MMA fighter Dr. Robert's rise to business success

what's up everybody john airpola here with my mma news and today our story's a bit different than usual normally we're we're talking with professional fighters talking about their upcoming fights talking about wins their future all that type of stuff and i'm sure you're used to seeing it on this youtube channel as well well today we have an mma story just a bit different so just bear with us here we're going to get into the the goods of mixed martial arts here in just a second today i'm talking to dr richard roberts who has an amazing story so i'm just going to get right into into it here with everybody and have him start explaining his background so uh let's bring dr roberts in here and uh dr roberts before we get started in your background i just got to ask you how's everything going and uh i really like that background you have there with all the fishes and everything else thank you yes uh believe it or not this tank was just put in a week ago i've i mean i'll step aside to see it better it's um a thousand gallon african cichlid tank i had a glass tank there for many many years and then i decided to replace it and it was a lesser quality glass which gives a green uh tint to the color so i decided to replace it with an acrylic tank that was a big mistake acrylic gets scratches it absorbs um organic solvents from the air gets cloudy so i just replace it now with a a low iron glass glass tank and it's gorgeous but a word of caution don't put a tank like this on the floor of your house um it weighs the tank the glass weight and metal weighs 2700 pounds the water weighs about 9 000 pounds so this is part when i put the fish tank in the first time it was part of an expansion of the house and we have six steel beams underneath the tank that go to the footers in the basement so yeah kids don't try this at home well as you say that definitely looks like a project to put in and it's definitely uh i i would never be able to do it i can just tell you that much i'm going to try to get into anything with fish or anything like that because i wouldn't have a clue don't even get that started but i do like it um but uh dr roberts let's start getting into your background here a little bit you're a fellow pennsylvania guy like myself here so why don't you just tell everybody a little bit about what it was like growing up and how exactly you started getting involved in uh the world of pharmaceuticals so um i grew up in a suburb of philadelphia called athington township the little town is called a rydal i was an eagles fan since i was before i was born and i still bleed eagle's green um and i also grew up as a as a totally secular you know jew at that point i'm now a orthodox jew um and and i um i loved science i went to college at university of pennsylvania i love science and i really want to be a physicist a physicist physicist or a mathematician and my father got a hold of me and he said um you are nuts he said um it's nice that you like that you're doing written science but you've got to go to medical school so you can earn a living even if you never use it you'll always have that in your back pockets you can earn a living so i listen to my father by the way i'm not saying the words my father used he was more animated than what i'm saying now but i listen to my father and i went to medical school but i also then stay true to my love of science i also got a doctorate in biophysics so i was at penn university pennsylvania for 12 years and um my father owned 50 interest in a small generic pharmaceutical company uh my whole life he had owned that it was a small company not really very sophisticated but it put food on the table uh when i was when i was young growing up you know you ask you know johnny what do you want to do when you grow up i want to be a fireman tommy what do you want to do when you grow up i want to be a you know a policeman richie what do you want to do i want to be the president chief executive officer of united research laboratories incorporated but things went awry things went a little off off off the plan because of my love of science um so so i went that direction i got my medical degree and my and my doctor biophysics at penn and then i went to harvard where i i trained in internal medicine did an internship internal medicine at the brigham and women's hospital of harvard medical school and while i was there in boston i actually lived in brookline which is the one town over um but the hospitals in boston my father called me said you know rich if you want to try your hand in the business you better come now it's not going to be around much longer so i i thought about it and i said you know if um if i am going to actually go into the business i'm not going to spend more years training in medicine um and if i'm going to stay in medicine then i'll just i'll just try the business one year unless if i don't like it i'll come back to medicine i'll stay there so it's one of my uh one of my prized possessions is a letter i have from the chair the uh director of the house gift training program at harvard saying we're sorry to see you go you want to come back come back anytime we'll take you back i have that one framed in my basement so i went and i tried i went to the company and they were in the verge of bankruptcy the company had about 35 million dollars in sales they were losing about two to three million dollars a year they were paying their vendors around four to five four to five months late the bank was about to put the company into into work out just to sell off everything and close the company and that's when i joined and that's how i got my start in business to make a long story short i mean a long grueling grueling story uh working day and night for 24 years um i basically i took over the operations after three months i told my father and his 50-50 partners brother that you know this place is going to collapse you have to give me full control of the operation or i'm just going back to medicine because it was ridiculous what was going on i can give you all the details interesting stories but maybe it's not for this venue so they did it and um the first year i was able to uh get the company back to a small profit and we had ups and downs throughout the years some opportunities some crises almost hit bankruptcy again uh a number of years later then we got big investors involved my father and upload were bought out of the business and eventually i think i took the company from 35 million dollars a year in sales to 600 million dollars a year in sales i transitioned the company from a tiny generic distributor distributing other generic drugs making a couple of themselves to a a scientifically driven um discovery company on on drug delivery technologies and new drugs uh it took us from a two to three million a year loss to a 300 million dollar a year profit and the number of employees went from 125 up to 800 and then including the contract sales force and finally in 2012 we were sold for 800 million dollars and it wasn't all my money but you know i got a few dollars here and there so i'm now retired and trying to figure out what i'll do when i grow up well i i have to ask you know when i hear about you know all of that uh you know how did you go from being a guy obviously so well-versed in science but then to being a businessman like that was there like a business course along the way or did you kind of just pick this up on the fly and figure hey you know i'm pretty good at doing business you're really asking like one of the most critical questions that's very a very astute question very astute um i had experience organizing many functions as a medical doctor in a hospital for each patient you have different lab tests you're sending in you have nursing support you have the ex x-ray people coming in you have a cardiology consultant then you get your lab they get without that result lab test results in you change the medicines so i i was used to handling you know a thousand different things organizing them all all together