The Future Of Plants, Sustainable Agriculture, Vertical Farming, AI-Driven Personalized Nutrition, Child Education & More With Willo's Sam Bertram.

My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, sit down, close your eyes and think about one human being in Uganda who doesn't know how he or she is going to feed their kids that evening. Multiply that by 821 million people. Sit down and think about that one woman or that one man and that feeling you may be overwhelmed with this sense human being the same as us, born of the same material, with the same same genetic code in a different location, who might look slightly different from us, are suffering.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

All right folks, this is going to be a fun episode. So I know that a lot of you are into the power of plants. Those of you who are not strict carnivore and haven't swallowed that hook, line and sinker and still like colorful vegetables to garnish your food. Even if you are one of those people who has liver for breakfast, lunch and dinner and rib eyes for dessert. I do a lot of carnivorous type of compounds, as many of you know, but man oh man, I dress up my diet with peace pea shoots and microgreens and all sorts of little protein packed crunchies and even things like bok choy and radish and brassica and I certainly have the ability in my house with eight, you know, raised garden beds and a giant greenhouse to be able to grow a lot of this stuff myself. However, if you're limited on backyard space, on garden space, if you just perhaps don't have a green thumb, and by the way, I don't. It's my wife who grows a lot of this stuff, then your really going to want to tune into today's show. I was shocked when I actually saw what my guest on today's show has been able to pull off and he'll be able to fill you in more about about what it is I'm talking about. Sorry to stay all mysterious for y', all, but you're going to find out soon enough. So my guest on today's show is Sam Bertram. Sam Bertram. And Sam is the CEO and he's the co founder of 1.1, which is an ag tech startup in the Bay Area that has developed what I consider to be some of the most sophisticated indoor farming technology in the world. The actual launch of 1.1 in terms of what they're offering to me, if you happen to open my refrigerator right now and see all the wonderful greens in there that I've been consuming from 1.1, really the company that's redefining under the arm of 1.1, the future of personalized nutrition and eating tasty vegetables in a sustainable manner that protects the planet. It's called Willow W I L L O, and Sam's going to tell us all about it, by the way, as we move forward. If you're listening in all the show notes, you can BenGreenfieldLife.com Willow podcast. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com W I L L O Podcast. Sam, welcome to the show, ma'. Am.

Thank you, mate. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, so I actually would love to hear a little bit more of, like, your story, how you got interested in all this, because from what I understand, you actually have kind of a. Kind of a cool story as far as how you came from Australia to the US and beyond.

Yeah, mate. Yeah, for sure. So I grew up in Australia in Wheelers Hill in Melbourne, Victoria, with my brother, obviously. And when we were 18, we both came to the United States to play tennis. And I went through my mechanical engineering degree and robotics masters, and my brother John went through his undergraduate in chemical physics, then mcat, then masters in power engineering. And we got our two heads together and we thought, you know what? We're going to be dead soon. And we have been blessed with so many blessings throughout our life, from people to environment to events. We want to channel that towards the biggest problem on planet Earth. And so we went onto the WHO's website for the number one leading cause of death and suffering and number one on planet Earth is poor nutrition. The who, though, is only focusing on the most destitute among us, you know, the developing nations where they simply don't get enough access to nutrition. But there are 2 billion people on the other end that are eating too much of the wrong thing. And we can go through the statistics that display that manifestation. But, you know, when John and I got our heads together, I was 23 at the time. I'm now 29. John was 25 at the time. We thought, you know what, you know, you get one shot at life, and. And we want to take a massive bloody swing. And so we wanted to figure out how we could make the greatest difference in the shortest period of time. And that was really the origin moment.

Now, speaking of swing, I mean, we can't ignore the fact that you actually were playing tennis at the time. Is that correct? Yes, sir.

Yes, sir. Yes.

Tell me about that, because, you know, I played NAIA Division 1 tennis, and it sounds like you had a history of Tennis as well, I think. Your brother John as well.

Yeah, yeah, that's correct. Yeah, we were, we came from, obviously from Australia to play. I was Novak Djokovic's ball kid when I was 13 and he about 10 years later to the day, he invested in the business and a lot of the investors in the business, we've raised almost $60 million now. So a lot of the investors, many of the investors have come through the tennis world. But yeah, I was the captain at Santa Clara University, a D1 school. Played my years out there while doing the engineering degree and you know, that's how this all started and all started through Stanford actually, funnily enough. But you know, I'm good friends now with Mikey Brian. He's a half decent tennis player as you might know.

You know Mike Bryan?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh my gosh, Mike's one of my friends.

That's funny. Such a good lad. So I mean talk about one of the most humble people on planet earth taking out that many grand slams and still being a down to earth guy.

Oh yeah. My sons, you know they're, they're, they're twin, they're 14 years old, right handed, left handed tennis players. They've got Bob and Mike Bryant, you know, autographed poster on their wall and you know they're, they're not, they're not super hardcore. My sons play, you know, they play three times a week but I mean three times a week since they were three years old in halfway. So they're halfway decent.

That's a fairy tale story, mate. I mean they can walk in the shoes of the Brians.

I mean they actually, I think they're a little bit more interested in painting right now at this stage of their lives. And I'm very, very cautious. You know, I'm more of a, I'm more of a David Epstein range type of guy than I am, you know, the old school Eastern European or Indian, Asian, you know, early intense specialization, early age type of parenting philosophy. And you know, actually, you know, I know we're kind of rabbit holing here but you know, from my discussions with Mike it sounds like their dad was kind of similar. Like they did a lot of stuff like band and I think basketball and you know, they, they weren't just pure hardcore tennis.

