 I feel that Mark is honest like I feel you're honest and your honesty deserves my opening up a little bit more so I'm going to just tell you a little bit about the juicero thesis because most people right and I I'm defining most is like 90% not 51% most people never understood what happened to juicero why I did it and and what happened so I'm going to share with you succinctly Doug Evans is my guest on this episode of inside ideas brought to you by 1.5 media and innovators magazine Doug is an early pioneer in the health and food movement many of you have probably heard of him before we've known each other for a while and after losing his mother to cancer and his father to heart disease and watching his brother suffer through diabetes and three strokes he invested in and co-founded organic avenue organic avenue was one of the first organic co-pressed juice and raw food retailers in the United States he was the inventor and founder of juicero the first at home co-pressed juicing system in a three-year period Doug led the company from conception to production launch and sold over 1 million juicero packs Doug has been an avid sprouter for over 20 years and wrote the sprout book got a copy right here Doug lives off the water grid and food grid in his land with private hot springs east of the Joshua tree in California and wonderful valley hot springs where he created a sprout lab and has daily practice of sitting soaking an ash tang primary series Doug I'm so glad you're here welcome thank you so much Mark it's great to be here you are such a pioneer and it's an honor to be able to share this dialogue with you I'm so glad that you feel that way right in the beginning of your book you gave a strong accolades to your brother who you also mentioned in your biography struggling with some health issues and stroke but also who's been the rock and and helping you with a lot of things besides your parents how have you been during this whole pandemic and craziness up until now has all this past experience helped you to be more resilient and get through this crazy time yeah I mean it's really interesting because I am not Pollyanna right I am enthusiastic I am resourceful and I strive to be a leader so during this crazy times you know for me it's business as usual because I'm honoring and respecting the requests that the government has made to be polite like I understand wearing a mask doesn't protect me but protects other people so I'm honoring that but as a result I don't like to leave my yurt I don't like to leave my land I like to do my work remotely and in this time of this pandemic I believe the world is advanced considerably on levels of communication like the amount of one-on-one zoom calls that I've had which would have been you know a plane trip and jet lag and travel and expense and enormous you know levels of fossil fuel you know consumed are now being able to be more efficient I was having a meeting with someone in a conference call with someone in Hong Kong and I was so excited during the call I literally just right before the pandemic I would have been at LAX on a plane to Hong Kong and instead because of the pandemic because of everything else I just said okay we got to make this work here so how can I make sure they know my level of commitment we can exchange information and the like and and I did that in in Australia in Hong Kong and in in Japan my book is very popular in Japan with the the English speaking Japanese who are plant-based and sprout eating and there's a company in in Japan that sells sprouts in over 20,000 stores and every word in my book resonated with them and the the advantage of selling seeds versus selling sprouts just solves so many food safety and transportation issues and shelf life issues and economic issues that they want to like open to the possibility of selling seeds selling information and so now this is another thing I add on to my plate is translating my book into Japanese. Are you like considering yourself this uh sprout farmer urban farmer you're actually in a rural area so it's uh but you you really kind of uh not only where you live now it is kind in the desert off the grid self-sustaining um you used to have to drive hours to to go get food tell us about that that that experience and how you've kind of created this whole self-sustaining area where you're at uh that's a story in another self that's worth worth hearing. Yeah I mean it's actually the opposite of what you just said before it became what you said because I used to live New York LA and San Francisco so I had ubiquitous omnipresent access to healthy organic food vegan food plant-based farmers markets you know there was always one day the week there was always a farmers market there was always access to um organic food and then you know after um Juicero was composted and you know that's a whole other story I I immediately felt like a rebound in a relationship and I started to scramble and I took on an opportunity and then the energy wasn't aligned with the the founder of that organization that I wanted to help and for the first time in my life I quit like I quit something because I felt like oh my god hey I don't need the money I don't want the money and I don't think that this person is going to change to accommodate my values so um in two weeks into it I gave it two weeks I got my spidey sense tingled on day one but I gave it two weeks and then when the person asked me to do something and I said I feel uncomfortable with doing that he goes you're a dummy