The Diet Crimes of Metabolife

Introduction

0:00what do you have i'm not tagging us in i was hoping i could just do that and you wouldn't notice you thought i wouldn't notice the problem is i don't i literally don't know what metabolite is is it a shake no it's a it's a pill it's a diet supplement ah okay uh the podcast i can't express to our listeners how many weeks of thinking about

0:34more than a month i could have googled at any moment

Metabolife Introduction

0:39uh okay tell me if this is problematic welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that will help you lose 10 pounds but you will be grinding your teeth for days honestly yes is that the twist of episode did i spoil it because it's methamphetamine i'm aubrey gordon i'm michael hobbs if you'd like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase oh the tiny repeating machine is back uh or you can subscribe on apple podcast it's the same audio content yeah there he

Metabolife History

1:11is michael aubrey today we are talking about one of the most popular diet pills of the sort of y2k era 90s into y2k okay the name of it is metabolite 356 wait are they wrong about the number of days in the year no i that is exactly the thought that i had every time i saw the fucking name mike i was like do you mean 365 do you mean every day do you mean metabolite every day is that because you get nine cheat days they're like 356 days no it's once a month you can just go nuts 356 was the number

1:48that the lab assigned it when they were formulating it it's the name of the founder john 356 we are

90s Fitness Craze

1:54beginning our story in the mid 90s by this point the 80s and 90s sort of fitness craze has grown into a massive industry this is the era of buns of steel of stop the insanity of sweating to the oldies this is also a time when the popularity of mlms are on the rise oh yeah at this point the burgeoning wellness industry is championing supplements and vitamins become much more widely used they sort of

2:26move from like a thing that crunchy granola hippies do to a much more mainstream thing this is when we get flinstone's vitamins and that kind of thing right oh yeah and anxieties about weight are on the rise mostly in an individual way at this point and in sort of a cosmetic way yeah so michael i'd like you to imagine this with me it's 1994 you're watching tgif and between an ad for slim fast and maybe like

2:57a bop it are those snap bracelets that killed like 3 000 children you see this ad

FDA Regulation

3:02with drug abuse spiraling the federal government has created special units to combat what they believe could be a more serious problem it's like soldiers like tooling up like getting their gear together yeah it looks like a scene from heat yeah yeah yeah the action is the juice okay they're breaking into a house they're like swat teaming into this like giant mcmansion they're

3:36disarming the security system there's some night vision footage it's all very serious very osama bin lot the fda is conducting raids against natural vitamin users but vitamins are not drugs this harassment must stop vitamin c you know like in oranges

Metabolife Advertising

4:01protect your right to use vitamins call congress now what okay this is a bizarre ad so they're breaking into a house the swat team going in and then it's mel gibson jump scare gremlin surprise it's mel gibson in the kitchen in a bathrobe like i guess putting vitamins in his water or something or like taking a vitamin and they like they're arresting him putting vitamins in his what or like whatever i don't know it do you know how vitamins work it's too early for this my brain is not awake yet

4:33listener it's 10 20 a.m all right all right all right all right all right don't unmask me but it's like they're basically lying to you here and creating a scenario that i assume does not actually exist no not one single solitary case that i'm aware of of anyone's house getting broken into for possession of vitamin c yeah vitamin c which has been on the market for like many decades at this

Dietary Supplement Law

4:57point this is an ad that is bankrolled by the supplement industry designed to astroturf the idea that supplements are over regulated and that the government is on the precipice of some really perilous overreach right yeah there's a little bit of backstory here in the 80s and early 90s congress had considered a number of bills that would have increased fda oversight and requirements of supplement manufacturers one of them would have standardized labeling for supplements and would have required

5:32ingredient disclosures at like a more detailed level oh tyranny that's actual government tyranny no one was talking about raids right no one was talking about confiscating supplements no one was talking about charges for possession of supplements they were talking about a label that tells you what's in it it's so funny like rfk jr's whole fucking thing is like pushing back it's like the conspiracy of big pharma and stuff but it's like the supplement makers are such fucking scammers dude yep they don't even have to have fucking vitamins in their vitamins they can just sell you anything

6:03those sort of coordinated lobbying efforts in the industry first really bore fruit with the passage of

DSHEA Act

6:13the dietary supplement health and education act uh i've been saying d shea d shea away as they always say they're talking about drug relations the d shea recategorized dietary supplements as food instead of drugs okay so it was drafted primarily to do one thing to define dietary supplements and exempt them not only from the fda's drug approval process

6:45but from an fda approval process at all so supplement makers do not have to prove that an ingredient is safe before taking it to market love this and it meant that the fda could only restrict a supplement ingredient if it posed a quote significant and unreasonable risk if used as instructed so the whole point of the law is like give the fda less power over this it is functionally like almost

7:16complete deregulation of the supplement industry yeah you don't know that what they put in there is what they said they put in there yeah you don't know that it's not contaminated with something like lead yeah you don't know that it is as potent or as non-potent as they say it is you're just trusting gwyneth with like your your long-term health and gwyneth is like the best case scenario honestly it was

