could still season them any way you want, but you're getting this food that has a life force. Right. That modern science isn't measuring ways and the significance, but you can feel. I had an interview with Joe DeSena from Spartan.

Yeah, I know Joe. So Joe was living under a rock, like was not sprouting. And now on his compound, wherever he is in Pennsylvania, like he's sprouting. Sprout maniac now. He's sprouting, yeah, he's sending me pictures. I registered the domain Sproutan after Spartan.

Oh, you did? That's funny. Yeah, because like he just was so kind of into like the sprouts. Yeah, he's a closet hippie too, that guy, when you get him talking. I think he grew up, if I'm not mistaken, I think he had a vegetarian mom and grew up in a farm.

And he's been, he eats, I don't know if he would call himself plant-based or vegan, but his diet is much more plant-based than I think people in the kind of Spartan race community might understand. But one of the things that I love about this whole sprouting conversation is that it's not contingent upon any kind of diet dogma. Like you said earlier, like whether you're paleo, keto, low-carb, whatever. It's like, this is just being healthy no matter where you're at. Like, this is a good idea to build into your routine. Well, being plant-based

and being passionate about plant-based, I would invariably be, people would just assume that I was like a violent vegan, right, and confrontational. And it just got boring, you know, answering the questions, where do you get your protein from and this, and I like this. And I just decided not to go there. Like I wanted sprouts to be for everybody.

If it's one sprout to your diet or 10% of your sprouts to your diet or like Juji Mufu adding sprouts to every meal, like this was something that was accessible. And if we think about in these underserved communities where Dean Ornish in the book had mentioned that he was a consultant to McDonald's. And when they put McDonald's, they put salads on the menu. But it was $5.99 for a de minimis amount of calories. Yeah, of iceberg lettuce, basically. Iceberg lettuce. But who is going to spend $6 for a salad

when you could spend 99 cents for a burger and get more calories? So the idea that for 99 cents, you could actually have something that was chewy and meaningful and nutritious, like that's what we needed to do is to plant these seeds. So like the more sprouts you eat, this is another insight. How familiar are you with Weight Watchers? I have a passing familiarity at best. So a few years ago, they shifted to a point system in Weight Watchers. So a piece of bread might be four points.

A Snickers bar might be eight points. Sprouts, zero points on the system. So if you're on Weight Watchers, you can eat as many sprouts as you want. They just encourage it. Just add sprouts. They don't say this, and I'll be careful not to say if you want to overeat, eat sprouts, but I just said it. But literally literally sprouts are a lot of fiber, some protein, rich in vitamins, and probably, and we have to be in full integrity until your microbiome adjusts to the sprouts,

there may be some flatulation. Some flatulence and gassiness. Yeah, I mean, you hear that a lot when you're switching from one dietary protocol to the next, especially if you're going from a lower fiber diet to a higher fiber diet, or you start eating more beans or something like that, that you're going to have that problem. But you have to allow that gut flora to literally seed itself with these new foods. And there's an adjustment period. But if you can get through that, you will adjust.

And then your ability to kind of digest these things will come in lockstep. And a lot of that flatulence will go away. Well, also, if you were to mix sprouts with fermented food, like they're not selling it yet, but fermented broccoli sprouts. Like you can sprout a lot of things and you can ferment a lot of things. And, you know, how easy it is to make sauerkraut, right?

Just water and salt and cabbage. So you could start to think about sprouting to also have, as opposed to taking a probiotic supplement, you could do things in your diet to create natural probiotics. Yeah, or prebiotics, which is essentially what this is. More and more, we're hearing about the microbiome. And again, I just did this podcast with Will Bulsiewicz, who's just super bullish on sprouts and essentially plant diversity and increasing your fiber intake. Like you, people want to, you mentioned earlier,

people want to know where do you get your protein, but the truth is none of us have a problem meeting our protein requirements, but something like 97% of people are fiber deficient. We need to be eating more fiber. The science is incontrovertible. And when you look at sprouts, not only are they super high in antioxidants, they're anti-inflammatory, they have these anti-cancer properties. I mean, you could, you know, I'd like to hear more about all of these nutritional benefits, but also they're incredibly good for your gut flora and your microbiome. And the more we learn about how important that is and the interrelationship between your microbiome and your wellbeing in general, or, or, you know, how it's contributing to disease, it's becoming more

and more incumbent upon us to be paying attention to these things and trying to serve our microbiome in the best way possible. Yeah, well, look, I think it's the microbiome, it's the calories, right? It's the convenience. Like what is more convenient than being able to make food with water and seeds in days? And especially, this was a big topic during COVID,

and I can say the combination of sheltering in place and the book coming out caused the leading sprout seed companies to literally sell out and their sales have doubled and tripled of selling seeds. Yeah. I mean, a couple observations on that. First of all, when COVID hit, my heart went out to you because I can't imagine trying to birth a book into the world where at a moment when everybody's in quarantine, but in retrospect, there was kind of a beautiful confluence, not to be dismissive of COVID in any manner, but to the extent that people were at home looking for things to do. You saw a lot about people making sourdough bread.

But sprouting played perfectly into people learning about how to take care of themselves. And I think an underserved conversation in the whole pandemic coronavirus narrative is a lack of understanding about the control that we have over our immune health and the importance of taking care of our immune systems and how to do it. Well, I don't know if you read the research coming out of Wuhan of the common thread among the COVID deaths had a lot to do with their fiber deficiency. I didn't hear that. I mean, I heard about vitamin D deficiency and I've heard about all kinds of cofactors, whether it's obesity, diabetes, heart disease, et cetera.

Another cofactor was fiber and fiber and gut health. So much of this has to do with what you're eating and you know this from a level of people may not have been able to go to crossroads or to plant food and wine or to air one

but the sprouting is a open door kind of access point into plant-based that is so accessible, so low cost. And it brings back when we were running Organic Avenue in New York City. We pretty much lost money on almost every product that we made because we didn't add, we had no additives, no fillers, no processed. Everything was just 100% organic plants with high labor, high rent, and high food waste because you couldn't manage it. But when we had sprouts in a dish, it was actually profitable. It was actually profitable because we were growing them on the countertop

to be able to do that. So I think from that level of people, like I encourage people in the book and I have citations for everything. I, independent of the publisher, and I have citations for everything. Independent of the publisher, I hired my own fact checker just to check all the facts because I wanted, if it wasn't accurate, I didn't want to put that information on there. The fact that the information about sprouts, this looks to me, the sunflower sprouts we're looking at,

look like green vegetables to me. Why don't you try one, Rich? Just eat them like this? Yeah, just eat them like that. You're going to have to talk because I'm not going to be able to talk when I'm doing this. So the fact that you can have something like literally grow your own food

right and an activity some of the like i'm not doing any kind of consulting but i'm doing a lot of evangelical work around sprouting and the families like the kids are excited to like watch the sprouts grow and they don't understand like what's happening. Like how does it go from this small to this, to this? And like everything changes. It's a dynamic game where the nutrition, as you were describing, kind of varies over the journey of the sprout. as you were describing, kind of varies over the journey of the sprout. So you can actually take things if you're sprouting specifically, right? If someone really wants sulforaphane, they could have sprouts, they could have the broccoli seeds, they could consume them on day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, all the way to day seven. From my perspective,

