 So, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. I'm Dr. Steven Gundry. This week, we're speaking with Phil Kruver, or is it Kruver? Kruver. All right, Kruver. He's the founder and CEO of the Catalina Sea Ranch. So what you're saying is you raise horses out on the ocean or something. Now, it's built as the first offshore facility in the United States federal water. And I think, and many other people think, it's probably the answer for sustainable seafood for certainly the United States and maybe the world. So, Phil has been the founder of four startup companies. He served as CEO of two publicly funded companies. So, that's a diverse background. How did the idea of raising muscles out in the ocean come to you? It came to me because, first of all, I read about the Blue Revolution for feeding the planet back in 2010. I had a project in Pakistan with USAID. I said, you know how are we going to feed these people? They have 900 miles of coastline. So, I started looking into it. And after a lot of investigation, I looked at the lower trophic marine species rather than fin fish, which I have nothing against. Someday, we may get involved with that. But you have to feed them. And there's also these issues about sustainability, feed conversion ratios, etc. So, it really boiled down to, I wanted to get into filter feeders. And it was either oysters or mussels. And mussels, after doing my homework, they grow prolifically on the oil rigs two miles away from where we have our ranch right now, 100 acre ranch. And their Mediterranean mussels naturalized over those oil rigs are 37 years old. So, I said, you know, if they're growing out here, and I know that the oil companies have to scrape the legs every year because they get so massive, they start to jeopardize the structural integrity of the oil rigs. So, I said, fast growth, you don't have to feed them as a factoid. If you have fin fish, you have to feed about 60% of your operating costs for feed. You don't feed the things. You just stick them out on ropes. They filter feed the phytoplankton naturally in the water, and they get a harvest less than a year. So, it's kind of like, you know, two and two. You look at the oil rigs and say, can I do them over here? So, we went down to New Zealand, got the gear, and here we are. So, this is actually how they do it in New Zealand with the green-lipped mussels? Yes. It's the same technology. Our anchors, our ropes, our floats are all from New Zealand for our first 100 acres. It'll do about 2 million pounds. We are on the verge right now. Within the next month, we will be applying to the government for another 2,900 acres. However, we now have taken the technologies, and we've gone to other countries, China, India, Korea, and we've reduced our capital costs by about 90%. So now, wait a minute. So, you have a ranch out in the middle of the ocean, and how did you catch the little mussels to put it on the strings? Well, first of all, a comment about the ranch is that, coming up with the name, Catalina, we're not next to Catalina. We're six miles off of Huntington Beach in U.S. Federal Waters. It's about another 15 miles to Catalina, but Catalina has an iconic name. I certainly didn't want to use farm. It alliterates with filthy, and when people say farm, ooh, type of thing, and ranch is kind of California. So, that's where we came up with the name of Catalina Sea Ranch. Answer your question. Currently, we are buying the seed from Oregon. There's only two hatcheries on the West Coast that produce seed, or spat, they call it, for mussels. One's in the state of Washington, and one's in the state of Oregon. We just had a delivery of about 200 million seed yesterday. 200 million. 200 million. So, these were 43 ropes that are 100 feet long, just loaded with, you could barely see them. It's like a little pepper type of thing of mussels. And when they came in by Federal Express, we picked them up, put them on our boat, went out to the ranch 10 miles away from our shoreside facilities, and we tied them on to a backbone rope. And they start today, they are filtering and growing very fast. It's rapid growth up to about two inches, and then they grow very slow. And so, it takes about a year from seed to harvest? That's correct. About one year. Now, do you, I mean, do you have to have divers go down there and tend them or anything? No. We're out there every day, at least five days a week, but most of the work is putting more floats on. So, as these, let me describe the cultivation gear. So, we have a hundred acres, we have 40, what we call backbone lines on it. Each backbone line is 600 feet long, and we're all the entire place that we're located, and the expansion is called the San Pedro Shelf, and it's all 150 feet deep. It's the largest underwater plateau on the West Coast. And this is not strategy or intelligence. This was serendipity. We just fell into that. You know, I said, oh, this is perfect for it. So, it's 150 feet deep, which makes it really interesting, is that it drops off to 3,000 feet, and there's this phenomenon of upwelling. So, the California currents come up and it just takes these nutrients and floods that shelf so that they have food for the filter feeders. So, anyway, going back to the gear, there's 4,600 