and and I was like I I may not be like you but I don't think that that's an accurate information and I will not work under those circumstances thank you very much and then he called me over the weekend and apologized and I said I understand that you're sorry and I fully accept your apology and I think you will have to find someone else thank you very much and have the best day ever and I got off the phone and so when I moved so then I said I'm going to give myself I've worked for 50 years I've been alive I've worked for most of them 37 of them I've been working since I was 13 years old independent never went to college joined the military at 17 so I've worked and I probably saved my first nickel right and I had you know one good exit and one good failure right under my belt and so I said I don't need to work today so what I want to do is I want to reflect and I want to unpack every decision that I made that could have been done differently could have been done better like where could I look in the mirror and so I've done two-day silent meditations vipassana meditations and I learned a lot from two days 10 days of no reading writing speaking or eye contact but I felt that I could have been more productive now that I had this skill and that I didn't need to go to a retreat center to be in silence I could go find a plot of land I could be in nature and I can connect to the universal force of energy and be grounded and be in water and breathe clean air and see the stars so that was like my modus operandi and it turns out that most people want to live in popular cities where the rent is extraordinary and the desert is virtually uncharted hostile hard to live in but after you go to burning man a few times you realize that you can you can live anywhere right and you could create community anywhere so I was very inspired after burning man to find land and and I'm in my tent I'm in my yurt which is a burning man yurt this year it's been to burning man several times I've upgraded it by adding denim insulation and outdoor fabric so it's it's comfortable it's 100 degrees now here Fahrenheit about 48 degrees Celsius to give you perspective and it's 913 in the morning but so but when I moved here not only was I in the desert I was in a food desert and the nearest whole foods was one hour and 15 minutes away without traffic right so without traffic it was an hour and 15 minutes away and that's when I said oh this does not make sense I'm not going to drive and it's hard to have a garden in sand it takes years to convert and to do the regenerative agriculture and and build up the soil which now I'm doing in my two and a half years later I finally have an organic garden on raised straw bale haze it's coming along fantastically but two and a half years ago I came here nothing was growing couldn't do anything and so I remembered in my in the back of my mind when I first started to sprout over 20 years ago and I go wow this is really easy you add water you know you put them in a jar and things sprout and it's like necessity is the greatest form of invention so during that time I never needed to sprout because I could go buy sprouts I was in the hustle like I'd go grab a pack of sprouts from the from the health food store I'd run on the train I'd run to a meeting I'd eat my sprouts and then I'd eat everything else but when I came here I didn't have a lot of options and I wanted to be here so much that I knew I was making sacrifices but I didn't realize that the sacrifices were going to be around food and and access and you know organic food and I am probably the worst person to go shopping with for organic produce if you're in a rush because I take my time and I inspect the produce not for beauty I'm not looking for the biggest beautiful things but I'm looking for freshness I'm looking for cellular integrity right I'm looking for the Christmas and I will go through till I find and it doesn't matter like a big thing for me is biodiversity so I don't want to eat the same rice and beans every day and be a vegan I certainly don't want to have Oreos and oat milk right I want to get a variety and diversity of whole food plant-based organic vegetables and fruit so I'm making sure I want to eat like a lot of variety and so it would take me a long time to pick out the things so when I got here I ordered some jars I ordered some seeds and I started to sprout and every day I was sprouting I felt like I was getting a bonus of three hours of not being in the car and then whatever time it took being in the store of shopping and so I was gaining extra time because the sprouting was very fast but I didn't know much about sprouts I had sprouted mung bean sprouts alfalfa sprouts and sunflower sprouts and it turns out like in the United States alfalfa sprouts are 80 percent of the market mung bean sprouts are about 14 15 percent of the market and every other sprout is you know sub four percent yeah so but being in you know access to the internet and access to information I was looking for organic sprouting seeds and I was able to get azuki and arugula and chia and flax and clover and radish and red cabbage and lentils all sorts of different lentils and I was amazed at how many different seeds I could get for sprouting and so I wasn't sure and in a way I'm an autodidactic scientist right I like the scientific method and I wanted to be most efficient so I decided to try and to test each different sprouting method jars trays bags soil different alternative sprouting means whether it was an unbleached