I'm eating them for a combination of food and for micronutrients and for the antioxidants. And I want to make sure that if I'm having at least four ounces, I usually have eight ounces of broccoli sprouts a day, I'm getting like my ample dose of sulforaphane, but I'm also getting the vitamin C and the fiber. But there's a whole kind of opportunity to dig into the details because there was research that watercress had the most detoxifying impact on benzene for smokers. most detoxifying impact on benzene for smokers. So as the research is unfolding, probably every single one of these seeds, sprouts has a whole story, a whole journey, a whole kind of slew of

benefits that will be revealed. If you had to pick one, what's the best one? I know you hate this question, but- I mean, I think for food and sustenance, it would be the sunflower sprouts. And just think about this, the sunflower, that little seed, if you soak it and let it grow, you can have a five-inch sunflower sprout. If you transplant that into the soil, it can grow into like a six foot tall sunflower that is so tuned in that it turns with the sun from sunrise to sunset. And at the end of its journey, the flower will start to seed and will generate 500 more seeds. So this plant, like nature knows what to do. And those seeds can feed other wildlife.

They could grow. They could propagate. There's all of these things. So sunflowers for food and sustenance, because I love the way they taste. Sunflowers for food and sustenance because I love the way they taste. From a health perspective, the broccoli sprouts, like why I'm sure there's scientists like Rhonda Patrick and Jed Fahey and those people that are studying the work on the NRF2 pathways and the longevity and the anti-cancer and the autism part that they're

going into the specifics around sulforaphane. That's a whole kind of subsection. I just know enough like that broccoli sprouts are probably the longevity sprout and this is the sustenance sprout. And I'll add one more. When I'm very physically active and I'm working on the farm and on the land and I want heartier things, the lentil sprouts, garbanzo beans, mung beans, those are just chewy, delicious, and light. Yeah. You had shared on Instagram recently, it was a mix kind of like this one in front of me here, but it was like your protein mix. So it's not just,

you could put some combination of all of these seeds into a jar and then you have, I think you call it your protein mix or something like that. So different seeds for different purposes play around. And the sense that I get is like, just have fun and experiment.

Like it's so cheap and easy and fast relative to trying to plant a garden or something that seems a lot more daunting. Well, the thing is you can be your own kitchen gardener. You can experiment. What's the craziest thing you've tried to sprout? Oh, I've sprouted avocado seeds. What's the craziest thing you've tried to sprout? I've sprouted avocado seeds, avocado pits. So when I put that in there. That's like a thing from the 70s, right?

You put the toothpicks into the avocado pit and put on top of like a mason jar. Yeah. What I do is I just wait until i know that they're like activated because either they're going to die and rot and mold or they're going to birth and as soon as they're activated then i dry them out and then i grind them and i put that powder into like whatever i'm eating at that time it doesn't taste particularly well but like I know there's some good stuff in there. I have a thing that I really like over here. These are hard to sprout. What are these?

Those are hemp seeds. Why do these look different than the hemp seeds that I get at my fancy grocery store? Because the ones you get at the grocery store are hulled. Yeah, shelled, right? Yeah, so those still have the shell on them. And those are just like incredible. Like I will sprout those literally a dozen at a time. And so I'm sprouting those for the purpose of just getting that plant intelligence inside. And so if you sprout them a little bit and you soak them, they just make it easier to do.

Buckwheat is another very, very satisfying part because it has a great flavor. It's chewy and it's easy to work with. Flax seeds too? Flax are incredible to sprout. Like if you would have flax in like three or four days, what you normally see the little brown or golden flax seed will have a tail that's five times its size and it's just alive. And when you sprout, you remove the enzyme inhibitors and the phytic acid breaks down. So you're even getting a more digestible seed when you're sprouting it and soaking it and germinating it.

When I think about trying to meet my omega-3s, I think about hemp seeds, chia seeds, and flax seeds. So if I'm sprouting those, is there an increase in the omega-3s or a more bioavailable? Like, what is the difference? I think that you get the bioavailability. I think there's a fine, similar to the sulforaphane, I think there's a finite amount of the omega-3s that's in every one of those seeds. And the benefit of sprouting them is that, you know, I'm sure you've had like, you know, kale where the stem is so, you know, so hard and so rough

that you just want to separate the leaf from the stem. The sprouts are just so tender that there's just a very fine line between the soluble and insoluble fiber that acts as that prebiotic and just easy to absorb. that acts as that prebiotic and just easy to absorb. So I think the younger tender vegetables are just ready to eat and easy to absorb. Hmm. On the subject of trying to redress the problems incident to food deserts

and accessibility to healthy foods, we've seen quite a bit of progress in terms of urban gardening. You know, there's guys like Ron Finley out there who are transforming. Yeah. Like they're transforming these, you know, downtrodden, um, neighborhoods and revitalizing them by teaching people how to grow their own food. Um, and that's cool. And that's happening everywhere. Rooftop gardens and the like, amazing. But those are sort of land intensive by comparison to what you're talking about. Has there been any kind of pilot programs or anybody who's leading the charge in terms of education and adoption when it comes to these areas of urban blight, so to speak? I mean, on my agenda is to inspire sprouting clubs

and to be able to have the connectivity that if someone, like for example, you may love chia and you may be sprouting the chia and Blake could be the guy who loves sunflowers. And if you think on a community level, if you up your game and instead of using half pint or pint or half gallon, you use a food grade five gallon bucket, you could be making copious amounts of sprouts. And if you have four or five people in these little sprouting clubs, people can come together and share their wares and go back to an early bounty stage so that you're not having to run your whole kitchen into a sprout farm, you could focus on one level of expertise. And I think that I was working with, I don't know if you saw the video that Isabella Miko.

Oh, is that the one where she's doing the Zoom call with her boyfriend? Yeah. Yeah, we did see that. So before that, the video- She's like a comedian actress right yeah very successful comedian actress and by the way that video was banned shadow banned on instagram oh it was it's funny i liked it it's funny but it was it was a little racy but the video we were going to do before the last frame the very end of the video like put it a little bit over the top. But up until that point, it's tongue-in-cheek.

She's funny. But the video we were going to do, which was much more serious, was she volunteers in a food kitchen. And she was going to go into the food kitchen and invite me in. And we were going to teach them how to grow their own sprouts in the food kitchen. So the people that were furthest shot of having organic vegetables might have the most nutritionally packed, high volume, high nutrition on a regular basis. Because at the end of the day, food is expensive. And we didn't talk about this. I don't know if we're going to talk about

it, but I can't not mention that sprouts are the most local food you could have, right? You take the seeds and you can grow them on your own kitchen countertop. They also require the least amount of water. I mean, if you just think about how many gallons of water it takes to prepare one pound of beef, what's your latest research or data point on that? On what specifically? One pound of beef or one hamburger, how many gallons of water? Oh, I mean, I don't know what the stats are off the top of my head, but it's- Thousands.

Yeah. Thousands. So this is from the environmental perspective, it's local, it's organic, there's little waste and it's the least amount of resources. It's the anti-GCero. Yeah, it just is. It just is. Which I do wanna ask you about. Sure.

