#376 - “Disaster!” - Cartel-Tracked CEO on (Legal) Drug 13x More Potent than MORPHINE | Ryan Niddel

Summary

Julian Dorey Podcast – Episode #376

“Disaster!” – Cartel-Tracked CEO on (Legal) Drug 13x More Potent than MORPHINE | Ryan Niddel

Date: January 23, 2026
Guest: Ryan Niddel (CEO, Diversified Botanics)

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the evolving and highly controversial American kratom industry—examined through the eyes of Ryan Niddel, CEO of Diversified Botanics. Host Julian Dorey and Niddel dissect the wild west of supplement regulation, the explosion of synthetic and semi-synthetic kratom derivatives (notably “7-OH”, up to 30 times more potent than morphine), public health and addiction concerns, and the infiltration of organized crime and foreign actors into the market. The episode also explores entrepreneurship, government response, and the guest’s personal experiences facing intimidation from cartels.

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Main Topics & Key Insights

1. Ryan Niddel’s Industry Story & Kratom 101

• Background: Niddel was drawn into Diversified Botanics (a kratom manufacturing business) after previously building a CBD company.
• What is Kratom?: A polarizing plant, a Southeast Asian tree whose leaves have stimulant effects when chewed and sedative, bonding qualities when consumed as tea. (06:00–08:00)
  • "Kratom is a tree that grows in Indonesia and Thailand... It takes four to five years to mature." (05:46)
  • First recorded use traced to 1880s Indonesian and Thai farmers (07:00).
• Effects & Usage: At low doses (e.g., tea or chewed leaf), energy and focus. At higher or differently prepared doses, relaxation or pain relief.
• Explosive Market Growth: Kratom industry jumped from "zero to $9 billion in 18 months." (141:00)

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2. Regulatory and Legal Wild West

• Dietary Supplement Regulations: Kratom fell into supplement gray areas due to lack of US use before 1994 (DSHEA loophole), leading to minimal oversight. (08:46–14:00)
• Lack of Testing & GMP: Many players operate without meaningful quality control; supplements in general face weak enforcement.
  • "It's a free for all with an asterisk. You're supposed to manufacture in a GMP-compliant facility... but that's a should." (32:25)

Memorable Quote:

“You would think there would always be regulation on someone being able to sell that. I’m not even talking about Kratom or anything… but there’s not. It’s a fucking free-for-all.”
— Julian, (32:25)

• FDA/DEA Actions: 2016 salmonella scare led to a temporary Schedule 1 drug threat for kratom; industry panicked and destroyed inventory, but scheduling was reversed after pushback from veterans and first responders (21:16–25:00).
  • "The DEA started by saying, ‘It's going to be a Schedule 1, but by early 2017, the DEA pulled back and said there's not enough evidence to show this is really an opioid.’" (19:08)

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3. The Rise of Dangerous Kratom Derivatives (7-OH)

• Kratom Alkaloids: Of 52, only a couple act on opioid receptors.
  • Mitragynine: Partial mu-opioid agonist, 1/10–1/20 as potent as morphine.
  • 7-Hydroxymitragynine (“7-OH”): Metabolite, potentially 13–30x more potent than morphine. Not naturally found in high concentrations, but can be chemically isolated/enhanced.
• Market Dynamics:
  • Extracts/tablets containing isolated 7-OH have exploded in popularity inside gas stations and smoke shops.
  • "Each tab started as 10mg, then 20, then 40 — now a pack of four tabs can be 200mg of 7-OH." (58:12)
• Addiction & Harm:
  • Strong anecdotal and early scientific evidence of rapid addiction and withdrawal resembling classical opioids.
  • "People were calling us asking how to get off the products... one guy went to outpatient rehab and had to be put on Suboxone." (66:02–67:25)
• Black Market/Foreign Actor Involvement:
  • CCP and Sinaloan cartel are reportedly involved in precursor shipment, money laundering, manufacturing (137:38–139:02).

Notable Quote:

“We could have had a chance to make a fuck-ton of money jumping in on this 7-OH thing... and we chose not to. Our business has been cut in half this year over last year. That’s okay. We’re not for sale. My morals aren’t for sale in this.” — Ryan Niddel, (74:09)

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4. Addiction, Harm Reduction & the Public Health Dilemma

• Abuse Potential:

  • Hosts and guest both acknowledge danger and rapid dependency of synthetic kratom derivatives.
  • "There’s no question it’s addictive... I think it should be like a cigarette-type warning.” (110:00–111:34)

• Policy Failure & Pendulum Swing:

  • US failures with prohibition and full deregulation compared; pendulum of regulation swings between extremes.
  • “If you legalize everything… you’re going to have deaths; you’re going to have tragedies and eventually a backlash.” — Julian (117:06–118:44)

• Guest’s Policy Ideal:

  • Full-spectrum (natural) kratom strictly 18+ or 21+; potent derivatives like 7-OH require extra safeguards, possibly a pharmacy model or prescription/telemedicine linkage (156:33–159:03).

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5. Technology, Transparency & Industry Ethics

• Transparency Initiatives:
  • Diversified Botanics implements 24/7 live video production feeds, QR-code batch tracking, and blockchain for supply validation.
  • "Why don’t we start posting 24/7, 365 live video feeds... if you don’t do stuff wrong, what do you have to hide?" (87:49–88:15)
• Call for Industry Reform:
  • Advocates for supplement regulation overhaul, standard serving sizes, blockchain tracking, enforcement for contaminants, and mandatory harm reduction programs.
  • "This is what the supplement industry needs." (78:41)

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6. Crime, Cartels, and Personal Safety

• Organized Crime Infiltration:
  • Sinaloan cartel, Chinese Communist Party, and Russian mafia all have documented hooks in the kratom (and derivatives) supply chain.
  • Niddel reports: surveillance, direct threats/warnings (e.g., strangers referencing private DC travel plans), requiring a personal security team. (132:14–144:00)
• Law Enforcement Awareness:
  • FBI and DEA aware, but investigations are slow due to limited resources and higher priorities.
  • “They say, protect yourself.” (139:00)
• Speculation on Motives:
  • Destabilization of American society and creation of a hyper-addictive, legal customer base.

Memorable Anecdote:

“I see an individual walking by and he says, ‘Have fun in DC tomorrow. I don’t think you should go now.’ No one knows I’m going to DC…” (132:36–143:53)

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• On the Regulatory System:

  “The FDA is at an all-time low from a staffing standpoint… So you look at the little tiny department that supplements—call it 20 people… who have to inspect every facility.” (129:37–130:06)

• On Industry Corruption:

  “The CCP is sending solvents and extracts to specific people in the US… the Sinaloan cartel is involved, Russian Bratva, too. Addresses, wire receipts—it’s all real.” (137:38–139:49)

• On Free Market Ethics:

  “I believe in free market capitalism… If people aren’t dying, should we ban it, or just control where it’s sold? Maybe it needs its own regulatory category, like cannabis or psilocybin.” (75:04–75:58)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Kratom 101, Traditional Use, Market Explosion ............ (06:00–08:00), (141:00)
• Regulatory Gaps, FDA/DEA Response ............................. (08:46–14:00), (19:08), (21:16–25:00)
• Salmonella, Spice, and Synthetic Supplement History ...(11:46–16:04)
• Rise of 7-OH, Differences with Full-Spectrum Kratom ..... (50:40–67:25)
• Case study: customer forced into rehab by 7-OH ............. (66:02–68:57)
• Kratom, FDA, and Supplement System Failure ................ (26:09–34:01)
• Blockchain, Tech for Transparency ................................... (87:49–100:03)
• Cartel Threats and Surveillance ........................................... (132:14–144:00)
• Organized Crime/Evidence ................................................. (137:38–139:49)
• Philosophy on Regulation & Harm Reduction ................... (156:33–160:16)
• Business Ethics: Declining 7-OH, Commitment to Transparency ...(74:09), (162:51–168:29)

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Takeaways for Listeners New to Kratom & the Crisis

• The Kratom industry is awash in both legitimate and highly dangerous actors/products.
• Natural kratom in measured doses occupies a gray area between coffee and opioids in effects—but derivatives like “7-OH” act like hard opiates and are rapidly physically addictive.
• Supplement regulation in America is almost feckless; there are very few controls on what becomes a “legal” dietary product.
• Organized crime and foreign entities have seized on the boom, seeking to launder money, move precursors, and exploit consumers.
• Industry insiders like Niddel (and whistleblowers like Steve Robinson) are pushing for radical transparency and reform—but face threats, pushback, and an overwhelmed regulatory system.
• The debate mirrors larger issues of legalization, market incentives, consumer protection, and the difficulty of threading the needle between prohibition and chaos.

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Final Thoughts

Ryan Niddel and Julian Dorey’s conversation is a whirlwind tour of the shadowy, modern supplement market: a dizzying blend of entrepreneurship, pharmaceutical chemistry, addiction, criminal intrigue, regulatory dysfunction, and moral philosophy. This episode will leave you stunned by the scale—and speed—of the crisis, and by how fragile America’s safeguards are in the face of both creative business and cartel-level malice.

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Note: Ad segments, intros, and outros were omitted from this summary.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Lot of up stuff that goes on in the world. From the first time I went to dc, one of the people says, I think you're being followed. What are you talking about? Nobody's following me. The lobbyist team calls me and says, no, we know you're being followed. We kind of have a sense of who it is. We were taking pictures, running through some intelligence, and it's the Sinaloan cartel following you? Yes. You mean to tell me the cartel's involved in this somehow? I'm out and about in the world. I see an individual, an individual walks past me and says, have fun in D.C. tomorrow. I don't think you should go now. No one knows I'm going to dc, but what has ended up happening is when you have an industry that went from zero to $9 billion in 18 months and you have this that you're not going to overdose on, it's hyper addictive. You've now built a customer for life. Anytime you have a chance impact people's pocketbooks significantly. Some people might not want that to happen. Like, I didn't sign up for all this because what we built is way bigger than something that's just about kratom, the transparency. I just chose the hardest entry in the world to do it originally thinking it was just a cartel, just a silo cartel. Just when you start to look at it.

[A]

Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. You know it's real when Rocco Vargas is like, yo, you gotta talk to this guy. He's something else, bro.

[B]

Yeah, Rocco, that. That's Rocco.

[A]

How long have you known him?

[B]

Gosh, I've known Rocco. Now. It would have been 20, 2019, 2018.

[A]

How'd you meet him?

[B]

So at an event in Park City, Utah. It was for the launch of, you know, think what a Article 15 range, when he had the movie production.

[A]

He's had a lot of things.

[B]

It's a long. So many things. Yeah. So so met him at this really intimate little. Little setting during Sundance, of all things.

[A]

Oh, nice.

[B]

Bunch of cool guys. Didn't know anything about him. Like, I was invited because I knew the owner of the actual restaurant they were in the bottom of. And so the owner said, like, stop by if you want to. Got some cool stuff going on. You might get along with the guys downstairs. Like, shit. All right. I didn't know anything about, you know, range 15. I didn't know anything about black rifle coffee. I didn't know anything about it.

[A]

Oh, they were there too.

[B]

Yeah, it was. It was all of them together. I'm like, okay, they're cool guys. And then at least the story I'll tell myself is the majority of them big league me, because I'm a nobody. Right. I didn't claim to be anybody, but Rocco didn't. Like, we just hit it off and that's cool. Became friends and stayed in touch. And he'd done a whole bunch of things, like you said, over the past handful of years. And there'd been times where just catching up with him, he needed help with, you know, an introduction here, some sponsorship there. And I'm like, man, I'll do it. Like, whatever that looks like.

[A]

That's cool.

[B]

I'm like, don't even worry about promoting the company I'm a part of, but I have so much love and respect for you. Do just throw some cash at it and let it roll. And so then as he was looking to get out of some of the movies, more in depth stuff he was doing on the border patrol. I'm like, man, why don't you come inside with us? Why do you work with us for a while as a place to land. And so he came in. He came internally for. That's probably six or eight months now. He's worked inside of our.

[A]

Yeah, I was gonna say this has been. This has been recent with. With. With him working with you. Yeah. He was telling me about this, like, right when it started, like, quickly. He's like, yeah, this Kratom shit's out of control, bro.

[B]

It's nice.

[A]

Doing all kinds of stuff to it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know how he is. He gets, like, so intense about it, and you're like, I. I can't tell if this is just a Tuesday for you or if this, like, shit just got real.

[B]

Yeah. And it got real. But it's so funny with him because he. He grabs those little nuggets.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And then he runs.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, he moves.

[B]

And I love it. But I'm like, hold on, you're kind of right, but you're kind of almost right and kind of not right. And I love him for it because there's so much passion because he gets it, he just doesn't. There's a lot of context to this. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So we're gonna go through a lot of, a lot of things like from the 30,000foot view today just for people to understand what's going. Talking about this modern day of legalization and the business that has been a booming out of that. There are a million different doors here, a million different ways people are using it in some cases correctly and for good in other cases because things are happening so fast, people are slipping through the cracks and doing some fucked up things. So to start, you are the CEO of your company right now. And what do you, what do you guys do?

[B]

Yeah, so I'm, I'm the CEO, one of the partners in a company called Diversified Botanics and we are a Kratom manufacturer, distributor, sales channel. Right. And Kratom, I had no idea what Kratom was. Right. I'm not a founder of our business. It's been around since 2012 and it's one of those things of when I jumped in, I just got done growing and selling a CBD business, had a little podcast I started that then led to a handful of people reaching out for some advice on different aspects of life or business. And one of the founders of this business reach out to me because he was burnout. Right? I mean you get it when you're on your hustle, your grind from 2012, 2018, and you're beating your head against the wall and you like don't know what to do next. And you hear somebody that might have a little insight commend, his name's Dalton. He just reached out and said, man, I don't know if you can help me or not, but could you help me? Man, shit, I don't have any idea. I don't know if what I do is going to help you or not. So dove into the business a little bit from afar and, and end up saying, okay, I love what I call the art and science of business. I didn't necessarily love Kratom. It was neutral to me.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But understanding what that was ended up, they offered me the opportunity to come internal as like a fractional COO for a period of time. And probably for the first two and a half years, Julie, maybe even three years, I didn't give a shit what Kratom was. It's crazy.

[A]

What is Crate. So you can explain to people, obviously, like, what is it?

[B]

So kratom is this incredibly polarizing plant. Most people, you say kratom, they conjure up thoughts of cannabis and cbd, and it's really pretty far away from that. Kratom is a tree that grows in Indonesia and Thailand specifically. Right. Southeast Asia. And it's a physical tree. It takes four to five years to grow to maturation.

[A]

Is this like in the rainforest, like that kind of tree, or it's almost.

[B]

More in like the swampy marsh type of area. Right. So There's a little 250 acre plot of land in Florida that's starting to grow some kratom. But it's one of those things of you have to be committed to it because it's five years.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, you don't get to kind of grow a kratom tree.

[A]

That's a big commitment.

[B]

It's a commitment because there's no yield for five years. And so these leaves on a tree, they have a very low melt point, so you can't smoke them. When you manufacture product, you can't heat it up too much or you break down anything that's good in it. So it's a complicated plant into itself.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

And so the first stated consumption of kratom that we can find is like 1880, where farmers in Indonesia would leave their house, would grab a couple leaves off a tree, and they would just chew it throughout the day.

[A]

And what would it do for them?

[B]

So they would state that it was energy focus, mental clarity. It's almost like we call probably nootropic. Now, I'm not professing for it to be nootropic, but that's kind of the anecdotal statements that they would have had back then. But then when they would get home from a long day on a farm, their family would have also grabbed leaves off a tree and steeped it into a tea. And from steeping it into your really low heat point, have it almost like a social elixir, like a bonding tonic. So you come back from a hard day of work, you'd have a meal with your family, and everybody would sip this kratom tea. And they found it to be relaxing and sedative and analgesic and bonding. And so it's the same leaf, but when you consume it one way, it's energy focus and clarity. When you consume another way, it's relaxing, sedative and analgesic.

[A]

All right, quick question there. Because you had said you can't smoke it because it has a low melt point.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

But they were able to make tea with it and that's not a problem. Well, so it's hard for me to think about that.

[B]

Of course, not a problem at all. So our anecdotal research would say if you get much above 90 degrees Celsius, you start to break down the chemical components of Kratom. Right. So for us to steep a tea, you don't have to be above 90 degrees Celsius. Right.

[A]

That.

[B]

That's a pretty significant temperature.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So you can, you know, slightly under a boil, have water and just slowly be introducing leaves to it. And quite frankly, it tastes horrible. Like Kratom tastes bad. Like it's not like a, like, oh, this is awesome. I can't wait to try some Kratom. It doesn't taste good.

[A]

You're not making me excited about it, man.

[B]

I just like to call it what it is. Like, it's. These are just what has been stated and it's what we see as well. And so fast forward all the way from 2000 or 1880, that first state of consumption that we could find, and go all the way to 2016. There's something called the DSHEA act, which essentially was legislation that was passed that said if product was consumed in the US prior to. Gosh, maybe it's 2004, October 11th of 2004, October 11th, 2002, one or the other, it was grandfathered in under old ways of viewing dietary ingredients, nutritional supplements. Why that matters is you could make structure and functional claims, you could make implied benefits, you could say all these things. It was grandfathered in under a whole different way of viewing the world. Well, nobody could find evidence of that from Kratom because when it was imported into local Thai grocers and things like that, of course you probably had suggestively, maybe immigrants, maybe, you know, a lot of cash, heavy transactions. There weren't a lot of receipts for things. And so I'm sorry, it's 1994, not 2004 we couldn't find. And it becomes important in a minute. We couldn't find evidence of being consumed in the US prior to 1994. Because we could. It would. We'd be having a whole different conversation right now. All this stuff I had no idea about, Julian, like this is all. It wasn't relevant to me and now it's hyper relevant. I'll explain. Because it impacts the entire supplement industry.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I've never, I never heard of it till Rocco called me about it. You know, it wasn't like a thing in my lexicon at all.

[B]

No, I mean, I was an amateur bodybuilders at the very. I think that's being a little generous with what I was doing.

[A]

I mean, you look like you're still doing all right.

[B]

Well, you know, you take enough anabolics, you do stuff like that, you can put on size. I mean, that's what it was. I don't. I was naturally a skinny guy growing up. I graduated high school at, gosh, about 61 and 175 pounds. So I was skinny.

[A]

Now you're 61 2, 3 5, 240.

[B]

I try to say office scales, about 250, 255 somewhere. There's still little remaining.

[A]

That's good. You can come train with me. We'll do it clean here. No steroids. Don't worry about it.

[B]

I love it. I love it. You kick my ass, it'll be perfect. So then you fast forward 2016 and this is where it gets a little interesting that the industry at that point was just powders and capsules. You take leaves off a tree, you dry them, you import them, you put it in a capsule based format, or you put a little jar and you put it in orange juice, or you put in water because it doesn't mix well. It's not water soluble. It tastes really. I can't.

