Barbell Shrugged - Episode 3 - Brad Pope

Episode Date: March 17, 2012

The supplement industry exposed.  Discover some interesting tid bits about the supplement industry from a man who works on the inside: Brad Pope.

Hey guys, this is CTP and you're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version of this podcast, check out Fitter.TV. I think the program is good, but my ability to sit down and actually do it is terrible. You're all pumped about it that first day. You're like, man, I'm going to do this every day. I'm learning Spanish every day. I got my app set up. I'm ready to go. Next day, I was like, you do it?

And you're like, no. This is his personality trait. Get very excited. Get very motivated. Lose interest in the details. Move on to the next thing. Right? It's true.

It's true. I share some of these traits. I would say, I would say, we'll talk about that on the next podcast if we do anymore. One out of 10 ideas actually stick, but I start about 10 a week.

You got to spend $1,000 on equipment to keep you rolling. Yeah. I got to set up a weekly meeting with my friends, spend $1,000 on audio equipment, and then we'll make it happen. Donde esta la biblioteca. So Joey Diaz, he's an actor. He's got a really funny story on YouTube.

Are we recording now? Yeah. So like Whitney, I guess. You didn't do any intro to the show. We're not doing the show yet. This is the pre-show. This is the warm-up, if you will. We're warming up. Yeah.. This is the pre-show. This is the warm-up. This is the pre-am. We're warming up. Joey Diaz has got this awesome story. You don't

have to start with 425 on the block. That's right. Did I say that before? No. That's a very specific thing you said. You can start with more weight than you think. Some people can start with 425. I don't know if Chris can start with 425. I'm confused about you. That's a solid warm up weight for me. Joey Diaz, I guess he's got this story about this six week period where he sold Whitney Houston and Chris Brown

cocaine. This sounds good. They were in California and he somehow got hooked up and they were spending $1100 a day for six weeks on cocaine. Every day he gets a phone call, and he finally put it together. He's like, oh, $1,100 is their per diem. Every day they're getting their per diem money, and they're going and blowing it on blow.

He would go into this house, and he would buy $1,100 worth of coke. He would cut it so he'd have something to take for himself. For anyone that knows anything about cocaine, when you cut it, you can make more with less. Anyways. Cocaine expert, Mike Dutzer. He'd mix it with confectioner's sugar. Yes. That's what I – I learned that from Cheech and Chong, actually.

Ajax works well. Jesus Christ. So he basically anyway he's got a six week story where he partied with him one time and they

they had to get some more just to get to the Grammys interesting story in light of all the recent news well this is he said that like a week before that happened too

this is a this is a case of death I don't think surprised me at all I'm surprised she's not been long dead she's always looked terribly terribly high any any last 15 years musicians are like oh they they keel over and die from overdose but you just sit on stage just just rolling with the profuse unparalleled sweat that's like being on stage like one minute and then the rambling in between line it just it was

very obvious oh yeah but now. But now, sweet angel, rest in peace. Everyone get all caught up in it. May your voice entertain the angels. I'm not going to feel sorry for one bit. So,

for the record, heartless. I'm a heartless bastard. You started off by saying terrible news this week, but when you used it, it was like you were a fan. Like your iTunes catalog

is filled with the entire what you used. I'm not going to lie, I jammed the shit out of the Body entire Whitney Houston I'm not gonna lie I jammed the shit out of the Bodyguard soundtrack just gonna put that out there so Lucas posted something really good

on his wall which was a Chinese kid singing I Will Always Love You probably better than Whitney Houston ever did it and I thought that was pretty good

and so I posted it on his wall boy the Chinese can do everything hey if he can sing better than her he could probably hold his crack better than her too.

Too soon. You went over some sort of line there. Sorry. Not really. And that leads us into Barbell Shrugged. Barbell Shrugged. Do your little introductory swag.

Barbell Shrugged. Shrugging barag. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. All right, guys. Barbell shrugged. Shrugging barbells. Talking about stuff and doing the stuff. Episode three, volume one. That was just Chris Moore with the musical intro. I'm Mike Bledsoe. We have Doug Larson here as well. And our guest, Brad Pope.

He's supplement industry extraordinaire. Something like that. Slash expert. So, Brad. Yep. As our guest, we have questions prepared for you. Okay. I wouldn't say we were really prepared.

It's a bit of a stretch. You work in the supplement industry. I don't know how deep in the details you really want to get. So, you can kind of maybe put your little disclaimer out there for us. Dip your toe in the water, see how it feels, and we'll get going from there. All right, all right. Yep. You know, out of grad school, me and some friends got involved in the supplement industry.

We started initially kind of selling and, you know, doing this, like being involved in the supplement industry. And then later we were kind of consultants for other people and analysts on how to move products, uh, kind of reverse of the way that you would traditionally do it. We started moving products out of the United States instead of into the United States. So, you know, typically when you have a supplement company, they're sourcing materials from, uh, most of the time, China, sometimes, you know, if it's easier to get geographically in another part of the world, they'll pull them from there. But we started producing here and moving to China. And the reason we did that is because, you know, everybody knows China is kind of up and coming and has a middle class growing.

And, you know, as that middle class grows, they're becoming more concerned with health and beauty products, which is where our niche market was when we started moving in. And so we kind of ran with that for a couple of years. And, you know, now we consult with other companies to kind of help them get their products to that market and fill that niche. Interesting. Yeah. This is a natural side effect of you spend less time working rice patties and slaving away and you have more income and time to worry about, you know, wrinkles.

That's correct. And vitamins and 100% carbs. We're starting to have the same first world problems we have. That's right. You start going, where can I get my shark fin concentrate? That is so unbelievably accurate that you have no idea. There's more. So you're not selling anything like we would normally buy.

You're not selling creatine and fish oil you're selling more obscure products like he's suggesting now they do it's not obscure for the chinese some things that have that are if you got shark fins or fucking bear prostates or something they're all over right yeah the um some things that that have caught on and kind of wet the supplement industry, like fish oil is pretty big over there and alternatives to fish oil like krill oil because the mercury content of the fish native to China or whatever. But as far as the bodybuilding stuff that traditionally people, you know, pick up over here, it's really not there in China. And so, yeah, their market is completely, completely different. Most of it is based off of, you know, Chinese medicine is based kind of on, I would call it homeopathic maybe. You know, that would be a pretty generous description of it, I guess.

Mostly anecdotal. Yeah, yeah, a lot of anecdotal. You know, it's not all hocus pocus, but some of it definitely is. Just like, you know, some of the bodybuilding stuff here is definitely, you know, scientifically, quote unquote, based hocus pocus, but some of it definitely is. Just like some of the bodybuilding stuff here is definitely scientifically, quote unquote, based hocus pocus. But over there, it's just kind of a more traditional role of medicine, I guess. I guess they look at it like homeopathic internal medicine. And that's what their supplement industry is kind of based around. Or whatever their father's father's father took for toe fungus.

Exactly right. Or for a urinary tract infection, he suggested to you. Right, right. Hey, I drank this root extract juice tea and I felt better. So hence, this is a cure for that. Right. And now they've gotten into this weird state where they like kind of a hybrid, where we like this extract that's been part of our culture for generations and generations and generations.

But what really drives sales is when you have the traditional remedy that's backed up with even a modicum of scientific evidence. And so then it's like, oh, we've known this for years, but now it's confirmed by science. And it's just flying off the shelves when you find a situation like that from a marketing standpoint. So you've been involved in trying to find some scientific evidence to, to back up some of the claims of some of these supplements or? Sure, sure. That in the nice cases, you know, in other cases, it's more of a challenge of how to market things in that direction, regardless of whether or not, you know, just to keep it real, you know, trying to figure out a way to meet that marketing demand rather, regardless of whether or not the product actually does qualifies,

you know? Right. So, I mean, I think we were talking or you guys were talking the other day about Honey Nut Cheerios on your last blog. So trying to find, you know,

fucking delicious, right. Trying to find some, trying to find some way to, to correlate, you know, what this extract does in the same way that Cheerios tries to correlate fiber to their product. Yeah, well, if you gave me an hour and said, tie A to B,

and here's your net connection, go on PubMed, see what you can find, you can do it. Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. And that's, I mean mean the good thing and the bad thing about evidence is that there's a lot of it then you but you can you can sure you pick the shit out of it absolutely you know i i hunt like we said last week a hundred studies on compound a would would probably get you going one study is of note but useless sure. I mean, any sort of error or bias or a missed decimal point, you know, screws all those results up.