Not right now, I want to continue this conversation. But I think that the challenge is going to be with education and adoption in the sense that people can wrap their heads around like, okay, I'm growing tomatoes. I know what that tastes like or fruits and vegetables and things like that. But you're asking a community of people that, you know, is, is operating on a very low budget and probably eating a lot of fast food and whatever bags of chips that they can get at the corner bodega to start, you know, eating something that is, um, not only relatively foreign and considered to be a garnish and something you would tolerate,

but not actually look forward to. And now eating that like is basically like snacks and is a larger portion of a meal. Like that's a tough sell. I mean, I have to tell you. You know what I mean? Come on. I put my phone down.

I could show you a video of this obese woman who was a cleaner for one of the houses out at Wonder Valley. And she'd always be hungry and just didn't plan to bring food to work, right? So she'd always be hungry and just didn't plan to bring food to work, right? So she'd always be hungry. And my refrigerator either had fruit in it that cost me a bloody fortune at the farmer's market once a week or sprouts.

So I would always just hand her sprouts. So I'd say, put your hands out and I'd pour in one cup, two cup of sprouts. And now she has four kids, single mother. I gave her two sprouting jars, some seeds, start her off, and now she's sprouting. And I'll show you the little video after. She's like eating the sprouts with no flavoring no nothing and like she's a her body is adopted and she's craving these healthy foods

that's pretty cool so you take her you take juji mufu you take chef jean george you take these other like um guys who you know dr b who you just you know interviewed you know who's a medical doctor and promoting it that this sprout consciousness these seeds are being planted and this is is something that, and I told you this in our Instagram live, like this is something that is like we've all been sitting on. And this is not a magic pill. Like everyone wants the magic pill. You know, they want the vaccine.

They want someone to solve their problem for them and if someone were to sit and most people just because they're and this is all about the equality being where I came from and I spent time in the military where I was an outcast in the military and I seem to be an outcast in most places where I go, but-

Not in my house, Doug. I feel very at home in your house. But in the idea that if you take the time to message to these people and to talk to them, it's rational. And if it's rational, if it's accessible, like I'm not, like there are things that taste bad that you develop the habit for. And I know you've openly spoken about alcohol, right? Did you like the taste of liquor the first time you had it? Not initially, grows on you pretty quick though.

Okay, I think sprouts will authent It grows on you pretty quick, though. Okay. I think sprouts will authentically grow on you pretty quickly. And grow in you. Grow on you and in you. And in your house. Yeah, and take over. And by the way, this green is very good for the house. Air quality in the house, indoor air quality.

Where do you get the seeds? Like if somebody's wrapping their heads around like how to begin, they're like, all right, well, I got to get the seeds. How do I start? Mason jar seeds. I mean, you can buy these. I'm sure there's all kinds of fancy kits and racks

and things that you can find online, but just the basics. The basics, the very basics, any Mason jar with cheesecloth, I prefer organic cheesecloth is the main sprouting equipment. You don't need a fancy rack. I use, for the amount of jars that I have juggling, I use a bamboo dish drying tray that I spent $20 on,

and I can hold 10 jars on there, and it's at the perfect angle for emptying those. And then on the seeds, what I look for when I buy seeds are organic seeds designed specifically for sprouting that have been tested for pathogens and that have a high germination rate. And those are like my four criteria. But now companies like sproutman.com, all their seeds meet every one of those criteria. True Leaf Market, which started selling wheatgrass kits 20 years ago and now evolved where you can buy seeds by the truckload,

their brand Handy Pantry is organic seeds designed for sprouting. So you don't want to just go to the grocery store and buy some dried black beans and try it that way. There's a specific type of seed that... When you say made for sprouting, what does that mean? How does that differentiate from what you would find at the grocery store? It's a great question. The sprouting seeds are the freshest seeds that have been handled with the most care. And this like the black beans

that might be in the bulk bin in the health food store may have been who knows how old and where they came from, and they will have the lowest germination rate. And the problem with low germination rate when you're sprouting is that they can yield to mold and they're just not going to be good. If you're cooking them, it just doesn't matter. And if you're planting them in the ground, it doesn't matter. So that's where it's important. But the difference between today and when I started to write the book two years ago, it's like the market is just growing, no pun intended. It's just growing and it's becoming easier. And now I'm even seeing

in health food stores, packs of organic sprouting seeds and sections. One thing that you do have to be somewhat mindful of is making sure that you don't let them go rancid, right? Like they can become toxic if they sit around for too long. right like they're they can become toxic if they sit around for too long i i would say that um someone asked that in a comment to juji mufu and said oh i hear that sprouts can have blah people think that and they're it scares them off from doing this because they don't want to suddenly make themselves sick yeah and i i think that most instances, and there's probably the number one cause of foodborne illness in the country is chicken. And they actually ship chicken. The legal limits of salmonella on chicken is they're actually allowed to ship chicken with salmonella on it

because they can't not, they're just too hard to deal with it. So if you think about foodborne illness from chicken, dairy, fish versus vegetables, there's almost no comparison. And the amount of instances of foodborne illness from sprouting at home, like I've never heard of it. And I think that if you're doing it on your own, like if they go bad, you will smell it and taste it and you'll have a natural reaction to it. So I think that

reaction to it. So I think that it's important to pay attention to your sprouting, but I don't, I'm not the least bit worried. There are people that may have concerns about specific sprouts and other levels. And if they have issues, you can explore that with... And what's your feeling on the lectins? Don't get me started on that. That's a whole other rabbit hole that we could go down on. There's a lot of fear around lectins. There's a certain particular doctor who's made a lot of statements around that

that have scared people off from eating foods that are healthy and should be part of everybody's diet, like beans, which is the staple of every blue zones place like that. But I know that you talked about lectins in the book specifically, and there are people that worry about that kind of thing. There's a lot of YouTube videos and sort of information swirling around on the internet. So why don't you put matters to rights on your perspective? Yeah, my perspective is that when you sprout legumes and you – did you say legumes or legumes? I don't know.

I say legumes. Legumes? Probably legumes. How proper do we want to be? I don't want to I say legumes. Legumes? Probably legumes. How proper do we want to be? I don't want to be proper at all. So if you're sprouting legumes, some people, if they have an issue with legumes, don't eat them. But you'll know. But I think that sprouts are the easiest.

Like evidence of this becoming mainstream. Katie Wells of Wellness Mama, huge Sprout fan. And literally, we did an interview and I did her podcast where she's recommending Sprouts to young mothers that are birthing, which are probably the most susceptible people to dietary parts, because they're breastfeeding and they're taking care of things.

And people ask her, are you concerned with this? And no. So I think the fear of one case being blown out of proportion to kind of throw out all this good stuff to keep people in the system. Have you been to Burning Man? Never have.

