Listen to Episode #25

S2E25 – From Surviving to Thriving with Steven Wright

Steven Wright

About our Guest

Steven Wright is a Medical Engineer, Kalish Functional Medicine Institute Graduate, and gut health specialist. He’s the founder of Healthygut.com. Since 2009, he’s been researching, testing, and educating on digestive health and its connections to other health problems.

Steven has spent close to $400,000 on his health recovery. He’s fascinated by new, novel and forgotten technologies that are still 10-20 years away from mainstream adoption. His journey has included losing over 60 pounds, recovering from IBS, eliminating exercise-induced asthma, restoring eyesight, nervous system retraining, overcoming cystic acne, concussion recovery, reconstructive dental work, mood imbalances, and seasonal allergy recovery.

All of these issues got better each time he improved his gut health which continues to be his main focus. He believes most chronic diseases are the body adapting to its current environment in order to keep us alive. And with the right interventions and elimination of root causes most health issues can be resolved. He lives in Boulder, CO with his fiancé Shay and their two dogs.

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Podcast Transcript

Michael Roesslein: We’re live. We’re actually deciding to record part of this conversation. This episode of the podcast, I am going to be joined by my friend, Steve Wright. I feel like we just ended one recording and we’re starting another. Because when we recorded this, we just did a webinar, but Steve’s surroundings have changed. Welcome back, man. Thanks for doing the podcast.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. Thanks for having me, man.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. It’s going to be fun. The podcast is my favorite thing that we do. Most of our audience, we’ve done a bunch of webinars with you in the last year, knows you and your work, but the podcast may reach some folks who don’t. A little intro. Steven Wright is a medical engineer, Kalish Functional Medicine Institute graduate, and gut health specialist, who has spent close to $400,000 in his life overcoming his own health challenges. Using everything from Western medicine to shamans, and lots of stuff in between. Steven is the founder of healthygut.com, a line of very high quality professional grade digestive aid supplements. He lives in Boulder, Colorado with his fiancé, Shay, and their two dogs. Wow! 400 grand, man. You’ve been through the ringer.

Steven Wright:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

That may sound crazy to some people and it probably doesn’t sound too crazy to others. Because when you have fill-in-the-blank chronic disease in this country, it can get very expensive very quickly, especially when it’s ones that conventional medicine doesn’t have much of an answer for and you need to go voraciously researching and trying, and tasting and taking, and doing all the different things that you’ve done, which we’re going to talk about. I guess I want to go back to the beginning of… We talked about this a little bit before in one of our conversations, but your digestive problems and symptoms started young, right?

Steven Wright:

Yeah. I was born with a hydrocoele hernia, which is a type of birth defect where the ball’s sac doesn’t completely close and usually the intestines are pinched or aggravated. Yeah. I was born with this pain and I didn’t take breast milk. I didn’t take anything. Basically, my mom tried to get me help. This was the middle ’80s and the rural area of Michigan. The doctor said she didn’t know what she was doing. Anyways, 12 weeks later, I only gained a pound. When they came in for the 12-week checkup, I was failure to thrive because I only gained a pound. He did a medical exam, found it, and then gave me some [anti-spasmodic 00:02:57] drugs, which just soothe everything. Then I was raised on soy formula and that’s how it got started.

Michael Roesslein:

Wow. We could have a whole another conversation on the trauma that that would be for a little one and what that causes long term, but I think that would be a conversation for another podcast.

Steven Wright:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

I was in a similar boat. What I mean, I was adopted at birth and then I was also raised on formula. I never had breast milk and had some really severe recurring ear infections when I was really little, and got fed boatloads of pink, chunky antibiotics for my entire childhood. Cheers to teams starting behind the eight ball. The digestive symptoms then were there from day 1 or did they manifest when you’re a little bit older? Is that your only memory, is feeling pretty terrible?

Steven Wright:

I don’t remember at that point. But yeah, I had digestive issues my entire life. I remember times of crying because I had bloating so bad when I tried cabbage one time. I ate too much stew. What do they call that? The extended family nicknamed me the gas man because I farted so much. Now I tried to laugh that off. That was in high school. Yeah. I had a dermatologist. I had cystic acne when I hit puberty. I had a dermatologist recommend Bactrim DS, which is a broad spectrum, strong, DS stands for double strike, antibiotic that I took for four years straight. I had multiple sports injuries that I took way over the recommended dose of ibuprofen for 12 to 16 weeks.