paper towel organic cotton muslim hemp husks coconut husk so I did all these things within 30 days 50 percent of my caloric intake were sprouts and turns out I was alive and I was alive by eating living foods which is a whole different concept if you talk about eating living foods to the average American I don't know you're a global guy I'm still more of an American you talk about eating living foods people think sushi they think you're sushi yeah like I'm sticking my face in the goldfish jar you know swallowing whole goldfish and but the living foods resonated so much with me that I was like oh I need more I need more and it turns out that I can overeat french fries I can overeat um kale that's been sauteed with oil and salt I could certainly overeat almost any veggie burger that's on the market can't overeat raw sprouts living sprouts I cannot overeat like I'll be eating eating eating hungry eating and then boom my brain says my gut says done done and then you're done but you also have that full feeling as well don't you oh a hundred percent like that roughage you know here's the thing you know and this is not a trick question I know you know the answer but I will say to people what someone says oh you're vegan you're plant-based where do you get your protein from and I go back I go where did you get that question from exactly because since when are you a nutritionist like do you want to inspect my stool to see like blood test and I and I go you know where do you get your fiber from and turns out doctor um doctor will be who wrote fiber fueled in his book he identified that 95% of people in America are fiber deficient but they're not protein deficient but no one's saying hey where do you get your fiber from because there's not like a global fiber lobby so so what I remembered when we started what I learned this when I was at organic avenue I reiterated it when I was at Juicero was the US dietary guidelines recommend seven to 13 servings of fruits and vegetables and the way they got that recommendation is against all odds because the the the dairy industry the meat industry the fish industry the shellfish industry the seafood industry they're all pushing their agenda right and food is big business in the united states so somehow these people they won't say don't eat meat they'll say eat leaner meats and they won't say you know don't chicken and you know so when we got to the point when I heard seven to 13 servings and and a serving is a fistful I was like if you're eating just the minimum seven servings of fruits and vegetables how do you have room for anything else how do you have anything room for anything else so if you look at the diversity and you're getting the calories and you're getting the servings of fruits and vegetables you're getting the nutritional balance load like it's just in there like the herbivores and primates are not like going through with my fitness pal analyzing what they're eating for the nutritional load right they're eating a variety of foods so I don't look at labels because when I'm eating fresh fruits and vegetables there are no labels on it like I don't want to eat things coming out of plastic packaging with labels that are old I want fresh I want ripe I want living organic fruits vegetable seeds nuts and seaweeds right that's what I wanted and then I added the big s and that s is not the dollar sign that's the sprout sign so I started to consume sprouts and then like I'm built on sprouts right now my energy my my whole metabolism my physical structure my bones my nails my hair all built on sprouts and turns out I sleep well I poop well and I've got good energy and my mind is like laser focused I'm even aware like of things that I never even thought I'd be aware of like I'm aware of oh this thought is lingering in my mind and if I don't take action on it now it might be at risk so the things that may have in the past dropped through the cracks are now like front and center and they're in there and I'm using the creativity of the mind to create systems so that I don't drop the ball I don't forget things I follow up on things and I have the energy and so if you ask me what's going on in the pandemic in my world my world is the best ever and I gone to maybe against popular advice I went to Los I went to Los Angeles I went to San Diego I went to Palm Desert and I participated in some of the peaceful protests because I felt it was important right felt it was important to do that and so I'm aware of the pain and the suffering that many many millions of people are experiencing around the world whether it's with Black Lives Matter whether it's with starvation whether it's with hunger whether it's with COVID the things that concern me on the long level are not the risks that the people being tested for COVID that are asymptomatic and that could pass it because I think it's a very concern for for people to be aware of but I'm concerned with fast food I'm concerned with with animal products I'm concerned with climate I'm concerned with the longer term aspects of what's happening in the world that that are being you know ignored when we think about and and I'm not a statistician I don't know any of these things I'm sure you do what percentage of people die from will die in the last 12 months or in the next 12 months from COVID influenza heart disease diabetes chronic illnesses that are preventable like almost all of these things are preventable right and these pandemics are largely tied to they're not um separate from the consumption