Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 466 - Pioneer of Supplements Michael Zumpano

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Michael Zumpano is the COO of FitPro USA. A sports nutrition company that is centered around creating high quality protein drinks from real milk, that contain a unique blend of casein and whey protein. He is also the former founder of Champion Nutrition, and the co-author of the “Underground Steroid Handbook”. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter: https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: https://drinklmnt.com/powerproject Purchase 3 boxes and receive one free, plus free shipping! No code required! ➢Freeze Sleeve: https://freezesleeve.com/ Use Code "POWER25" for 25% off plus FREE Shipping on all domestic orders! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project podcast. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by friends over at Piedmontese Beef. Real quick, I have to give a huge shout out to my boy in SEMA. Dude, you looked fantastic for that photo shoot. What were you eating for your meal prep? So it's actually pretty awesome. The reason why Piedmontese is so great is not only does their beef taste amazing from those jack cows over at Piedmontese. But it's also pretty low fat. They have certain cuts that have more fat, but it's like a diet steak. And I coined that from you, Andrew. You're the one who called it a diet steak because leading up to the shoot,

I wanted to lose a little bit more body fat. I didn't want to eat a crazy amount of fat. So I just like honestly loaded up on protein and steak from Piedmontese. Can you tell me the macros on their flat iron, Andrew? Because you know those. Yeah, so the flat iron, I believe, is like 46 grams of protein to only four grams of fat i mean tell me another protein source that has that ratio of protein to fat like it doesn't exist

yeah and then even more so so the diet steak itself that i you know i guess i could have some claim to fame uh i call the bovette steak a a diet steak because there's like 100 grams of protein for the whole thing and only 16 grams of fat. But the thing is, it's like the size of a football. So for anybody that's really trying to cut down and they're like, oh, I can't be on a diet because I'm always hungry, try eating a Bovet steak. See how you feel. You're going to get tons of great protein, tons of healthy fat, taste amazing. And I can tell you right now how to get 25% off that. You guys got to head over of great protein, tons of healthy fat, taste amazing. And I can tell you right now how to get 25% off that. You guys got to head over to piedmontese.com. If you

know how to spell it, say it with me. It's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Yeah. I had vascularity on my head my shiny head how are things different for you now uh versus you know in in the 80s when you were messing around some bodybuilding stuff like uh how do you train now and have you have you been able to kind of let go of some of that yeah that urge to be big and strong uh no i'd love to be i'm just super busy you know i'd love to train again and get back in shape you still look like you're in great shape well i stay really lean i mean i usually i have a bit of a six-pack but um but the time is just real tough right now we got four companies they're all

circling the drain because of covid and yeah it's a it's a handful right um are most of your companies uh like online sales? So have you been able to kind of just shift to doing stuff online rather than like stores and stuff like that? No, no, not at all. So one company is called Fiore. Our website is F-I-O-R-I dot L-I-F-E, Fiore dot life. And that sells CBD and THC tinctures and manufactured products they go through distributors in california to dispensaries and real remedy is a company that's run by my son-in-law

and he uh he does private label cbd products so those can ship across state lines, across the country. And then Versagenics is our cannabis license. That's out of Emeryville. And that goes under the name of GRO, GRO.life, grow.life. So you can check out that website. And then the other company is more of a research company. And we're doing research into safe ways of extracting cannabinoids from cannabis. So we're not using flammable solvents. We're not using everything is non-toxic, non-flammable, environmentally friendly and biodegradable.

Explain to us how you got into that one because you told me a little bit on the phone and I thought it was an interesting story. What did I tell you? You told me some crazy stuff about the Russians and not just kidding. You told me you had, you had, Oh, what the hell's the name of that?

You had a disease or a virus. You had a virus. Oh, how I got into cannabis. Yeah. Right. Oh, okay.

Yeah. I had, I had shingles in 2003 in my eye, in this eye, the one that's all red right now. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's red because I splashed some chemicals in it. But at the time, yeah, I got shingles in this eye. Ocular shingles is the most painful thing I've ever experienced. And I've experienced some pain.

Pain in your eyeball? I can't imagine. Oh, no, it's in your head. It's trigeminal nerve damage and you're you're miserable it's the worst thing you could imagine i had i had open heart surgery last year for uh not for my heart but for uh an aorta that just a genetic problem with my aorta nothing no pain at all i got i got burned alive when something in my lab exploded i was in the burn ward up at UC Davis. So it happens when you're trying to make protein powder available for people. And you know, they have to, when you get burned, they got to scrape your skin. You know that?

They got to tear your skin off every day, a couple of times a day. And they would like, well, we're going to give you some morphine. I don't really need it. And they say, no, no, it's really painful. I go, I had ocular shingles. And they go, oh, all right. Well, you know, it was nothing., I had ocular shingles. And they go, oh, all right. Well, you know, it was nothing. That's nothing compared to shingles.

Just kind of putting it in perspective. And what are shingles? It's a virus, zoster. It's a remnant of chicken pox, if you've ever had chicken pox. And it kind of takes root in your basal ganglia. And then when you get into a period of, period of high cortisol for a long period of time, if you're under a lot of stress, it can come out. It hits you all at once. And it does the damage immediately when your immune system attacks it, when it gets to the end of the nerves.

It does that damage in hours. So even if you get Valtrex or some antiviral after that, the damage is done. You know, I got Valtrex within 24 hours, and I was a year, a little over a year, getting over the pain. I might be totally mistaken, but isn't shingles something that, like, you get a vaccine for as a kid? Like, isn't it super rare to get it or am I wrong? No, shingles is not that rare.

Oh, it's not. No, it's not. But, and you can get a vaccine for it. They don't usually give it to you when you're a kid. And you normally, normally people that are over 45 or 50 years old will get a vaccine just randomly for it just to try to avoid it. Right. Right.

Yeah. Do you recommend that? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not afraid of nanobots. it, right? Right. Yeah. Do you recommend that? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not afraid of nanobots. Get the vaccine. Yeah.

So that turned you on to CBD to try to get out of pain or something like that? Well, not actually. What happened was the doctor put me on narcotics. Heavy, heavy narcotics. I mean, you know, like 500 milligrams a day of Oxycontin. And it was, it was not pleasant for me. I don't like narcotics. I don't like the feeling. I don't like how my brain works. Nothing about it appeals to me. And, uh, and then that didn't work. So they put me on fentanyl and I was taking fentanyl patches. Yeah.

I was looking for skin to put these patches on. And, you know, I was, I was doing the lolly, the fentanyl lollipops and the pain was out of this world. That sounds like a blast. Yeah. No, it wasn't. It's not pleasant for me. It wasn't.

So, um, my cousin, I have a lot of cousins. My grandmother had 12 siblings, so I have lot of cousins. My grandmother had 12 siblings. So I have hundreds of cousins. Wow. But so a cousin of mine said, hey, why don't you try cannabis? And I said, this was like 2002. And I said, well, you know, I got kids at home. I got this and that.

And he said, just freaking try it. Isn't that interesting? Because you got these fentanyl pack patches all over and you have a fentanyl lollipop. Yeah. But then you're thinking smoking weed is like bad. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Isn't that funny? How weird perspective, how we've been brainwashed in our society. Right. Totally. So I, you know, I did it. I tried it. I didn't tell my kids, my wife, I did it. I tried it. I didn't tell my kids, my wife.

I had it, you know, I'd do it when I get to the office and in the morning and then I'd do it at lunchtime. None of my employees knew or anything. And this was when I had Champion Nutrition. And the, it worked. I mean, I didn't have to get high. I'd do a couple of hits. I wasn't high. I wasn't, you know, non-functional or unmotivated.

And the pain, the neuropathic pain, better than all the fentanyl in the world. Wow. Right? So I made the mistake of going, well, shit, I don't need this. And I stopped fentanyl cold turkey. Did you ever see the movie French Connection? I haven't. Well, it's an old movie, right?

This is, we're talking in the 60s, but the guy goes through withdrawal and it's like, it's like the worst thing you could imagine. It's horrible. It was terrible. My heart rate would go up to 180. I had to throw my bed away because it was black with mold because I'd sweat, you know. That's how powerful a lot of these drugs are. You need other drugs to come off of them, right? Right.

What was your wife thinking at the time when you were going through all that? It was the worst thing that we ever went through. Yeah. That was really tough. Well, you were probably, I would imagine you're probably real irritable, right? That's the next question. Right. I'd argue with a glass of milk.

No, I mean, it was bad. But anyway, the cannabis, it didn't prevent the withdrawal from happening. The doctor told me, you're going to die. You got to get back on this. And I said, I'm never touching this crap again. You know, I'd rather die than. So anyway, I got through it, but the cannabis helped and I kept using that until it was healed. And, uh, and then I stopped using it. I didn't use it anymore. Then I sold champion in 2008

and I started thinking about, um, what am I going to do with my life? I'm 50 years old, you know, what am I going to do with my life? I'm 50 years old, you know, 51. And I thought, you know, I wonder if anybody knows about this cannabis thing with neuropathic pain. And so I started researching it, got interested in it. And by the way, started studying CBD and the research that was being done in Israel primarily at the time. And this, so it kind of launched me in that direction. And I ran into another cousin, and she told me about her son was involved in a cannabis company in Colorado.

And she said he's having a lot of trouble. The market had just crashed. It was 2008. Right. And she said, would you call him and just talk to him? So we met, he's 20 years younger than me, but we got together and I said, well, I'm really interested in this. And he said, well, you know, if you're interested in cannabis, I mean, Colorado is the Mecca. Yeah. You got to go to Colorado. So the next week we went to Colorado and he said, if you're interested in cannabis, I mean, Colorado is the Mecca. You got to go to Colorado. So the next week we went to Colorado and he said, and you got to meet this guy named Josh Stanley because Josh is at the center of it. He's trying to do legislation.

