george grombacher 0:00
Come on

board this is George G. And the time is right welcome today’s guest strong, the powerful Matt parks. Matt, are you ready to do this? Let’s go. Let’s go. Matt is the founder and CEO of one less CBD. They’re an organization working to create a better option for those suffering from chronic pain and inflammation. Matt, tell us a little about your personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do. All right. Well, personal life mainly, I’m a father of three, three young girls eight, five and three. So they they keep me young, energized and if people talk about their why, you know, definitely my kids are a big part of my why why? Get up every day why hustle I try to

Matt Parks 1:01
My other head is I work in durable medical equipment. So I mean, I’m working multiple jobs always hustling always, you know, doing things trying to help people kind of indirectly but in healthcare my entire life and part of that was growing up in in northeast Baltimore City, my mom going to er, nightshift, ER nurse in Baltimore City for 43 years.

And my brother, who’s three years older, was in Johns Hopkins. From the time he was a baby to the time he was about 1617. He was born with hydrocephalus, and a dandy Walker malformation, which in layman’s terms, essentially means he was born with missing 80% of his cerebellum. So has it.

Operations Ben Carson was a surgeon.

Really, what it does is it builds pressure on the brainstem. So I mean, he had shunts

Unknown Speaker 2:02
titanium metal plate, put his head, all kinds of things that I was exposed to at a young age. In that hospitals, I was independent, I was living with families, all up and down the street, church families and school families and relatives because my parents were busy with him. So I had to be independent, I, you know, was exposed to a world like that. And my mother, you know, she is a very much a in head Outmail type person, so she doesn’t keep me away from anything. And especially when I was young. So I just really knew about drug addiction, about inflammation about, you know, people who were in a much more space than I was and how the world really worked. I was exposed to that at a very young age. And it was really instrumental in how I grew up. I ultimately left Baltimore and played baseball in college at Belmont University in Nashville, that my wife in grad school, and then started working in durable medical equipment, about 2011 2010. And it was there that I really started to develop an appreciation for an underlying root cause of people’s problems from Crohn’s, colitis, diverticulitis, rheumatoid arthritis. You know, I really figured out that inflammation was the root cause of all pain, and underlying health conditions. So when you can attack inflammation, you can kind of get to that initial response, your body’s telling you, okay, something’s wrong. How are we going to deal with it? Are we going to overload ourselves on over the counter medications, we’re going to go down the prescription opioid route, which most people have taken and has caused a addiction epidemic in our country. So it really just led to a kind of a self discovery. I want to learn more about this, I want to help people. How can I do that and have an opportunity presented itself to get into a topical information space, but I wanted to do it right. And I really felt like the CBD industry was up and coming but already losing its way. It was over commercialized, ever marketed. And I really felt the product offerings were really suspect and not really well thought out from the get go. So that kind of led me to where I am now.

george grombacher 4:33
Nice. Well, I appreciate you sharing your story. And I you were kind enough or somebody from your organization was kind enough to send me a jar of your CBD cream. And I really it’s CBD seems to be just ever present sort of to your point, but I had no idea really what it was, like, you know, like, it seems like it’s good. Joe Rogan talks about it every once in a while. And I see CBD everywhere. But it was great timing because as as we get older, Matt, and like, you’re a little younger than me, your body starts to hurt more and more. And I bought one of those therapy guns, and that was working. But then I’ve had this chronic chronic pain in my right foot for feels like a year. And the therapy gun was helping, but it wasn’t getting rid of it. And I started using the cream about three weeks to two weeks ago. And it’s made an enormous difference. So, so thank you,