Metabolife Founders

7:41signed into law by president clinton in october of 1994 d shea was co-sponsored by tom harkin a democrat from iowa and orrin hatch notorious trash can orrin hatch republican from utah one of the longest serving trash cans trash cans in congress for both harkin and hatch both the democrat and the republican one of their largest campaign contributors for both of them was previous maintenance phase subject

8:13and weight loss super mlm herbal life oh really hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars what was the like stated argument for this that supplement makers should be able to like do what they need unencumbered by government uh incursion it's just like hollow anti-regulation yeah they should be free to innovate and it's like general god deregulation shit and it's like 1994 right so we're like coming in hot off of uh reagan and hw bush but think about think about how much less often

8:44mel gibson is getting raided in his home for having a vitamin supplement in the middle of the night this is the other thing that i do want to say about the fucking mel gibson ad is like that is also indicative of how much fucking money they had mel gibson was arguably the biggest movie star in the world in 1994 yeah and they are hiring him for a tv ad yeah that in itself you should call congress and be like whatever they want don't give it to them these people have too much fucking money listen sugar tits yeah so this is the environment in which metabolife goes to market okay it was a multi-level marketing

9:20company that like herbal life before it sold herbal weight loss supplements quote unquote that's always a good sign when like you can't buy it at a store or from like a normal place you have to like call up somebody and like their website doesn't say what they do or what it comes that's how you know it works when a friend from high school asks you to sell it it was started by michael

Metabolife Launch

9:39blevins and michael ellis two dudes from the greater san diego area um who had been childhood friends they're not gays are they i don't have to be mad at gays no they're not homosexuals because then i would have to support it especially if they were under five eight you just start yelling representation matters short gay michaels i'm sorry at the time that the dietary supplement health and education act passes ellis is bouncing around from one job to another he reportedly worked for a time as a chauffeur a real estate agent and a private investigator oh no oh no is correct michael i'm just

10:18like red flag red flag red flag again there are two co-founders there's michael ellis and michael blevins michael ellis went on to write a book about metabolife and he also became the face of the company so we're going to focus more on him because we've heard more from him okay in the book he writes about a couple of his prior jobs in the 1980s before founding metabolife the first is as a police officer for the national city police department near san diego okay he writes at some length about how

10:51competitive the application process was that there were 300 applicants for three open jobs and that he made the cut okay but he also says he just needed the money and that quote a job with a gun sounded interesting cool you had me at i wanted a gun that's it i want to buy your weight loss supplements i'm already in when he talks about the neighborhoods he policed it is also not great he has long passages about how run down the streets and buildings are nice he goes on at length about the

11:24scourge of street gangs that are predominantly latino on one of those calls to the quote-unquote gangbanger war zone nice he ends up chasing someone who he says starts threatening to stab him and his partner with a screwdriver okay michael ellis goes on to shoot this person who collapses and stops moving according to ellis this young man is permanently disabled as a result is he telling this as like i like i'm a hero story this is his story of being like this is how i learned being a cop

12:00was not for me but it's very odd that in the book he only really talks about the impacts on his own emotional state right right it doesn't really grapple with like the life this dude could have lived or the effect on his family or the implications for the community there's no existential anything it's like i shot someone and i felt really bad and i didn't want to feel bad anymore i can't believe a pathological individualist would go on to sell weight loss supplements in 1990 after leaving the police force michael ellis faces drug charges wait what so he was charged because he had rented a house for

12:37the express purpose of cooking meth in it my meth joke is true your meth joke is so much truer than you realize wait he's literally cooking fucking meth and then he goes on to sell a weight loss pill he and michael blevins his future co-founder rented a house hired a cook and attempted to make meth they hired a meth cook they hired a meth cook you hire a meth cook writing the ad on craigslist it sounds like he was like neither one of them was very good at being a drug kingpin ellis rented a

13:08house that the owners were trying to put on the market so they kept getting things set up to cook meth and then they'd get a notice from the landlord that like hey some buyers are coming by and put a blanket over the meth lab they have to like dismantle it put it all away that's like the sitcom version of breaking bad like we gotta hide the meth lab again it's just heisenberg shrugging and looking into the camera like dude that's so funny that like he couldn't even cook the meth himself he

13:40had to delegate it he like he it was such a calculated plan like i'm gonna be a meth kingpin that he like hired it it's like opening a bakery or something well now i have to hire some bakers to their credit both blevins and ellis uh turned themselves in and pled out so the cops eventually found them and then they were like yes we did this and then got a plea deal again this is a place where we don't have digitized records of other reporting from the time so much wait so in his book he says for no reason he just marched into the police station said hello i'm cooking meth he was like we had a

14:14conversation about it we decided it was the right thing and we wanted to be like upstanding guys so we turned ourselves in there's no fucking way no a couple of fucking san diego dirt bags are turning themselves like absolutely not absolutely excuse me officer excuse me i i stole something yesterday i just want to let you know that i broke the law so you can punish me i cannot tell a lie yeah he must have gotten caught michael ellis is sentenced to probation and michael blevins is sentenced to prison as the guy who hired the cook and transported the meth so while michael