Go ahead, Brad. It's really interesting. You know, a lot of the problems are the same that plague both industries. You know, you have problems with the American supplement industry just like you have problems with the Chinese industry. And the Chinese industry is just sort of like the wild, wild West. I mean,

you can show up with a box of snake oil and be like, Hey, you know, this is ancient Chinese. This is also on unregulated over there. I mean, they have a regulatory body, but you know,

that's the, we have the FDA and, you know, supplements are largely unregulated here. I may forget how it shook out, but at my work, we all got a little nervous when the stories of what China did to the guy who should have been the one protecting the population from that milk incident. What was that chemical they found in milk? It was some sort of toxic substance. Yeah, it starts with an M, too.

Yeah, but apparently, the guy who was in charge of making sure that didn't happen, I think he was executed. Probably. I think the government said, you have screwed up, and the penalty for this is death. And we're like, oh boy,

we have a regulated product going on in China. Oh, yeah. So I wondered, wow, American companies putting in compounds. How does the government... I mean, maybe now they're just so focused on this weird, bizarre capitalism they've got going on. Like, hey, if it makes money, let's do it. Oh, sure.

And that's a pretty... The milk thing was pretty egregious. A lot of people died and some kids died. Can't be overlooked. That's very different than having a supplement that doesn't do what it says it does on the label in the Chinese government. So I hadn't heard about that at all. They were adding a compound to milk and it killed people? No, no, no.

Somehow the milk, you know, there's the same thing that happened with raw milk. You know, the reason that raw milk is outlawed in a lot of states is because, you know, there's something to be said for pasteurization and removing impurities and bacteria and things like that from milk. And they were trying to do it, but they were... I think what had happened actually was they were... And I don't want to get into details because I'm not sure, but somehow the milk was tainted. I think it was being handled in the same production environment that other things were being handled in. And it was tainting the milk and people were drinking tainted milk and dying essentially mostly kids so and old people

yeah kids and old people yeah so if you're young and you have a healthy digestion you can just do whatever you want yeah you can probably get past that yeah that's the way i see it i might get a little sick but whatever um so one of the things I thought was really interesting, I remember the day that I was in the gym and I was coaching you. And I don't know how we got on the topic. He's like, what do you do? Like, oh, I export supplements to China. And I was just like, what?

This doesn't make any sense. Like the world just got turned upside down. Right. But I was immediately interested in what you did. And we got in a lot of conversations about the regulation on supplements here in the United States. The ability to make sure that what you're getting is really what you're – or what you're buying is what you're really getting. We talked a little bit about there's some breakdowns. There's some different levels in manufacturing where communication or something can break down to

where you're not really getting what you thought you were getting. So even outside the whole, you know, whether creatine actually works or not, like there's the whole issue of whether you're actually getting creatine when the bottle says creatine. Right. And it goes so far beyond that. Like calling it a breakdown is like, I don't know, calling the, is that an understatement? Yeah.

It's like calling the earthquake in Haiti a minor tremor. You know, it's so mine, mind blowingly bad. You know, when we were actually, you know, had our hands in the supplement industry,

um, we were ordering supplements from China and they would just not send us at all what we had requested. And I think we talked about this, you know, we had ordered some creatine monohydrate and they sent us like water, you know, just no attempt at all to try it, to try. And I think what the specific instance was, we ordered some AAKG, which I'm sure some of you will probably know what that is. And it was just, it was basically an anti-caking agent and not at all, not even in the supplement industry, not even, not even anything that you would use for any supplement product. And it was in a, in a drum labeled AAKG.

And, you know, if you're not on, if you're not really on. They just put random shit in the supplements and it's there to you. Right. And I mean, it's a coarse powder, just the same. And somebody who really knows what they're, what they're dealing with would probably know. But if you're not on top of your testing and if you're not on what's called the GMP, which is the FDA's, they call it the GMP, the good manufacturing processes. If you're really not on top of that kind of process, which a lot of small supplement industries or small supplement suppliers just can't be from a cost perspective, you have no idea. You know, so, I mean, you get to does creatine work and is creatine actually in that bottle?

And the answer a lot of times is maybe, maybe not. Interesting. So if I buy a bottle of protein or something like that and it's got the GMP label on there, what is that telling me exactly? That tells you that the company is claiming that they are maintaining good manufacturing practices. The problem is the FDA has their arms tied up in so many different things. You know, I think Chris works for Smith & Nephew, and he can tell you the FDA is probably very involved with their work and their business. Overly.

They are not very involved in dietary supplements at all. They're just not that concerned about it. It really falls on the same level as pet food. Occasionally, they audit. I think they audited maybe 300 facilities last year of nutritional supplement industries, which is not even a scratch in the surface of the supplement industry. The people that they audit are normally normally larger scale players like eas who has a presence in walmart or walgreens or whoever well i mean dancing a line between supplement and food sure sure i understand

that a lot of manufacturers i mean um a lot of companies are getting the same supplement manufactured so you know creatine for one company there's like 20 companies using the same supplement manufactured. So creatine for one company, there's like 20 companies using the same manufacturer. They're just packaging it a little bit differently. That being the case, how many manufacturers of supplements are out there in the United States? There's endless.

That number changes probably by the hour, how many small-scale suppliers there are. Now, you do have a very limited supply of raw ingredients suppliers. And one of the big players in this is Mitsubishi, who makes the cars. They're also a huge conglomerate, but they deal a lot in supplies. That's usually a pretty safe place to get your products from or your raw ingredients from. That sounds incredibly odd. Oh, yeah.

Mitsubishi, stereos, cars, supplement ingredients. Oh, yeah oh yeah mitsubishi stereos cars supplement ingredients oh yeah i was super shocked to hear that yeah yeah and if you really want to see the scale of it you know we'll talk about the natural food so you would say like the the bigger raw raw supplement producers are probably more trustworthy and that you're getting what you're really getting or for sure and the reason is the the large-scale guys can afford the cost of the gmp processes you know the gmp process is really really complex it has a lot of rules and a lot of regulations that like i said if you and i were starting a supplement industry there's just probably no way we could get our head around it without the hire a whole staff to run those procedures. Sure.

So that's all completely voluntary. Oh yeah. Well, it's not voluntary, but I mean you, if you open a supplement industry, you have to be, you're liable for keeping your facility up to GMP standards. But the problem is there's really no accountability, you know what I mean? Who's going to audit you? Yeah, exactly. The FDA has to go through medical devices, drug companies, food, cosmetic products, and then maybe they'll get to you around the same time they get to dog food. So, I mean, the chances of you being audited are so small.

There's a lot more FDA involvement than there used to be, though. Isn't it kind of heading in that direction where they're starting to do more with dietary supplements than they used to? They say that. There's a big claim every year. Senator Hatch, where are you? Yeah. There's a private company that normally, if a small-scale supplement vendor comes into the industry, they'll normally hire this company to kind of faux audit them and take them through the GMP process. And that company's name is NSF.

And they work pretty closely with the FDA. And they publish a study every year on how many supplement places were audited. Those are the kinds of agencies that do a much better job of making sure people are doing their job. Oh, for sure. You should pay people to audit you, then just have the FDA review a summary report that's certified. That'd be a better way of going forward. Right. And that would be great. Um, if you could kind of get by with that. The FDA is, if the FDA actually audits you, it's really just about your paper trail. You know, it doesn't even have to be true in most cases. It's just, can you present a convincing case that you were doing the things that you needed to be doing, whether or not you were actually doing them or not?

Because there's no way. I mean, the FDA comes out for two days, maybe three. And the only way the FDA comes out, normally, is if there's an adverse report on your product. So if a customer calls and says, you know, I took this product and my face fell off, then the FDA... How many times have you gotten that report, Brad? I think we're on six now, audits?

