[00:00:03] DE: The idea of food was somewhat a reward system, once I became financially quasi-independent, where I could afford to eat in a restaurant. I wasn't eating in Michelin star restaurants, but I could afford to go to a steak house, or I could get a hotdog on the street, or I could go to a nice Chinese restaurant. We just ate. Then, the first clue that something was wrong with the diet was when my aunt got diabetes, and we were told that they were going to have to chop off her feet below her ankles, like a double amputation.

I guess, I was just around 30 or so when that happened. It's incomprehensible to me to envision what it would be like at the time for me to just think about someone close to me losing their feet, was a very, very hard thing to process. Then ultimately, she died of complications associated with diabetes after the amputation. Then my uncle died of heart disease. Then my other uncle died of heart disease. Then my mother got stomach cancer and died. It was within three months. I thought, maybe she had an ulcer, or had something else, or whatever a kid who doesn't want his mother to die is thinking, but we were in definitive denial that she was dying. She went downhill and she died. Then my father died of heart disease in the same hospital as my mother. Then my brother, who is less active than me, my older brother ended up becoming overweight, obese, having the first of three strokes, and a heart attack.

[00:02:06] LW: Hello, friends, and welcome back to The Light Watkins Show with yours truly, Light Watkins. If this is your first time here, so I interview ordinary people, just like you and me who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith, often in the direction of their path, their purpose, or their mission. In doing so, they've been able to positively impact the lives of many others who’ve either heard about their story, or who witnessed them in action, or who have directly benefited from their work.

I met today's guest several years ago at a wellness conference in Arizona. He used to be known as the 'raw foods guy' after starting a venture called Organic Avenue in New York City. Then, he became known as the 'juice guy' after starting a raw juice company called Juicero. Then most recently, he's become known as the sprout guy. His name is Doug Evans. Doug has a fascinating backstory of how he went from growing up as a bit of a misfit/graffiti artist, to going to the military, because he actually wanted to be disciplined, and discovering that it was a lot harder than he ever imagined it to be. But he credits that experience with giving him the confidence and the discipline that he would use later in life to take many professional risks that would end up resulting in him starting all these ventures.

Then shortly after getting out of the military, Doug started working in graphic design. He opened his own shop, which was relatively successful. Simultaneously, he was interning with a legendary designer named Paul Rand, who created these iconic logos for everyone, from UPS, to FedEx, to Steve Jobs’s company, NeXT. In fact, while working with Paul, Doug got to interview Steve Jobs about his creative process and we are sharing a little clip of that interview during our conversation.

While all of this was going on, Doug was also indulging in what they call the SAD diet. That's an acronym for the Standard American Diet. In other words, pizza, hotdogs, French fries, that kind of thing. Meanwhile, he was watching his family members, one by one, suffer these major lifestyle and diet related diseases and illnesses. This led Doug to questioning his own health and eventually adopting a clean plant-based diet. Then that switch is what inspired the idea for his first food venture, which was Organic Avenue, which Doug operated from his apartment in New York City. It ended up growing to a dozen stores over those next 10 years. Then Doug exited from that company and started his next company, which was a juicing brand called Juicero.

In our car conversation, Doug speaks rather candidly about what went right with Juicero, as well as what went wrong with that company, because it got a lot of negative press at the very end. This led Doug to going all in on a sprout-based diet and lifestyle. I know sprout, right? But it's a thing, and Doug is so passionate about sprouts that his social media has blown up over the past few years of him posting about it. His book, which is called The Sprout Book quickly became a best seller. Doug has become the gateway drug, so to speak, for millions of people who are looking for the superfood of all superfoods, but without breaking the bank, and it turns out to be sprouts. Go figure.

I think, you're really going to enjoy this conversation. It seems to be all over the place in the beginning. But as you'll see, it all comes together beautifully at the end. Grab yourself some tea, sit back, relax, and get ready to be obsessed with sprouting after listening to my conversation with the legendary, Mr. Doug Evans.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:06:13] LW: Doug Evans, thank you so much, brother, for coming on to the show. I'm super excited to dive into your story. Then to enlighten my audience about the wonders, the magic, as you call it, of sprouting.

[00:06:28] DE: Wow. Well, Light, I have to say, the magic of light. When I got the email and I got the message that you wanted me on the show, I felt like, I'd rather be on your show and doing this than anything else in the world right now. This is exciting, because I love all of our interactions, the walks on the beach, the time at The Shine, the phone calls. This is just great. I'm glad that we get to have a deep dialogue, and other people get to observe and learn and have a bird's eye view of it.

[00:07:08] LW: Thank you, brother. Yeah, we know we were talking earlier about how we don't talk, or see each other that often, but when we do, we tend to have a fairly deep connection. I believe that there are people in everyone's life like that, or if they're fortunate, where you just have these kindred spirits. Do you believe in kindred spirits and things like that?

[00:07:31] DE: Definitely. I've been through a lot. There are people that become close to kindred spirits with you, and they become close to you on your ascension. Then the relationship is not rooted as deep as I would have thought it would be, and that they disappear, go dark, as if you are a total stranger, or a ghost.

[00:08:03] LW: What's interesting about people like you, and maybe even I put myself in that category is when we disappear, it's usually because we're creating something, we’re birthing something. Because every time I turn around, you're doing something amazing, profound. That's what I'm interested in talking about during this interview. I've done the same thing. I found the pandemic to be one of my most creative periods. What was your pandemic experience like?

[00:08:26] DE: My pandemic experience was, I was in shock. The shock part came through with the post-Juicero journey. Then doing years of the New York, LA, San Francisco triangle, and then go into my first Burn. Then at Burning Man, not necessarily under the influence of anything, but just in the energy of all these creative people in the desert, where there was no exchange of money, where everything was just open. People were sharing their passions. I felt like, “Wow, I could live in the desert. I felt like I could live in the desert.”

When I moved to the desert, which was about a year and a half before the pandemic, and I put my tent in the desert, and I lived there for three years in the tent. Many people thought it was crazy. Then when the pandemic hit, it was genius. It was genius. Here in LA, people are beating each other up over toilet paper. I'm using a bidet, soaking in the hot springs, eating my own sprouts. I didn't see a mask for months. I wouldn't go to town. I had no reason to go to town. I was, in the beginning of the pandemic, to me, it seemed like the twilight zone. If I ever did go to town, I saw everyone with the masks, it felt like the twilight zone.

[00:10:22] LW: LA was really intense at the beginning. People were literally wearing hazmat suits to the grocery store with gloves and just the whole thing standing 6 feet apart. It was dystopian.

[00:10:33] DE: Oh, yeah. Getting their Amazon boxes and having a demilitarized zone where they're laying them down and opening them. It was really a bizarre time. My pandemic experience was, I was just doing my thing. I was reading. I was writing. I was growing my sprouts. It was interesting that during the pandemic, is when I did a lot of building at Wonder Valley Hot Springs. It was something that a lot of people weren't working. There wasn't a lot to get done. I was able to find many opportunities to build my little – I describe Wonder Valley Hot Springs, where we live today, as part of this triangle, like George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, [inaudible 00:11:21] and Burning Man.

That was my vision to have hot springs, to have community, to have housing, where people could come for a day, or a week, or a month, or live here and be far enough away from the energetic fields of the combative urban environment. Where we live in Wonder Valley, Wonder Valley is a 100 square miles with a population of 600 people. When I was in New York, there would be a 1,000 people on every floor in the office building. Imagine having a 100 square miles with less than 1,000 people.

[00:12:08] LW: Did that idea come to you at Burning Man, or when you were living in a tent for those years?