He's trying to do all kinds of things to legitimize cannabis. And I met Josh, good looking young guy. I mean, he kind of looked like Jesus, you know, with blonde hair, blue eyes, kind of an Aryan Jesus, you can say. And, uh, Josh, uh, Josh was impressive. I mean, he was really, really had his head on straight when it came to, um, to the future of the cannabis industry. So I started working with him. I moved to Colorado, um, with the blessing of my, my family. And, uh, I started working in the industry, kind of learning it and that. And pretty soon I was running, um, uh, the shops that we were opening up. And, uh, uh, we built a huge cultivation facility in Colorado.

This is pre laws. This is before any, any laws allowed us to do that. So we were working with law enforcement directly and I built the cultivation facility like a, like a, a food plant that was going to be FDA USDA inspected. So I wanted to show legislators and law enforcement that you could run it like any normal industry. Right. And I had done that with champion. We, we did our own manufacturing. So that was great. And then we, we got a lobby firm and we started working with, you know, the local politicians and we started working on the laws, and ultimately we passed 1284, which was the first law that, you know, national law that there was.

And it was great. Yeah, to what, legalize cannabis in Colorado specifically, right? Right, and it was medical. Right, and that was 2010, 12? It was 2010 yeah yeah i i was there on the day that the law like passed because people were like oh man you're in town for this and i was like i was in town for a seminar to do a power lifting seminar yeah and everybody thought me and my friend were there to smoke weed but i was like hey this is well it almost sounds like everybody

left the floor i mean it was it was done. It was killed. And Josh and I and a couple other people got on the phones. We started calling people. We got everybody to come back, and we got them to do a floor vote on it. So it passed at the 12th and a half hour. Do you think other things will come through now that that did? Do you think other things will come through now that that did? Like, so that's cannabis and I guess CBD, but like THC and some other things are still hard to get. You have to go to like a head shop and you can't really just necessarily order them online.

Like, that's one of my issues with my product, MindBullet Kratom, is it's like, you know, kind of this gray area. Do you think other things will pass through at some point, even like psychedelics and stuff like that well you know what happened up in oregon yeah oh yeah yeah we got a law passed for psilocybin up in oregon so that's where it starts it starts with um with research and and i think that's where it should start and i think that these new ideas they have to play in the sandbox a little bit i think it's wise that we don't just open up the world all at once because... Yeah, you don't know what you're going to get from that. Well, anything powerful has potential for abuse, right? And you've got to understand what that is, whether it's nuclear energy or just straight chemistry in the turn of the last century. I mean, you heard about radium girls, the girls that were painting the radium dials on the watch,

and they'd lick their tongue to sharpen the paintbrush, and they were getting radium on their tongue, and they all got cancer. Oh, jeez. So we don't know what we don't know, and we need to take a little time to learn before we open things up widely. So it's – and by the way, you don't buy THC at a head shop. You buy it at a dispensary. There you go.

Yeah. The other thing that I wanted to mention here and a big reason why you're on the show today. This guy's this is Michael Zampano. I know people are tuning in. They'll see the title. But also, Michael is local. So we've connected through my brother and through our good friend, Tom File. And we've been trying to set this up for quite some time.

Over a year. I consider you a pioneer and somebody that has kind of, you know, I always kind of say the first man through the wall gets bloody. The first guy that's got to kind of lead the charge gets fucked up pretty bad along the way. That's right. And ends up making mistakes and running into errors and stuff, but error correcting quickly, but handling all that. And then everyone else can kind of come behind later on.

I mean, you are somebody that was bringing like protein powder to the market. And I think even you were mentioning that the distribution of that protein powder was even like illegal at that time. Sure. What year was that? Like when did something like that go? 1976. Yeah. And What year was that? Like, when did something like that go? 1976. Yeah.

And why was protein illegal? Well, it just hadn't been used in this way. It wasn't illegal, but I mean, supplements were not federally legal. There was nothing that made supplements legal. It was the Food and Drug Administration, not the Food, Drug, and Supplement Administration. So, I would have I got called into an FDA office at one point this was 1983 and a federal agent was screaming at me from across the table pounding his fist and telling me I'm going to jail he said you are either selling an illegal drug or an adulterated food.

Take your pick. Either way, you're going to jail. Wow. So, you know. Was there a reason? Like, why? Because it's like, it's protein. I mean, why was it so?

Because there was no statute. There was no act. There was no bill. There was no law. And so no bill. There was no law. And so we realized that we needed that. And to your point of saying, well, you know, I was involved in, you know, nutrition. That was kind of like cannabis light. And then got involved in cannabis.

You know, the first mouse isn't the one that gets the cheese. The first mouse gets the trap across the neck. Right. But I like, I like edgy businesses and I like to do it with integrity and I like to do it with a little bit of, try to do it with wisdom, you know? And,

but yeah, it's those, those first guys in, they take a beating and if they do it right, they can kind of break through as we have, you know. But, boy, it takes staying power because if you think it's going to take two years, it's going to take 12, you know. What led you to get into supplements? What made you think that they were effective?

Was it some experience in bodybuilding or where did it come from? No, I was a triple major in college, math, physics, chemistry. So all hard courses. And I was taking a lot of units. And it didn't happen every quarter. But toward the end of each quarter during dead week, I'd literally faint. I'd, you know, I'd collapse. I went into the hospital in 76.

I was, I'm six, almost six three, or I was at the time. I weighed 121 pounds. Yeah. So the doctor started giving me steroids. He said, if anybody, if they're for anybody, they're for you, buddy. And he said, you might think about working're for anybody, they're for you, buddy. And he said, you, you might think about working out. I literally looked like a POW. I mean, I, I, I saw at the time we had POWs coming back from Vietnam, I saw a guy in the paper and I commented to my

friend, I said something like, yeah, if I looked like that, I wouldn't be wearing short sleeve shirts. And he said to me, dude, are you kidding? You look worse than that. And, you know, I looked at myself in the mirror and I mean, it was a reality check. So I got serious about it. I dropped out of school for a quarter and I went from 120 pounds to 180 pounds in three months. Dropped out of school specifically to train? Yeah, I did. When I do something, I don't do it halfway. No, I jump in with both feet. And yeah, and I gained 60 pounds in three months. And I started researching products.

I didn't like eating food, especially not cafeteria food at a vegetarian college. They were vegetarian? A vegetarian college. I'll tell you, ask me about that later. Yeah. And so I started thinking about, okay, macronutrients, you have carbohydrate, fat, and protein. So what would be the best carbohydrate that I could drink? Well, there wasn't anything. You had sugar. You could put sugar in water or, you know, fruit sugar or lactose or something like that. But there was nothing really that wasn't going to just blow

your blood sugar, you know, through the roof. So I started looking at complex carbohydrates, and I saw some study that showed the solubility of complex carbohydrates improved dramatically if you just broke it down a little bit. So the length of that complex carbohydrate, if you could just break it down a little, it would dissolve in water without making it thick. So I started making it at the school lab. And once a week, I'd go in and I'd break it down with enzymes. And then when it would start to clear up, I'd, you know, kill off the enzymes with heat. And then I put—

No idea why you're doing this other than just for your own— No, because I wanted to be—I wanted to double my body weight. Yeah, your own interest. I wanted to be 240, which I did, you know, pretty quick. But so, yeah, so that was the carbohydrate portion. And then I started studying fats, and I came on to medium-chain triglycerides. This was all 1976, right? I found out about medium-chain triglyceride oil and what they did with it with children

and neonatal kids that were, you know, having trouble. Anyway, I started using MCTs. Fantastic. I mean, and I also started studying proteins. I found there was a beef protein that I didn't use in my products until 89. But I found a beef protein that was literally, you know, when, when, when they cut beef off the bone in a slaughterhouse, there's still a lot of beef left on the bone.

And they take that off with a rotating wire brushes, I guess. And then they cook it up and they make a stock out of it. And they sell that as like a, a soup stock bone broth type thing. Yeah. Yeah. And,

uh, so I, I would buy that. And what I liked about it was it was very easy on the intestines. So if you had piglets that you were, if you were a farmer, you don't look like a farmer, but if you were, if you, if you had piglets, you want to wean them quickly because the quicker you can wean them, the more insecure they are and the more they'll eat and the fatter they'll eat and the

fatter they'll get and the more money you'll make. So you want to traumatize these poor little piglets as early as freaking possible in their life. And, but the trouble is if you wean them too early, uh, they can't take anything but mom's milk and they'll slough their intestines and die. But if you give them this, um, beef protein, they won't and they'll slough their intestines and die. But if you give them this beef protein, they won't and they'll survive. So that was one of the major uses and I thought, well, it's good for baby pigs. And so I would blend-

And pigs are actually pretty similar to humans, right? They are. In some ways, yeah. Well, in- Digestion and things like that. Yeah, in a lot of ways. Drug responses too in some cases, yeah. So yeah, so then in some cases. Yeah. So, yeah.

So then I started working with proteins. And same thing. If you take a protein and you break it down, not all the way to a free amino, because that tastes terrible. But if you break it down to, like, small peptides, oligopeptides, it actually improves absorption. They actually can be absorbed faster than, I mean, everybody knows this. This is 40-year-old information, actually older information, more than 40 years old. But yeah, they're absorbed faster than free amino acids in some cases. So some amino acids like tyrosine, tryptophan, they're still in the blood.

I mean, in the gut several hours later, they're not all in your blood. But if you take them as a tripeptide, you know, or as a short peptide, yeah, they get drawn in much quicker. So I added those to the product, and I added, I looked at, I wanted to see what the amino acid profile was that a athlete would use. So I was reading a lot of information. There wasn't a lot out there in the 1970s, but there was some. And so I started, I started creating formulas where I blend different proteins to get a certain amino acid profile, you know,

and then I try to blend them to get a certain time course of digestion. So like whey is digested very quickly, but it drops you. How were you testing this at the time, by the way? I wasn't testing. Okay. I was just putting stuff together. Yeah. Eating it. Yeah.