I'm just kidding. No, we've never been audited. So, you know, if the FDA gets that adverse we've never been audited um so you know if the fda gets that adverse report then they make a decision you know whether or not they want to come out and audit normally if you don't get an adverse report on your product then they're not going to bother oh yeah they're not going to bother at all if your paperwork's in order then you're not gonna you're covered pretty sure and like i said you could be grinding up puppies in the back and throwing them in your whey protein and as long as you have that paper trail that says quality protein that says

that you're not doing that high biological availability i might sell in asia chances come on by the way just just now that we touched back on asia that milk thing consulting i'm consulting wikipedia the 2008 milk scandal uh apparently you had a bunch of infants and adults coming down with various stages of kidney failure and renal stress and death and apparently it's tied to a chemical melamine

that's it melamine which among other things was being used to sort of give the perception that the milk and formula had a higher protein content than it actually did. Huh. Interesting. It was used, I guess, as a cutter.

Yeah. Essentially. They're cutting their milk, man. They should have just gone with Ajax, right? A cheap chemical, like probably somebody did some sort of test and said, well, this is fine. This won't cause any problems. You use it in large amounts,

and all of a sudden... Probably worked fine on rats. Some period of time after your testing window like if they said oh we tested this and after a couple months no one has any problems

but a year two years five years people get these problems or whatever then holy shit storm your head's decapitated

and they solve that problem they probably just test it on rats oh the rats are still alive oh the rats are still alive after a week so hey let's give it to a million people.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, they get a population problem anyway, right? Jeez. You know, Chad, I could hear this. They don't have real internet. But not understand it. Fitter TV is actually probably blocked.

Oh, yeah. I go over there every now and then. Anything that's given them subversive information yeah oh yeah shortly before my uh my journey into the fitness world i was i played a lot of warcraft for those of you who may not be able to tell about minority voice um but yeah i played a lot and i went over there and i remember i was so frustrated also known as wow that's correct wow i learned that from Daniel Tosh. Did you? Thank you, Daniel Tosh, wherever you may be tonight. I was just really frustrated because I couldn't get to my Warcraft page.

What in the world? When you're in China. What could I possibly do to subvert your authority? I'm not secretly planning a coup through Warcraft. You can chat in WoW, right? You can, for sure. Yeah, that's probably what it is. Yeah, maybe. Probably hard to monitor all the chat that's going on inside of the area.

Yeah, and the company that owns Warcraft opened some strictly Taiwanese servers, so China probably didn't take too kindly to that. So that may be why they blocked them. Interesting. They don't mess around. No, they do not mess around with censorship. That's such a weird...

I don't quite understand. Communist, hyper-capitalist, no-holds-barred, all-holds-barred. It's just a weird mix of all sorts of things. I'm not really even sure how... I mean, Brad would probably know better exactly how their economy operates i know that they're i know that it used to be where the government pretty much owned all the companies and then they would allow people to run them and i think they're getting more and more autonomous but i think the government's having a hard time letting them be as

autonomous as they probably want to be yeah Yeah, that's a pretty fair summation. Now, the irony is, you know, in addition to the supplement industry, I've kind of spent a lot of time in Asia. You know, I lived in Japan for a little while and visited China a few times. And the funny thing is, you know, in Japan, it's a very conservative culture. And Japan actually feels more closed than China does. When you have your feet on the street in China, the people are really super friendly and they're, they're great to be around and they're very hospitable. The food is probably absolutely drop dead amazing, right?

No, you can't get like meat on a stick in the street. Oh, you can for sure. But I mean, what kind of meat is it? Yeah. You go and they serve you. I think I saw it. It's just like the supplements. You don't know really what it is. Right. It's Labrador. I was told by wise people. That's right. I was told by wise people, whatever is being cooked and being sold and eaten around you, no matter what it is, consume that thing.

If there's something off to the side that's a little more comfortable to your palate, don't eat that. That's what makes you sick. Yeah. If somebody's serving you a skewer of beating hearts from cobras, which I saw Andrew Zimmern eat one time. Somebody cut a cobra open and gave him the beating heart of a fucking cobra. And he ate it. And then he had, like, snake ice cream. Yeah.

But basically, whatever they're eating, I think I've heard that from Bourdain, uh, Zimmer on a show. And also a guy at work who travels like nonstop. It's like, yeah, eat whatever they got, man.

Just, just do it. Yeah. I went and ate authentic Chinese once with, uh, some Chinese friends of mine. And I asked, I was like,

just don't tell me what I'm eating. Yeah. You know, just don't tell me. You don't want to be the guy. You don't want to be the guy who shows up and gets offered something goes oh no i don't want that right then you look at the fucking asshole american they all think you are funny funny story we sit down i'm i'm with like it's me and other one other round eye and it's like welcome to 1960 so that's what they

would it was it was me and one of the non charlie and it was steven seagal that's how it was me and one of the non-Charlie. And it was Steven Seagal. That's who it was. Me and my buddy were like the only two white guys there. It's like eight Chinese folks. And we're all hanging out. We're having a good time. And I'm like, don't tell me what I'm eating. And one of them is obviously like a fried chicken foot. Oh, yeah. I heard they're great.

Delicious. It's just a chicken foot, right? And it's like family style. So I pick my chicken foot up off. I stick it on my plate. And five minutes goes by. But I stick the chicken foot in so and it's like family style so i pick my chicken foot up off i stick it on my plate and five minutes goes by but i stick the chicken foot in my mouth i i chew it up and i swallow it so my i don't know i got it i got it i got a couple friends there my friend uh towel my friend towel looks at me and goes hey bro did you put the chicken foot back out there after it

was on your plate that's that's not very sanitary dude i don't appreciate that or something like that and i was like no i ate it he's like well where's the bone i was like no i i ate it you know anything overly crunchy or oh i mean i don't know i'm just small i didn't know anything i was like oh well i'm an idiot i had to like convince them that i didn't put it back i was like, oh, well, I'm an idiot. I had to convince them that I didn't put it back. I was like, no, seriously, I hate it. And they were like, no way you did that. No, I hate it.

Toenails and all, I hate it. Just right down in there. I don't know. Between that and some other stuff that was like raw eggs, that had that consistency, I was just like. Well, yeah. To this day, I don't know what that was. The biggest problem with Americans is texture.

Like, as soon as you get some weird... Like, especially when I was in... It's probably because we cook everything. When I was in Horn for the first time, a suburb of Amsterdam with family, I was offered pickled herring, which a lot of people love. They eat it. You take this pickled herring and you smush it with raw onion and just eat it so it's like a gelatinous pickled fish like six or

eight inches long so there's a picture of me i pick it up i go yes it'd be fine i put it in my mouth and it was just like firm fishy jello and i bite into it this one just like this is this jelly feel in my mouth and it was every molecule in my body to fight and go don't throw up on the kitchen table

don't throw up on the kitchen table you'll have a lot of those experiences if you ever yeah it's worth it it's a great memory but the texture is super challenging

like in Korea when they're having they have like the potent like kimchi stuff or the the fermented're having they have like the uh potent like kimchi stuff or the the fermented fish eggs and stuff like andrew zimmer one time pulled out this dude was in vietnam or korea or somewhere and he pulled out they served him a a fermented almost hatched duck egg oh yeah so he like pulled this thing out of the egg and it was a feathered duck embryo with a yolk sack attached to it.

He bit through the whole thing. Yeah, like a balut, I guess is what they call it. It was so – it's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. It sounds terrible. He goes, it's very, very swampy. Very – you know, he said very – I'm getting a lot of feather and swamp and mud tones. I saw that episode. I think it was in Cambodia is where he's actually at.

We may have been watching at the same time. Actually, I think may have watched that together. Yeah. I think what it was, was he bought a so many week old, like this is the three week old duck. And he's like,

Oh, okay. And then he, and then he like opens up. He's like, this is not three weeks. This is at least six. You know,

it's like, it's kind of weird comment. It was like, it was like too far along. And it's, he's like, I is not three weeks. This is at least six. You know? It's like. Some kind of weird comment. It was like too far along. And he's like, I don't know if I should eat this. You know? It was so gross. It was pretty awesome. I can't.

Ashley can't watch that. Like Ashley, my wife, is extremely prone to throwing up at any given moment. All you got to do is go like that. And she is running for the bathroom like as fast as she can can't see anybody in a mask no can't see even if it's just like a piece of paper over somebody's face exactly is that true that's very yeah it's super true if you go like this she's fucking totally scared you can't take her to a theme park actually i'm doing that tomorrow man she can't get show up tomorrow mickey mouse is the scariest person on the hockey

something may have happened to her as a young child and she like blocked it out but as far as i know she doesn't have any real like any real reason to be terrified of masks but you never know yeah halloween is the worst holiday ever for her. She hates it. She hates it. Yeah. It's really funny for me. Wait. So, Brad, how come you have specifically shown just to go to China?