I messed my gut up real good in high school and I paid for it when I went to college. I was in a fraternity and there wasn’t much to do at my engineering college. We were in the ghetto of Flint, Michigan and there’s not really much to do. It’s not very safe. We did a lot of studying and a lot of beer and pizza. But also living with 50 guys, it showed me that like, “Hey, not everyone has these reactions to beer and pizza and smells terrible, and has to spend three hours in the bathroom every day.” I thought it was something I was going to have to live with. My family, obviously, has a history of IBS. That’s why it was funny and I was named the gas man. It wasn’t like I was just the only black sheep. Everybody has a history of IBS in my family. But in college, when I made it even worse through high 20-credit hour semesters and plenty of beer every day.

Michael Roesslein:

Oh, 20’s a lot.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. Yeah. I did that.

Michael Roesslein:

That’s a lot, especially in engineering school. For me, I think in college, one engineering class would’ve been about my limit of total hours I’d be able to do. So, cheers.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. We will talk-

Michael Roesslein:

All semester hours are not created equally. For those who didn’t go to college, engineering credit hours are more difficult than most of the credit hours that I was enrolled in.

Steven Wright:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they are. Yeah. I think there’s somewhere around a 50% dropout rate in that college. It’s a meat grinder. Those who make it through have a special brokenness that they see the world through.

Michael Roesslein:

Lovely. Is that on the brochure for the school?

Steven Wright:

No.

Michael Roesslein:

We will break your soul and give you an engineering degree. Here’s your beer and pizza, and your IBS.

Steven Wright:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

Come to beautiful Flint.

Steven Wright:

Yup. Come to Kettering University.

Michael Roesslein:

That’s when you realize that not everybody had these terrible reactions to college. What would be typical college life, basically: totally messed up sleep patterns, really high stress, lots of beer, lots of pizza. No, I didn’t feel awesome when I was doing that, but I didn’t have those same symptoms. You started to realize then like, “This is not normal.” It probably just got more and more severe, I’m guessing. But you finished there and you started a career as an engineer, right?

Steven Wright:

Yeah, yeah. I worked for General Motors as a management supervisor in the plants, overseeing 55 UAW workers, and then I hated it. It was high stress; it’s lots of hours. But I was third generation automotive guy. Luckily, General Motors went bankrupt. Then that gave me the freedom to go seek a job I’d always wanted, which is in my head as a small town boy, I’d always wanted basically to fly around and do business consulting, and hopefully one day have a sweet condo and a sweet Ferrari, or something. That’s what I thought was the pinnacle of what someone could do with their life. I was able to actually get a job with the Big Four accounting firm as a tax consultant. There’s a specialty that engineers can help out the tax people. I got a job in Chicago and I moved to the windy city. I was working in this high-rise, doing the whole top 100 consulting thing.

I was still overweight. I still had cystic acne, but that’s when the panic attacks and the depression really start taking over. Then that’s also when, just because of the fact that I was taking clients out and I was working even more stressful hours, my co-workers complained that I was farting too much and I was stinking off in the office. I had an accident commuter bus. When you’re on a fast commuter bus that doesn’t have any stops for 40 minutes and you have an accident in your pants, that’s some very embarrassing, shameful things. I started having a lot of those issues despite my desire not to have those things. My boss was like, “Hey, man. You got to fix this. Otherwise, this isn’t going to work.” I sought medical attention in Chicago. I tried to see the top people I could find. I saw three different doctors and the consensus was I didn’t have celiac disease. Therefore, I have a family history of IBS. I need to suck it up. Take Metamucil and eat more whole grains. Anyways, that was really sad-

Michael Roesslein:

How did that work?

Steven Wright:

… and annoying. Then I missed a date. I was literally locked on the toilet for 15 hours. I missed a date that I was looking forward to and that broke my spirit. I think most people who wake up and really take responsibility for their health and take the power back from the Western medical system so that they become the CEO again rather than offloading all their responsibility, they usually have a few emotional breakpoints. That was a big one for me. I called Jordan and he was my one buddy. When it comes to digestive or really embarrassing problems, we usually have one friend in our lives that we’re actually honest with. Everybody else were like, “Oh, yeah. I am okay”, even though you’ve been sitting on the toilet all day or you’re so bloated that you’re in the big pants, not the skinny pants.