There was no, at the time, I mean, in the 70s, I wasn't doing any university studies or anything like that. Gotcha. Yeah. And so, yeah, you know, I blend the smaller proteins like whey, larger proteins like casein, and then the largest proteins like egg. Right. So I had a pretty cool formula that ultimately in 1986 became Metabolol. And I don't know if you guys remember Metabolol back in the day, you're not that old, but Metabolol was a big product, you know, in the late 80s.

Yeah, that's a blended protein that's slow and fast, right? I mean. Yeah. And it had carbohydrate. And at the time, I went away from the straight chain carbs to a branching carbohydrate, which is what everybody takes now. So the years, those are maybe like almost like a full kind of meal replacement almost. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Everything except fiber. I didn't put any fiber in Metabolol, but it had even back in the day, originally it had EPA and DHA in it back in the mid eighties. And, uh, we actually had to stop putting it in because we couldn't get it anymore. We were getting it very refined, so it didn't have a fishy taste to it. And the guy at a certain point said, well, I can't make enough of that and I have to sell it for, you know, higher, higher volume product, better products like capsules and things like that. So I had to. What was the transition of you kind of like tampering with this stuff when you're in school versus like turning into a business?

Oh, well, you know, I was making stuff for myself, right, in college. And then the guys that I was working out with, I'd make stuff for them. You know, it was organically, it was an organic business evolution, right? And then I got to know this guy that was a Olympic athlete, a guy named Dave McKenzie. And he introduced me to other Olympic athletes. He was a hammer thrower. And so I started getting products for them. And ultimately, I started working at Gold's Gym. I left college in 1980 and went down and got to know all these guys at Gold's. And I was selling products to them. I was actually weighing stuff out on the scale at the gym and Wow it wasn't it wasn't

pretty and then when I came back from Gold's after with the underground steroid handbook and and all of that after I came back to Northern California in 80 late 80 well early early 83 my, my girlfriend who became my wife and still is, uh, her senior marketing project was my first marketing campaign. And we literally manufactured the product in my parents' garage and we delivered it to Jim's with my parents' van. And that was Carboplex. So Carboplex was just that straight-chain carbohydrate that I was talking about with nothing else blended in it because I didn't own a blender, and I would, you know. Was there a flavor to it or anything?

No flavor in that. Same thing with Metabolol. The first Metabolol was unflavored. But people were more tolerant of that at the time. Yeah, they weren't used to the amazing flavors that we have nowadays. Yeah, and I like to think we kind of pioneered that too. We worked real hard on flavors. Was there

other companies around at that time? Twin Lab was around. Beverly International was around. And of course, Weeder. So they were established companies. But I told Joe, I had worked for Joe, and I was developing products for Joe as well.

And some of the products were the products that I ultimately launched. But Joe wasn't going to launch them because they involved a lot of, uh, unique ingredients that were expensive. And Joe said, Mike, why are you doing this? You're, you're upping the ante and no one's asking for it. And he said, look, you're, your company's never going to get very big because bodybuilding is a rite of passage for kids. Some kids find monster trucks and some kids find rock and roll and some kids,

you know, find bodybuilding when they're 15 years old. And he said, and by the time they're smart enough to understand a damn thing you're saying, you know, they've got a job, they're out of college, they got a job, they got kids, they got a wife, and they're not really pursuing this anymore. So he said, you're hitting a very and they're not really pursuing this anymore. So he said, you're hitting a very small part of the market with these products. Just help me make my products better and cheaper. But you know, and I said, well, Joe, this is really in my heart to do, and I want your

blessing. And I'll tell you that I'll always be your partner because I'll be your biggest advertiser and and I did that you know we were we were one of Weider's biggest advertisers for you know many many years and I always had a real warm relationship with him had a lot of respect yeah so what were your were your products like more expensive because of these different type of exotic ingredients you're putting into them? And that's why he was saying, like, it's not necessary. Well, they were a little more expensive. I didn't sell them at a real high price.

I should have. You know, in general, when you when you make a product and you're going to be going through distributors, you want maybe a seven to one or eight to one from your cost to the suggested retail price. Yeah. And if you're smart, you get better than 10 to one. And that's what people do now. You know, if you make it for a dollar, it's got a retail for 10. And then of course the retailer sells it for 799 or something like that. Right.

But, but the suggested retail price nowadays, it's, it's like eight or 10 times more. We were more like five at the time and also i mean how did you come across getting to know joe weeder like how did how did that happen i literally called his office and made an appointment and asked to come in and see him i mean that was that was just you know when i get into something, I just take the leap. I just, what could, the worst thing that could happen is they'd say, you want to do what? You know, I mean, so I called him and we met and, and we got along and he asked me. I'd be fascinated that you're already like making stuff, right? You're already making.

Yeah, right. I guess so. Yeah, you're already making supplements. Joe was always looking for opportunities. He was real progressive in some ways. And so he said, yeah, come down to L.A. We'll help you get an apartment, and I'll pay you for articles. If you can write an article a week, I'll give you $200 a week for writing articles.

And so I didn't come to L.A. for a while and I got a phone call. I wish I had the tape. I think I lost it, but I got a phone call. In those days, we recorded cassette tape. Right. And it said, it said, Michael, where the hell are you? I asked you to come down here and I don't see you. It's been a month.

And he said, I tell you, we'll take care of you. Come down. We'll give you the job. We'll give you, you know, we'll find you an apartment. And so I get to LA. I just hop in the car and load it up. And I drive to LA and I talked to his secretary, Betty, at the time, not his wife, Betty, but secretary Betty. And she said, Joe just left for, he just left the country. He's going to be gone for six weeks. So I didn't tell my parents. So I just starved for six weeks until Joe got back. And then when Joe got back, he introduced me to the guys at Gold's Gym.

And they did help me find an apartment. And I wrote an article a week. I was a terrible writer. Joe had to hire somebody else to rewrite all my articles, and that guy was Bill Dobbins, if you know who Bill Dobbins is. I think I've heard his name before. He's actually in this picture here. That's Bill right there. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so Bill kind of took me under his wing and taught me how to write a little bit. And, and, uh, uh, but I did, I got $200 a week for writing articles. Was it about like training or was it about like just everything when it pertains to that realm? And what was his name? Bill Reynolds or Bill Roberts was the editor. And he was tasked with just so much writing. So he just handed me art. They all came out under other people's names, you know. But at the time, that was what we were doing. So I'd talk to a bodybuilder about their stuff. And then I'd write an article.

And then Bill Dobbins would have to rewrite it. And, you know. It took seven people to write one article. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, and Joe did this. There were times that Joe actually wrote a check out of his personal checkbook to me because they didn't have the money in the company. He'd had a CEO.

I think I don't remember the guy's name, but this was before Alan Dolphin. Alan Dolphin came in and fixed everything. But he had a CEO before that that apparently had kind of mismanaged and absconded. And Joe was sort of kind of where his business was kind of broke at the time. So but he never failed to pay me or the other guys that were, you know, he was paying every week. And, you know, I always appreciated him for that. Tell us about the underground steroid handbook. What's this about? Oh, well, so I told you that when I, you know, when I ended up in the hospital, 120 pounds,

the doctor started giving me steroids and he gave me DECA. And I wanted to understand more about it. So being a kind of a science-y guy, I started reading all the research I could read on it. And I had a friend at Caltech at the time. He was 19 years old, getting his PhD in theoretical physics. And he had a full-time research assistant. And so he had her copy off every, literally every piece of research that was ever published on steroids. I mean, East German, Russians, whatever they could find.

I had a stack of research that was three feet high. And they translated the East German studies for me. So I just absorbed that. I read it all. And that's really where the Underground Steroid Handbook came from. So when I was, after we moved Gold's Gym from 2nd Street to Hampton Court, where it is now, which was the end of 1980, I started doing these things called, actually, I think actually it was probably late 81 that I started doing this, but I started having these Sunday classes at Gold's Gym. We called it Sunday school. And, you know, people would just sit on the benches and I'd start and I'd had had a syllabus that I'd hand out and I'd start to go over it.

Well, that's what it started from. And this guy, Dan Duchesne, I may have never really, I probably would have published it as a book, but it wouldn't have been as good as it was. It would have been a little too sciencey, I think. But Dan had come from Maine and he was trying to get to know me. And I didn't know how to take him at first. Like he, he went back to New York and he brought me a pie from New York, all the way from New York and gave me this pie. So I didn't know how to take his affections, right? I didn't quite get it. So what does this pie mean? And, and does it have something in it that's going to, you know, I don't know. Right. So I didn't eat the pie. And, uh, and then, uh, one day he shows up at Sunday school and I was out of syllabuses. So I handed him mine. And at the end of the class, he came up and it was covered with notes. I mean, he'd written all over it on the backside and everything. He was just writing like a madman the whole time. And he said, can I, like, can I take you to breakfast or something? And can we talk about this?

I think there's an idea for a book. And I said, yeah. And so he picked me up on his scooter, which was also a little strange. And we went to this great breakfast place at the beach in Santa Monica. Wait, like Scooter? No. Oh, like a little... Scooter like Vespa.

Yeah. I think it was a Vespa. I'm picturing the big old helmets. No, no, no. Dan would never wear a helmet. Oh, man. But I'm sure we did look like that, except for the helmets. Except we were both bodybuilders.

So, look, I'm sure that looked normal. Wearing some shorts in the 80s. Yeah, exactly. 1980s, both of us with a bare midriff. That's amazing. Yeah, so, and it was there we started talking about names. And Dan liked the name Underground. And I liked the name Handbook.