No, no, no. You know, I mean I know in a lot of tennis players, you know, there is sort of the Djokovic story which is from, from birth they had a racket in their hand. But a lot of people around sort of that age 14, probably on the upper end. But you know, around 11, 12, 13, 14, they start to specialize. They get a great breadth of skills from lots of different sports. And of course those skills are translatable into tennis. Tennis is so much of it of course is the hand skills, hand eye coordination, but so much of it is positioning. It's a foot sport in a lot of ways. So I see that as well. I'm actually really interested in your parenting style. Those five pillars you talk about, reading, writing, logic, rhetoric and arithmetic. I think those are some really nice buckets. I've got a three year old, almost four year old daughter here now, mate. So I'm looking for as many tips as possible.

Yeah, it's interesting. That comes from Naval Ravikant who originally came across that idea that the best way to educate and create kind of a resilient, impactful and creative human being is to let them engage in a lot of their passions and interests and desires at an early age on forward and almost like a creative, free play, unschooling type of way. But to ensure that no matter what, they have a really, really strong understanding of reading or the ability to really like filter and digest information at a somewhat rapid pace. Writing, right. Expression of thoughts in a clear manner in written word format, logic and or computer programming, they're kind of synonymous. Just this ability to be able to know like the, you know, A equals B, B equals C, therefore a C type of stuff. And then rhetoric or persuasion, right. The ability to be able to not just express yourself in written word but to persuade in verbal form and then mathematics or arithmetic. And so that's kind of sort of what I focus on. It's almost like a classical education type of approach blended with unschooling with our model. But it's really interesting. There's actually maybe a link to it in the show notes. There's this book called Raise a Genius which sounds like it's one of those early specialization type of models. And it was written by Hungarian guy named Laszlo Polgar. And that book's really interesting because like he lays out kind of a different format that he used with all three of his daughters became chess superstars right at a very early age. And so you think that all they did was play chess, but the way that he set them up is they basically had had like a five day week curriculum that was an hour of foreign language. It was an hour of general study like science, social studies, language, et cetera was an hour of computers and computing with an hour of anything moral, psychological or pedagogical. Like, like humor lessons, joke telling, you know, anything. Like, just like how to understand people, you know, almost understand cognitive biases and decision making and then an hour of gymnastics. And that was all they did. And aside from that, all they did was play chess. And so that's also an interesting model. It's not like there's one perfect model, but that's really the nature of this whole parenting book I'm working on right now. Sam is just like all of these different things we're talking about, I'm trying to put them all in one big book that allows people to draw from the best of the best.

That's fantastic. I mean, both of my parents are teachers. Each of them spent 25, 30 years in the classroom, thousands and thousands of kids, and being able to abstract and distill from them the learnings of how to educate a child in an optimal manner from their perspective. Of course, course I am interested. I mean, one of those five pillars of yours is rhetoric. You know, when I was thinking about these five, one of the especially particularly from my vantage point, one of the greatest skills a human being can learn is the ability for a human being to interact with other human beings. Well, and that is the highest level abstraction, but you know, you've got it there with rhetoric, the ability to persuade, but also that ability to connect with other human beings. You know, I'm not a particularly special human being, but I would say that one of my, one of my skills is being able to communicate or have an interesting conversation with someone and I suppose in this case in persuasion, convince them that what we're doing is a good idea. Hopefully it's sort of a little bit self explanatory. But I'm interested to know from you, of those five pillars, do you think that that's where sort of socialization fits in, is on that sort of rhetoric persuasion pillar?

I don't know. If so I think socialization falls more under the creative free play that they're engaging in outside of each of those subjects. Because, you know, at least my own sons, the greatest amount of social interaction that they engage in is in extracurriculars. It's in jiu jitsu, it's in tennis, it's in, you know, evening youth group and church. It's in having friends over to play and just explore in the forest. It's in the wilderness survival camps. And so, yeah, I don't think they get, they actually don't get a lot of social interaction during their actual studies per se.

Right, right, right. Well, it's all Very interesting. Especially I'm bringing up this four year old and trying to give her sort of the optimal path. But the optimal path, you know, what you're taught is the optimal path is actually a suboptimal path.

It worked at one time, you know, when for things like factory workers and pre automation, pre artificial intelligence, pre computing, you know, farming, ag, factory worker engineering type of work. But, but now it's not quite as up to date that that school educational model. It actually makes me think a little bit though, like, like for you, you know, with as much as you focused on with 1.1 sustainability, protecting the planet kind of as you alluded to earlier, looking at, you know, who the, who focuses on and considering focusing on more of the world as a whole. Were you kind of raised in an environment where your parents were into that type of thing or how did you develop an interest in helping people in that way?

I suppose that they, I suppose that they gave us a great platform to analyze ideas. You know, my dad's heavily into philosophy. As I said in the beginning, we've always been keenly aware of our mortality from a very, very young age. And that's just a ticking clock. And so when you have that sense that the clock is ticking and that there is an end to this party, you start to think about how to utilize your time. Sitting in front of a television watching nightly news is not the best way to optimize your time on planet Earth. So certainly the platform was given to us from my parents. I would say that my brother is also, he's a co founder of the business. He has been a phenomenal influence on me. His ability to unemotionally analyze ideas and get to the crux of things, even when the answer is not the most pleasurable or personally favorable. It's all about ideas. Putting those ideas on the table. Remove the ego as much as you can and analyze those ideas. So that's where it really began. But it was also, you know, there were a couple of psychedelic expeditions, of course, but you know, understanding.

Are you referring to the heroic dose of psilocybin during which you realize that all the world needs is love? And then you come out of that experience deciding that all you want to focus on is loving the world.