So I only learned this after being a burner for a while, what it meant about Burning Man. It's like the anti-system. It's against the system. And I talk about my plan for this burn, which isn't happening this year, was to bring in sprouting seeds and do a sprout camp where that would just, like that would be the gift, turning all these people on to sprouts and it would be the greatest leave no trace item. Because people bring in truckloads of food and packaging and things and garbage

and they have to take them out. So the only service that Burning Man provided was porta potties. So you bring in your seeds, you sprout them and you actually will leave no trace and be able to leave without packaging. So there's so many things about sprouts on the nutrition side, on the packaging side,

on the environmental resource side and on the nutrition side, on the packaging side, on the environmental resource side, and on the brain. Like, you know, when I think about my brain today, I'm going to be 54 years old in two weeks. I've never been sharper, clearer, more energy, more discipline, because there's no processed food. I'm eating the things that I think that my body is just jiving with. Yeah. Well, you look great. I said that the minute that you walked in the door and I probably saw you like, I don't know, six weeks ago or something like that. And I know that you've been running a

lot and you've been wearing the Vibram five fingers running out in the desert and you have a nice color to yourself and there's a brightness in your eye. Like you are, you know, certainly if nothing else, like a living embodiment of, you know, healthy lifestyle. Like your energy is infectious. You have so much enthusiasm for this lifestyle and the things that you talk about and you talk about it so eloquently and beautifully. And you are the ambassador that we need.

Like, how are we gonna clone Doug Evans so he can go into all of these communities and espouse the, you know, revolutionary benefits of, you know, eating this way? I mean, you have to plant a lot of seeds, Rich. The seed metaphor just keeps circling back here. And look, I think it makes sense. And, you know, if you see, like, you see, I've been on Instagram for a while

and I didn't engage, I didn't do things. But now, people ask questions, I'm responding to the questions. The most amazing thing is I'm learning by having to think through these corner case examples and expanding my sphere from the community of the collective intelligence. And the fact that now all these diverse range of people are now sprouting and it resonates with them, that's it. So I think, how do we do it? It's like one person at a time. Like I'll engage in a conversation with one person online or physically or at the farmer's market. In the Joshua Tree farmer's market, there's a little couple that sells microgreens and they're now selling microgreens and they're

selling my book and I'm giving them every week, I'm giving them ideas of what to do to bake it, make it easier for them to share the consciousness. And people are like buying the book that I never, like, it's so strange because it was hard for me to write a sentence, like having barely gotten through high school, writing a book, like I, you know, for virtually no money, like writing the book and having that part was something that was missionary. And it's got gotta be incredibly gratifying when you see people that you wouldn't suspect would be interested in what you have to say, like cottoning onto it and sharing it online.

It's very cool. I mean, the idea, and I had spoken to you that I met Marianne Williamson. Right. And I'd listened to Return to Love. I had read A Course in Miracles and her ideals. And she had talked about reparations as part of her policy. In one part, I didn't feel like the Sprout conversation would pique her interest. But the other part said,

I think this is so important that, you know, can I infect her consciousness, you know, with lighting this up for Sprouts? Like, is this important enough, you know, for her to take seriously? And now I'm seeing like this, you know, for her to take seriously. And now I'm seeing like this, you know, and I'm saying this, knowing where we are today in the world and what's going on. This is one of the most important conversations that people can have is about diet and lifestyle and nutrition. And I don't know how

many of the people on your guests, on your podcast have talked about that decision of what you put in your mouth and how it affects your life. And if this could be something for literally pennies a serving, dollars a day, to be able to up the nutrition and level the game. And if people can have better memory, better energy, better fit,

because there's all this unconscious bias. There's all of this kind of prejudice and limitations. And I have a- And tribalism. Tribalism. And this is unifying, like people around food and collectivity. But what is the level of unconscious bias

around people that are overweight and obese? And it's just another form of discrimination. So this is, I think, plants bring people. I could tell you the woman who started iVillage, I forgot her name, and she had been a long-term vegetarian. And then when she took the company public, she started to eat meat.

And she said, I need to eat meat in order to fend off the toxicity of the public environment and all of these other people. Then she resigned. And then she went back to being a vegetarian. Like the idea of the toxicity, you know, of the aggression that I find I'm a much nicer person.

I don't get, so I was trying to understand what you were saying. Basically, you're saying like an order, she felt like an order for her to kind of compete in this you know clawing world of masculine you know corporate executives that she had to eat meat to like she had to eat me to be at that level of consciousness yeah like you know she she went like she reverted back to more primal survival. I didn't fully get that, but it was something that I just became aware of.

And then afterwards, she went back to eating plants. So I think that to go back to the bigger question you asked, how does this happen? It's one person at a time. It's literally having conversations and building a collective consciousness. Like at some point there's, you know, kale came onto the scene, right? And kale is no more healthy than collard greens or chard, right? It does have- Yeah, but it became the thing. It's so interesting that that was the one that got selected.

Yeah, and Brussels sprouts became a thing, right? Did you see the Brussels sprouts thing? Not like kale though. Yeah, I don't know. Who are these publicists pulling the levers behind? What's going to be the thing? There was an artificial organization that I talk about in the book. What?

A woman kind of created the National Kale Growers Association and launched PR and did all this stuff around kale as a passion project. But it wasn't. It was like her project, but it wasn't. It was like her project and it ignited. And I think that, you know, sprouts have been around for a really long time. My pitch, I pitched one publisher in New York and I made the recipes and I brought her some seeds

and there'd never been a book on sprouting from a major publisher. I mean, this is like, so all these things were. And now I think this is the time for sprouting has come. He said it here first, my friends. Well, listen, look, undoubtedly we're in the midst of an insane health crisis right now. Obesity rates, cancer, diabetes, heart disease,

all of these things are escalating rapidly, childhood obesity, et cetera. And it's creating all these downstream health impacts as well. And we're all well aware of the fact that the people who are most at risk for having severe cases of coronavirus are the people with sort of these co-factor health problems, comorbidity issues. And so now is the time, people, if there was ever a time now. And it's not about – what I like about this also is that it's not about what you're removing from your diet. It's about building something in that we can all unite around that doesn't have anything to do with tribalism or whatever kind of like worldview or

particular, you know, diet proclivity that you happen to adhere to. Yeah. I mean, I'm done with having conversations about telling people what they shouldn't eat anymore. It's just, I just don't have one more breath of energy to do that. Like I'm done, but I will tell them to eat sprouts. And you have. Can we step it back a little bit? Sure. So we've known each other for many years.

I think we met around 2011 or 2012, something like that. Yeah, with John Joseph at Jivamukti Cafe. known each other for many years i think we met around 2011 or 2012 something yeah with john joseph at jiva mukti cafe was it at jiva mukti or did we meet at the seed back to the seed thing right like oh yeah we met there at seed conference in new york maybe but i remember walking and you were going to meet with john joseph and then we went there and had dinner i think oh yeah i think you're right i think you're right in any, we've known each other for many years. Interestingly, we have friend circles that intersect that I continue to learn that you knew people that I know.