And we kind of put together the Underground Steroid Handbook. And as soon as we thought of it, I mean, as soon as it came out of our mouths, it was like, yeah, this is the name. You know. There was no information being, like, shared back then, really, right? Well, there was a little bit. People had misinformation. There was a little bit. There was Dr. Wright was sharing a little information, but it was a little dry, you know.

Pete Grimkowski had some great information in an article that he wrote for Weider, but it was one article that was here and gone, right? was one article that was here and gone. Right. So we, uh, I started working on the actual writing and Dan put a lot of the humor in it and kind of rewrote it and made it, you know, more funny and readable. I had to pull some things out of the book cause Dan was off the wall. And well, yeah, I mean like he said he wanted it to be for men and women. Right. Which at the time for steroids was kind of weird. Right. And he said we were talking about, you know, how it can cause enlarged prostates. And he wrote in there, you know, you got to make the doctor check your prostate.

Girls, your doctor is going to insist that you don't have a prostate, but insist that you do and make him check for it. And I said, Dan, we are not putting that in there. That's absolutely terrible. Yeah. And there were other things, worse things. But, yeah. So, you know, we... Was that before steroids were a Schedule III drug?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, way before. Like early 80s, and that was maybe late 80s early 90s or something i mean to give it some perspective when i was in high school coaches i'm not saying which coach but coaches were still handing out diana ball to the kids in high school what a great era and the kids were talking about these little school little blue pills and they called them dino balls. They didn't even have the name right.

Oh, no, they make you real strong after about two weeks. And so all the football players were taking dino balls. And there were no regulations. Probably very similar to when pro-hormones came around. I think people came in. They were like, oh, yeah, I'm on this trend product or whatever. And who knows what some of that stuff did. I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it was, it was fun. I mean, I like, I like emerging, I don't know. I guess I appreciate the, the entropy factor and just the, the randomness of, of some emerging industries like that. Were you surprised that, like, were there a lot of people that were interested in the Underground Storytelling book? Were you like, oh, my God, like we always talk about, you know, everyone's on stuff, but now we know because everyone's buying the book. Okay, so we wrote this book.

Joe gave us free ads in return for articles that I was writing. I was still writing articles, but I traded the money for ad space, and he gave me a great deal. And I think our first ad was a half-a-page ad or something like that in the back of the book. And the ad came out, nothing. We didn't get a single dollar and it was, you know, like a week and a half had gone by. I kept going to the mailbox every day, nothing, nothing, nothing. Well, um, the postmaster had been a bodybuilder. If you remember Armin Tanny and Vic Tanny, I think I might have it mixed up, but I think Armentani was the postmaster at Venice Beach at the time. And he said to me, wow, you guys are really killing it, huh,

with your book. And I said, no, we actually, we're getting nothing. And he goes, Mike, did you look in the mailbox? I said, yeah, I look in the little glass, there's nothing there. goes, Mike, did you look in the mailbox? I said, yeah, I look in the little glass. There's nothing there. And he said, no, there's a little yellow sheet of paper in there. We can't fit the mail in the mailbox. Oh, wow. Um, hold on. And he hands me, you know, this huge bag of hundreds and hundreds of envelopes, right? It's like heavy, right? And, uh, I take it back and we open it and there's money in every envelope all cash and it was like the greatest day of my life right dan and i are opening these ultimately we had to have a our housekeeper would oh would help us make the books we were we were just we had like a

an out of work uh illustrator from disney wrote the cartoons, and he introduced us to a guy that had a printing press in his garage. That guy was an alcoholic. He ultimately, I think, ended up in the hospital. So we had to then Xerox the books, and we were paying like two cents a page to Xerox it. But, you know, you get four pages on a page because it's half-sized. So it cost us like 15 cents to Xerox the booklet. And for a lot of the books we sold, we were getting, I think, $20. Yeah. Yeah.

And we sold half a million books. And I had no idea because we were selling most of them. We were selling, we didn't get $20 for all of those. But I mean, we started at like $6 and then we said, well, that's not enough money and yeah we're selling them for like 20 everyone wants to start to play nice when they start in business yeah so but i mean we sold like 40 000 books to some guy in england that distributed them and you know through i didn't think there were 40 000 bodybuilders and yeah of England or wherever. And we did the same thing to Australia. We sold a ton of books to these guys in Australia. So it just kept rolling up and getting bigger and bigger.

Did you have any trouble, or was it ever problematic that you were connected to that, and then you went in the supplement industry? People are weird about steroids. People are still weird about steroids. It came up during lawsuits from connected to that. And then you went in the supplement industry. Like, is it ever like people are weird about steroids came up still weird about steroids came up during lawsuits from time to time. I mean, you know, trying to paint you a certain way. Yeah. But I don't know. It wasn't that big of a problem. Yeah. And that's what I was going to mention is, you know, you sold, you know, you said it was half a million right, right off the gate. Well, I think in the first month, in the first six months, we sold a half a million books. Okay.

So within the first six months, but yet everybody does look at steroids like, oh, that's, you know, it's so weird. Or like, it's not a, you know, like the stigmatism with it. But yet people are, they're buying this book. So I'd imagine a lot of people are still doing steroids, but they're still looked at so weird, but everybody gets so upset when they come up yet. Everybody was so interested in this book that it sold like it sold insanely fast. Yeah. It slowed down after the first six months. I feel like we saturated the market and it kind of slowed down after that. But, um, uh, I don't think that everybody that bought the book was taking steroids. I think they were interested in it. I think there was a curiosity factor. And so if you read the book,

I feel like we wrote it. I mean, the title was inflammatory because if it wasn't, we wouldn't have sold books. Right. But I think the information still was pretty good information if you look at it through the eye of 1980. You know, we told kids not to buy black market steroids. You don't know what you're getting. We told them to go to a doctor. Be careful because some of the doctors that write these scripts have other things in mind for you. And, you know, we said, uh, what do you mean by that blood tests? Well, there were three doctors in LA that would write scripts for bodybuilders. They were all three of them were gay. So if you're gay, no problem,

right. But if you're not, um, you know, you might not know what's coming at you. So we just, um, wanted to make kids aware of that because you had you know and we told them that uh it could stunt your growth we told them that um uh you need to get regular blood tests and really one of the worst things about steroids is what it can do to blood pressure and to your mood i mean if you've ever taken anadrol you know roid rage is real you know and uh you know you may not even realize that you're beating that guy up in the parking lot because of steroids that you might have let it pass when he bumped into you but you know yeah but uh so you know we kind of warn people about some of the problems of steroids and i feel like we did a good job at the

time at that like when people are making supplements at that time i've i've heard people mention that sometimes things would end up in products that like weren't on the label like certain type of like steroids would be in certain products well was that a myth or no it's not a myth. Oh. But I don't want to name a product. Okay. Okay. But, you know, but there was a product that was very popular in the early 90s, and that product contained clenbuterol. Was it a product that had a wide array of stuff in it? It did.

Okay. I think we talked about it on the podcast. Let's not. Let's not. Please. Because I'll get sued now i've already been sued by them so yeah so um yeah there was clenbuterol in the product and it was hidden in a uh in a fat even though it's a water soluble material it was hidden in a fat and uh so it wasn't something you picked up unless you broke down the fat. And so we kind of realized that because Dan was actually working with some of those guys at the time. And Dan was trying to get me to put clenbuterol in my products. He worked with me at Champion for a little while. And I wouldn't do do it but he was kind of telling me how to how to

hide it where it couldn't be detected i mean you got to realize in 1990 there you know hplc the the ways that you detect these compounds it was not very common now you know everybody has it but in those days they didn't so i actually had to hire a lab on the East Coast. They went to the stores and picked up the products off the shelf, and they analyzed them, and they found clenbuterol. So later on, when I was involved in a trademark lawsuit, I had to hand over my notes, and in the notes was that analysis. So the company that actually saw that I'd done it. I had to hand over my notes and in the notes was that analysis. So they,

the company that actually saw that I'd done it, but what I, I did, and I probably shouldn't have done it at the time was I called one of the principals in the company and I said, look, it's in here. And I said, the,

you're going to get caught. And the, the headlines and the New York times, you're going to be bodybuilding products contain drugs. I said it's going to hurt the entire industry. Get it out. I'm going to test it in six months. And if your stuff moves on the shelf really fast, if it's still in there, dude, you know, come on.

And they did take it out, you know. That's good. Yeah, it must have got people pretty pretty wired right i mean and the overall is pretty it's uh pretty strong but it's hard to find because we're talking a dose is 10 micrograms right you can't even see that right yeah it'd be a small amount yeah so very hard to detect especially when you're hiding it in among a matrix of a lot of other peaks on a chromatogram. And did you end up writing other books after the Underground Steroid Handbook? Because there was interest in that one topic. Did you try to go in on a few other topics that might be related to bodybuilding or health?

Well, we did The Ultimate Dieting. Was it The Ultimate Dieting Handbook or The Ultimate Dieting? What was the... I don't recall. Yeah, I think it was The Ultimate Dieting. Was it The Ultimate Dieting Handbook or The Ultimate Dieting? What was the... I don't recall. Yeah. I think it was The Ultimate Dieting Handbook. Right. Right.

And that came out of some articles that actually are published in Weeders Magazine from 81. So when I came to LA, one of the first things I talked to Joe about was this training system that I called rebound training. And the idea of rebound training is that, okay, you build muscle because you're subjecting your body to an unfamiliar stress, right? I mean, that's the essence of it. But your body only has the capacity to recover from stresses that it's used to at that moment. It doesn't keep a lot of extra capacity around. That would be inefficient, right? So when you subject your body to that unfamiliar stress the first time, it has to increase its recovery capacity.