Anyways, I called Jordan and he was like, “Dude, you got to try this diet. This diet stopped my diarrhea. It’s the only thing that’s been working for my celiac disease.” I switched my diet to the specific carbohydrate diet. In three days, 50% of my bloating went away. I think it triggered rage, honestly. It triggered empowerment and rage that, “Oh, my God. I’ve been having all this pain and all this embarrassment every single day for so long-“

Michael Roesslein:

“And I didn’t have to.”

Steven Wright:

“And I could’ve done something different.”

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. And nobody told you?

Steven Wright:

Right. All the people that I trusted to tell me didn’t know anything. Then that triggered my engineering brainwashing, which as an electrical engineer, you’re basically just brainwashed to solve complex systems without knowing or understanding the system. I was like, “Hold on. I’m just applying the skill set to the body. I can do this. I just got to find a group of people or a person who’s had similar issues and find out what they tried, and I’ll start trying the things. I’m going to figure this out.” [crosstalk 00:11:17]

Michael Roesslein:

Like reverse engineering symptom resolution.

Steven Wright:

Exactly.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. Was Jordan an engineer, too?

Steven Wright:

Yeah. He’s a mechanical engineer.

Michael Roesslein:

Okay. For those who don’t know, Steven and Jordan then founded SCD Lifestyle. That’s where I learned about the SCD diet and I put clients on that when I was doing health coaching. This was, date ourselves, probably 10, 12 years ago. I had a few of those people, a few of those phone calls that were similar. They were like, “I don’t feel all the way better, but I feel a lot better and I feel better than I’ve ever felt before. Why the hell didn’t anybody tell me this and why isn’t this known everywhere?” You guys created a ton of really incredible educational resources.

He told you about the diet. You started the diet. You started feeling better. He was feeling better. You wanted to reverse engineer things to figure stuff out. Where did creating a business come in there? That was just like, “We’re going to do this”, or was it not a business at first? You were just putting your info online. How did that happen?

Steven Wright:

No. It was a conscious choice to build the business in concert because we had been talking about lifestyle design and getting wealthy, and not working. Because we both watched our parents work really middle class. Not real middle class, but poor middle class lives. We both bonded on the fact that we didn’t want to repeat that experience that our parents had because we watched them suffer so much. When I got to Chicago, I thought this job was it. I got close to some of the partners in the firm and I realized that they were making $1 million a year, but they hated life. Then I started realizing that the managers hated life. Nobody enjoyed what they were doing. Then I was like, “Oh, my God. I’m just switching one bad lifestyle for another bad lifestyle that just has more money.” Therefore, you spend more money and you still don’t feel enjoyable.

I was really disillusioned for a little bit and then I caught my breath. I was like, “Okay. That means I got to build my own company.” We consciously started making a lot of notes. Then a few months later, we wrote our first e-book on it and launched our first website in 2009, and then launched the e-book in 2010. Yeah. It was a very conscious we’re going to be able to leave our engineering jobs and we’re going to forge our own path, and not be stuck in a cubicle answering the phone. Because I was on call. I would’ve plans to go see my family and they would call and say, “Hey, Bank of America’s upset. You got to fly to Atlanta or wherever.” That’s not a life that I want. Yeah. It was a very conscious decision to try to build a business, which was as hard as solving my health issues, honestly.

Michael Roesslein:

I’ve been through it, too. I actually did this years later. I did business coaching with you guys, with Steve and Jordan, and it’s learning another thing. It’s a completely different profession that now in this world that we live in now, no matter what somebody’s skill is or what they do or what their expertise is, if they want to have their own business, they also need to become marketing professionals and tech people, and everything else. For better or worse, that’s where we’re at. I also had no idea what I had bitten off when I decided to do that either. I was like, “Oh, I just get really good at this thing and then a bunch of people will pay me to do it.” Done.

Steven Wright:

Right.

Michael Roesslein:

Simple. Then when no one knows you do the thing, nobody pays you to do it. It was my harsh realization. You guys grew SCD lifestyle. It was a pretty big company. I had that e-book. I saw you guys on all the things, the summits and the speaking tours. You guys helped a lot of people. SCD, I’m sure, changed your health trajectory a lot. For those who don’t know, you can look it up. What’s the book? Is it Breaking the Vicious Cycle? Was that the book?

