This is Chris Ashenden, a convicted criminal and the founder of the billion-dollar supplement company AG1. AG1 hired the most powerful defamation lawyer in the country to kill this video before it ever aired. But as you can see, it didn't work.
What if a tasty green smoothie drink could meet all of your nutritional needs? Giving your body what it needs can sometimes feel really complicated. But it doesn't have to be. What if this same slurry of specially formulated macro and micronutrients was endorsed by some of the most influential scientists on the internet? Beneficial effects of supplements include improvements in our gut microbiome through the ingestion of critical micronutrients in the proper ratios.
What would you pay for something this simple, this beautiful? Could you even put a price on it? This was 99 US dollars. It was 90 quid. It was a hundred and eighty Australian dollars for this tiny little pouch.
If you've been on the internet or listened to just about any podcast in the last few years, you've probably heard something about Athletic Greens or AG1 as it was recently rebranded. We're Athletic Greens, here to make healthy habits beautifully easy for you. Lately, AG1 has come under a lot of flack for not really living up to the hype.
A popular health trend creating quite the stir. What do you think about like the proprietary blend in Athletic Greens? The calling, for example, Athletic Greens 1 or AG1 a high quality greens powder is a little misleading.
So did AG1 about getting their certificates of analysis to see what the heavy metal load is or the mycotoxin profile and they refused to share it with you? Correct. And while, yeah, I'm going to get into its actual nutritional claims.
I'm also going to tell you a story that is almost completely absent from the internet. One that took me on a deep dive into court records on two continents, consulting with scientists all over the world, and into interviews that are easily available, but just about no one saw. This is the story of how AG1's billionaire founder, Chris Ashenden, had to flee his native country of New Zealand after he was convicted for 43 breaches of the New Zealand Fair Trading Act for a massive rent-to-own real estate scheme. While some details are still unclear, it is clear that he built dozens of people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and then went on the run. After hiding his money in a Byzantine maze of corporate shell companies, he showed up in America like the villain from The Music Man and founded the most successful supplement company on the planet, not based on science but on what he thought people would be.
by. Ashenden's mostly spirulina empire was built in the shadow of a documented scam. Now, there is a story, of course, of AG1's nutritional effectiveness or lack thereof. That is hugely important, but it's really only part of what's really going on.
I've searched news sources all across the internet from recent coverage in The New York Times to the lowliest blog, and what truly astounds me is that despite hundreds of journalists Digging into what AG1 is all about, basically no one bothered to look at the publicly available information about its charlatan founder. Ashenden doesn't give a lot of long-form interviews now that he's climbed into the billionaire echelons, but I did find this one on a tiny channel that just has 2,000 subscribers by coach Dana Cavella, where he opened up about his origins. I sat down with CEO of supplement company Athletic Greens with Chris Ashenden. So let's go back in time to 2010 when Ashenden was just another Kiwi trying to make a buck. Now, he'd gone through some hard years taking a stint as a used car salesman and then as a police officer, all the time thinking of how he might one day make it big.
I started a sports science degree at Auckland University. It's a three-year degree. I got right to the end and dropped out to start my first company, which was a nutrition company, a supplement company, and that didn't pan out.
So that was kind of the beginning of my formal. entrepreneur. Eventually started taking in self-improvement books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad that promised that he could will his way into fortune by changing his mindset about things.
And then he found a book on real estate, an industry that is thick with people who swear by the law of attraction. And he was off to the races. So I read a book on real estate on how to do up and sell houses and how to invest in property.
And I could suddenly see how I can do that. I can see how to do that. buying houses, doing them up and either selling them or renting them.
That was sort of my first sort of successful business foray. Now remember, this all happened in the wake of America's real estate crash that ultimately sank the global economy. Ashenden was just one of a whole flock of speculators ready to cash in on other people's misfortune. In his native New Zealand, he began advertising a shady rent-to-own scheme where he promised people a chance to own their own homes by renting their way to financial independence. The catch was...
that while he promised people ownership stakes in the properties that they were renting, the reality was that Ashenden remained the owner on the deeds. According to the judgment by the New Zealand Department of Justice, by encouraging vulnerable people in the mistaken belief that they were acquiring home ownership rather than a package of rights and obligations, which on any view fell far short of that concept, folk were lured into commitments which were a recipe for disaster. in which they lost most everything that they put into the property that they were seeking to acquire.