Then the next time you stimulate that muscle in the same way, whether it's, you know, you're stressing the tissue of the muscle or you're stressing the energy stores in the muscle, then you get this big rebound. And the rebound can come even if you have a kind of a minor stress. So the rebound training was set up so that you would, you would. It's really in a sense of like, it's really in a sense of you're just not over training. Like you might train hard one time.

Next time you might train a little easier. And then the third time you would go hard again, something like that. It was three training. It was three, three training sessions in a cycle. Right. And it was a 10-day cycle. And we experimented with different cycles even when I was in college. We tried, you know, 14 days, 10 days, you know, tried doing it in seven days.

10 days seemed to work the best. It was a 10-day cycle. But in one part of the cycle, you'd be off all carbohydrate. I mean, no carbohydrate. And you do the type of training that would burn the carbohydrate out of muscle. So that was stressing the energy system in the muscle. Then when you'd have that second workout, right after that, while you're still in the gym, you'd just start eating thousands of grams a day, you know, 2,000 grams a day of carbohydrate, maybe more if you could get it down.

You have to drink a lot of that, right? Oh, my God. And you would blow up. 2,000 grams of carbs in a day? That's a lot of carbs. Wow. And you'd blow up. Your muscles would blow up. I mean, you'd get glycogen like you couldn't handle, like you couldn't walk.

It's amazing you hurt yourself at a certain point with that many carbs. Right. And then that would make you very strong. And then you'd use that strength to have a powerlifting workout. So that was the third workout, was that powerlifting workout. Wow. You'd probably go up and down and wait quite a bit during that period. In 10 days?

Yeah, bringing the carbs down and bringing them back up. Yeah, you'd go up and down and wait quite a bit during that period. In 10 days? Yeah, bringing the carbs down and bringing them back up. Yeah, you'd go up and down and wait a little bit. But you'd get, after you, you do that cycle for, you know, six weeks, eight weeks, and you'd grow incredibly, especially if you were on a lot of other things to help you. Yeah, you've had a little further assistance. Yeah, but I mean, you'd just blow up. A little further assistance. Yeah, but I mean, you'd just blow up. You'd get incredibly strong because you're going through that process of that keto process, you know, in the low carb phase. You wouldn't get fat if you managed it well.

And I'm saying some people didn't care. So they were the ones that would eat 2000 grams a day. Over time, you kind of scale it back because you got to be able to walk. You got to put your pants on, you know. But yeah. You know, you, you mentioned that you went from one 20 to one 50, six pounds. So one 20 to one 80 in like three months. Um, and then you mentioned that you actually got up to two 40. So I got up higher than that. You did. Yeah. Yeah. I got up to two 55 or so, but I wasn't in good shape. But I was in fairly good shape at around 242.

225, I was, you know, super lean, great condition. I never had trouble losing fat. I just didn't do it very often because I wasn't training, but, you know, I could always kind of get lean and get a six pack if I wanted to. And I didn't even have to think about it. I just wouldn't force feed myself. You know, you say nowadays you don't have the opportunity to train as much as you did in the past. Do you miss it? Do you want to get back in the gym?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. And then every time you do come back, is it pretty tough? Yeah, it's a little tough. It takes a couple of weeks. Yeah. I mean, the first couple tough? Yeah, it's a little tough at first. Takes a couple weeks. Yeah, I mean, the first couple of weeks is tough, and then you get your stride. And if you're taking a little something, of course, that helps. Right.

You know, I just, I'm old, so I just do a little bit. I don't, you know, I never went crazy. Yeah. I mean, the most Diana ball I ever took in my life was three, three, five milligram tablets a day. And I had guys, I knew a lot of guys that were taking 20, 50, you know. In a day? Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, we had the reps from the companies that were making the steroids coming by Gold's Gym at one time.

So, you know, the Organon rep, the serial rep, they'd come by and they'd drop off cases. So there were guys that would literally put, I don't want to say names, but they'd put a bottle of Anivar on their sugar pops in the morning or their Captain Crunch, right? That sounds amazing. Just pour it right in there. Yeah. And this is the thing about steroids. so people say oh they're dangerous well yeah i mean i'm sure they are and i don't i'm not discounting that but i looked at guys that were doing you know 11 000 migs a week some guys said they were doing 16 000 migs a week of injectables, not of the, yeah. And guys doing, you know, a hundred anivar a day, two and a half mig anivars a day.

And they, they layer these drugs. And I guess because they were young, you didn't see a lot of problems other than high blood pressure. High blood pressure was the worst thing. And blood pressure in some of these guys would go absolutely through the roof. I mean, like over 200, you know. So I guess when you're young, you survive that and you don't see these guys dropping out. But I would say for anybody that's going to take steroids, watch all the normal stuff, but also keep an eye on your blood pressure like every day.

Because it gets very erratic when you're on a lot of steroids and it might be normal in the morning. And then you get upset about something and it's 200, you know, and I'll tell you that does progressive damage on your kidneys. And when your kidneys go, life isn't the same anymore. So you want to you want to protect your kidneys. Yeah. And so I would say

that's one of the things I didn't see people get liver damage. I didn't see people get cancer. The guys that got cancer were, you know, there was like Lyle Alzado got cancer. Lyle and I were training partners for, I don't know, six months, something like that. And, um, I think, uh, Lyle had a brain tumor cause he had a brain tumor. I don't think it was from steroids because if it was from steroids, you'd see a cluster and see a lot of other people. Frankly, Lyle didn't take a lot, right? You know, Lyle, people thought that Lyle took a lot, but he really didn't.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm curious about something because you've mentioned like with a lot of things, like for example, you dropped out of school for that semester so you could get big um you just dived into cannabis when weeder called you to move to la you just drove to la and moved there yeah um my parents loved that and you can imagine after you know four and a half years of college yeah they loved that but like what you know because again you were three major guys so you're're super smart. You're in college. You don't see like that. That kind of makes it seem like that's not a person that takes risks, but you took a lot of risks and it seemed like it was just easy for you to do that. Why was it so easy for you to take risks like that?

Well, I think this is not a dress rehearsal for life, right? And if you want to have certain experiences, if you don't want those experiences, then you get a stable job somewhere and that's your life. And I respect that. I respect that more and more the older I get. But I wanted to have these adventures. And I happened to marry a girl that loves adventures. And I've never seen her afraid of loves adventures and she's never, she's, I've never seen her afraid of anything. She's not afraid of anything. And, uh, and so she supported

me. My kids are the same way. They've all kind of launched out on their own. And, um, uh, and I, I can tell you, it wasn't that I wasn't afraid. I mean, there were times in Colorado where I was absolutely sure I was going to federal prison, you know, being in cannabis. Right. One time we got a call from a state official who said, boy, if you've got anything in your house, you've got to clean it out now. He said a bunch of federal agents just landed in the town next to you. They're taking someone down in your town. They described it to me. It sounded like you guys. And so I was, you know, we were all dealing with cash at the time. I was hiding cash all over town and, and, uh, cleaning everything out of the house that could get us in trouble.

And the next morning they took a group down, a Russian group that was near us, you know. So it wasn't us, but I mean, you know, that was a rough night's sleep, you know. So there were times that it's kind of like what they say about being a pilot, you know. It's hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. It's hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. But I think if you realize that that's part of the ride and you want to have an exciting life, you take those opportunities. But you've got to realize that they can go bad if you're not really, really careful. You've got to be careful.

And I think you've got to do things with integrity. That's what my wife always says, is whatever you do, you've got to do it. And I think you've got to do things with integrity. You know, my, that's what my wife always says is whatever you do, you got to do it with a lot of integrity. You got to think about the other person and not just be out for yourself. And, um, and, uh, you gotta be,

you have to think about all the ways that these things can go south fast and kind of try to protect yourself from those things if you're going to do edgy stuff what uh what other companies did you get involved in because you had champion nutrition and i think you later sold it and i think you did uh collaborations with other people and i think you're involved with like cytosport and stuff like that as well right well no i wasn't involved in cytosport my my partner in Champion went and started CytoSport. So that's how that happened. But no, when I sold Champion, I went to Colorado.

And then after Colorado, I came back to California, started a cannabis company in California. That's Versagenics now. And the actual name of the business that people see is Grow, G-R-O, and the website is grow.life, G-R-O dot L-I-F-E. We're out of Emeryville, but we deliver all the way out here. We deliver throughout the Bay Area. And it's non-storefront it's delivery you know we also manufacture through versagenix so we we manufacture distribute and we have non-storefront delivery and and then we have real remedy it's a company that my son-in-law runs and they make private label cbd products so if anybody's in the market for private label they want their own

cbd brand give uh give real remedy a call and so thanks for letting me plug yeah absolutely yeah no problem yeah and i'm also working on a a method for extracting cannabinoids from cannabis or hemp, you know, and that's a very, very inexpensive process, a lot less money than ethanol. It is non-toxic, non-flammable, environmentally friendly and biodegradable. And so we're getting that ready for market. And I work in the lab every day now. Great. Yeah.

Did you sell Champion Nutrition, you think, at like a great time or do you kick yourself and wish you sold it earlier or what, you know, how did that work out for you? You know, it's funny. I mean, my daughter, my kids were in high school and I kind of wanted to spend time with them before they moved away. And I, I don't know, it was an opportune time to do that, but I kind of regret it. Honestly, I have seller's remorse, you know, and then the company that bought it didn't do too well with it at first, but you got to give them a little slack because the whole industry crashed, the market crashed, the world crashed.

So, um, yeah, uh, no, I, I, um, I love Champion. It was 25 years. I love the people. And, you know, you got to realize when you sell your company, those people aren't people that work for you. They're your friends. They're your family. Right. And that all goes away when you sell your company.