Steven Wright:

Yeah. The first one was written by Dr. Sidney Haas in the 1950s. The second one was called Breaking the Vicious Cycle. That’s the one that’s mostly in print and has the blueprint. Then Jordan and I’s book is basically how do you execute Breaking the Vicious Cycle. Because the book has a lot of rules, but no real advice on how to do it. [crosstalk 00:16:08]

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. I bought it and read it, and came to the same conclusion because I was trying to pull nuggets out of it to teach the clients. Then I was like, “Where’s the what to do in here?” There’s a whole lot of what not to do, but it’s a specific diet that removes certain types of carbohydrates from the diet that tend to give people with various IBS symptoms a lot of problems. A lot of people find relief from it.

We’re fast forwarding a lot because I get to what you’re doing now, but you’ve created this company, Healthy Gut, and you make a few really good digestive products there. For some people switching diet, sometimes boom, magic done, gone, whatever. For a lot of people, they go from feeling completely horrible and not being able to do anything and missing dates, and being the gas man at work and all these things to being mildly uncomfortable all the time instead of super uncomfortable most of the time and mildly uncomfortable all the time, and tend to need a little additional help, a little additional things. Is that where you found yourself? It’s like SCD got you to a more manageable type of situation?

Steven Wright:

Yeah, yeah. It got me more manageable. I actually started Betaine HCl pills shortly thereafter. I really don’t how to relax and I’m really good at working, and my whole family is. It’s part of my gifts and burden in this lifetime. I was using nootropics in high school. I was-

Michael Roesslein:

Really?

Steven Wright:

Oh, yeah. [crosstalk 00:17:49] I use piracetam when I was 15 or 16. I’ve been ordering-

Michael Roesslein:

That’s wild.

Steven Wright:

… stuff off the internet and trying substances well before-

Michael Roesslein:

Since there’s been the internet.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. Basically.

Michael Roesslein:

Okay. All right. You had tried a whole lot of stuff. You were not new in the supplements and trying stuff.

Steven Wright:

Yes. I knew that there was another level, right? I knew that, okay, diet was just one component, but there’s other things that could matter. I’ve seen what creatine could do to muscle growth. I saw what nootropics could do to my brain. I figured there had to be this area for the gut. Immediately, I started seeking it. Because what happened to me was what happens to most people. It’s exactly what you said. They feel really terrible and then they find a few options like diet and some supplements. All of a sudden, they’re getting better, but their life is restricting into a box. It’s like, “I’m okay and I feel good, but I can only do X, Y, and Z. I have to take these things with me and I have to do this, and I have to do this, and all these things. Then if I do all those things and I get lucky, I have a great day.”

As you get better, your world closes in on you and you’re in this box. The other thing is I just happen to be a hedonist and I don’t like being controlled by boxes. I couldn’t stop asking the question: Why can’t I eat dairy? Why can’t I eat grains? That just drives my insatiable nature to keep testing and tweaking. I sought out most of the top famous best selling authors for functional or integrative medicine for consults and testing. It just turns out I did have a whole lot of issues. I had a history of concussions. I had some brain issues. I had parasites. I had estrogen dominance. I had a lot of different things that I had to go through. Each professional gave me a nugget or two. They would help me with one thing, but then their skill sets ran out and I’d have to switch to somebody else and somebody else.

Because I decided health was my number one value, I racked up credit card bills in the early days. I spent $600 a month on supplements. I bought the $2,000 worth of testing over and over again. Some days, I would quit and I’d go have a pizza, and I’d feel like to jump. But then I’d wake up the next day and be like, “That’s it. I can’t quit. I got to figure this out.” Otherwise, I’m not going to have the life I want. I’m going to be stuck in this box and not be resilient. What happened is I just kept seeking this resiliency and the question of why. Why do I have to be restricted? That led me to better and better health.

But as SCD Lifestyle grew and as I was able to expand my box and my capacity, I kept running into a wall where I would have these random, extreme gut pains. I could still had some food sensitivities. I just couldn’t figure it out. The best doctors and practitioners in the world couldn’t help me. The testing didn’t help me. At the same time, SCD Lifestyle have grown into multi-seven-figure company, which was really cool, but it was also very stressful. I just blew up. Honestly, I blew up and walked away. It was very immature of me in some regards, but it’s exactly what I needed because I got disillusioned. I got disillusioned that supplements were really all that mattered and diet really mattered, and functional medicine was really the answer because I couldn’t get out of my own box and actually build the resilient me.