of animal products in the dietary they're all like these live markets these conditions where they're stuffing you know animal on top of animal on top of animal living on their own feces in and in shipping that it's crazy out there so in order for me to be saying I have to do something and the stuff that I'm doing is like all about getting the message out for sprouts right like that's what my life is about it's about sprouts and every day I'm talking about sprouts I'm educating people about sprouts I'm answering questions about sprouts and I'm learning about sprouts so I'm learning you've had a huge journey and learning process but and I know for a fact that you want to hyper focus you want to almost specialize in the area to be to go pro to to develop it as as much as possible but organic avenue juicero and your standards we're already high for for many many years your view of of plant-based and of foods and how to produce and and I think don't get me wrong as an outsider with juicero in all the enormous production processes that you had to go to hold the standards and how it's done and and all that process around that I think your standards even were raised even more because of how you wanted to present that product and how you wanted to do that that you I believe you've always had a very critical eye on on what's quality what it needs to be needs to be live and fresh and and those things so I don't think that ever disappeared but now it's you know you've you've even stepped it up even more and and but that that history that passed is almost in many respects shaping you for where you whether you know whether success or failure or whatever it has shaped you into the direction and this focus that you have now and I I I do want to talk about it a little bit if that's okay yeah let's let's let's talk I'm I'm happy because I feel your truth right I feel that mark is honest like I feel you're honest and your honesty deserves my opening up a little bit more so I'm going to just tell you a little bit about the juicero thesis because most people right and I I'm defining most is like 90 percent not 51 percent most people never understood what happened at juicero why I did it and and what happened so I'm going to share with you succinctly and I'm going to talk fast because that's fine I'm out these are I got no prepared notes here so it's a store that needs to be told so yeah so when I learned that the US dietary guidelines recommended seven to 13 servings and I was drinking green juice every day at organic avenue and we had large-scale commercial juice presses and we were buying fresh produce from the farm making the juice I was getting multiple servings and when you juice you're not getting the fiber but you're getting concentrations of the micronutrients phytonutrients polyphenols and you're getting juices phenomenal because you're actually getting the liquid of rainwater that's filtered through the organic soil through the roots through the stems through the leaves and through the flesh of the plants so I loved cold pressed juice after I sold my interest in organic avenue I'm sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn and I'm missing the juice and I knew too much about food safety and food security to just go to any other juice bar and just get juice so I was looking okay so I went online to Amazon I went to Bed Bath and Beyond and the Bloomingdale's and Macy's and William Sonoma wherever the juicers were sold and all the juicers were antiquated and they were all based on a centrifugal and there was one commercially available juice press it was $2,500 right so it was like literally eight times the cost of an average juicer and it wasn't safe because it had pinch points where you could crush your fingers you could stick your hand in the grinder and you still had to go buy the produce wash the produce chop the produce then clean and do the whole setup so that wasn't a real viable option although I bought the machine myself so I bought the $2,500 personal juice press but I didn't use it because it was such a pain so then I reflected on okay well what am I going to drink so I'm drinking water water is like the healthiest thing I drink water all the time but I I was craving the the boost that I was getting from the fresh chlorophyll from the fresh micronutrients and phytonutrients like I love that that was like a fuel to me so everyone else around is drinking coffee and I'm watching people have an espresso machine using it once or twice or more a day and the juicers are sitting on their countertop or under the countertop and they're not using it and I said if I can make a juicer that was as easy to use as an espresso machine people would use it and the people who could afford it would pay the premium and this is a first generation and the first espresso machine and the first Kurg machine came out and they were $1,500 for the first and so I started to think about how could I do it what does this mean but I had 10 years so I had 20,000 hours of professional juicing I was a juicing pro we had 10 retail stores we were doing hundreds of thousands of cold pressed juices per month so we were doing real volume or per quarter to be accurate you know I come from the production side of food and deal a lot with production and that as well and and I think you guys were using good nature presses commercial grade quality presses and also in store high high turnout presses and juicers to do this I mean it's no joke oh yeah we started with one norwalk then it