[00:12:15] DE: Burning Man provided a lot of influence, of community. I know you live very modestly out of a backpack. A lot of people at Burning Man are moving there as if they're living there forever and they're only going for a week. They're hauling all of this stuff. For me, Burning Man gave me the possibility is like, oh, I actually can use a porta potty. I was in the army, so it wasn't surprising, and that I didn't need broad bandwidth all the time. There's no cellphone reception there. You find out like, okay, the time goes by.

Burning Man, for me was a challenging experience, like doing a 10-day Vipassana. When I would do Vipassana, very hard not to look at people, but not being connected on the phone, and not being able to know what's going on and being able to respond to things. In a way, Burning Man is a different form of dystopia. Because here you are, where there's all this activity, all these people, all this energy, but no connectivity outside of that container.

[00:13:34] LW: You mentioned that you were meditating, or you did Vipassana. Was that before all of this? Were you already meditating twice a day, every day, even at Burning Man, even while you're living in your –

[00:13:46] DE: I did my first 10 day sit in Tamil Nadu in 2004. Then, I did another 10-day sit in Sebastopol, probably in 2006 or 7. Since then, my Vipassana practice has been 30 minutes a day, every day, once a day. Now, I do it in the hot spring. The interesting thing is, and the hardest thing for Vipassana was the sit. When I'm in the hot spring, I'm floating, so I have to keep my balance, so I'm going back and forth, because I don't want to sink. It keeps me fully present in my body. No phone, no technology. I'm just in there with the water and it makes me feel I'm in the womb. The time, sometimes it takes forever that 30 minutes, and sometimes it's really quick.

Now it's such a habit for me. I get up before 6. I go soak and then I begin my day. My day might mean exercise, might mean a 5K, or 10K run in the desert, or it can be a short – and I say short, beginning of my Vipassana, my Ashtanga practice. I'll do the beginning of the series, and then I end. Then I go on with my day.

[00:15:18] LW: I want to go back to the early days, young Doug. You grew up in New York City with Beverly and Robert Evans, and Andrew. Was Andrew older or younger?

[00:15:31] DE: Older.

[00:15:31] LW: How much older?

[00:15:33] DE: Two years older.

[00:15:34] LW: Okay. In the shadow of Andrew, essentially. I know what that's like. I grew up with an older brother as well. What was that like in the early days? Talk about whatever philosophies, or ideologies that were being circulated in your Jewish household when you're growing up in the city, and what you gleaned from that at that point in time?

[00:15:55] DE: It's interesting, because I don't talk about this very frequently. In a way, it was very traumatic and inconsistent. We were lower-middle income. We've lived in a marginal neighborhood. My parents managed to get us on the kindness of a private Hebrew school to go on a quasi-scholarship from first grade through eighth grade. We would have to take the bus there. It was in a beautiful place. Now I can appreciate the beauty. It was near Wave Hill in the Bronx.

One of the buildings was the Toscanini mansion, overlooking the Hudson River. I mean, beautiful place with big, weeping willow trees. I didn't appreciate any of that. We had to take one or two buses to get there. It could be cold, wet, snowy. New York is four seasons for sure. The other kids in school, and I'm still friends with several of them to this day. They were much more affluent. They may be dropped off, either by the nanny, or the housekeeper, or the parent in a Mercedes, and we're taking the bus and having to walk several blocks to the school.

Then in the classroom, the curriculum was half English and half Hebrew. Many of these kids came from much more religious households, where they took things seriously. We would get home, and our parents didn't – There was incongruency with the religion, and with everything else. We would get home, and maybe my father was watching sports or something, and we didn't do our homework, we didn't say our prayers before and after every meal. We didn't observe the Sabbath. The other kids would be going to temple and we'd be going to Little League. There just became a wider and wider gap.

I didn't feel I fit in. These are the nicest kids, but I never really felt I fit in with them. It wasn't because of them. It was because of me. I ended up just getting into trouble, or rebelling and not doing homework, not listening. There's another thing where I didn't wear my glasses. I was prescribed with glasses, but I didn't want to be called four eyes. I mean, the level of misunderstanding and judgment and ego and confusion that I experienced as an adolescent and teenager, when I look back on, is very confusing, candidly for me. Now I see that there was a method to the madness.

[00:19:12] LW: You're very mission-focused these days. The last few things you've done professionally have been about serving the greater good. Were there any breadcrumbs of that growing up? And/or what was the idea of success in your household? For instance, in my household, my dad always talked about, you have to be an entrepreneur, you have to start your own business, blah, blah, blah. What was your understanding of success as a young person?

[00:19:37] DE: I don't think we ever talked about it. I remember my mother telling me that I could do anything. She planted those seeds that I could do anything.

[00:19:50] LW: No pun intended, by the way. Planted those seeds.

[00:19:56] DE: Right. There was never a level of thinking, what did I want to do when I grew up? I thought in hindsight that there was potential to do some artistic things. Like, maybe I would be an artist and there was some freedom to do that. I went to high school music and art. I was surrounded by artists. Some of these artists there had such incredible skill, that it was daunting to me, as if I was a different species, as if their art and their talent, and even their handwriting was at such a different level than mine, that it was incomprehensible.

[00:20:43] LW: One of your mantras today is I will persist until I succeed. What was your work ethic like as a young person?

[00:20:49] DE: If it was something that I wanted to do, then it was incredibly strong. I remember the first snowstorm when I was maybe 10-years-old. I remember taking the bus, going to an affluent neighborhood, and my willingness to shovel snow, from sunrise to sunset. It didn't matter how wet I got, how cold I got. It brings up, like I tried different things. I had this idea that if I poured hot water on the snow, it would melt. I didn't realize that it would then subsequently freeze.

[00:21:32] LW: Freeze.

[00:21:36] DE: Bad idea. Bad idea.

[00:21:40] LW: You are also a prolific graffiti artist, spraying hundreds of trains?

[00:21:44] DE: Hundreds of trains, inside and out. It's interesting, the other graffiti writers and artists were much more talented than I was. My talent might have been, my persistence of willing to go paint with anybody, any day, any time of day, or night and my ability to obtain, secure, shoplift spray paint in copious amounts, more so than anybody else. I would find my little niche to fit in, and I would do that.

[00:22:28] LW: You had a bit of a – I guess, you described it as a near death experience in one of those subways one night, that led to you ending up in the army recruiter's office? What was that experience?

[00:22:40] DE: Boredom. Boredom. Self-medicating through negative, questionable activity. On a Sunday afternoon, I didn't really have any friends. There was nothing really to do exciting. I was like, “Oh, I'll take a few cans of paint and I'll go paint my home subway platform, so I wouldn't be inconvenienced with my boredom.” As I was painting the subway train, trains would go by, I would stop. Without getting into the full story, I ended up getting arrested and I ended up escaping. Then I got home and I was bloody, I was beat up, I was dirty. I have climbed down the bridge with oil and dirt. Literally looked like Dawn of the Dead when I got home.

My mother and my parents, when they weren't raging, were so sweet. I felt so embarrassed and humiliated. Then, I also felt scared. Like, “Oh, my God. I'm now 17-years-old.” If I were to be apprehended at this stage for even these seemingly inconsequential crimes, I could be locked up. That was a scary thought for me. For whatever insight that I had, my insight said, almost as if I was in a AA meeting. I am powerless over my addiction, that I knew that I was powerless over my inability to stay out of trouble. That I was just attracted to trouble.

That's what led me to the recruiter’s office. Here I was, I was 17. I was well aware of my intelligence. Early on, I was aware that I was smart, and that I could do things and I also knew that I had no discipline and that I was attracted to bad people, bad things, bad activities. I couldn't just go out to a nightclub for an hour or two. If I went out, whether I was drinking, or partying or not. We would go out, then we'd go from one club to the next club, to the next club, to after-hours clubs, then to after-after-hours clubs, because I didn't want to go into the darkness and peace and abyss of sleeping at home in a comfortable bed at a normal time.