When I walked away and blew everything up, I found out that I’d been just blocking away all these emotions. I had all this trauma from my birth as well as throughout my childhood. I learned there’s a whole host of stuff in the emotional, psychosocial world that actually affects your gut and affects your ability to eat food, and affects your ability to sleep and feel good every day, and have good hormones. That’s when I spent a whole bunch more money and a lot of weekends in various types of workshops and ceremonies, and all kinds of cool stuff. I wasted a bunch more money and found some really good things that helped. I was feeling really good a couple years later, but then life was like, “Hey, we’re not done with you, man.”

Essentially, my fiancé was diagnosed with cancer. Her mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. The business officially fell apart and I was signing the mortgage on my first home, on $1 million home that I had no longer had any incoming money for. All of my digestive symptoms just came back. All that stress, all that scariness around cancer, the woman that I want to spend the rest of my life with, just overwhelmed all the work I had done. Almost within six weeks, I was back to square one. I was like, “Oh, my God. I got to restrict my diet again and I got to go buy a bunch of supplements.” I bought all the brain supplements I knew that worked and I bought all the digestive supplements that used to work. I started taking them. Because I basically had to start over, I realized that like, “Man, these things don’t work like I thought they used to. This sucks and I’m still bloated. I still can’t eat anything.”

Now I’m dealing with all these stressors. I’m having financial stress. I’m having family stress. I’m having health stress all at the same time. I was like, “I got to solve this.” Again, I guess the universe gave me a gift. The best way out of this was to solve my own pain and build a company around it. That was when I acquired the company from Jordan and we’re still really great friends, and I pivoted it. I just said, “This is ridiculous. There has to be a better way to build gut supplements that can help my issues and I’m going to use the same engineering philosophy.” You can’t engineer a car to work part of the time. You can’t engineer a bridge to mostly last. Engineers aren’t trained to have 60% or 40% success rates. We’re trained to have 99.999% success rates. I was like, “These products suck because engineers are not removing the variables that could make them work for the vast majority of humans. Can I do that?”

That’s how Healthy Gut was formed and that’s one of the founding principles. If I’m going to build a product, the reason why I believe it’s the best in its class is because I’ve done a ridiculous amount of thinking and meditating on how many variables can I remove to make sure that hopefully 80% of people who buy this actually get the benefit they’re hoping to get out of it.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that. I think I connect. I was still in San Diego when you’re in that window of time. I remember talking to you once. I know where I was driving when we had the conversation and I had just gone through some pretty rough patch myself. I had been in the weekends and the workshops and the ceremonies, and the therapy and all the trauma stuff and whatever. I think I reached out to you to talk about that, but I remember it was when you were going through the cancer with Shay and the company, and everything else. For those out there who have autoimmune conditions and other digestive symptoms, I’m pretty sure there’s some people nodding their head along when they’ve had those experiences in life. Something they thought was gone is not gone and it comes back, and it can happen really quickly.

One of Mira’s flares started overnight when something stressful happened. We thought we had that under control. Then boom, stressful day, stressful events, stressful thing. Boom, pain comes back. It’s just like, “This can’t be real. This can’t be happening.” Then it compounds on top of the shit that’s happening that made it happen in the first place. I just want to acknowledge that and I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who can relate to that. We’ve had a lot of conversations around the research you do. We even did a webinar about… I forget. What is it? Maverick? What did you create?

Steven Wright:

Maverick Healing.

Michael Roesslein:

Maverick Healing, a PDF guide that Steve created that basically put some of your most, I don’t even know what to call them, outside the box research projects and guinea pigs. Another thing about Steve is if he puts out any information or education or talks about a supplement or any other type of thing that you can take or do or ingest, I promise you that he’s taken it and done it and ingested it probably in multiple ways and dosages and times and been self-guinea pig on everything. You decided to create a new company to make digestion-related products that would actually work for you. The byproduct of it is that they’ll probably work for most everybody else, too.