Indeed, they were given to understand they had acquired. Let me explain how bad these deals really were. According to the Commerce Commission, if the people who signed up with Ashenden wanted to leave their homes for 30 days or more, or made unauthorized home improvements of any kind, or missed a payment by more than 28 days, At any time over the course of 30 years, then Ashenden's company could seize their home and retain all of the money that they'd been paid over that time.
But that's not all. The renters had to maintain the house in the same condition it was purchased in or it could be forfeit, which is insane if you think about the 30-year term of the contract. All this time they were paying above-market rent for the privilege of likely never achieving true home ownership. To make it all the more egregious, Ashenden employed so-called tame lawyers who were paid specifically not to explain how risky the deals were to the clients and how likely they were to default. All told, the case involved 90 charges, 43 against Ashenden specifically, while 47 more charges against the companies he founded.
I'd like to be clear here. The charges happened in a criminal While I've petitioned the court to get the exact description of the charges, the judgment frustratingly does not mention what they are specifically. AG1's extremely powerful lawyers have been very vocal that the charges are not technically fraud in a strictly legal sense. Given some of the things that I'll get to later in this video, it's not clear to me that this legal team has a solid grasp on the case.
For now, you can make up your own mind. for yourself about the statements of the New Zealand court and what they actually meant. I have links down to the original documents below. The judgment said Ashenden displayed, and I quote, strong elements of cynicism and the calculated exploitation of people struggling financially. Ultimately, the case was going so badly for Ashenden that he even stopped defending himself in court.
He dismissed his legal team, filed for bankruptcy, and then fled the country. Here's how Ashton explains those years. After that real estate piece, I traveled the world for a while. Then I had a finance company.
All of that stuff got wiped with the global financial crisis. I had some pretty dark times with litigation, bankruptcy, sort of absolutely going back to the bottom of the well to then dig out and come out. I'll be honest, man, I was hitting the bottle for a little while. You know, there weren't good times from a psychological standpoint.
So it was the psychological health. And I was insanely passionate, and I still am, man, about the fundamental drivers for happiness. And I think, again, one of the things I'm most proud of is I could have gone for shortcuts when I was in that hole. And I'm really proud of the decisions I made to just build something that I would be proud of for the rest of my life. The New Zealand Department of Justice, on the other hand, put it this way.
Mr. Ashenden's alleged creditors point to a complex structure designed primarily to confuse the courts and make it difficult to enforce the judgment. Mr. Ashenden's petition for his own bankruptcy in this country seems directed at ridding himself of modest obligations by way of credit card debts and student loans. And that is quite a way to spin going on the lam, isn't it?
Now, there are a lot of details that I am sure other reporters will follow up on. What I do know is that America is the land of reinvention, a place where a person can get a fresh start. In New Zealand, Ashenden discovered that there are ethical and fiduciary requirements in real estate transactions.
But the world of wellness and supplement slinging in America has basically no regulation whatsoever. It's the perfect environment for an international grifter to thrive. The supplement industry in the U.S. is virtually unregulated. It's kind of a wild west. That's Christy Harrison, a journalist, dietitian, and author of the book The Wellness Trap.
I think supplements are such great targets for wellness grifters because they, well, two things. There's such a lack of regulation in the supplement industry, so there's no meaningful oversight, really. They can go to market very quickly.
It's not this, you know, billion-dollar investment that... that a pharmaceutical company would make to bring a new drug to market. So that's one thing.
And then the second thing is that there are huge profit margins in that industry. Here's Vicky Nguyen on the Today Show asking Ashton about the health claims on the back of his bag. An asterisk next to each of these claims. What do you say to people who say, well, then why should I spend three bucks a day on this? We actually have to put the asterisk there to state that while there is a horde of scientific data, that the ingredients exist inside this product that can substantiate.