[00:25:32] LW: You end up in the 82nd Airborne Division. What does that mean, if someone is not familiar with the army, what does that actually mean in terms of your experience?

[00:25:42] DE: There are different divisions in the military. On a broad level, you've got Army, Air Force, Marines, then you've got Coast Guard and National Guard, Navy, etc. Within the army, they have different divisions and different battalions. Some are field artillery, some are tanks. Most of the military is infantry, where they give you a M16 assault rifle, and they let you go. The 82nd Airborne Division was a first deployment unit, where they would deploy you by tossing you out of a perfectly good airplane.

It has a little bit more rigorous training. Then a little bit more money, because you're having to do higher risk things, like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. The 82nd airborne, there were two airborne divisions. There was a 101st Airborne Division, the 82nd Airborne Division. Because they're flying out of a plane, and they could drop a couple 100 troops out of a plane, and hope that as they're landing, they're evading ground to air fire, you could place infantry troops wherever you want. Where otherwise, they're not taking you on the A train and dropping you off on 34th Street. Normally, they would have to take buses, or trucks, or boats and then land. The Airborne Division, they could fly over and drop you wherever they want you to fight.

[00:27:26] LW: People say, often, the army taught me discipline, confidence structure, but they don't really ever say how. Can you just talk a little bit about how, in your experience, the army was able to take someone like you, a knucklehead, looking for trouble, and teach you confidence and discipline?

[00:27:43] DE: The way that the military did it for me was that they break down your ego, through fear, intimidation, hard labor, and every level of abuse you can think about. By breaking down your ego, one thing they do, and you do this consciously, you shave your head. I didn't shave my head. I liked my hair. My hair was part of my personality. You get to the military, they shave your head. Then I had a big duffel bag with what I thought I would need during my tour of service. They poured it out on the ground. The drill sergeant is going through my personal belongings. No privacy. You don't need this. You don't need this. You don't need this.

When I looked up as to like, “Dude, what are you doing to my shit?” I did pushups. Unlike Light, who's doing voluntary 100 push-ups, 100 pull-ups, 100 burpees, these were involuntary. This is having a big, strong, ugly man yelling at you, “Give me 50 push-ups!” I'm like, “Huh?” The more you resist, the more they persist. This is the first day in the military, my scrawny little body was doing hundreds of push-ups in the snow, cold, wet hands. Then they make you wear boots and you're running. Normally, if someone said something to me, but I didn't want to do it, I would ignore them. I just ignored all rules, whether it's my parents, a school teacher, the train conductor, I just ignored all the rules. In the military, failure to comply with even a suggestion is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and could be subject to hard labor.

[00:29:53] LW: Which means what exactly? You're hitting rocks, or – 

[00:29:56] DE: Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, the hard labor is if you crossed the line there, they will incarcerate you, and put you in anything from solitary confinement to a chain gang, to working on things. After the first day, I said to my drill sergeant, I said, “I think you've got the wrong guy. I'm done.” My experience of the military prior to being in the military was Private Benjamin. Which was a joke. Goldie Hawn was a joke. It was a whole joke. There's nothing funny in the military. No one wants to hear my jokes. You cannot be a class clown in the military, without seriously suffering.

He looks at me, and he says, “There is no way out.” I’m like, “Huh?” Because I'm used to finding a way out. He goes, “There are no bars on the window. The campus isn’t barbed wire to keep you in. But if you leave, you're going to be a fugitive. They will find you and then you will be locked up. You have no choice. Get the fuck out of my office.” That was, okay, there are guys like David Goggins, who want the abuse. They want it. I didn't want it. I was done. I wanted out.

I had to subject myself to, I grew up, I never did laundry, we never did chores in the house. I never washed dishes. Here in the military, you're constantly – Everything that you have is exactly as the guy next to you. They would give you a chart that showed you how your socks needed to be rolled and stored, how your underwear needed to be folded. If you were to open up everyone's little footlocker, they would all be the same. You'd have to make your bed tight, as if they dropped a quarter on it, it would bounce up. This was madness. But you really don't have a choice. You just suck it up. Then if you suck it up and you do it long enough, it becomes a habit and it effectively and ostensibly breaks down that ego and that's how you learn discipline.

[00:32:47] LW: I love that story. Can we fast forward along now a little bit? You're out of the military. You're now disciplined. You're now confident. You're now working in graphic design. You decide to go to Paul Rand’s house in Connecticut. Talk about the moment just before that. What gave you the confidence to go to Paul Rand’s house, who's 70-years-old, one-man show and offer to volunteer your time for indefinitely?

[00:33:16] DE: One of the things you learn in the military is that we're all equal. I'm sure there's racism and prejudice in the military and I experienced a little. But what you really learn is that everyone has to take off their pants one leg at a time, you have to poop, you have to do things. It's a very humiliating, but heart-opening experience, as you're with other like-minded souls, or not like-minded souls, you're there.

The idea that someone was higher than me in the hierarchy, whether it was a business tycoon, or an artist, or someone else, to me, everyone was just equal. I could talk to anybody. I had no fear of speaking to someone. I had never heard of Paul Rand, until I went to Barnes and Noble in Union Square and I found one of his books on graphic design. Because graphic design was, in my opinion, a legitimate vocation based on something similar, or analogous to graffiti. It's like, oh, a logical progression, graffiti, graphic design.

I called Paul Rand. I got his phone number from the type directors club. He answered his own phone. He was like, “Well, what do you want?” I was like, “I was a graffiti writer. I want to become a graphic designer. I'd love to meet you. I want to show you my portfolio of my work.” He was marginally polite. Then after several phone calls, he said, “Okay, next time I come into New York City, I'll give you a call. I'll meet with you.”

Then several weeks went by, and he never called. Then there was a sighting of Paul Rand at one of these art director clubs, or something else. Someone had mentioned that Paul was there. This is infuriated me, because I felt that this man had given me his word that when he was in New York, that he was going to call me, and then we were going to get together. I called him up, I said, “Mr. Rand. I understand you were in New York yesterday, and you didn't call, so you must be really busy. I'm just going to have to come to see you.”

In many cases, in Paul's relationship, he was always part in shock, and part mortified by my behavior, but he also loved me. I told him I was coming. He didn't say not to. I made my way to his house. I remember sitting on a stool, almost as if I was a spectacle. His wife was sitting there watching the interaction with me and Paul. He's sitting in a comfortable chair, I'm on the stool, his wife is in a different chair. I'm sitting there for three hours.

At one point, I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Rand. May I use the toilet?” He looks at me, and he looks at his wife, and he goes, “Go shit in your own house.” He was just playing. I was like, “No, okay. I'll just hold it in.” I didn't have to take a shit. I just needed to pee. It was just like, he liked to play. When I did talk to him, well I went to work for him for free indefinitely, was he taught the master's program at Yale, which had 25 students. All of those students would leave that program and go work at the biggest corporations, or the biggest design studios. They would all go on to become something. It was very hard, expensive program to get into.

I didn't have an undergraduate degree. There was no way I was going to the program, nor did I have whatever it cost, a $100,000 a year to go to Yale at the time. It was funny. I said, “Mr. Rand, the close –” Because I said, “I really want to learn from you.” He goes, “I teach at Yale.” I said, “Well, Mr. Rand, the closest I get to Yale was I go to the Yale club near Grand Central, and I eat hors d'oeuvres on Thursday.” He just laughed. I said, “Look, I don't need the money. I've got money. I just want to work. I'll do anything.” Part of the salesmanship was my willingness to do whatever it took to be around Paul.

[00:38:04] LW: What was your commitment, your time commitment for your self-imposed internship?

[00:38:08] DE: It could be anywhere from 30 to 80 hours a week.

[00:38:12] LW: Wow. You were making money with your regular graphic design?