Unknown Speaker 5:30
love to hear it. And that’s, you know, inflammation is root cause so you know, the body is, is basically sending you signals, you know, and we talked about CBD really derives from this discovery of the endocannabinoid system. And that was kind of late 80s, early 90s. And, you know, a lot of stuff like you said, it’s been over commercialized over hype, so people hear CBD, and they don’t really know what it is. And then it becomes a problem that everybody has their own interpretation of what it is. And usually, that’s just a self fulfilling proclamation of their product of what it does, or an ingredient, they’re trying to skew people or sway people to use their products. So it’s not really a lot of science that’s behind their products. And the thing with the CBD industry is you really can’t say what your product does, because the FDA won’t allow it. It’s a supplement. It’s no different than vitamin C, vitamin D, ginkgo biloba, any of those things, you can’t scientifically say my product will reduce inflammation, you know, I don’t ever tell that. That’s my hope. You know, that’s my desire, I put active ingredients in there that I believe are going to do that. But in essence, where CBD has lost its way is too many people claiming too many things that simply are just not true. Or are really not proven in a human clinical trial sense. And that’s unfortunate, because there is a lot of promise and hope with this ingredient. You know, I most certainly believe in it. But it also comes to a sense where people are just getting too much information, and they don’t know who’s telling the truth and who’s not. And that’s the upsetting part is that you’re constantly fighting that uphill battle of false proclamations and people really just trying to make a quick buck sell their product and then sell their company for, you know, multiple multiples of EBITDA, and get out and, you know, on to the next thing, and that’s unfortunate, because there was a lot of problems with this ingredient.

george grombacher 7:46
Yeah, that was kind of my my impression when, when, when we got in touch, and you know, when you start thinking about buying a certain card, and you start noticing it on the street a lot more. I’m like, what, what, what is going on with all the CBD and what went through my head is, well, there’s obviously money in it if there’s so many companies that are doing it, and it’s obviously a good thing. So you talked a little bit about it, and it sounds like we can’t say that this will reduce your inflammation. That’s what we’re hoping it happens. But just really what is CBD, right?

Unknown Speaker 8:24
So it’s a when I was kind of going down that road but the endocannabinoid system, so when your body has an injury, it actually releases cannabinoids, your body has natural cannabinoids in time. The problem is, is that there’s protein enzymes in your body as well. So when your body has an injury, let’s say I go out for a jog and I twist my ankle. So naturally, my brain is sending a signal and it starts firing you know really quickly it starts beating like a heartbeat when it goes really fast, your brain is going and paying cannabinoids have been released and their job is to go and directly attack the inflammation. The problem is is that these Protein Protein enzymes act like Pac Man, and they eat up the cannabinoids in your body. So not enough cannabinoids are going to the inflammation and doing the natural occurrence of what your body’s trying to do and Duke decrease it. So the thought process is with CBD and there have been some great studies on rats. As far as injecting cannabinoids to an area of inflammation, you’re getting more cannabinoids to that area. And you’re essentially blocking those protein enzymes from decreasing the cannabinoids in your body. So you are giving your body more cannabinoids than the protein enzymes can attack. So now we’ve introduced cannabinoids to that area. And the hope the idea of the thought is that the cannabinoids now can naturally decrease inflammation without increasing You know without introducing ibuprofen acetaminophen you know whatever you might you know an opioid whatever it might be. And you know for me what I always tell people you know my product is that CBD is one part. You know, we tell our six ingredients, camphor geranium, menthol eucalyptus, white willow bark, and then the CBD isolate. And CBD isolate is important because isolate is just pure CBD. And CBD is a phyto cannabinoid, which means it’s derived from a plant. And when we extract CBD or CBD that we get is hemp based. It’s not marijuana based, so there’s no THC. And THC is that main ingredient that kind of makes you feel like you’re flying on a magic carpet somewhere and you’re not in you know, where you currently are. So, you know, that was the thing for me is that I heard a lot of people talking about, you know, CBD, but the question was, will this get me high? You know, am I gonna fail a drug test? Am I going to do all these things? So my goal was, how can we make a product that incorporates CBD, but eliminates all those underlying things that we see when companies really don’t know their extraction methods, or they’re not extracting the THC fully, or they’re misrepresenting their product. So our goal was, let’s access this now we have access to this great, you know, topical inflammation ingredient. Let’s just make sure it’s safe and effective. But that’s that’s really the science is that you know, we endocannabinoid system releases cannabinoids, it just does not release enough. It all plays a role in the central nervous system. And we’re just trying to get more cannabinoids to the area, we can block those protein enzymes and we can let the cannabinoids in the body do its natural healing. And my goal is if I can take the pain scale, I wake up every day on 167 scale, I can get you down to a three or four, I can make you more mobile, I can make you more active, then you’re going to naturally decrease inflammation, we’re not going to be sedentary, we’re not going to be still, we’re gonna get up we’re gonna get moving. And I want you to enjoy applying the product. So it’s all those things together that you enjoy, it absorbs it gets into the skin, it doesn’t feel like it’s sitting on your skin for six hours, you know, all day, it actually absorbs it gets in there, it feels nice, it’s cooling. So there’s a lot of things that go into it. It’s not just you know, throw some CBD and a hand cream and call it information products because it’s just not there’s more to it took us two years to figure this out. It’s not it’s not an overnight thing. But unfortunately, you have a cash crop and people go Alright, let’s let’s get to it. I can make I can white label a CBD product and sell it and make a quick buck. And if one thing the pandemic did, it did weed out a lot of those pretenders in the industry, which was a great thing. But it’s still an ever it’s an uphill battle every day to get your product out there and get people to buy in because they may have bought one CBD product at a gas station had a bad experience. You know, now all CBD products are they’re worthless, they don’t work. I’m not gonna do that again. So it’s like anything, you just got to get out there and get your message out there and tell people why you do what you do and hope people will take advantage and think okay,