foot lines, and under that is drape the grow-out lines, 30 to 50 foot, all continuous, for 10,000 feet. So, once we put the seed in, in about three months, they grow really fast to about as big as your thumbnail. And then we go out with these machinery from New Zealand. And if we take that rope and you stick it through, it goes through a little orifice and just peels them off, 10,000 pounds per hour, washes them, cleans them, and we put them in a bag. And then we drive after harvesting all day, we go back to shore side and our distributor's there with a refrigerated truck. We unload it with a forklift and that's the life of the mussel. So, you didn't have to do anything to these guys because, as you know, and our listeners, we're very suspicious of farm raised fish and farm raised shellfish like shrimp. But your farm is not doing that. Correct? Our ranch is, yes, our ranch is very sustainable. When I started, that was so important to say sustainable and we've got away from shellfish now, but the real proper terminology, we're doing it in Mullis, but that people don't understand. That's why we say shellfish. But just in the last year, it's changed from sustainability or addition, it's called regenerative. So it's not just sustainable as a crop, but also it's regenerating the ocean, not only the mussels or the Mullis, but also the seaweed that we'll be growing in the future. So, I think that's a really good point because sustainable is one thing, but regenerative. Tell me about filter feeders. There's a lot of worry that filter feeders like Mullis are eating toxins, eating filth, eating heavy metals, radioactive from Fukushima. Give me your thought of, you know, free out in the ocean filter feeders. What's the difference? So most of the aquaculture, let's say Mullisk, or let's just stick right to mussel. Mussel farms in the United States worldwide, they're close to shore. They're in bays and estuaries, there's runoff in the urban areas from, you know, the storm sewer lines that come in, in the agricultural areas. There's all kinds of runoff from cows and sheep and so forth. So there is a lot of nutrients, but it's a quality of the nutrients. Where we are, six miles offshore, we've done all the evaluations and so forth. The stormwater pipe from Orange County doesn't come close. They monitor very closely. So all the food that our crops are consuming all come from 3,000 feet down, coming up from the bottom, and it's clean phytoplankton chlorophyll that makes them eat. But what they do have, or what they can filter, there certainly is no chloroform, there's no bacteria, the big thing is biotoxins. There are two prevalent biotoxins in Southern California that we have to test. Some people call it a red tide. And it doesn't kill the shellfish, but if a human or a seal or bird or wildlife that they eat the mussel, then they will get sick or die. But so what we do, we have to test before every harvest to make sure we send it to a federal lab or state lab. They evaluate it, how many parts per it, if there's any of the biotoxin. And then they release the crop next day, they say there's no biotoxins of a certain level, and we haven't had any problem with it so far. But we have to test for that. But the shellfish doesn't die, and if there wasn't, unfortunately, a red tide loaded with the biotoxins, it would drift off, and then they would flush that within a day. So they wouldn't have it, and we keep testing it, and then we could put it back on the market for sale. So they wouldn't incorporate it into their flesh. That's correct. That's correct. Now, the other thing is with scallops, you eat the medallion, and that will not accumulate the biotoxins. That's kind of an interesting thing as well. Because that's just the mussel. Just the mussel. So this whole fear, which has been founded since almost pre-recorded history, that shellfish or bottom feeders, and they're full of filth and danger, do you still hear that? You do with wild mussels, and Belgium's a huge area for consumption, but those are all wild. So they're on the bottom, and they do have grit, and they have to deprivate them and clean them out. Ours are all suspended. We're in 150 feet of water. The backbone line of where they're all draped is 20 feet under the water. And then, so we're 100 feet below from the sandy bottom type of thing. So no, we don't have to deprivate them. They're clean. After we harvest them on the boat, they're ready to go into the marketplace. So the idea that I'm going to have a mussel, and I got to be really careful because there might be sand or grit. You won't have that. You mentioned the heavy metals. They're down on the bottom. If they were bottom feeders, they would be susceptible to that, but heavy metals don't come up there. We don't have to test for them. It's not even a concern as far as the health authorities are concerned. Now, mollusks in general are great cleaners of the ocean. Is that a pretty good description? Absolutely. So the data shows that a large gigas mussel, I'm sorry, oyster, will filter 50 gallons of water per day. A mussel a little bit smaller, ours two and two and a half inches, they'll do about 30 gallons per day. There's some really interesting YouTube videos where they put a mussel into a dirty