Those support claims, those specific claims have not been validated by the FDA. Not been validated by the FDA. You've probably heard those words before. It turns out that the Dietary and Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, or the DSHEA for short, pretty much allows supplement companies to claim almost anything short of saying that they can cure a specific medical condition. Supplement companies can only make what are called structure function claims, which is to say like supports kidney health and function.
but you can't say cures kidney infection. So instead of specific health claims, Ashenden mastered the art of promoting the beautiful AG1 lifestyle, drinking smoothies after a workout in rainforests and just stopping short of wording that might upset the FDA. And let's pause for a hot second here and remind you that it doesn't really take any actual credentials to start up a supplement company. Recently, the gynecologist Jennifer Gunther did the math in her newsletter. that she could create her own brand of menopause-delaying turmeric powder with special bioavailable black pepper for as little as $28,000 to found the whole company.
That includes packing and shipping and all of the details that it takes to provide her own proprietary blend of flim flam. And sure, that's not free, but it's shockingly low for an investment when you compare it to just about any other business. When Big Pharma wants to put a drug on the market, it can take billions of dollars.
and years of research to clear the regulatory hurdles. Meanwhile, anyone can start a supplement company tomorrow and face basically zero oversight. And like any business, the profits scale up with more investment. Gunther ultimately figured out that she could make $195,000 of profit on a $100,000 investment.
And that is good money. All she needed was a marketing plan. And this is where Ashenden shines. Sure, he arrived in Arizona in 2011 at rock bottom. He was $5 million in debt and had no prospects other than a reading list of eternal positive thinking.
But ultimately, all he really needed was a complete lack of regulation. And to be in the U.S., which, I mean, if you want a most spectacular country in the world to go forth and build something, just period. His strategy was crushingly straightforward.
He would convince famous and successful people that his green slurry of proprietary nutrients would fix all their health problems for a share of the profits of each sale. The beauty was in the simplicity and the gorgeous marketing materials. So I thought, who are my early adopters who are most likely going to both get this and help me spread the gospel? And it was health and fitness professionals. It was trainers, nutritionists, and atropaths.
people who are coaching people in weight loss and lifestyle dynamic and it was one great partner at a time so yeah I literally went looking for the smallest group of people who I thought would deeply understand what we're trying to do and then figure out how to help them share the message in a way where we could both win and that was that was my business model. Look the concerns he identifies are real. We all want to be healthy.
But health is complex. Answers are not straightforward. There's nothing simple about it.
And, you know, if you just watch Ashenden's interview, there's nothing that suggests that he has a deep knowledge of human health or biology. He's not a doctor. He's a former used car salesman.
I mean, it's a little like the company Theranos, where Elizabeth Holmes dreamed up an amazing product where hundreds of diagnostic tests could be done on a single droplet of blood. But she had no technology to back it up. She identified the problem and just told people she had the solution. And she raised billions of dollars in investments. Unfortunately for Holmes, her specific claims fell under FDA regulation.
But Ashenden was clear to sell his simple product without any actual evidence of efficacy. It could be hundreds of dollars a month. And there's really, there's no science to support the claims that they're making.
And that's not even getting into the fact that they have this like 75 ingredient proprietary mix. And this proprietary mix is a loophole that they're trying to use to pretend that they're protecting trade secrets. So they want to say they don't want to release their full proportion ingredient mix because, well, someone then could reverse engineer it and they could compete with them and they could get their market share. But the reason they're asking.
actually doing it is because, again, because the dietary supplement industry is unregulated. That's Andrea Love, a friend of the channel, and I've done some great interviews with her. With a little bit of luck and hard work, Ashton did expanded his company and reinvested in marketing, ultimately targeting the most influential people in social media.
Tim Ferris loved the simplicity of Athletic Greens. He featured it in his bestseller, The 4-Hour Body, and soon the supplement took off in a... big way.
In this interview with Ashenden, Ferris slyly promotes AG1's health shake for its disproportionate gains. AG1 was, at the time, of course, a major sponsor of his show. Obviously, there's a handful of experiments in there that you were involved with.
If you take a post-workout shake most of the time, you should take it before you work out. And I saw that in my data. So a lot of really simple ways to track a few very simple things for extremely disproportionate return on investment.