[A]

Sounds so inconvenient. This plant.

[B]

It's horrible.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, it is, but you're CEO of a company.

[B]

Well, we make it eventually more convenient, but it's not convenient to start with.

[A]

Yeah. I don't know. You're not, you're not selling Joe yet. He's the sales signal over here.

[B]

Yeah, we'll get there. Yeah. Let me give you some stuff that tastes really bad, but if it's efficacy. Right. That's kind of. That was the whole pitch to it.

[A]

Efficacy.

[B]

Yeah. Good. That it would work. And so you look at 2016 and a bunch of companies imported product that had salmonell in it. And there wasn't testing. I mean, there should have been testing, but it was a wild west. You think of the days of spice. I don't know if you like the synthetic cannabis that came out talking about like Posh Spice or something almost the same time it could have been. But no, there was a whole industry called the spice industry or the bath salt industry. That was, that was, that was booming. And so you had a bunch of, I would say, unique characters that were selling spice. The federal government said, hold on, you literally have evidence of people in Florida that are turning into cannibals, like eating people's faces off. You can probably find old videos of this.

[A]

Oh yeah. You know what, we've talked about this on the podcast before. Yeah. Who the fuck brought this up? Was that when you were here yet deep. Someone brought this up about like the dude eating faces in Florida.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He was high on bath salts or something. Yeah. All right, we'll see if we can find it, but please continue.

[B]

Yeah, no problem. So, yeah, you have unscrupulous individuals not meeting testing criteria because it's a, it's a rogue industry at that point. It's not. I didn't know this at the time, but in the supplement industry, when you bring a supplement to market, the FDA would require you have to be able to prove it within a reasonable sense of, of certainty that it's air quote, safe. Well, it's interesting, the FDA says you there's a whole bunch of ways to prove that it's safe. One way would be in vitro studies. So little petri dishes, did it hurt somebody?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The other is if enough people consumed it and didn't say they had a negative effect. That's also safe.

[A]

Now there's a third way too.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You take the fucking head of the FDA to dinner at a nice steakhouse, you say, ah, we'll get there.

[B]

Then they let that go through, we'll get that as well. But there's actually no mechanism to submit a product to go to market in the supplement side. Where that becomes interesting is think of all the influencers. You think of all the people that pop up that just are magically making, making product out of nowhere.

[A]

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[B]

There's actually a documentary called Bigger, Stronger, Faster. That was Mark Bell, Anabolic steroids, all that stuff. And they actually showed that they went to, I'll say a Home Depot or a Lowe's. They went to the parking lot, they grabbed some Spanish speaking individuals, they brought them into one of the guys houses, they packed up supplements right in front of people and they sold it online. It's completely legal. Right. There's no quality control, there's no anything. You'd be shocked at how much that's actually going on. Not in, not just inside the Kratom space but, but the supplement space.

[A]

Overall I would not be shocked about the supplement space at this point.

[B]

It is wild.

[A]

So many bad things.

[B]

It is. It is a wild west space. So you have the people in Spice that were making money hand over fist selling people synthetic cannabis, essentially bath salts in people's faces. All types of stuff.

[A]

Yeah. By the way, Miami Cannibal attack. This was the context, right? You're talking about.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

On May 26, 2012, Rudy Eugene attacked and maimed Ronaldo Popo, a homeless man, on the MacArthur Causeway in Miami, Florida. During the 18 minute filmed encounter, Eugene accused Popo of stealing his Bible. Can't do that. Beat him unconscious, removed his pants and bit off most of Popo's face above the beard, including his left eye, leaving him blind in both eyes. As a result of the incident's shocking nature and subsequent worldwide media coverage, Eugene came to be dubbed the Miami Zombie and the Causeway Cannibal. The attack ended when Eugene was fatally shot by an officer of the Miami Police Department. Although friends and families filled in details of Eugene's life, the reason for the attack remains unclear. Eugene was employed at a car Wash, at the time, was divorced and had a series of petty criminal arrests from age 16, with the last in 2009. While police sources speculated that the use of a street drug like bath salts might have been a factor, experts expressed doubt since toxicology reports were only able to identify small amounts of marijuana in Eugene's system, leaving the ultimate cause of his behavior unknown. But also, like, you can get up on drugs over a long period of time if you're abusing them and your mind is mush.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[A]

Yeah. That. That doesn't sound like weed caused that.

[B]

That would not be weed. But again, basalts were deemed synthetic cannabis. Yeah, like synthetic weed. And so it doesn't shock me that there was trace elements of cannabis in the system because it wasn't cannabis. And so that really led to some of the. Some of the scheduling or some of the eradicating of that industry. So you have all these individuals that were making money hand over fist selling spice that then said, okay, what do we do now?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, well, we'll bring in Kratom. Kratom be the next thing. So they just start bringing in Kratom.

[A]

Like, buy the boatload.

[B]

A whole industry. Yeah. And so no testing, no things like that. That leads to the salmonella that happened. And salmonella ended up, I think. And don't hold me to this. I don't know the exact number, but let's say there were somewhere between 6 and 16 stated deaths.

[A]

Yeah, we can pull it up. 2016. Salmonella.

[B]

Yeah, it's gonna be 1516 somewhere in there.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And saying, okay, that then put kratom on the FDA's radar of saying, what is this? What's really going on? So the fda, at that point, Scott Godlib was.

[A]

Damn.

[B]

Was ahead of the FDA and said, we gotta. We gotta ban this stuff. This has got to be a Schedule 1, because there's. Back then, they would have said kratom had 46 different components. Now we know it has 52. So the science is emerging on it.

[A]

What do you mean, components?

[B]

So they're. They're called alkaloids, subalkaloids or metabolites, kind of the. The atomic structure of what's in the Kratom leaf.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And so each of those 52 different components, alkaloids, subalkaloids, metabolites, they all have their own unique mechanism of action on the human body. Two of those are partial mu opioid agonist inside your body.

[A]

Oh, I know what that means.

[B]

Yep. Partial. So we'll get into a whole whole thing. On this stuff. And so just a tip, just the tip right now. Gotta leave a little, gotta keep people, you know, excited.

[A]

Get a little heroin. Not all of it.

[B]

Correct, Correct. Just a little tap. So what ends up happening is the FDA sees that and says, we gotta schedule this stuff. They get the DA riled up. They said, this is absolutely the next, this is the next heroin. We got to stop this. So 2016, I think either Q3 or early Q4, 2016, the FDA and DA said we're going to sketch. This is going to be a Schedule 1, come out. The whole industry shits themselves like, oh well we're got to. It's all gone. And because these individuals were used to the spice world, used to the basalt world, it was just another money making hustle to make a bunch of cash knowing it was going to be short term. It's a story I'll tell myself. I wasn't involved in the industry then, but. But it kind of maps out that way. Well, and one of the only times we can find the DEA started by saying, yep, it's gonna be a schedule one. But by early 2017 the DA pulled back and said there's actually not enough evidence to show this is really an.

[A]

Opioid because this is how it got on the radar in the first place. Something that doesn't have to do with the actual drug itself. The salmonella.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

Yeah. By the way, we pulled this up just so people can get context on what you were already talking about. But this is from archive.cdc.gov as of 04-05-2018, a total of 132 people infected with outbreak strains of salmonella have been reported from 38 states. And since then there's been another 45 more ill people from 19 states. But they said that. Is there anything? Oh yeah, there it is. Whole, Whole genome sequencing analysis did not identify any predicted antibiotic resistance and isolates from 60 ill people and 3 kratom samples. Testing of 8 clinical isolates using standard antibiotic. Antibiotic susceptibility testing methods by CDC. Something, something, something. Laboratory also did not show any resistance. 57, 73% of 78 people interviewed reported consuming Kratom in pills, powder or tea. There it is. Most people report consuming the powder form of Kratom. So they like snorting it?

[B]

No, no, it's, it's capsule. They drink it. Oh yeah, it's a really like airy powder. Like our production facility. There's the shit in the air all the time. Like we operate in what's called an ISO 7 compliant facility with HEPA filters and all this stuff because it's just, it's really light. And so when you grind it up into, into the capsule based form or the powder based form, you. I guess someone maybe could snort it, but I don't know how like it. I've never considered that mechanism of consumption.

[A]

But people are not going to try it.

[B]

People do some crazy shit. So they could. So in our business at that point, the two founding partners said, well, shit, we don't want to go to prison. We're going to destroy all of our product. So they took it up to North Salt Lake, incinerated it all about a million dollars worth of product.

[A]

Wait, your guys did?

[B]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because firebombing session on the lake. Love that.

[B]

Yeah, of course.

[A]

Good for them.

[B]

Well, because it was going to be a schedule one.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like you're in possession of it. That's no different than being in possession of heroin at that point.

[A]

But isn't there like a rule that if you brought it in legally and now they declare it that way, you just like, I don't know, call the hotline and say, by the way, I have this, I had it legally, so what do you want me to do with it?

[B]

Yep, I believe that to be true. The legal team that they had at that point recommended they just go ahead and incinerate it just preemptively again, before my time.

[A]

Who was it? Saul Goodman. Take it up there, burn it.

[B]

I think that that's how it feels to me a lot. But again, I need to make certain that contextually some of this could be a little bit wrong because I wasn't around at this point. And so what ends up happening is the DA then reverses that, that ruling. They say there's not enough evidence to call to schedule one. And so the partners saying, holy shit, we built this business. Oh, my God, we just incinerated a million dollars worth of product. What do we do?

[A]

It's a tough day.

[B]

It is. It is a tough day. So Sean, the second founding partner, ended up taking a double mortgage on his house.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

Borrowed. I think it's 60 or 80 grand against, against his house value. And brought in just enough to keep the ball bouncing, like, just enough. But it was just powders and capsules. So a true commodity. Right. There's nothing unique to it. Because think about it, inside the cannabis world, the way I view it, you can manufacture strands, you can do some cross breeding, you can do all types of stuff. And I'm not a Cannabis guy. So, again, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But because these trees take five years. There's no hybrids, there's no cross breeding. Like, these are trees that have been in Indonesia and Thailand for hundreds of years.

[A]

Right now, did Sean. Because obviously you have this whipamarole that happens where it's like, oh, or schedule one and, oh, we're not doing that. It's legal again. But the whole thing is born out of. This is a very new thing. This is. This was something that we didn't have a ton of research on or whatever. And obviously people try to start businesses or whatever, but after this back and forth happens is, I understand, like, you know, Sean has a mortgage to pay and stuff like that. But are there questions of, like, saying, okay, maybe it's not a schedule run one right now, but maybe we're going to find out something later that could make it that or that this is not going to be helpful for people. How did he reconcile that?

[B]

100%. So Sean and Dalton owned a business that was some sort of nutritional supplement or dietary ingredient. 2010, 2011, 2012.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And it was in Huntington Beach, California, where. Where they were operating and they had Thai workers that were helping them pack out packaging. Yeah, it's awesome. And so it's awesome. The businesses is in the process of either shutting down or retooling. And Sean and Dalton are physically packing orders to ship out. And Sean's complaining how his back hurts, how he's tired. And One of the TiE workers says, Mr. Sean, try some of this. And it's four or five capsules of kratom now, but at that point, just four or five green capsules. Like, I'm not taking that shit. What is it? Kratom. Kratom. Because I'm not going to get high. That's not what I do. No, no, it's good for you. It's good. We end up taking it. And 45 minutes later, as he would tell the story, no back pain, tons of energy, tons of focus, he goes, why isn't everybody selling this? It actually works. And so that's what started at that point. Ssv, or the first iteration of our company, was anecdotal. This makes me feel great. I'm not noticing the back pain.

[A]

I mean, they might have said that about, like, OxyContin back in, like, oh, three though, too, for sure. You know what I mean? But he just started it based on that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

I know.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Right. I mean, what. Necessity is a mother of invention.

[A]

Yeah. You're sitting over there, like, no judgment.

[B]

Well, I mean, I. I'd love to say that. It's easy to say from my position that maybe we should have done things differently back then, but I think of 2012 in an emerging industry, like, it's easy to say a lot of what I would do differently now because we're a large company with money in the bank.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

When you first start, it's like, sure, what do you. What do you. What do you do? And I just think of even 2012, I mean, it's almost like I take for granted the Internet, AI research, availability of information, and I'm justifying it because I'm an owner of the business. I'm acknowledging that. But it's still 2012. It just feels like a lifetime ago from how I would have approached supplements overall.

[A]

Yeah. And I think this is. This is one of those, like, really tough gray area type things about the system we have where I'm just talking about all forms of like, say, legalization of certain substances right now, when that happens, it happens because there's data that says certain things are actually okay for people or for people to make their own choices on that. And that's great. But when you rip the band aid off completely and leave it wide open, and this applies to all this stuff, you create business incentives for people to be like, oh, it. We're just gonna run right into that and figure it out. And then maybe you accidentally break. And when you're breaking this time, people get hurt as well, which is a tough thing. So I look at it more like a system failure than like, pointing at all the individuals. Yes. Sometimes there's actually bad people who get involved with this stuff for sure. But like, a lot of people, it's like, okay, I see business opportunity. This makes sense. The government says, this does. Fine, let's go. And you have. It's like. You ever seen the video of like, fucking Jerry World Cowboy Stadium when they open it up?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And everyone just fucking runs in there. That's kind of what it is. Like, you can't. If, if they. Now those people are happy to go to a football game, but if they were there to, like, burn the fucking place down, you're not stopping it. They're going to burn it down. You know what I mean? And I worry about that with all of this stuff, whether it's weed, whether it's fucking edibles, whether it's kratom, whether it's. Insert it here, that the government said, okay, this isn't on a schedule. You can Sell it or package it up into a supplement. Do you have that worry too?

[B]

I do. And I've fortunately or unfortunately throughout this year I've spent a lot more time in dc. I've spent a lot of time with the fda. Hhs. It's understand the system is flawed, but I don't know the answer to solving the flawed system. Because on one side you would want to do safety studies. Well, a safety study, to do it appropriately, you're probably six months, maybe eight months. Yeah, you're probably a couple hundred grand. You have to have a university that's accredited, that's validated from the FDA that's willing to actually do the study. You have to do it in such a way that's essentially double blinded. And so can you explain that to.

[A]

People what that would look like as an example?

[B]

Let's say, because we're talking about kratom, let's say Kratom. We just figured out what kratom is a day and we would say, okay, we want to do a safety study before we bring something to market. Well, you have to essentially tell the FDA we have this thing, we'd like to do a study on it. Are you okay with us doing a study on this? They can say yes or no for all the different reasons, depending on who's in office, a political climate. Let's assume they say yes in this moment in time. Then you have to reach out to a series of universities and get them to say we have the resources, we have the interest and we're willing to actually conduct the study. That group, that that university has to also be accredited by the fda. You can't just magically pick, you know, some podunk university in the middle of Kansas. It has to be something that the FDA validates, is, is solid and viable.

[A]

Sorry, University of Phoenix.

[B]

Yeah, right. It'd be great. Right. We get the University of Phoenix to sign off on it. But what ends up happening then is assuming that all those things happen, assuming you find the university, assuming they're willing to do it, then they have to set up their own protocols with sourcing material, understanding the requirements of the test. That would make the FDA happy. They're going to start with almost always in an in vitro study. So inside of petri dissonance inside a cell dish and they're trying to understand the mechanisms of action, like what goes on as could be good or bad for human being. Assuming that that goes through and they don't find anything significant, the next step would be some series of a rodent study. Now rodent could be mice or rats, right. They both have their own digestive mechanisms.

[A]

We've got a few rats out here for you.

[B]

I saw them coming in, it's awesome. Well, we don't have those in the Midwest politician. We got these awesome. We got these small little mice around those places. All right, we got, we got rats you could ride on around here.

[A]

They swim. That's when it gets scary. You see those jump in the Hudson, it's nuts.

[B]

Just get right across. So what ends up happening is all those things happen. The actual study itself might take four to six weeks, but then to do the scientific write up to validate it, to then ship it to somebody else to validate the study, another university or another group of people, that's where you get that double blinded. So they don't know what was actually the thesis of the study to start with. So just that process, if everything goes the right way, you're probably eight months and you're probably 100 grand.

[A]

Sounds like, it sounds like more than 100 grand too.

[B]

It very well could be. And saying, okay, you think of the startup entrepreneur might not have access to 100 grand.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And because you don't know if it's going to work or not, even if you went out and hustled up the hundred grand, it's a complete crapshoot. Because what if it doesn't work? What if it fails? Now you don't have a way to pay back the a hundred grand. And so that's where this is a really interesting dynamic because of course it would make sense to validate everything before you bring it to market. But do you have the money? Do you have the time and can you get everybody to play the game that way? Because only takes one rogue person to go around the outside of the system to put a product on shelf that then beat you to market.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so it's like it's a fuck system from the start.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Because in theory that would be what we would do. But if you do that then it really pushes more towards a pharmaceutical pathway. And so people with the biggest checkbooks end up getting the market first, which really starts to eliminate free market capitalism to me.

[A]

Yeah, now that's an interesting point because that's. Now if we're going to look at the full supplement industry and rope that in. Because you brought up that point, I'm glad you did because it's pretty wild what goes on there. This is a system that you would think like remove business, remove capitalism, all of it. Just look at it with common sense, you'd be like, okay, it's a substance that's created that you sell to people to ingest into their bodies that's gonna do something when it goes into their bodies. You would think there would always be regulation on someone being able to sell that. I'm not even talking about Kratom or anything. I'm talking about selling fucking omega 3 fatty acids if they form a new solution of it or something. I don't know if that's possible, but you know what I mean.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Right. But there's not. It's a fucking free for all.

[B]

It's a free for all with an asterisk of. You're supposed to manufacture in a GMP compliant facility. Right. Generally accepted manufacturing principles, essentially, that there's a sense of quality. Right. You should be manufacturing in a quality environment that's clean, that has documented protocols, but that's a should.

[A]

So the Home Depot guys weren't doing that.

[B]

They weren't doing that, unfortunately. Yeah, right, but, but even saying that, then you take another step and say, well, how do you enforce that? Like the government then would have to have the funding to enforce product on shelf, all the different ways. And then you get to government overreach. Then like, that's where sitting back and wanting to figure out the solution, not because of Kratom. I mean, in some aspects, who cares about that? This is a much more.

[A]

Oh, it's wide.

[B]

It's a systemic issue.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

But there's not the clear, concise answer to me.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because it would be like, sure, we should be able to do xyz. So my. Again, we can get into it whenever. But I think using large language models, I think having a series of, you know, quantum compute. I think using the blockchain starts to become very, very relevant for this.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

Because now all of a sudden you take what could take eight months and hundreds of thousands of dollars and you could do it in six or eight days and have a good sense of. Of confidence. Then you do a chain of custody using the blockchain to verify where every source material comes from.

[A]

All right, back up a second. Because you just said we're going to use AI, Quantum and blockchain.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To solve the supplement process. So, like, I'm a fifth grader.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How would this look?