container. And then after 24 hours, they do a time lapse like that. It just cleans it all up. But the dirt's not in the mussel flesh. That's correct. They put it. It's called sue fichies. They get rid of it. See, I think that's probably the biggest point that you can make to your audience, my audience, that everybody thinks that this stuff is ending up in mussels, and it's not. Well, the key to me is if it's the traditional onshore, it could be in there. Even though they go through deprivation with UV lights that kill the bacteria, you still have that in there. Our mussels are offshore. So they're filter feeding really pure phytoplankton that's not contaminated with them even. So you don't have to treat it with UV light and all that? Most, well, many of the near shore farms are actually unacceptable for shellfish cultivation, but they get around that because they do the deprivation and they kill the bacteria. There is no bacteria out where we are. We don't even have to do it. We're not the only ones that don't have to do that. So if the month doesn't end in an R, you can still have them. So that's what's spawning and typically a bi-valve or a mullus will spawn twice a year. So it's a natural thing with them when the temperatures change. They do it in spring in the fall. They know it's time to propagate and so forth. So they spawn naturally. And that's when we have our spawns up at our hatcheries. But we're overcoming that now. So what we have done, we've got a small business innovative research grant from the United States Department of Agriculture. It was to develop cryopreservation. It just clicked to me. Here's a good thing. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a farmer or whatever like that. I'm an outlier. I'm an entrepreneur. We've been freezing human embryos for decades. Why can't we do it to get rid of this cycle with cryopreserve larva larvae? So we got this grant. We got a 70% success. No, so now we have seed on demand. So it's a big doer, liquid nitrogen. And so when we want to have a spawn, they pull it out, stick it in, and now we're ready to go. So you're using European mussel stock. Can you grow a green-lip mussel? They wouldn't grow there. And the regulatory authorities would never let you do it. So there's two types of mussels in California that grow on the rigs all around. The native one is called a California anus. I know it's not really good for branding. But the other one is the Gallo provincialis, which actually came from Spain. But it was so many years ago that it's considered naturalized. It's not native, but it's naturalized. So they're so prolific two miles away. They're all around the shoreline and everything else. They're really preferred by the chefs. So we have no problems with doing it. But you can't bring in or introduce a foreign mussel. Say on the east coast, it's called edulis. I don't know how well they'll grow. They're more in the cold water. I don't know if they'd even survive. But the regulatory authorities, both in state and federal, will never allow you to put those in there. So we're using a naturalized mussel that's enjoyed by the chefs. So they're naturalized so they have American citizenship? Yeah. Exactly. So, okay. So as you know, I'm a big fan of shellfish and mollus. A lot of the reason for the omega-3 content. And the other thing I like about farmed mussels is they're not farmed. They're ranched. Tell me all about the omega-3 content in mussels compared to other things. So the big push now, I'll work into this, but the big push now is we have a 15 billion, underscore billion, not million, seafood trade deficit. Secretary Ross, the Department of Commerce, when he was confirmed, he went on record. He said, I've got my eye on that. At that time, $14 billion seafood deficit. He said, we have the largest EZZ economic zone in all the countries. We should be net exporters rather than importing 15 billion. So that has increased. So since he went on record during his confirmation hearing, according to NOAA, United States increased its seafood trade deficit by $1.1 billion in 2017. So we're importing $15 billion worth of seafood. And 90% of a little over 90% comes from China and Asia. So why can't we grow our own? So what we're looking at is expanding. We feel we have a first mover advantage. We've got the first permit in federal waters. That's the only place you're going to get expansion. As an example, in California, if you wanted to grow mussels, anything that's sustainable, seaweed or whatever, you're not going to get a permit. California has not issued a permit in 22 years. So if you're three miles to the shore, you're in California waters, you're not going to get a permit. We've jumped over that. We're six miles out. And that's federal waters. Only the Army Corps of Engineers has jurisdiction. So it's a building permit, no term on it. This is something I learned about in October of 2011. And I went, whoa, did I hit the jackpot on this? You know, type of thing. So anyway, there's great opportunity for expansion to reduce this seafood trade deficit. You were talking about Omega-3, or asked about Omega-3s. Of the $15 billion, $6 billion is shrimp. And the scientific literature to research shows that mussels have three times the Omega-3 content