went to five norwalks then we went to one good nature x1 then five good nature x1s then five good nature x6's so we went from 12 quarts an hour with the norwalk to 15 gallons an hour with the good nature x1 to 50 gallons an hour with the good nature x6 and then we got the good nature squeeze box 280 which was 24 plates huge yeah 500 gallons an hour so I knew a lot about juice and the supply chain so I then went and understood the process of how you make cold pressed juice is you basically take the produce whole produce and you dice it slice it chop it shred it and the whole produce goes into a cheesecloth bag and then it goes into the press and you press it and you separate the water molecules from the cytoplasm or the cellulose and that's how you get juice and that bag could be squeezed by hand it could go into a press it could go into a ringer but it was all about how do you separate the juice from the fiber the invention that I had in the insight was if you could take the produce and put in the bag and you could put an over bag around it and then you put that into the the the machine and you pressed it you weren't contaminating the machine so there would be no cleanup required so that was the big insight and then the next level was all produce that's sold in the supermarket is old whether it's two days old three days old a week old or two week old I wanted fresh so what we had done at organic avenue which we did at juicero and the vision was let's establish relationships directly with the farmers let's create a system that when we need the produce they will harvest ship it to us fresh we will then wash it in a systematic way to reduce the microbial load right very loud to reduce it by at least two million to one reductions of pathogens from the soil from the handling and then so that was one hurdle the super washing techniques triple washing each item we then kept it cold so cold kept it fresh and then we had nine food scientists in the company in in quality and service and the top phd who ran a rnd said dug you need to add a sorbic acid or citric acid as an assidulent to reduce the ph because that will reduce the risk of pathogens growing and spreading and so on my own thank goddess for google i researched citric acid and absorbic acid turns out citric acid isn't from citrus it's like from black mold in china and it's labeled really well and it's used in practically everything and i was like no way and then i also the clue from the fda was if you use citric acid or absorbic acid those are preservatives and you can't call it fresh and i was obsessed with fresh because all juice that came in a bottle was pasteurized using thermal or non-thermal technology and i wanted to be fresh so i said none of that so we ended up you know being creative and we sliced lemons and we put lemons in it so obviously if you slice a lemon you're going to get a lot of lemon juice but if you put the whole sliced lemon in there including the fiber it's still lemon not lemon juice it's lemon juice if you would have juiced and put the juice in so we were very careful about making the product fresh but what was inside the pack was 100 fresh organic produce no water added no preservatives no nothing just fresh produce but you know fresh produce that is water-based that's grinded sliced and shredded can be you know have a great percentage of liquid it just mixed in with the fiber so we then i went i built a prototype my early prototype was a hot water bottle that was being inflated with an airbrush compressor pushing a plate a cutting board against the plate and that was the press and then we took the produce putting in cheesecloth putting in a ziplock bag cut off the corner putting the machine and voila so why it was easy easy to raise capital because i would show up and with this these bags of produce with the machine plug it in and i could make this fresh juice that was so delicious so fresh so alive that people like wow wow because most people had never tasted fresh it was so fresh that you could have a green juice that didn't even have apple in it there was no sweetener like we were using the natural sugars that were in the green leafy vegetables um in order to provide flavor so we did that i built prototypes i ended up you know going to the head of good nature and and licensing their patents and getting him to help build prototypes and do a lot of things and then i went to silicon valley and then silicon valley drank it up they loved it and they saw that this was a very big business because um people need to drink right so what are your options for drinking water flavored water with high fructose corn syrup and sweeteners and add-ons energy drinks beer wine soda alcohol like so the choices for fresh drinks were were limited so the idea of fresh juice on demand and it worked so we ended up building a team we raised a lot of capital north of 120 million dollars in capital we built the machines we hired 50 engineers we um the the 12 phd's the nine food scientists we had a real serious team working on this and people who were tuned in they loved it they loved it absolutely loved it right people who weren't tuned in it was an enigma like what is this how does someone you know why does a company need 100 million dollars to do a juicer and then in the age of social media and online and no fact checking and jealousy and clickbait and hating juicero became a meme for excess and one of the things they criticized was so relevant today was i realized when you put the produce in the bag