It's so funny you say that, mate. I mean, you know, it was during that time where I realized that the only currency, in my opinion that has inherent value is something, is an exchange of something on the spectrum of love. We can exchange money. If you have a trillion dollars on a deserted island it means nothing. But if you can transact with a human being something on the spectrum of love, typically that is what has intrinsic value. And my ability to wrangle the English language to describe what I mean is poor. But if I can exchange with you something on the spectrum of love, there is intrinsic value there. And so that was another one of those sort of fundamental beliefs. But as soon as.

And by the way, that's interesting also, Sam, because I grew up Christian knowing that love conquers all. Love is the greatest. Love covers all. I'm blanking on the actual verse right now. I'll pull it out of my memory eventually. But basically it's this idea that love is all you need and the greatest thing we can do is love God and love other people. And I grew up with that as the core value.

But.

But for me, it wasn't until I had a massive heart opening session, you know, with, with the inclusion of plant medicines that I. That I realized the magnitude of love that human beings are capable of and the magnitude of love that human beings need. It's really, it's really odd. You know, sometimes I wonder if God put certain compounds on the planet to open our minds and to open our hearts, you know, in the right set and setting to be aware of that. You know, you'd think you'd just kind of know that growing up if you were immersed in the right environment. But it's one thing to know it and it's another thing to experience it so deeply from the core of your soul as your ego is in a fully dissolved state. So I don't, I'm not one of those guys says everybody needs to do plant medicine. But it is interesting how you see that as a prevailing characteristic. People come out of an experience like that and if their heart is in the right place, all they want to do is reorient their lives to be able to love as many people as possible.

Yeah, yeah, well, a couple things on that. I mean from like, like from the Good Will Hunting movie, you know, you can understand what the Sistine Chapel looks like, but you don't know what it's smells like. Experiencing it is something completely different. And you know, we as biological organisms of the earth have mechanisms in place to keep us safe and to make us reproduce. It's very, very interesting that we have the capacity to love. It's very interesting that it's. We have the. Our brains have the capacity to interact with specific plant based molecules that take us to a new dimension. They show us a new room in our home. That we never knew existed. I mean, all of this stuff is just so fascinating to me. And it's a tool, of course, you know, you would never, I would never go to a party on these substances. I sit down, I've got a page of notes, I've got, you know, what are you doing that is pathological? Where have you developed habits that are suboptimal, these kinds of things? And it's a tool to allow you to look at yourself and improve yourself. That's how it should be used in.

My, yeah, deep introspection and personal insight in a state of a different consciousness. That, that I think does have its value when used responsibly in the right setting and not as like a crutch or escapism or as a, you know, noble excuse to do drugs, which is how a lot of people use those type of compounds. Now, now, now for you going from, from Australia and you know, then coming into the US to play tennis and studying engineering. I'm just curious like, like, did, did you always, as you were playing tennis, know you're going to go into engineering or did engineering become an interest at a later age?

Yeah, mate, I describe my story as a three year old's birthday party with a pinata and I'm just bloody swinging, mate. There was no grand plan.

I love that.

At least from my perspective. I wasn't doing any planning, but, you know, came to the US taking random units in Central Valley in Fresno and then got recruited to come to Santa Clara University. I was, look, I was on YouTube and I thought nanoengineering, nanotechnology was awesome and Santa Clara had a good lab. So I accepted that offer. Never stepped foot inside of the nanotechnology lab once while I was there, keep in mind. But you know, I knew nothing about engineering. I didn't know it was, it was mathematically centric math. Centric. I didn't know you made a lot of money. I didn't know it was hard. I just, I thought that nanotechnology was fascinating. And so in the middle of summer I walked into the engineering school and said, hey guys, you know, I don't know a thing or two about math or physics, but I guarantee you I'll graduate with above a 3.5 in three years. And for whatever reason they heard that story and said, all right mate, come on in, give it a shot. So, you know, the one common thread is the desire to battle and to squeeze as much juice out of the lemon as I possibly can. The lemon being life, I suppose I should say orange I shouldn't say lemon, but it was, it's just, it's a collection of those moments where an opportunity arose and you lean in. Another opportunity arises, you lean in. You can plan all you want, but life has a different plan for you. So you really just have to develop those fundamentals and have a specific mindset. It's, it's attitude and preparation and both of those things I try hard to get right.

Did you have like an experience when you were going through engineering that made you realize that you wanted to help people? Or did you have anything that gave you that feeling of wanting to do a little bit more than just say, I don't know, fix computers or make railroad tracks or something like that?

So sit down, close your eyes and think about one human being in Uganda who doesn't know how he or she is going to feed their kids that evening. Multiply that by 821 million people, triple the population in the United States. Sit down and think about that one woman or that one man and that feeling, and multiply that magnitude out. And you may be overwhelmed with this sense that human beings the same as us. And I think this extends down into animals as well. Human being the same as us, born of the same material with the same genetic code in a different location, who might look slightly different from us, are suffering immensely. And so that was that. Now, during that, during that experience with my brother, that now is embedded within me. Now we have to being human beings that run businesses, of course we have to be very practical. We have to keep our mind focused on the short, the medium and the long. But think about how profound that thought is when assisted. It was a very, very deep moment. And I'm no martyr, I'm no self sacrifice or anything like that. But what I am very aware of is the suffering that human beings endure. And I'm also aware that I may, and my brother and our team now may have the skills to solve a significant portion of that problem. So, hell yeah, I'm leaning right in. And we're going to solve that buddy problem. I don't care if it takes me 10, 20, 30 years. I'm on earth once. And my heuristic is how do I make the greatest difference in the shortest period of time? And five years later, I still think we're on the right path.