So you got to calculate that into the equation. Yeah. You know, with CBD products that are on the market these days, like I remember it was like maybe three or four years ago is when I started seeing all these fitness influencers posting their CBD, whatever. And then you'd find out later that like the actual product didn't have as much or wasn't, yeah, it didn't have as much because I guess there weren't regulations to make sure they did. So right now with like the products that you're making, how do you feel that they can be, how beneficial can they be for performance athletes, guys in the gym, people working out? Why should they consider using stuff like this? Okay. So when CBD first came out as an isolate, right, it was a hundred

thousand dollars a kilo. So nobody was putting anything in their products. They were putting a milligram in and selling it for 50 bucks. You know, I mean, it was, it was just so expensive, but this is the same thing with creatine. Creatine was $600 a pound when it first entered the marketplace. So, um, creatine ultimately fell to $4 a pound from 600 to four. So could you take more and could you get a better result? You know, if you took more and people did, you know, same thing with CBD. So CBD, if people need 10 milligrams, a kilogram would say for, for helping with epilepsy. Well, that was expensive. You know,

it wasn't, we were trying to get it to people for a few hundred dollars a month because it's what they could afford, but that was really difficult. There was no money to be made. And so in 2012, we started marketing a CBD product that had 15 milligrams per milliliter and parents would give it to kids with epilepsy. We now have over 1500 kids in the Central Valley that rely on our products. And my son-in-law makes those products along with another partner of ours, My son-in-law makes those products along with another partner of ours, a pharmacist that we work with. And we've been doing that since, well, since at least 2014 with these kids. So they're all types of kids with palsies and development issues, heart development issues.

One girl was born without a heart valve. So we hear a lot of stories from the parents. And I think that's what's really, it's more satisfying than anything else. To have a parent say, you know, our kid had a do not resuscitate on them. And we started giving him CBD and all of their conditions improved. And now we have a normal kid. You know, he's learning, he's going to school. And before it was just, you know, something that had 100 seizures a day and just laid in a, you know, in bed and couldn't do anything. Is that just straight CBD that they're taking or is to have the THC in it as well?

Some of the products now have THC in them. At the beginning, it was just CBD. It works better with a little THC. It actually does. And the terpenes seem to help too. So, you know, as far as the really, there's no Schedule III trials that have been done on this yet. So I don't want to make any claims. I just tell people, you know, try it if it works for you.

And I don't want to blow it up too much, but we had, you know, there was one girl that had cystic fibrosis. And it's not a condition that a lot of kids survive. And she was on hospice and her doctor finally gave us access. We got a new doctor to take care of her because she went on hospice. She had a lung infection. We started treating her. The lung infection went away and she came back and she was a normal kid for a couple of years. And then she went in for some tests and her doctor, the doctor that we knew, had to go give a keynote address for a conference on CBD, on the outcomes that he'd experienced with CBD.

Well, the doctor that took care of her in the hospital said, you're not bringing that crap into my hospital. She went into the hospital for a week. She was off her CBD. She got a lung infection. And our doctor got back to her just in time to say goodbye to her. So, you know, we do believe, like I said, this is not a Schedule III trial, and this is an N of 1, you know, but we do have now experience with 1,500 kids.

It does look like it's effective, you know. How much easier is it nowadays for you to make stuff as opposed to, like, in the beginning? I would imagine, like, trying to come out with these whey proteins and MCT oils probably back before there was even machines readily available for it and stuff was really difficult. So there was a, today there was a company in Petaluma called New Zealand milk products. And, uh, I would go pick up a bag of protein from them. This was 1976.

I, I pick up a 50 pound bag of protein or 44 pound bag, 20 kilos. And, uh, when they found out what I was doing, they tried to shut me off because they said, we can't accept the liability. This is to be used for, you know, coating paper or, you know, they use protein to coat paper and make it shiny. Yeah. Casein, you know? So, um, but one of their people a girl named marcia that was in their uh in in their research department her husband was a bodybuilder and she and i started working together she kind of smoothed

the way for me and i was able to buy the products but it was it was that bad it was at the point i tell you trying to work with flavorists at the time there were no flavors that were going to work with me they wanted to work with nab no flavors that were going to work with me. They wanted to work with Nabisco, right? So I had to learn how to flavor products from the ground up. I had to just study what I could. And you got to realize 1976, there was no internet. Just making stuff in your kitchen kind of thing. How do you get the information, right?

You have to figure it out. You have to read it. You have to go to libraries. And what libraries have that kind of information in them have to read it. You have to go to libraries and what libraries have, have that kind of information in them. It was, it was tough. Yeah. Yeah. Did you just mix stuff up in your own kitchen kind of thing? Yeah, at first. And then, you know, when I started Champion, we built a lab and we had a nice lab and I could do, you know, we had analytical equipment. And now, I mean, I have analytical equipment, you know, I run a full lab and we have, you know, HPLC, we have mass spectrometers, we have everything. So it's so much easier now.

you did that they didn't like, but what did they do? Like how, how did they influence you? Because like, uh, you know, going to college again and getting a major in math, physics, and chemistry, that shit's like, those are three of the craziest hard majors, right? Yeah. I think, I think my dad didn't really understand what I was studying. He just wanted me to be a doctor. Yeah. You know, parents at that time, they just want their kids to be doctors and have respect. And, you know, and but my dad was a bodybuilder when he was younger. And I grew up with pictures of bodybuilders on the wall and weights in my house. But I was this nerdy little science kid that my dad couldn't relate to very well. Nice dad.

But, you know, I was a different kind of person. But then when I got into bodybuilding, I got really into it. And so I brought those posters and they were in my, in my dorm room. And I was going to a religious college, a Christian college, Pacific Union College up in Angwin. And, and I had a poster of Casey Vietor, one of my favorite bodybuilders, who I later got to know really well. But Casey, I had Casey in my closet. So when you'd open the closet door, there was Casey. And one day, the dean of this religious school walked by my room and saw the bodybuilder in the closet. What's going on here?

Yeah. And he called me in to his office and I had no idea why. Right. And I sit down and and he's I can see he's nervous. He's almost sweating and his hands are kind of waving. And he's saying he's saying, well, you know, young boys, they reach a certain age and they get certain urges and they have these feelings and it's easy to misinterpret you know and you're like oh yeah where are we going with this like i saw that bodybuilding poster in your closet yeah right does uh does anything surprise you in the supplement world

these days like you see a product and you're just like i can't believe they actually were able to produce that no no okay no it doesn't surprise me but you know you see those things come on the market and then they're off the market and uh you know uh uh you guys probably know who Pat Arnold was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Pat brought a lot of things out. Brilliant guy. And I haven't seen Pat in, I don't know, 15 years. I think he helped create the ketone, right?

He did a lot. Ketone ester, right? Yeah, he did a lot. But, you know, those things come out and they hit the market for a little while and then they're hard to get after that. What is it? 1,3-dimethylamine? Is that the other compound? Is that a pro-hormone? No, it's kind of like semi-legal speed.

You know, it hit the market. It was a big deal for a while. What was that pre-workout that everyone loved? Yeah, JACT 3D. Yeah i think that had had it in there in the early 90s um we had uh ghb right everybody was taking i remember that i had in the supplement stores that was a hell of an experience all right what's ghb well there was a product called hot stuff and another product called renutrient Gamma Hydroxybutyrate. Okay.

And it would get you straight up high and make you oh so horny. Like ecstasy kind of, right? Yeah, like non-selective in your appetites. Right. I mean, it was, you know. in your, in your appetites. Right. I mean, you know. Makes you hungry for everything. Yeah. So women were taking it, men were taking it.

It actually became kind of a date rape drug. Oh, no. Right. That's what he got. Yeah. Notoriety. Yeah. So you, you see these things, you know, hit the market and then the government gets control

on them as they should, right? And there was no sandbox to play in, you know, with that stuff. It just hit the market, and it took the market by storm. And my salespeople actually wanted me to get into that, but I kind of saw the handwriting on the wall. Is there stuff that you were uh didn't do a lot better that you had to stop selling that you thought was like a great product because of your i mean you have so much knowledge you know and sometimes things just don't hit because of maybe marketing or whatever other reason you know i i've had as many as six terrible ideas before breakfast. We launched a lot of products that were just, you know, they didn't, the market didn't understand them.

So I had one product that we actually started selling it in 1977. It was my first product. Later on, we named it Muscle Nitro. But it came out of some research that was done by Dr. Kondrashova in Russia, and she studied mitochondria. And she saw that when mitochondria charge up almost like a battery, so they pump an electron out of a membrane, and that creates a positive charge on the inside. And now you've got a battery, and you can use that battery to make ATP in the cell. And ATP is that final unit of energy that you use for all muscle contraction, for any

work that gets done in the body, just about. So the trouble is that the electrons will leak back through. So you pump them out, that takes energy, and then some of them leak back through. And so out of 100 you pump out, maybe 18 leak back through. Well, you've just lost 18% of your efficiency, and not only that, you've got to pump them out again. So what she studied was a compound called succinic acid. Succinic acid is part of Krebs cycle, so it's part of the whole energy system in the body.

But it has another effect, she said, on tissue, and that was to improve the integrity of these ion pumping channels. And so we marketed a product around that. One thing that we found was that people didn't get sore when they, excuse me, they wouldn't get sore when they'd work out. So we kind of looked at that and kind of thought, well, when the muscle cell depolarizes and contracts, when you get a neurological impulse, the muscle cell depolarizes. and contracts when you get a neurological impulse, the muscle cell depolarizes. What's actually happening is there's a little bag or network of calcium, free calcium in this little bag in the muscle. That bag is called the sarcoplasmic reticulum. And the channels relax when it's hit with a nerve impulse, and all of those calcium ions come out, and that's what actually causes the muscle tissue to contract, right?

But that calcium, it's doubly ionized, it's very reactive, and our theory at the time was that it would chew holes in the membrane of that muscle cell. in the membrane of that muscle cell. And those little micro tears you could see on electron micrographs. And those micro tears then would attract cytokines and they'd get an immune response. And that's where soreness was coming from. So we assumed then that this succinate must be improving the capture of those calcium ions after they come out of the bag, you've contracted the muscle, and that takes a millisecond, and now that calcium is going to wander back in.