How come you haven't tried to break into the American market at all? Yeah. Well, to be honest, the product we sell is more in the vein of that sort of traditional Chinese remedy. And so we don't really think that it would be very popular here. And another point is it saves us a lot of money not really having to deal, knowing that we're not going to have to deal as extensively with the FDA as we would if we had a presence in America.

And for the cost involved to keep up the testing and the stuff that the GMP require, it would just be, you know, monetarily less enjoyable. And that's a message from our sponsor. Do you need an alarm? I didn't want to turn off their phones.

James? I thought you wanted to know when time was up. Oh, was that it? That was our first segment? Oh, we used a different timer this time. Oh. What are we going to... All right.

What's up? Take a break and we'll revisit that when I get back. Or when we get back. Yeah, let's go ahead and take a break. And then we'll be back with Brad talking about... Boring stuff. After a message from our sponsors. Hey guys, this is CTP.

Hey, and this is James Chaney. And we've been trying to come up with this commercial here for five minutes. So we've been failing miserably. So what we're going to do is just try to explain what we're doing. So tell them, James. All right. So what we're doing is we're doing a documentary about Olympic weightlifting. Okay.

If you do CrossFit, you probably know what a clean and jerk or a snatch is. These are the guys in the Olympics that they throw an incredible amount of weight over their heads. In other countries, people know about them, but for some reason in the United States, no one really knows about the sport and about its top elite athletes. So we want to change that. We want to bring light to this really cool sport. I mean, there's really nothing cooler than throwing over 400 pounds over your head. I agree with that. So we're going to go around. We're going to follow the top athletes. There's about three or four guys we're going to follow,

and we're going to document how they train, how they live, how they eat. We're going to find out what makes them tick. And then we're also going to travel down to the Pan Am Championships in May in Guatemala, and we're going to film that because that competition is going to decide who gets to go to the Olympics. And there's actually only going to be one guy who's going to go to the olympics this year to represent the united states for weightlifting one spot baby so if you want to help us uh you can go where are they going we're gonna uh check out our kickstarter campaign you can find a link on the blog at

fitter.tv check out the olymp the weightlifting documentary blog and then you'll see a link for the for the kickstarter uh website yep and j James is doing a good job of keeping everybody posted on kind of what we're doing there. So if you want to keep up with how the progress is going, check it out. Fitter.tv. We're awesome commercial makers. Peace. I don't even know if I can do this anymore.

Mike's about to walk out of set. Welcome back from your break watching video. I hope you enjoyed that video. was great it was great all right so Brad you were talking about we're getting into why you guys do not delve into the US market with your your supplements yeah we touched on that a little bit I think first of all you know we talked about our supplement is definitely in a niche product in China and we just don't feel like that that niche would translate well to the American market. But on the other side of that is also we talked a little bit about how small suppliers of supplements have a hard time wrapping their head around the FDA requirements.

And the FDA does some things that are really good, but, you know, they create a large barrier to entry for small people trying to get into the market. There's a whole lot of just ridiculous rules that get carried over from the pharmaceutical industry or the food industry that they've taken and tried to kind of adapt them to the supplement industry. A really good example is the label, labeling for nutritional supplements. Nutritional supplement labels have to be accounted, there has to be a process in place, a written process in place and documented throughout every batch that you run of label accountability. How many labels did you use? How many went to scrap? That's just not a very, it's a transaction cost of doing business.

Right. So, and I understand that from a pharmaceutical standpoint, because if you mislabel aspirin and give someone the wrong dosage. Might die. Yeah, they could probably die. But asking a small startup supplement industry to kind of have a label accountability procedure and 50,000 other procedures like a label accountability procedure, it just gets cumbersome and expensive, you know, let alone the testing, you know, the FDA requires, quote unquote, that you test every single batch of raw ingredient that comes into your facility for handling. So there's a quarantine phase,

you have to ship out, You either have to test it in house or ship out to an independent laboratory and wait for the results to get back before you release it from quarantine. So you pay and wait for that or you invest in a testing facility of your own, which is expensive. Right. Which I mean, if you're a small scale operation, you know, a single test is, you know, maybe five employees, this company. Yeah, exactly right. You know, there's just no way that a small scale company can can one really navigate these rules effectively because you have to have somebody. You definitely have to have someone who knows the process, you know, and understands the process of an FDA audit and a GMP audit. And two, you have to have someone who who who really gives a shit, you know, like who thinks that the FDA has a valid point and feels that

just having these processes in place will be good for the company knowing that they may or may not be audited. I'd be terrible for that job. Yeah. Yeah. And so FDA who, you know, and it goes, it goes, those guys, it gets so ridiculous. Like I'll give you guys a couple of examples real quick and then we'll move on. But, um, they they they the fda wants you to test for water potability and what that is is you know basically the quality of your drinking water and which is pretty easy now because they have um you know tests that you can use on your own but when you're first getting started they want you to go to the municipality oftentimes and get like a report from the gis you know like i would go to Memphis GIS services or Memphis Geographical Services

and have them pull the water potability reports and have those on file. That doesn't make any sense. So every business in this area would have to prove that the water that they all use, it seems like that's not their responsibility. We're hooked up to the city's water supply. It's their job to make sure the water is okay. Right, the fda would say to that is well you have to do it on a weekly basis from a different water source each time and if it's not up to par which you have to constantly monitor for different water sources within your your town right so like no no no like

if you have four sinks you know in your facility they want you to test from a different they don't want you just testing from the quote unquote good sink. So they want you testing all around your facility. I guess you could have rusty pipes or something. Sure. You know, it might have lead pipes somewhere. Sure. Yeah.

And the FDA makes no, no policy for that. So if it's rusty pipe on the city's end or it's rusty pipe on there, on your end, it doesn't matter. The FDA says the burden falls on you. And if your water falls outside of those potability measures, it's your job to filter it. And like I said, it's not necessarily that one policy, but it's so many of those policies. A thousand of those could be. Yeah.

It gets really expensive really fast, and the transaction costs are really, really, really high. If you actually do it right, which no one does. Even the big players, you know, really. They're just. So are the big supplement companies that have a lot of money, are they more likely to give you a higher quality product? Or I see a lot of stuff online. I even have some people who seem to be pretty knowledgeable about supplements,

and they usually point to the smaller companies that are much more niche than say eas eas who's like you know they're they're getting everybody in every gym type of thing right and then you have like this niche product and they're only going after the people who follow you know the warrior diet or something like that well if you do the warrior diet then you're going to do take these supplements and it's that's that's extremely niche that's interesting because i did see there was some sort of report a few months ago where somebody tested multivitamins in a grocery store cheap brands versus the higher end brands and found that the cheaper brands or like the kroger brands had more consistent mineral content than your centrums and your your daily whatever's xyz, Y, Z's. Sure. So the Kroger brand.

Yeah, there was no benefit to paying premium for vitamins. Sure. And kind of on that note, maybe a year ago now, Consumer Reports did a bunch of research into heavy metals in protein powders and a variety of other supplements. And that was a big fiasco in the whole fitness world. Absolutely, I remember that. I know a lot of people were, for a while, they were basically swearing off, I'm never doing supplements ever again because they had lead and arsenic

and a variety of other things I can't remember at the moment. Like mercury? Yeah, they had mercury in there. And all the stuff that you obviously shouldn't be putting in your body in high enough concentrations where I was expecting lawsuit after lawsuit to follow those reports. And probably didn't happen. And I don't remember seeing them. There very well may have been because they were for big products.

I remember Muscle Milk was top of the charts. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Saddle Sport was up there. To address Mike's point, we need to make a delineation that compliance with the FDA really doesn't have anything to do with product quality. I mean, it does to some extent, but just because you're compliant with the FDA doesn't mean that your product is any good. It means you have a really good paper trail and your facility is probably pretty clean.