I love that. For me, I share the same sentiment as you. Even at Ben Greenfield Life, we don't have a monetary goal. Our goal is how many lives can we touch. And that's what we're basing Our entire enterprise around. For me, I'm coming at it from not the aspect of an engineer as you are, but more as wordsmith or as an orator, as a content producer, bringing ideas to people, helping people out with information, collecting information, filtering information and disseminating information, just like the information you and I are producing right now to hopefully help people eat healthier and to help the planet be healthier. And so, you know, I totally get it. And I think it's just such a wonderful way to live your life when you can step back and say, okay, how does my job. And it can literally be flipping burgers, right? How does. How does my job love others? And just. Just adding that perspective and then operating from that perspective in your career is just so transformative. As far as a mindset shift, I mean, that. That's when I'm on my knees in the morning and I'm praying, you know, and that's. I do my spiritual care the very first thing in the morning, you know that. Yeah, I take that back. I have my glass of water and I jump up and down trampoline. I get the blood flowing, you know, so that I. I don't fall asleep while I'm talking to God. And then one of the very last things I say, though, when I pray is it varies the way that I phrase it, but it's essentially help me to love people, show me how I can love people, show me how I can love more people. Make what I do. Not for me, but for you. Not for me, but for the world. And operating from that mentality, it makes things so much more meaningful. Rips you out of bed in the morning with a smile on your face. In my opinion.

It does, mate. I'm totally with you. And I think that one of the other elements, preparation and attitude are huge. But part of that attitude element, I think is gratitude, being grateful. I mean, like, you submit yourself in the morning to God. It's the same thing. It's a similar thing, I suppose, for me. You know, the fact that I have running water through a tap, that I just turn a knob and the water doesn't kill me, and I have a warm bed. I mean, people might think that this is trite or, you know, so what? You can't get lost in those simple things. It is the simple things that we take most for granted that we should be most grateful for. And these being able to live a life with pretty acute and powerful gratitude. I think that is a major source of my happiness. Because whenever adversity runs across my plate, which is obviously same as you. It's constant. You're still coming from that place of just pure gratitude. And at that point, really, any problem is solvable because you understand that people before you have solved more complicated things.

So tell me about Willow.

Sure. I very firmly believe that nutrition will be personalized. I very firmly believe that plants are the basis of human well being. Well, at least human nutrition. I'll start there. Plants are the basis of human nutrition. I think we've known that for quite a while. Yes, there are other elements to nutrition. I'm not denying that. There are other elements to well being, of course, sleep, spirituality, education, all of these kinds of things. But what the data shows right now is that 821 million people don't get enough food and 2.2 billion people eat too much of the wrong stuff. I know people prefer stories over data, but I'll just mention one data point. The Milken Institute found that diet related disease, not disease. Diet related disease costs the United States $1.7 trillion a year. It's almost 10% of US GDP. Think about that. What a state of play. Once we can personalize nutrition, we can have systems that are built that are designed to optimize human nutrition, help humans make decisions about what they consume, and, of course, all those other factors when they consume it, how much they sleep and so forth. We can really optimize human nutrition. And when you're well, when you're well in the gut, you're well in the mind. And I think that that is a huge priority for me. It's a huge priority for my brother, and I think it's a great priority for our business. So starting with 1.1. Actually, I'll give two seconds on 1.1. 1.1 is.

You're fine, by the way. We got time.

All right, mate. So 1.1 began with the realization that 1.1 billion people began this millennium malnourished. That was the moment. And we were talking about that moment before with my brother. That was the moment. And so the name of our company is called 1.1. It is a daily reminder about what we're aiming at. Again, time is a factor. It's not going to happen in 20 minutes, but that's what we're aiming at. So we realized that the way we currently produce plants, it's kind of like, you know, the way we produced oil back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. You know, we got it from whales. And, you know, everyone, of course, was saying, it's horrible to kill whales. For our oil. But humans hadn't yet found a better way to produce oil.

Oil.

And there were all these attempts at government mandates.

By the way, for a second there, I thought you were talking about Wales, part of the United Kingdom. But you're referring to WH s. For a second I had a little bit of a pattern interrupt. Now really, a lot of our oil came from Wales.

All right, sorry, go ahead. The bloody Welsh, mate. It's the bloody Welsh. No. So we found oil in the ground. Of course it's suboptimal to be pulling fossil fuels out of the ground and producing CO2. But look at the wealth and the well being that is created on planet Earth. And now it is time for us to shift to another form of energy production, of course, solar and wind. But the obvious one is nuclear. I mean, without a doubt, that's what's going to solve our problems once. Once we all kind of wake up to the fact that it's actually not that dangerous and the government shouldn't be standing in the way. But that's a segue. We haven't digitized agriculture, we haven't revolutionized agriculture in a long, long time. And it's the oldest industry on planet Earth. It's 10,000 years old. So we saw that the way we were producing plants as a human race was suboptimal and destroying the bloody planet. Destroying it like really like nothing else. You know, there's a lot of organizations, there's a lot of industries that emit CO2. But think about an industry that destroys habitats. That's agriculture. And so it was the combination of humans being unwell due to the fact that they were sub optimally nourished, as well as the fact that we're producing those nutrients in a way that is destroying the environment. Okay, how can we produce plants better? Well, plants are always at the whims of seasons. You can't grow any plant anywhere. 95% of the leafy greens in the United States are grown in the Southwest in Yuma, Arizona and Salinas, California. And then they're shipped on average 2,000 miles. We've got to figure out a way to produce plants that doesn't destroy the environment. Where we can produce them year round, where they aren't covered in bloody pesticides, my goodness. Where they're completely pesticide free, completely heavy metal free. They don't destroy the soil, all of these kinds of things. When you grow a plant inside of a warehouse, the plant is now dissociated from the outside environment, which is a wonderful thing. From a production perspective. And it's also a wonderful thing from a plant health perspective, which we can get into. So when you produce it indoors, you're producing the plant's light artificially. You're keeping the plant at its optimal temperature and humidity throughout its entire life cycle. You're irrigating the plant in an optimal manner. And what results from that is the highest quality plant material on Earth. And so what 1.1 does, we develop the highest quality vertical farming technology on planet Earth. Vertical farming is the process of farming plants indoors and using the third dimension. In other words, using height as opposed to a plane, which outdoor agriculture. Two dimensional plane.