george grombacher 13:23
yeah, I appreciate that. So I don’t know if you’re currently distributing gas stations but you probably ought not do that. That’s just my my professional. Alright, so if cannabinoids are produced by my whatever, they’re there, they’re naturally producing my body. Why are these proteins attacking it?

Unknown Speaker 13:44
Just the body’s natural defense system and it’s I mean, it was really what the discovery of the endocannabinoid system again it’s like an 80s and 90s when that was finally discovered, that you know, these cannabinoids, were actually being released in the body nobody had ever really studied it there was no you know, it was always just you know, marijuana is marijuana. So I mean, it’s really does come from the discovery that medical marijuana did have some healing properties. And I think that’s what led Doctor scientists to start really studying that okay. Rather than just drug or not counting sense or people trying to get high. There actually seems to be some healing benefits from hemp and marijuana based products. You know, we start to see the originally discovered with glaucoma, you know, and starting to introduce medical marijuana out into the field and giving people license to actually, you know, apply the product prescribed by a doctor. It just led to this further inclination. And I think with the opioid epidemic, doctors, physicians, natural healing professionals are trying to find more ways to help people, reduce their pain and not be bound To because even ibuprofen if we take that daily ibuprofen, we are ruining our stomach linings, we’re causing internal bleeds. I mean, if you are somebody who’s in your 50s and 60s and goes you bruised naturally, and you’ve been taking a lead every day, there’s a reason and your blood is not acting probably not going to clot properly. There are so many things that OTC medications and prescription drugs have done to our bodies over the years that I really think the opioid epidemic has started to allow doctors physicians to really take a stronger look at cannabis and hemp based products and say, Okay, there’s a path for this. There’s a need. Let’s see what we can do. And let’s do some further study. So there is a FDA approved drug for childhood epilepsy, called epileptics that actually does use CBD in the product to help with childhood epilepsy is approved by the FDA. That is really the reason why the FDA will not give its credence to making CBD a dietary supplement. They’ve gone look, we using this stuff and prescription based drug, we can’t then turn around and say, Okay, can you CBD as a dietary pill, you know, and it’s actually a company I won’t name names, but they’re a big way out there. And their products, I’ll say dietary supplement on them. And that’s a big no, no, all the FDA, how they haven’t got all their products pulled off the shelves is beyond me. But, you know, it’s a slippery slope of what you can tell what you can’t. But it was really the 2018 farm bill which took CBD off the schedule one narcotic list, when we were allowed to finally extract, cultivate and put these things in, you know, in products. But it had to have point 3% or less weighted THC in it. That was the only regulation. So it was open season for anybody to make a CBD product and found its benefits. And that’s, again, a problem with our system is that we, we allow these things to happen. But we don’t give any regulatory framework. So then it allows something that has a lot of promise and hope to then be muddied and go down this path of over commercialization. And people getting the wrong message about the product. And that’s, that’s what we fight every single day. It’s because people are telling things they shouldn’t be. And people were just, I mean, I could go on for days, but it’s just a frustrating aspect of when you know, something’s good. And you know, I have countless stories and testimonials of people who have, you know, help with my cream, which is what I use, as kind of a segue into, I think it’s worth trying my product. Because you know, I can’t come out and say anything, I’m just, I’m trying to let science be my guide.