[B]

So how to guess?

[A]

This rules out my friends Juan and Carlos in the, in the Home Depot park, man.

[B]

Juan and Carlos. I might be able to hustle up some AI.

[A]

Listen, I'm rooting for you.

[B]

Yeah. I want them, I want Them to win too. So, so what I look at that you have. I'm operating on the premise right now that kind of all, all information in the world is available. Right? It's there. What happens is what we're studying in the US we don't know what they're studying in Russia, we don't know what they're studying in Germany. There's language barriers and not a centralized reporting platform. You don't really know what's going on. And some of that's because we all want the competitive advantage to go to market. But you take things that are published, white papers that are validated studies on any material component, what would that mean, the Omega 3? Well, for all we know, there's this one substrate of Omega 3 that comes out of Northern Alaska, that the cod there have a slightly different biology to them. And so that put into a model, AI would be able to at least pour through and say, oh, this, this and this. Right. Three different parts of the industry that nobody knows connect. AI could then help connect. Oh, so now you're. Okay, now you're taking the study that had n of three.

[A]

Yes, right.

[B]

Three substance or three sub subjects in northern Alaska. You're also seeing that in Southeast asia there were 4,000 studies, but we don't know about it because different language, different reporting system. To me, when you start looking at quantum compute, it's just the ability to condense the data down in a much more expedient manner. If you were able to do that, you could come up with a reasonable sense of certainty on safety versus potential for harm.

[A]

Wouldn't that automatically take away some level of competition though? And here's what I mean by that. If AI solved, stay with the Omega 3 example. If AI solved for the optimal Omega 3, the fucking COD in Alaska, you know, the worms in Georgia and what, sorry, Georgia, whatever. You know, these three things that you put in there. Now if someone's like trying to reinvent the wheel, they can't beat that. So if they come out with a new supplement and say, yeah, but we threw in, you know, the sand in California, they're gonna be like, malaka. The AI doesn't want that. Like it already said, we have something better. So you would essentially be creating a monopoly for whichever person hit refresh fast enough on the AI to know that that was the answer it just came up with. And now we're going to make the business as fast as we can.

[B]

Yes, in some capacity. But I also think in a truly efficient market, yeah, we're going to get There, no matter whatever long enough horizon, I think you might be any commodity based product, we're going to lose unique value propositions come down to who offers the best customer support, who offers the best customer experience. Right. At some point we as consumers I think deserve that. And this is whole other thing that we walk into, no shade on, on Whole Foods. We walk into Whole Foods and because it's Whole Foods we have this. At least I do. Oh, it's on whole food shelf. It needs. It's, it's safe, it's efficacy, it, it's. There's a reasonable nature because of the environment that it sits in that we think all these things have happened, right. They haven't happened. If you have the right insurance and you have the right GMP classification, you check the boxes for Amazon, you check the boxes for Whole Foods, you can put that product on shelf and it's never been tested. The world doesn't know that. Like this is a whole bigger issue.

[A]

Oh, this is a huge issue across.

[B]

A lot of industries, 100%.

[A]

I want to say, I hope I'm remembering this right, but I'm pretty sure it was my friend Ali Tabrizi's documentary Conspiracy on Netflix. Do you remember that? So tell me if I'm remembering the right film here because it's been a few years since I saw that. Ali's great, by the way. But I believe it was in there where they were describing how the, the labeling that would get put on your tuna or whatever was just all bought and paid for and it, and it's not real and meaning they would catch this fish illegally. Sometimes it would be, I think some other form of fish. Go watch the documentary. There was a lot of shit there, but I'm pretty sure it's the right documentaries. In cspiracy they talked about that. And yet this is something that you want to look at the supplements industry, you want to look at the fucking botanicals industry, you want to look at the pop up. This happens everywhere.

[B]

Everywhere, Everywhere. And you're spot on. I mean it was, it's interesting. I have a small interest in a grass fed, grass finished beef operation of all things in, in a little rural part of Wyoming. I knew nothing about beef. I mean, I know I like to eat it, but I didn't know anything about much more than that. And to dive in like what's it mean to be organic? What's it mean to be certified organic? What's it mean to be certified grass fed? Grass fed just means that during a certain point that the Cow was able to eat grass, but then you can take it to a feedlot a month before slaughter and you can pound that thing full of grain, you can load it up to get it fat, have it marble, and it still comes out on the backside as grass fed.

[A]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[B]

And like you spend all this extra money at a, at a grocery store. Well, somebody figured out who to pay to make that real because it's not what we think it is. And I mean, it's every industry to me.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so it's not to me a conspiracy theory. It's. It's the system itself.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Is. Is not wired the way that we think it is.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

But we kind of. I'm a sheep in some aspects, right. I go into an environment, oh, it's grass fed, grass finished or grass fed at least. I look at the way it looks in a package versus the other thing in the package. Man, this one looks better. It's $2 more. It's gotta make sense. It's more expensive. Yeah, it's better. And I buy it and then come to find out it came from the same fucking facility as the other one that is just grain fed all the way through. It's all the same.

[A]

Yeah, I think you make a really important point there because our brains, especially in the post Covid era, immediately go to, you know, there's a giant person with the peasant of ante on the string behind every fucking thing that happens. And I. Sometimes that's true, depending on what it is. Other times I think it's market dynamics and things like that incentivize structures to happen. That then, you know, people have to compete. And as they continue to compete, bad things happen for everyone. And an amazing. Or that's the wrong word, but an unfortunate example of this is the, the, the color patterning in a grocery store, right? So you know what I'm going to say. You look at the 15 middle aisles, everything's red, blue, shiny. Go get it. Right? You look at all the aisles on the outside, that's fruit and stuff, which still has the glyphosate on it and all that bullshit. But you know what I mean? Like it's, it's at least nicer and natural. But all the stuff in the middle is what people go buy because the marketing is in front of you. They have, they pay for spaces on the ends of the aisle. Oh, this looks so good. And it's got all the processed shit in it, all the food dyes, all the stuff that the human Body is not meant to process. And so I don't think it's like one evil guy was like, we're going to poison everyone. I think it was just market dynamics was like, well, we got to compete. Those guys, their food last six months, we got to last seven months.

[B]

100%. You know, I mean, I forget the name of the. The. It's not a documentary, but kind of a mockumentary movie that's about the dupont family, right?

[A]

Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah. I haven't seen this, though.

[B]

Yeah. So it basically tells a story of how Teflon was created originally to cover tanks. Right. World War II made tons of sense. Water resistant, all those things. And Teflon then was deemed this miracle molecule that was going to make life better, living better through chemistry. And so I was like, oh, it worked there. Why wouldn't we spray our pans with Teflon? Because things didn't stick to it. It made. Now, I'm not saying that the dupont family knew good or bad. Just at a cursory level, it's like, well, that makes sense. None of us wanted our shit to stick to pans in the 60s.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And we didn't want our furniture to be destroyed. We didn't want carpet to be destroyed when you spilled stuff on it. So everything got started getting sprayed with Teflon. Well, Teflon now is a forever chemical. You can never get rid of it. And so you see all after a period of time, this, this television show or this movie gets into starting to have a conversation around, you know, birth defects. All these things were happening in West Virginia, kind of West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, southern Ohio about then the dupont family became complicit because they knew it and they tried to suppress it. But I don't think when they created something you just like we're saying about Kratom, you do something, you see it, you run it through whatever test you're running through, like, oh, this is good. This is good shit. Yeah, this, this makes a lot of sense. And then you, you launch it. And then you fast forward 20 years, like, oh, shit, that genie's out of the bottle now. We can't put it back in. What do we do? A whole industry is built around this. And so I think that happens in a lot of spaces that I don't think that there's this magical, nefarious source that's wanting to kill half the population all the time. There could be, but something like Teflon, it made sense to me.

[A]

Yeah, it doesn't have to be with everything is the point. It can be. Some of it is just the market dynamics. Like I said. I. I don't know which is which or where. There really is that or something. But there's. You could. You could find in everything we've repeatedly as a society. And I'll focus on America more than anything right now because I think other places are doing a better job with some of these things we're talking about. It's like we've kicked the can down the road. Like someone else will deal with that problem. Right. And then it just keeps spiraling and spiraling and then it's so big that it's like, wait a minute, you know, now everyone's getting aware of it. But I do. You know, when you're in college and stuff, you don't think about any of this stuff. If there's food in front of you, you eat it. If there's something with liquid, everybody wins, Right?

[B]

Correct.

[A]

But then you start to like go through life a little bit and you're like, damn, what, what am I eating? Why do I feel better when I have that? But not that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's common sense. Like just look, is it fresh or isn't it? And the stuff that's not. We're doing something to it.

[B]

100. But I think even that's indicative. You take look at the work of Ray Dalio. Right. Bridgewater.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And just saying, in our lifetimes, everything's the first time it's ever happened.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You zoom out enough, it's 80 year cycles, 100 year cycles. This just repeats itself over and over again. Turning with. With a different. Different lens on top of it.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

But we're so myopic in our vantage point because we're going to live at 80. 85. Brian Johnson. Maybe we live to 200. Who the hell knows how long we live?

[A]

He's looking good, man.

[B]

He's going back some psilocybin in the past couple weeks. He's looking young.

[A]

Yeah. He's got a girlfriend now. He does like 20 years younger too.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Living the life, bro.

[B]

He's winning. Right?

[A]

I'm happy for him.

[B]

Absolutely. But. But in saying all those things, it's like we don't slow down enough to consider it. But there's almost always going to be someone that's not going to slow down.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And that's where it gets challenging to me. It's again, from where I view our industry. Bring back to Kratom. It's really easy right now to Say, oh, you dumb. Should be doing it this way. Well, because we're a successful business with a couple dollars in the bank, so I can say that at this point.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I couldn't say it six years ago because we didn't have the money in the bank. We didn't know. We didn't know. And so to bring it back to that part of the conversation, when you get to the backside of the FDA still pushing the scheduling, the industry pivots and says, there's a call to march on Capitol Hill because you have first responders, armed services that go to DC when the scheduling is supposed to happen and say, hold on a second. This is allowing us to function because it's not an opioid. It's not triggering drug tests. But from jumping out of airplanes and helicopters, I don't have back pain, so I'm not prescribed opioids. So I can still function inside the military. I'm not. I'm not pissing dirty. Don't take this away. This is my livelihood. And you can see 2017, the industry shifts and starts calling this a replacement for your opioids.

[A]

Kratom.

[B]

Kratom. Now, it's not. And I'll get into all the reasons why it's not.

[A]

Let's start there. Actually, can we do that?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, why it's not. That's a good place to start.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. So I believe the industry adapted as it needed to in that moment in time to protect the industry. You have. It's really challenging me, no matter what the political climate is, to shit on veterans and first responders.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That's a. That's a protected group of people, whether you like what they stand for or not. When. When they march and say, this is helping us, it's really fucking tough to get everybody to say, oh, we're going to take it away from you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so the industry says at that point, oh, this is awesome. We found our silver bullet to stay alive. This is. This is a replacement for opioids. Now, up until that point, I don't see any data that I can find online where someone was saying, this is a replacement for opioids. Because when you look at the mechanism of action, right? And I didn't know any of this stuff before getting in this industry. You have three different types of opioid receptors in your body. They all do different things for different reasons. You take something like an Oxycontin or Percocet that is a 100 agonist to your mu. Opioid receptor. Think of A lock and key.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Your mu opioid receptor is the lock. Oxycontin's the key. It fits in exactly. And it's like an old lock, so when it goes in, it sticks. It's not going to fall out.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That is, to me, 100 agonistic relationship. What we found with Kratom is it is a partial mu opioid agonist. So same lock and key kind of mechanism. But imagine. Imagine the locks a little worn out, and it's got a bunch of WD40 in it. So the key slides in, but slide. It falls right out. Slides in, falls out, Slides and falls out. Then we start to dissect the 52 components of kratom. Those alkaloids, subalkaloids, all these fancy terms. Nobody cares about 52 things inside of Kratom. And we realize out of those 52, two of them impact the mu opioid receptor. The rest don't really.

[A]

So what does that mean?

[B]

It means there is a. The by weight. There's something called mitragynine. Some might call it metragynine. Depends on where you're from. That is 60% of the weight by volume of a Kratom leaf. That's the. The alkaloid. That alkaloid is a incredible partial mu opioid agonist. It's easy to compare it to morphine because morphine is kind of like the gold standard in the pharmaceutical industry for an opioid agonist. Metragynine itself, and I could be a little off on this. I think it's. I think it's a 20th as potent as morphine. So. 1 20th.

[A]

How do you spell metragonous?

[B]

Metragynine. Close. It's all the same, man. People bastardize. And I'm probably bastardizing it. You know, I'm gonna have people commenting that you're not saying it the right way.

[A]

All right, what did you say? 1 20th the potency of opium.

[B]

Of. Of morphine.

[A]

Morphine.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Morphine. Some strong shit, bro.

[B]

It is. It is.

[A]

All right. It says it's a major. Wait. Metragynine is a major metabolite.

[B]

Metabolite.

[A]

Yeah, metabolite 7. Hydroxymetragynine 7. Oh. Is generally considered to be significantly more potent than morphine. So this is 708. That's not what you're talking about.

[B]

It's not. And this is where the whole confusion happens. Our industry is this exact thing.

[A]

Okay, so Google AI bad.

[B]

Well, just. It's confusing as. Because you hear metrogynine and then there's this other thing called 7 hydroxymetragynine.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Those are two different things.

[A]

All right, before you explain that, I also want to say, because this was part of my conversation with Rocco, especially when I'm gonna go to talk to someone who deals in something I know fucking nothing about, like Kratom or whatever, some of that stuff makes me nervous because I'm like, what is this? What does it mean? What's the business behind it? Is this gonna be something really bad in a few years? But the fact that Rocco is in there working with you guys on this, who has, like, dedicated his life to fighting against bad substances coming into this country and things like that, was a huge bill of approval for me. And what he really liked about you guys is exactly what you're going to talk about right now, which is that. And I guess this is. I know about the seven oh, but the lower volume thing you're talking about, you're going to explain. I. I don't understand that. So you're gonna explain that. But, like, you guys could have had a chance to make a fuck ton of money jumping in on this 7 oh thing, which obviously is very not good, versus staying with a simple safe form that actually might make sense and help people like our veterans to make less money. And you chose that and to also fight against the seven oh thing. Is that a fair way of putting it?

[B]

It is a very fair and accurate way of putting it.

[A]

All right, so now let's explain the difference and I'll let you kind of take it from there.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So when you look at mitragynine, mitragine, however you want to say it, whether it's a tenth as potent as morphine, a twentieth is as potent as morphine. It's. It's not. It's nowhere near the same category. Okay. You could take a shitload of Kratom metragynine and not feel anything. It's not like morphine. Because of the partial opioid agonist relationship versus the full agonistic relationship. Morphine's a full agonist. Metragine is partial.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Where this gets confusing is if we test a live leaf on a tree in Indonesia, and it's still living, there's almost zero percent, 7 hydroxy mitragynine present.

[A]

Leaf almost zero percent.

[B]

Less than 400 parts per million. Even less than that, 7OH is a metabolite, meaning as mitragynine gets digested as it breaks down, whether it breaks down because of chemical oxidation from being in the air or because you Ingest it. The conversion mechanism is into 7 hydroxymitragynine 7. Oh, okay. And so when what I've been advocating for is we've tested 10,000 plus kilos of biomass over the course of our business. We operate in a way that when Kratom comes from Indonesia or Thailand, we require that we can see a test from over there before we agree to buy it. When it lands in our facility, it gets quarantined. We then send it out for third party testing. Before it can move, we need to validate that it matches the same test.

[A]

That's good.

[B]

We want to make sure there's no heavy metals, that there's no salmonella, that it has ultra low 7 hydroxy mitragnine in it. It should fit a very specific profile before it ever moves.

[A]

And you have a mathematical range you put on that.

[B]

Obviously we do. And the mathematical range is just the proven standards for what Kratom is and naturally occurring plant. Assuming that that comes back and it's validated that the third party test is not us gassing up a test saying, oh, it's good. We send out to a third party. They say, yep, it's in the range. Here's all the certificates of analysis. Then we say, okay, we now can decide what we want to do with that. And it goes into. I'll laugh. And they call it general population. So where this starts to become interesting is in 2023, our business had grown to the point that we were looking for additional manufacturing capacity. We just out kicked our coverage. We, we were making the market was requiring more product than we were able to make inside of our four walls. Great problem to have.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We started scouring the country for a manufacturing facility that would meet our standards and help us progress the science forward. We introduced to a group out of just outside of Chicago kind of a really strange place for this to be.

[A]

I was gonna say a lot of drugs flown into Chicago.

[B]

Lots of drugs.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But this individual ended up having a research facility that had whatever level one classification to test psilocybin. And he had angelfish models that he was able to give psilocybin to and see through AI if they were impacted by psilocybin. Really crazy stuff.

[A]

Angelfish models.

[B]

So physical angelfish.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so what he had figured out.

[A]

Is, oh, they're mushrooming up the fish.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They must be tripping in there.

[B]

They were, but they really sideways and big time zigzagging. But that, that was the whole thing of the AI inference because he would have cameras set up and he knew based off their swim patterns, what. What was going on inside of them. And so as we started going down the path of Kratom with this individual, this group, he started saying, hey, we can really isolate all these different alkaloids. We can pull them apart. Let's see what happens when you take the top five. Let's see what happens when we isolate those independent. Awesome. Let's do it. Well, we kind of. We have a reasonable sense of basis for Metrogynine because it's 60%. A bunch of people have done studies on that. Then you get into 7 hydroxymitragynine, known as 7OH in something called pianine. All these words that don't matter. Yeah. And he starts showing us 7 oh operates 13 to 30 times more potently than morphine. He's like, I can show you. I'm like, what do you mean? So this is 20, 23. We have 100%. We know how to isolate 7 hydroxymitratinine. And we see very, very strong validated support that this is 13 to 30 times more potent than morphine.

[A]

Now, when you say 13 to 30 times more potent than morphine, I just want to make sure I also understand what this looks like when it gets to the final shelf. Right. And we're going to talk more about. So I'm giving a little preview. We'll come back to this later and go into more detail. But when a product that's not from your company obviously gets to a shelf in a gas station that contains 7 oh, what is the dosing level of 7 oh in it, this thing that is more potent than morphine, but, like, is it a low enough dose that, you know, it's nowhere near the effect of, say, morphine you'd give a patient who might be dying or something like that. You know what I mean? Because you're pumping them up with like a horse tranquilizer when they're dying, they're not necessarily pumping them with a horse tranquilizer at the gas station. If of seven oh, is that fair?

[B]

It is not fair.

[A]

It's not fair. So you think they're tripping them up.

[B]

So there's been new studies have emerged. These aren't our studies. We can pull them up and find them.

[A]

Yeah, let's do that.

[B]

That 10 milligrams of consumption of 7 hydroxy 7OH in rodent studies. Now, rodents are a little different because you have to go IV with rodents because they're oral. Digestive pathways are really inefficient for these products. So you have to put it in their veins. So I'm acknowledging it's a little different. But what that ultimately equates to is a blood serum level that equals 10 milligrams or more. When you get to 10 milligrams or more from this study, n might have been 8 or 9. So not significant, but significant enough to give a little insight to it. You start to see that it triggers all the same effects of a, of a morphine and also shows that it's now addictive. Where the rodents now in stimulated models are chasing that high. They're, they're following the same pathway, they're searching more of the same behavior.

[A]

I'm trying to like make this mathematical in my head though, a little bit to understand. So I apologize if I'm slowing you down.

[B]

Not at all.

[A]

But when you say so, it's 13 to 30 times as pot. Was that it as morphine? And what you were just saying there is that at this 10 milligram, Joe pulled it up, it is approximately 10 milligram. It looks like when they put it into rodents, you said it has the same effects as morphine.

[B]

Well, when you put it into rodents instead of 10 milligrams. So you have not only the analgesic effect. Right. The opioid receptor effect.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But by the nature of opioids, I think we could all kind of unilaterally agree there's a mechanism that we become addicted to them because people like the way it makes them feel.

[A]

Yes, right.

[B]

That's, that's the issue. And so the same things happen now with 10mg of consumption IV based. Now I'm going to take a step back from IV because I think this is also important.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

When you consume a capsule of product. So if we were to go to a gas station right now, you're going to see 7 hydroxy for the most part in press tabs. It's going to be little like five to six. You probably pull it up five to six, count packages of tabs that are in, in these little press em out and they fall on your hand. The industry started at each one of those tabs was 10 milligrams. Then the industry is known for chasing the stronger and stronger and stronger. So it went from 10 milligrams per tab to 20 to 40 to. Now when you pull up some of the more recent tabs are in the market, you're gonna see a pack of four tabs is 200 milligrams of seven hydroxy.

[A]

Now that's and how much more does the average human weigh than, Than a rat?

[B]

There's a, there's a whole science, there's a, there's a conversion mechanism of what percentage goes to what and where. I don't have a committed memory. I think it's 3.6 times. It takes 3.6 times as much product to have the same effect. We can pull.

[A]

That's less than I thought, first of all. Secondly, though, let's go back to the rat for a minute because now I'm formulating how I want to ask this question. So when you put 10 milligrams of this into a rat in their veins, in their veins intravenously, it has an effect that morphine has on them. How much morphine would it take, do you know, to have to put into their veins that would have the same level of effect?

[B]

I don't. It's in that study. I'm going to pull it up and share the study. It's in there.

[A]

That's what I want to, I want.

[B]

To make sure that I'm not. Again.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

When I don't know the answer. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna it.

[A]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[B]

But what I do know is the counter argument to this, which I can appreciate. You take a press tab of 7 hydroxy, we'll use round numbers. We'll say it's 100 milligram tab. Only a certain percent of that is bioavailable.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because you're going to break it down through digestive pathways. So that 100 milligrams, let's say it's a 30 bioavailable product. So you have 100 milligrams in the tab, but it reaches your digestive tract and gets to the backside. You only have 30 milligrams that are present.

[A]

Isn't that like false advertising?

[B]

No, it's. Every product we consume, everything is going to. From the milligrams that are stated on a package, that is true in theory and accurate at point of production. But by the time you digest it, less of that product's bioavailable in your bloodstream.

[A]

Okay, all right.

[B]

You're breaking it down.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And so I, I know mitragynine very well. It's about a 30 conversion rate. So if you take one of our products, a kratom based product, and it says for us, we believe in standard serving sizes. So a serving size of any product we have, we think is 25 milligrams of metrogynine, why that matters is which is not seven.

[A]

Oh, it is not metragy.

[B]

It's just metragynine. So 30% of that is now bioavailable inside the body. So we can say 7.5 milligrams on average, depending on height, weight, metabolic rate, disease history. Like it's not perfect, but it's 30. A nice round number.

[A]

Yeah, you'd need a couple servings.

[B]

I might have the same amount of bioavailability, but you say that and then that same mitragynine, 30% bioavailable, but then 50% of the bioavailable converts to 7 hydroxy inside your body because you're breaking it down. That's where this gets so confusing for people. But I gotta. I gotta zoom out one layer.

[A]

Yeah, let's zoom out.

[B]

When you consume what we'll call full spectrum kratom. Now, that's not really a term. It's a term in the CBD world.

[A]

Yeah, it'll be spectrum. You gotta be careful with that.

[B]

So it. We'll look at a complete alkaloid profile. Kratom. Right. So it has all 52 alkaloids present.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

You have somewhere between two and four that might have. We know the two for certain have a partial mu opioid agonistic relationship, meaning it has a slight bonding effect. You have another six that are antagonistic to the myopoid receptor. So that's that whole premise of are you spraying the lock with WD40 or not? So when you're consuming complete spectrum kratom. Complete alkaloid spectrum kratom, you have six or more components that are actually the buffer that's making it. So the trace amounts of 7 hydroxy don't bond to the mu opid receptor. They can't do it. What happens when you isolate just seven hydroxy? All of those things are now gone. You only have the agonistic relationship to the myopid receptor.

[A]

Okay, now, like, I'm a fifth grader.

[B]

Yeah. Yep, no problem. So fifth grade basis.

[A]

Yes. To think about that.

[B]

Well, no, I want to make sure I make. I'm making this relevant because this is. This is. It's been challenging. I'll start with the example of an apple. Okay. We get home from school, our mom slices up an apple. It's on a plate in front of us. No peanut butter, any of that. Just an apple. It's before the days of glycophosphate and all the bad that's in. It's just a nice natural apple. And we have. We eat the apple and we might Swallow a seed or two. Right? No big deal. No. I'm from the age where my mom said, don't swallow the seeds because you're gonna grow an apple tree in your stomach. And all the dumb. But it was. It was a joke. So you swallow the seeds, nothing happens. However, if somebody else took all the seeds out of a series of apples and then soaked them for a while in a specific product, those seeds turn into something very different. Those seeds turn into cyanide. And so you could take just the seeds that have been soaked and consume them, and you've now consumed cyanide. But when you have an apple, you don't think twice about if you eat a seed or two, you're not worried about cyanide consumption. It doesn't register. That is the difference in full spectrum Kratom versus seven hydroxy. Seven hydroxy is the seed. Now by itself in very small quantities. 7 oh could be fine because you're having one seed. But when you're taking all the seeds and putting them together and giving people endless amounts of the seeds you're now giving them, you're not. Because not killing people. It's a whole nother conversation. You're not giving them the same product as Kratom. And that's where there's so much confusion in the market, because you see the news reports that pop up, people are dying. There's all these things happening. I got to tell you, from someone that's been a huge proponent of 707-Hydroxy. I don't think you can overdose on it.

[A]

You don't think you can overdose on it?

[B]

I do not think you can overdose on 7 hydroxy.

[A]

On what basis?

[B]

So the counter argument, the other side of the aisle, if you would, would tell you that it has a ceiling effect. What that would basically state is as you consume more and more of something, your body reaches a saturation point and you just excrete the rest of it. There's a lot of science that shows that's actually not true. There isn't a ceiling effect for 7. There is a ceiling effect for Kratom. What happens on the seven OH side, The reason why people O D the mechanism of action, why people OD is experiencing respiratory suppression. They can't breathe right. Their. Their heart rate slows down, their breathing slows down, and they essentially suffocate is what happens.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Unfortunately, those things aren't true. In the same capacity with seven oh. There's people. We could hop on Reddit right now and go to 7oh or 77 METEGYNINE or there's Reddit forums, and you will see endless people saying they're taking 3, 4, 500 milligrams a day and they're fine. And they're fine.

[A]

They're not fine, but they're, they're not dying.

[B]

They're not dying. And this is, this is where I don't want to say I have it all figured out. Because what I started this year was saying my whole crusade to get this stuff off of shelf came from our customer base reaching out to us, saying, can you help us get off of this product? And I'm like, what are you talking about? What's this product? I mean, I know what it is, but what, why are you calling me? Why? We don't sell this. Well, we started our Kratom journey by consuming one of your products. We went to our local convenience store or gas station or smoke shop. They were out of your product. They told me that this was the next best Kratom product and they gave me this, and now I can't stop taking it. What do you recommend that I do? And so I'm seeing this, I'm like, okay, is this a one off? Is it? And so I personally start calling these people and interviewing them. I'm like, I gotta understand more. And there's an individual from Indiana who tells me a story very comparable. His wife is an rn. Yeah, his wife says, you're addicted. We have to check you into outpatient rehab. You can't stop taking this. So he goes to outpatient rehab for 10 days to try to get clean. They put him on Suboxone, they recommend methadone because he can't stop consuming the product at that point. This is March of this year. I'm like, okay, something has to change.

[A]

Now, what did he describe as? Did you talk to his wife as well or as.

[B]

I spoke to both them.

[A]

Okay, what did they describe about his behaviors and what happens to him when he takes the product?

[B]

A euphoric great feeling.

[A]

Now how did she see it, though? It's euphoric for him. But like, what did she think? Like, he's useless right now or.

[B]

No, not quite. I mean, she, she said that he was more in like a Zen, like state. So he's not couch locked. Right. He's not, you know, drooling out of the side of his mouth. But what she would notice is it started with Kratom, has a half life of 22 to 24 hours. 7 oh, has a half life of four hours. So what started with him consuming one of our products a day. When he got introduced to seven, oh, he took his one product. He made it six or eight hours. He's like, the feeling's got to need more. So he takes one in the morning, then one right before bed the next day, maybe five days later. But sometime in a very short period of time, he's like, I need a third serving. Another handful of days. I can't make it through the night without waking up in cold sweats. So I have to have more when I go to bed and have to have some next to the nightstand. So now he's spending hundreds of dollars a day on this. His wife seeing the bank account deplete. He's not being sketchy because he's like, he's needing this to now function, to be at a baseline. I mean, he's a full blown.

[A]

And he wasn't like that when he was on Kratom.

[B]

So they tell me he was not like that when he was consuming Kratom. Now I don't know him personally. I only know the interview. I'm not saying Kratom's a perfect product either. No problem sharing all that as well. I'm sharing this one story. There were five stories like this in a weeks long period. And I'm like, okay, this is fucked. Because we knew it existed in 23 and we knew it was stronger than. More potent than morphine. There's a difference between strong and potent.

[A]

You guys were tempted to go to it because of.

[B]

We weren't, we weren't at ever at the beginning. The first time I went to a trade show in our industry, the trade show for this really obscure counterculture world.

[A]

Is something called fucking trade show.

[B]

Oh yeah. Oh, it's nuts. It's in Vegas, of course. Right. It's a place called Champs and it's. It's the counterculture world.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's everything you'd imagine a smoke shop.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So whatever you can conjure up in your mind, that's exactly what it's like.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the first time I go there, right. I'm not from this industry. I don't know anything about it. Like I said, I love the art and science of business. And I'm walking around at the founder and we're in Orlando. There's one in Orlando and there's one in. In Vegas. I'm looking, I'm like, this is this little incestuous sandbox that everybody's fighting for the same thing. Why don't we look at the entire blue ocean of the rest of the world. Because inside the smoke shop world, people are chasing a feeling. I don't say they're chasing a high. I think that's a little mischaracteristic or classification, but they could be that you're going to a smoke shop looking for a specific experience. Yeah. I myself, when I consume Kratom, I'm using a very small amount as a caffeine replacement. I'm using it for energy focus and mental clarity. I own a company. I could swim in the shit every day. If I take three servings a month, I'd be shocked because it doesn't function the way that this broad brush statement of it's hyper addictive. No. No, it's not. There's a whole bunch of science to support this. So when I'm consuming it this way and I'm seeing the science that we're starting to fund because now we have the money and we're funding, I want to know what the fuck's going on with the plant. I'm like, this deserves a spot on whole food shelf. This should be on sprouts. One day we have to get out of the 15,000 smoke shops in the country where any good business goes to die. And we have to get mass market. We have to retool our packaging. We need to standardize our serving sizes. We need to have metered serving sizes. We need to have clear and transparent warning labels. We need to do all the stuff so we can go play in the big boy arena. Because I'm walking through this trade show and it's no disrespect for the trade show, but the only mechanism of uniqueness is to make stronger and stronger products to people up more.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I'm like, we're not going to do that, guys. And my partners agree, like, hold on. We don't want to do that. We don't want to get people high. Like, that's. That's not why Sean started taking the product. He wasn't taking it to escape reality. He was taking it because he had back pain and he was taking that and he felt better. It wasn't like ibuprofen. It wasn't like Advil.

[A]

Yeah. He wasn't getting like autism from it or something, you know?

[B]

No. And he wasn't getting liver disease. All the shit. Yeah, of course. And so you look at all those things, I'm like, let's stop focusing on this little sandbox and let's go focus on how we take this mass market. I know it's lofty. I know it's ambitious because you still, you pull up Google right now and you say, what the fuck is Kratom? You see the first three page, the first four or five things on Google, Addictive death schedules. Because Kratom is still deemed a new food ingredient from the fda. That's where the FDA puts product. They don't know how to classify it. A new food ingredient, you can't make a structure functional claim.

[A]

What does that mean?

[B]

I can't tell you. It's going to solve something for you.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I also can't tell you there's an implied benefit from consuming it. From a, from a business standpoint, I can't say. If you take this, one of these three things would happen.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Why that matters is when you move into a supplement category, you can now start to promote that it could solve some different ailments. In order to do that, we have to get out of this dirty sandbox of people looking to get high all the time. Bad classification. And we have to start approaching it through a different lens of how do we take a mass market.

[A]

But you also have in that dirty sandbox the people trying to get high off the top all the time. A lot of other companies now using 7oh to pump up their Kratom or whatever you want to say. Yeah, you do that, you're then forced to compete with where you're like, well, I have a safe product that I use myself sparsely when I want to, no problem. But I know if I use their product over there, that probably wouldn't be the case and I might get addicted to it. But my business says that people are starting to buy that more than this because it's, you know, they, they find something that's potent and then they unfortunately get addicted. It's a very strange place to be.

[B]

It is. And the choices that we have made as a business have almost bankrupted us twice in the past 18 months because we have, as a, as a business decided that no matter what would ever happen, we'd never go on that pathway, period. Full stop.

[A]

Good for you guys. Yeah.

[B]

Our business has been cut in half this year over last year. That's okay. We're not for sale. Like my morals aren't for sale in this.

[A]

I appreciate that a lot. Yeah.

[B]

And so it's. It's not. I started this year by saying, this is the devil's work. Like, this is horrible. We got to get off shelf. And now I'm looking at, through a slightly different lens. And not because we're going to make it, not because we're going to manufacture it. When you start to study, when I start to look at more objectively, I don't see people going and overdosing on it. Okay. So if people aren't dying from it. I do believe in free market capitalism. I do believe that as human beings, we should get to choose what we want to put in our body. Okay. So if they're not dying, they don't really have to worry about the harm side. You have a large subset of people that.

[A]

Wait, if they're not dying, you don't have to worry about the harm side, even if they're getting crazy addicted.

[B]

Well, that's where this gets interesting.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I don't have to worry about the extreme side of harm reduction.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

It's not on shelf and it's like, gosh, if you take 400 milligrams, you could die.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I then start to look at how are people consuming it. There's a lot of people online that state that they don't have access to opioids, that they were prescribed at one point for whatever the reasons would be, and they found this to be a healthy replacement to an opioid.

[A]

Seven. Oh.

[B]

And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. Where's the truth in that? Because of my. To start with, you're addicted. Of course you're gonna say that. They start looking. It's like that actually can make sense somewhere. Now let's assume that that does make sense. That product still shouldn't be sold in gas stations, convenience stores and smoke shops to me, because it's still addictive. There's no question it's addictive.

[A]

Meaning you think it should be something that's prescribed from a doctor.

[B]

I think there's a, there's a classification somewhere in the middle that the FDA needs to come up with. And I think cannabis falls into this. I think psilocybin falls into this. I think there's a lot of things. I think from some of my conversations with HHS and fda, they kind of acknowled this, but there's no easy way to do it.

[A]

All right, let's take a big step back for a minute and we'll come back to this because this is just, this is like the, you know, the 500 pound elephant in the room the whole day, which is the fda and like how it works. It's. You already laid out the two ways you get through the FDA earlier. I put the third way on it, which unfortunately is probably true as well. And it's like they don't have A set system. It's like a relationship business. It's not like they operate. I don't mean this literally, but figuratively is like an AI that says, do you have these 10 things for these two things right here? Yes. No. If it's yes, you go through. If no, you don't go through, don't care who you are. Like, we're. We're dealing with something that's supposed to regulate. Regulate all food and drugs. And they may be really scrupulous with some drugs, but then when it comes to supplements or random that people are selling on the free market, not even the black market, they're like, yeah, all right, whatever. I mean, how. It seems to me like it's such a broken system. How. How do we even fix it?

[B]

That's a great question.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

Of course. Why I say it through that lens because I. I'm not. I don't have delusions of grandeur, of wanting to be in politics. Our industry had ran in fear of the FDA since I'd been involved in it. My counterparts in the industry blackballed me because I started going to dc. So, like, you're going to bring the whole industry down. Like, we operate. I don't say above reproach, but our facility is as clean and nice. I mean, nothing to hide. We have 24 7, 365 video feeds you could pull up right now and you could show everybody else producing all the time. We don't hide.

[A]

Fucking. Can we pull that up? That's kind of cool.

[B]

Yeah. Well, I don't have the website committed to memory. It's going to be diversified Botanics for dot com, forward slash, maybe transparency, maybe is.

[A]

That's kind of cool that you have that.

[B]

Oh, I don't want to hide.

[A]

So if, like, Cindy in the back corner is, like, sprinkling a little nicotine and something, I can catch her.

[B]

You're gonna see it snitch. Yep.

[A]

I wouldn't snitch, Cindy. Don't worry.

[B]

Right, so those are. Those are real. Those are live. Right now.

[A]

This is live in your facility. Then just. What's she using? A vacuum cleaner and cook some kratom right there.

[B]

Yeah. No, so. So that room that you're seeing right there, that's our. Our powder production room.

[A]

And so Hope Ice isn't watching this.

[B]

Yeah, that's all right. They're all. They're all i9 validated. They are. They are. We take great pride in this stuff. But you see, I think that the supplement industry needs this.

[A]

And so, yes, this is I've never, I've never seen this before. This is awesome.

[B]

Nobody does this. And so we take, we get some.

[A]

Close up shots too. Yeah, no, no, I'm saying like, can we, can we work that out? You got to get some FX threes like right on there while they're like packaging it.

[B]

We, we have that coming. We're updating the camera.

[A]

I'm going to hold you to it 100%. Okay.