Yeah. And by the way, for people listening as you describe this, if you happen to be at a computer, you can make a note to yourself. Go to the show notes later on@BenGreenfieldLife.com Willow podcast w I L L O podcast because I'll link to some photos of, of the vertical farms that Sam has built. They're beautiful. They're gorgeous. I mean, it just. I mean, yeah, they're just really cool to look at. Like massive vertical structures where plants are just, just blooming and popping out everywhere.

Yes, because in the end, this is about the health of the plant. This isn't about creating cool technology or getting rich and famous. This is about developing a system that grows the highest quality plant materials on Earth. And I think I share that opinion with you, Ben. I mean, you imagine the 2001 A Space Odyssey. Those, those monoliths, those black monoliths. Imagine hundreds and hundreds of those with luscious plants coming out of both sides. Leafy greens, berries, eventually cannabis biopharmaceuticals. There are a really wide variety of products this technology can grow. But 1.1 develops the most advanced vertical farming technology on Earth. We have these large cultivation chambers around the top of the facility. We have robots that run around the facility performing the logistics functions that human beings would typically perform. Plant movement, plant inspection, facility cleaning, light move, and so forth. So that's the focus of 1.1 develop automated systems to grow the highest quality plants on Earth.

I noticed when I was looking around your website and reading about your vertical farming systems that you use the word aeroponics. What's aeroponics?

So aeroponics is where the roots sit in thin air and where the roots are sprayed with a nutrient infused mist. So if you go to a grocery store, you go to the produce section, you see that mist that's being sprayed onto the plants? Of course that's completely different. But that's the kind of mist we're talking about.

Okay, okay. And so these plants, they're basically grown on these vertical structures indoors. And the other quick question I wanted to ask you is, you call it AI powered farming. What's the AI component of it?

Sure. So artificial intelligence and machine learning are very good at taking huge numbers of data and multiple variables and then optimizing for those variables. So for example, if you grow an arugula plant at 72 degrees, you're going to grow it optimally. If you grow it at 78 or 80 degrees, the plant's going to bolt, it's going to start shooting its flowers, it's going to start being bitter. So you have there, for example, is temperature, then there's CO2 concentration, humidity levels, light periods during the day, 18 hours on, 6 hours off. What's the recipe of light? You know, there are all of these variable variables associated with the plant. And again back to that point before, how do we cultivate the highest quality plants on earth? Well, you take all of those variables and you optimize them for the desired output. The desired output is long shelf life, three to five times longer than any product you can buy off the shelf today. The optimal output is increased nutrition, higher nutrient density, better taste, better varieties of plants. You know, taking different cultivars of the same category and plant and growing them differently in order to get more nutritious and tastier plants. So it's applying modern day techniques of artificial intelligence and machine learning. One of our investors is the head of artificial intelligence for all of Apple. He's going to be helping us build that algorithm again with all keeping in mind the highest quality plants on earth. Wow.

So is aeroponics different than hydroponics?

It's a subset of hydroponics. So hydroponics, Greek word, hydroponos, the water does the work, aeroponics still, the water is doing the work. But the difference here is rather than a pool of water or a stream of water, these plants are growing in a mist. And fundamentally the biggest difference between the two systems is in aeroponics, the roots ability to access oxygen goes up by a massive, massive amount. And that allows the plant to be healthier, it allows the plant to grow faster. And so compared to a soil produced plant, we're at least 100, we're at least 200% the speed we grow, twice as fast as you would grow a plant outside. And then we have a, a production yield increase. Production speed increase over hydroponics as well. Somewhere on the range of 30%. All without not only not sacrificing the quality of the plant, but actually improving the quality of the plant.

Yeah. Now obviously I could grow plants out in like I mentioned, my raised garden beds with compost and eggshells and chicken poop. Everything else I have out there. And I'm curious, when it comes to hydroponics, I think I've even heard this before. There's, there's a questionable comparison of nutrient density of plants grown in soil versus plants grown using hydroponics. Have you, have you compared your guys produce to like similar produce grown in soil?

We absolutely have. You know, we took our product, we took a competitors product that's doing hydroponic and then we took organic365 from Safeway. Excuse me, from Whole Foods. My apologies. Whole Foods 365. And we turn them to a third party to get analyzed. And of course when you look at the heavy metals and the pesticides that are on the product inside whole Foods, don't be fooled. By organic, everyone. Organic does not mean pesticide free. Organic still has many pesticides and I am not against pesticides as a human being. Pesticides allow humans, especially in the places where they can't get access to food, to eat more product. It increases yield. Pesticides are a good thing in areas where the main requirement is to get calories. In the United States, we're at a level of affluence where we should be selective about what we're eating. We shouldn't be eating things with pesticides on them and heavy metals inside of them. So anyway, when we did the analysis, the product that we grew was on the order of 20 to 300% higher in nutritional concentration than our organic 365 counterparts at whole Foods and then slightly higher than our competitor as well, who was on the hydroponic side. But that absence of pesticides, the absence of heady heavy metals, lead as an example, chief among them is step one. And then making these plants more nutritious. First by choosing the plants that are inherently more nutritious and then growing them in such a way that maintains that nutrition level. That is absolutely what aeroponics will our version of aeroponics can do.