I know one example. We’ve done webinars on these. If you go to our site, we have the webinars about each product. We’re not going to go crazy details about the products, but you have a digestive enzyme called HoloZyme, which is a really comprehensive formula. It includes the mineral co-factors that are necessary to activate enzymes, which when you told me that those weren’t in most enzyme formulas, I thought that can’t actually be true. Then I went and looked it up, and it actually is true. It seems like a simple thing that everybody would just do, but there are co-factors to enzymes and digestive enzymes that make them turn on and make them go, and make them do their thing. Even some of the more expensive products in the market, which I have used and taken and given to clients, they don’t have them.

This is how good I’ve been studying in the webinars. The HCL Guard is… You mentioned Betaine HCl. It’s a really common supplement; lots of people take it. But you’ve created a formula that also has a bunch of synergistic ingredients, which are soothing and reparative and restorative to the stomach lining and to the upper GI, and stimulate bile flow and a bunch of things that will help in addition to the HCl. Because at one point, you were probably taking a handful of different pills that do the same thing and it’s like, “Why isn’t this all just in one thing?”

Steven Wright:

Yeah. I think I had spent over a year in my life taking 12 HCl tablets per meal, every meal.

Michael Roesslein:

Jesus, man. And plus the other things.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. Plus enzymes.

Michael Roesslein:

You’re like this. You need a beer bong from college to fit your supplements.

Steven Wright:

I can do 80 pills at a time.

Michael Roesslein:

Jeez, man. That’s like a meal.

Steven Wright:

I know. Yeah. It is, actually.

Michael Roesslein:

It’s like a whole meal. [crosstalk 00:28:48]

Steven Wright:

I try to turn life’s turds into gold and just go heavy into it. I was like, “Well, if I can take 60, can I take 61? Can I take 62?”

Michael Roesslein:

Man, okay. There’s a lot of ways that could go. But people can probably relate to this, too. If I have to take this one and this one and this one and this one, why doesn’t somebody just put them together into one and then I can take one? Because it gets exhausting. When Mira’s in flares and I’m making up her little thing with the supplements, it can get exhausting and overwhelming. Less pills is better. Less bottles of things to buy is better. More effective, efficient things that work are better. The HCL is a hybrid formula that is the HCl, but also has synergistic things. That’s upper GI. The digestive enzymes help break down the food with the bloating and the gas and the symptoms like that.

Then you make a really interesting product that I honestly didn’t first understand or get the gist of when you said, “Yeah. We make this.” Before we had the webinar, I was like, “What the hell is that? I’ve never heard of that.” I knew of butyrate, but I didn’t know the supplement form. That’s Tributyrin-X, which is a Tributyrin which is butyric acid, right?

Steven Wright:

Yup.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. That is a fuel for both the cells in the gut lining and it does a whole bunch of other really cool stuff. The webinar on that one honestly blew me away the most because I had the most knowledge of enzymes and HCl. I didn’t know anything about that. Some of the stuff that you dropped there and that you’re seeing results with super highly reactive people and people with histamine intolerance and mast cell activation syndrome. People who if they look at a supplement, they usually will react to the thought of taking it, let alone actually taking it. Tributyrin can do some really cool systemic things. There’s research showing links to brain health and mental health as well as inflammation in the gut and repairing the gut.

When I got wind of these… We have a retail shop on our site. We’ve only worked with a few different companies the whole time because I don’t sell shitty things and my bar for that is pretty high, what I would consider. If it’s a product that’s decent or whatever, I don’t need to be the one that sells it. They can get it somewhere else. I’ve really only tried to stick to things that we feel really, really strongly about, that are really high quality. They’re going to work for most people and that are universally beneficial. You don’t have to take a 2000-question test to try to figure out if this is the right thing for you and they fit.

We worked it out and we brought them in. The feedback that we’ve gotten from them has been really positive. I really appreciate the level of customer support that you guys provide. Not only for the people who buy products in that, but for us, too, because there’s been some times where we get questions we don’t know how to answer. Your team is awesome at being extraordinarily thorough in explaining how to best respond to each question and how to help people out. I’ve worked with enough companies to say that for those of you that don’t work in the behind the scenes in the industry, I don’t know how to put it nicely, but customer service can be a thing that is not like that. You’re on your own once you buy things from them. I think you guys are doing a hell of a job with it.

Steven Wright:

Can I say something about that?