[00:38:17] DE: A little on my regular graphic job. Most on side hustles. I would busboy in an after-hours club. I would work security in a nightclub. I would just do other things in order to make money, so that I continue to spend time with Paul. It's hard to imagine, but it's like, every minute that I was with Paul felt like it was heaven. He was such a genius. He was such a deep thinker. We would always have really complex conversations. He would talk to me about his other complex conversations, or business issues, or design issues, or his curriculum. I was exposed to this mind of this genius.

There was never two days that were the same. I went there open-ended, not knowing what was going to happen. At some point, it was just like, “Oh, that's my habit.” This is my Karate Kid wax-on, wax-off moment is with Paul. The more I was with him, the more I appreciated his work and who he was. In the beginning, I didn't really understand his graphic design. It was so simple, that to me, it's a novice criticizing the Matisse blue paper, cut paper things thinking like, “Oh, that's so simple. Anyone could do that.” Not realizing the thought process.

As I start to see how Paul would take a design challenge, and really seek to understand the business, the audience, the CEO, or the entrepreneur, and look at this art problem as a business problem that needed to be solved using graphic design, that was incredibly fascinating to me. I had a front row seat of this genius, and who was working with other geniuses. When I met Paul, he was right in the mix of doing the next corporate identity for Steve Jobs. I'm right in there, and seeing how Steve would make his requests, how Paul would do his things, how Steve was then pushing it.

As genius as Paul was, Paul was very focused in what he would do. Paul did the logo, and then the type. Then when it came to the advertising, Steve went to Ralph Ammirati, who did the BMW ad campaigns. The original NeXT ad campaign was very similar to BMW campaign. Steve had multiples, I don't know how many of the same BMW. That was his vehicle. He had multiples of the similar cars, but he loved the BMW experience. He loved the Porsche. He loved to drive. He appreciated the quality and the nuance, which to me, I'd never been in a BMW. I couldn't appreciate it.

Hearing Paul, and because of my naiveté, whatever Paul told me to do, I would do. Almost invariably, whatever I did was wrong. I would have to keep doing it over and over and over again. I can send you a link to some artwork, where Paul would send me – I have copies of faxes, where he would send them to me at 2 in the morning. There was one follow up where he sent me a message when he goes, “You must be dead or something.” Because I didn't respond fast enough to his changes. Hold on. I'm going to see if I can find this. Just bear with me a second.

[00:42:26] LW: While you're looking for that, there's an anecdote about Paul Rand that I loved, about Paul dealing with Steve Jobs. Apparently, he showed him the design for the NeXT logo, and Steve wanted options. Paul says, “I don't do options. My job is to solve your problem. You can use it, or you don't have to use it, but I'm not going to give you more options.” Were you there for that?

[00:42:48] DE: I was. I was very close to that. As a matter of fact, you can find an interview that I did in 1993 that I posted on YouTube with Steve Jobs, where I'm interviewing Steve, and he described that experience.

[00:43:06] LW: Oh, wow. That's you interviewing him?

[00:43:08] DE: Yeah. Me interviewing Steve.

[00:43:10] LW: Is that on YouTube, or is that an article?

[00:43:12] DE: That’s on YouTube. That's on YouTube. I think, I uploaded it sometime in 2007.

[00:43:21] LW: We'll link to it in the show notes, for those who are interested in checking that out.

[00:43:25] DE: Like me to share my screen?

[00:43:27] LW: Yeah.

[00:43:28] DE: Yeah, there we go.

[CLIP]

[00:43:30] SJ: I had seen a lot of his work, but didn't know too much about him. When we were starting our quest for what a corporate identity was going to be, a person that we had in house gave me a few of his books and articles to read. I got up to speed on who he was and the immense body of his work, which I wasn't familiar with at the time.

[00:43:52] DE: Was he the first designer that you approached?

[00:43:54] SJ: He was the only one we approached. He said, he'd love to do it. He came out and visited us several times at NeXT and got to know the company and the people, and I think solved a very difficult problem for us. The problem he solved was, generally, most companies have their logo is just a logo type. Every once in a while, a company has a logo that’s a little jewel, a symbol that can be used independently of the logo type. At Apple, we had such a symbol. A matter of fact, that Apple was very rare, because the symbol was the name of the company. It was a thing that had the same name as the company, an apple.

Our challenge was that usually, it takes 10 years and a 100 million dollars to associate a symbol with the name of the company. Our challenge was, how could we have a little jewel that we could use without the name to put on the product, etc., without spending a 100 million in 10 years to make that association in the customer's mind? Paul solved that by making us a little jewel that had contained in it the name of the company. I think that he really approached it as a problem that had to be solved, not artistic challenge for its own sake.

[00:45:02] DE: What was he like to work with?

[00:45:06] SJ: Paul is a gem. I think, he personally works on perfecting the exterior of a curmudgeon. I think, he's perfected it to new heights, actually. I think, it's his way of dealing with the part of the world that he doesn't necessarily want to deal with. I found him to be extremely bright, and really have a heart of gold. When I think of Paul, I think of a slightly tough exterior and a teddy bear inside.

In particular, working with him, he is one of the most professional people I've ever worked with, in the sense that he thought through all of the formal relationship between a client and a professional, such as himself. Obviously, very deep thoughts about this. Therefore, he had very clear conclusions about what the relationship meant to both parties and how it should be conducted.

For example, I asked him if he would come up with a few options. He said, “No. I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. You don't have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people. I'll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not. That's up to you. You're the client. But you pay me.” There was a clarity about the relationship that was so refreshing. Again, obviously, the result of thinking about that relationship for many years or decades. It was evident in several types of things that came up throughout the relationship.

[END OF CLIP]

[00:46:35] LW: Genius.

[00:46:37] DE: Yeah. Walter Isaacson in the Jobs biography, this is a quote. He's referencing this interview that I did with Steve. It goes back that far. It was really part of history. There was no way that I would have met Steve, other than at that time. It wasn't an option. That was really good times. I have something else, which is funny. These are faxes that I got from Paul that they're really funny. “Now, try screwing this one up.” Look, this is 6:15 pm. 18:15 6:15 pm.

[00:47:27] LW: He's helping you out with your own logo. Is that what that is?

[00:47:30] DE: Yeah. Helping me out with my own logo. Then I got another one. “Your typographic skills are less than minimal.” It was something that there was a true love. He knew I can handle it, so he would pour it on.

[00:48:03] LW: I love that story. I love that relationship. He ended up passing away, obviously. At this point in your life, you're working with a true master. Meanwhile, you're eating the standard American diet and everything that comes along with that. Your family is starting to have some health challenges. Let's walk us through what that experience was like, leading up to you meeting Denise.

[00:48:26] DE: Watching water boil happens really slowly. Everyone around me was eating cooked food, processed food, meat, chicken, fish, dairy, Chinese food, soul food, pizza, Italian food, Greek food. We just ate. The idea of food was somewhat a reward system, once I became financially quasi-independent, where I could afford to eat in a restaurant. I wasn't eating in Michelin star restaurants, but I could afford to go to a steak house, or I could get a hotdog in the street, or I could go to a nice Chinese restaurant. We just ate.

Then, the first clue that something was wrong with the diet was when my aunt got diabetes. We were told that they were going to have to chop off her feet below her ankles. A double amputation. I guess, I was just around 30 or so when that happened. It's incomprehensible to me to envision what it would be like.

Now we could see, guys like Stephen Hawking had incredible lives using his brain and little things with little faculty. There's people at the time for me to just think about someone close to me losing their feet was a very, very hard thing to process. Then ultimately, she died of complications associated with diabetes after the amputation. Then my uncle died of heart disease. Then my other uncle died of heart disease. Then my mother got stomach cancer and died. It was like, within three months, I thought maybe she had an ulcer, or had something else, or whatever a kid who doesn't want his mother to die is thinking. We were in definitive denial that she was dying. She went downhill and she died.