You're good at keeping yourself accountable for your procedures. It doesn't matter what your procedures are like. Your procedures could be total shit. Maybe you're more inclined to have a shittier product. You know how to look good. You've got to restore margins by having cheap ingredients

because you have to pay so much for the quality. That's exactly right. What the small players normally have on their side is they have genuine passion for their product. So they're really concerned with, you know, what's the quality of this protein that we're putting in our protein powder? What's the quality of this whey that we're putting in our whey powder? Whereas, you know, when it gets to like a Walmart distribution type level, I mean, they're

just looking for the bottom dollar whey protein that they can, they're making it as cheaply as they can to get as many on the shelves. It turns into a volume game. There's pros and cons to each one. You just, as a consumer, have to decide, are you going to go with these larger FDA-compliant facilities that you know are going to turn out a relatively consistent product, regardless of whether or not it's just consistent shit, or are you going to go with kind of a new guy on the block who is really interested in getting the maximum result out of this product? I guess this is a good lesson. This translates to food and everything else.

Right, and that falls really on the conscious of the consumer. All right, well, that's a good point because i know that uh we at our gym get our food from a couple different sources um and one of them is from directly from a farm and i know that i know there's i know some people from our facility that have been to that farm so they've been able you might want to elaborate what you how you define the word farm what What do you mean? Because there's all kinds of farms, aren't there? There are farms with fucking pigs caged up in chicken wire.

This would be a sustainable farm. For the benefit of the audience, dear friend. I don't know. I guess what's called sustainable farming or beyond organic or something like that. In your mind, picture a children's book, Old MacDonald. That kind of fucking farm. That kind of farm.. That kind of farm, not the kind of farm.

A guy walking around taking care of animals and plants. Yeah, they've got more than one thing going on. Most farms actually have a single item that they grow or they raise. So they only do cattle

or they only do corn or they only do apples. And then you poison the land and everything. That's a whole other thing they go into. They have to import and export a lot of product,

whereas with these other farms, they don't import or export hardly anything. They use the manure instead of some chemicals for fertilizer, stuff like that. So they go beyond the standards for organic. Organic standards are actually pretty low, but they go beyond it. And they know that the customers really appreciate that so they make deliveries all over tennessee and i think they have a hard time delivering some of their products outside of the state because once you start crossing state lines with certain products i.e raw milk then you're breaking um you're a felon at that point you're

bringing federal laws absolutely so. How dare you. Which is pretty interesting in itself, but we won't go there today. But this particular farm, Westwind Farms, where we get some shipments to our facility, there have been people from our facility that have actually gone and put eyes on the farm. Okay, this place is legit. They're not, you know know they really care about the animals

the cage-free chickens are actually out pastured chickens they're not just they're not kept in a barn with a tiny door and called cage-free so um i mean that's the type of facility i'm talking about so we can do that with our food and we have done that with our food and that's that's pretty much the only place i do get my food is from places where i really i have like a personal relationship almost a personal relationship with the owners and full trust that they're gonna do um what they say they're doing you're i think you're this close from being the guy who wants to kill his own cow hey man oh yeah action kiss it on the cheek pet it you know learn its nickname then slit its throat.

Or be the one to double tap it on the back of the skull. Who hasn't done that? I haven't done it. You know I haven't done it. I could never kill a living thing. I'd just eat his corpse. It's much easier. My conscience is so clean.

It's great. By the way, guys, for the audience, we are planning to go for a weekend, and Chris Moore make his first kill and eat. I'm so domesticated, man. That's ridiculous. We're going to turn him into a feral Chris. Yeah. He's going to grow tusks and everything.

Yeah. That's pretty awesome. So, anyways, we can do that with our food. We can visit the farm and we can go locally and obviously cost more. Can we do that with our supplements? Is there a way to kind of check on shit ourselves? It's more, it's definitely more difficult to do in the supplement industry because you know, one of two things happens. Either you get a, the company either gets a direct line to a source of whatever ingredient, Let's take whey protein because that's one that everybody here uses, their fish oil. They have a direct line to the guy who makes the fish oil,

which is actually really rare. What normally happens is they interact with a broker or an agent or a larger distributor to get theirs. And larger distributors can really be kind of almost hostile. When you start asking, where did you get this? Is this from wild caught fish or, you know, where's this sourced? And, you know, they don't, they don't want to give you that because then you can just end around them. You know, if you're, if you're getting your ingredients from China, the guy that you order from China doesn't care if he's sending to you or to Mitsubishi, you know, he'd rather just send straight, just as soon send straight to you, you know, at a higher price or whatever. So it's harder to get that direct relationship with your raw ingredient suppliers.

It can be done. It is done in some cases. But for the most part, you're kind of at the mercy of which raw ingredient supplier do you trust the most. And that's if you're running a supplement company. Correct. So me as an individual who I'm the end consumer here. Right. You're going to have to go a step further. I'm buying it from a website or a guy that says,

Hey, our whey protein comes from pastured cows. The cows aren't cooped up and grain fed and all that kind of stuff. They're from pastured cows. It's cold-pressed, non-denatured protein yada yada yada it doesn't it hasn't been exposed to high heat and they're saying the stuff it's on the label um when i take it of course i'm like oh man i read the label sounded like this stuff is way higher quality so i've got a little bit of you know psychologically i'm going man i feel i feel really good right i like the way this little bit of, you know, psychologically I'm going, man, I feel really good. Right. I like the way this stuff makes me feel.

I feel more huge already. And I recognize that. I'm like testing this stuff on myself, but I know that I'm taking it. It's really hard to do a double-blind study on yourself. Yeah. Some people might call that impossible, actually. I tricked myself. But, yeah.

What we could do is I could set the supplements up, and then Doug could punch me right afterwards, and I won't remember anything about what I had set up. I've seen Doug work the bag. This seems like a good plan. You don't want Doug punching you. But to answer your question, yeah, it's even harder for the consumer because they're one step removed. I have to go to the supplement company.

They have to tell me who their supplier is. I have to go to the supplier, and they have to tell me who their supplier is. I have to go to the supplier, and they have to tell me who their source is if I want to do all the research myself. And that can get really tough for a consumer to do, and most people don't do real well with tough. So if you really want to do it, you could probably track it down, and it would take some effort. It could be done, but it's usually not.

So for me, personally, I've been kind of thinking about just my own health and then, of course, anything I do for myself, I want to do for the members of the gym as well because I don't want to be off on one path and then leading them down another path or anything like that. So I want everyone to be on the same page. I want everyone to get the best stuff, highest quality.

So I've been kind of trying to figure out what I can do to figure out what's best. What would you suggest that if I wanted to make sure that I was getting the highest quality protein without any of the crazy additives or chemicals or whatever, and down to the other supplements too, but just using protein as an example, what would you suggest would be the smartest way? Maybe not like, you know, all the way where I have to track down, you know, the guy chopping down or feeding the cow or anything like that. But like what, what makes sense like economically even too? Yeah. I mean, I think if you're, if you're really interested, you know, there's a couple of things you can do and there's a couple of things we've seen, a couple of ways we've seen

people handle this, you know? Um, first you you're you're always going to be a little bit safer with minimum ingredient supplements that make sense like fish oil it's one ingredient you know what it is stay away from the proprietary blend with 18 different ingredients correct yeah i mean those are those are almost random shit that sure i mean i'm sure everybody here has seen bigger faster stronger which is a documentary on steroids and yeah for the audience who hasn't seen it there's a there's a go see it right you should definitely go see that movie but um there's a scene in there where he starts his own quote-unquote supplement label and he basically just grabs some rice flour you know the minimum amount of these ingredients that he can put in this product to call it a product

and he gets some day laborers and they make it in his kitchen, you know? And so, and then they hide behind the thing that we've all seen before, proprietary blend. So, you know, you, you really want to stay away from really complicated formulas. And, you know, if you're really concerned about purity, it's obviously going to be easier to trace the purity of a single ingredient supplement versus proprietary blend with 19 different um that's one thing we do already right we don't sell products that have creatine in them we just sell the creatine right that being said from a from a retailer standpoint uh some large retailers do this periodically they will send off their supplements for a for a analysis test from

an independent laboratory you know from a fcertified laboratory or even not FDA-certified laboratory, university or whatever. And that's usually a pretty cheap test. You can get that done for anywhere from $300 to $800, depending on how complicated the product is and how much they need to break down and the nature of the supplements. And that's really worth doing. Could I use a test like that if I wanted to send off um one of these higher end smaller smaller companies you know like can i compare like the denate you know non-denatured cold press protein versus like

the eas protein just to see which one in that case they would higher quality and all that kind of stuff in that case you would probably they would probably give you a purity. They would say, this fish oil is 99.98% fish oil. This fish oil is 86% fish oil. You're obviously better with the 99.98%. If you're talking about purity, say something is only 80%, whatever, whey protein, for example. What else is in it? I know you've got potentially artificial sweeteners or anti-caking agents or just plain filler maybe just to make it look bigger.