and you put that bag in a refrigerator and a month goes by that bag which was opaque because the the produce was sensitive to light time and temperature so the the the light would increase oxidation so we put an opaque bag turns out a fresh bag and a one month old bag or a three month old bag all look the same and if someone would consume one month old or three month old produce the level of ecoli 015787 that's in produce but when it's fresh it's very low load in a month it's increasing a million times a day three months it's deadly and i had read the harvard business school case study in 1997 about adwala where people died from drinking raw juice so i said oh wait we can't do this i don't want to put people's lives at risk i want to help people so we went back and i said problem you know requires solutions so we defined the problem and i said okay well what if i can prevent how can i prevent someone from consuming a pack that's expired so one of the ideas and the first thing we did was we put a rfid tag on it yeah right and then if you put the rfid thing in the machine and it was old it would reject it because there could be a battery in a clock yeah but then you know having a conscience right and guilt i said oh e-waste on the rfid takes the entire pack and makes it non-recyclable and has the e-waste and would cost more to recycle and take apart that pack than it was thing so we had to keep things simple so we could be in the recyclable chain so that's when we said oh we put a qr code on it and then the machine could do the qr codes and and that i could have done without wi-fi right because we could have algorithmically created a formula of encrypted qr codes that the machine would read but then there was another area that we were learning that the packs as you press them depending on whether they were all fruit based or vegetable based or mixed required a differing pressing algorithm and when we ship the machines we wouldn't know all those because they would develop over time the second thing was if you look at food recalls and foodborne illness in the united states above meat chicken fish produce had the most recalls so i said wow well if we can connect the machine to wi-fi and we can talk to the reader and we could put a qr code on it that qr code could have the full chain of custody of the produce where did the produce come from what farmer where did it go when was it packed what ingredients were inside what nutrition were inside and then the qr code would read it and display that information in the hands of the individual user and in the event that there was a food recall from my iphone i could literally stop the presses we could go out to any network stop any press any pack from consuming something that may be compromised either for date or for voluntary or involuntary recall and that would allow me to sleep at night and it turns out as we researched with the fda and the food safety modernization act in the united states actually will hold the ceo accountable for the food safety issues and there have been many ceos that have been prosecuted and incarcerated for violations of that and for me i wasn't worried about that i was just saying how i want this to help people so there were layers so in a first generation and we started jucero in 2013 today in 2020 everything is connected but to have a connected device in 2013 seven eight years ago way ahead of its time that's a costly product and it's way ahead of its time costly so so as a result we were growing 20 month over month we were bringing you know health to the people who wanted it and we were somehow antagonizing everyone else it's like people love to like hate vegans right it's it's so funny i mean this is a vegan thing i don't i don't really get it but someone could be eating mcdonald's and no one will say anything to them someone is vegan and all of a sudden you're under the microscope well where do you get this where are you getting your omega threes where are you getting your protein and it's like vegans are targets for all sorts of things i don't really get it and so we became a target we became a meme and then you know i made another mistake which i will say i was founder and CEO the board of directors suggested hey doug we can bring in the president of cambell soup who is the former chief operating officer of coca-cola and he ran their juice business the minute made business and the adwala business and he sold a billion pounds of carrots and you can design the trains he'll make them run on time and there was you know big stakes hundred million dollars of capital and i said if you think that's a good idea then i will be supportive and that's when like it was over it was really over and that was um i don't have regrets because my life is the best ever but in my unpacking and i unlearned that was something i probably wouldn't have done right with what i know now i wouldn't have done i wouldn't have done that but so the end of the day bad press investors fickle they decided to gracefully shut the company down sell the assets and everyone goes do something else and the trauma you know the trauma i have a lot of you know um compassion for the investors who invested and lost money but do you know where my real compassion goes for twofold one for the customers who had the machine who were using it nine times a week who had to send it back and lost the service but the the worst of all the thing that like really pains me the most were the employees who worked so hard on this moonshot and we launched