Okay, got it. So I want to kind of shift into, and I may have some other questions that come to mind about the actual plants and the way they're grown. But I want to shift for a second into the experience from the customer side because basically the way that I've experienced it is I have all these amazing vegetables arriving to my house. And again Like, I, you know, I'm one of those guys, one of those few people who actually does have access to be able to grow all this stuff. But, you know, as a guy who does podcasts like this, my responsibility to try this stuff out myself and tell people about it. So, you know, I'm one of those guys who's like fan and not probably not your ideal customer just because I live out on a farm. But the idea here is that I can basically take. Take an app and essentially have my own little farm at 1.1 Technologies.

Yes, that's right. So what about. Yeah, sure. So what Willow allows you to do, and you can visit at www.willow.farm w I l L O what this allows you to do. And we're developing these capabilities, of course, but what this allows you to do is to personalize new nutrition. You get to choose what you grow on your portion of your vertical farm. So that means you go on your mobile phone, you select which bundle of crops you would like to grow, or you select the crops individually, then you send that. You lock in what you want your farm to look like over here at our 1.1 farm connected to you by Willow. And that 1.1 farm then cultivates those products personally for you. We harvest them, we send that product directly to your door, and then you consume them. And then over time, you can change what products you're consuming based upon third party data. What is your doctor telling you to consume? What are many other volume? What's viome telling you to consume? So over time, our vision for Willow is to be your personalized farm. And of course, we're starting with the leafy greens and the microgreens and the herbs and the peasants. Shoots moving into strawberries very quickly, then blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. And then where things really start to get interesting is our ability to produce molecules like THC or cbg, CBD in cannabis, our ability to produce biopharmaceutical molecules. These are real bonafide medicines and vaccines as well, out of these plants, out of these facilities. So our vision is absolutely to become the personalized plant production, a personalized farm for all of our Willow members.

And so in terms of the actual growth of the plants, where do the seeds come from? Like, where are you guys actually getting your starting materials?

Sure. So today we're getting our starting materials in the same place that we would get any of our starting materials. We have a partnership with Cicada Seeds, one of the largest seed companies in the world, to sort of dive into Their seed bank, because you can imagine how large these seed seed banks are and these, these genetic libraries of plants. So we can dive into those libraries of seeds that aren't that productive on the outdoor farm or have some massive propensity to get sick from some particular ailment so they can't grow them outdoors. We can dig into that seed bank and find those plants that are hyper nutritious or super tasty and we can start to grow them inside of our farm as well. So today, you know, we're selecting from a, from a small to medium sized seed subset and we're being selective about which crops we grow. But think about it in the future. Think of the millions of cultivars of plants. There are 30,000 edible species of plants. Of course, there are sub cultivars and human beings at any one time are only really consuming up to 300 of them. So that's what I'm saying. We have not even come close to, to unleashing the power of plants on human health. Not even close. And that's part of our personal mandate.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a second, Sam. So there's other vertical growth systems out there. I know of one called the lettuce Grow, for example. I actually have one in my utilities room. I get these little seed pods sent to me and I can put them in there and I can grow from these little seed pods in my utilities room. And it seems to work pretty well. Tell me about why somebody would, would choose Willow over just like, oh, I'm going to do my own vertical farming on my patio or in my basement or in my utilities room.

Couple different things. I mean, first of all, safety. I mean, these products that we grow are inside a very, very clean spaces. The human being does not interact with the plant. The first person to breathe on the plant is going to be the person that consumes it. That's number one. The small installments that you can buy for your home are certainly great for the consumer that wants to farm their own product. But I think it's very similar to a personal mechanic. Very few people are going to have the time or the desire, the energy to be able to grow their own products in their house. And the number of cultivars that can be grown in those systems are quite limited. The products that we'll be able to grow in our system are much greater than that in terms of category and in terms of number of cultivars. But look, I don't want to speak down on those system whatsoever. I'm really happy that people are taking this, taking their nutrition seriously enough to start their own little vertical farm in their house. I think there is certainly a market for that, but what we're looking at is the mass market, the vast majority of human beings that want to have their nutrition taken care of for them. And I think that this solution firstly gives you the peace of mind that I am consuming the highest quality plant materials on earth and I am not consuming heavy metals or pesticides. That's peace of mind, number one. And then number two, it's the ability to be able to very quickly change what you're consuming out of your vertical farm, your 1.1 vertical farm, and have those products fit your diet or fit your taste for the season.

Yeah, well, and also, I have to admit, the vertical farming systems that are done for you, for your home, they still require the daily or weekly PH adjustments, water changes, adding all the vitamins and minerals to the water, like you're still gardening versus pressing a button on your phone and having it appear at your front door. So there's a little bit of a, of a convenience factor, I suppose.

Yes, yes. And a lot of people are looking because there are so many things to optimize for these days. Mate, I don't know how you fit the hundred activities into your 48 hours a day.

I don't want, I don't watch TV. That's how I do it.

Yeah, well, that's a bloody good start in a lot of different ways. But, yeah, I think, look, as I said, there's a market for each of these things, but what we're focused on is the mass market that doesn't have enough time, who takes their nutrition seriously. And first of all, they just want peace of mind. And second of all, they really want to be on the forefront of human nutrition.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Now, in terms of the packaging, obviously, I'm sure some people are wondering, well, gosh, you say this is all great, it's sustainable for the planet and you're not using as much topsoil and you're growing in a smaller space where you'd have to grow on a lot of acreage, et cetera, et cetera, but then I know what people are going to say, but there's jet fuel, there's packaging, like, what's the actual carbon footprint once you step back? I'm sure that you've heard that before.