[B]

So what, what started out with last year without any of the, without any of the seven. Oh, stuff I said, hold on. Well, I mean, where did those all started from? Is we got served a wrongful death lawsuit in 2022 and I, myself and my partners kind of lost our mind because I don't want to be responsible for causing harm for somebody. It's not what we stand for, it's not what we want to do. And we got served this lawsuit and we sit around a table and said if we've, if we're killing people, we got to stop the entire business.

[A]

Yeah. What was the, what was the nature? Obviously it's a death, but like what was the claim?

[B]

What was the whole thing that the consumption of Kratom was responsible for the individual's death. And so we get served the lawsuit. First time we'd been sued in this business, right? I mean, first time we'd ever been in a wrongful death lawsuit. Still an ongoing case, so I'll share as much as I possibly can.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And saying, okay, we get served this and it's saying the, the deceased name, what, whatever it was, consumed these three products. Your product was found in his residence and so it's your fault. Highest level.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I'm like, what? And so the first thing we do, right, we retain a lawyer and they then pull an autopsy. And that autopsy shows somewhere around 250 nanograms per milliliter of kratom in somebody's body. And everybody's like, what the does that mean? Yeah, if you consume 25 milligrams of kratom, that converts to about 53 nanograms per milliliter in your bloodstream.

[A]

Okay?

[B]

So this individual at, at the time in which he passed away had about 5 servings of kratom in his body. I'm like, that's interesting. I mean a third of our company takes seven or eight servings a day. And it's very reasonable. Like, that's not crazy to me. But then we start poking around a little bit deeper in the toxicology report and this individual has, I think 22 or 2300 nanograms per milliliter of amphetamines in the system.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

And you start to see that the cause of death is tachycardia, officially.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Heart attack.

[A]

And they were trying to blame this on Kratom.

[B]

So it still is. It's ongoing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And saying, okay, this is interesting that that had me start looking at Kratom through a different lens. What's going on when you consume Kratom? Is it making other things more bioavailable? Because this individual had had a history of drug abuse. He'd been in out of rehab. This individual, the way I recall, and I could be a little off on this, but. But he was at home with his mother, living in his mother's house. He had his child there. He came out of the bedroom one morning and then kind of fell over and had a heart attack in front of him. Horrible thing. I mean, that's horrible for anybody, a mother and a daughter having to see that. Don't wish upon anybody. But in seeing that, I'm like, here's an individual that had had a history of various things that he battled with over the course of his life, had went to rehab and kicked his habit. So it was said. But then he's consuming a little bit of Kratom and we're being blamed for the death. And so I started chasing the digestive pathways that we all have. So you have a series of SIP digestive enzymes, CYP and so there's a SIP4A pathway or SIP4YA pathway doesn't mean anything, it's just numbers. But that pathway is what's required to digest Kratom. But when you start looking at the molecular weight of Kratom and you start looking at the specific gravity of the molecules of Kratom, it's got a higher specific gravity and molecular weight than almost anything else. Why I think that ends up mattering is if you're consuming other products that need the same digestive enzymes, they're all being pulled to digest Kratom first. And it's having everything else become more bioavailable at the same time. I'm playing around with, could that be the case? We're in the process of manufacturing a pre workout product because I'm like, oh, I'm a fitness guy. Why wouldn't we create a pre workout? And so we put I think 5mg or 10mg of metragine in this pre workout and we put arginine and citrulline and good stuff. Yeah, just stuff for blood flow, stuff for pump. And we give out samples to our sales staff, primarily men, younger, fitness enthusiast. And they're walking around with erections, they're walking around with bloodshot eyes and they think I've with them, they think I've swiped the product with Cialis or Viagra. And I'm like, no, like here's all the certificates analysis. Like I wouldn't, it'd be funny. I mean, kind of, but I would never do that. Like that's just not. And so we pulled the strict analysis and we then send the product out for testing. There's no Tadalafil or Cialis or anything the product and that's happening simultaneously. I'm like, holy, you have Kratom. That by itself is probably incredibly benign. But when consumed with alcohol, when consumed with caffeine, when consumed with arginine, citrulline, there's a whole series of things that need the same digestive enzymes. Now all of a sudden those things are way more bioavailable in your bloodstream and it's ramping up the effective nature of all these things.

[A]

I mean, it's awesome that you're also curious in your seat where your job is to run the business, to go look into things and where it can, that's, that's in an ideal world, that's what you should do. So I commend you for that. But like when you start to find out these things because you're making one product. Right.

[B]

A series of products all Kratom based.

[A]

Right. But I'm saying like just to keep it simple, like you're creating.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

When you start to figure out that other things that you don't have any control over, meaning someone could buy your product and then buy perfectly harmless other things that they put into their body. But when put in a cocktail of that could potentially cause a problem, you know, like downstream effects. Is that like scary for you? Because I mean Chick, I'm defer this thing from a doctor obviously, but shit can go wrong in a lot of different mathematical permutations here.

[B]

No, it can, it can. And why this starts to become important is I see these things, I'm okay, we have to, we have to change the way our product is packaged. We have to get this information out into the industry. We have to sit in front of our counterparts and explain what we're seeing. Because there's an odin of responsibility. Now. If someone wants to take methamphetamines, that's their choice. I don't know how to Defend against different. Those sort of things.

[A]

That's different. Yes. That's abusing it. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. But I can say, okay, now there's contraindications that we need to make sure people are aware of when they're at the store, that they could buy a product.

[A]

Yeah. What I'm saying. Let me be a little more fair and clear. If someone, like, goes and buys street drugs or something like that, and they happen to take Kratom, and that causes a bigger problem. I mean, that's horrible. I'm sorry, but that's not your problem.

[B]

I'm gonna make one up.

[A]

That's stupid. But if someone consumes Cheerios.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's got, I don't know, some type of grain in it, and that grain happens to combine with Kratom and, like, the wrong way in the digestive tract, and it goes, whoa. You know, Then it's an issue because they're not doing anything wrong or surreptitious or anything like that in that situation. They're doing something perfectly normal, and they got 100. Okay.

[B]

And so what that started to do is inform all the changes. We started making the business as quickly as we could. We went from an old glass bottle you could probably find online that we said it had three or four servings in it, and it did. But it's not so easy to see through the side of a glass bottle.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I said, okay, we got to change that. We got to put stuff. We got to have metered servings. We got to have droppers in all of our products. Products. Okay, well, that's cute, but that's not a big deal. I said, okay, well, what's the lowest amount of Kratom metragynine that someone could consume or the highest amount that wouldn't trigger those effects? And it's roughly 25 milligrams of Metrogynine.

[A]

Oh, so you were able to. Okay, get.

[B]

Get pretty close to it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so now we say, okay, we're going to standardize the serving size across every product that comes out of our facility. Anything comes out, a serving is 25 milligrams. A serving has to have a dropper on it so you can physically meter out what one serving is. Then we put in a box. So it's not just a bottle because the box has a QR code. The QR code. I said, well, shit. There's so much sign changing all the time. If I keep printing labels and say, contraindication warnings, I'm going to be fucked. Because every six weeks There's a new study that comes out that's informing something new. So if we do a QR code, you can scan the QR code, you can end up on a website, and we can keep showing you all the new studies, all the new research. I said, okay, well, that's cute, but then why don't we stop running from what we do and why don't we start posting 24 7, 365 live video feeds and my lawyers loses his shit. He goes, you're opening yourself up for a ton of liability. I said, only if we do stuff wrong.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

If you don't do stuff wrong, I don't think we do nothing to hide.

[A]

Nothing to not show 100. I love that.

[B]

And then I say, well, what about certificates of analysis? Why wouldn't we have it be that you could scan that same QR code and you could see every material component that's in your hand and you can see all the tests. And so we build that out. I said, well, fuck, that's cute. But someone could completely bullshit that. You could literally use graphic design and just tell everybody their secrets. Analysis don't mean anything. Like, why don't we design a blockchain that you have to physically give people nodes all the way through the supply chain.

[A]

There it is.

[B]

To validate it. And so we do that. Then I start meeting with the government early this year and say, look, all of us inside the Kratom search are not assholes. We're all not trying to kill people. I can't speak for my counterparts. No, nobody's our counterparts are trying to kill people either. But that was the premise that they were meeting.

[A]

You can only control who you are and what you do, correct?

[B]

Yes. And I started showing stuff like this and I started showing the blockchain and I started showing certificates analysis. And I get in. In meetings with individuals that are worried about glycophosphate.

[A]

Is that the. They're spraying on the.

[B]

That's the. That's the stuff when you're looking at apples and the food supply and all that stuff.

[A]

Have I been saying that wrong?

[B]

Glyphosate glycophosphate.

[A]

He says it in such a up voice. I can never tell, but it's a good.

[B]

That's a good representation.

[A]

Damn it. Sorry, people.

[B]

I start showing certain people this blockchain. They said, this is exactly what we need to validate the food supply. Could you make it more mass market? Because then we would hold people accountable, their testing protocols. So now all of a Sudden, people couldn't bullshit us and say it wasn't sprayed on their product because there'd be soil retains and there'd be nodes to show every time something moves, who holds it. And so I'm like, how do you.

[A]

All right, take me inside that. How do you build that out? Because I, you know, I remember back in 2017, people were just like, stop a blockchain on it. And that was like the thing. And it's like, no one knows what it means. You're not supposed to know what it means. It's provocative. It gets the people going. Shout out, Will Ferrell. Yeah, but like, when you say, we're gonna stick it on the blockchain so that people know, let's stay with your product even before we get to regular products. What. What does it actually look like? For my grandma, who might actually listen to this, she does listen to some podcasts. What? How could she understand it?

[B]

Your grandmother could understand it that the blockchain would be the computer program behind what you see on a website. Okay, we don't understand the code. Most of us on a website, we just know when you look at it, it works or it doesn't work. To start with, we are starting to show we bought our glass bottles from supplier A. Supplier A. In order for them to supply our glass bottles, they're saying that their testing protocol is at food grade levels and they have to post their, Their, their testing protocols to the blockchain. Now, what that means inside the blockchain is it's just a digital footprint that has something called nodes to it. Now, I'm not a blockchain aficionado, so if I fuck this up, so be it.

[A]

Comments. Have at it.

[B]

Yeah, but these nodes now all of a sudden you get to say, from a community aspect, is that real and valid or not? And so someone says they're doing the testing, but are they really doing the testing?

[A]

Yeah. How do we know that from the node?

[B]

Because before it can post or be validated to the blockchain, the conglomerate, the groups of people that have nodes have to say, yes, that's true and real.

[A]

But what if they weren't there?

[B]

So that goes into the validation of the data that gets entered and people understanding how that works. So in order for the blockchain to be validated, the FDA has a series of nodes. Their. Their competitors have a series of nodes, our banks have a series of nodes. So now all of a sudden, everybody with a vested interest to say, is this real or not, they don't know each other. There's all just numbers, right. So they get to look and say, yeah, that makes sense. The protocol makes sense, the sign off makes sense, the time of day makes sense, the classification makes sense. All the things that they say they're doing because they're posting their testing like inside of our facility. You see it right now, I keep pointing out, like someone can see it. You'll see at some point us doing swabs to test for microbials on every piece of equipment. You'll see it putting on a clipboard. You'll see all these things go on. And then that gets entered in a computer system.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It has timestamp with the person.

[A]

It's proven.

[B]

It's proven right now.

[A]

You can see it.

[B]

You can see. I'm saying, but from that every supplement manufacturer, every food supplier is, should be doing this.

[A]

I agree 100% with the example. I want to go back to the blockchain though, with the example we're giving. We have to. I've never even heard of this before. I've talked about everyone doing this for shit and you're actually doing it. That's crazy. But like, like with the camera feed and everything. But assuming that other people aren't doing that and you have the banks, the fda, all these different parties who have a node or nodes on the blockchain and they have to validate that this company uploaded this test right here on the glass bottles.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If they weren't there and didn't see it and they're like, well, the time looks good. What they said they did looks good, therefore it looks good. How does that solve the problem? I'll go back to the conspiracy example where like they were putting the label on the tune. Whatever it was. I'm gonna say it was tuna. I don't think it was. But they're putting the label on the tuna is like it was clean and caught clean. Well, let's say that people catch tuna clean in the Mediterranean. Like legally, I'm gonna make something up at 12pm and so it was uploaded at 12pm and let's say the people catch it on at, you know, reporting it at this location, whatever X location is. And on the other end, I actually catch my tuna in one of the illegal locations. I catch it at 9am illegally. But I just decide to put on the upload. I caught it at 12 and I caught it here. And now people validate it. It's like, oh, it's validated because it's blockchain, but to me it's not. I Hope that's making sense for people out there. But to me, that's not validated.

[B]

Very true. But that operates on the premise that you would know all the various components at the same time. What I mean by that is the sense of anonymity actually starts to create the protective mechanism.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Because if you bought, if you got it at 9 o', clock, you have no idea when the noon upload is because it's not always gonna be the same.

[A]

So you lost me there.

[B]

So you're saying you caught your tuna, hypothetically at 9am 9.

[A]

It's supposed to be caught at 12.

[B]

Unless you know for certain it's supposed to be caught at 12 when you go to post it. It's got a timestamp, it's got all the things. And someone's gonna look and say, hold on, this doesn't make sense. This isn't. This isn't. This isn't validated. So part of this ends up being you. The manufacturers have to have a sense of buy into this, that this is where the industry is going. Because the first time you fuck up and you lie and you get caught, you're almost kicked off.

[A]

Yeah, you're kicked off. But I'm saying it would be very easy to lie. I'm trying to keep the example very literal here. Most examples would not be this cut and dry. But if I catch fish offline, no pun intended, at 9am in an illegal place, and I look at my watch, I say, all right, Captain, in case someone's actually tracking our location data, I need you to drive to this point by 12.

[B]

So I would say. I'll stop you right there.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

The way I would solve that is to say, in order to be able to post anything to blockchain, you have to have a GPS locator on your, on your boat to even be validated, to be able to post something on.

[A]

The blockchain at all times.

[B]

At all times.

[A]

Okay. All right. And you're saying you could see they were in a legal place?

[B]

Well, I figured out a way to bounce things across GPS and create a spoofing mechanism. And so I know how to gamify that. Cool. There's gonna be people to do that. 100. There's gonna. People, Bad people are always gonna do bad shit.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And say, okay, let's say that happens. Well, you still then have the. And anytime those fish change hands, those people have a validation checkpoint. They have to approve the transaction. It moved. So you, you figured out how to gamify your gps. You figured how to Spoof it. You're only in the right place. You even figured out how to alter the timestamp. Then you're going to give the fish to somebody to say it's processed. You'd have to have that entire group of people in on it as well. Every one of them in on it, because they not only have to validate the transaction, but they're on the hook for the chain of custody. So if they lie, they're. But it's not a single point node. It's not just them saying, oh, yeah, it's noon.

[A]

Click right.

[B]

It's, oh, yeah, it's noon. Hold on.

[A]

Where'd you go?

[B]

Where'd you go? And the other 700 people with a node. Can we all prove it? It's your responsibility to make sure we can. That you're proving it to us. It's not the other way around. Because if you want to conduct business in the transparent ecosystem, it's on you. You got to give me everything we need to show that it's validated.

[A]

Okay, so question. Why do we need the blockchain for this if everything else requires physical world validation like that, like cameras and GPS location services and stuff?

[B]

For me, it's the. The transfer of data. I think we're in an emerging age where AI specifically, is making it harder and harder and harder to know what's real and what's not. And so, of course, the physical cameras, in theory, I guess someone could use AI and completely all this.

[A]

Yeah. Joe, can you pull up that tweet we had the other day on the Jake Demon account? You know what I'm talking about with the chick? Yeah, this. And so it's getting scary day by day.

[B]

It's horrible. And that's where I think the blockchain starts to finally make sense to people. If you have to have your own unique identifier, and anytime you post content, your physical video content, it had to come through your entry point into. Into the blockchain, and other people had to validate it. People are going to start needing to know that it was really your content because. Right. You have enough content online right now. I could rip 10 videos of yours and have a standalone that looks just like you sound just like.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And that's happening all the time. Yeah, of course that's scary. It's horrible. But to me, that. That is the evolution that we're. We're starting to trap, you know, step into. And I think this. The scary, weird thing about blockchain of, like, it. The other thing with blockchain I think it's a really bad name. We're not trying to make money with a blockchain. There's no magic fucking altcoin that's going to come out. There's no magic rug.

[A]

You don't have a Kratom coin.

[B]

We don't have any of that.

[A]

Come on.

[B]

We just want to value.

[A]

Are you even trying?

[B]

We're not yet. Okay, we're not. But I think that's where this gets such a bad name, is that the, the technology behind it makes a lot of sense. I mean, your time on Wall street, there were. There was a digital layer of transaction for everything you guys did.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Right. Money changes hands. Somebody stamping it somewhere.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That's available to someone, somewhere to review if they wanted to.

[A]

Internally. Yeah. It's not on a public ledger 100%. Right.

[B]

For all the reasons that would be. Yeah. But that then presupposes that couldn't be hacked, altered, edited. We can start to look at Enron, Arthur Anderson, a number of different places where we could say that's actually not true. People will do whatever they need to do. If that's on a blockchain and you have external people that have to validate it, you would have to have a whole conspiracy of thousands of people in on the same thing at the same time. And because it's all. It's all anonymous, you don't know what the. You don't know all the details behind it. You just know what you need to know to validate or not validate it. And so when you take out the altcoins, you take out the rug pools, you take out the ICOs, and you use it for the core technology of showing that when you said you did something, you actually did it.

[A]

Right. Yes, of course.

[B]

That's it. And is it perfect? Fuck no. We're still figuring out on the fly.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, I'm not, I'm not professing to have it all figured out, but I.

[A]

Know that you see the use case for it.

[B]

I see the use case and I see the fact that the average erp, the average tech platform that all of us are posting our shit to, it's only as good as data you put into it. And the overwatch that we put in front of it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so you bring anonymous overwatch from the outside to look at it, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, yeah, this, this passes the smell test. Or it doesn't.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And if it doesn't, it just stays in the pending status that requires us to go look at it and it could still pass. Like, for all I know, in. In the fish example, you actually didn't go somewhere you shouldn't have went. And somebody fat figured one of the test results. They transposed two numbers.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And all of a sudden, normally that would just post somewhere and then you don't catch it for an audit 45 days later. But because the blockchain has guardrails, it's going to flag it before it posts and say, hold on, this doesn't match.

[A]

So you could.

[B]

You could prefix.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You could solve it.

[A]

It's getting scary, though, with the AI stuff.

[B]

It's horrible.