14:48blevins is in prison michael ellis starts metabolife okay he's like with my experience in meth i went into diet supplements yeah correct so the story that michael ellis tells about this sort of in the press throughout and in his book is that he developed metabolife while his father was undergoing cancer treatment to help him combat fatigue and negative symptoms does he have any background in chemistry or anything no he's just like a random guy he's a cop a chauffeur yeah what does that mean like i

15:21developed a how would you even do that as like a random civilian he doesn't say yeah in 1992 he starts selling it initially he starts marketing it as a bodybuilding supplement at gyms in the sort of gold's gym era and it's a weight loss thing or it's a muscle building thing right now he's saying it's a muscle building thing but that doesn't work so he goes it's for weight loss those are opposite things which is very funny one of them helps you put on weight the other one helps you take off weight correct yeah the active ingredient is marketed as ma huang a chinese herbal supplement that's true that's an

15:55actual herb that's an actual herb metabolife uses ma huang as an appetite suppressant but historically in chinese medicine it was used as a cold remedy okay the historical herbal use of ma huang is to make a tea out of the leaves that are not distilled down and crushed into a capsule and all of that kind of shit metabolife distributors are telling you to take this every day right that's why i take mucinex every day to make me feel a little bit healthier right it would be like if you were like i'm taking nyquil every fucking day of my life this is also it's such it's so funny thinking back on this time

16:27when you could just say like it's an ancient chinese ingredient and everybody like whoo that is the entire herbalife model right and the entire metabolife model we now have two mlms that are just like doing the full like ancient chinese secret fucking bullshit totally metabolife distributors tell really extraordinary stories about its effectiveness in weight loss eating whatever you want still losing weight amazing wow i feel incredible they also brag after the passage of the

16:59dj they advertise that we're the only weight loss supplement that's lab tested for safety oh what but also they can just fucking say that because there's no regulation they can just fucking lie yes correct correct correct and you called it it's both ma huang 12 milligrams of ma huang in a metabolife caplet and 40 milligrams of guarana concentrate uh that's caffeine baby wait is it guarana so it's about one espresso shot worth of caffeine okay as the business is getting

17:33started as an mlm michael blevins he who is in prison starts recruiting distributors in prison wait really use your networks baby get those facebook messages out i had real conflicted feelings about this it's an mlm so it is garbage from top to bottom they are selling a product that is garbage from top to bottom and also famously the people who make money in an mlm are the first people to get in the door so in this case the prisoners got like rich off of it they're like the

18:03first 10 people so i was like is this redistribution of wealth and they're like no they're recruiting from their fucking networks yeah they're fucking over people that they know and the first 10 prisoners might make money but the next 90 prisoners don't once metabolife launches as a weight loss supplement and as an mlm in 1995 the business grows really big really fast in the first couple of years it's profits it's already turning a profit in the millions no way in the first like two years in

18:341999 just four years after the launch they report one billion dollars in sales i guess they just got in early after this law got passed there's probably like a vacuum that they were able to fill and just making these insane health claims before essentially everybody started doing that it was a crowded market yes and it's not the only one using ma wong it's one of the most popular ones but it's not the only one there are also brands on the market you may remember these i definitely do xenodrine efx no

19:06hydroxy cut i may have even taken that one for a while and one called and i quote herbal ecstasy it'll make you lick someone else's face but it's herbal wait i'm looking i googled i want to see their logo it's bad at this time oh it's so bad metabolife it's like bright yellow and there's like seven different fonts happening there's like a little gold seal yeah red font and it just says diet and yeah herbal formula to enhance your and then it's like the font goes up like 50 sizes and it says diet

19:39oh and provide energy asterisk asterisk super small print all of these brands also get a big boost in 1997 a big windfall from the release of entrapment starring catherine jesus jones and yeah everybody wanted to look like her snaking through those lasers a little laser no the boost they get in 1997 is that fen fen has pulled off the market oh right so fen fen miracle drug that stopped people's hearts and the thing that we have done a previous episode on if you would like to know that story go back and listen to the fen fen episode it is kind of a miracle that with what with

20:12a single pill you can stop your heart incredible he's been working on it for so long so amazing that uh winds up being quite a boon to the industry right you've got all these people who were on fen fen who are really dejected that it's like off the market because it didn't stop their heart what the fuck yeah and they're looking for something else and actually these things you can get cheaper and at the gas station you don't even need to get a doctor involved you can get it from your neighbor so these are now some of the biggest sort of like pill makers in the country right and they

20:44have a bunch of fucking money so their ads are all over tv yeah so we are going to watch a metabolife ad from 2000 fuck yes you want to buy some metabolists is it laboratory tested for safety no but it's cheaper how about some metabol that does it have the same proprietary herbal blend as metabolite 356 no but it's got all the same herbs i don't think well what about what you want

21:15to buy a watch don't be fooled by imitators metabolite is number one for a reason laboratory tested for safety and clinically there's an ugly label weight loss only available through metabolite retailers and distributors call for the location nearest you so for the listener what is happening is that there is a guy wearing a trench coat who opens his trench coat and it's lined with like fake bottles of metabolite he's up late at night like meticulously sewing the extra pockets into his trench coat he's like i gotta be able to open the flap this drug dealer has dedication yeah so

21:49they're doing this weird thing where they're like implying that their competitors are like a shady and be like drugs and they are not drugs it's so funny for them to complain about like fly by night counterfeit yeah they're like take it from us a fucking cop who disabled someone but also a guy who doesn't cook the meth but does hire the guy who cooks the mess because you just made this up too you're just like you're just as much of a drug dealer as people selling counterfeit metabolite

22:19well michael the drug dealer plot thickens because the active ingredient mahuang is better known in english as ephedra wait what's ephedra ephedra is the name for the plant the plant has sub compounds uh called alkaloids called ephedrine and pseudo ephedrine oh that's the meth shit that's the shit you can't buy with that id anymore yep correct dude that's the shit when whenever you're sick if you get like what is it called mucinex part d or some shit it's a full-on crack cocaine it's like

22:55the shit that you have to go to the store and like ask for the thing behind the counter i did this once because the uh suggested dose or whatever is two of them and i was like i've never taken this before i'll take one i felt like i could like lift a fucking volkswagen yes i'm like they tell you to take two of these fucking things so for americans who bought cold medicine before like the mid 2000s you will recognize the brand name pseudo fed you can still get it it's behind the counter yeah it's short for pseudo ephedrine that's what it was yeah in addition to its chinese medicine use as a cold

23:28remedy it was also used in the u.s for the same purposes until the 1980s ephedrine was an over-the-counter cold and allergy medicine i bet it clears out your fucking sinuses you're like heart is beating like 300 times a minute yeah so ephedrine does in fact constrict your blood vessels and speed up your heart for people with asthma that means that it helps reduce the swelling in their airways and can genuinely be helpful for respiratory stuff but it was ultimately banned by many many states because

24:05of the safety risks and the risk of dependence and it was also the basis for cooking meth right yes pseudo ephedrine as one of the sort of subcompounds was absolutely like a key ingredient in cooking meth yeah which is what ultimately got pseudo ephedrine banned that's why you have to show your id because you can't just go into the store and buy like 300 packets of it because then they assume you're cooking a shitload of meth and i believe it's not sold in the eu at all anymore there was like a high risk of dependence yeah there are major safety risks for selling something over the counter

24:36that speeds up your heart are you kidding me now so i only took half the recommended dose what if you took twice the recommended dose i mean you could it felt like you could like really hurt yourself i was like as soon as i took it i was like why is this legal you know we mentioned that this is predominantly used as a respiratory thing in the u.s in the 80s i will say that they honest to god learned about the weight loss effects of ephedra during asthma research so they're doing some research into the effects of ephedrine on asthma and the researchers are like man these asthma patients are getting real

25:10skinny they're tripping balls and they're like fighting and like biting each other all the time but look how trim they are very svelte skinny many god on the less intense end uh ephedrine users can experience jitteriness anxiety and insomnia yeah on the more intense and ephedra does increase your heart rate it does increase your blood pressure which in turn can lead to cardiac events stroke all kinds of acute

25:40really scary things and on top of all of that ephedrine users may even experience hallucinations seizures and psychosis nice also there are people with ephedra allergies who might experience like their throat closing up right right that kind of thing and on top of all of that ephedrine like the methamphetamine that it is uh then used to make people can develop a tolerance really quickly right to a small amount and they need to up their dose so very quickly in order to get the

26:16same effects people have to take more and more and more and then you're talking about long-term health and side effects and everything else yes you rebrand this thing that is just like a pharmaceutical you rebrand it as like ancient chinese medicine and people think they're taking something like natural and herbal but i mean everything is natural when you think about it there are lots of parts of the natural world not to get all verner herzog on it but like there are lots of parts of the natural world that are trying to kill you it's all just marketing to be like oh it's mahuang it's very natural and ancient it sounds like it's just fucking drugs

26:47you're just like taking drugs yes and the ingredient listed on metabolife isn't just mahuang it's uh mahuang concentrate right so it's just like it's a fucking drug you're taking pseudophed yeah you're taking ephedrine also also didn't you say earlier the metabolife is mahuang and caffeine basically right so research found at the time that the combination of ephedra and caffeine marginally increased weight loss over ephedra alone right well yeah probably fucking hell yeah you're on crack

27:19but caffeine like ephedra also increases your heart rate and your blood pressure it also increases the likelihood of those side effects and particularly the like vascular and cardiac effects right so adding caffeine to this is really like pouring lighter fluid yeah totally risk side of it right and also this is something that you would want on like a warning label of like this is habit forming you can fucking overdose on this stuff i mean you can overdose on caffeine yes again this is like the perfect argument for the fucking fda to regulate this shit michael leave me with my panera

27:53lemonade in peace yeah exactly you can like really hurt yourself so unsurprisingly knowing all of this adverse reaction reports started to roll in with just within just a year or two of metabolife's launch right metabolife comes onto the market as a weight loss supplement in 1995 and by 1997 there's this massive wave of adverse uh reaction reports it's like i only lost three pounds and i murdered my entire family so the early adverse reactions that come in show reports of sudden hypertension in people

28:31without existing cardiovascular conditions as with herbalife before it a lot of people didn't report their adverse reactions right some assumed that because it was listed as herbal and because metabolife touted that they were lab tested for safety that it couldn't hurt them so they didn't think to report that they're just like weird mystery hypertension right others assumed that their weight already put them at ill health so they blamed their weight and not the medication again metabolife is launched in 1995

29:05by 1996 multiple states are already proposing full or partial bans yes on ephedra it's crack when fen fen fen is taken off the market it's september and just immediately thereafter ephedra supplements like metabolife start marketing themselves as quote-unquote herbal fen fen yeah by november two months later the fda is already issuing official warnings about ephedra use and the dangers of ephedra man still

29:36the product continues to grow the business continues to grow and by 1999 the fda reports over 1000 adverse reactions man and 35 of those are deaths oh wait what people died 35 people have died in four years that the fda is tracking what yes correct how do we pull fen fen and we didn't pull this shit this is fucking crazy so of course this leads to a wave of lawsuits there are class action suits from consumers there are suits from distributors many of whom are also consumers yeah but there are also lawsuits

30:13from metabolife wait what they start suing people wait who so as these adverse events grow and more states consider bans on ephedra so too does the negative media coverage as it fucking should right and when these negative news stories crop up metabolife often file suit for defamation again great sign that you're running a real business you're selling a useful product to people

30:45in his book about metabolife michael ellis writes about this wave of lawsuits and his reactions are nutso send it send it send it send it i'll send you a quote in a minute but just as a preview he has a passage and he talks about his power combo to prep for depositions is it like seven metabolites it's a bunch of metabolite pills and dip gross gross he's like spitting into the cup in like a little room he for our younger listeners dip is like zins but without the like tea bag so gross

31:23dude he does talk in the book about how much dip you can put in your lip without it showing up on camera in the deposition video he's like doing that like with the brown liquid coming out of his mouth um he talks he's like i would check my lip sometimes and feel if there was like a bump no we're good also think about how psychotic you would feel if you're also if you're on caffeine and like dollar store meth and fucking tobacco yeah your little heart is just like a little shrew like right i

31:54imagine the effects being somewhere on the cocaine spectrum i would not want to give it a deposition in that state disaster someone asked you like what's your address and you start talking about your screenplay idea so i just sent you a little passage uh from the book of him talking about his attorneys and depositions i'm gonna add little spitting sounds no he has to do that every couple seconds i don't like it he says most of the attorneys i've met in my long string of legal battles fall into one of two categories either they work their asses off or they do the opposite of work

32:27their asses off oh he's a good writer wow this is just singing he really paints a picture the reason they could exist in either of these ways is that they've basically created their own industry in other words the legal world is so complex so convoluted that you now need an attorney for everything from defending yourself against trumped up lawsuits to filing paperwork at the office lawyers just help you get through the fog a fog they created throw in the fear that gets propagated by the justice system and you can't help but want to hire a whole team of lawyers

32:57that's the ultimate job security right there i love how you're also just like a dick to your own lawyers like oh what do i need you for oh my god the way he writes about he's like one of my lawyers real fat he's real baby huey type where you're like gross yeah but also he thinks lawyers are grifting yeah i know i know how dare they he thinks everyone is grifting all the time it is a self-justification narrative right yeah like i'm just doing what everyone's doing also

33:30lawyers only have ultimate job security if you're constantly getting sued for people dying the reason they have job security is in fact metabolites maybe if you sold a product that like helps people or like ads to their life rather than killing them maybe you wouldn't have this problem all of that legal activity increases media attention which publicizes some more troubling aspects of ephedra products there's more and more media from more and more outlets it is frankly too many to sue

34:01yeah yeah and that includes this 1999 coverage from the new york times talking to a researcher who tested ephedra products on the market um that researcher's name is dr gurley dr gurley said most ephedra users who become ill can blame their own stupidity for going well over their recommendations on labels but he and his colleagues have tested the potency of a dozen ephedra products and found that the amount of active ingredient in some brands varied by as much as 130 percent most contain less ephedra that the labels claimed but dr gurley is still troubled as a consumer and a pharmaceutical

34:35scientist it was an eye-opening experience he said you can't trust what's on the label yeah dude they're they're varying by as much as 130 percent so you might be getting 10 milligrams or like 23 yes that's huge yes also the fact that most of them are under what the label claimed is also bad i mean like it's not like people need more ephedra but it's like yeah if you're selling 10 milligrams of something it should have fucking 10 milligrams in it so by the end of the 90s there's a growing number of adverse reactions a growing number of deaths a growing list of side effects it's not

35:07just the sort of jitteriness and hypertension stuff it's cardiac events it's psychosis and that is when 2020 decides to film a piece about ephedra and metabolife okay in 1999 2020 film 72 minutes of interview with michael ellis for this piece the segment they run is under 15 minutes and it includes about one minute of ellis's interview in the press ellis says that the interview felt quote more like a deposition because you were dipping because you had a deposition

35:43that's what i call him so he after the interview he was like uh-oh the fix is in this is going to be a hit piece so metabolife cooked up a wild strategy you can't say cooked up in this episode it's like zing 2020 recorded the interview and filmed it so did metabolife this was like a relatively common practice at the time yeah they were afraid that the edit was going to be unfavorable

36:15so they came up with like a pretty wild and innovative solution for 1999 purposes they decide to upload the uncut interview on a standalone website this has become like more common since then yeah and then they sink two million dollars into an ad campaign buying full page newspaper ads in the post and the times and tv spots including some tv spots during 2020 that's actually kind of good okay being like go to this website and see the full uncut interview

36:50right the website michael is television interview.com what dude sit on that domain that domain's probably worth millions i should also say michael ellis's website after all of the metabolife stuff is like mj ellis1.com real michael ellis.com yeah when the interview airs it's focused on metabolife's claim that it is quote-unquote lab tested for safety as it turns out and as 2020 reports their quote-unquote studies have extremely small sample sizes they have high dropout rates and in one case

37:27they couldn't account for the contents of the bottles in what was supposed to be a blinded trial we think we're giving you medieval life we don't we're not sure these meth cooks can't do anything right ellis in the book writes about the 2020 interview and his account is bananas the tone is a hundred percent like the fix was in from the beginning yeah the chapter title on this scenario is called hindsight is 2020 got him he writes about sort of every aspect of it he's like these

38:00fuckers are so shady for example he talks about like the interviewer from 2020 is getting in makeup for tv and ellis is like who's gonna do my makeup is there somebody to do my makeup and the interview is like no okay and ellis writes i get it i thought he's kennedy and i'm nixon i know dude or you could sell a product that doesn't kill people i don't know or you could do that you have a billion dollars in sale you could hire a makeup person you could get some concealer you could do it you could go to sephora he also says that a bunch of metabolite staff came to watch the filming of the interview

38:35okay and that they burst into applause after yes because ellis was so good and he made the 2020 interviewer look so bad why didn't you put that on your tv he takes issue with the editing he's like we recorded 72 minutes and they only aired one minute and i was like do you know how editing works yeah in the book he writes quote i guess everything else just made me look too good to air yeah the entire segment ran for 14 minutes so in his head he thought it was going to be a full hour on

39:07metabolite he thought we'd be a live interview with you just like a verbatim interview yeah like a sitting fucking president like we're just gonna dedicate an hour also does he say that it's not true like they made substantive allegations against him about like the lab testing and stuff because ultimately the interview doesn't really matter if the allegations that they're making are true then like what what is the interview even supposed to fucking say it's very funny because there are some press pieces that come out after this where they talk to michael ellis and they're like when they said this thing do you think that was fair and he was like oh sure

39:40what about this thing when they made this allegation was that a fair thing to go after and he was like well it's true he's like yeah our product is not tested but anyway there was one incident that he wrote about where i was like oh okay so now he's just lying so i'm gonna send you a passage from his book he's talking about mr diaz um in this that's the interviewer from 2020 it says mr diaz we heard the producer say would you like to meet mr ellis's mother diaz turned around to glare at me fuck mrs ellis he said and without another word he stalked away

40:16in one microscopic instant my mood changed from triumphant to enraged it took every ounce of my effort not to chase him down grab him and beat the hell out of him i mean who in his right mind would say something like that to an old woman to a man's mother for me diaz's slight was the turning point the point when i decided that the media had harmed my family for long enough from that moment on i would remain on the offensive i'd had enough rolling over yeah when he said fuck your mom to my face i was like that's it this is a real thing that happened and i'm super mad about it two things

40:49one i do not believe that this happened there's no fucking way this happened there's no way when were you rolling over yeah when you were suing tv stations for covering your product i've also i've been in situations where someone's like do you want to meet my friend or like do you want to say hi to my mom and i like definitely don't want to do that i'm not gonna be like fuck your mom there's no way yeah there's no way an actual professional in a setting like this would say fuck your mom there's no way the only way that that's coming out of my mouth is if your mom is like christy gnome yeah so the 2020 piece as it aired included some interviews with doctors and

41:25researchers um who had researched metabolife one of those doctors worked for columbia university's hospital saint luke's roosevelt hospital in the piece he was asked a factual question which was did your research definitively prove that metabolife was safe he said no okay for metabolife that was unacceptable okay they hired a private investigator they dug up some allegations against one of his old

41:57supervisors who had been alleged to doctored research metabolife then reached out to 2020 to pass it along and quote unquote like make sure you were aware pretty heavily implying that this doctor was in on the bad acts of his supervisor okay they also start calling people at the hospital where he works they say again we just want to make sure you knew that this guy was mixed up in this shit like you're fully just trying to get this guy fired and also for this guy saying like a boilerplate thing did you prove that it's safe any

42:31researcher would say no because there's no way to prove that something is safe right that is a factual statement yeah did one single study prove definitively that any substance was perfectly safe right no any responsible scientists would answer in that way so on top of that once again they take out newspaper ads accusing this scientist of working for a competitor because he had also conducted research separately on slim

43:01fast oh what well that's also normal so they're like he's trying to fix the market for slim fast he just was like normal right and they're so they're arguing that he's like an operative for slim fast who's trying to undercut metabolife success is sort of the implication right it wasn't just scientists that they were doing this for they were hiring pis on plaintiffs in their lawsuits no way and in his book he alleges that many of them were feigning disability and feigning their reactions good stuff to metabolite

43:35they were walking around just fine they seemed good to me i saw the pictures oh my god so as you can tell there's like trouble in paradise all of that media attention leads to more government action the fda brings michael ellis in for questioning about the negative side effects of their products which they downplay and about how many adverse reactions the company has heard about through their customer service line they say it's in the hundreds that diverges sharply from the fda's records which

44:08are over a thousand right there are congressional hearings oh ellis is called to testify and he invokes his fifth amendment right to avoid self-incrimination so he shows up but he doesn't testify and by 2002 the doj launches a criminal investigation into metabolife again why do these companies still exist they are trying to determine whether or not executives understood the danger of their product and the risks that it posed to consumers and by this point according to fda records metabolife users

44:44have reported 95 heart attacks oh wow 69 strokes 70 seizures 91 cases of high blood pressure and 81 deaths and that is what's reported is that bad is that is that bad 81 deaths is that bad from a diet pill from an over-the-counter diet pill but how do those people look but how do they look amazing are they like ropey still that same year the same year that the doj criminal investigation launches the fda declines

45:16to take action on ephedra and says that they're waiting for more studies while all of this is happening the irs is also investigating michael ellis for hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax evasion oh wow of course of course so this comes to a head when the irs raids one of ellis's houses and he depicts them in the book as absolute super villains yeah he has different like little pet names uh he doesn't know the names of the agents who raid this house one of them has a battering ram

45:49so he calls him rammy and there's another one who he says he can smell alcohol on his breath so he calls him drunky that's not even good he says that his wife was crying the whole time which i absolutely believe if my house got raided i would cry and then barf and then cry and then barf and then barf and then cry he writes quote when they had finished with the safe room they searched every other room in the house beginning with the bedroom where drunky immediately started riffling through monica's

46:20underwear drawer what holding each piece up and laughing ooh he would say look at this one i wonder what it cost laughter all of this happening right in front of my wife it's like the least reliable narrator we've ever had one million percent where he's like holding up his wife's underwear i was like yeah if these guys are doing raids they see shit that is so much more interesting than underwear yeah there's no way yeah they're not stopping to comment on like this woman has

46:54underpants this woman has a crotch he also really leans into how the irs agents raiding his house were armed at first that gave me pause irs agents with guns is just kind of a wild fucking image yeah yeah but then i learned what they found in the raid which was a hidden safe with a million dollars in it and guns no way he again had been previously convicted of a felony or he pled guilty to a felony so he's barred from owning guns also a million dollars in cash in the safe is fucking crazy here is his

47:28explanation he says at the time of my conviction back in 1991 i knew that i could no longer possess firearms so i asked a federal agent friend of mine what i should do with the two handguns that i already had so i gave my guns to monica my girlfriend at the time explaining to her that i couldn't have access to them no matter what she promised that she would keep them away from me and to that end she bought a safe that only she would know the combination to she put several things in there with the guns including her paper copy of the safe's combination oh don't put it in the safe long story short for the

48:00three or four years leading up to the raid we couldn't access that safe even if we wanted to so there are a few things to note here one he's alleging that everything in the safe was his wife's and that the safe belonged to his wife what about the million in cash hers according to him she's she's frugal she's very frugal he's fully throwing his fucking wife under the bus although i don't think that's like a useful loophole like you do have access to guns but they're your wives i don't think that like works and you bought them yeah when you know that you can't do that yeah and you're married

48:30so everything that is hers is also yours my guy right unforge unforge for you yeah as part of the fallout from this they raid ellis's home they also raid blevin's home michael blevins goes back to prison on gun charges starts the company with a prison sentence uh his exit from the company is also a prison sentence and michael ellis ends up going to prison for lying to the fda it's actually so weird that he didn't just go to the federal authorities and tell them that he was breaking the law because

49:03that's like that's what he usually does so once again as before michael ellis pled guilty he was sentenced to six months in federal prison and a twenty thousand dollar fine wait what six months and a twenty thousand dollar fine for a guy whose company made one billion dollars in one year but that's the thing of like convicting people for lying to the fda or whatever when it's like the product that he sells is trash because the actual problem here is is basically this previous law that means that they don't have to label anything correct they are operating within the law but the law is fucking