Well, of course, of course. And we take that seriously as well. But look, nothing is a panacea and, you know, we can't solve all problems on day one. Now with the packaging side, you know we're working on compostable packaging where you throw this, you would throw this into your elevator garden. Garden beds mate. I mean this is, this is where we want to go with the packaging. We want to make this product as sustainable as possible and get to net zero as quickly as possible. Our number one priority is human nutrition mode. The state of human nutrition in the United States is so abysmal that not at all costs. Of course we don't want to do it all costs but we must get these products in the mouths of as many human beings as possible as quickly as possible. And part of that is distributing product directly to consumers doors. Now we're going to become much, much more efficient over time. We're going to have vertical farms in every major city on planet Earth. Over time we're going to piggyback on the distribution networks that already exist. So we're going to be dramatically minimizing our carbon footprint. But again our number one mandate is to get the highest quality plants on planet earth inside of humans mouths as quickly as possible.

Yeah, yeah. And so the other thing that's really interesting and this is what I like, there actually are companies that I subscribe to. Like I get a box from, I get sashimi grade quality fish from a company called Seatopia and I open up their packaging from this, this, this place called Seatopia and I can literally take their packaging and put it in my compost pile. It's all, it's all compostable, you know and I do the other, you know, quarterly shipments. I do US Wellness meat shipment and butcher box shipment. But the thing that I like is a lot of companies are doing this now. They got little QR codes that come on the packaging QR code gives you a recipe for, for, for what you can do with what's arrived at your house. Reminds me of way back in the day. My wife and I used to do CSA which is gosh, what's, what's that? Community supported agriculture. Yeah. And we'd get boxes that arrived to our house from local farms. This is back when we live in a little condo. We didn't have a garden or anything but it'd be weird looking things I'd never cooked with before, you know, Jerusalem artichoke or a purple parsnip. And, and so I'd have to get on the Internet and google all these recipes and you know, very similar. Now this stuff arrives to my house. I don't how, you know, how to use it, but there'll be a QR code I can scan to kind of, kind of learn about it. I noticed on your guys's website you have a bunch of recipes, like everything from it, from cocktails that you can make using your microgreens or your basil, to different pastas with pak choi. And you have a halibut with like, I think it's got like dill or something on it. And so I'm curious, have you guys ever thought about, like putting QR codes on your packaging that automatically shows people what they could cook?

For sure. For sure. I mean, we have a new revision of the packaging coming out very, very soon. And included in that is going to be a QR code. And not only is the QR code going to be able to give you recipes for what products, what meals to cook, it's also going to connect you directly to your farm. So you can connect through the app or you can connect through that QR code and you can see what plants are growing, what your plants are growing, what the nutrition levels are. You'll be able to control your farm from home and you'll be able to trace every single step of that plant's life all the way from seed to your plate to make sure that you have peace of mind that all the way along this hasn't been subject to a huge, to any real dirtiness or pathogen load.

So I'm assuming you're a customer of your own company, at least in some way. Tell me about how you eat. What's your diet look like?

I am gluten free vegan and I do intermittent fasting. How does that sound?

Gluten free vegan with intermittent fasting. All right, I'll ask you the million dollar question that I know people will get on me if I don't ask you this as a vegan, how are you getting your protein?

Yeah, sure, mate. I mean, I get a lot of the protein. First of all, if you eat a lot of vegetables, you can get a decent amount of protein out of vegetables. You just need to eat a lot by weight. Number two, I eat a massive amount of nuts and seeds. Those are some of the best sources of protein and legumes in general, beans. So the protein, I've never really had an issue with the protein. I did this while I was a D1 athlete at Santa Clara and it has served me well. Of course, you need to be mindful. You need to get your B12 from a certain source, your DHAs, your Omega 3s and 6s. You do need to be mindful. Don't get me wrong, but I haven't had. And regular blood testing shows that all of my levels are perfectly fine. But everyone's diet, everyone is different. And therefore everyone's diet should be different. And you know, this is, in this period of my life. This is my attempt to do what I think is the right thing for myself on the planet.

Yeah, our diets are way different. Like I do you like tonight's dinner is, is bone marrow, you know, like, like a roasted bone marrow with braised oxtail.

Yeah.

And you know, and lunch will be like wild caught salmon leftover from the night before. Breakfast is like a raw liver smoothie. And yet, yet in a lot of these recipes, I'm actually sprinkling microgreens. I'm adding little bits of plants here and there. One of those guys who's like, plants are gonna kill you. But I'm all, you know, I'm looking at fermentation and soaking and sprouting and cooking methods and pureeing and mashing and blending.

Yeah.

So, you know, I've, I've got, I think I've got about seven different willow packages up in the refrigerator right now. And I'll chop them up and I'll add a little bit to smoothies and I'll sprinkle some on top of like the oxtail tonight. I'll use a little bit of those in that recipe. I use a lot of this stuff almost like a condiment, you know. Next one, some berries and some raw honey and some tubers. But you know, I think that, that just the idea of adding a lot of these colorful foods, all these rainbow colored foods to your diet, in my opinion, also looking at it from an epidemiological standpoint, no matter what, you know, my, my carnivore friends like Paul Saladino or Dr. Sean Davis. Is it Shaun Davis now? I'm forgetting his last name. What's that?

Jordan Peterson as well. Full carnivorous.