[A]

You see this? So Deep's got this account. It's. It's wild. I just found out this was you the other day. It's Jake. I was like, we do Patreon episodes. So Deep was like, retweeting this Jake Demon guy. I'm like, all right. I was about to say, let's get him in for a Patreon. Turns out it's just deef under an alter fucking ego because he's like a writer and shit. But this. So this is one iteration of the nano banana AI. Can we blow that up so people can see this? Steve, this is from Google. So the one on the left is very. This first one is very realistic, but if you look at that close enough, you're like Uncanny Valley ever so slightly. That's AI. Now let's go to the next one. That girl's a fucking angel, bro. Yeah, look at her.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Oh, yeah, that's real. But it's not. It's not like that girl is perfect. Imagine where this is going to be in two years. That's one iteration. Oh.

[B]

We can do the whole conversation around Moore's Law and compute power. And the 18 months is no longer 18 months. It's like eight months. The doubling of compute power and the halfing of expense associated with it. I mean, if. To me, if anybody's not paying attention to that on global security, on everything across the board, you're just missing it.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

Like, it's. It is crazy.

[A]

What do you think DARPA has. They're fucking 40 years ahead.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They've probably been engineering the weather since 92. Just saying. least they were trying to talk to dolphins. Telepathy. Ethically in 91.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

That's all I'm saying.

[B]

You know, that means I figured out by 93.

[A]

That's right. That's right. You know what I mean? So where else are they? Is any of this real?

[B]

Probably not.

[A]

Yeah. Maybe you're a figment of my imagination. I don't know.

[B]

Elon would say it's simulation.

[A]

It's. Do you ever think it is?

[B]

I question that more and more. I question. You start to really, to me, backtrack some of the origins of religion and what that looks like and the fact that, you know, the dogma that we all attach ourselves to, that it has to be one certain way. But then you look at all the religious scriptures, and they're all kind of a version of each other through a specific lens. Well, where did all that come from? Why is it there? It could make sense to me that it's all some sort of massive computer simulation, that somebody way smarter than we are, way more maybe benevolent, hopefully than we are, is playing a game to see how we play itself out. That's not without possibility to me at this point.

[A]

And why do we live on a planet that's so perfectly distant from the sun with the, you know, 9.8 meters per second gravity, every temperature just right enough to exist every 6,000 years before we wipe ourselves out and have to redo it again? Like, why? Whatever. You know what I mean?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, why is that?

[B]

I'm with it.

[A]

You know, I just had David Kipping in here, who's. He's the head of the Cool Worlds lab at Columbia. One of the coolest dudes I've ever talked to, no pun intended. But he. His whole life is studying and, like, trying. Among other things, is studying and trying to find exoplanets, you know, across the galaxy, if you will, universe. And, you know, like, he'll see these places, and he's like, yeah, no one could live there, though, over and over and over again. And then there's like. He thinks there could be places where people could live or life could live. But it just goes to show you, the more and more we find a guy like him finds, the more and more rare we are to be able to be here. Which you wonder. Like. Like, I've always cited this, but that last scene in Men in Black where they're playing with the marbles that turn into a marble that turn, you know, it's like, yeah, it's possible. It could be.

[B]

It could be.

[A]

I also had Riz Verk in here. You ever hear that guy?

[B]

I haven't.

[A]

He's cool as shit. He's like the Godfather of Simulation Theory. One of them. I shouldn't call him the Godfather. I mean, I love Riz. I think he's a genius. I know People came up with it before him, but he's really run with it. He's an MIT scientist. I've had him in here twice for episodes 274. And then I think I had him back for like 329. But he. Or 3:30, but he basically has gone through, like, all the mathematical probabilities that we could be in a simulation and what that would mean and what. What scares me about is it's like, does that mean there's no free will and it's all just predetermined and like, when I do a good thing or when I do a bad thing, that wasn't my decision. That's where I start to get a little. Freak the fuck out.

[B]

Yeah, he's rushing real quick.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So let's get back into some of the seven. Oh, stuff that's been helpful for you to draw the differences today as well. And I appreciate your candor with all this as well, because this is a new frontier.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

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[A]

See experian.com for details. Experian. When you're. You are in a business, you're supposed to go make money, but you're also trying to be transparent about it and make a product that's not going to fucking hurt people and stuff like that. But I had Steve Robinson in here, Yeah, a couple months ago, and Steve's great. He's like, been on a crusade up in. Up in Maine, in particularly where he's from, where he's uncovered all kinds of abuses of just the overall legalized industry, which I do want to help exposed because I don't want us to blow this. You know what I mean? And there's people who push back on a lot of shit Steve says. But I don't think Steve's 100% right about everything. I think he's on to a lot of things that he has really good evidence for, though. And so just like, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater on, you know, the direction of legalization. We also shouldn't throw it out on the people who are trying to say, hey, let's pull back a little bit here and make sure we're doing it the right way, which is what he's doing now. He's uncovered a whole Chinese thing going on there with the Triads. And I mean, he has it down to the addresses of places they're buying up to do illegal grows and all kinds of shit. However, he also came upon the whole seven OH thing, and this was a shock to him. He didn't know anything about this. And he raised the point about the people buying this up in gas stations and getting addicted. Now, I believe there were a couple people who they were saying maybe were traced to death with seven oh. But to be fair, there's probably other underlying causes there as well. I'm not sure everyone out there argue in the comment section. You know, when you see reporters starting to go in and dig at this kind of thing, though, like Steve and. And find a lot of stories of people who are having horror stories to where they have to go into rehab and it's ruining their family life, life and everything like that. Even if you believe that 7 oh maybe has a ceiling to not be able to kill people on its own, do you not think it's a. Maybe a similar category towards other opioids and stuff like that that we actually should regulate and not have on the market if we can see that it's causing people to have to go to rehab?

[B]

Man, what a.

[A]

It's a loaded question. I'm sorry.

[B]

No, it's. It's not. It's. It's not. I think the, the. I think anytime I hear someone speak in absolutes, there's a sense of in it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And what I mean by that is when I started, I'll say, my crusade in March or April going to dc, I was convinced the world looked one way. And here we are in December, and I think the world looks a little bit different. And what I mean by that is we'd have to. I want to zoom out and look and say, how many times have we tried to abolish something? And what has been the outcome of doing that?

[A]

Prohibition's great example.

[B]

Has it worked before? Yep. The genie is already out of the bottle. Now, whether I think it should go back in the bottle or should never came out of the bottle almost doesn't. It's irrelevant. It's out. And so saying, if that is in fact true, how do we how do we structure it in a way that minimizes harm unilaterally? To me that starts with transparency. I mean it's what we believe in. Actually could care less to quote, unquote, talk about our business. I care more about the industry and what I think we should start focusing on as a society. It just happens to be. I get amused. It's our business of saying here's everything we are, here's everything we up. I think that's a better way to live personally. But when I look at the confusion that started with 7 oh was because it was sold in convenience stores, gas station smoke shops and it was originally labeled as an advanced kratom alkaloid. So you had a customer that walked through the front door that up until mid 24 had only ever been exposed to kratom.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Now they walk in for whatever the reason and are told this is a better version of kratom. And because they've got a sense of trust or rapport building with the place they bought their product from, they say, sure. Now simultaneously we can pull up and you can see, I'll make sure to share it. It's going to be on, on X somewhere. Eric Finneman would be the one to look at. You're going to see that some of our counterparts in the 7 oh world were taking out billboards on the side of highways that it said free70h.com and a QR code. And they knew that they would physically say it wasn't like a free plus shipping model. Like they would send you free product because they knew if you took the product, they knew you're going to buy more. Like the quintessential drug dealing 101. Give you a sample, not charge you anything for it. It's coming to you for free and they know you're going to buy more. That to me is where like, hold on. People knew at that moment they were doing something that was addictive. You just don't do that unless you know it's going to back out on the backside. And so part of it to me starts with whether it's good or bad. I'm not the ultimate judge. I think we need labeling that very clearly states this is addictive because all the science shows it's addictive. I think it should be like a cigarette type of addiction. Now does that kind of stop people from consuming it? Probably not. Could it stop the 18 year old that walked into the gas station that one of his friends said something he sees like, man, my mom was addicted to something I don't think I should do this. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I originally would have started and said I think it should be a Schedule 1. So when you look at July 29, you see a press conference that I was a part of with RFK, with Marty McCary, with Jim O' Neill in.

[A]

DC on the day ish with them.

[B]

I was not on, on the physical stage with them, but I, I'll just say I played a role and I was invited to be in the press conference as well. It. And you'll see them start to discuss just the, the harmful nature of what's going on. The fact that it's the fourth wave of the opioid crisis. The fact. The fourth wave of the opioid crisis. Yep. I mean, you look at like the first wave would have been what, maybe the heroin, how things started. Then I think it switched to, oh, Oxycontin, then it went to Fentanyl. They were saying 7 oh is a fourth wave.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

I would say that's true with the asterisks that now over the past nine months with how much of this is being consumed. So this industry didn't exist in 23 from 24 until now. It's somewhere between 9 and 10 billion dollars a year in revenue. And so when you look at a unit of consumption, if we walk to a gas station, you're going to buy a package, we'll say $20 dollars.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

There's been a lot of people consuming a lot of product. If it was as harmful as I would like it to be, not as I might have made it out to be, you would have seen people dying left, right and center.

[A]

I understand what you're saying.

[B]

Right. There's so much that's being consumed. It's like, okay, hold on, I want to be right, but I might not be right. And so if it's not killing people, which is a up basis for base level, I'm acknowledging that it's still addictive. Yes. But there's a handful of people that are consuming it that it's physically helping them exist. They're, they're business owners, their mothers and fathers that are using it to get through their day. That's a small subset. I'm a numeric guy. So I look at the fact, if you look at the average gas station, convenience store in the US you're gonna get somewhere around. By the time the water finds level, you have about 20 million potential people that are going to buy something inside of a gas station at point of sale that could be easily converted to try something new. New. It's about how the math breaks out. When you look at the number of people that are in active recovery right now, stated in the US it's about two and a half million. So if I look at who am I going to look to protect more? The two and a half million people that could completely get off of fentanyl, could completely get off of methamphetamines, completely get off of suboxone, methadone and switch to a natural botanic based product. Maybe 2 or 3 million people. Those people do matter. But I look at the 20 million people that are walking to a gas station, yes, I need, we need to protect those people from making a mistake and becoming addicted. So the challenging part is the genie's out of the bottle. You look at what's happened in the CBD world. Steve, cannabis, cbd. So we, from Steve's time on Steve's show, we became connected to Steve about from Maine.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And started sharing all the information we had as well.

[A]

Yeah, I knew Rocco, knew him, so I figured he did too.

[B]

Yeah, Yep. Great guy. I mean when, when you start to look at it, it's saying the, the CBD world where you had originally CBD, like I had a CBD company from 16 to 18, it was just CBD. Then you have Delta 8, Delta 9, Delta 10, THCA, THC, B D, all the things I'm not familiar with. The chemists figured out all these crazy things to do with the same molecular structure. Those chemists that, that has become a true commodity. There's no revenue, there's no profit left in that industry. Many of those scientists and chemists vacated and came to our industry now. And so you have the 7 hydroxy. Well, now there's 16 different. 7 hydroxy is not the biggest issue. 7 hydroxy converts to something called pseudo and doxinol. So if you can, if you consume 7 hydroxy, a tab of 7 hydroxy and you metabolize that and you test your blood serum levels post liver, you see something in your bloodstream called pseudo endoxanol. Okay. That's 20 times more potent than seven. Oh, that's in market right now. You can pull up pseudo endoxanol. You can pull it up on the screen, you're going to see seven. Oh, and pseudo, it kind of goes by the name pseudo. That product's already in market. There's another further synthetic derivative. So you metabolize 7 oh into pseudo. You metabolize pseudo into something called MGM 16.

[A]

MGM 16.

[B]

MGM 16. Is now that could be wrong. 10 to 20 times more potent than pseudo. And so you have this game of whack a mole that's starting to get played where it's saying, okay, can we learn from the CBD world? Can we learn from the cannabis world? Can we do things that are different? Because right now, one of the differences is kratom is legal. Federally, it's not illegal.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like, it is allowed to be sold.

[A]

And consumed in all 50 states, too.

[B]

No. So there are six states that it's now currently illegal in and another eight, 10, 12 counties across the U.S. interesting. So that's even its own nuanced issue.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so for me, what I'm starting to look at is say, how do we regulate it? Regulate it being. If you decide as informed consumer that you want to buy this stuff, how do we know it's manufactured the right way? How do we know what a serving size is? How do we know what's in it is clean?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

How can we backtrack all the things? Because then if you're making the decision because you want to experience that, that's up to you.

[A]

Yeah. This is where. All right, this is a wider conversation when it comes to. Let me go to the highest level, when it comes to just legalization of substances. Sometimes it feels like you're stuck between a shit and a fart. Right. Because on the one hand, if you legalize everything, you legalize heroin, you legalize blow, like you are going to have in the free market with. Especially when you enter drugs that we know can be deadly, you are going to have deaths and you are going to have, you know, the. I don't want to state this the wrong way, but, you know, like the tragedy of the. Of every anecdotal time that happens, which will not be once or twice, it'll be a very uncomfortable number to where you then will have movements formed to push it all the way back in the other direction. Now, let me bring it down to 15,000ft in the air. The legalization we have chosen to do with cbd, marijuana, all the, you know, kratom, all these different things. Yeah. Maybe people can end up under these procedures making things that are tantamount to, like fentanyl or something that can kill you. But if they start doing things that on an anecdotal level builds into a lot of different anecdotals, like a seven. Oh. That then leads to serious social upheaval from a group of society saying, wait a minute, let's put this genie all the way Back in the bottle. We can't have nice things. You're going to go all the way back. You know, society is a pendulum. How hard do you want that pendulum to swing, though? And what it feels like is that this whole industry was set up in a way where they're like, people. They fought it for the longest time. You go all the way back to the 30s when they outlawed weed. They made a Schedule 1 drug, and. And all this. And it's like they fought it, they fought it, they fought it, they fought. They said it. Open up the. Open up the doors here. Everything goes. And it's like the people that did that are like, watch what happens now, because you're going to have an uncontrollable free market flowing into this, and problems are going to arise, and you're going to end up building a movement from the other side to. To, like I said, push it back. And sometimes it feels like that's exactly what's happening. It's the same example with the NCAA and paying athletes. I've supported that my whole life. I absolutely think those athletes should be able to go make money on their name. It's crazy that everyone made billions of dollars except the people who did it, right? But the guys like Mark Emmert, the old fucking wigs in the room who fought it forever, I really think they were like, okay, it. You guys want it.

[B]

It.

[A]

We'll give you all of it. Watch what happens. And they set up a system that's built to fail. Now you got kids transferring on a Tuesday because they feel a little differently than they did on Friday. You know, you got legendary coaches retiring because they can't even keep up with it, you know? So do you worry we're going to head in that direction with this industry?

[B]

Yes, I think. I think again, over a long enough rise, and everything's cyclical. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's. It's great that some people might want to try to learn from the indiscretions or the. The. The misgivings of the past, but it's enough people that would want to do it for the right reasons. Right. The counter argument to this, on my side, it's what gets thrown around against me online all the time. It's the only reason that we want to ban this is because it hurt our dollars, it hurt our bottom line. That's. We could pull up a hundred episodes, 100 people online that are saying, that's the only reason I want a gun. It's like, hold on. I can literally show you evidence that I knew how to do this before any of you. You.

[A]

And I could go do it right.

[B]

Now, and I could do it right.

[A]

Now, but I choose not to.

[B]

I choose not to. Now, it's not that my way is right and your way is wrong or vice versa, but it's not because of the dollars and cents. It's because to me, I want to make sure this doesn't turn into a false, a false idol crusade. Yes, I happen to have lost my best friend to an accidental overdose in 2018. Now, that's not why I'm in the industry. That's not somebody sort of hero's journey of now. I'm here to save the day. I didn't even know this industry existed. My best friend ended up breaking his leg playing high school football. Went to the hospital, was put on dilata drip, was in there getting it reset, was in there for a week, 10 days. Whatever it was, was discharged to go home, was given Vicodin, Percocet, whatever it would have been, had maybe a month supply of that to wean off the pain. But then that was it. There was no, there's nothing else. And so then he turned to black market pills when he couldn't have the money for the black market pills, switch to heroin. And here's a guy that, you know, upper middle class white guy from suburb Ohio, like, doesn't really checks the boxes, but he, he had a lot going for him. Yeah, Was in and out of rehab from, you know, 19 until, you know, 23, 24. Kicked it, beat it in his mind. He, he became a, a large advocate for sobriety inside of the little world of suburb Columbus, Ohio. And then one thing leads to another and he starts to do better for himself. He starts to sign a lease on a new apartment in downtown Columbus and decides for whatever the reason, to buy some coke. Goes to his new condo that's unfurnished, he just got the keys, puts a line of coke on his sink, and it happens, that fentanyl in it and it kills him. And it was one of the most horrible, catastrophic things that ever happened to me. I mean, it just shattered my sense of reality because here's this guy that is part of my CBD company. Here's all these things.

[A]

Oh, he was in your company too?

[B]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he started to do better for himself with the success of the business. So moved out of his parents, like all these things, parents end up blaming me for a while. It was a challenging time in life. And so I sit there and say, okay, from where I'm at now, if this product existed back then, would I want him to take it or not? And I don't know how to answer the question. Back when, specifically 2018, when he. When he accidentally overdosed, when he was chasing a feeling, when that. When that thing tapped him on the shoulder and said, you need to do something different.

[A]

All right, not to get too literalist.

[B]

Here, but, no, we can.

[A]

Coke's.

[B]

Coke's different.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, that's out to party. And I mean, I never tried it because it looked amazing and very expensive. I work for 725 an hour in college, and all these kids were spending 100 bucks for three hours to do blow and then spend it. I'm like, I don't know where you get the money. Number one, it looks expensive. But number two, like, never saw someone on coke who wasn't having a good time. Totally different than when you see someone on OxyContin.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, like, these are different.

[B]

Very different. To me, I believe in his side, he was chasing feelings like he was chasing to escape reality. He wanted to feel a different way. And so in his mind, he thought that, I don't know, I never going to have the chance to have this conversation. But he. I don't. He had never shared with me he'd done coke before. And so it wasn't like this was this monkey that was in the background. It's like, oh, well, I want to do something different. I'm going to go do this. I don't know if that's true or not. I could completely making this story up. But if we pull up anecdotal conversations on a Reddit forum or things like that, you're gonna have people that say, seven. Oh, gives me tons of energy, makes me feel great. I can just zip through my day.

[A]

I see what you're saying. It's a tough. Yeah, I don't know if I'd.

[B]

And so that's where I said, tough one. When I started in March and April, it was, this needs to be a Schedule 1. This is going to be the bane of our existence. I'm the far end of the pendulum problem. And then as time's progressing, I'm somewhere more towards the middle of saying, okay, if we ban it, it's just gonna cascade into something else somewhere else.

[A]

But you still have no temptation to make it at your company.