Like you just posted about Jesse Itzler. I didn't realize that you went way back with Jesse, too. Oh, yeah, he's OG. Right. We've been friends for a long time, and I've watched you through a portion of your Organic Avenue days and was certainly there throughout the whole Juicero adventure. The first time that you came on the podcast, I actually – for people that are newer to the show, I went to the Juicero headquarters in San Francisco. Well, first of all, you invited me out to the facility in Los Angeles, this gigantic place that you were just building out, and then I went and visited you in San Francisco. Well, first of all, you invited me out to the facility in Los Angeles, this

gigantic place that you were just building out. And then I went and visited you in San Francisco. I was in the Juicero offices the evening just prior to you announcing publicly what you were doing. And there was going to be this New York Times article coming out and you had board members there and there was a lot of excitement and activity and we carved out an hour and a half in your office to bang out a podcast. And then Juicero was birthed into the world and you went on this crazy roller coaster ride of an adventure with some pretty high highs and some pretty low lows. And I've talked about this with other people on the podcast since, but I love you, Doug, and I always, I believed in you and I still believe in you. And I've talked about this with other people on the podcast since, but I love you, Doug, and I believed in you and I still believe in you. And I think that there's been a lot of misunderstanding about what went down.

And I wanted to provide you with the opportunity to talk a little bit about that experience. Because when people think Juicero, there's a certain association that comes with that, but that's not, like most things, that's not really the full story. Yeah. So one of the things that we live in a society where everyone is focused on money. is focused on money. And so for me, when I came up with the vision for Juicero, which was hardware, software, sustainable packaging, fresh supply chain, farm fresh produce, nutrition protocol, and having an integrated solution, I did that because I wanted people to have accessibility to more servings of fruits and vegetables. So US dietary guidelines said seven to 13 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. The average American was consuming less than one. And I knew that people who bought a home juicer

were using it once or twice a month, but people who were using an espresso machine were using it once or twice a day. And so having spent 10 years of my life making juice, I knew a lot about how to make juice and I used dozens of different juicers. So I put my kind of head around, could I make a juicer that was fresh juice, which everything that was in a bottle wasn't fresh. And I didn't believe the HPP and the pasteurization part,

hot pasteurization, cold pasteurization, wasn't fresh. And being like who I am, energetically, I wouldn't drink those juices. So I wanted my design criteria was, how do you have a fresh juice on demand in two minutes? So I built a prototype with a welder that was doing kitchen equipment on the corner of Bowery and Canal in Chinatown.

Okay, where I could barely communicate with them and they built me a first prototype or one of the first prototypes, which was literally a hot water bottle that we were inflating with an airbrush compressor to push two cutting boards together to create the force because you needed a lot of force to extract juice. And if you were to go to any cold press juice shop in the United States, maybe around the world, I haven't been around the world to see them, the way you make cold-pressed

juice was you take produce, you dice it, slice it, chop it, shred it to create like a slurry, where there's chunks of in it, but you have to open up the cellular walls. And if you watch the medical medium telling you, how do you make celery juice without a juicer? He tells you to blend it and then put in cheesecloth and wring it out to make your juice. So that's just how juice was made. The insight was if you took the produce, you put it in the bag, and then you put it in another bag, then you put it in the machine, you could press without making a mess.

And so to do all that was a big deal. So I made prototype after prototype, and then we realized that this was much harder to do than we thought. Like there were so many pinch points that someone could get hurt on in the machine. Like if, you know, you have all this force. So we had to design the machine so there's no pain points. And the original machine was like the size of a television. Like it was just big and that wasn't a consumer product. So we just had to design it smaller and smaller.

So fast forward, the reason why people funded the business because it really was the freshest, most delicious juice that you could have. It really took two minutes. And it really worked. But in order to make that magic, you needed to have a fresh produce supply chain. You needed to make the packaging. You needed to do the distribution.

You needed, like, I didn't want a Wi-Fi connected machine. That wasn't my vision. I'm not a millennial. I didn't want that. But in 1997, when Adwala had people die from drinking raw juice, I didn't want to risk anyone ever getting sick from having a raw product. So the overhead that we would have to put around protecting someone from consuming, because we live, I don't know, like when the last time you had milk in your house, for me, it's been years. But no one believes expiration dates. So people would go, they'd do the sniff test.

And then if it's sour, they'd throw it out, and if it wasn't. But how can you determine if produce was fresh when it was in a sealed packaging that was opaque because the produce was sensitive to light, and you put it in the refrigerator? There's no difference between the fresh pack and the old pack. So the Wi-Fi enabled aspect of it, setting aside the bells and whistles of the wired household or whatever, was simply to be a check on the produce to make sure that it

was fresh, right? It was a way of sort of blockchaining the supply chain to make sure that – and if it wasn't fresh, the thing wouldn't press. Wouldn't press. But the thing is – here's the thing. So the narrative that got spun is here's a guy. He comes to Silicon Valley. He raises an ungodly amount of money from some very important people that he apparently hoodwinks into this vision of creating a juice machine, which is $700. And then you got to subscribe and get these packs. And they're like, I don't know,

what are they? Five, $7 a piece. This is like the ultimate in Silicon Valley being checked out from where America's truly at and what people really need. And it became this symbol of excess and so much so that people were cheering for its demise. And it became this like meme, right? Like where the schadenfreude was essentially unparalleled and all of that got directed at you being the brainchild of all of this. And it began, I would say, and we've had many conversations about this, but I would say that it began with the publication of that New York Times article

that came out the morning after we had our first podcast that spun you in a certain light. And you and the team at Juicero were never able to gain control of the narrative. And that narrative that began with the New York Times story just spiraled out of control and began to build and build and build until it just became impossible for you

to even tell your version of the story. Yeah, I think many mistakes, and I told Greg one of the mistakes, but one of the major mistakes was ever, ever telling anyone how much money we raised for the business. Because if we, you know, people, there are $5,000 coffee makers or $15,000 coffee makers. There are Prada bags.

Like people fly first class chartered air, private air. People buy, you can buy a Hyundai or you could buy a Rolls Royce. So people choose to use their money. And when Starbucks opened up their new juice plant for Evolution Fresh, they spent $100 million. They couldn't even get a press release out. No one cared.

So it was just the fact that people knew how much money we raised, which is a lot of money, but we were doing a lot of things. The R&D and the tech was pretty heavy, but a lot of that went into the supply chain. Like, how are you going to, like, what are the deals that you're making with all of these farms? Like, where's all this food coming from? How is it being shipped? Like, the logistics you going to, like, what are the deals that you're making with all of these farms? Like, where is all this food coming from? How is it being shipped? Like, the logistics of all of that are a huge part of the longer-term business that you were mapping out that I don't think people truly understood. And the second thing is the machine that cost $700 was the first iteration. Like you had already, you had showed me designs for the newer version, which was meant to come out, you know,

basically shortly after the company got shuttered. That was like half the price that pressed, like, I don't know, like 30 or 40% more juice at a much cheaper price point. Like there's an economy of scale here that had this thing been given the runway to play itself out, you would have arrived at a place where the press would have been, you know, price effective and all of these things would have made much more sense, but

you couldn't get to that point. I mean, there's so many mistakes. I made so many mistakes and I own all the mistakes. I love the plant that we had in LA. It was 111,000 square feet on four and a half acres. And we had a choice. We could have been in a 10,000 square foot plant, a 20,000. And this plant was a food processing facility that was already built. And it was all refrigerated and it had floor drains and it had FDA certification and it was LEED Gold certified and it had solar. And so the Silicon Valley mindset is you have to be thinking about scale. have to be thinking about scale. And so when you moved into that operation, then that was capable of producing a million packs a week. And we were producing 50,000 packs a week, it would have been 10,000 square feet. And so my limited mindset couldn't imagine the thing not growing at the pace it was going to grow. I knew from my experience before how difficult it is to move plants.