Yeah, exactly. I'm not one of those guys who forsaken plants. I use them basically in almost every meal. But the same way that I use like salt and you know, a nice organic ketchup or a Dijon mustard, like I just, I sprinkle them all over in there as little supplements to my diet. And this thing you're doing now is just, it's so cool and so easy. What I like best is that it's allowing people who aren't able to actually get access to this stuff to only get it, but to personalize it I mean, open app on your phone. And I know now I'm just sounding like a giant commercial for you, so I don't want to show your stuff. I had you on to make people aware of this, but I really, really do. I dig the approach. I dig what you guys are doing.

Yeah, yeah. It all comes back to the same thing I've probably mentioned about four times is just high quality plant material in people's mouths. And from a diet perspective, you know, there are a million reasons to argue either way. I am certainly I don't look at myself in a sense that, yes, I've got it absolutely right and everyone has it wrong. You know, quite the contrary. I might have some facts to support that. You know, the human body is designed more so to eat a larger quantity of plant based products and then every so often eat some meat. But look, A, I'm not an expert and B, I think it's still very much an unsolved science. But yeah, the passion, the thing that drives me is I think that nutrition underlies so much of human performance and human happiness and I think that we can really genuinely make the world a better place by feeding people better food.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. Now, there was one thing at the back of my mind, something you went over. You related to cannabis, cbd, cbn, CBG and the molecular isolation, the ability to isolate as you're growing, certain compounds. Tell me a little bit more about that. Are you guys actually doing some type of, do you have like a biochemistry lab there where you're taking the plants and actually isolating different molecules from them?

So for 1.1, our whole goal is about the plant production system. So we aren't the ones doing the extraction or isolation, things like that. Now what we can do with our system is choose from a very wide variety of cultivars and then grow them in specific ways so that these plants can naturally express themselves in a manner that we desire. And so if you want to plant with more CBG or CBN or CBD or THC or Delta 8, Delta 9, I'm not sure the list goes on. You can take those cultivars and through many, many cultivation cycles you can start to determine, hey, when it's 78 degrees and the relative humidity is at 52, 52%, we've really got a high expression of CBG. Let's push all of our cultivars towards an environmental set point that mimics those better results. So doing that for kale produces a very high quality, tasty kale that's rich in iron And a couple of other factors. But for a cannabis plant, that additional or that concentrated expression of a particular cannabinoid is very useful for the market. And that's how we see our technology being useful for cannabis.

Cool. So as far as the future, you alluded to a lot of stuff that you guys are up to. Anything else that you got your eyes on for the future that you're excited about, that you want to tell people about big time.

I mean, the ability for this technology to grow plants that nourish human beings is well established. And anyone listening to the podcast can go on right now and join that Willow membership, the Willow community. I think, you know, if we're looking 20 or 30 years down the path, plants are an incredible bioreactor. Incredible bioreactor. So you can work with the plant and you can push the plant in certain directions to produce essentially any molecule that you like, whether that's, you know, measles, munch, rubella, vaccines, whether that's a rituximab anti cancer drug. I mean, the market for biologics is about a $450 billion market today. Massive, massive market. And using plants, as opposed to how we currently produce our vaccines and medicines, which is typically biologics, which is typically in Chinese hamster ovary cells and monkey kidney cells. And this is serious. This is not a joke. There are even acronyms for them. Shifting that production of molecules over to production inside of plants is a far, far better way to produce molecules. So the future that I see is a fundamentally, the people that don't have access to food now have access to food that that must exist in order for these communities, in order for these civilizations to rise, rise above and to rise to that per capita GDP that we want them to be. Imagine if the continent of Africa had a per capita GDP similar to that of Australia or the United States or the uk. Imagine how different the world would be if those people had opportunities like we have opportunities. And that's, I suppose, one of my meta goals. But I believe in the developed nations that anyone in an urban area and suburban for that matter, will be directly connected to a vertical farm that is not only growing the plants for their nourishment, for their basic micro and macronutrient nutrition, but they're also connected to these vertical farms, production of, you know, nad all of these other longevity molecules. You know, this is where you're going to be sourcing these molecules, and we'll be able to grow them specifically for you in the concentrations that you need to extend your life. And to feel good and to live a happy and healthy life.

Wow. Well, I think it's super cool. Maybe I'm just a geek and a hippie at heart and I love this merging of technology and plants. And so what I'm going to do for people listening and like I mentioned, I'll put a bunch of stuff in the show notes. You can go see pictures, you can, you can get in on, on like a Willow membership and start to reserve your first box to get shipped to your house. There's a code. The code is BEN20. That get. That gets you 20 bucks off getting onto the, onto the list for Willow. And so you can go to BenGreenfieldLife.com w I l l O podcast. That's what I'll put on the show notes. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Willow that's BenGreenfieldLife.com W I L L O. The code you can use is BEN20. And that gets you 20 bucks off. And I think you'll have a lot of fun playing around with it. And it's an app that you can use to customize, right?

That's correct. And that's still in development. I will say if you go online and you reserve your spot and you get that test box, I can almost guarantee you that immediately you will notice the difference, the difference in quality. One of our investors was 62 and he said, for every second of my life, I've hated kale until I tasted it right now. You know, the quality of these products is just outrageous. Wow. Wow.

Well, Sam, I love what you're doing. I love your passion. I love what you pull together here. It's so inspirational what you and your brother have done. And I mean, like, honestly, like, I would, I would be happy as a clan if my own sons were to grow up, you know, and do something for the planet in a similar manner that you have. Well, not as the planet, but obviously the people on the planet. And so I really respect what you've done and thank you for what you're doing and keep up the great work, man.

I really appreciate that, mate. And thank you for your time. Thanks, Ben.

Hi, folks, I'm Ben along with Sam Bertram from Willow, signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, formed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you. On this episode today, and if you liked it or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.

Sam.