Unknown Speaker 17:59
And get into the system and help to decrease inflammation as best I can. You know, this is my part, I don’t do adjustables I don’t trust the science behind it. How much of our body’s really ingesting and absorbing the CBD when we’re doing it in a tincture sense, or gummy, or protein powder or water. To me, the topical is just the path of least resistance, we go directly to the source. And we, you know, can get relief, and hopefully it lasts four to six hours a day. You know, that’s my product, you can apply it all day long. There’s nothing my products that could hurt you. And that was the whole hope behind it. I just don’t know enough about the adjustables. And there’s just not enough science out there for me to say, Yeah, I’m getting the adjustable market because I don’t know how much the body is really absorbing by by doing it in an adjustable form.

george grombacher 18:54
Well, I appreciate it because that that really answered my question. I was I was curious about the delivery mechanism of it. So so there you go. Topical makes sense. Love it. Well, Matt, the people are ready for your difference making tip, what do you have for them?

Unknown Speaker 19:12
Do your research in life, um in my my experience, you cannot be afraid to fail. My difference. Maybe tip is embrace failure. Because it really opened your eyes to what can be you know, if you don’t get out and try and if you overanalyze and think about all the different ways you can get your product to market or spread your message. You’re never gonna get off the bench. You’re just gonna be there every day just wondering, okay, will this work, will it not? The only way to find out is to get out there and do it and you’re gonna fail and embrace that because you just got to hit one time. You connect one time and really I land on something that’s going to build momentum. And then the sky’s the limit. But you know, I’m as guilty of it as anybody of overthinking and overanalyzing and just this fear of failure that, you know, what are people gonna think of me? Or, you know, how’s this gonna look? Or is this is this gonna, you know, really start to drive a minimum? Or is this gonna, you know, just be a dead end. You don’t know until you do it. You just got to get out there and be active and, you know, self, promote yourself, don’t care what other people think of you because they’re gonna forget about you. Right? Five minutes later, you know, if you made a fool of yourself, it’s not gonna stick with them forever. But you learned, you learned, okay, that didn’t work. So on to the next one. And once I started to care less about what people think and worry more about what I believed in. And just to get that message out there, the better off I was, and the more confident I was, and the more people started to relate to me, you just be yourself. Try new things. And don’t be afraid that it may get misconstrued or people may not hear the message the first time. You just keep out there and keep hammering the message and find out what works. And you’ll you’ll make your way through you know, this is a this in a lot of ways these last two years have been a great path to self discovery for a lot of people. And I hope that continues. Because it’s people have so much more potential than they’re even allowing themselves to to find and I think that as long as you get out there, try something. Give it everything you got. Try as many different ways as you can to break through and something is going to happen that you just didn’t expect. That would be my my biggest tip is just get off the bench and try it. You don’t care what the results are just embrace failure and make it happen.

george grombacher 22:01
I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets come up. Matt, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you and work can they pick up a jar of one less CBD

Unknown Speaker 22:12
whale special offer today. Then I’m going to listeners of the podcast we’re going to do a travel jar free of charge which is a quarter ounce jar. All they’re paying is shipping and handling, which is $4.95 so they get to travel jars my product for $4.95. All they have to do is go to www dot one less cbd.com forward slash lifeblood. And you can go to our website one less CBD calm you can learn about our formulation and learn about me Instagram handles at one less CBD. But again that offer is one less CBD OLES cbd.com forward slash lifeblood and you can get a travel sized jar of my product to try it and a little bit goes a long way and just $4.95 Can’t beat it. We’ll get it out to you immediately. And let you guys try it and see what you think.

george grombacher 23:11
Awesome Have you enjoyed this as much as I did show Matt your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas and or is dealing with chronic pain. Go to one less CBD calm that’s all spelled out. O n e l e s s CBD calm. Slash lifeblood and pick up take Matt up on his offer for the free travel charges for paying shipping and handling and fight them on social media. I’ll list everything in the notes of the show. Thanks good, Matt. My pleasure. And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai