Doug Evans On Food Inequality, The Power of Sprouts & Lessons Learned from Failure

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  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, et cetera, 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.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  This is just the beginning, but this is truly living, enzymatically-rich, fiber-rich food. I just, I welcome people to try it.

• 2:01Rich Roll?

  That's Doug Evans, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:15Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:53Rich Roll?

  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.

• 3:37Rich Roll?

  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. 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

• 4:21Rich Roll?

  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 Singore, 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, serial health food entrepreneur Doug Evans, the Silicon

• 5:00Rich Roll?

  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.

• 5:45Rich Roll?

  So if you're new to the show, or all you know about Doug are 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...

• 6:08Rich Roll?

  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 VC's, 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, Juicero failed, and the narrative around that failure was quite vicious. And look, a core tenet of this show is human achievement.

• 6:51Rich Roll?

  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,

• 7:35Rich Roll?

  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.

• 8:13Rich Roll?

  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.

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  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?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Book came out April 7.

• 8:55Rich Roll?

  But we can't, we were going to get together, it was, it was in the very beginning of the quarantine era, right? And we decided we should push it. So here we are.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:13Rich Roll?

  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.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel, it's so different to be in person.

• 9:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Like I'll, I'll travel anywhere to be with someone in person.

• 9:58Rich Roll?

  I know. And you drove here from your compound, which we're going to get into in a minute. But I think before we launch into all the fascinating things that we're going to talk about today, it's important to just acknowledge this very strange moment that we're in right now. Today is Tuesday, June 2. There are

• 10:18Rich Roll?

  Cities on fire right now protesting, you know, 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 are, that I think are also, as you'll, as you'll find out, you know, tangentially related to at least coronavirus, immunity, things like that. But I just wanted to, you know, acknowledge that we're in a very strange moment right now. And it's also difficult to figure out how to appropriately communicate

• 11:03Rich Roll?

  around that.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, 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

• 11:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:08Rich Roll?

  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, the level of conscious awareness on the planet. And it's not that I condone violence, but to...

• 12:44Rich Roll?

  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, 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.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is part of history and at a time like we've never experienced before.

• 13:14Rich Roll?

  What was the protest like?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  There was probably, you know, a couple thousand people. It was, you know, relatively peaceful, but kind of mixed, lot of mixed race and, you know, 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, you know, as part of a protest.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  So some people had some words, you know, there were some signs and, but relatively protest in Palm Desert. So it was, you know, 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.

• 14:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Time.

• 14:27Rich Roll?

  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, you know, precarious uncertainty about the whole thing.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:40Rich Roll?

  And an awareness and an acknowledgement that literally anything could happen right now.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the one thing that I like took away is that there's nothing funny about this. Like there is no joke. That can be uttered whatsoever, under any circumstances.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  No, 100% not.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  And the, I was hearing like parts of jokes or other things like of, and not being malicious, but like one woman, you know, 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 like, I'm cringing because like, like her level of uncomfortability was disconnected with the, the fact that, oh, you know, life and lives were lost.

• 15:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  And so it's just, there's a seriousness and a darkness that will invariably, you know, turn into light. Like, I think it has to turn into light.

• 15:50Rich Roll?

  You're optimistic.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  I, I, I have to be.

• 15:53Rich Roll?

  I mean, you're a very energetic, optimistic guy by nature.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:56Rich Roll?

  But if anything was going to temper that, it would, I would suspect it would be this.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I mean, I wasn't tempered by the, the COVID, right? I mean, I took it seriously. I honored it because people were, you know, legitimately scared, but I, I wasn't. But this is a whole different level of like, you know, from generations of oppression and unfairness that caused me to really recognize like, you know, white fragility, white privilege in, in ways that I had never thought about before.

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  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.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  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 that, 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.

• 17:22Rich Roll?

  It is difficult to figure out where and how to direct that right now, though.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I look at like my purpose, and after like everything that I've been through, and you know, ironically, two months ago, I did a podcast with Marion Williamson. And the topic of the podcast was food, you know, food poverty, food equality, food deserts. Because so many of the underprivileged, underserved are malnourished, and their options for nutrition, you know, are fast food, and processed food, and refined sugar.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And those things are, you know, 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, you know, with your work. And that's what I feel compelled to do with mine.

• 18:41Rich Roll?

  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. It involves going to Air One or Whole Foods and superfoods that are very expensive to

• 19:25Rich Roll?

  buy, and recipes that are difficult to prepare and 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

• 20:05Rich Roll?

  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?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. What drove me to, like, 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...

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And that's the beginning, and I'll just, 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, you know, I'm genetically cursed. And I was thirty-six pounds overweight. And in a two-week period, I went from eating anything to vegetarian, vegan, then raw vegan. How long ago was that? Twenty-one years ago. Nineteen ninety-nine, 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?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  What can I learn? What books can I read? What seminars can I go to? What speakers can I hear? And that, you know, was my first exposure to sprouts. Like, 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 twenty-one 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 can just grow sprouts. So like, that was just in the back of my mind. And then, you know, fast forward through two years ago,

• 22:17Speaker 01

  after, you know, my world, my privileged world, had the apocalypse. I moved to the desert because I wanted to be away from everybody and everything. And I wanted to be in nature. And I wanted to, like, watch the sun rise, watch the sun set, 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.

• 23:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, quite literally.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  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

• 23:43Speaker 01

  in my last world because a cold-pressed juice was $7. And same price, if you went to a juice bar or Air One, you'd spend $7 for a juice, but if you made it home, it was still $7. But if you were 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 $5. 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.

• 24:23Rich Roll?

  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, those plastic containers of sprouts where, you know, 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.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:45Rich Roll?

  And so the appearance is that this is a very costly endeavor. This is a, 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 they're 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 Arowan or 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.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  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. So if you're thinking and 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

• 26:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:26Rich Roll?

  Right. It is. It is that simple, which is amazing because I always thought, well, yeah, you soak them and you rinse them, but this is going to 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 on to your book and they're sharing it on Instagram. You've been reposting it. This guy, what's his name? John Col? Like the Juju Mufu guy? He's got like millions of followers on Instagram is like, he's like a body. I don't know who this guy is, but he's

• 26:54Speaker 01

  He was on America's Got Talent.

• 26:56Rich Roll?

  Oh, is that? Oh, really? He's like a he's super jacked.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And he's flexible. He did a chair split while holding like someone over his head. So he's flexible, acrobatic.

• 27:12Rich Roll?

  Is that what he did on America's Got Talent? Cause 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, but, um, 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.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Well, the, 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. And 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, and produce in their supermarket. So now we live in a convenience culture.

• 28:18Speaker 01

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

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Idea, I thought that it was flawed, like there, I must be missing something. And that kind of led to me, you know, calling up a Michael, Dr. Michael Greger and calling up Dr. Oz and calling up Mark Hyman and Dean Ornish and Joel Furman 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 loved sprouts. And they all had good things to say about sprouts.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:00Rich Roll?

  Nobody shit talking the sprouts.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  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, I, 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. And like now the guy is like eating sprouts every meal. Super sprout guy.

• 30:48Rich Roll?

  I think that, that 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 pension for the Grateful Dead, like wandering around the health food store in her Birkenstocks, talking about sprouts.

• 31:14Rich Roll?

  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 sate 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, 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, 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.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing, I don't think it's possible to overeat sprouts. Like, you just, at some, like, if you gave me, even today, like, if you gave me, like, fresh, cut, like, friend, 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-

• 32:28Rich Roll?

  Game over.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  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. And that's when I went to, you know, 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

• 33:08Speaker 01

  a recipe developer, who did Leila 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.

• 33:27Rich Roll?

  It's a tall order.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  And she said, are you serious? And I said, I'm serious as a heart attack. We, 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.

• 33:47Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 33:56Rich Roll?

  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 that.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna grab a prop.

• 34:15Rich Roll?

  This is like show and tell. Doug brought like all kinds of jars of stuff. And these, we should say, for people that are watching on YouTube in the mid, in the middle of the table here, you brought this. This is not a prop.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, those, those are, those are sunflower sprouts.

• 34:29Rich Roll?

  And how long did it take for those to grow?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  One week.

• 34:32Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  And, and this was literally, I'm gonna show you. One second. This is my measuring cup.

• 34:42Rich Roll?

  So these are like?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  These are a third of a cup.

• 34:45Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And these are sunflower.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  These are sunflowers.

• 34:47Rich Roll?

  And these are, for people that are just listening on audio, they're, 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 and?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  There's probably a hundred varieties of sunflowers. And that's just a black oil, organic sunflower seed.

• 35:28Rich Roll?

  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.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so many, 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.

• 36:13Rich Roll?

  So you just put them in a jar, like one of those in front of you right there?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:45Rich Roll?

  Right, so you see the germination here. And you've got a lid on here with a, 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, any moisture just, you know, evaporates out that way.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, gravity will cause it to strain.

• 37:04Rich Roll?

  And this is just two days?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Two days. And if you didn't have the, 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, the modalities for sprouting, the methods of sprouting.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  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 jude. And it's almost like the seed wants to sprout in any environment. Like, 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.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  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, you know, you're, like, I know I've heard you say, um, you know, about protein, and you don't use protein powd- do you use protein powders?

• 38:41Rich Roll?

  I mean, very sparingly.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  So, this is a, um, green pea. You could take a look at these. These are, this is a mix of mung beans, green peas, garbanzo beans. Um, and it's a, it's a protein blend. And those-

• 39:01Rich Roll?

  And lentils in here, too? Are the green ones lentils, or these are the green peas?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Those are the green peas. I don't have lentils in this, 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 so- salt on it, you put an oil on it, you put a marinara sauce on, whatever you put on it, this just becomes the texture that you're eating.

• 39:44Rich Roll?

  Or you can just take handfuls of it and eat it the way that you do, right? That's basically your, your program.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I do that, but what, what, the reason why I did the recipes, um, is because, like, I'm not, like, normal. You know, like, to thy known self be true-

• 40:03Rich Roll?

  Definitely not, definitely not.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  So- I know that for me, I am definitely 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 there, you know, food pornography and other things. To me, I've gotten to the point that I realize that food is a necessity. I realize that I can be prone to tripping on addiction, you know, which is why I eliminated, added salt, added sugar, added oil, because I will eat when I'm not hungry, and I will overeat.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:06Rich Roll?

  Right. How do you know when they're done? So you said three days.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:24Rich Roll?

  He's getting more stuff out.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Like, these are.

• 41:27Rich Roll?

  These chia seeds?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Those are chia seeds. So, the chia seeds will literally grow 20 times the size. And so if you think about, like, 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 pad, or on an unglazed, unglazed clay pot or saucer.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:28Rich Roll?

  So why is the germinated, sprouted version of the seed more nutritious than just eating the seed itself? Like, I could put this, these chia seeds in my smoothie, or any of these, you know, sesame seeds, whatever kind of seed, on my salad, etc. But there's something about when they're in that germinated state that suddenly makes, they become more nutritionally dense, and also those nutrients become more bioavailable.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm gonna do my best to unpack this, with the caveat, not a scientist, not a nutritionist, not a doctor.

• 43:08Rich Roll?

  But you're the sprout book author guy.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  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 seed, right? I'm just keeping, so the broccoli seeds, you know...

• 43:29Rich Roll?

  I don't know that I've ever seen broccoli seeds before.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  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...

• 43:56Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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

• 44:40Speaker 01

  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 sulfurophane is because as the broccoli gets bigger, you're not getting any more sulfurophane. You're just, you're getting more broccoli, but you're not getting more of the sulfurophane. So in the efficient stage, the fledgling stage of the seed, so you actually, if you

• 45:20Speaker 01

  were just looking for sulfurophane, you could grind those broccoli seeds up, chew them, grind them, because you want to grind them, chew them, to mix the glucorafenin 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 sulfurophane compound is created with like, it's a science project all happening in nature to protect the seed and to protect the plant.

• 46:01Rich Roll?

  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 Bolswitz, and he just goes on and on about sulforaphane. So why is that such an important nutrient?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  I think, and it's interesting, I just read Dr. B., Dr. B.'s book.

• 46:21Rich Roll?

  Fiber fueled, yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  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

• 47:06Speaker 01

  mechanism of sulforaphane was just proven to be able to cause a biological reaction in the body, that, you know, they call it anti-cancer, it's not a cancer cure, but in the case of ASD, autism.

• 47:23Rich Roll?

  Spectrum disorder.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Spectrum disorder. In that case, the sulforaphane kind of creates the heat shock proteins. So it's simulating what's happening, you know, with the heat, and causing the body to shift. So all of the research, the 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, there's

• 48:07Speaker 01

  no cure for autism, the most effective treatment, and this is like National Institute of Health, peer-reviewed papers, are the benefits of

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Treating with sulforaphane. And so they're trying to figure out like sulforaphane supplements. Very expensive, like $60 for a bottle with 30 capsules in.

• 48:34Rich Roll?

  But the efficacy of that is super low, right? That's something I talked about with Dr. B as well.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Well, I don't even know about the efficacy versus the financial inaccessibility versus just buying 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.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  And you've, you've had more experts on the microbiome and the gut. So imagine you're feeding yourself 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.

• 49:57Rich Roll?

  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.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Fifty, fifty.

• 50:23Rich Roll?

  Is it 50 times? Wow. Yeah, and for pennies, you can be eating this stuff.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  I mean, it's such a no-brainer. I mean, literally, there's, you can get the cowries. Let's just talk about lentils for a second. I'm just shifting from broccoli and sulfurophane 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,

• 51:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  That, you know, modern science isn't measuring, you know, ways and the significance, but you can feel. Like, I had an interview with Joe DeSena from Spartan.

• 51:50Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, yeah, I know Joe.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  So, Joe, you know, was like, living under a rock, like, was not sprouting. And now, on his compound, wherever he is in Pennsylvania, like, he's sprouting.

• 52:03Rich Roll?

  Sprout maniac now.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  He's sprouting, yeah, he's sending me pictures, you know. I registered the domain Sprouten, after Spartan.

• 52:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did, that's funny.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz like, he just was so kind of into, like, the sprouts.

• 52:19Rich Roll?

  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, you know, 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, 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.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Well, I, being plant-based and being passionate about plant-based, I would invariably, you know, 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, juju mufu adding sprouts to every meal, like, this was something that was accessible.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  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. It was $5.99 for a diminutous amount of calories.

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Right?

• 54:05Rich Roll?

  Iceberg lettuce.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Iceberg lettuce. But who is gonna spend $6 for a salad, when you could spend 99 cent 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?

• 54:36Rich Roll?

  I have a passing familiarity at best.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  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. Like, just add sprouts. Like, you want to over... 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. So, but, like, literally, sprouts are a lot of fiber, some protein, rich in vitamins, and probably, and, you know, we have to be in full integrity,

• 55:23Speaker 01

  until your microbiome adjusts to the sprouts, there may be some flatulation.

• 55:30Rich Roll?

  Some 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 it'll... a lot of that flatulence will go away.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Well, also, if you were to mix sprouts with fermented food, like, you know, you're not... 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...

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Sauerkraut, right? Just water and salt and cabbage. So you could start to think about sprouting to also have, like, as opposed to taking a probiotic supplement, you could do things in your diet to create natural probiotics.

• 56:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, or prebiotics, right? Which is essentially what this is, you know. More and more, we're hearing about the microbiome. And again, I just did this podcast with Will Bulsa-Witt, who's just super bullish on sprouts and essentially plant diversity and increasing your fiber intake. Like, you, people want, you mentioned earlier, people want to know where 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.

• 57:29Rich Roll?

  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 inner relationship between your microbiome and your well-being 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.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, look, I think it's, 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, you know, during COVID. And I can say, the combination of sheltering in place and the book coming out.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Caused the leading sprout seed companies to literally sell out and their sales have doubled and tripled of selling seeds.

• 58:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, a couple of 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, you know, not to like 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.

• 59:14Rich Roll?

  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 that we, the importance of taking care of our immune systems and how to do it.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if you read the research, you know, coming out of Wuhan, you know, of the, the common thread among the COVID deaths had a lot to do with their fiber deficiency?

• 59:53Rich Roll?

  I didn't hear that. I mean, I heard about vitamin D deficiency and I've heard about all kinds of, you know, cofactors, whether it's, you know, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, et cetera.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Another cofactor was fiber and fiber and gut health. So, you know, so much of this has to do with the, what you're eating, right? And you know this from a level of people may not have been able to go to crossroads, right? 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

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  accessible, so low cost. And, you know, 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 process. 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, you know, on the countertop to be able to do that. Right.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  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, I hired my own fact checker just to check all the facts because I wanted, you know, if it wasn't accurate, I didn't want to put that information out there. And even though the science is changing, there was a good stamp on there. The fact that, like, the information about sprouts, like, this looks to me, the sunflower sprouts we're looking at, looked like green vegetables to me. Why don't you try one, Rich? Just eat them like this? Yeah, just eat them like that.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  You're gonna have to talk because I'm not gonna be able to talk when I'm doing this. No, no. So the fact that you can have something, like, literally grow your own food 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

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  the journey of the sprout. So you can actually take things, if you're, you know, 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. The, you know, 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,

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  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. So there's, you know, 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.

• 1:04:09Rich Roll?

  If you had to pick one, what's the best one? I know you hate this question, but...

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  So this plant, like, nature knows what to do. And that's, those seeds can feed other wildlife, they could grow, they could propagate, there's all these things. So 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, you know, scientists like Rhonda Patrick and Jed Fahey and those people that are studying the work on the N R F two pathways and the longevity and the anti-cancer and the autism part, that they're going into the specifics around sulforaphane.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you had shared on Instagram recently, it was a, 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, you know, 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.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Well, the, the, the thing is you can be your own like kitchen gardener, right? You can experiment.

• 1:06:49Rich Roll?

  What's the craziest thing you've tried to sprout?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I, I've, I've sprouted avocado seeds, you know, avocado pits.

• 1:06:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  So when I, I put that in there.

• 1:07:02Rich Roll?

  That's like a thing from the seventies, right? You should put the, the toothpicks into the avocado pit and, and on the top of like a mason jar.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  I have a thing that I really like over here. These are hard to sprout. These are.

• 1:07:43Rich Roll?

  What are these?

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Those are hemp seeds.

• 1:07:46Rich Roll?

  Why do these look different than the hemp seeds that I get at my fancy grocery store?

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Because those, the ones you get at the grocery store are hulled.

• 1:07:54Rich Roll?

  They're shelled, yeah, shelled, right?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  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, that plant intelligence inside. And so if you sprout them a little bit and you soak them, they just make it easier to do. Buckweed is another very, very satisfying part because it has a great flavor. It's chewy and it's easy to, to work with.

• 1:08:34Rich Roll?

  Flax seeds too?

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Flax are incredible to sprout. Like if you would have flax, in like three or four days, what you'd normally see the little brown or golden flaxseed 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, when you're sprouting it and soaking it and germinating it.

• 1:09:15Rich Roll?

  When I think about trying to meet my omega threes, I think about hemp seeds, chia seeds and flax seeds. So if I'm sprouting those, is there an increase in the omega threes or a more bioavailable? Like, what is the difference?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  I, I think that you get the bioavailability. I think there's a, similar to the sulforaphane, I think there's a finite amount of the omega threes 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.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  So I think the younger tender vegetables are just ready to eat and easy to absorb.

• 1:10:19Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Love Ron.

• 1:10:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like they're transforming these, you know, downtrodden neighborhoods and revitalizing them by teaching people how to grow their own food. 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, you know, these areas of, you know, urban blight, so to speak?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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?

• 1:12:24Rich Roll?

  Uh, is that the one where she's doing the Zoom call with her boyfriend?

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Rich Roll?

  I did see that, yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  So before that, the video-

• 1:12:32Rich Roll?

  She's like a comedian actress, right?

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, very successful comedian actress. And by the way, that video was banned, shadow banned on Instagram.

• 1:12:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, it was? It's funny. I liked it.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  It's funny, but it was a little racy. But the video we were going to do before-

• 1:12:47Rich Roll?

  Only 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 funny, it's tongue in cheek.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  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 gonna go into the food kitchen and invite me in and we were gonna teach them how to grow their own sprouts in the food kitchen.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  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, it's, food is expensive. And, you know, 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.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  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 that or data point on that?

• 1:14:02Rich Roll?

  On what specifically?

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  One, one pound of beef or one hamburger.

• 1:14:06Rich Roll?

  Oh, I mean, I don't know what the stats are off the top of my head, but you know, it's.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Thousands, 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.

• 1:14:24Rich Roll?

  It's the anti-gussero.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it just is. It's, it just is.

• 1:14:30Rich Roll?

  Which I do want to ask you about.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14:32Rich Roll?

  We, not right now. I want to, I want to continue this conversation, but um, I think that the, 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 you know, 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 not only relatively foreign

• 1:15:14Rich Roll?

  and considered to be a garnish and something you would tolerate, but not actually look forward to. And, and now eating that like is basically like snacks and is a larger portion of a meal? Like, that's a tough sell.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I have to tell you.

• 1:15:30Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Come on.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  I put my phone, I put my phone down. I could show you a video of this obese woman who was a cleaner, you know, in, in, on, for one of the houses out at Wonder Valley. And she'd always be hungry.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  And you know, just didn't plan to bring food to work. Right? So she'd always be hungry. And my refrigerator, you know, 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, you know, one cup, two cup of sprouts. And now she has four kids, single mother. I gave her two sprouting jars, some seeds, started 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.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  And like she's, her body is adopted and she's craving these healthy foods. That's pretty cool. So you take her, you take Juju Mufu. You take Chef Jean George. You take these other like 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 something that, and we, I, I told you this in our Instagram live.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  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, you know, most people, just because they're, you know, and this is all about the equality. Like being where I came from and I spent time in the military. You know, where I was an outcast in the military. And like I seem to be an outcast in most places where I go, but. Not in my house, Doug. I, I feel very at home in your house.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  But in, in, 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.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:18:30Rich Roll?

  Not initially. Grows on you pretty quick, though.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Okay. I think sprouts will authentically grow on you pretty quickly.

• 1:18:38Rich Roll?

  And grow in you.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Grow on you and in you.

• 1:18:40Rich Roll?

  And in your house.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and take over. And, and by the way, this green is very good for the house. Air quality in the house, indoor air quality.

• 1:18:50Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Where do you get the seeds? Like, if somebody's wrapping their heads around, like, how to begin, they're like, alright, well, I gotta 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.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  The, the, the basics, the very basics, any mason jar with cheesecloth, I prefer organic cheesecloth, is the, 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, you know, 10 jars on there, and it's at the perfect angle for, 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

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  criteria. But now, companies like sproutman.com, all of 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.

• 1:20:16Rich Roll?

  So you don't want to just go to the grocery store and buy some dried black beans and try it that way? Like, there's, there's a specific type of seed that, like, when you say, like, made for sprouting, like, what does that mean? What, how does that differentiate from what you would find at the grocery store?

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  It's a great question. The, the sprouting seeds are the freshest seeds.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Right. And if you're planting them in the ground, it doesn't matter. So that's where, you know, it's important, but the, the difference between today and when I started to write the book, um, two years ago, it's like the market is just growing, no pun, 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.

• 1:21:41Rich Roll?

  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're, they can become toxic if they sit around for too long.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  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, blah, blah.

• 1:22:05Rich Roll?

  People think that and they're, it scares them off from doing this because they don't want to suddenly make themselves sick.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I think that most instances, and there's probably the, the number one cause of food borne 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, they're just too hard to deal with it. So if you think about food borne illness from chicken, dairy, fish versus vegetables, there's almost no comparison.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  And the amount of instances of, of food borne 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 like So I, I think that the, it's important to pay attention to your sprouting. But I don't, I'm not the least bit, you know, worried. There are people that may have concerns about specific sprouts and other levels. And if they have issues,

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  you know, you can explore that with, and what, what's your, what's your feeling on the, the lectins and?

• 1:23:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, don't get me started.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:43Rich Roll?

  You know, like that's a whole other, you know, 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, that are, you know, healthy and should be part of everybody's diet, like beans, which is the staple of every blue zones, you know, place like that. But I would, I know that you talked about lectins in, in, in the book specifically, and there are people that worry about that kind of thing. You know, 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?

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. My, my perspective is that when you sprout legumes and you, you, did you say legumes or goons? How do you?

• 1:24:28Rich Roll?

  I don't know. I say legumes. Legumes? Probably legumes.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Rich Roll?

  How proper do we want to be, Doug?

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  I don't want to be proper at all.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  So if you're sprouting legumes, some people, if they have an issue with legumes, you know, don't eat them. But you'll know. But I, I think that sprouts are the easiest, you know, like evidence of, of this becoming mainstream, Katie Wells of Wellness Mama, huge sprout fan. And literally, we, we did an interview and I did her podcast, you know, where she's recommending sprouts to young mothers that are birthing, which are probably the most susceptible, you know, people to, you know, dietary parts. Cause if they're breastfeeding

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  and they're taking care of things. And people ask her, are you concerned, you know, with this? And no. So I think the fear.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Of, of one, you know, one case being blown out of proportion to kind of throw out all this good stuff to keep people in, kind of in the system. Have you been to Burning Man?

• 1:25:43Rich Roll?

  Never have.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  So, I only learned this after being a burner for a while. What it meant about Burning Man, it's like the anti-system. Like, you know, it's against the system. And I talk about, like, my plan for this burn, which isn't happening this year, was to bring in sprouting seeds and do a sprout camp where you 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, you know, people bring in truckloads of food and packaging and things and garbage

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  and they have to take them out. So, the only service that Burning Man provided was porta-potties. So, you bring, you bring in your, your seeds, you sprout them, and you actually will leave no trace and be able to leave without packaging. So, there's, there's so many things about sprouts. On the nutrition side, on the packaging side, on the environmental resource side, and on the brain. Like, you know, when, when I think about my brain today, and when we're 54 years old in two weeks, I've never been sharper, clear, more energy, more disciplined, because there's no processed food. Like, I'm eating the things that I think that my body is just jiving with.

• 1:27:14Rich Roll?

  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. Like, 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 going to clone Doug Evans so he can go into all of these communities?

• 1:27:57Rich Roll?

  espouse the revolutionary benefits of eating this way.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  I mean, you have to plant a lot of seeds, Rich.

• 1:28:05Rich Roll?

  The seed metaphor just keeps circling back here.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  And look, I think it makes sense. And if you see, like, I've been on Instagram for a while and I didn't engage, I didn't do things. But now, like, people ask questions, I'm responding to the questions. The most amazing thing is, like, 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.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  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 make it easier for them to share the consciousness. And people are buying the book that I never, like, it's so strange because it was hard for me

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  to write a sentence, like, having barely gotten through high school, writing a book. Like, for virtually no money, like, writing the book and having that part was something that was missionary.

• 1:29:52Rich Roll?

  And it's got to be incredibly gratifying when you see people that you wouldn't suspect would be interested in what you have to say, like, cottoning on to it and sharing it online. It's very cool.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  The idea, and you know, I had spoken to you that I went, I met Marion Williamson. Right. And, you know, I had listened to Return to Love, I had read A Course in Miracles, and, you know, her ideals, and she had talked about reparations, you know, as part of her policy. Like, in one part, I didn't feel like, like the sprout conversation would pique her interest. But the other part said, I, 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?

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. 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

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  all this unconscious bias. There's all of this kind of prejudice and limitations and, you know, I have a- And tribalism. Tribalism. And this is unifying. Like, people, you know, around food and collectivity, but, you know, 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, I could tell you, the, the woman who, I started Eye Village, I forgot her name, and she had been a long-term vegetarian, and then when she took the company

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  public, she started to eat meat.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  And she said, I need to eat meat in order to 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 the idea of the toxicity, you know, of of of the aggression, that I find I'm a much nicer person.

• 1:32:49Rich Roll?

  I don't get, I was so, I was trying to understand what you were saying. Basically, you're saying like, in order, she felt like in 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

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  She had to eat meat.

• 1:33:05Rich Roll?

  To be at that level of consciousness?

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you know, she she went, like, she reverted back to more primal, you know, survival. And I didn't fully get that, but it was something that, you know, I just became aware of. And then afterwards, she went back to eating plants. So I think that, you know, to answer, 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 on to the scene, right?

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  And kale is no more healthy than collard greens or charred, right? It does have

• 1:33:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but it became the thing. So interesting that that was the one that got selected.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Brussels sprouts became a thing, right? Did you see the Brussels sprouts?

• 1:34:05Rich Roll?

  Not like kale, though.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I, all these

• 1:34:10Rich Roll?

  Who are these publicists pulling the levers behind what's gonna be the thing?

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  There was an artificial organization called, that I talk about in the book.

• 1:34:19Rich Roll?

  What?

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  That 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 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.

• 1:35:01Rich Roll?

  He said it here first, my friends. Well, listen, look, undoubtedly, we're, we're, you know, 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, you know, sort of these cofactor health problems, comorbidity issues. And so now is the time, people, if there was ever a time now.

• 1:35:44Rich Roll?

  And it's not about, what I like about this also is that it's, 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.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:22Rich Roll?

  And you have.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  I, I, I.

• 1:36:24Rich Roll?

  Can we, um, can we step it back a little bit?

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:36:27Rich Roll?

  Uh, so we've known each other for many years. I think we met around 2011 or 2012, something like that.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, with John Joseph at Jiva Mookti Cafe.

• 1:36:36Rich Roll?

  Was it at Jiva Mookti or did we meet at the Seed, back to the Seed thing, right? Like.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, we met there.

• 1:36:42Rich Roll?

  Seed Conference in New York, maybe?

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  But I remember walking and you were going to meet with John Joseph and then we went there and had dinner.

• 1:36:50Rich Roll?

  I think so. Oh, yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. In any event, we've known each other for many years. Interestingly, like we have friend circles that intersect that I continue to learn that you knew people that I know. Like you just posted about Jesse Isler. I didn't realize that you went way back with Jesse too.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, he's OG.

• 1:37:08Rich Roll?

  Right. We've been friends for a long time and I've watched you, you know, through a portion of your Organic Avenue days and was certainly, you know, 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, like 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. 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

• 1:37:50Rich Roll?

  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. Um, and I've talked about this with other people on the podcast since, but, you know, I love you, Doug, and I always, you know, I believed in you and I still believe in you. And I think that there's been a lot of.

• 1:38:21Rich Roll?

  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, you know, there's a certain association that comes with that, but that's not, like most things, that's not really the full story.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, one of the things that, we live in a society where everyone 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.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Okay, where they, 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-pressed 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

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  a slurry, you know, 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, was a big deal.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  So, I made prototype after prototype, and then we realized that this was much harder to do than we thought, 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.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  So, fast forward, the, the reason why people funded the business, because it really was the, 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 didn't come from, I'm not a millennial. I didn't want that.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  But in 1997, when Adwalla 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 was 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 was sour, they'd throw it out, and if it wasn't. But how can you determine if produce was fresh

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:44:14Rich Roll?

  So the Wi-Fi-enabled aspect of it, you know, setting aside the bells and whistles of the, like, 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, like, sort of block chaining the supply chain to make sure that, you know, and if it wasn't fresh, the thing wouldn't press.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  Wouldn't press.

• 1:44:38Rich Roll?

  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, $5, $7 apiece?

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:45:01Rich Roll?

  This is like the ultimate in Silicon Valley being checked out from, you know, 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, you know, essentially unparalleled. And all of that got... Directed at you, you know, being, being the brainchild of all of this. And it began, I, 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

• 1:45:41Rich Roll?

  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, 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, until it just became impossible for you to even tell your version of the story.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the, you know, many mistakes, you know, 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, first class, chartered air, private air. People buy, you know, 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

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  million. They couldn't even get a press release out. No one cared. So it was just the, the fact that people knew how much money we raised, which is a lot of money, but we were doing a lot of things.

• 1:47:03Rich Roll?

  The R and 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 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 costs $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

• 1:47:47Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  I mean, there are so many mistakes. I made so many mistakes and I take, I own all the mistakes. Like, you know, I loved 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 had, 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

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  Silicon Valley mindset is you 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. And so, had we had a facility to do the 50,000 packs a week, it would have been 10,000, 10,000 square feet. And so, my limited mindset couldn't imagine not, the thing not growing at the pace it was going to grow. I didn't

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  want, I knew from my experience before how difficult it is to move plants. Like, 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 in Tyvek, men or women in Tyvek suits with ice cream scoopers filling the packs with, 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 gonna do a thousand versions of the first one.

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  It's only gonna 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 podcast, like Uber is losing 11 million dollars a day, right? 11 million a day, but they have four 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.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  And so the media of like Bloomberg writing an article that you could squeeze the pack by hand.

• 1:51:03Rich Roll?

  Well, that was the nail in the coffin when people were squeezing it and then people were making YouTube videos about that. So, you know, what's, what happened there?

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 1:51:12Rich Roll?

  Because technically you could squeeze, if you squeezed it hard enough, you could squeeze it out.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Well, hard enough and long enough with a technique, you know, 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 an espresso pod, pour hot water over it and get coffee and you don't need the espresso machine. So the idea of that you could squeeze the pack by hand is like, that's just how juice was made. And, but the experience was, you know, in your household where you had, you know, multiple people juicing, you know, using the machine was easy. You press the button and it does the work.

• 1:52:00Speaker 01

  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 like 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, it'll give you 100% refund. And less than 5% of the people. Sent back their machines. Ninety-five percent of the people continued to use their Juicero nine, nine point two times a week. So all metrics, I mean, this is a crazy thing

• 1:52:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:53:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, people that, 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.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, from my perspective as an entrepreneur, right, many aspects of the business failed, just failed. I mean, that's, you know, the, the fact. From others, we did great. Like, the product worked, you know, it really worked, it did what it was supposed to do. The messaging and the communications was, like, terrible.

• 1:54:07Rich Roll?

  You guys never controlled the story. That was my whole thing. I was, 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.

• 1:54:25Speaker 01

  Well, and it was unprecedented, like, the amount of vitriol.

• 1:54:32Rich Roll?

  It was intense.

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  It was like, you know, like, you know,

• 1:54:37Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it, it's almost like, you know, up until eight days ago, the entire conversation was about COVID.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  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 that money could buy said, "It'll pass."

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  And this was the top advice, and the then CEO, you know, was responding with the fact that, "Oh, 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. Like, 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

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  using my Whirlpool washing machine. But no one's protesting Whirlpool.

• 1:56:37Rich Roll?