Then my father died of heart disease in the same hospital as my mother. Then my brother, who was less active than me, my older brother ended up becoming overweight, obese, having the first of three strokes and a heart attack. Then I met Denise.

[00:51:06] LW: At a nightclub, at 2 in the morning.

[00:51:08] DE: At 2 in the morning. Yeah. I was still just out there, not wanting to go home. It's like that movie, Repo Man. Like, where could we go next?

[00:51:20] LW: She tells you about this funny type of diet.

[00:51:24] DE: Denise was vegetarian going vegan. I had never heard of vegan. I had unknown vegetarians. It was really powerful for me. I just did a class with John Robbins, who wrote Diet for a New America. Someone had given me his book 10 years before I became vegetarian, or vegan. I opened up the book, and it talked about all these atrocities to the animals. I closed up the book, and I stored it on my shelf with the book cover spine on the inside, so you would only see the paper, because there was something haunting in the words of that book that I didn't want to read. That was the expression. The blinder’s on, the cognitive dissidence of not wanting to know, and so I could continue life as it was without having to face the atrocities that I was directly, or indirectly participating in.

[00:52:30] LW: How did this lead to you co-founding Organic Avenue with Denise?

[00:52:34] DE: I really was attracted to Denise. We ended up spending a lot of time together. Then we became a couple. Denise was working as a speech-language pathologist at United Cerebral Palsy. Her heart was in to helping people, and she was very loving, very compassionate. Her sister died of leukemia when she was seven. Denise was commuting from my apartment in the West Village to Long Island, to go to United Cerebral Palsy.

I said, “Look, why don't you do something that you're passionate about?” She was exploring, doing tofu cheesecakes, or doing the beginning of e-commerce for different natural products. Then, I moved into a loft space in Chinatown. In there, we said, well, maybe we'll have some potlucks and we'll invite people over. Maybe we'll have a movie night and we'll show conscious movies, Who Killed the Electric Car or the like. When we would come over and then we would do these dinner parties, turns out, the potlucks were a bomb, because people wouldn't bring high enough quality food to work.

Then we said, well, maybe we'll bring in a chef. Denise went to the raw food festival in Oregon, and recruited top raw chefs to come and then we would have dinner parties. Then, we learned about juice. We learned about raw food. We started to buy products, so when people came over, they could take some product with them and go home. Then that became the genesis of Organic Avenue.

[00:54:29] LW: You were operating the whole thing from your loft in Chinatown, correct?

[00:54:33] DE: Yeah, for a couple of years. Until we had so much inventory and no foot traffic. The only time people could come is when we invited them, or had an event, or something. Then to me, we had more inventory than it costs for rent. It makes sense like, oh, we'll get a store and then work in the store and then you could get foot traffic and be available and make it a thing.

[00:55:03] LW: This is 2002. The idea of opening up a store in Manhattan seems very costly. What was your financial situation at the time? How were you able to make that happen?

[00:55:16] DE: I was always working, always to saving money, and very calculated. I remember, we furnished the store with furniture from IKEA. We bought the absolute necessities. We went to the garment district, and we found some glass shelves and racks. We found a handyman to help put them together, and we sanded the original wood floors. We did things in a very scrappy, entrepreneurial way.

[00:55:49] LW: I remember that beautifully minimal orange branding. Did you design that?

[00:55:54] DE: I did not. A different Rand student did.

[00:55:58] LW: Interesting.

[00:55:59] DE: I didn't have the talent. It was really not very good for my confidence regarding my design. It was good for my confidence in execution, but not in design. I found another Rand student, a friend of mine that I trusted, who did this every day, that I thought would be able to embody what Paul would think was good.

[00:56:26] LW: This was your first exposure to sprouts. You mentioned in the book, the sprout guy would come and deliver the sprouts from upstate New York.

[00:56:35] DE: Yeah, we got that. I was probably exposed to the spouts a little bit even earlier than that in the Union Farmers Market. We would get sprouts delivered, and wheatgrass delivered by some guy named Harley. It was just such a seemingly different lifetime. When I think about how many years ago, like two decades, over two years ago, seems like a long time.

[00:57:02] LW: You said that business grew a 100% a year and you exited 10 years later. Were you financially “free” at that moment in time, where you could pretty much do whatever you wanted to do?

[00:57:13] DE: To a certain extent. Everything is relative. For my lifestyle, yes, because I could buy raw food. I could go where I wanted to go. I never got hooked on the trappings. I didn't want that – To me, fancy cars would be more anxiety. Where are you going to park them? Now you're going to have to get a garage. What if someone scratches them? I really think that automobiles were not designed for utility, as much as they were for ego. I didn't want to be stuck in that trap. I had an aversion to the trappings of fancy and material things, even back then, whether I could afford them or not.

[00:58:01] LW: Then there was the Juicero era, where it was a five-year long thing. You glossed over that in the book. What did people get wrong about Juicero?

[00:58:11] DE: I mean, what they got wrong was it was all the writings and all the things were all about a mockery of Silicon Valley and a mockery of me and this expensive machine that you could squeeze the pack by hand. When in fact, I had 10 years of making juice by hand, using semi-mechanical advances to make juice. I knew a lot about making juice. One of the observations that I had was that unsweetened green juice, or even green juice that was sweetened was the best possible, healthiest beverage option one could have, other than spring water.

If you look at the alternatives to beverages, that people could have, beer, wine, soda, energy drinks, highly processed juices from concentrated that were pasteurized, or making fresh juice in a juicer. Anecdotally, people who had a home juicer were maybe using them once or twice a month. People who had an espresso machine, were using it once or twice a day. You could say, well, you could just go buy a bottle of juice from the grocery store. It turns out that there is a federal law that makes it illegal to sell raw juice over interstate lines, or in retail.

If you're selling juice on a shelf in a supermarket and you're not making that juice in that store, it must be pasteurized, which means, they are either cooking it to kill the microbial activity by 5 million to one, or they're putting so much cold pressure on it to kill all the microbial activity 5 million to one. As a raw vegan, I wanted raw juice. We resisted doing the processed, pasteurized juice. My insight was that the way you make cold pressed juice was that you take the produce, you triple wash it, then you dice it, slice it, grind it, shred it, so that you're opening up all the cell walls of the fiber, so that you then could put it into a piece of cheesecloth, and then separate the juice from the fiber.

If you couldn't squeeze juice out of the pack by hand, then there would be something wrong with that pack. It had to be. The fact was, it was mostly fresh cut produce and maybe some free liquid. If you think about the dexterity and faculty of these hands, in combined with your eyes and the senses, you could easily ring it, but you'd have to invest two minutes into wringing it, like you would a towel.

I, of course, as well as anyone who was in the juicing business, we could go watch a little video of Norwalk juicer, and you could see their process. The Norwalk juicer was $2,500. At Organic Avenue, we started with one Norwalk juicer, then we got a second one and a third one and a fourth one and a fifth one, and those will cost $2,500 each. My vision was, if you bought a Norwalk for $2,500, you still had to do, buy the produce, wash to produce, make the juice, then clean the juicer. The idea was if you could take the product of the grinding, shredding, putting it into a cheesecloth bag, and then the patent said, you take that cheesecloth bag with the produce, you put it into another bag that has a spout, you could then insert that into a Juicero press, or if you want to spend three times the amount, put into a Norwalk press, and it would press out the juice. That was the idea of Juicero.

What happened was, if we were creating a solar farm, and raised a 100 million, no one would even write a press release. If Starbucks was creating a new coffee grinding plant for a 100 million, no one cares. When you get a guy from New York who is running a lemonade stand and he goes to Silicon Valley, and big investors, Google and Kleiner Perkins and big people invest, then all of a sudden, you're on the radar. You're just on the radar, and you have a target. Then, a series of mistakes – Good things happen.