Those, those are the, those are, you just nailed the big three. I mean, anti-caking is something that you have to put in there. The amount is pretty small normally. Rice flour, which again you see in bigger, faster, stronger is a, is a huge filler. You know, I can probably, but won't name 15 different suppliers who, you know i can probably but won't name 15 different suppliers who you know so what's the purpose of rice flour is just to just give it more volume just filler it just you know like mike alluded you can put it in bigger containers help for more money it's just more stuff just like cocaine like how some people you know have a little bit of that special magic that turns a

kilo into a kilo and a half cocaine. And I didn't notice your margins, but this is interesting because there's this one supplement that I've been using that's, you know, more expensive, smaller company. And, um,

I'm not going to come out and promote them just yet, but like, right. I've noticed. I'll give you free shit. Right. They're onto me. Yeah,

that's right. I'll be making phone calls this week. That's right. Now, but, um, I'm getting more protein per volume. The scooper is smaller, but I'm getting the same, however many grams of protein.

That's what the label says anyway. Sure. So does that have a good chance that the EAS I was using had more fillers? Right. And the smaller companies are usually really honest. They know that they're fighting an uphill battle against larger suppliers, and they're normally a lot more willing to tell you yes, we get this from here. Sorry, I interrupted

you and I apologize sincerely. But you've got to know in this world that if you pick up two products and it's supposed to be the same thing and one has more servings and is cheaper, but they're calling it both things whey protein powder,

your first thought has to be something's going on to justify the difference in price, right? There should be an assumption that they've done something to lower the quality of that. Not always, because you guys, I mean, you could have the appearance of a higher quality product and just charge more money. I know that happens.

So with other stuff, but usually you get what you pay for and most of the time but one of the things is like you know with say EAS versus one of these smaller companies is um am i am i really is it worth you know this the artificial sweeteners and the fillers and all that kind of stuff like how much is it really do I need to be putting sucralose in my body every single day and the way that is this other company that's smaller do they have sucralose in their product but they're just not saying they do you know what i mean so like like i'm not testing i'm paying i'm paying the extra bucks to avoid

those artificial sweeteners and and getting a higher percentage of protein per whatever but you know is are they just taking easAS bag and dumping it into a different container in their facility? And then charging me double of what I get? That's kind of where I'm coming from on that. You're anti-capitalist? To shed some light on that. They're capitalizing. To kind of answer that, like I know like i said most of the small

companies are really honest so if you're getting a product where you know something some test is run they find out that it's inferior it's usually just as much as a shock of a shock to the small supplier as it is to you the consumer and normally what's happened is the small supplier has been kind of deceived by their raw supplier the raw raw ingredient supplier. So in most cases you are safer, I would say. Well, like I said, smaller suppliers are usually just more honest. And larger suppliers, you know, I mean, you gotta, you gotta accept them for what they are. You know, they're, they're looking to make the bare minimum profitable whey protein. You know, you know, know we say eas and other companies like that but you know the large-scale distributors of whey protein they're looking for how can they it's

inherent to the business model sure exactly right and if i want to offer my members and just my customers period higher quality protein i probably should be going to the smaller companies is kind of what i'm getting at my suggestion would be yes um and you said there'd be more willing to be open absolutely you think i could probably get like the owner of one of these companies oh yeah My suggestion would be yes. And you said they'd be more willing to be open. Absolutely. You think I could probably get the owner of one of these companies interviewed and all that kind of stuff? Visit the facility? Yeah, I mean, the smaller whey protein, there's probably one girl who answers the front desk, a couple of guys who run it, and then the owner.

It's probably four or five. It's not rocket science to run a supplement business. Do you know any small companies that we could we could go after here in the united states don't say go after you mean interview yeah investigative journalism yeah i mean they're like uh that guy said go after no way yeah i mean i'm sure we could probably i mean i could probably refer you to something that will name off air and kind of point you in the direction of how that process runs for sure like a local mom and pop supplement company. You know, I've been in business for 35 years.

Just your average everyday supplement manufacturer. Pope and protein manufacturer. I can probably put you in touch with those guys. In my mind, I picture you like, picture in your mind, like a local mom and pop, like a fucking maple syrup distillery.

Yep. This has been our family for a hundred years. We just sit around making one bottle a day. Or if they do it the same thing, if I fucking protein syrup distiller. Like, yep, this has been in our family for 100 years. We just sit around making one bottle a day. Or they do the same thing with like fucking protein powder. Yeah. We craft every single bottle of protein to your specifications. Yeah. And so we hand seal it and stamp it with fucking wax and a seal.

And a lot of times the deception doesn't really, you know, that's a really, like I said, you're splitting hairs when you get to, know deceiving people on the ingredients where people will really get deceived is on the product itself you know the efficacy of you know heavy water is one that we've had to deal with a lot and you know like you know that's just probably your best seller it is what do you put in your heavy water? Is it a proprietary blend? It's a proprietary blend. I got it.

Sure. That's all he sells is proprietary blends. We mixed it up. He's like, don't trust those guys. Oh, yeah, that's all I sell. It's a proprietary water and mercury blend. It makes the water heavy. Who needs two eyes?

You only need one. Guaranteed to have an effect. Only the heaviest metals in our water. Yeah, so like I said, the deception normally comes on the premise of the product itself. What you need to be looking at once you get past or when you're entering the supplement world, I guess you would say, is what's the research behind this product and does it actually work? You know, does it have peer reviewed evidence that,

that shows that exactly what they're putting in the bottle is exactly what was tested. For that specific brand or are you talking about just like creatine in general? Just creatine in general. You know, there, there are so many just bogus supplements out there.

You know, um, there's a really good website called information is beautiful and they recently did a oh yeah really great site yeah they really did they do a lot of visual i haven't i haven't heard that site yeah oh really they do a visual representation of all these i'm in pub med every day yeah yeah but this has got pictures yeah yeah it's like reading but not it's like's like my type of website. Yeah, and I mean,

Chris Moore probably has a little more free time than I do, and I don't have six hours a day to surf PubMed. Just kidding, Chris. That's my job. What was the website? Informationisbeautiful.com And they do a really good job of, you know, even supplements that do

have some credible use often get kind of attributed to these things that they are absolutely useless for. You know, like, I don't know, St. John's wort cures cancer. No, it doesn't. I mean, it has some useful benefits, but that's not one of them. I think one of those guys did a TED Talk, didn't he? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that whole lookup, I think it's a snake oil, snake oil something. Snake oil supplements on information is beautiful.

Yeah, it's got this cool interactive chart where basically has the most, the supplements with the most efficacy towards the top for the specific thing that they're supposed to be, supposed to be helping. It'll say, it'll say fish oil and inflammation. It'll be like right up top. And then the size of the bubble is, is how many studies have been done for that particular ailment or what have you right and then you can and it has a google doc that's publicly shared that has all the different articles that that's referencing it takes you straight to pubmed right and what's fantastic

and what's really interesting is you'll see like fish oil way at the top for you know inflammation or whatever and then way at the bottom for some other thing that it allegedly cures. It'll say like joint pain or something. Which maybe it kind of helps with that, but there's no studies that show that. Exactly right. Even if anecdotally people say it does. Right.

When you're first getting into supplements, that's the thing in the current environment that you really need to be looking at the most is does this product really do what it says it does? And who says that it actually does

what it says it does and how did they prove it? Don't listen to your buddy at the gym who's a bodybuilder who swears by it. Spend some time going on decent sites

and it sounds like informationisbeautiful.com is one hell of a one. Right. They do a very good job of summing up large volumes of information into one small picture.

Seek out actual evidence. Right. There's one supplement that always stands out to me anytime we have like a conversation about this is one is nitric oxide. And it's not that it doesn't work.

It's, I think most studies have said, you know know to explode yeah i mean yeah it causes like an eight percent increase in vasodilation but then there's like this other study that like they played music that the person liked and it caused like a 20 percent increase it's like uh i think i'll just wear my walkman to the gym instead and that's like you have walkman everything just has to be better than nothing sure and so that I'll just wear my Walkman to the gym instead. You have a Walkman? Everything just has to be better than nothing.