  That's a good point. I didn't think of that. Other than, other than not making public the amount of money that was raised and...

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  It's already public. It doesn't matter.

• 1:56:47Rich Roll?

  No, I know now. I'm saying, I'm saying, if you could have done it again, like, what are the things that you would, 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, you know, as a serial entrepreneur, a seed entrepreneur, I'm gonna call you now, looking back on this adventure that you've been on, I mean, I'm sure that it's, it's littered with lessons for people that are watching or listening, who are on their own entrepreneurial journey about, you know, what the landmines are, what to look out for, what to avoid, what to, you know, focus on. I mean, few people have, you know, raised that amount of money, sort of been celebrated

• 1:57:29Rich Roll?

  by Silicon Valley and then, you know, basically vilified. Like, the highs, the high highs and the low lows, I think, are instructive.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so many. So, I think, for one, like, I was operating like my hair was on fire.

• 1:57:47Rich Roll?

  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. Like, you were just literally on fire 24 hours a day.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that being on fire did not get the best results from the team. Like, you know, 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, you know, in necessarily 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

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  the, the structure is really designed for, you know, grand slam homerun, you know, or wipeout. So, you know, if I were doing it again today, like, 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 gonna 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, we were a local product. It was only available in California. But we had national press, right? So you're, like, we weren't doing national marketing. But if we would have just gone slower...

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  Right, still working with a good intense base, I think we would have made different decisions. And, you know, not having a big plant, like, like, why would a startup need to recruit the president of Campbell's Soup to come from a billion dollar operation to a company doing a hundred thousand dollars in revenue? Like, why, why, 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 going B to B versus B to C, our product did both.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  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, the, and, and that's where we were towards the end when we were in Whole Foods and we were in La Pan Cotidienne 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, you know, in New York and LA, and you could buy it by the glass.

• 2:00:51Rich Roll?

  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, that would, you know, 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, you know, affordable machine, there would be a huge amount of people

• 2:01:34Rich Roll?

  ready and willing and excited to buy something like that.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, only two years after, you know, we, we started the journey towards a consumer, did I interview a former founder, executive, board member of Keurig.

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  And the original Kerg machine was $1,500. And today it's $99. So, so I think that that that's another, you know, just strategic play. But I'll also tell you that a B to B like juice machine backend that would be in supermarkets, non-consumer product, not fundable in Silicon Valley.

• 2:02:20Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Yeah, it's a different thing. You're not like this fancy sexy technology company. It's a completely different thing.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one knows the name of the oven that Starbucks uses to reheat the grilled puffed cheese, you know, that they're selling there. No one knows that.

• 2:02:38Rich Roll?

  Well, what did you learn about the Silicon Valley culture, the venture capital, you know, world like that's shrouded in in kind of its own sexy 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.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:26Rich Roll?

  Like a publisher doling out advances on books. It's the Harry Potter that, you know, finances everybody else's book.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  So, so I think there's, you know, a lot of people like, did you see the General Magic movie?

• 2:03:41Rich Roll?

  No, I don't think so. What is that?

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  It's a documentary. It's on Netflix or somewhere. But it's about, you know, Tony Fadell and Mark Parrot.

• 2:03:52Rich Roll?

  The next.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Nest.

• 2:03:55Rich Roll?

  Nest.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Nest and then Google, but it's about.

• 2:03:57Rich Roll?

  Tony I met in your office, right?

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe. Maybe.

• 2:04:02Rich Roll?

  He was on your board, right?

• 2:04:04Speaker 01

  No, Matt Rogers was on.

• 2:04:05Rich Roll?

  Oh, Matt is who I met then.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, but Tony's, Tony's great entrepreneur, but Tony was like a kid wet behind the ears. And he worked at this spin off 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. And the best people in the world, like the people who developed the Macintosh were assigned to this thing. And then Sculley 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.

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  And Tony Fadell 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 all the, everyone like just dissipated 20 years later, everyone was successful, except the CEO, he never surfaced again. But it's just a story. So still the tales of Silicon Valley are that you must swing for the fences. Like no one is interested in number two or number three. You know, like Lyft, you know, is did okay, but people were interested in Uber. Right? So the breakaways and how you can dominate.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  And, you know, raising the capital is an accomplishment, but really, like I love, you know, Sara Blakely at, at Spanx, you know, where, you know, she saved $5,000, hustled and, and built, built a business selling product and wheeling and dealing.

• 2:05:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there is a weird backwards nature to this in the sense that we celebrate these people who, who, who are successful with raising tremendous amounts, 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?

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  Well, I think that, you know, part of it is the society we live in, you know, 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, if we would have known, like, we did market research.

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  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 know, you do all this research and it's wrong. And so I, I think raising money is innovation and people are funding creativity and innovation. So if you want, if you have a big idea and you need a lot of money, like, you couldn't build a computer, per se,

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  without, at scale, to go to manufacturing without it.

• 2:08:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  So you need, you need to do certain things.

• 2:08:06Rich Roll?

  It depends on what kind of idea it is.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  So I, I think that 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 until, but it's definitely about the money in Silicon Valley. Like, it's about the money.

• 2:08:39Rich Roll?

  The interesting journey for you, or for me, watching you kind of go through this is, you know, the kind of emotional and spiritual evolution 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.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:09:32Rich Roll?

  And everybody that knows you knew that, like, your friends all knew that.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but in the media, like, you know, it's like, the irony, do you know what a Bloomberg terminal is?

• 2:09:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  Right? So, on the Bloomberg terminal, 90% of the data you can get on a Bloomberg terminal is available on Google and Yahoo Finance, etc., and they charge $2,000 a month, you know, 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, etc., but I thought it was very, like, I appreciated the beauty and the thousands of problems that we solved, you know, as a result of my three years of being a maniac to launch it.

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:10:48Rich Roll?