It's just really difficult to set up all the systems and the food safety and to move plants. But in hindsight, if we would have been in a smaller plant without the robotic automation and the larger scale things, and we would have had guys, men or women women in Tyvek suits with ice cream scoopers filling the packs with heat sealing would have been the better thing to do for version one. And so I didn't have the ability to do the calculus that said, okay, we're only going to do a thousand versions of the first one. It's only going to be here and no one will know what it costs. There'll be no press release. There'll be no things. We'll just work it. And then that would have given us time to do version two. So people don't know this today

on your product. Uber is losing $11 million a day, right? $11 million a day, but they have $4 billion or so on the balance sheet, so they're able to do that. So the Silicon Valley part is you have to think big. You enter that spectrum, you have to think big. And if you make a mistake, it's unforgiving. And so the media of like Bloomberg writing an article that you could squeeze the pack by hand. Well, that was the nail in the coffin when people were squeezing it and then people were making YouTube videos about that.

So what happened there? Because technically you could squeeze, if you squeezed it hard enough, you could squeeze it out. Well, hard enough and long enough with a technique to do it. And I'm happy to show you a video of like a football player squeezing it, a model squeezing it. It was a rigorous two-minute part. But that would be like saying you could take a Nespresso pod, pour hot water over it and get coffee and you don't need the Nespresso machine. So the idea of that you could squeeze the pack by hand is like, that's just how juice was made. But the experience was, in your household where you had multiple people juicing, using the machine was easy.

You press the button and it does the work. And if you had to squeeze the pack by hand and do it for the two minutes or so, then people wouldn't use it. And the best example that we had was after the Bloomberg article came out, the company said, hey, if you want a refund, if you're unhappy, if you feel like you were duped, send back a machine, no matter what you paid for it, when you bought it, we'll give you 100% refund. And less than 5% of the people sent back their machines. 95% of the people continued to use their Juicero 9.2 times a week. So all metrics, I mean, this is a crazy thing for me to look at, but all metrics, other than the fact that the business is out of business and it's gone and it's sad, We sold thousands of machines.

We sold over a million packs and people who had the machine loved it, but everyone else hated it. Yeah, people that didn't try it or use it just simply made fun of it because it was the easy thing to do. And I can tell you when we had it, like I was drinking tons of green juice all the

time. And I don't like, I make smoothies now, but I'm not getting out our clunky juicer and making juice. Like I just don't, I don't do it. And that was really the, the motivation behind this as Mr. Juice guy yourself who, you know, created Organic Avenue, co-created it, you know better than anybody that it's a cumbersome process. And the whole idea here was to make this seamless and easy for people so that they would be ingesting more healthy foods. Yeah. And from my perspective as an entrepreneur,

many aspects of the business failed, just failed. I mean, that's the fact. From others, we did great. Like the product worked. It really worked. It did what it was supposed to do. The messaging and the communications was like terrible. You guys never controlled the story.

That was my whole thing. You never were able to get out in front and dictate the message that you wanted people to hear about what you were doing. You were always reacting to some news article or something else, something that somebody else was saying. Well, and it was unprecedented, like the amount of vitriol. It was intense. It was like, you know, like the amount of vitriol. It was intense. It was like, you know, like, you know- I can't imagine, you know, what it must have felt like

for you to be on the receiving end of such a tirade of, you know, hypercritical news. I mean, it's almost like, you know, up until eight days ago, the entire conversation was about COVID, right? And now the entire, like no one's even talking about COVID. Like people are, I was at the protest, less than half the people had masks on yesterday.

So conversations shift. When the article came out, the Bloomberg article, the company, and I was no longer CEO, which was another mistake that I made. I never should have turned my baby over, but it's my mistake. No one put a gun to my head. Not at that point.

So, but when the article came out the top crisis management pr firms um that money could buy said it'll pass and this was the top advice and the then ceo you know was responding with the fact that oh okay, okay, just lay low. They'll go pick on someone else the next day. But the perfect storm just led into an avalanche. And then even though the company, I mean, this is crazy. The company was still growing. The products were still selling. Like no, this wasn't like Theranos where they were doing false finger pricks with fake tests. The product did what it was supposed to do. The fact that there were alternative ways, I could wash this shirt in my kitchen sink with less soap, less water, and faster than using my

Whirlpool washing machine. But no one's protesting Whirlpool. That's a good point. Right. Other than not making public the amount of money that was raised. It's already public. It doesn't matter. No, I know now. I'm saying if you could have done it again,

what are the things that you've learned that you would do differently other than like the press release about the venture raise or stepping down as CEO? Like as a serial entrepreneur, a seed entrepreneur, I'm going to call you now, looking back on this adventure that you've been on, I mean I'm sure it's littered with lessons for people that are watching or listening who are on their own entrepreneurial journey about what the landmines are, what to look out for, what to avoid, what to focus on. I mean, few people have raised that amount of money, sort of been celebrated by Silicon Valley and then basically vilified.

Like the high highs and the low lows, I think, are instructive. I mean, it's so many. So I think for one, like I was operating like my hair was on fire. You were a maniac. Like I remember visiting you in San Francisco and it was like, I don't think you were sleeping. Or like if you had an apartment, you never went to it. You were just literally on fire 24 hours a day. And that being on fire did not get the best results from the team.

Like Silicon Valley operates in these sprints and people are working. But when you're working that fast, you don't get a chance for the organization to really learn and take over. And you don't solve the problems in necessarily the most cost-efficient way. the most cost-efficient way and you're making rash decisions because there's some target date, because the money will run out and you need to do your next round and you need to hit this part, that the structure is really designed for grand slam home run or wipeout. So if I were doing it again today, I would have gone a lot slower and would have redefined different parts and say, oh, well, okay, in the first year, we'll do 1,000 machines. They're only going to go local. We don't need anybody in PR and marketing. I mean, I think we had like a six-person marketing team, right?

And, you know, we were a local product. It was only available in California, but we had national press, right? So, like, we weren't doing national marketing. But if we would have just gone slower, right, still working with a good intense base, I think we would have made different decisions. Not having a big plant.

Why would a startup need to recruit the president of Campbell Soup to come from a billion dollar operation to a company doing $100,000 in revenue? Why do that so just the focus you take you know to do things like that were were were you know huge the the thing about um going b2b versus b2c our product did both. And in hindsight, it was expensive for a consumer and too inexpensive for a business. So had we focused on a more robust machine just for businesses, all of the... And that's where we were towards the end when we were in Whole Foods and we were in La Panne Quotidienne and we were in the Jean George restaurants and all the parts where people were able to get this exquisite product. I mean, we were in the top restaurants in New York and L.A., and you could buy it by the glass.

and you could buy it by the glass. Yeah, it seems in retrospect that a smart move would have been to create a premium version of the machine that looked beautiful, like a beautiful espresso machine that would allow the customer when they were visiting that restaurant or that retail outlet or whatever to buy their very fine juice. And people would look forward to that.