[B]

Absolutely not.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

That's interesting. So you're not to be. And this is like a compliment, you're not technically in the middle on it. You're in the middle on the legislation of it. If you're going to be a part of that conversation, which you are. But it sounds, it's just. I don't know, it's a tough one because it sounds like. It sounds like a little bit of double speak because you're like, no, we're never. It is, it is.

[B]

But I think that, that to me is, who knows? I'm going to be on a soapbox for just a second. I think the individuals that get locked into one perspective, that refuse to consider other opportunities or other perspectives miss out on a whole bunch of what the world has to offer. And so when I start in March and say, like, I know it's hurt these five people, I know, like, our revenue hadn't changed as of March. If I, if I were to pull up our, Our, our revenue and look at Q1 of this year versus Q4 of the previous year, our trend lines are still in the same direction. Our revenue is not at all 0% have changed. But I see these people that unknowingly got introduced to a product and became addicted.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I'm like, somebody's got to do something about that. I understand why, because we knew the science back in 23. So I understand what's going on. And fortunately or unfortunately, as I massively categorize our industry, a lot of the owners of other businesses in the Kratom space, because they might have come from the spice days, because they might have had different paths, I don't know, they'd be as comfortable going to D.C. having conversations. I think, you know, if you, if you pull up, you know, I know that if I wanted, as I well say, get into Capitol Hill, if somebody does a background check on me, I'm gonna pass. I don't. There's nothing a couple speeding tickets like, not the end of the world. Yeah. No drug trafficking, no criminal convictions, no felonies, no things like that.

[A]

Yeah, that's what we said we weren't. That.

[B]

I know. Well, whatever. I'm sharing it now.

[A]

So I'm just trying to help you.

[B]

I appreciate it. I appreciate you watching out for me. And I need to watch out for. But it's in sharing those things, it's saying, okay, somebody need to do something. And I felt comfortable at least going and opening the conversation. And when I started in, in D.C. in March or April, whenever it was, I'm sitting down with congressmen, senators, hhs, fda, like, what the fuck are you talking about? You're talking about Kratom. We tried to. We Tried to schedule that in 2016. I'm not talking about Kratom. There's this other thing you don't even know about, and it's everywhere.

[A]

It sounds like you've had some direct conversations with RFK about this or more the people around him.

[B]

Some of all of it.

[A]

Okay. Whether it's directly with him or some of the people around him in the, in the combination of all the conversations. Where is the current department's head at with this? I mean, you said they were calling it the fourth wave and everything, but I don't know if you want to, like, reveal this, but behind closed doors, how are they looking at it? Is that like some public marketing that they're saying it that way and maybe they feel a little more nuanced on it, or do they actually feel that strongly about it?

[B]

So I didn't know these things prior to this whole year. When I started bringing to the attention of everyone I brought to attention to. They said, we need to do what's called an eight factor analysis. There are eight factors that are required by the FDA to deem if something's harmful or not. We hear you, Ryan. We understand the signs you're showing us, but we need to do our own analyzation to it. And so they start in, I'll make it up March or April doing this. And the eight factor takes time. At the end of the eight factor, they say unequivocally, this should be a schedule one. It checks all the boxes for what should be a Schedule 1 narcotic. And so that's the press conference. And from July 29, you pull it up on YouTube, it's there. They say very clearly, fourth wave of the opioid crisis needs to be a Schedule 1. It's our recommendation. Yes, yes, yes.

[A]

That's the public.

[B]

That's the public. They meant that all the way up to that point. And I think they still mean that. Then it goes to the dea. The DEA now has to also do their own eight factor analysis to prove that the FDA wasn't full of shit. And then the DA is the only one that can actually, other than the president, invoke a scheduling of a product. And so I know from ongoing conversations with HHS and fda, they're still saying this is horrible and pseudo indoxinol is horrible and MGM is horrible and everything you're sharing. Yes, yes, yes, yes, we see it. We're still on the same page as so much. So they're. They're asking the DA like, can you get off your ass and do something. The challenge is, of course, during that time period, the government shutdown, we have a current administration who has wanted to, I think, have some level of a surplus, hypothetically. So they started pulling back on any level of additional support. So the FDA is at an all time low from a staffing standpoint. The DEA is at an all time low from a staffing standpoint.

[A]

DEA too.

[B]

But you also have to look at. This is again, things I didn't know the fda. I'm going to make up the numbers. Who knows what the fuck it is. Let's say they have 20,000 employees. That's for everything that food and drug in the entire U.S. yeah. It's not enough. And so you look at the little tiny department that supplements call it. 20 people. So these 20 people, I don't care if it's 200 people, they have to go and inspect every facility.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

Pull labels, do testing. There's not enough manpower to do it.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

And so the fact that they even did an eight factor and they really did it, and they're really like, yes, thank you. You're exactly right. Like, awesome, thank you. Press conference. Yes. Hand over. The da And DA is like, well, hold on. We're worried about the Sinaloan cartel and blowing them up as they're trying to bring in fentanyl into the country. Worried about the CCP and their connection. We're worried about all this stuff. And you want us to. With Kratom 7.

[A]

Oh, I see what you're saying.

[B]

And so I say, hold on a second. From the first time I went to dc, not the first time, but this year I'm with my lobbyist off, off of Capitol Hill. He's got some people around him and says, one of the people says, I think you're being followed. What are you talking about? Nobody's following me. I'm literally a nobody. No, I think you're being followed. And I'm like, okay, maybe this is some sort of hustle. They're going to shake me down for some money, for protect. Like, I'm instantly getting into the way the world could work. I see. That's fine. Whatever. Another day passes, we have another meeting. I feel like, no, we're pretty positive being followed. I said, of course you go to Capitol Hill. You gotta have the background checks.

[A]

Yeah. You get followed, right?

[B]

I mean, sure. So I go back home, all the pieces and parts, and the lobbyist team calls me and says, no, we know you're being followed. And we kind of have a sense of who it is? We were taking some pictures, running through some intelligence, and it's the Sinaloan cartel following you. I say, like, where's the ask for you to then offer me protection? They said, we don't offer protection services. I said, hold on, you mean tell me the cartel's involved in this somehow? They said, I don't know. They're just the ones that we think we're following. We have pretty good reason to believe they're following you. All right, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being like, I should hunker down on a bunker and never come out, and one being I should just walk around with target on my back, where do you rate this risk? So I don't know, maybe four and a half, five. Mike. Thanks. Right down the middle, like, well, what the fuck am I going to do? So just continue.

[A]

Look like you could take them. Might be all right.

[B]

And so one thing leads to another and I'm out and about in the world and I see an individual walking around. Doesn't really fit the environment I'm in. Latin American individual and in a place where Latin Americans wouldn't normally be.

[A]

How dare you?

[B]

I know, I'm sorry. Just the nature of some places, they're just not a large Latin American population. Zen, brutal, has a face tattoo, a shaved head. Like, doesn't. Like which one of these doesn't belong? He didn't belong. And eventually walks up and he literally sits at a table adjacent to me and starts taking pictures and video and laughing. Okay, this is really weird. Maybe I food on my, like, whatever. So I shake it off. This is three weeks afterwards, Fast forward another week or two. So I'm back and forth to DC a couple times a month, and I have a trip planned to go to D.C. on a Monday. And I'm at a shopping center, don't know what I'm buying, don't really remember the details. But an individual walks past, like a trip for a store, closed walk, walks past me, goes and looks at some things, comes back and walks in front of me and says, have fun at DC tomorrow. I don't think you should go now. No one knows I'm going to dc, right? This isn't like public. I'm not posting some magic place. Like, I've got an itinerary that I booked an hour before. Like, there's nothing. Oh, okay. And this is the same time I. That Rocco joins us. And so I'm like, this is. This is really uncomfortable now. This is really uncomfortable. And so I bring it up to My lobbyist, the guy that's helping us with this stuff, he said, look, I've had, From lobbying for 20 years, I've had some things go on in my life because I'll introduce you to somebody that can at least do a deeper sense of background. If you needed some protection, they could do that. And so they do what they do and they share what they share. Which then eventually has me saying to Rocco, but I know this is really weird. I don't know who to tell this to, because everybody thinks I'm fucking crazy. But I've had two or three interactions with somebody that doesn't really fit. Like it wouldn't be anywhere. Normal people somehow know I'm going places that there's no record of me going. So it feels like our systems have been hacked. Do you know anything about that? Do you have anybody? He goes, oh, yeah, I used to do that. I'm like, wait, what? And it's like Pandora's box opens, his eyes light up, Brother, I got you 100%. That's exactly what it was. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he, you know, shares what he shares, and that then introduces me to a whole whole new way of being where, you know, have. Have armored vehicles and have security team.

[A]

And yeah, you got some. Are you allowed to talk about that with your guy and your friend? And.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you got like a heavy hitter now helping you?

[B]

Well, you know, to have. I think anytime there's a lot of money involved in situations that sometimes money clouds people's judgment. And so whether it's a cartel or the Chinese Communist Party or the Russian Bratba, which we'll get into, that thing is all of them in different ways. I think anytime you have a chance to impact people's pocketbooks significantly, some people might not want that to happen. And so I think originally things were more of a scare tactic.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like, if somebody wanted me dead, I would have been dead like this. That's not a big deal.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

But what has ended up happening is as Rocco has helped us assemble a security team not only for our business, but for me as a person and just life in general. Some of those people have a background that I'm not. I hadn't been familiar with. Right. That had done things inside of three letter agencies that had done things inside of the Marines that had been part of. Of assisting some elite level operating crews.

[A]

Like whacking people and shit.

[B]

You know, whatever they've done, they've done. Right. And then has worked inside of Marines in the CIA. And why that ends up being interesting is it exposed me to a whole different level of intel that I'd never considered before. Every one of our phones has not only a tracking device on it, but if you're interacting with social media and you happen to open up the app that drops a pin somewhere that someone can easily see where you're at and what they're doing doing, they're marking that for you. They're marking it. I mean it's happening all the time, non stop, no matter what all of us are doing. And I wasn't aware of all this. And so I start taking social off my devices and I don't care about the stuff anyways. But then as I'm exposing the security team to more and more and more of what's going on and how it's all interacted, they say, well, we'll just do a, you know, a deep dive analyzation of all this. We have access to some software and then we'll will interact with, will actually pay a company that can, can go even deeper than we can go. And they do a really in depth deep dive on the industry. The bills of lading, the shipping, the wire confirmations, what's happening where? And unequivocally, with no shadow of a doubt, you have the Chinese Communist Party that is sending a series of extract solutions and solvents and things to a handful of very specific people in the US they are absolutely on the naughty list. And a. It's a company that's on the do not fly list that is directly sending product to us. Wait, wait, not do not fly. The.

[A]

Right, right. No, I understand what you're saying. It's a company. You're saying the company in China, the company actually send it. They're not sending it like through the cartels coming across the border, they're directly sending it to the U.S. directly send.

[B]

To the U.S. yeah. You have the cartel that's the Sinaloan cartel that's involved with some aspect of what it looks like originally, money laundering, but I think it's more than that now. And then you have same thing with the Russian Brava, that there's a direct connection to some of the industry that, what looks like speculative. I don't know this to be true. It looks like one of the individuals probably took a loan out from somebody to get a business off the ground and maybe didn't know that it was someone you wouldn't want to loan from.

[A]

Yeah. When you say Russian Bratfire, you're referring to their mafia.

[B]

I am, yeah. And so you have this, I'll call it as much as dead to rights, this whole intelligent package that we've put together that, that we've turned over to the FBI, to the DIA dea.

[A]

That's not so promising these days.

[B]

Right. Right now we're looking for something as I'll be conscientious of this. When this has been brought up to the FBI, they say we're aware of it and it's part of a bigger ongoing investigation. Great. So what should I do? Just protect yourself. Okay, cool. Thank you.

[A]

I'll see you in Valhalla, brother.

[B]

Cool. Right. So. So it's just. It's been an interesting year with saying, you know, I started out on something that I had no idea any of that was behind the scenes. It was just people looking to make money. But it's a lot more than that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then having conversations with Steve and starting to see kind of the underbelly. That's where the conspiracy thing, conspiracy theory, like so much. That is a conspiracy theory.

[A]

It's not that in this case. I mean, he's got addresses, bro.

[B]

And not we go as far as we have addresses of businesses external from the states. Right. It's only external. Right. That's important to state. But we've got addresses, we've got pictures, we've got bills of lading, we've got wire receipts, we've got got. We've got entire packages to show what's actually happening.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So this isn't like, well, it could be maybe happening. And this is using some pretty advanced tech that we paid somebody else to do. Right. It's not our tech. And it's like, holy. Like this is real. This is really happening. And then I've been back, like, why would anybody want to. This is pro linebacker TJ Watt. And I'm back with YPB by Abercrombie for another activewear drop. My second co design collection collection has new shorts and tanks that keep up with all my in season workouts. And their new Restore collection is a game changer off the field too, because even pro athletes like me need rest days. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in the app online and in stores. Because your personal best is greater than anything. With this. Like why, how.

[A]

How creative do you want me to get on that, on the answer to that?

[B]

Well, I'll share my speculation. I want. I want to know yours.

[A]

Let's get your first.

[B]

Yeah. Because what I started looking at is originally thinking it was just a cartel, just a Sinaloan cartel. Just. But starting there y. I showed on the path of. Hold on. If fentanyl is being squeezed out and you have this drug that's really inexpensive to manufacture that you not going to overdose on, but it is hyper addictive, you've now built a customer for life in your ecosystem system.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And saying okay. But then I see the combination, the connection from CCP to the cartel and more of a destabilization of. Of the American society. And what's going on there. You can see not only are they. Is the CCP shipping product. Not product, but solvents and things like that directly, but they are now doing things with the cartel as well. That just wasn't where it started.

[A]

Oh yeah, they've been doing that for a while. Yeah.

[B]

Right. In. In our industry we can see that. And so I'm saying, okay, they're looking to destabilize our, our life, our society as a whole. I'm a little lost on the Russian side of things. Other than the natural sense of money laundering and back and forth. Could it be destabilization as well? You would know a lot more than I would in that sense. Because here I look at. I'm just. I'm laughingly. I'm a guy that didn't inherently care about a business that loves business, then comes in and says man, there's a big problem over here. Why don't we solve the big problem collectively? Why don't we watch out for people? Why don't we take a product mainstream that then in doing all this there's this whole other Pandora's box that gets opened and saying there's a lot of up stuff that goes on in the world. I can see not. We have sex trafficking evidence, we've got child trafficking evidence. It's all the same and we have it all. It's like I'm seeing how all these pieces go together.

[A]

You're getting it too.

[B]

What do you mean? I'm not getting. I'm not.

[A]

No, no, you're getting. No, no, not, not you. But I'm saying like in your security team going through things that relate to your industry, they're also bumping into this stuff.

[B]

They are. And yeah.

[A]

Now I've heard this from fucking 40 million people from all different angles reporting on the same thing. It's obviously completely true.

[B]

Yeah. And just seeing that knowing. And again these aren't. This isn't me originally. It was how do we just create a perimeter? Right. How do we protect just the. Just a business itself. To me, when you have an industry that went from zero to $9 billion in 18 months.

[A]

Huh?

[B]

All of a sudden, there's a lot of extra cash flowing around to cause a lot of havoc. So it was originally, let's button up our four walls and make sure nobody come in and spike our product. That's what started. So if I was going to with somebody and I had the inroads, I would put a plant in. I would put somebody inside your facility. I would drop some stuff, I would then, you know, leak it. And all of a sudden, poof, you're out of business. And so we started protecting that. And then it was, well, holy shit, I'm being tracked. I'm being traced. I gotta essentially start to become a ghost. I gotta start using Faraday bags. I gotta start figuring out how to divert where I'm going. And people don't know where I'm going all the time. I need different cell phones. It's.

[A]

Do you get scared?

[B]

For a long time? I was. For the first four months, I wasn't sleeping much at all. I mean, this is so far out. Like, I didn't sign up for all this.

[A]

I mean, to have a guy walk up to you in the store and say, have fun in D.C. essay.

[B]

Yeah, it was one of those. When I heard it, it. I'm like, what the fuck did I just hear? And the guy walks out the door, and I'm like, was this real?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then it is real. And then we. I land in D.C. that's the other part. I land in D.C. and. And start getting a hop in a car. And a pilot calls me and says. He keeps calling. I'm on a phone call and some maybe 15 minutes towards downtown, and you finally pick up the phone. He goes, hey, Brian. Yeah. He goes, you're being followed. Like, what do you mean? Because there's a brown. Whatever it was, Kia Sportage. Is there one behind you? I look sure. Three cars back, a brown Kia Sportage follows me all the way to downtown. And here's. There's no itinerary. There's no. I'm like, this is wild to me. And so it's during those times I'm not sleeping, I'm not eating. You think of all, like, it's so wild to me with how much I travel. You check into a hotel.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You're vulnerable everywhere.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

I don't have an idea who has come in before me and spoken to the clerk behind the counter and says, I'm Ryan's. Insert X, insert Y, has already went to the room has already put stuff down, is already waiting for me there. Like all of a sudden it's just everything that is normal is not normal.

[A]

They God damn swear all this is dirty. No matter where you turn your head. They, I'm guessing, you know, if they saw you as a guy that was trying to actively lobby against this, which you would think, oh, that creates a total dark black market for them. Maybe they like that better. But obviously there's something so good about the legal market that they're able to use as their own black market right now that they're like, no, we want that. And that probably has a lot to do with China. I'm talking about the cartels getting involved obviously too. But no, it's interesting because this is where my head goes with this stuff. You bring in the security, three letter agency, high level X, ground branch type people, X. You know, I could see, I'm not implicating my boy Rocco in this. I'm not saying he would know this, but I could see how Rocco, through his connections, the people look at Rocco and they're like, oh, wait, Rocco's connected to that guy. We're still working over here. We can kind of use this as a back channel to get in there. And I don't say this from, you know, some tinfoil hat place. I mean, I had a pretty surreal moment back in March. I had Ed Calderon sitting in that chair right there, who's obviously been, you know, he was a cartel cop in Mexico. He's been, he's been the guy reporting on this for decades at this point. And you know, he's, he's just cooking. And while he was sitting here for like six hours, we did two episodes. He's cooking at one point and he's like, you know, going through all these different things. He's like, so are we going to talk about like the CIA getting to these big banks and you know, getting top 10 and then laundering money for the cartel? Are we going to talk about that? And I'm like, ed, as a matter of fact, seven days ago, I you not, I had the guy who was the knock from the CIA, who was that dude who did flip that guy at the bank to launder money for the cartels on behalf of the CIA as a part of the mission. So yeah, we are going to talk about that. We actually did just talk about that on the show as well, but please continue. And he didn't even skip a beat. He wasn't like, he was like, yeah, exactly. And just kept going. And it's like the world is this really up place and all these dark underground organizations, including the worst criminal organizations that exist, are actually cover battlefields for people on both sides of the coin, be it foreign governments, our own government espionage agencies, obviously, whatever, to use as a tool for access for whatever means they're going to do that for. In some cases, it's not actually to stop it, by the way. It may be for just pure intelligence purposes. In other cases, I'd like to think it'd be to help to try to curb some of this stuff or stop it, but it gets really weird. So that's what I was saying, like, where my head goes to with some of this. I'm not saying that's what it is, but I do wonder sometimes if like, that's where the eye is on the ball.