And so they're literally, those calcium atoms are hitting the channels that are going to pump them back into the bag, and they're bouncing off in normal cases. But we felt that with succinates, they would stick better, and they'd be drawn back in. And so we saw a tremendous improvement in muscle soreness with muscle nitro. The other thing that we saw, because you're not having to pump so many electrons out that have already been pumped out and leaked back in, we saw better thermoregulation.

And when we studied it with professional athletes, we saw higher VO2 max by maybe 5% higher VO2 max. Huge, right? How do you explain all that in an ad to 15-year-old athletes? It's not the same as like a vasodilator, make your veins pump, make your veins burst or whatever. It's simple. So, so we sold that product to professional athletes and we sold it until I sold the company.

And I mean, it wasn't a big seller for us, but, uh, but you know, it was a product that I kept because I thought it was a great product. And, you know, I mean, over 30 years, right, we had that product. Is there a product that is like similar to that on the market right now? Because what was that ingredient that you talked about? Succinate? I've never heard of that. Right.

It would be we'd blend potassium succinate, sodium succinate. blend potassium succinate, sodium succinate. They were very hygroscopic and we'd add magnesium succinate and some succinic acid and glutamic acid to that. And the trouble with glutamic acid is that it breaks down. It's not super stable. So we'd have to do things to keep that stable. but uh yeah succinic acid is uh as far as i know it's not available in the marketplace right now maybe if we googled it right now we'd find that it's all over the place but i i don't know who's selling it and this might sound like a dumb question but you mentioned like sodium magnesium potassium succinate and is that different than like electrolytes somehow or is.

No, those would provide electrolytes. Yeah. The only reason that we're not selling it as a succinic acid is because we're trying to make it more basic. Okay. So we'd adjust it so that when it hits your stomach, it would have the right pH. So it wouldn't make you either get a stomach ache or throw up or, you know, if you if you change the pH of the stomach really rapidly, you know, weird stuff happens. So, gotcha. Yeah. You mentioned, you know, being part of legislation before. Did you have to get stuff passed earlier in your career in order to be able to sell certain supplements or to have, I guess, more free reign of what you could sell with Champion Nutrition?

Well, we tried. We tried. And I wasn't involved in the final push for the Deshaies Act, but in the early days I was involved. So in the late 80s, we had a problem with tryptophan. In 1989, there were a lot of people that were poisoned by a bad batch of tryptophan. In 1989, there were a lot of people that were poisoned by a bad batch of tryptophan. Yeah. So it had some contaminants in it and people were at least temporarily paralyzed. And so the FDA put a ban on tryptophan. And I went back to Washington and I worked with someone at the FDA. And then that got me kind of into the whole issue of supplement legislation. I worked with the Council for Responsible Nutrition,

which is a great group. And we tried to get Strom Thurmond. Do you guys know who Strom Thurmond is? Eh, you're too young. You're all too young. Well, who was Strom Thurmond? I'm sorry. He was a terrible, I mean, he, depending on who you talk to, he wasn't the most open-minded politician in some ways. But anyway, oh, there we go. Strom Thurmond. You put it up there. He lived until he was 90 something years old. Wow. When I met him,

he was an old guy already. Uh, but he just didn't have the steam. He wasn't going to make it happen. We, we went after him because he took supplements, you know? Um, he wasn't the guy to make it happen. The guy that made it happen was Orrin Hatch in Utah. Orrin Hatch, Utah, Utah was making more supplements than anyone in the world. You follow the money. And Orrin Hatch put the Deshaies Act across the line. And in 1995, we had a bill that gave us legal access to supplements. And it changed our world. I mean, my company, who was I going to sell my company to in 1994?

Who was going to buy it? Maybe Twin Lab would buy me out just to get rid of the competition. They didn't, but I mean, they never offered, but I mean, it really wasn't. And then after the Deshaies Act, I get phone calls and people are offering me, you know, $50 million for my company. I couldn't have gotten 5 million for it before. So it's like, um, when you get a legal industry, when you pass, nobody wants limitations, right? But when you do pass those laws in an industry like the cannabis industry, suddenly these companies become worth a lot of money, usually too much money and they can't support it. And then you have a crash and you go through a kind of a period of clearing out,

which we're going through now. But, uh, you know, I didn't finish my, my discussion about CBD, a hundred thousand dollars a kilo CBD. Now,

sometimes you're finding it for a few hundred dollars a kilo. Wow. So it's become very accessible for people to take, you know, some kids have to take 500 milligrams a day, even a thousand milligrams a day. Um, and now that's not expensive at all. So that's the benefit of, uh, you know, the economies of scale that we've gotten to. Yeah. As far as CBD is concerned, you know, um do you think like because I think there's still people like an example is my mother.

When she thinks about CBD and THC and that type of stuff, she would she she looks at very, very negatively because there's still somewhat of stigma on it, even though a lot of that's been legalized. So like what applications have you seen that people maybe don't really think about? I think that sleep is one big thing that this can help some people maybe don't really think about? I think that sleep is one big thing that this can help some people massively for. But what else? Well, for me, I use cannabis for sleep. So I only use it at night. I use it usually when I'm already in bed and it might be an edible, you know, like I told you, it might be a flower.

I had three. Yeah. And how are you guys feeling? I feel good great all right awesome mark had four by the way guys yeah so next one at a certain point you start to forget where you are and a little bit what was i gonna ask next yeah yeah what did i write down over here yeah so what was the question just like we're there yeah just benefits of cbd that maybe somebody's not thinking of yeah like i mean just like says the sober guy over here yeah okay so there's been research done now one research paper doesn't prove something right yeah it points you in a direction so i don't want to make claims and I'm not making claims, but I'm saying there are research papers that show things like improved bone healing after a breaking bone,

25% improvement in bone healing, right? With CBD. Um, there are, uh, studies like, you know, of course we've talked about, um, uh about epilepsy, but pain is another thing. And particularly if that CBD is blended with a terpene like beta-caryophylline, the two together plus a little bit of THC, not enough to really get you high, seems to help with pain. And in my case, you know, I told you about the THC and neuropathic pain with shingles, but I think you get quite a bit of pain relief from just a little bit of THC and neuropathic pain with shingles. But I think you get quite a bit of pain relief from just a little bit of THC plus a lot of CBD plus these terpenes. And there are many formulas

available on the market now. So, you know, pain, depression, and anxiety. We work with a woman at Harvard that's done research on anxiety and depression. Tremendous, seems to be tremendous for anxiety and depression. But like I say, I don't, I don't want to make these strong claims because these things haven't been through extensive studies and trials. So this is, this is just somewhat anecdotal, right? Yeah. But yeah, no, as we do more research, there's more information. You know, Ruth Galilee in Israel did some research, and I heard this before it was published, so I'm not confident that this particular study published, but it was based on a study that had to do with type 1 diabetes.

So type 1 diabetes is where kids start developing an antibody to their own pancreas, and their own body eats up their pancreas, and they become diabetics. That whole process takes about a year. That year is kind of called the honeymoon period, you know, where they still have a pancreas that's operating, but it's being attacked and there's a lot of inflammation, right? when they were first diagnosed, that it could scale back that inflammatory process and that over time the pancreas could heal. Now, I'm sure this doesn't work with every kid, and a lot of drugs only work on 30% of people. So I can't claim that parents should stop treating their kid with a doctor

and just put them on CBD if they have that. Don't do that. But, uh, there are a lot of studies out there showing all kinds of effects that have to do with CBD and, uh, auto-inflammatory diseases.

Wow. Um, CBD, it could be, it could be helpful for IBS and other bowel syndromes. We've, uh, we've seen patients take it for that or customers take it for that. It seems to help in 30 to 50% of the cases. So it's not 100%. It's not a silver bullet,

but it does seem to help. And who knows that if we find an adjunctive compound that would go with it or maybe the dose needs to be higher, maybe it'll work in more people. Have you seen CBD just not work for certain people? And I'm saying this not like trying to, because I know you have CBD products up there right now. I'm not trying to attack, you know, CBD at all. It's just, I've tried topical. I've tried, what's it like, vaping it. I've tried ingesting it. I mean, it could very well be that I've just had 100 percent like bad, you know, attempts at CBD products.

I've always been looking for like ways of trying to ease some of the pain so that way I can, you know, just go about my day. But I've yet to ever really experience anything where like I actually noticed a difference. So I'm just curious, like, is it maybe something like my the makeup that, you know, that I have where it's like, oh, that just that chemical, whatever, doesn't actually affect me at all. Yeah, I mean, that's possible. Everybody's different, right? Maybe you don't have the same density of receptor sites or something like that. It's possible, too, that the dosage that you're getting is not very high. And like I say, everybody's different for a lot of different reasons we just said receptor sites but it could be something complete the body is really complicated right

and uh um you know have you tried thc i i have um i don't really like the way i feel with it but maybe for right before bed i might try something like that or I might try those gummies up there, actually. But no, I've never really like I just I don't like the way it feels like that combo that you mentioned earlier. You mentioned low amounts of CBD or low amounts of THC and high amounts of CBD. That that might, you know, that might be something that is the kind of magic pill for you. That might be something that is the kind of magic pill for you. Maybe. The other thing is that when I was in high school, I have to admit I tried marijuana a couple of times.

Oh, my gosh. And I hated it. I mean, it made me paranoid, anxious. I couldn't think straight. I didn't like it at all. And still today, most cannabis makes me feel bad. I don't feel good. Every now and then I'll find something that's perfect, though.