It would be considered like this luxury item. And you could perfect your systems over time and slowly and organically create that consumer demand. So by the time you had a consumer-friendly, cost-affordable machine, there would be a huge amount of people ready and willing and excited to buy something like that. Yeah. I mean, only two years after we started the journey towards a consumer did I interview a former founder, executive, a board member of Keurig.

And the original Keurig machine was $1,500. And today it's $99. So I think that that's another just strategic play. But I'll also tell you that a B2B juice machine back end that would be in supermarkets, non-consumer product, not fundable in Silicon Valley. Right, right. Yeah, it's a different thing.

You're not like this fancy, sexy technology company. It's a completely different thing. Yeah, no one knows the name of the oven that Starbucks uses to reheat the grilled puss cheese that they're selling there. No one knows the name of the oven that Starbucks uses to reheat the grilled puss cheese that they're selling there. No one knows that. What did you learn about the Silicon Valley culture, the venture capital world? That's shrouded in kind of its own sexy version of mystery. version of mystery. Everybody's aspiring to be able to go pitch their startup to, you know,

Andreessen Horowitz or, you know, Kleiner Perkins and these companies that you're familiar with. So paint the picture of the reality of what it's like to be a company funded by one of those entities. You know, it's really interesting. I think those venture capitalists go into the game knowing that 75% of those companies will not make it, right? And won't make it. Like a publisher doling out advances on books. It's the Harry Potter that finances everybody else's book. So I think there's a lot of people... Did you see the General Magic movie? No, I don't think so. What is that? It's a documentary. It's on Netflix or somewhere. I didn't see it. But it's about Tony Fidel and Mark Peratt. The next or the... Yeah. Nest. Nest. Nest and then Google. But it's about this. Tony, I met in your office, right? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. He was on your board, right? No, Matt Rogers was on. Oh, Matt is who I met then. Yeah. So, but Tony's great entrepreneur, but Tony was like a kid, wet behind the ears, and he worked at this spinoff of Apple called General Magic, where John Sculley spun off this group to make a handheld, which was basically the iPhone 20 years ago.

It had email, it had a phone, it had things, it was big and bulky. email, it had a phone, it had things, it was big and bulky. And the best people in the world, the people who developed the Macintosh were assigned to this thing. And then Scully ended up screwing them, launching the Newton before they could launch the General Magic. And they lost a boatload of money and they all went away. And Tony Fidel ended up going to Apple and working on the iPhone and then starting Nest. And Andy Rubin ended up going to Google and creating Android. And everyone just dissipated. 20 years later, everyone was successful,

except the CEO. He never surfaced again. But it's just a story. The tales of Silicon Valley are that you must swing for the fences. Like no one is interested in number two or number three. Like Lyft did okay, but people were interested in Uber, right?

So the breakaways and how you can dominate. were interested in Uber, right? So the breakaways and how you can dominate. And raising the capital is an accomplishment, but really, I love Sarah Blakely at Spanx, where she saved $5,000, hustled, and built a business selling product and wheeling and dealing. Yeah, there is a weird backwards nature to this

in the sense that we celebrate these people who are successful with raising tremendous amounts of money. But essentially all they're doing is like giving away large portions of their company. We should be celebrating the people who are able to find a way to not have to do that and also to celebrate people that just create a successful business.

We're in this weird moment where unless it's a unicorn, it's not successful. What's wrong with building a business that just does well every year, even if it's not growing at some crazy rate? Well, I think that part of it is the society we live in, which is why the country is bifurcated and there's all these things going on. It's what people are focusing on. And so the, you know, what I took from, you know, Juicero was that it was a good, it was a,

I think it was a big idea and I think it worked, but I think that there are ways to approach things differently. And it's hard to see your blind spots. So if we would have known, like we did market research and market research said the total addressable market for a $700 juicer was 3 million people in the state of California.

And what really came out was maybe we had the addressable market for a $700 juicer was 30,000 people. And you do all this research and it's wrong. And so I think raising money is innovation and people are funding creativity and innovation. So if you have a big idea and you need a lot of money, you couldn't build a computer per se at scale to go to manufacturing without it. So you need to do certain things. It depends on what kind of idea it is. So I think that there are some people there, like in all industries, there are some people there like in all industries

there are some people there that are really nice really honest some people are fair weathered some people are duplicitous and you never you never know who you're dealing with

but it's definitely about the money in Silicon Valley. Like it's about the money. The interesting journey for you or for me watching you kind of go through this is, is, you know, the kind of emotional and spiritual evolution that hit, that it catalyzed in you. Like I saw somebody who really had to, who kind of met his maker and was forced to meet himself in a very profound way because, you know, that external validation got so stripped away from you that you had to figure out a way to move forward for yourself. So tell me a little bit about like what that was like. I mean, at the end,

a lot of the attacks didn't hurt because I knew like what my intention was. Like my intention was I want people to have more servings of fruits and vegetables. And that's what I was doing. And I made some mistakes. And everybody that knows you knew that. Like your friends all knew that. Yeah, but in the media, like, you know, it's like the irony, do you know what a Bloomberg terminal is? Yeah.

Right? So on the Bloomberg terminal, 90% of the data you can get on a Bloomberg terminal is available on Google and Yahoo Finance, et cetera. And they charge $2,000 a month for this data. And so the media is about clickbait and about sensationalism. And I knew that what I created had its flaws, had its mistakes, et cetera.

had its flaws had its mistakes etc but i thought it was a it was very like i i i i appreciated the beauty and the the thousands of problems that we solved you know as a result of my three years of being a maniac to launch it so when someone would say oh you're this or that i was like you have no idea what you're talking about. And I'm not going to waste my time explaining it to you. Like, it's just, there's no point. So the hard part was, you know, all of a sudden you're going to all these conferences and you have all these things and you're invited to parties. You went to every conference because you, we would talk on the phone or get tight. You'd be at Google Zeitgeist and you're at Davos and you're at TED. I mean, there was – I don't think there was a conference that existed that you didn't go to.

I went to a lot. And every Tony Robbins, I should add to that as well. And what happened is then all of a sudden you don't get invited anymore. Right. then all of a sudden you don't get invited anymore right right so but the the point for for me was that i had to look at like what was my true intention and i realized like i wanted people to be healthier and you know i never like my most expensive car was a toyota prius that i bought used right so i never bought a house um you know, at Jusser, I never bought the, I never, no trappings. And I ate it and there weren't like restaurants that really, like I

preferred eating my own raw food, like I would indulge in the farmer's market. So I didn't have any of the trappings. And that's what allowed me to kind of move to the desert and really like deepen my meditation practice deepen my yoga practice you know gave me time to really learn and reflect and you know i gave you know originally and i think you you know this like right after juseira i thought like oh my god i'm 50 years. No one's ever going to hire me again. What am I going to do? I took this job for this company. We'll leave them nameless.

I spent two weeks there. I saw everything from the founder's eyes, the CEO's eyes, the venture eyes, and I was like, there's lack of congruency here. Like the integrity level here is just not up to par. I can't sell this. So I literally broke my contract. I left money on the table. And then I gave myself permission for time to mourn the loss and also time to reflect.