AG1 thrived because of its partnerships with media influencers in a time when it was increasingly difficult to make money as a creative professional on the internet. I mean, you probably remember that podcasts found their first sponsors with direct mail companies like MailChimp and then security companies like SimpliSafe and then prepared meals sent directly to your home. Eventually, most of those advertising opportunities sort of dried up.
Meanwhile, big brand car companies and luxury watchers and pharmaceuticals did not and have not invested in small creators. And this left a void for AG1 to fill for any influencer who wanted an affiliate deal. AG1 reportedly spends $2.1 million a month on affiliate ads.
They also signed more lucrative sponsorship deals with top influencers like Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia, both of whom ended up as scientific advisors, Any sort of specialty in nutrition. Huberman is a neuroscientist who specializes in ophthalmology, and Peter Attia is trained as an oncologist, meaning he treats cancer. Now, I've done videos on both Huberman and Attia, and I do not want to get bogged down now on the specifics of their shaky scientific communications. Suffice it to say, though, that out of all of their sponsors, AG1 is by far the most problematic and the most profitable, and they both know. that its research is just not up to snuff.
And I digress. Let's take a step back from the business model and sham science behind AG1 specifically. Many people have noted that AG1 is far from the only bad actor in the supplement industry.
This week, as I was preparing this video, I posted my thesis on threads, which you have to know is where all the action is on social media these days. So go sign up for a Threads account if you're not there. Anyway, I suggested that AG1 is basically the Theranos of the supplement industry. And then Hank Green, yeah, that Hank Green, responded.
This is what he wrote. The thing is, this will surprise no one, as the supplement industry has always been and remains in many ways the Theranos of industries. But I wish you luck.
And thanks for the love, Hank. Say hi to your brother. And of course, Hank was right. Supplements are the Gibraltar of grift. A free-for-all.
And it's important to ask, beyond being the biggest nutrient slurry affiliate marketing shake on the market, has AG1 done any actual harm? Answering this question is tricky because there is a type of harm that happens when people spend money frivolously in the hopes that they are getting something that will improve their lives in a measurable way. But it doesn't happen.
And there's another type of harm that can occur when a customer opts to use AG1 instead of actual medicine for an acute condition. And these cases are not well recorded in any data set that I could find. Sure, there's been grumbling on the internet, but what else? Well, one place to start looking is the FDA. in particular a subdivision called the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, which collects official complaints related to just about every product sold in grocery and drugstores across the United States.
Naturally, there are hundreds of thousands of products on the list. Customers filed 63 official complaints against the brand. Unfortunately, the FDA does not provide a lot of information about what was in those complaints specifically, except to label AG1 potentially suspicious. And there have also been lawsuits in the United States that have been concerning.
In 2015, the Environmental Research Center Incorporated sued Athletic Greens over high levels of lead that it detected in the product in California. Now, the two parties settled for about $78,000 and Athletic Greens agreed that it would include warnings about potential lead exposure on its packaging to everyone in California. But AG1 doesn't include that warning anywhere else in America and I did check that. Which leaves me wondering about lead content in the product in general.
A second lawsuit, this one from 2020, also filed in California by Travis Edwards, who worked at Athletic Greens as the head of global fulfillment and distribution, claimed that he was fired because he reported to his superiors that he had discovered mold in the ingredients that the company received to make the green slurry shake. He told his boss, that they should return the moldy ingredients to the suppliers and get a refund and not ship them out to the world. But he alleged that the company simply didn't listen.
Instead, they shipped the spoiled ingredients out to their customers. Three months after he started making noise, Ashenden and AG1 fired Edwards in what he said was an attempt to silence a whistleblower. Now though I reached out to Edwards, I never could figure out why the case was ultimately dismissed. Still, it's pretty shocking. that AG1 might not have cared about shipping contaminated products to its millions of customers.
It's indeed possible that some of the complaints filed with the FDA last quarter could go back to a sloppy supply chain. Ultimately, to me, the biggest problem with AG1 is how they sell false hope to their customers. Known grifter Chris Ashenden found a mostly unregulated niche and used his inspirational marketing to dupe millions of people into spending $100 a month on a questionable nutrient shake.