is shrimp, which in shrimp, by the way, is one of the most devastating to both the farm plants, for the mangroves, and then the wild caught because of the bycatch or like that. So I always say, if I could only get Leonardo DiCaprio to eat a pizza with mussels on it instead of sausage, then our branding is going to make it happen. Let me work on that. Or maybe Dr. Gee, we got to get you to eat one. Absolutely. Well, you brought some. So that's a good question. I just got back from Europe last week in France and Italy. And every restaurant, I mean literally, and I was on primarily the shore, has mussels. And people are eating mussels for lunch, they're eating it for dinner. I didn't see it on the breakfast menu, but there should be. What's the cultural difference? Why don't Americans in general, that's kind of down the list of shellfish and mollusks? What explain that? Great, great question. Because when I got into the business, I found out about the part of the deficit is that we import 30 million pounds of live mussels, underscore live mussels, from Prince Edward Island, 100,000 people, 3,500 air polluting miles away. Then of course I'm out there on the oil rigs diving, and I see all these mussels and find out they have to scrape them and everything. And I say, well, why can't we grow our own type of thing? So the numbers though is because I think we have substandard mussels. People just don't eat it. In fact, a lot of people ask me, you're growing it. What is that bait? They think of it as bait. So the numbers are, in the United States, the average per capita consumption annually is 0.15 pounds for America. In Europe generally, it changes from each country, it's about five pounds per capita. In New Zealand, only 7 million people, but it's 33 million pounds per capita. So my big pitch to my investors is that everybody likes local now. So we got a local mussel, there's 40 million people in California. If I get up some way or another with maybe having Dr. G eat a couple of these things, talk about the nutritional value and so forth, the education, the awareness. But if they could get up to five pounds per capita in California, now you got 200 million pounds, you got a couple bucks per pound, you got a half a billion dollar industry. So that's my big dream and goal. Okay. So how segue to that, how do we get people to try mussels? Is it a tough sell? Or are you working with chefs? Yes, we are. In fact, last week, the chef from Nomad LA, I've never even heard of him. Wonderful restaurant. The one in New York was voted the number one restaurant in the United States in the world. But he last year was the number one young chef in the United States. He took our mussels and he went to New York and he won this Vitamix challenge. He came in number one and number two. He actually took our mussels and he put them in a blender that's sponsoring it. He made this incredible recipe and that's going to get a lot of publicity type of thing. So I think I see the awareness of the nutritional value, unique recipes that people could try. Or when you go to New Zealand, you have mussel sausages, you have mussel, everything is mussel. I'm looking at a mussel hot dog now that the ingredients try to promote that. So it's going to be an uphill battle. People just have that kind of negative thing about mussel. Why do you do it and so forth? So it's going to be a lot of branding. One of the things that impresses me about mussels and shellfish in general is this, our brain is anywhere from 60 to 70% fat. And half of the fat in our brain is a component omega-3 called DHA. The other half, interestingly enough, is arachidonic acid. Now, a lot of people are very afraid of arachidonic acid, the evil omega-6 fat. If it was so evil, then half of our brain would not be made out of it. And one of the fascinating things not only do shellfish have a lot of omega-3 DHA, but they actually have arachidonic acid. And there's some very compelling evidence that one of the reasons that we are such a big brained animal is that long ago, we built our big brain by eating primarily shellfish. And you and I were talking off camera that certainly on the East Coast early on, we really founded America on oysters and clams and mussels. And we paved our streets with the leftover shells. And so I think there's hope, number one. But I think the more I can convince people that they should be eating these foods for their brain. Mom always said fish is brain food, and she was right. And you're right. Fish, at least the way we're doing it now, is not a sustainable thing. And certainly I'm very cautious about farm-raised fish because you're right. We have to feed them and the things we've chosen to feed them are not good for them or for us. So I'm, you know, when we get in contact, I just think this is one of these ways where you can make a difference for the environment. And you can probably make a difference for people's health, which is what a double good thing. So you don't have to feed these guys, huh? No. You're not sprinkling some fertilizer out on the ranch. No external externalities. And you know, with the changing climate and the droughts, and there's a lot to be said about offshore aquaculture, particularly the low-trophic aquaculture that don't have to be fed. The one thing about that is that the feed conversion ratio, they're starting to get that down one to one. But as an example, farm-raised tuna, it's 50 to one. So you have to put 50 pounds in of anchovies or other type of forage fish to get one pound out. So we don't have to do that. That's why they're so profitable. We put them out there. We keep putting floats on there as they grow. We'll keep the lines from sagging. So each line is 10,000 feet. We get about five to seven pounds per foot. So you've got 50,000 pounds of weight pulling it down. So we're out there. We've got thousands of floats, 120 and 300-liter floats out there, keep suspending that backbone line. So these are the Arnold Schwarzenegger's of the sea. I mean, they just pump you up just by filtering. Yeah. You know, another really interesting positive is that where we're located, there's no habitat. So it's all just open sea, all 150 feet deep on this plateau, mud and sand, so it doesn't attract the fish. Right now, Catalina Sea Ranch is the hottest fishing spot in Southern California because all the habitat there, little fish climb around on it. The big fish come through. So in the Yellowtail, which is a pelagic, they come through. Three Sundays ago, I went out there on a Sunday because I kind of keep an eye on things, there was over 200 recreational fishing boats on top of the ranch. What are they doing there? Isn't there a sign, say, Catalina Sea Ranch, keep out? We welcome them because the recreational fishing industry is in the billions of dollars and we want support for our expansion. So I go out there and I'd say, hey, write a letter of support for us type of thing. You know, this is good for it. It's attracting fish. It's a good thing. So is Bass Pro Shops your sponsor? We're working on that. We're working on that. I think that's a natural. So, I mean, big ships and things, they don't have to, you don't have to worry about them or they're not in a... Well, we're right outside the two largest ports in the United States, the Port of L.A., the Port of Long Beach. And it's kind of interesting little story is that when I had the idea, I didn't know about the traffic lanes when these ships come in. Now, they're on the outside of the oil rigs. There's four oil rigs that are two miles further out. And so the transit lines for these big ships, which have a keel 40, 50 feet deep, they would tear everything down. But why we're lucky here is that the ship lanes are outside. Every boat that has a, it's over 60 feet as of a couple of years ago, they have to have an AIS. So they have to transmit data, what they are, how big they are, and so forth. And we're within the, it's called the vessel transit of Long Beach. So they're watching it with a radar all the time. So if there was some errant large vessel for some reason wandered off, they could alert them and then they would send the Coast Guard out right away. So no, we're not in the fishing lanes, but for the commercial fishermen, the recreational fishermen, the people, we're not in the way of people going to Catalina like that. They don't have to go around this and so forth. They go right over the top. Doesn't hurt us. We lose a couple floats once in a while. And by the way, they all have my cell phone on it. That was one of the regulatory requirements. So I get, every once in a while, I'll get a call from someone saying that, hey Phil, we got one of your floats that lined it up here. So we go and we read. And thanks for the muscles. Yeah. Well, we do. We bring a bag of muscles. Thank you for reporting. Because it's a couple hundred dollars. How big are these floats? The ones that are subsurface are 120 liters and the top ones are 300 liters. So they're about like this. So you can see them. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like a little buoy. No. When you go out there, it's love to have you come out, by the way. So all you'll see is we have four corner 100 acres. It's 2,000 feet. And so we have four corner buoys, not floats. And then we have what's called a nomad buoy. It was given to us by NOAA. It's 17,000 pounds, but it transmits data into the cellular network at Huntington Beach and Verizon in real time. So in the morning, you go up there, you can see what's going on. I keep an eye on things and so forth. But it's transmitting data for two purposes. One for our husbandry. You know, do we know the oxygen? We know the phytoplankton, richness of temperatures and all that stuff. But also for regulatory compliance, making sure that there is no measurable impact, whether it be positive or negative. And we think it's going to be positive. So you're a sea rancher. How do you harvest these guys? You go down one of their with divers and pick the little fellas off? When they're ready to go, we have about a million and a half pounds ready to go right now. They're growing very slowly. Ready means about two inches long, two and a two and a half inches. We pick up that grow line that's 10,000 feet, shove it into this. It's called a declumper and it just strips them off and then it goes into a washing machine type of thing, goes up a conveyor, and then it's graded because they're different sizes. So we only sell the large and the mediums. I brought mediums today. The