And like I just, we talked about here. Yeah. Every once in a while I'll find something that's perfect. And, you know, it's an interesting problem. I mean, some cannabis can make you talkative. Some can just, you don't have any desire to talk. Some can make you feel really swimmy, and other cannabis just makes you feel anxious and kind of angry, you know. So what's causing it? You can't blame all of that on THC. Right. Right. And I've had it happen before where I've taken a hit of something that I thought was one

strain and it was really another strain. And I'd go right after I smoked it, I'd go, oh, my gosh, I did the wrong one. Oh, this is going to be a bad right. So it is for real. I don't think it's a placebo effect i think there's really an effect yeah what causes that it's not just thc it's a multi-component drug effect that you're getting could be coming from terpenes it could be coming from i think from isomers meaning you have thc which is called delta 9 thc but there's also delta 88. And there are other isomers, many other isomers. Now, we couldn't even

separate those out with HPLC before, but now with the new columns and new technology, we're able to separate isomers, and we're going to start studying those more. And so I think you're going to find in another 10 years that you're going to have strains that are extracted and blended to give a particular effect, right? But they're still only going to work on 30% of the people. Not everybody's going to get the same response. But you may find that there's something that gives you a really great response. Some strains are recognized for pain relief. Granddaddy perp, great for lower back pain. But anybody can call anything granddaddy perp if they're making

a sale, right? So there's no standardization and there's really no test that we can do right now unless we do, you know, PCR genetic test to say, oh yeah, this is derived from granddaddy perp. And there's really no chemical test where we can test the balance of chemicals to say, oh yeah, it's these three chemicals in it that are really going to help your lower back pain. It's going to be some time before we get that all figured out. Which strain would help for somebody that wants to talk more? Because I didn't even know that was the thing. Oh,

what? Oh, sativas. Okay. So just sativas. Yeah. I hate these names guys, but what's this one by the way,

Durban poison. Huh? Is this a sativa or is this a, that's a, that is a blend of a hundred different thing. I mean, that's a way into the hybrid. We'll see you in our space.

I can't wait. Yeah. That's very relaxing, very happy, very creative. And I take a hit of that at night before I go to sleep. It's going to be fun. But it doesn't keep me from sleeping. I sleep really great. I have trouble with insomnia. And I sleep great with that, but it doesn't put me to sleep.

I could take a little during the day. I just don't, I don't use cannabis for recreational purposes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Do you use it? So like actually what Andrew was saying, cause I totally kind of cut that off, but, um, do you use it to like, you know, cause he was talking about ones that help you talk more.

You mentioned it was your sativa, but do you use it to like be more productive in terms of working and that type of stuff too? I don't, but a lot of people do. Okay. So what I find is that, um, the, what I use to help me sleep at night, um, makes me very creative and I keep a book by the side of my bed and i still study physics and every night you know for for many years you know i write a page almost every night of ideas that i have that are probably drug induced but you know they're you know i'll watch youtube videos on math and i i do that every night as i'm going to bed. It gets my mind off the day. Otherwise, you just got the day just circling around you, right? Like hawks.

Wow. Like vultures. Yeah. Where do you see the whole industry in terms of CBD, THC? How do you see it continuing to grow? Because the last decade, obviously, we've noticed that there's legalizations happening everywhere. Everyone's trying to get into that type of business.

Where do you see it heading? Well, everything eventually heads to the corporate world if there's a lot of money. Yeah. Right. So I do see these and nobody wanted that to happen, especially with cannabis. I mean, the guys in Humboldt were, you know, fought that really hard, but everything goes that way. It's no different than the internet in the beginning of the internet. They, they said, don't corporatize the

internet. Don't, don't build laws around the internet, but it's powerful. It's invasive and we're going to have laws, you know, and it's the same thing with this. You're going to have big companies take over just like what happened in the Internet and just like what happens in anything. So I do see it going more corporate. And I think there's always going to be some artisans out there that are going to have, you know, a corner for themselves. But I see a lot of research happening in the future. And I think when that research is done, we're going to find that it's not the panacea. It has certain specific uses, and those uses are great. You know, one preparation will work for 30% of the people, and another one works for another 30% of the people. But I think it's gonna it's gonna become more of a balanced view on it i think it's gonna have um

benefits and i think it there's gonna be harms you know so for example for young people i'm talking kids i think that uh cannabis can be a complacency drug. Okay. Maybe, especially the cannabis that kids get, because it's not really the highest quality stuff. So as far as motivation goes, it might not be real high. I don't know if, you know. That's kind of odd. You said that the cannabis that kids get isn't quality. I would think that as a consumer, you'd hope it's the opposite. You'd hope that the stuff that they're giving kids would be.

No, I'm talking about black market kids on the street. I'm not talking about doctors treating epileptic kids. I was like, what? Yeah. Okay. I'm talking about kids getting hold of cannabis and using it. I think it's a complacency drug. And, you know, if a kid wakes up in the morning and before they go to high school, they smoke down.

And, you know, I think it just pulls their motivation down. Yeah. But I believe the same thing about antidepressants. I don't think people should live on antidepressants. I think maybe it's a great thing to get you through a difficult time in your life. But, I mean, I think it's a complacency drug. Right? Why are you less depressed?

Because you don't care as much. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And I feel the same thing about cannabis, so I don't want to see kids use it. There's studies that show, see, this is what happens. They always do these studies like with steroids and with cannabis. They do these studies that show these horrible things happening.

You know, people losing fingers, you know, and you've seen those ads about smoking where the people don't have their fingers anymore. I've never seen that. Oh, yeah. There's ads. Like where they're melting into the couches and stuff? Yeah.

Oh, okay, yeah. No, no, no, no. I mean, where they literally have to have body parts amputated as a result of smoking. And it's a real condition. It's a genetic condition. And some people have it. And when they smoke, they lose body parts. And they try to apply that to cannabis. those things is because they look around and they don't see it happening. Same thing with steroids. Nobody took that information seriously when they would say, oh, liver cancer. I've never known one bodybuilder in my life that had liver cancer.

I'm sure it happens, but it's not because of steroids. It's not. Or if it was because of steroids, it's because they had a particular condition, right? Same thing with, um, uh, you know, cancer or, or liver damage or things like that. You don't see it. And so it, it doesn't, um, it doesn't impact kids. And now you've lost authority for anything else you tell them because they feel like you lied to them. You're just trying, you're trying to control their behavior at a time in their life when they're trying to assert themselves. Yeah.

So I think you got to be straight and tell them what the real risks are. And to me, the real risk or one of the important risks is, hey, what do you want to do later on? Do you want to just, if you want to work in a warehouse and move boxes, maybe that's all right. But if you want something more for your life, maybe you shouldn't be doing something that takes your motivation away. So that's my public service. I got you.

All right. What are some things you've done to successfully navigate business now that you've sold champion nutrition and you're moving on to some other things? What are some things that you think you and your company have done well? Well, first off, when I got involved in cannabis, I put all my assets in my kids' names. So I think that's the first thing, because it was federally illegal and I didn't want to. Because it was federally illegal and I didn't want to.

So as far as the things that I've done right, I think working with legislators and law enforcement, I think that was the right thing to do. I think setting up cultivation facilities that were built like plants that were intended to be USDA inspected. I think that that was a good thing. I think the research that we've been doing with these kids in the Central Valley and with the person that we're working with at Harvard, I think those are good things. And I don't think it's about money. I mean, I didn't get into this for money. I think I,

I really got into it because I felt that I was helped so much by it. Um, and it was just so attacked. So maybe I, maybe I saw it as an underdog that needed to be protected and, you know, and that, so I, I am proud of what we've done so far, you know. In terms of champion nutrition, what was your worst day and what did you learn from it? Did you have a day where it was just like, I don't know, something really terrible happened with a large shipment or, I mean, all these kinds of things happen as the longer you do it for. You know, I do have a story about that, i it's not one i want to tell okay because it involves people that are still alive right and uh but it was it was a time that i felt betrayed very betrayed and it was a it was the worst day of my life when i realized it yeah and probably uh

but still maybe uh was there a silver lining in any of that, or just made you not trust people anymore? I wish there was. I wish I could tell that story. But I don't think there's a silver lining, because I don't really believe that revenge, class revenge, even successful revenge is a silver lining. Right. No. Well, great. It was awesome having you on the show today.

What are you doing nowadays to stay lean and stay in shape? Just eating properly or you're doing any sort of exercise? You know, I wish I could tell you I was doing something incredible and I had a new product to sell. But no, I think my metabolism is just really bad. I tend to lose weight all the time if I'm not careful. So, you know, my body fat when I first started training was less than 2%. It couldn't be measured. And frequently, if I work out and I don't even pay attention to it, I'll be 6% body fat or so.

I'm almost never over 9% unless I'm bulking up. Then I might be 20%, you know, body fat or maybe even higher. But yeah. And as far as exercise, I love working out. But I start my day about 4.30 in the morning and I go till about 8.30 at night. And that's about as much as I can do. And that doesn't involve a lot of training right now, but I do stay in shape. You know, my wife and I exercise a little bit at the house, but it's not enough to put on any muscle.

But you know, you have muscle memory. So you, you start working out again and two weeks later, you know, your body starts responding and yeah. So I hope to get back to that. Great.

Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. Andrew, want to take us on out of here, buddy? Sure will. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episodes. I really appreciate it. Everyone on the live stream, you guys are freaking awesome. I didn't realize how many people in our live chat smoke weed. That's literally all they talked about.

It was great. Great. Yeah. And by the way, Mark, my son is a big fan. Oh, cool. and as I told you Dave Palumbo says hi yeah

I just spoke to Dave the other day wow heck yeah please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram

at MB Power Project on Twitter my Instagram and Twitter is at I am Andrew Z and Seema where are you at and Seema Inyang

on Instagram and YouTube and Seema Inyang on Twitter at Mark Smelly Bell strength is never weakness weakness is never strength catch you guys later