49:34bad yes agree although he dips i feel like go to jail just go to jail just for the dip just for your fucking tin of skull anytime you have it if i catch you with it you're going to jail it also turns out through this sort of increased government oversight period that the company was falsifying its taxes clicking its books and concealing over 93 million dollars in four years whoa okay their accountant michael compton admits to federal authorities that he did cook the books at the behest of company executives

50:08no way and when the story broke about the company's tax evasion compton died by suicide oh no way michael ellis writes about this in his book and he goes it's a real shame and that's it that's it again it's not unlike the shooting when he's at the police force where you're like what a bummer you don't seem to be grappling with this with any level of depth yeah for hiding 93 million dollars the company is assessed a 600 000 fine what come on dude after michael ellis is released from prison he publishes his book that's in

50:452008 i have not told you this whole time what the title of the book is okay the title of the book is the metabolite story colon the rape of cinderella what yes what the fuck does that even mean like we were a cinderella story oh and they were raped by the irs and our company was raped by the federal government that is rape no it has since if you look for it now it's still available as like an ebook or whatever okay it now is called the metabolite story the rise and fall of an american

51:19success story or something like that they're like make it normal please be fucking normal give it a normal title dude because that title is just like oh you're a nutcase the final straw for ephedra products comes when there is a high profile death so far there have been many deaths from ephedra products and there is one from a public figure so in 2003 baltimore orioles pitcher steve belcher

51:49heads to spring training in florida since the last season he has put on some weight so he starts taking an ephedra supplement to lose weight during spring training at 23 years old steve belcher a professional athlete collapses and dies 23 holy shit as the reporting comes out about steve belcher's death it comes along with like that reporting is like actually this isn't the only ephedra incident for

52:20athletes another player for the orioles who had previously collapsed and been found unconscious then disclosed that he had been taking ephedra supplements at the time that's not even the only incident for the orioles there are also adverse reactions for cory stringer from the minnesota vikings devon darling a linebacker for florida state a college student like the list goes on there are many many more wild this is popping up in sports media so it's no longer like government

52:52accountability reporting and it's no longer like quote unquote women's media reporting it's now getting in front of sports fans who are like wait a minute what the fuck yeah sorry what wait how much is the meth that i can go to the store and buy right like there's like a big outcry following this death according to the nutrition business journal u.s ephedra sales in 2002 were 1.28 billion dollars and by 2003 the year that belcher died uh in the spring sales fell to 510 million okay 50 percent

53:27hit more than a 50 percent hit metabolife is trying to defend themselves you know what i mean like they're trying to like save face a little bit so they put up a statement on their website about belcher's death and they're like he was overweight and he was exercising strenuously in the heat so don't do that everyone who does that dies also like do you not think fat people are taking your weight loss product yeah no kidding exactly do you not think that the people who are taking your weight loss product live in hot climates and are also exercising they're trying to lose weight yeah belcher dies in the spring of 2003 and in december of that same year the fda finally announces a ban

54:03of ephedra okay at the time that it is banned ephedra represents five percent of sales of dietary supplements in the u.s five percent of dietary supplements sold are ephedra but they are 45 percent of adverse events linked to any dietary supplement wow soon after the fda banned sale of products containing ephedra congress moved to ban pseudo ephedrine because of its role in the

54:34manufacture of black market meth it was first introduced in congress as a standalone bill that had some i can't remember the name but it was like something like the like combating methamphetamine act of 2005 or whatever ultimately it passed as a part of the patriot act wait what it was in the fucking patriot act you remember how they dropped it at night and it was like a bajillion pages yeah this was in the patriot act dude we should do one of those sleep casts where we just read federal legislation so today many nations around the world ban ephedrine some also ban ephedra as a whole

55:10the u.s bans both and we also track sales of pseudo ephedrine and have moved it behind the counter metabolife ended up filing for bankruptcy and its non ephedra assets were sold to a new owner the product is still around although they wouldn't be ephedrine anymore yes they have reformulated with dr oz favorite green coffee bean extract okay well at least that's fake and dumb and doesn't do anything at least it's not like scary i will say i didn't come to this one thinking that i was telling

55:40you a story about money and politics but like here we are yeah there's no real move today to repeal the dietary supplement health education act of course we clearly have bigger fish to fry as a nation but it is a bad policy that puts consumers at risk if not with ephedra products anymore then with all manner of other shit that doesn't have to prove that it's safe before it goes on the fucking market for no upside for no benefit to anyone there are supplements on the market legally that are very

56:13very very hazardous or just full-on scams or something you saw to us or you're paying 12 bucks for it or whatever or we don't fucking know yeah you should know and be able to know before you take a thing it's totally indefensible so metabolife isn't the juggernaut that it once was yeah but the system that created it remains by which you mean they are still raiding the home of mel gibson simply for putting vitamins in his water you

56:44you you you you you you Thank you.