little ones, we reseed and stick them back out on the ranch. And so we bag and tag them. It's required by federal law that any shellfish have to have a tag on it and it follows that shellfish to the consumer. So if you go to a restaurant, if you go to a grocery store, by law you have to say, well, can I see the tag? And they have to show it to you. So it will show it when it was harvested and where. So where can we find the Catalina Sea Ranch mussels? Well, right now, mostly in Southern California, the first round of capital that we raise were all the seafood, the major seafood distributors. So right now, our distributor for shellfish is DeCarlo Seafood. They have about 80% of the market in Southern California. One of my founding directors is Roger O'Brien, who is the CEO and Chairman of Santa Monica Seafood. So anyway, it's being distributed by both of them and other seafood distributors. You can find them in restaurants. And we're putting that up. I have a new marketing guide. We're going to put it on our website where you can find the mussels as they are being harvested. So is your goal Costco or is that? No, I think it's fresh and Costco takes it. We buy from them, by the way, all of our competitor mussels. We go out every week, we buy them and we do meat to shell ratios. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, we want to know, we want to make sure that we have all the data that we have a superior mussel and local and fresh. You tell? I mean, you got a better mussel than Costco? It looks really good. Looks really, really good. And we're improving upon it. We have a selective breeding program. We're building a hatchery so we don't have to take these mussels from Oregon that we could spawn them ourselves. So we're in the process of constructing. I have a meeting this afternoon about that. So we'll have our own hatchery and have our control of our own destiny with a higher performing mussel and other type of bivalves as we expand into them because of selective breeding. Nobody's doing that. I mean, it's just incredible. And a guy who just went into this for fun. Exactly. And a challenge. Everybody said, you'll never get a permit, Phil. And I said, oh, I got to do it now. That's a challenge. And so, I mean, are you going to become the mussel king of America? Or, I mean, what's your goals in all this? Well, thank you for asking. Because I really see that. I've been pitching. I actually trademarked the aquaculture capital of America. And I really believe that we're in such a incredible location. Number one, this plateau that has 40 square miles or 26,000 acres in US federal waters, where all you have is one regulatory agency, the Army Corps of Engineers. They give you a building permit. So expansion being the first mover advantage and so forth. I'm looking at 3,000 acres. I think that's going to keep me busy for a while, but it'll be a thousand acres of mussels, thousand acres of seaweed or kelp, giant kelp. And then another thousand acres we call cage culture, experimenting with oysters, mussels, abalone. We're trying that. We've actually tried that. That seemed to do fairly well. But you got to feed them kelp, but not other outside, but you have to go out and feed them. So will they be as profitable? I don't know. Why don't you take over the little purple sea urchin culture? Oh, yeah. We're going to experiment with that. See if that's a possibility. Take them from where they're devastating the giant kelp and palace vertis and transfer them out there and feed them, bulk them up and then try to sell them. All right. So has this journey changed your health or are you eating more mussels than you used to? You know, I've always loved mussels, probably being from the East Coast. And I had mussels last night. They were fairly good. So I eat them very, very frequently. They're good for you. I just love them. I don't eat them mostly. Well, I never eat them for breakfast. But you know, in the evening time, they're just wonderful. So yeah, it's a healthy, healthy, healthy food. I think you need a mussel breakfast sausage. All right. So your detractors, when you came looking for money or what did you tell them? Obviously, you built other companies, which helps. But why did you, how did you convince them that you could do this? Well, you know, I have a lot of experience with capital formation. But I really underestimated the challenge of raising millions of dollars for a mussel farm offshore. Right. Please. But that's what they say, those farms. So anyway, I would call institutional capital people, you know, VCs and so forth. And I would say, can we put you, I've got my colleagues here, can I put you on the speaker box? I could hear them giggling in the background. You've got to be kidding type of thing. But to me, it just made perfect sense. So the success was, we did it with accredited investors and most of them were mission driven. It wasn't that they want to make a lot of money or anything else. They said, hey, this sounds good for the ocean. This is kind of like my donation, my contribution to very wealthy people for improving the environment. So that's where our first rounds came in. And we're doing the same thing right now. There's a new emerging group of people called Impact Investors with