In some ways, this is the most American story I have ever heard, where even the most destitute grifter can show up on our shores and then reinvent themselves with hard work, gumption, and a flashy business plan. It's unclear to me if any supplement maker has ever faced serious consequences in American courts. While it was...
preparing this video, Athletic Green started following me on Substack and I immediately asked them for a comment. They got an early access to the video, I think through my very affordable premium membership plan, and then they immediately wrote me with a few clarifications. A spokesman at AG1 wrote that Ashenden has never been charged with an arrestable offense and that all fines and retributions were paid by September 2014. AG1 further denies the allegations. by Travis Edwards about mold in the supply chain and that AG1's in-house research team continues to develop and refine the formula for AG1 based on scientific evidence for efficacy and safety for the ingredients that we use. Before moving on, I want to just pause to say how insane talking with AG1's team actually was.
This wasn't just some lowly PR person or run-of-the-mill legal counsel. AG1 retained one of the most powerful lawyers in America to respond to my initial reporting that appeared on Substack. Megan Meyer, the founding partner of Meyer, Watkins, Phillips, and Pusch, was one of the people behind the $787 million defamation settlement against Fox News in the Dominion voting machine case.
Her bio states that she has, quote, nixed false stories before they were published and scored countless corrections and retractions. from the national media. Now, if you think that this is overkill for dealing with a channel whose average video barely breaks 2,000 views, you're right. It was clear from our interactions that AG1 didn't really understand the facts of the case, insisting repeatedly that Ashenden was tried in a civil court.
It wasn't. Meyer wrote that I was potentially defaming Ashenden by calling him a criminal, which he technically is because he was convicted in a criminal court. Finally, Meyer provided me with a document from the Ministry of Justice of New Zealand that stated that Ashton had had no criminal convictions. And this like really, really confused me because the judgment looked pretty clear to me. And then on further research, I realized that New Zealand conceals criminal record convictions for non-jailable offenses after seven years.
And the letter that they sent me was dated from 2019. All this proves to me is that the criminal charges that he was convicted on didn't carry jail time. And honestly, this... feels like it was all part of the same grift that Ashenden has been using all along to use what privilege and marketing resources are at his disposal to confuse and obfuscate the truth of what's really happening. Whether it's selling impossible real estate dreams to destitute people, impossible healthy nutrient shakes to an uncritical audience, or now trying to nix my factual reporting with high-priced lawyers and misleading documents.
As you can see, it didn't work. Instead, I lawyered up, triple-checked my facts, and dug in my heels. If anything, the heavy-handed approach has only drawn more attention to this project with a huge influx of amazing new subscribers on my Substack.
And incidentally, if you're going to subscribe to this channel, do it on Substack because Substack is where I have the most control over the information that I send to you. And before I go, I want to leave you with a few words from Andrea Love. So Is it surprising that he is fraudulent?
No, it's not surprising. It's also not surprising that he fled to the U.S. Again, I'm not 100 percent familiar with the regulations in New Zealand, but the regulations on supplements are extremely lax here. And so it's an obvious place to go if you want to fly under the radar and make a lot of money by exploiting people. And with that hopeful note.
Maybe that's all I have to say about AG1 for now. If you happen to be watching this video with ads inserted, I will bet you that there is at least a small chance that YouTube played you one of their ads over the course of this video. And there's absolutely nothing that anyone can do about it.
Let me know if it does play down below. As Ashton says, he is very grateful for everything this country has done for him. Thanks so much for everyone who has supported this channel over the last few years. I'm making a few changes to my exclusive offerings over the next few months, which is going to include the launch of an eight-episode true crime podcast about grape fraud in California's wine country.
Oh, and also murder. It's called Blood Vines, and I'm going to give early access to my premium supporters on Substack in what will be a pretty big reorganization of what it is I do here on the internet. So consider signing up and becoming a premium member.
Anyway, there's a lot to look forward to, so please... check out the links down below and in the pinned comment up top. Remember, get all of your macronutrients.
I wouldn't want you to be deficient in essential vitamins. Thank you so much to all of my supporters on Patreon and on Substack who make this work possible. If you want early access and to get your name on the honor roll, please check out those links down below. And, you know, it just means the world to me that you're here.
From PokeBear LLC in Denver, Colorado, this...