  You went to every conference. Cause you, we would talk on the phone or get, you'd be at Google Zeitgeist and you're at Davos and you're at TED and, I mean, you, there was, I don't think there was a conference that existed that you didn't go to.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  I, I went to, I went to a lot.

• 2:11:03Rich Roll?

  And every Tony Robbins, I should add to that as well.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  And, and what happened is then all of a sudden, you don't get invited anymore.

• 2:11:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Right? So, but the, 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 and used, right? So, I never bought a house, um, you know, at Juicera. I never bought the, I never, and no trappings. And I ate it, and there weren't, like, um, 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

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  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 Juicera, I thought like, oh my God, I'm 50 years old, no one's ever gonna hire me again, what am I gonna do? And like, I took this job, you know, for this company, we'll leave them nameless. And I spent two weeks there and, like, I saw.

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  Everything from the founder's eyes, the CEO's eyes, the venture eyes. And I was like, there's lack of congruency here. Like this, 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 I, and then I gave myself permission for time to mourn. You know, the loss and also time to reflect. And like, I, 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.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:13:39Rich Roll?

  That's beautiful. And you wouldn't change it, wouldn't change the path, the trajectory.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. I mean, I just want to lie in the sun and, and be massaged and be fed exotic fruit.

• 2:13:52Rich Roll?

  It sounds like you kind of do that though. I mean, let's, we gotta end this shortly, but I, I want to, 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's lit, it is literally in the middle of nowhere. It's not like directly in Joshua Tree, like it's out, you know?

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, two towns over.

• 2:14:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like truly in the middle of nowhere on a flat desert piece of land, 40 acres?

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  Um, the, the actual ranch I live on is 25 acres.

• 2:14:22Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  But we have other land nearby with hot springs on it.

• 2:14:26Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:14:36Speaker 01

  It's on Airbnb.

• 2:14:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  There's, there's a bunch of houses on Airbnb.

• 2:14:40Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  And.

• 2:14:41Rich Roll?

  So if anybody's listening to this can come and, come and book it and, and hang out with you in the hot tubs.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  Message me directly.

• 2:14:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:14:49Rich Roll?

  What is, talk to me about, you know, the day to day existence. I mean, it's, 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.

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  We're off, we're off the water grid.

• 2:15:04Rich Roll?

  You're off the water grid, but not the electricity grid.

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  No, I mean, what, you know, like, I'm waiting for the next, like, Silicon Valley breakthrough on solar batteries.

• 2:15:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Because, yeah, I don't want to get stuck with a 30 year lease, you know, on.

• 2:15:20Rich Roll?

  That's the battle we keep having over how to do that.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:23Rich Roll?

  But anyway.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  I, I, my, the solution is to buy used panels from some other solar farm that went out and you'll, you'll save half the money and you'll, we can work that out.

• 2:15:35Rich Roll?

  We'll talk about that afterwards.

• 2:15:35Speaker 01

  So, so, 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.

• 2:15:57Rich Roll?

  Isn't there, aren't there springs at, what is it, Two Bunch Palms?

• 2:16:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:16:36Rich Roll?

  So the geologist was able to, you, you literally, you went like prospecting, basically.

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:41Rich Roll?

  You just went, you know, there will be blood.

• 2:16:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  For under $5,000 an acre.

• 2:17:09Rich Roll?

  It's crazy.

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  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, you know, spent the last two years instead of, you know, watch, and we have no TV, no cable on the property. So no TVs, no radios, no cable. We do have internet.

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  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. And I'm learning. So we have a greenhouse and we're doing straw bale, raised beds covered in jute and planted melons and tomatoes. So, 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.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  And then we have the gray water that comes from the soaking tubs that we use for irrigation.

• 2:18:28Rich Roll?

  That's quite something.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  And it all works.

• 2:18:31Rich Roll?

  When you were a little kid growing up in New York and going to school in Harlem, the Bronx or Brooklyn?

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  I went to school, I went to elementary school in the Bronx. I went to high school in Harlem.

• 2:18:42Rich Roll?

  Could you have imagined yourself living out in the middle of the desert as an adult?

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:18:49Rich Roll?

  When you were tagging subways and running around New York City?

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:19:05Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, let's wrap it up. Final thoughts on sprouting?

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  I think sprouting is easy. It's accessible. It's inexpensive. It's nutritious. It's plant-based. And like, I want to.

• 2:19:24Rich Roll?

  It's local.

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  It's local. You know, just, you know, when I, when I thought about sprouting.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  I couldn't believe it. Like, I was questioning every one of my hypotheses to see, was it flawed? And this came out with like shining colors and everything, you know, was 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 than we've even talked about. Like, when you think about the power of, you know, there's been virtually no research whatsoever about the power of consuming living plant foods.

• 2:20:18Speaker 01

  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 just, I welcome people to try it.

• 2:20:34Rich Roll?

  And try it, they will, I think. I love you, my friend. Thank you for sharing your message. The book is The Sprout Book. 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, no better time to learn about this, begin practicing it yourselves, and to take better control of your health and your immunity and everything. So, thank you for sharing that today. You have been, I just want to acknowledge you, like, you've just, you've been an amazing friend, too.

• 2:21:18Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:21:47Speaker 01

  Like, you know, the people-

• 2:21:48Rich Roll?

  This is your second time.

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  I understand, but it's still, I mean, it's a real, it's a real honor. And, you know, it's very intimidating and, but, thank you, thank you for having me for the second time.

• 2:22:01Rich Roll?

  Welcome here anytime, my friend. All right, well, let's do it again, all right?

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:22:05Rich Roll?

  Cool. Take us out with a piece of plants?

• 2:22:08Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 2:22:14Rich Roll?

  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, uh, 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 ritual.com/donate.

• 2:22:57Rich Roll?

  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. Ally 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- And AMA with my buddy Adam Skolnick. We're trying something new and different.

• 2:23:42Rich Roll?

  We're going to experiment with the format a little bit. Hope you guys enjoy it. So you have that to look forward to. Until then, peace. Play it. Namaste.