it and we you know left the atmosphere and it launched and then it got shot down and that's the thing that's the the hardest for me like their employees who worked at the company who still won't talk to me three years later because of the pain the pain now the the the first level people who like the sea level suite they understood what what happened but deeper in the organization they didn't get it like it's it's hard and so that's the hard part and the probably the fourth thing which is the most painful is that since then there's been no innovation of juice yeah there's been no substitute no nothing come out that that's there it's it's really sad so I maybe maybe you'll go back to it eventually maybe not but I am so glad that you had that wonderful success in my opinion what it still is a wonderful success and it was also a great learning experience for you in many many many aspects not only the high standard of quality and it was a bad rap it was a bullshit outcome honestly going back to any of the machines that you mentioned leading up that are just more expensive for juicing or coffee what have they all come out with koi rig came out with a k cup that's reusable that you've put your own coffee grounds in a little cup like that so you can have one cup reusable without k cup servings uh for what for a fifteen hundred dollar machine I could just get a regular coffee machine for that right well but here's the thing when when kerr came out with the k cup the original one was fifteen hundred dollars yeah I bought it but now it's like ninety nine dollars so things come down in price but the fact that you could squeeze the pack by hand would be just saying do you need the do you need the the the kerg machine or the nespresso machine or could you tear open the pack and pour hot water over it and get your coffee like that beautiful denim shirt that you're wearing you could wash that in the kitchen sink with less water less soap and faster than using a washing machine and far less energy right you can do that so so many things you could so so the the idea is we live in an irrational world so that's where like I don't even bother talking about it I don't need to be expository I know the truth I know that I did my best with the information I had at that moment and now I have new information and the thing that was true and this was true it was if you went to a juice bar and you bought a juice six dollars to ten dollars you bought a juicera pack it was six dollars right and so you didn't get any economic advantage you got a fresher product but you didn't get the economic advantage that if you go to starbucks you could pay five dollars for latte and if you use an espresso it's fifty cents so you had that advantage with sprouts you have that advantage because if you buy sprouts in the store you're paying five dollars a serving but if you grow them on your own it's twenty cents so that's where sprouts were the the resolution and the solution for me to get my message out at the broadest scale that sprouts are vegetables so I think there's global consensus around the world that vegetables are good for you sprouts are vegetables the insight that I had when I wrote the book was that seeds have been around for the beginning of time in order for a seed to grow it germinates and that germination is a sprout term nature doesn't think like oh my seed is a sprout now nature wants to grow right it is how nature goes so from the beginning of time seeds were planted either wildly or cultivated and they took weeks or months or years to grow into fruits and vegetables and trees weeks months or years the insight that I had was hey there's this little window between day zero and day seven where you have sprouts and you can eat these sprouts and they're pennies of servings and not only are you consuming something that is nutritious it is more nutritious on a per calorie and per gram basis than the mature vegetables and there's these other incredible healing properties the anti-cancer anti-chemo protective properties of like the cruciferous vegetables so everyone knows like in the science community that cruciferous vegetables have glucoraphanin which forms sulforaphane which is phenomenal as anti-cancer as well as helps offset some of the treatment of chemotherapy in the chemo protective properties so everyone knows that um Paul Dr. Paul Lay and and um Jed Fahey at Johns Hopkins University were challenged with which of the cruciferous vegetables and which broccoli's have the most glucoraphanin the precursor to sulforaphane and they found out broccoli sprouts can have 50 to 100 times of the mature broccoli and that put broccoli sprouts on the map 25 years ago but they're still barely on the map my mission is to get sprouts out there whether you're like you know different categories if you want protein you know rather than have what's in vogue pea protein whey protein hemp protein powders and shakes you could take seeds like just imagine taking peas right sprouted peas green peas take the peas when you soak them you double the antioxidant level you triple the vitamin c level and you're getting in a cup seven or eight grams of protein so you're getting like this serving and you're getting all the fiber so like sprouts are a complete food they're fiber rich they're nutrient rich their pennies are serving that what's happening now is since the sprout book came out this is my early advanced copy that i keep my desk um since the book came out people are tuning in turning on to healthy