Sure. So they're spending $60 a month on this NO supplement. Which technically has an effect of some kind, 8%. But not $60 a month. You know what? If I had all the money in the world, I would probably take it. I probably still wouldn't take it because I wouldn't want to take it. For most guys, it's like warming up increases vasodilation by

probably more like we've noticed warming up right starting to do some activity probably vasodilates you more than eight percent right and that's a total fucking guess on my part but i bet these guys who are in the gyms would be eating uh taking that 60 bucks and putting it towards meat or spending an extra hour a day sleeping would have the most profound effect for these guys. The same people that can't afford high quality food

spend $60 a month on that. You don't understand. I can't afford grass-fed beef. I can't afford it. My bar tab is only $200 a month. Right. Now, that comes back.

You know, a lot of, a lot of, it's like, it's like the girl who says, oh, you know, I would return your, I would return your call, but I've been really busy. That's horse shit. comes back you know a lot of a lot of it's like it's what the girl who says oh you know i would

have returned your like in high i would return your call but i've been really busy that's horse shit and a guy who says oh i i would have i would have got that but i'm limited money you have money for everything somebody sounds a little jaded expressing old especially old valentine's day memories this is the valentine's day edition we all here. We're all going to get our... Anytime somebody says, oh, I wish I could do that, but it's horse shit, right? The other thing too, people want like...

What I hate is when people are like, well, these are the supplements I'm taking. What else should I take? I'm like, fill out a diet log for the next three days and bring it to me. Because... You'll never see that diet log.

It doesn't matter what you're taking if your diet is shit food is still the most important thing right and still back to the point and nitric oxide is a no2 i guess is what they call it in biz um we in the biz the no supplement a lot of times those products aren't even nitric oxide they're what's called nitric oxide quote-unquote activators you know okay and so you're getting absolutely zero benefit. They're just kind of packaging in the purported benefit of nitric oxide into branding for their product.

And you see that all the time. Two out of three words is the same. Right. I mean, pretty close. The 66% equivalence. Two out of three words agree. What about that other word? That's pretty good.

Most products don't have any words i agree so speaking of being you know totally deceived we were talking about oh god we're out of time we're talking about in podcast world we never run out of time true story it's virtual time so we're talking about organic products and you know you you were suggesting that organic basically doesn't mean anything anymore yeah yeah i think we you know kind of in the break we were talking this over and i said that a product um calling itself organic is like a business major saying that he thinks outside of the box you know it's just kind of a buzzword or a key phrase they all kind of throw around and it has very minimal requirements you know like if somebody says they think out of

the box that normally they may have taken a business class at some point in their life, you know, or read a book about business. That's really about all it means. And that's where I was kind of getting with this is a lot of this marketing is kind of haloing products into other purported benefits that and it's really just not true at all. You know, we like I said, we were talking during the break and coming up next month is this thing called Expo West. And it's the largest natural slash organic trade show in America. And it happens annually every year in Anaheim, California. It's in the Anaheim Convention Center. It's huge.

It's like a three-story ordeal. And, you know, it's over a weekend, and it would probably take you the entire weekend to run it or walk it. And companies spend probably hundreds of thousands, some of them probably spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their displays. They give away free samples all weekend long, promoting their healthy products. And I would say that probably 66% of them are not healthy at all. Organic waffles, organic Pop-Tarts, organic ice cream. It's really just going to give you an organically fat ass and make you die of organic heart disease.

I already have a problem with these terms because if you want a waffle, you should get the ingredients, mix it up, cook it properly, and eat a fucking waffle. You are a human. You're here for a finite amount of time. Don't sit around eating bullshit versions of the real thing right if you're gonna be a fat ass at least that's a to be a real fat it's like the vegans the vegans they eat vegan hot dogs i'm like yeah yeah they're

a real vegan if you're eating vegan hot dogs come on how could you eat that beef patty i only eat boca burgers which are processed soybean burgers and they don't redefine print well these soybeans were grown with industrial fertilizers and pesticides and processed and destroyed chemically packaged into meat-like forms and fed to you which is probably 10 times worse than a fucking ground beef hamburger yeah doug and i got in this conversation on the way over here and we were talking about how like i feel I feel like, like, our generation. You were talking about Boca Burgers earlier? No.

Like, our generation, we've got a lot of people who are getting type 2 diabetes at a young age. And we've got a lot of people who, I consider them, like, when I look at people's diets and I get to see exactly what they're eating, they're eating a bunch of processed meats and processed carbs, just grain products essentially. Not a lot of nutrients there. These people are malnourished. If they were to go get blood and they were to look at it and say, what do your vitamins and minerals look like? They would be terrible.

So we have an entire generation and these people are actually having kids and raising them popping up with which is serious cancers when they're 50s and 40s we live in a country where we have all the opportunity in the world so what we end up with is a bunch of kids are going to be very malnourished they're not going to have all the vitamins minerals they need and the good proteins and good fats and all that kind of stuff to grow nice not paying attention to school can't keep up with the math these kids in india and china are and all that kind of stuff to grow nice healthy bodies. Not paying attention to school. Can't keep up with the math these kids in India and China are doing. That shit ain't even a joke.

That's real. But the thing is, they're probably getting the same nutritional value as maybe one of these poor kids with a fat belly in Africa. It helps to make a point if you scream and you shake your finger. So, I can't do that. So, like, they're getting about the same amount of nutrition as some of these kids in these third-world countries that don't eat, you know, but once every three days or something like that.

Well, it's great for keeping thin. They're getting an abundance of carbohydrates and calories. So, what we're ending up with is not only are we just as malnourished as these other countries voluntarily, but we're also getting really fat and diabetic so what's going to end up happening is is you have all of the problems of the third world plus diabetes and insulin resistance sure so i i mean i don't know 20 30 years i really think you're going to see disease one. You think it's bad now. I think it's going to get

way worse because people just choose to not be educated. They choose not to make the right choices. And guess what? I'm going to be paying for this. You know what I mean? I mean, the way the healthcare is set up now is like if you don't take care of yourself, nobody is.

I read this a couple weeks ago. One of my favorite columnists wrote a, Mark Morford, wrote a thing about the new Taco Bell breakfast food. Have you seen that fucking thing? Oh, man. I got to go get this. I haven't heard about it. It's like a bowl looking like shapes of tortilla shell. Oh, so like a taco salad shell.

No, no, no. It's like a... I don't know. There's like 800 different words describing the same thing a Taco Bell. It's just a shallow taco bowl. Right. Like a taco salad bowl. It's that.

It's a fucking bowl. I said it, man. It's a shallow bowl. Is it made of corn? Moving right along. Apparently. This is the argument we were looking for earlier. Filled with some sort

of egg type thing. On something super important too. Some sort of egg type thing. Some sort of pseudo ground beef substance.

And then a fucking like fake cheese poured on top. Maple syrup? No, no syrup. Cheese. Why would they do that? Will you let me

conclude my point? Can I finish? Can I finish? Can I finish? But he made a point. He wrote saying, please, God, don't eat this. Have some decency. Stand up to your Monsanto overlords who are feeding you just whatever they can find at the cheapest possible. And then he got a lot of hate mail saying, how dare you try to tell me,

I'm assuming it was a redneck. It's got a San Francisco columnist, so usually rednecks don't take comments. It's the only problem. How do you tell me what I'm going to eat for breakfast? How dare you shut your mouth?

And he goes, well, and he answered, he goes, well, I should tell you what to do if in fact, because your fat ass eats this,

you get sick and you contribute to the crippling healthcare system that I end up having to help pay for your ass. That's where it does. That's where we all have a shared interest in what we're all eating. Well, my vote is to not bail these people out of their poor decisions and we'll just let them go by the wayside. That's my vote. Yeah, I mean, without getting too... That's a true listener. I'm a libertarian not gonna apologize there's a couple of forces at work here you know there's you know people

obviously who who always get people i hate dealing with them i hate i hate myself who always bear the brunt of it you know like people are stupid and uneducated and you know but you know how many things am i uneducated about in life like if a theoretical physicist walked in the door and then he was like, screw that guy for not being educated. You know, I think we can all probably agree that nutrition is a complicated topic. I think physics is not even real. It's a made up thing.