major funds. And they're trying to do social good by investing in companies that are sustainable that will help the planet. And next week, I go to Connecticut for 10 days to meet with or to go to a workshop with them. So that's kind of the investor community we're approaching. So show us the muscles. All right, brought them. So these were harvested yesterday. So Mediterranean mussels, they're about five pounds. So they're still alive? Still alive. And for the neophyte, if the shell is open after you cook them, it's good. And if it's not, don't eat it. And give us just an idea for people who don't understand how do you cook a mussel? It all depends on what I like. It's like 10 minutes. I put it in with beer, a lot of garlic. I'm a garlic affectionato type of thing. And that's it, beer or wine and garlic. But there's so many other types of ingredients that you could put with them. And typically a mussel will taste like the ingredients you cook them in. That's what's good about it. So there's a lot of variety, a lot of opportunity to be very creative. Yeah, I like coconut curry mussels. Really good. We have to share that recipe with them. All right. Okay. All right. Well, we're definitely going to do that. Okay. Well, this is this has been great. Now I mentioned before we take an audience question before we finish up. So I've got the audience question today from Michael Ganaville. I think that's correct. Dr. G, your best if a person needed to cut one thing from their diet, what would you suggest? Food or liquid? I know it depends on each individual. What's your thoughts? Well, again, in the plant paradox, I tell you it's not what I tell you to eat that's important. It's what I tell you not to eat. But I'm going to give you actually, I just got this email today from one of my colleagues in Sweden. And there's a new paper out looking at the toxicity to our microbiome from artificial sweeteners. You know, I talk about this a lot. But there's a new study that kind of backs up the Duke study that a packet of Splenda, for instance, will kill 50% of your microbiome in your gut, one packet. And this paper, which I haven't finished reading because I literally got it this morning, shows that all of these sweeteners, whether it's saccharine, whether it's neutrosweet, whether it's Splenda sucralose, are lethal to friendly bacteria in our gut. And it's dose related. And as you remember, I was an eight diet coke a day addict and running and going to the gym and eating healthy and wondering why I wasn't losing weight. And it's one factor, but one of the things I really urge you to do is just ditch the diet soda. And among other things, families, please do not give your children fruit juice. Apple juice is not an appropriate food for a child. Do not give them orange juice in the morning. I know that sounds like heresy. But these are pure sugar products. So ditch the juices, ditch the artificial sweeteners, and we'll be well on our way to better health. Okay, so where can your audience find you? Do you have a website that they can visit to learn all about you? Yes, it's www.catalineserange.com. That seems easy. And just don't type in farm. Right. Absolutely. Catalina C Ranch. All right. And if I may say, we also have loads of videos. So you click on our Facebook or YouTube. There's at least 200 videos there that yours truly. That's my hobby. They're cheesy videos, but they recorded everything that we've done in the last three years for become the aquaculture capital of America. All right. And do you have any cooking videos on your site? We do. We have, we've taken out the 50 chefs at one time. We have a research vessel called the Captain Jack. It's a 111 ton, 75 foot vessel. And we love to take chefs out, people. You're invited. We would welcome you. Love to come out. We'll bring a couple of my James Beard award-winning friends. Well, we'll go for it. All right. Fantastic. All right. Well, so thank you for joining us. I really appreciate you making the trouble. So for more information about this week's episode, please take a look at my show notes below and on drgundry.com. In the show notes, you'll also find a survey. And I'd love to find out more about you. Please take a few minutes to fill it out so I can do my best to provide information you're looking for. And I'll give you a follow-up. I was filling up with gas in Palm Springs yesterday on my way westward to LA. And I was putting diesel in my diesel car, and 39 miles per gallon, by the way, and in an SUV. And a gentleman in an Audi, doesn't make a difference, was filling up next to me. And he says, you're Dr. Gundry. And I said, yeah, I am. And he said, love your podcast. My wife and I and the wife's waving. He said, your podcasts are great. So thank you for that follow-up. And by the way, he says, I have a wonderful voice just like David Letterman. And we're both from the Midwest. So thank you for listening. Stop me. I was stopped all over Europe. This is a movement. So we want to promote things that are going to save the planet. And by eating mussels from the Catalina Sea Ranch, you're not only going to save the planet, but you're going to save your brain. And that's what we're all about. So remember, I'm Dr. Stephen Gundry, and I'm always looking out for you.