vibrant sprouting globally and i see we are at the beginning of a sprouting revolution and what i'm encouraging people is to ask the questions because since i wrote the book i've learned more information since the book was done then before i wrote the book and that's why i called it the sprout book not the sprout bible because it's not a bible it's the beginning of a conversation to get people out there to to sprout and i'm so glad that you did and my my question was leading and you you may have misunderstood it just a tad bit i'm so thankful for the big history of where you came i wanted to know the production and the deep inside of of the knowledge and what's gone into this it's you're not some crazy vegan or somebody out there who's just you know let's do this as a side hobby this is a real deal and so i see this also as the sprout book and not the bible that uh from what i know of dug and and i've known you a little not that intensive i know that there's gotta be more to come that eventually not only are you starting the conversation you're continuing to learn but there's more to come and so that's that's where i was kind of leading you because i want to know what's what can we expect next in the sprout arena from from the dug compound and maybe can i caveat it with um because i'm a sustainable futurist i'm thinking sustainably in the future so i've been sprouting i've been eating sprouts for a long time myself i i've told you this before i i really like these these radish type of chia and these kind of really in german they call it gewürzig so it's a really seasonal spicy type of a mixture you know a mixture of a few because i i like that i just i love it regardless of that are you thinking about your own uh seed bank your own seed uh resources or how people who are thinking more self-sustaining cannot only do sprouting daily but then also create their own seed banks some new methods besides just the jars on on a maybe you know more future large-scale daily every day that's just a natural habit things like that i mean i i'm thinking of all those things and what i'm doing is i'm working with and supporting many different organizations institutions about getting the sprout message out there and i'm doing it one day at a time so as a inventor right i've got huge ideas as an entrepreneur i've got huge ideas as a humanitarian i've got huge ideas so today you know my message is get people to sprout with the equipment that's available the seeds that are available to get the highest yield and to think about sprouts as something that you can add to everything like just start eating sprouts and watch the world change so that's like my message in my mantra now but i'm obsessed with thinking like how do we make it easier how do we make it fresher how do we make it safer all those things like are in the mind but right now i want to talk about what people can do today and today order organic seeds order mason jars get some cheese cloth you know watch the infinite videos on youtube follow my instagram buy the sprout book talk to your friends get sprouting that's what it's about start sprouting stay sprouting stay healthy i love it that that's a super message so i always ask some very hard questions in the podcast and i'm going you're you're not going to get free of of those questions i'm going to ask you as well i believe that you do have the answers or or you do have them for you i want them to you to answer them for you the first one is the burning question wtf and it's not the swear word that you think although that's probably what we're saying with the things that are going on in our world it's what's the future and i want to know what's the future for doug i think the future for doug is to grow like a sprout into the healthiest most valuable human that i could be in this physical form while there is breath in me that is the future thank you the next one is do you feel like you're a global citizen and what if in the future there were no walls borders nations or limitations dividing us you consider yourself that yeah it's really interesting i consider myself and not just a global citizen but like an earth citizen and um the word citizen um usually doesn't apply to animals but i feel like i'm part of the animal community and i think the animal suffering causes suffering for all and how we treat our animals is how we'll treat our neighbors and the idea that that that someone on the other side of the border or a different wall is different than us and we should discriminate it's very hard to think about um any reason to treat someone of different skin color or different language or different um species even when you know we're all here as a gift so i i i i think in in your vernacular i will say yes i i raise my hand to join the global citizenship and then i also want to add the compassion for the environment for plants for animals and do even more because it's one big ecosystem that's required what does a world that works for everyone look like for you i think it's a matter of every decision goes to the filter and saying is this decision going to create love or is it serving the love in the higher order or is it serving the ego and so if if everyone just thinks about those parts um and we're kinder to people and more compassionate i think everything will be better and i i i just love you dug and i appreciate uh all you do keep up the fight and keep going and be happy you got it mark thank you so much namaste namaste we'll talk to you soon my friend thanks dog bye bye