[B]

I agree. It's. It's been. It was one of those things that physically made me sick the first time I started putting together what I thought could be pieces. And what I mean by that is, of course, to me, I have this romanticized version of the CIA that they're, you know, out inside the world doing, you know, inherent good. I know, I know, right.

[A]

Sorry.

[B]

But, you know, they're. They're out protecting us. They're doing whatever. They're destabilizing governments for our best ability. And let's even. I'll even operate in a sense for just a moment. Let's say that's unequivocally true. I'll put on Rosecard glasses that it has to be true. I know, I know. But then how foolish am I to think that other countries haven't done the same thing with their version and take them into our. Our ecosystem. That's right. That we're so advanced and we're so sophisticated that no one could come on our turf. And as I start going to D.C. and start having these meetings and start seeing which ones work and which ones don't work and, and saying like, hold on. At the highest level, you have a product that you know is addictive, that's being sold in gas stations, and we've got kids as young as 15 being.

[A]

Sold that should not be allowed in any circumstances.

[B]

It's labeled 18 and over, but it's still happening. And we've got video and evidence and all these things.

[A]

That's nuts.

[B]

And so I show it to a senator or congressman and said like, this, this is your. This is your state. This is the exact address. This is happening. Like, oh, and nothing. I'm like, hold on, this isn't one Business owner being mad at another type of business owner that wants to put the business owner out of business. And I get that. That's what you deal with a lot of times in your chair. I get that. I get it. But as I'm looking at that, looking at, you know, agencies and the way the world works and hadn't considered that maybe somebody's putting people inside of our government, inside of foolish. Like, I'm acknowledging my. My, my. The moronic nature of what I'm saying. I had never considered it before. I'm living in this bubble of like, oh, no.

[A]

Well, welcome to reality.

[B]

We're doing it everywhere else in the world. No one's coming here with us. And I don't have direct evidence of any of this, but it stands within reason that, of course it would be happening.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And of course we can see the CCP buying up land and we can see all the things that go on.

[A]

Have you ever seen that map?

[B]

Oh, it's. It's next to nuclear sites and.

[A]

Oh, my God, bro.

[B]

Potential, you know, deep underground bases, all the fun stuff.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's wild. And, you know, the CCP thing with the reverse Opium War has been well documented at this point. There was a guy, Ben Westoff, who I hope to get on the show at some point, who wrote a book called Fentanyl, Inc. Back in, like, 2018, 2019, you know, I'm talking about. So really cool guy. I remember he did a podcast with Joe Rogan back in 2019 where he talked about all this. And. Sorry, for people who've heard this on the podcast before. I've told this story a few times, but. But, you know, he was telling Joe he was a. He was like a culture reporter, reporter on, like, music. And so he got to sign a story, something in the music industry. And he was interviewing some source in the story. And the guy, as an offhand, mentioned this fentanyl thing, this maybe back in 2014. He's like, what the is that? Starts pulling on this phrase, like, holy, this is crazy. Turns into this whole project that turns into this book. And this dude, Savage, he's like, you know what? Why don't I just fly over to China and see how easy this is? Flies his ass over to China alone. This is just like a fucking reporter, author, right? Goes to one of these labs and. And very easily, like, walked into a fucking Walmart, procures all the. All the shit you need for fentanyl, and, like, realizes where it's going, how they're sending it in this case, there was a lot of stuff going through. The cartels getting directly to our country. And it's like, like, of course, like if you're an enemy country, this is, if it's this easy, this is what you're going to do. And this is my point with, with capitalism. Like, capitalism is the best system. I'm the farthest thing from a socialist, let's be very honest. But it's not like anything. It's not a perfect system. And unfortunately, when you combine elements of capitalism and, you know, democracy and republicanism and these beautiful things, places that don't have to play by those rules can use those forces against you. It creates the ultimate place for a Trojan horse. Because if you are a place that lets in all horses, regardless of what color they are or how big they are, you can get in something fake and you can let all the fucking people come out and pillage the whole place. And we are seeing that to an extent that I'm not sure we've ever seen it it at this point in our country.

[B]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, look what's coming out right now. And what is Minnesota about? The Somalians?

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Just recently, what, 2735 bucks per Somalian that comes. And it's a government funded program and it's nuts because of the, the communist dictator they were trying to put in. Like it's a whole back channel of things. And whether it's unequivocally true or partially true, it's so wild.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

It's just like, like in the number of people to me that. And I have been one of them. Just bury my head in the sand.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then the number of people then don't bury their head in the sand. That will hop on a microphone and feel free to talk about it and then do nothing about it other than that. Now I'm not, I'm not saying that on your side, I'm saying.

[A]

Oh no, I know what you're saying.

[B]

Like there are so many people that will gladly post online and say whatever, but then push comes to shove, then what the are you going to do about it?

[A]

That's right.

[B]

There's a lot of. It's not even the keyboard warrior side. It's like if you stand for something. Stand for something.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's the thing. Like not being melodramatic, putting my life on the line, going to D.C. i don't know if that's fucking real or not, but I stand for something. So I'm going to keep going because that's what you do.

[A]

Yeah, it seems. It does seem to me, and I don't want to understate it at all. That's scary. And you're getting fought. You've been followed now, at least that you know of repeatedly. Which means. Probably happened more times you didn't know. Oh, yeah, you know, so they're monitoring you. Hope they're not outside my place right now, by the way. But that's neither here nor there, you know. So, Joe, you want to go out there and give it a gander? Good Spanish. That's not promising.

[B]

There's security outside.

[A]

The guys, those guys, they know it. The dudes working, drilling over there, they can help out. But, you know, it's like. It sounds to me like it's more a scare tactic. But what happens when you get the one. Whatever it is, and you only know what it is, you get the one good outcome that they decide is a bad outcome for them. And they're like, wouldn't be the worst thing if this guy went. I mean, that's. That's terrifying, bro.

[B]

Yeah. And that. That's where I was for a while. What I look at at this point, if there was a time, like, talk about the simulation, if this is the way to go out, I look at all the different ways I could go out. Like, when it really comes down to it, die of old age, die of cancer, die of a heart attack, die in a random car accident, that somebody runs a red light, that I've done nothing wrong, or if I was to be eliminated for doing something that I believe in, that's okay to me. I don't want that. I'm not wishing for that. And it's not to say like, what a noble cause, because it's fucking Kratom. At the end of the day, this isn't the most noble cause in the world.

[A]

World, right.

[B]

But saying if you don't believe, what is it that. What's that saying if. If you don't stand for something, you fall for everything.

[A]

Right. Yeah.

[B]

I only stand for this right now. I don't want to go out. I think there's a lot of good still to do in the world. I think that all this stuff, hopefully, you know, platforms like yours shine light on. Hold on, there's. Number one, the media is presenting this in an entirely bastardized version. Number two, because it's an. Because Kratom to start with, is a new food ingredient. When you go to Google, I know SEO really, really well because you can't talk about structure, functional claims or implied benefits of consumption. We can't get anything to rank in Google anywhere. So the first eight things in Google say how bad Kratom is. You can't, you can't unseed that right now, because if you did, you're breaking the law. You're gonna get in trouble for that. So, okay, that's there. Then you have this, this plant that people don't understand. That's confusing as. Because it has 52 alkaloids. What's an alkaloid? What's a sub alkaloid, what's a metabolite, what's mitragnosis, what's 7? Oh, I don't understand the difference. None of it's simple, none of it's easy. But there's still people that benefit from consumption. There's people that have a lot of harm from consumption, including Kratom.

[A]

All right, so let me ask it like this. And this is a little bit simplified, so might not be the easiest answer, but five years from now, what does a perfect market look like within your realm of the market? Don't give me weed and all that, but like within kratom. And 7. Oh. From a regulation standpoint, what's allowed? What's not allowed? You have a magic wand. What would it look like?

[B]

I believe that everything should be allowed. I believe things should be sold in certain channels based off a harm reduction model in English, taking Kratom leaf. Kratom, that's had an established basis for consumption since 1880. For that to be sold in whole foods, for that to be sold in sprouts, for that to be sold anywhere in powders and capsules, there is almost no chance the FDA did what's called a single ascending dose study all the way up to 12 grams of consumption. That'd be like a salad bowl. You'd have to eat of Kratom. And it was supposed to be the FDA smoking gun that said Kratom was the worst thing in the world. And what came out of the study is no significant adverse effects. People weren't addicted to it. They didn't go through withdrawal. They didn't want more. They had some nausea, but so did the placebo. Because 12 grams of anything is a lot of consumption. And so because that's true, I think that should be sold. I think it should be an 18 and over product. I would even say let's, let's ramp it up and say 21 and over.

[A]

If you're gonna do alcohol.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, no big deal at all to me. Call it a 21 and over product. I think as you start to get into an extract based world, which is what we're actually known for, we extract our products. It's actually when you extract you're able to tighten up the tolerances because natural BioMass has a 20% swing in what's in it. Our tolerances are a half percentage point. But that also means it's more pure, it's more potent, you can consume a lot more in a lot less time. I think that should end up finding its way into more of a dispensary type of model where the entire environment is 21 and over. I think you still have to have certain labels on package. I think it's lost to be metered servings. I still think we should cap the amount of total availability of product in a bottle so that if you. You'd have to buy multiple bottles to cause harm to yourself. I think as you get into some of the more strong derivatives that is 7 hydroxy, pseudo endoxanol and MGM and who knows the other 65 things that come out, I think those end up needing to be in a compound pharmacy type of environment that you could use a Teladoc to gain access to it, that it could be shipped to your house overnight. I think there should be another step that goes in between you and being able to walk in and buy way too much too quickly. And because it's a naturally occurring product, it should always be in market and naturally occurring like it, it doesn't need to be eradicated. Doesn't need to be a monopolized by putting inside of Pfizer's hands. Lord knows that's a fucking horrible thing to do. Yeah, but it's saying how do you ensure that the quality is always maintained? Because in a true commodity market then the only way to increase your margin is to cut corners.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so how do you protect that? Because the consumers are going to consume it. And so I would have label requirements, metered serving size requirements, standard serving sizes across the industry. I would have certain product being able to be sold in certain verticals to watch out for people. Certain certain sales environments. I would have the digital side of things would have to have a really true way to validate someone's driver's license to purchase for shipment that we'd have to both bolster that up. I think we'd have some sort of. I mean this gets a little Pollyannish. But I like inside of our business, if you wanted to buy, if you came online and tried to buy a bunch of product every day for Five days. By the time you get to day three, we're stopping your order and we're calling you. Yeah, because it doesn't make sense to us like all of a sudden automatically. Yeah. Hold on. Like, wait, wait, why are you buying 24 bottles of this stuff?

[A]

Right.

[B]

Some. Wait. I think, I think we should do that as an industry and I think we should do that to watch out for people. I think we should have a secondary side that's a true harm reduction model where if you've developed an unhealthy relationship with any of our products, I think we have an odess of responsibility to help you get off the products. I think that should be something we do. That would be the, the idealistic world in five years would be creating that ecosystem.

[A]

Okay. If you found out, because again, this is still a new. Kratom itself is still a very new phenomenon. It's something they're learning a lot more about. You outlined earlier all the different things that still need to go into that. If you found out at any given day moving forward that, that you could sit back alone after reviewing a bunch of data that you were able to get a hold of and sit in your room and realize in your subconscious and conscious that there were more damage to this existing than not existing, would you get out 100%. Could you see why people might be cynical out there and not believe you on that?

[B]

I do. We have built a mechanism that's unique, which is our distribution channels and our manufacturing prowess and what that means. GMP compliance is kind of the base level standard for manufacturing supplements. When you want to get into the fray and be the best of the best, the one of one, you start going after an NSF certification. It's a, it's something that's, you know, as much as three times more stringent than the fda. And so a year ago I told our team, we're going to file for an nsf. We're going go through this, we're going to figure this out. And they looked at me like I was crazy because most supplement manufacturers can't get nsf and no Kratom company is being considered like we're like the scum of the earth. I said after the first quarter, I said, we're paying for it. So it's going to, you know, we're putting a constraint on it. Like I'm already going to pay for it. They're going to show up. Let's build towards it. Well, the, the audit was scheduled for the first week in March and we get a call Thursday before Thanksgiving. And they said, well, we had somebody cancel. We're going to be out on Monday. Oh, you're going to come do the most stringent inspection in the world on Monday? Four months ahead of schedule? Yep. Great. We'll see on Monday. They show up on Monday. By the end of the second day, they come and sit down and say, look, we literally thought this was a joke. We thought we were going to come in and like you're just a trying to make Kratom, like we're just gonna fail you right away. Like we're just gonna take your money. We have tried and we can't find anything material that's wrong with your business. You're gonna be the not. So if you look at NSF. NSF, it's what, 455? 2? Not that that matters, but the supplement classification. Less than 50% of the companies that ever apply get approved for any level of NSF. Less than 30% of the companies that apply ever get an A rating. And less than 2% get an A rating on their first try.

[A]

You got all of them?

[B]

We got an A on our first try. We're the only Kratom based company in the country that has nsf. And so what I'm saying is, yeah, I understand it's cynical, but we've been in business since 2012. We've got very, very, very solid distribution partners across the country and we've got a world class manufacturing facility that's able to, to ratchet up and ratchet down in any consumer package you could at any moment in time. So would it be hard? Absolutely. Would it be painful? 100%. We also have ran our business that we like to keep, you know, three to four months of operating capital floating around at all times. I've said to our company from the day I say I was, you know, anointed CEO if and when the creative industry got eradicated, I want enough money sitting aside so nobody would be, everybody would still have a job. It would take us 90 days to spool up something new and we should always have two or three new products that are not this vertical ready to come to market in case that day happens. So we actually have the products, would they be as lucrative? Probably not. Would they have the same sales velocity? Probably not. But we'd be able to continue forward and the people that look to us to earn a living would still have, would still have a way to make a living. It wouldn't be the same, it wouldn't be easy. And it's easy to say that because I haven't been faced with it. It. So I. Some of it's all too. It's easier for me to say this because it's hypothetical. I know when we got. When we got that first wrongful death lawsuit, partners, I sat down, said, we're done. We're just going to fold shop. It's not all the money in the world. Like, we've been successful as a business and we've had hard times as a business. It's not worth knowing you're causing harm to me. Great. Like there's. There's so many other things I'm involved with. You'll appreciate this. Somehow, through the. The luck of the way the world works, I get introduced to a scientific researcher out of Maryland that has been working on a 5D amino acid peptide. What is in English, naturally occurring amino acid string that has a 5 dimethylated. It's science, okay? It's. It's the molecules. It's the molecules that get put together to do some fancy. And this individual, this peptide has reversed Alzheimer's and dementia in 1200 people.

[A]

Reversed it?

[B]

Reversed it. Not late stage, pre late stage. It's reversed it.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

And so I have a meeting with him, having a great conversation. He said, I'm looking for a partner, right. They're already through the whole series of 1, you know, 1a, 1b clinical trials. They're stepping into 2a. I said, okay. I said, you know, I have a sense of how much that investment is. I'm not independently wealthy, the fact of being able to, you know, take us all the way through a, you know, a pharmaceutical offering. But I think it could help figure out 2a. The only way I'd be willing to do that is if we unequivocally would never sell it to a pharmaceutical company ever. And I want you to put it in writing that we'd never do that. And if that was the case, I'd be interested. And he sits back and smiled and said, that's the only reason why I would do it. Every other person that sat here said, how quickly could we get cash out?

[A]

Right?

[B]

And so we passed 2A pretty quickly. In passing 2A, we start to progress towards 2B. And from NDAs, I can't exactly get into specifics, details, but let's say a large pharmaceutical manufacturer comes and visits us and offers two of us. I mean, there's three of us on the cap table. A dollar amount, that's more money than I physically would know how to spend, like a real dollar amount. And I Look at him. You're the brains behind this. And the other group sitting across the table from us and says, yeah, no, I'm good. I'm gonna do it the right way. Slides a contract, slides a check back over, says, thanks, no thanks, and steps away. So this 5D amino acid peptide, it, we've, we've also figured out, he's figured out I'm not anything. That's also a prophylactic and a 30 day serving. Right now, if we manufactured, our facility would cost us $2.60 to make. So you have this product that in theory would reverse Alzheimer's dementia, that we could make for $2.30 and then retail for 30 bucks and make it available to everybody.

[A]

Nice margins.

[B]

Well, nice margins, but you look at what I mean, if you do any level of research on Mark Cuban and his work inside of the pharmaceutical industry, most things cost two to five bucks to make. We just all pay hundreds of dollars for them because of the markup through insurance and all the things that go on.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And so I share all this because what we've built is way bigger than something that's just about Kratom. The transparency, the blockchain, the chain of custody, the way that all the ecosystem's built. It's built for something that's a hell of a lot bigger than Kratom. I just inadvertently chose the hardest fucking entry in the world to do it in because nobody else is playing the game that way. Yeah, it's the hardest one to play because nobody wants to play that game.

[A]

Well, it's, it's. Some of, it's cool, man. Some of the way you're doing is, is. Floats my boat in the sense that it does seem like you're really trying with the transparency, which is this is an industry that has none of that. So, like the bar is low, but that's really cool, the camera thing, I can't really get that out of my head. That's, that's, yeah, that's awesome.

[B]

But yeah, it's also, I'm gonna jump in. It's also saying everybody shouldn't take Kratom. Yeah, it's saying the same 10 milligrams of 7 hydroxymitragynine in your bloodstream, you can consume enough Kratom to have the same amount of 7 hydroxy in your bloodstream as if you just took 7 hydroxy because it converts Mitra guinea, metabolizes the 7 hydroxy, which still can cause the same issue. So you have to, you have to go to the base level and say we need to make sure that people can't consume too much.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so that's where, like, this whole thing is. Like, it's not an easy converse, it's easy conversation to have. It's not easy to necessarily understand.

[A]

No, I. I know what you mean, man. And it's, you know, like. Like we were saying the whole time, we're really at the dawn of a brand new era and there's painful growing pains with it. But you'd like to. You like to see that there's some people out there who seem to have, like, a good head on their shoulders about it. I just met you today, but you see, you seem to have that, and. And Rocco vouches for that, which went a long way with me. But I really appreciate you going through all this, Ryan. It's. It's a whole new world for me. I. I really knew nothing about anything in this industry. I hope people out there, I'm sure they're gonna argue in the comments over this and everything, but. But, you know, have at it. Say whatever you want to say. And, you know, I'm. I'm curious to see where this develops over the next few years. So thanks so much for coming in.

[B]

Yeah, thanks, man. I appreciate it.

[A]

All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that, like, button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.