This is the great part about Juicero. I came up with an idea that was creative, out of the box, had never been done before. I wrote some patents. We got 40 patents. I hired a bunch of teams. I went to Canal Street. I had a Chinese kitchen place that I knew from my Organic Avenue days, build me my first prototype, so I could take the produce, put in cheesecloth, put in a Ziploc bag, put in my early Juicero, pressed it, and you are getting the best juice ever.

There was very little between the first machine I made and the 20th version that shipped. Then I went to Silicon Valley, and I raised a 120 million dollars. Then we hired 50 engineers, nine food scientists, quality experts, 12 PhDs in electrical engineering and packaging and firmware and software. I'm not patting myself on the back, but we sold thousands of machines. We sold over 1 million servings in our first year. This was doing a million dollars a month and growing.

From my perspective, I was like, “Wow, that was really great.” Now, I made some mistakes. One mistake was I wasn't meditating enough. I was working seven days a week. I was still listening to everyone on the board, as if they were my drill sergeants, wanting to please them, etc. Then when they suggested that the company bring in a new CEO, who was the former chief operating officer of Coca Cola, and the way they painted that picture was very glorified. Like, “Doug, you can design the trains. He'll make them run on time. He knows about leadership, and raising capital and building teams, and scaling globally, and retail and all these things.” I was like, “If you guys think this is the right thing to do, then I'm on the team. I'll agree with that.”

To all founders out there, when you are a founder, CEO, and then you are no longer the CEO, you're just a founder, it's possible that all of your authority can be removed, and you become a figurehead, and something just off in the side. To me, that was the beginning and the end of the company. Nine months later, they shut Juicero down. Much to my sadness, and much to what I learned is that that happened for me. I'm not a victim. No one made this thing come up and put a gun to my head. These were the decisions that I made based on my prior historical trauma, my military experience, my design, and my opportunistic and my desire to please, and my not taking breaths and me just wanting to work and work and follow this path.

Turns out, that was a decision that I made that should have required more thoughtfulness, and more reflection, and Juicero got composted. What emerged from the compost was this idea for sprouts.

[01:06:59] LW: Was that revelation relatively immediate, or did it take some time for you to get there, maybe another one of those Vipassana trainings, or something, for in order for you to really embody that sense of, hey, this happened for me and not to me?

[01:07:14] DE: It took probably years, and I'm still processing that.

[01:07:20] LW: Okay, that's honest.

[01:07:21] DE: I'm still processing that. I think at the time, it was more shock. I was pouring my heart into this every day. Whatever the advisors of the board were telling me to do, I was doing. I could be combative. In this case, with the board, I was never combative. I was so agreeable, because we were doing things that were defying gravity in every step of the way. What we launched was an incredible product. The greatest part of that story for me, the Juicero experience was my original vision was that people used an espresso machine once or twice a day, people were using their Juicero machine once or twice a day. The people who were drinking soda, energy drinks, processed juice, coffee, who will never drink cold-pressed green juice, they weren't our audience and they were the haters. Out there was much more of them than us.

Unlike what I'm doing now with launching a movement for sprouts, I had a few 100 followers on Twitter, I had 3,000 followers on Instagram. I had no presence. All of my sales and all of my work was focused on recruiting people to the company and raising capital. I do not have an outward facing community aspect to anyone to defend anything that I did. The misinformation that was out there relative to Juicero was beyond my wildest dreams. I couldn't believe that legitimate media organizations were telling half-truths and exaggerating them and could be so out of integrity. I had never experienced that Machiavellian malice.

Because of my meditation and my lifestyle, I don't read the newspaper, I don't read the gossip parts. I never even understood the notion of clickbait. It just wasn't in my stratosphere. That just drove things. If they got anything wrong, which was your question, and this was a long, circuitous answer, people thought Juicero was about the money, and that was about fake. What I can say is, it wasn't about the money and Juicero was real as anything, and had  its great utility. What it was, for me was an opportunity to close the gap of fresh produce that the US Dietary Guidelines were recommending that people consume seven to 13 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. The average American was consuming less than one. That one serving that they had could have been French fries.

To me, the idea to make it easier for people to have a fresh, raw unpasteurized juice, without setup, without cleanup, even if it costs a lot of money. Who cares? We live in a society where you can fly to Mexico on Volaris, on United, on net jets, a private jet, what have you. That same flight from Mexico City to LA could cost $69 to $69 a second, if you are flying a charter G5 to go there. People have the right.

The fact that the juicer was expensive, the version one was expensive, we weren't forcing people to buy it. The people who bought it loved it. It was such an education to understand how you could be doing all the right things. If anyone would have asked me, what could go wrong with Juicero? I would have said, someone could get sick. You're doing raw produce, you're doing raw juice, you're on the fringe of non-pasteurizing part that someone could get sick. If someone gets sick, that's really bad. I never would have thought it would have been some farce of a financial escapade that would bring the company down.

I was just on the phone yesterday with a major entrepreneur, executive investor. We were talking about sprouts, and we were talking about Juicero. Every aspect of Juicero, he loved. He's like, “I love my Juicero. I love using it. I love the convenience. I love the design. Doug, you did a great job.” For him in my mind, because of all the evisceration in the media, I thought like I should duck my head in the sand and never come out. Then there are people who I respect, who loved the machine who loved the product, and they’re like, “Doug, it's not the critic who counts. It's the man who gets in the ring.”

When I realized I got in the ring, I actually did a really good job for my first time in the ring in Silicon Valley. Going from, you look at my career, I was a graffiti writer, then I was a paratrooper, then I was a graphic design intern. Then I did some different jobs. Then I ended up running a juice bar, which is pretty low tech. Although, I did program the website. I did design spreadsheets to manage logistics, where we could do 1,000s of deliveries a day and our e-commerce stuff, but it was still low-tech stuff. We weren't really inventing things.

Then to go to Silicon Valley, and actually invent something that was a combination of hardware, software, packaging, fresh produce, connected, things. This was a lot of brain expansion part. New materials, stretching my imagination, and my brain and my skill set exponentially, simultaneously in multiple directions, and recruiting and capital raising and investor relations. Who trained you how to run a board meeting? It's not like I went to Harvard Business School, and had any training, whatsoever. The fact that I went there, and I look at and I go, wow, in the whole scheme of things, I'm pretty proud of myself. My ego is not out of control. The business was shut down. Clearly, I was responsible for everything that happened.

Now, if I get to do something else, look at those lessons. I read a lot of books. I didn't read the lessons of how to prevent these things. I read different lessons of what to do, but everyone's life journey is different and the circumstances of which they are exposed to are different, so the best thing that you could do is be influenced by what other people are doing, but then really reflect on my own experiences and see how can I apply them to whatever I'm doing next.

[01:15:15] LW: Speaking of which, I mean, it sounds like, you're very, and maybe the general public did not realize this, but how mission focused you actually were. Because our mutual friend, Amanda from Moon Juice, she had the same thing. She got caught up in the perception of, oh, this is for the effluent, so let's make fun of it. Let's stereotype it. Let's characterize it. When you get caught up in that, then, yeah, it becomes about something completely different than what your original purpose is in relationship to all of that.

You're asking this question after the fact, which is what would serve the world better at a fraction of the cost of a Juicero machine, even though that is at a fraction of the cost compared to a Norwalk machine, which, obviously, the media ignores. What were the answers that came to you, and how did you land on going all in? Because I don't know anybody who's more in on sprouts than you are?