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. If you’re listening to this, you actually probably already know the next steps in your life. You probably already know what you need to do next for your health. It might be go all in and spend three grand on some supplements and a new health practitioner. It might be trying a supplement that you find scary. It might be switching your diet and actually never cheating for 30 days or 100 days. It could be moving out of the house. You already know it, but you just don’t want to do it because you’re resisting it. The same thing is true for business owners. We usually already know what the heck we have to do. It’s just we’re resisting it because it’s going to cause a lot of pain and it’s going to be hard.

When SCD Lifestyle was at its peak, we knew that the next step for us was to launch supplements. But at the time, I didn’t want to do it because I felt like I wasn’t ready and I felt like we would just be another company. Just another company trying to find some margin and find some stability by white labeling. There’s 10,000 supplement companies. The world doesn’t-

Michael Roesslein:

Hold on. Hold on. I want to define something that the audience might not know. White labeling is what a lot of people do in this industry. A lot of practitioners, a lot of your favorite supplement lines might actually be somebody else’s supplement with their label put on it. That’s what you can do. You can buy something in bulk. They’ll put your name, your label, your brand on it. It’s their product. That’s what he’s talking about.

Steven Wright:

Yup. Yup. It’s ridiculously common in the supplement industry. There’s actually not that many unique [inaudible 00:33:57] out there. We knew that that would save the company probably and it would build this thing, but I just didn’t believe in it and I didn’t want to do it. I resisted it. It blew the company up and we lost it. That’s on me. When it became clear that there wasn’t a lot of options and I had my own problems to solve again, I decided that like, “Look. I really thought I was going to do something else with my life. I really didn’t want to build a supplement company because again, why does the world need another one?” But then I realized that maybe I actually could create products that were innovative and better than anything that’s ever been done in the human history. Two, I have bought a ridiculous amount of supplements and I have taken a ridiculous amount of supplements. As you’ve mentioned already, I have 400 pages on various types of substances from around the world that I’ve acquired and tested on myself, and read the research on.

What I’ve learned is that you can mess up taking supplements and prescription drugs if you don’t understand how to dose it and you don’t have someone to support you. You can get it all right. You can match. You can listen to something like this. You could watch something on YouTube. You could whatever. You could talk to even a doctor or a health provider, and you could be like, “Oh, I need Curcumin. Curcumin is going to save the day.” But if you get the brand wrong or the dosage wrong, you’ll just waste that whole 12 weeks. You’ll waste all the money. You’ll waste $100. Then you’ll go away thinking, “Dang! I fell for it again. I’m embarrassed. I did it wrong.” The truth was you took the wrong dose. You got everything right. You bought it from a practitioner who knew the brand was good. But guess what? The research on Curcumin says a lot of people need 1,500 milligrams and some people need 3,000 milligrams, but no one’s giving those dosages out.

That is the difference between getting the benefit you hear for some people and just being like, “Man, another one bites the dust. I hate this. I’m going to go get some pizza.” That’s what the other arm of our business model and what I want to offer the world, is that I’m going to make a stand for we are going to educate our customers and we’re going to help them with dosing and understanding their bodies more than any company’s ever done. Think of it like if Zappos made the sexiest shoes in the world and they still allowed you to call in any time and talk to them. That’s what we want to be for our supplements.

Michael Roesslein:

Thank you for that. It’s important because on many levels. One, just the amount of education it provides and the better outcomes and everything. But the people that are customers of this kind of products, they’ve been through the ringer. How many times has there been a practitioner or a company or a somebody that you wanted to help you not help you or not be able to help you or give you like, “Man, I don’t know. Worked for somebody else”, kind of answer? When I was working with clients one on one, every single one of them, literally I would wager on this, had a story like that. Either with their doctor or some product they tried or some therapy they went to go do or something, somebody was like, “Oh, I don’t know. It worked for the other person”, or, “Something’s wrong with you. You’re too messed up. That’s on you. You’re too messed up for this thing. Sorry. Cool. Thanks for your money. No, we don’t do refunds.”