I mean, I'm pretty sure of it. I went to class. I didn't understand any of it. I think I actually he said it was theoretical I think I actually just heard the sound

of like half of your users signing off right now just done you know but you know there's a lot of things that are but you could probably

draw the line I actually did okay in physics class you could draw a line there's some knowledge sets that if it's essential for your personal well-being you have some sort of responsibility to at least have some baseline

if it like no one's gonna die prematurely because they didn't grasp strength theory but sure if you don't know how to identify the foods you need if you're by to operate maybe that's a different sort of yeah i think i think It's like being able to drive a car or being able to pay taxes. Some things you must know. Hundreds of years ago, you didn't have to know about the food that was going in your body because there wasn't a lot of food that was available to you. You ate what was available. Sure, that's true.

And so now we've gotten to where we have way too much choice. And you get what you pay for, and a lot of people are just opting for the cheapest. And not only just the cheapest, but the most convenient. So if I go to the grocery store, the things that are the most convenient products are the ones that I can just open and start eating. Well, that's going to be high glycemic carbohydrates that have been highly processed. And not only... It may say organic. Yeah, and it might say organic on the package, which will make me feel better about myself. So it's uber convenient.

Ignite is bliss. It's very cheap and it's very convenient. So, you know, people are going to go to the path of least resistance for whatever. Right. And, you know, there's that and there's the fact that companies make a lot of money by marketing unhealthy foods as healthy to people, you know, for whatever reason. I think people know better. Some people do.

I think the majority of people know better, but they like to buy the package that says organic. You're giving people credit. I really think they know better for the most part. You know what I mean? Like the organic Pop-Tart. You know what I mean? Yeah.

There's nobody that doesn't know that vegetables are good for them. That's true. Everybody knows that. If you put mac and cheese and broccoli in front of somebody and you say, which one is better for you, everybody knows. Everyone knows that you're supposed to mix them together. Can I just take the macaroni out and pour the cheese on the broccoli i'm taking a broccoli with butter i fucked the macaroni cheese so i don't know i think most people know that and they're just looking for some way to justify it and they know that somebody if

they get sick somebody else is going to take care of them right you know what i mean but if i think if you really put it to them like hey if you get sick we're just going to take care of them. Right. You know what I mean? But if I think if you really put it to them, like, hey, if you get sick, we're just going to leave you outside. I think people would straighten up, man. I agree. Like, I don't want to be in that position. Like, one of the reasons I work out

is so I can wipe my ass when I'm 80 years old. Right, for sure. I care about the people around me. It's got things long term. All these people that want collectivism just want people to take care of them because they want to make lousy decisions. If you get sick, can't carry on weight, we'll take you to the Spartan cliffs and

toss you over. Thank you. You'll die honorably. We'll shoot a flaming arrow into your body. It better be way epic and you better videotape it. That's all I'm saying. We're YouTube's for. The question really is, if everybody knows this, what's a model for getting these companies to sell us things that are good for us?

Stop subsidizing food that's not good for us. That would be a step new place to start. I don't blame the companies at all. I'm all for selling people things that they want. You know, I'm for selling people things that they want as well. But what I'm not...

You sell something to China that don't work. I'm for selling people what they want, but I'm not for selling people telling them it's one thing and then selling them another.

You know? Sure. And in a way that makes it very difficult from, you know, legally they don't have to disclose it and whatever because of proprietary blend or selling them things that, you know, that they think are one thing and are actually another. You know, I'm really not in favor of that.

You believe in some standard. There should be some standards. Yeah. And I believe that the consumer should be able to sue those people for fraud. You're not putting on your labels, hey, this has been researched and it's found to be effective for this treatment you're just saying hey this is heavy water right have at it yep here's what's in it you know and you know the irony is we tried you know in the chinese market to say like hey here are some supplements that are that have a lot of scientific backing and are you are kind of new and will really address

kind of the pitfalls of an Eastern diet. Because Eastern diets have their problems just like Western diets do. Now their diet's becoming more and more Western. That's true. They're eating a lot of the bad things in the Eastern diet and a lot of the bad things in the Western diet.

Right. They're double screwed. Yeah, they're now getting fat and sedentary. Everything that comes with middle class Westernized lifestyle with Mickey D's and all that bullshit is now affecting China, Japan, and everybody else. It's that protein. It's killing them.

It's kind of like when we get a Cracker Barrel for lunch and then pay for dinner. That damn movie keeps on popping up in every podcast. It's because I hate it. I hate it that much. The sheer ridiculousness of that movie. Forks Over Knives? Yeah. Have you seen it?

Correlation, causation, overload. Yeah. So that being said, I think it would be really interesting for somebody to kind of really attack and approach, you know, how can we change the industry model?

Because I think it would be wildly profitable for the first people who did it, which is really where my interest lies. So, you know, if you could... If you want to do that in the United States, I'll team up with you. Let's do it. All right. wildly profitable for the first people who did it, which is really where my interest lies. If you want to do that in the United States, I'll team up with you. Let's do it.

All right. Let's change the world. I don't care about changing the world. I just want to make a ton of money. You need to get some more projects going. Hey, Steve Jobs just wanted to change the world, and guess what? He died a rich man.

Yeah, he didn't really change the world all that much. The iPod? Come on, man. I mean, I can listen to music on a portable device like I could for 30 years before Steve Jobs. Sorry, Steve Jobs. Rest in peace. Love you, buddy. Too soon. He's passing notes in class.

What is going on? Do we want to go any further or do we want to cut it for the night? Closing thoughts? I think we're good. I think we've covered a lot of ground i'll make a closing thought i like to ramble i guess the good message of the day what nothing fucker i thought brad was like what can we do to change the industry oh yeah whatever anyway so for the next part closing point

oh okay well brad next part, closing point. Okay, well, Brad made his fucking closing point. Can I make my closing point? Go ahead, Chris. He might have something better now. We talked labeling buzzwords and checking ingredients and considering price and whether it's worth the tradeoff in any money you save versus the quality of the product you get. I think no matter, it's just a good practice, no matter what you're shopping for, particularly supplements and food, it's probably a good idea to pick things up,

compare ingredients, compare price, where did the food come from, what is on the label. If two things say organic and one costs $4 and the other one costs $1.15, why does one cost $1.15? And why does that $1.15 item have 10 or 15 more ingredients? I think these are all incredibly important things to consider every time you make a purchase. Fair point? I like it.

Thanks, Chris Moore. You're welcome. I have got nothing to say now. Wisdom. You took the words right out of my mouth. Well, that's not hard. Yeah, that's i have got nothing to say now you wisdom you took the words right out of my mouth well that's not hard yeah yeah i was gonna say the same exact thing no um go ahead doggie oh and also just remember that most things remember i was about to say something i thought it was my turn just just remember that most things you're gonna see assume they're bullshit and crappy search out the minority of things of the highest quality damn it go on doug i was about

to say that too no you weren't i was about to say something about being a skeptic but go ahead speaking of high quality i mean if anyone in the audience needs some powdered deer penis brad is definitely a man i can help you out he's got all the obscure products that you would ever need. I know a guy in China. He's got people. Provide you. Was that it? That was it. That was all I had to say.

I'm good. Yeah. Well, to reiterate what Chris said is be a skeptic. People all the time bring me research or they say they read. They actually don't bring me research. They just say they read something somewhere. I read it in a book. Are you sure it was just say they read something somewhere. I was going to say.

I read it in the book. Are you sure it was in the book? They were like, I was reading some research. Are you sure it wasn't nothing? Well, I had to color the first three pages, but I think this is pretty credible. Yeah, I get a lot of people. I was reading some research in the European Journal of Medicine. I'm like, God. Stop there.

Whatever. Europe is stupid. And last time it was some Romanians that were bringing this up. But anyways, so, no, I was like, I really encourage people to be skeptics. Like, don't believe anything they see. There's research to support everything. Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Yeah, I mean.

Yeah. So, anyways. Back to my point. um yeah just be a skit oh man i got into the third beer that was it no um anyways uh after talking to brad um before tonight and tonight i think i'm gonna take a little more seriously like delve more into some supplement companies I'm going to try

and contact maybe some supplement companies and see if we can get those guys interviewed and we may not be able to do it here

we may have to travel but this is something I really want to pursue future content on Barbell Shrugged looking forward to it guys alright guys I'm Mike Bledsoe

with Doug Larson Chris Moore goodbye and Brad Pope thanks a lot for having me on guys see you next time yeah man