[01:16:18] DE: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you and I went to Air One together, but I know we've both been probably in Air One in the same day, in the same year in the same store. On one of my last trips to Air One, I filled up a big Yeti-like cooler, an Arctic cooler, 60-litre of cooler, with all this prepared gourmet, raw vegan food, fresh produce, etc. Fill up the cooler, come out to Joshua Tree, come out to Wonder Valley Hot Springs. I go into my yurt, and I'm fine. I've got the Milky Way. I got the hot springs. I got the stars. I feel grounded. I don't have a cement floor in the yurt. It's like, I'm grounded.

The next day as they go into the cooler, the ice packs are melting. The food supply is dwindling. I go onto my phone. My favorite app was Happy Cow. Go anywhere in the world, go to Happy Cow and I do vegan, nothing. Do vegetarian, nothing. Do veg friendly, nothing. The things that were close to me were Del Taco, 7/11, Burger King. Then when I use Google Maps, and I ultimately found the Whole Foods in La Quinta, was an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and a half away. I suck it up. I get in the car. I'm like, “This is not why I moved to the desert, to be driving all this distance.”

That night, I'm soaking in the hot springs, looking up at the stars in the Milky Way, may or may not have been hallucinating and seeing every star twinkling into a sprouting tail. I'm like, “No, really? Wow.” I'm getting this download from the heavens, from the skies, from the universe, that number one, sprouts were vegetables. Number two, those vegetables contained every micronutrient, phytonutrient, polyphenol, bioflavonoid, antioxidant, amino acid for complete proteins as mature vegetables, all in the sprouts. Number three, sprouts had medicinal properties.

I had no idea that those medicinal properties were backed by thousands of published white papers by top universities and scientists around the world. This was just coming to me like, “Oh, sprouts were medicine.” The next morning, I'm really excited. I go online, and I see that there's many more options in 2018 than there were in 1999 to 2002, that now you could get alfalfa, azuki, arugula, radish, clover, broccoli, chia, mustard, fenugreek, all sorts of lentils, all sorts of peas, all sorts of strains of hemp seeds that would sprout in their halls. I was like, “Wow.”

Within a month, I've got six jars in rotation and I'm growing thousands of calories of vegetables in days, not weeks, months or years, for under a $1 serving, AKA pennies is serving. I'm feeling light, energetic, alive, satiated, bright and clear. I'm like, “Wow, this is too good to be true.” This is unbelievable, within a month, basically, I'm eating sprouts.

[01:20:40] LW: What was your go to meal? Because you're a guy. We like the systems and processes, doing the same thing, the thing that works. What was your go-to meal back in those early days with the sprouts? Or were you just grabbing a handful of them and stuffing them in your mouth?

[01:20:53] DE: I mean, I had a rotation of jars going. I would take handfuls of these. Originally, just eat them raw out of the jars. I was sprouting garbanzo beans. I was sprouting green peas, lentils, alfalfa sprouts, broccoli sprouts. Then I would get these salad mixes and protein mixes. I was just rotating these. Then, I had these little terracotta trays, and I was growing chia and flax sprouts in there for my omega 3s. I would just eat. I also intermittent fast. I only eat between noon and at the time noon and six. Now, I extended my eat time until 7 pm. I would eat as many sprouts as I wanted until I was content.

The absence of adding salt, oil, or sugar meant there was no overeating. You can overeat sprouts plain. You eat them if you're hungry. Intellectually I knew I won't eat this in this moment, then I'm not really hungry. Maybe I'm emotionally eating. Maybe I’m something else. If I'm hungry, I would eat this. If someone's hungry, and you gave them a head of raw broccoli, they'd eat the whole thing, they might even bite your fingers off. If they're carrying extra weight, and they're eating for pleasure, and they're living to eat and you say here's some raw broccoli, they're going to be like, “No way. Get away from me.” That's how you know if someone's really hungry or not.

[01:22:40] LW: Were you thinking at the time, how do I convert this into the next Organic Avenue, the sprout version of this, or the next Juicero, the sprout version of this? Or, what was that thinking like in terms of how do I spread this?

[01:22:52] DE: What I thought was, let me see what books are written on sprouting. That's when I went online and there were historical books written by Ann Wigmore, and Viktoras Kulvinskas, and Steve Meyerowitz. There were some books written about sprouts, but all of them were a minimum of 10-years-old. The approach that they took was very earthy, hippie niche. Having done that New York, LA, San Francisco triangle, having gone through Juicero, I'm thinking about the mindset of all the people who would go to The Shine, I felt there was an opportunity to elaborate and expand on the prior work on sprouts to include my lens on sprouts, my experience on sprouts, and details of other sprouts that hadn't been written about back then, like the azuki and the radish and the clover and the broccoli. People weren't eating broccoli sprouts 10 and 20 years ago. It’s a relatively new thing.

I just felt like, my next step was to go to New York, leave my compound, go to New York, pitch a publisher, and basically, sell them the spout manifesto, or the spout book, so that we could share this information. I want to be on a major publisher, because I want the distribution and I want the credibility. I want people to have access to this. Two and a half years later, The Spout Book, hit number one best-seller vegetarian book on Amazon. Out of all books on Amazon, hit number 69 out of 3 million books on Amazon, on sprouts.

[01:25:01] LW: Talk about the pitch though, because that was a funny – It was a great story. You went in there one meeting. How did you, and you obviously, your favorite book is The Greatest Salesman in the World. What do you say to get a publisher to do a book on sprouts?

[01:25:13] DE: Well, for one, I let the sprouts speak.

[01:25:16] LW: You brought sprouts.

[01:25:17] DE: I brought sprouts, all these different sprouts. Then I went to a friend of mine, who was a recipe developer. She developed the recipes for Laila Ali's book and for Oprah Winfrey's book. I said, I want to do recipes with sprouts that are all vegan, all raw, and 50% are sprout-based. She worked with me on the recipes. We found a friend of hers who was a chef, who prepared the various dishes, and I grew the sprouts. I went in with this sprout smorgasbord.

The editor was literally eating out of the palm of my hand. She said, “Doug, how big do you think the market is for sprouts? How many people have sprouts? I've heard about sprouts, they were in the Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall, hippies have them.” I was like, “You don't understand. Sprouts solves so many problems. We could solve world hunger with sprouts.” There's 19,500 cities in America. There's only 500 Whole Foods, right? The majority of those Whole Foods are in LA and New York and in Texas. You probably have 19,400 cities that don't have a Whole Foods in it. That people don't have access to organic vegetables.

The fact that you could grow your own sprouts in days for pennies a serving, without soil, without sunshine, without fertilizer, everyone needs to know this information. This is sovereignty. This is independence. This is food equality, food justice. I was emphatic. My level of enthusiasm was off the charts. It was like, I was full throttle, 100%, from the time the meeting began till the time the meeting ended.

[01:27:21] LW: You've done a ton of interviews, talking about all the benefits of sprouts, what the best sprouts are, you don't have a favorite, but broccoli sprouts have the highest form of cancer prevention, blah, blah, blah. I don't want to go too much into that. What I am curious about is you are prolifically posting on your social media. I'm wondering, who's helping you? Who's doing that for you? Are you doing it all by yourself?

[01:27:44] DE: My Instagram broke through a 100,000.

[01:27:48] LW: Yeah, I saw that.

[01:27:49] DE: It took years. It took years. My TikTok broke through, in six weeks, I went from zero to a 100,000. I got a 1,000,002 likes. I got 20 million views. The engagement was incredible. All of the Instagram stuff is basically me, or my wife shooting it and putting it out there.

[01:28:18] LW: Tripod next to the sink.

[01:28:22] DE: No, no, no. My wife will follow, or I will get anybody who is near me to take the camera and shoot.

[01:28:32] LW: You go in and put the titles and all that stuff in it?