And I look at this now and saying, where I am with Sprouts and the mission of getting people to grow their own food and food equality is so important. And that I'm grateful, like really grateful that I get to work on this. And I don't feel like I'm a victim of some trap or some vitriol or some Silicon Valley failure. That was just part of my journey that got me to here. And I love my life now more than I ever have. That's beautiful. And you wouldn't change it. Wouldn't change the path, the trajectory. Oh, of course. I mean, I just want to lie in the sun and be massaged and be fed exotic fruit. It sounds like you kind of do that though. We got to end this shortly, but I want to like, you know,

paint the picture of this compound that you've built out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it is literally in the middle of nowhere. It's not like directly in Joshua Tree, like it's out, you know. Yeah, two towns over. Yeah, like truly in the middle of nowhere on a flat desert piece of land, 40 acres?

The actual ranch I live on is 25 acres. Okay. But we have other land nearby with hot springs on it. Right. So there are these hot springs and you've built these tubs and you're kind of slowly creating dwellings on the property. Friends can come and stay and things like that. It's on Airbnb. There's a bunch of houses on Airbnb. So anybody who's listening to this can come and book it and hang out with you in the

hot tubs? Yeah, or message me directly. Talk to me about the day-to-day existence. I mean, it's like a homesteading thing because you really are, you know, about as far, you're not completely off the grid, right? But like about as close as you can be to that. We're off the water grid. You're off the water grid, but not the electricity grid. No, I mean, what, you know, like I'm waiting for the next,

like Silicon Valley breakthrough on solar batteries. Yeah, we need that. Yeah, I don't want to get stuck with a 30-year lease. That's the battle we keep having over how to do that. Yeah. But anyway, keep talking. The solution is to buy used panels from some other solar farm that went out, and you'll save half the money money and we can work that out.

We'll talk about that afterwards. So the insight that I had, and I had a hunch, I had never spent a night in Joshua Tree. I'd never been to Joshua Tree National Park, but I kept having this vision that there were hot springs there. And so I got on a plane and I went there and no hot springs. Aren't there springs at, what is it, Two Bunch Palms? That's down the hill. That's Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs.

But up the hill where there's Joshua Tree and 29 Palms, no hot springs. And so I hired a geologist. I hired well drillers, consultants, realtors. And I kept asking questions. And then it seemingly like all of a sudden just everything unfolded. And then I bought like a five acre piece of property

with a cabin on it that had 135 degree geothermal hot spring right on the land. So the geologist was able to, you literally, you went like prospecting, basically. You just went, there will be blood. Instead of looking for gold, I was looking for hot springs. And between this like group of people with, we were able to find it. And then, you know, I'm just putting this out there, like land, you could still today buy five acres of land in or around Joshua Tree for under $5,000 an acre. It's crazy. Right? Five acres, beautiful view, no light pollution, no noise pollution. You're just there. And then if you drill a well, you have a source of water. And if you have a hot spring well, then you have an oasis. And so I just spent the last two years instead of

watch... And we have no TV, no cable on the property. So no TVs, no radios, no cable. We do have internet. But I use that time to really just learn. Like I like to learn. So I learned about sprouting. And we also have planted an organic farm. So we have a greenhouse and we're doing straw bale, raised beds covered in jute

and planted melons and tomatoes. And I've had to figure out how do you desalinate water, and we have five streams of water. We've got the hot spring water. Then we have the hot spring water that sits in an underground cistern and becomes ambient. Then we have a water chiller for the Wim Hof chilling soaking tubs. Then we have the RO desalination system so we could have potable drinking water. And then we have the gray water

that comes from the soaking tubs that we use for irrigation. Wow. That's quite something. And it all works. When you were a little kid growing up in New York and going to school in Harlem, the Bronx or Brooklyn? I went to elementary school in the Bronx. I went to high school in Harlem. Could you have imagined yourself living out in the middle of the desert as an adult? No. When you were tagging subways and running around New York City. I mean, I can't even believe it now. I wake up, but I get the deepest sleeps, and it's just so beautiful there. And I think I'll be there for a while. All right.

Well, let's wrap it up. Final thoughts on sprouting? I think sprouting is easy. It's accessible. It's inexpensive. It's nutritious. It's plant-based. And like, I want to- It's local. It's local. You know, when I thought about sprouting, I couldn't believe it. I was questioning every one of my hypotheses to see was it flawed. And this came out with shining colors and everything was good. I mean, I can't believe,

but I'm pinching myself and believe, like sprouting is everything and more. Like it's even more than we've even talked about. Like when you think about the power of, there's been virtually no research whatsoever about the power of consuming living plant foods, what that does to the mind, to the gut, et cetera. I mean, this is just the beginning, but this is truly living enzymatically rich, fiber rich food.

I welcome people to try it. And try it they will, I think. I welcome people to try it. And try it. They will. I think, um, I love you, my friend. Thank you for sharing your message. The book is the sprout book. Uh, basically everything you ever wanted to know and more about sprouting. And you've got all these excerpts in there, interviews with doctors, and then you've got this whole, you know, all the, all the recipes and the how to, you know, essentially everything you need to know. And while people are kind of locked in their homes and unable to go out into the world, uh, no better time to learn about this, begin practicing it yourselves and, uh, to take better control of your health and your immunity and everything. So thank you for sharing that today. Um, You have been, I just want to acknowledge you.

Like you've just, you've been an amazing friend to not just me, but my wife, my family. And I love you dearly. You have a huge heart. And I just, I want nothing but good things and success for you. So thanks for coming and sharing with me today. My pleasure. I think, you know, I listened to your podcast and it took every bit of my, like, energy and positive thinking to feel worthy

to come on to this show. Oh, come on. Like, you know, the people- This is your second time. I understand, but it's still, I mean, it's a real honor. And, you know, it was very intimidating. But thank you for having me for the second time.

Welcome here anytime, my friend. All right. Well, let's do it again, all right? Yep. Cool. Take us out with a piece and a plants. Peace. Plants.

Thank you. I adore that man. He's just so full of love and enthusiasm. It's infectious. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Do me a favor, let Doug know what you thought of today's show. Shoot him a message at Doug Evans on Instagram

and at I am Doug Evans on Twitter. Be sure to check out the Sprout book. It's time to start sprouting people. I've started doing it. I'm actually really having fun with it. It's really cool. And hey, look, it might just change your life. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show,

subscribe, rate, and comment on the program, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. Share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I appreciate my team that works very hard to put on today's show. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis, who videoed today's show in a makeshift studio at Sideshow Collectibles.

Check it out on YouTube. The lighting is incredible. I think it looks really great. So thank you for that. Blake, Jessica Marana for graphics. Allie Rogers, typically for portraits, although not today. Georgia Whaley for copywriting.

DK for advertiser relationships and theme music by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis. Thanks. I love you guys. See you back here in a couple of days with another great episode. What's the next episode? Oh, I think it's gonna be an AMA with my buddy, Adam Skolnick.

We're trying something new and different. We're gonna experiment with the format a little bit. Hope you guys enjoy it. So you have that to look forward to. Until then, peace, plants. Namaste. Thank you.