Tetragrammaton.

I was raised by two very kind of holistic spiritual parents who raised me a vegetarian.

So I was raised with a strong belief of like food can be medicine or food can be poison.

So following that philosophy, my parents brought a lot of weird things into the house,

from noni juice to aloe vera juice to wheatgrass, tofu, you name it. But in the early 90s,

one of the things that they brought in was this thing called kombucha. And I remember it very clearly

because it was a very defining moment. My dad came home one day with the kombucha culture, which if you've seen when

they're kind of these like rubbery circular pancakes, so to speak, and he came home in a Ziploc

bag. And he goes to my mom and to my brothers like, hey guys, I'm going to make kombucha tomorrow.

It's called the drink of immortality. And both of us were like, okay, dad, you're crazy, whatever.

But that next day and every day after that,

I noticed that he became obsessive with making it and drinking it.

And the way he would make it was very pungent.

Like, kombucha was pungent on its own,

but he would make it incredibly pungent

to the point where only him and my mother could stomach it. I tried, and I was like, Dad, I love you. I've tried a lot of the crazy things you brought into this household, but I just can't. So then fast forward two years later, it just became more and more integrated into the household and then ultimately played a very strong role in my mom's health.

Before you got involved in the business of kombucha, it had a healing effect on your mom?

Oh, yeah. So the way kombucha was introduced to my parents is that because my parents were on that

kind of spiritual, holistic health path, kombucha was circulating a little bit in LA.

There was this underground movement of kombucha in the early 90s,

and I think it was primarily because it was getting buzz

about how it was helping individuals of HIV-AIDS and or cancer.

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