[01:28:34] DE: Yeah, yeah. I downloaded Rush on the iPhone, so I can edit the videos. Then I post them. I'm still figuring it out.

[01:28:45] LW: Are you formulaic with it? Like, “I'm posting every day before such and such time?”

[01:28:49] DE: No. I got to feel inspired to have something. Then I take some feedback like, “Oh, wow. The video I did with the broccoli sprouts, this one went –” It's crazy. Over 10 of my videos on TikTok went viral with over a million views. On Instagram, a dozen went viral at different degrees. I look at that and say, oh, this influenced people a lot. This got shared a lot. Then you figure out and if you think you have any clue about the algorithm, because I could do the same thing that I did that worked and it'll be a wet blanket, like a lead balloon. I do the exact that thing. I think I have the form. I think I understand it and it's no response, but I don't care. I was like, I'll just post something else and I'll go something else.

[01:29:54] LW: I do have one question to ask about something you said. I think I read it, or you said it in another interview, but I thought it was really interesting. When people hear, people who are non-vegan, vegetarian, hear that someone is vegan vegetarian, and then that they're really enthusiastic about it, and you start talking about the studies and whatnot, people naturally roll their eyes and goes, “Well, how do they get their protein?” You said, “You're asking the wrong question. You need to be asking, how am I getting my fiber?” Talk a little bit about that.

[01:30:23] DE: Well, it's actually, I have two canned responses to when someone asks, where I get the protein? One is where did you get that question? Are you in a [inaudible 01:30:34]? Where are you getting that question? Who is eating your mind with that question? The other one is, where do you get your fiber from? About 95% of America is fiber deficient. Because fiber only exists in plants. Most people, if they're not eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, they're not getting a lot of fiber, which results in several things.

Number one, constipation. Number two, anti-acids and indigestions and acid reflux. Number three, chronic health issues. We have two out of three Americans are overweight, or obese. We have tens of millions of people that are adult onset diabetic. We have 90-plus people that are pre-diabetic, of which more than half of them don't even know they're pre-diabetic. Heart disease is still the number one killer. When people ask, where do you get the protein from? I was like, I don't even think about protein. Where am I getting my protein? Here, I'll give you my third answer. Every single sprout contains every single amino acid to make a protein. Where am I getting my protein from? Sprouts.

[01:31:53] LW: You said, one day worth of eating sprouts, which is really only about 800 calories is more nutrients than most people get from their diet in a week.

[01:32:01] DE: Micronutrients, phytonutrients for sure. Also, it's constantly evolving information. You could easily eat thousands of calories a day of sprouts. It all depends. If you're eating alfalfa sprouts, it's low calorie. If you're eating garbanzo beans, if you're eating sprouted lentils, if you're eating sprouted peas, if you're eating sprouted chia, you can easily get as many calories as you want. The problem is the whole notion of calories, and now they translate into weight gain, weight loss muscle is such an imperfect science. No one is really tracking exactly.

If someone really want to do research, you got to take people, and you have to create ankle bracelets, chow hall, limited food, full monitoring. I mean, maybe that's what you use Google Glass for is to make sure that someone's not doing something – you're seeing the world through their lens to get healthy stuff. I don't know. What I will say is where I used to be a very hardcore vegan, and I'm still a 100% vegan. Now when I speak to other people, I'm less about telling them what to do, what not to do. What I am doing is I'm encouraging them to add spouts to their diet. The more sprouts they add, the better they will feel.

I had no idea that sprouts were the number one food for regulating insulin levels. I had no idea that sprouts were the number one food for weight loss. I had no idea that sprouts contained a compound called glucoraphanin, that when it mixed with an enzyme called myrosinase would form sulforaphane that would have these chemo-protected, anti-cancer properties. I had no idea of these things. Similar to me going all in, whether it was with graffiti, or graphic design, or the military, or juice, I'm all in on the sprouts. I'm so grateful.

I can't believe, the way you went all in on meditation in the late 90s and you've stayed in and you've made it your career and your vocation, your identity. With that, I can't believe that sprouts were just there. Just an opportunity waiting to sprout. They were just waiting for someone to show them some love and put them on the map. I'm going to New York next week to be on Good Day New York to talk about sprouts. It's just the beginning of like, oh, and this was sending text messages, calling, messaging. I go through without fear of rejection. That's a great, great skill and a muscle to have that I really – I would love for everyone to take my call. I would love for everyone to respond to my call. I'd love all my emails, text messages to be responded to positively. If they don't, so what?

[01:35:33] LW: You mentioned in the book that – and the book is The Sprout Book. You mentioned that your brother, Andrew, was your greatest teacher. Briefly, why do you say that?

[01:35:41] DE: Because I am so evolved in so many ways. My brother can trigger me in a millisecond.

[01:35:52] LW: That’s what I thought. Yeah.

[01:35:56] DE: In a millisecond. I still cannot sit through a dinner without being triggered in one, or two, or a hundred way, shape or forms. It's constant reminding, and there's so many similarities. It's great to have my wife whisper to me afterwards like, “Doug, you do the same thing that you're telling him not to do.” I was like, “Yeah, I know. I'm sorry, I just can't control myself.” That's it. It's a great practice. I'm so glad to have my brother, still here alive and kicking.

[01:36:36] LW: Beautiful. Thank you so much, man, for sharing so vulnerably your life. It was a pleasure and an honor to chat with you. This is one of my favorite conversations I've had in a long time. Hopefully, I'll get out to Wonder Valley one of these days soon and we can hang out and soak in one of the hot springs, one of the natural hot springs.

[01:36:56] DE: I would love that, Light. I would say, you were the most prepared. You did even more preparation than John and Ocean Robbins. You really did your homework. It's a testament to who you are and your presence and why you're successful. That's what created the trust for me to be vulnerable. Because I trusted that there's no gotcha. When the Vice interview was and they asked about Juicero and they're looking for a gotcha, it just triggers me. No, I'm not going to feed your desire for clickbait. I know that you are all love, Light. You are all love. You are all heart. You're all goodness. You're all light. As a result, why wouldn't I be open and vulnerable with you, because I know where your heart is?

[01:37:57] LW: Yeah, thank you so much, man. Yeah. When I took on the name Light in 2005, that was a part of the deal. Painting myself on this corner. You can't be an asshole and call yourself Light. You have to go above and beyond. Yeah, man. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. You look good, you sound good and I'm happy that you're out there very much on mission. We know that's what the world needs more of, is just people who are doing things that light them up inside. I'm honored to be able to call your friend.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[01:38:27] LW: Thank you for listening to my conversation with Doug Evans. If you're not already following the sprout guy, make sure to follow Doug on social media. It's @DougEvans. That's just D-O-U-G-E-V-A-N-S. You can grab a copy of The Sprout Book everywhere books are sold. Of course, we'll put links to everything in the show notes, which you can find at lightwatkins.com/show.

If this is your first time listening to The Light Watkins Show, we've got an incredible archives of past interviews with other luminaries, such as Ed Mylett, Director Ava DuVernay, spoken word artist, Saul Williams, Chef Marcus Samuelsson. It's people from a bunch of different fields of interest. They're sharing how they found their path and their purpose. You can also search the interviews by subject matter. If you go to lightwatkins.com/show, you'll see a drop-down menu where you can search people who've overcome health challenges, financial struggles, people who've taken leaps of faith, etc. If you want to watch these interviews, you can do so on YouTube. If you just go to YouTube and search Light Watkins Podcast, you'll see a whole playlist where you can put a face to their story.

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I look forward to hopefully seeing you back here next week with another story about someone just like me and you, who took a leap of faith in the direction of their purpose. Until then, please keep trusting your intuition, keep following your heart, keep taking your leaps of faith and who knows, maybe one day we'll be having a conversation about it on this podcast as well. Thank you so much. If no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Have a great day.

[END]