That was what they’re used to hearing. I just had Dr. Eric Gordon on the podcast, who’s actually Mira’s doctor, and he’s in the Bay Area. He’s awesome. He gave all this really complex information about the cell danger response and systemic inflammation, and all these things. At the end, I asked him for a nugget of what’s the most important or what’s one thing that would help every person, or what’s the essential first step. He said hope and being supported. That was it. He went through outrageous biochemistry and then he was like, “No. It’s hope and being supported. It’s having somebody to help you and believing that it’s going to help you, and that they’re in your corner.” He goes, “I’ve seen more complex illness cases turn the corner when that’s provided for them than any other thing.” Just that level of support and the quality with it. We’ve seen great results with our people. I take it. The popcorn’s always my example. I think yours is red wine and something else. Is it pizza? Yeah.

Steven Wright:

Tortilla chips. Corn chips.

Michael Roesslein:

Tortilla chips. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, it was the popcorn trial. Four HoloZyme and I can eat popcorn without feeling like a beach ball is in my belly. It’s worth it for me. But for people who have a lot more issues, it can really help and improve quality of life. All three of the products are excellent. We’re grateful to have them in the shop. We’re grateful to be working with you. I actually just had the idea when you were talking about the level of customer support. I think I’m going to volunteer Whitney from our side to get some training from you guys so that we can directly answer the questions and to provide the support, too, so we don’t have to hit up your staff as much. Maybe we could arrange some team training over here for our people.

Steven Wright:

Of course.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. I’m grateful that our paths keep interweaving and crossing, and where I was looking to expand the gut-related products that we had. I was like, “Man, I don’t want to bring in these things.” Because it was the same thing like you with the white labeling, I was like, “Yeah. I could do it and it’ll help some people. It’ll help the bottom line in the company.” But it wasn’t a hell yes. It was a I guess so. I don’t do I guess so’s anymore. I’m just not. I totally feel you when you kept saying, “Then I blew up the company.” I get it, man. I’ve been there. I’ve had those days where it’s like, “Maybe it’s just time to do something else.” That happens.

I’m glad that your something else was this for now. Who knows where things are going to go? But on one hand, it sucks that people need to go through so much stuff to be able to discover things and find things, and do all this. But what tends to come out of it are end results like this, where now you’ve created something that’s helping a whole bunch of people that didn’t have that support or have that thing, and shortening that length of time of suffering for a lot of people. Thanks a lot, man.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. That would be my hope. My hope is that you don’t have to spend a $100,000 or $400,000. You don’t have to spend years testing-

Michael Roesslein:

No.

Steven Wright:

… all these products on yourself. My hope would be that-

Michael Roesslein:

Nobody should.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. My hope is that we could shorten that time so that you go do whatever you got to do in the world. I’m probably not going to solve climate change, but I hope someone does and I’m probably not going to… I don’t know.

Michael Roesslein:

They have a better chance to do it if they’re not bloated and…

Steven Wright:

That’s actually my belief system, is that everybody has their own gift based on their pain and their opportunities, and talents they’re given in their lifetime. We don’t really get to choose it. Actually, life chooses it for you based on all those circumstances. Because when you’re bloated or constipated or having diarrhea, the chances of you having a great relationship or you changing the world, or being really effective at your work is really, really small. I know because I tried for a long time. My goal is to help people handle their physical health as fast and as good as possible such that they can get on working on whatever. Hunger, homelessness, war, or climate change. I don’t know. Do something for the planet or even just a local community.

Michael Roesslein:

There’s plenty of problems that need to be solved.

Steven Wright:

Yeah, yeah. There’s plenty of work to be done. If I can make sure you got a smile on your face and not a beach ball in your tummy, then we’re all in this together.

Michael Roesslein:

That’s the new tagline that’s going on the packages. Smile on your face, not a beach ball in your tummy. But thanks, man. I appreciate. I know the behind the scenes of how much research you do and how many things you tried. When he’s saying he took 80 pills, I promise he took 80 pills. Your 400-page notes on, “I almost bought some strange supplement from Russia the last time I was having a bad mental health month.” That came from your webinar. I can prove that there are things that come from other countries that Steve has acquired and tried, and taken notes on and provided education around. That combines your insatiable research with your desire to create these things; both of those are necessary to create stuff like this.

I am grateful you are an obsessive researcher and really ready guinea pig, and that this is what’s come out of it. Thanks for sharing your story, man. I know that there’s three other conversations that could come out of that, that it would be really fun to have. But I’m grateful for what you’re doing now and we’re glad to be partnered with you. Everybody, check out the products. Check out the webinars and get your learn on.

Steven Wright:

Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks for continuing to do Rebel Health Tribe and get the message out there.

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