to the one goal of the of the patient's health also when i worked my phd in biophysics i designed experiments with many many hundreds of steps i had many different scientific pieces of equipment going chemical reactions you know and and i was shuffling all so that that organizational ability i brought from science and medicine the other thing i brought though is um and i say people say what's the one key to business to success in business well there isn't one key but i can tell you the major thing i've seen that has some people made them fail is ego ego that if you you're not willing to take advice or you think you know everything or if you have an idea and it turns out the facts that come in show that that's really not the best idea well you're going to defend it because your honor is on the line no no no you have to you have to go where the facts take you and along the way any decisions that you're making um have to always be tentative and there's more because you're always making decisions based on incomplete knowledge in business and as more information comes in you're ready to switch courses uh as which course as a matter of fact sometimes when we got bigger and we were hiring in uh executives from the biggest pharmaceutical companies uh one of the things i'd make sure to do was when that they would be in a meeting that i was in and i'd be running a meeting maybe there's 10 12 people there vice presidents maybe a director or two i would try to find something right i came out with an opinion in front of everybody and someone else had a different idea and i said wait stop you're right i'm wrong i i just forget my idea was flawed you're right the way you're going these guys came from these big pharma companies they almost fall off the chair what they're used to is politicking clapping up up the up the the management hierarchy bowel to the ceo and and i needed to teach them very early on no you have to go where the information takes you have to go where the facts take you and i would not allow anyone to uh to put their they're being hurt their honor being hurt the ego being hurt or when they'll not allow anyone to put that in the way of making a clear-minded decision that's very interesting and that's a really a lesson that can go all throughout life no matter what you're doing to not let your ego get into the way and uh i guess moving along here too i know we can talk about the whole business side of things and the pharmaceutical things probably all day i do want to get to the mma stuff just before i do one other quick little side note here you you're heavily involved in politics as well so let me just talk a little bit about how you got involved with politics and the republican party well that's also a long story my first involvement in politics was um around the year 19 around the year 2000 and what happened was fda the fda local office came in and didn't they did an inspection on our company and they wrote up what they call observations if they're real violations they give you something called a warning letter but they didn't but then they said we get no drug approvals so you have to we i sent in to them let me the company send it to fda and i worked on this with you know many people company sent in corrective actions and after six months we heard nothing from fda we're not getting drug approvals they didn't tell us whether the corrective action plan was effective or sufficient insufficient and but no drug approvals they come out of it and after six months they do another inspection more observations never a warning letter but no drug approvals and after three cycles of this it became clear to me that they were they were just trying to put us out of business i have some theories but i can't prove them as to why some personal vendetta maybe the lead inspector had against me maybe because i'm a religious a religious jew and i'm not god goes around saying prejudice prejudice but maybe her lifestyle she knows would conflict with what i believe in maybe she took offense to that i don't i don't i just don't know so we were going to go out of business we were being strangled so i was trying to think about reason so we're here the company's here fda is above us is above us who is above fda and that is the senators and the congressmen that control fda's budget so i reached out to senator arlen specter we are a philadelphia company we're sold all over the country but headquarters and manufacturing facilities research facilities in philadelphia he was a he was a renowned united states senator from pennsylvania so we are his constituent and he was chairman of the senate committee that determines fda's budget and i also reached out to congressman jim greenwood who was congressman of a suburban area of philadelphia but where some of our employees come from and he was chairman of the congressional committee that oversees fda's budget and i told them about the situation ft is not giving us drug approvals not taking formal action against us and just sitting on us so both of them agreed to write a letter saying you know look we don't know quality you know the quality regulations um but this process looks illegitimate to us something's wrong so they sent the letter to fda and that was the first time i got involved with them so i decided to meet with them tell them about what's going on about our employees by the way they never asked for a contribution they just wanted to protect the jobs of people who who live live and work in or work in their districts then fda came after us with an inspection we'd actually showed criminal violations fraud and i was freaking out now remember this huge manufacturing operation underneath me i don't know what goes on you know all throughout the operation right you get machine operators they report report to supervisors they report to managers the report to senior magic to directors to vice presidents to me so i don't i don't look so i'm freaking out and and my vice presidents are telling me rich what fda wrote is not true it's flat out not true so i dug in literally um 14 hours a day working with all the different people in the company getting data in getting information getting documents and it turned out what fda wrote the inspection results they were false for example if in a manufacturing facility for pharmaceuticals if you have work done on your air conditioning system you need to then before you manufacture drugs again you need to check that the hepa filters are keeping any particles from traveling from one room to another so the fda inspection said we are our our air conditioning people came in on this date they did work we made no checks from the air conditioning system after that and yet we went and manufactured and released to the public tens of millions of tablets well this is criminal we go into the documentation the invoice from the day shows that the air conditioning people fixed the refrigerator they didn't touch the air systems they fix every feature maker so so i i so i i call so i end up calling the district director after i've been working for about 10 days on this day and night and i said you know i'm halfway mr director i'm halfway through the process of going through these observations from fda and i got to tell you the half i've looked at so far we have ample documentation documentary evidence they're just false this is dr roberts i'm so glad you called me now and not three days from now that means he was getting ready to send federal marshals in to close our company because this inspector this lead inspector had it in for us so he said when can you get me the response i said well i can send you that he responds to the first half the first the first half of questions in three days he says great i will wait three days i said for the second half will take me another two weeks fine if i if i think that what you're saying is valid you send it for the first half then i'll then i'll then i'll wait for the second hand long story short first step goes in second half goes in with the second office in a letter in my cover letter i said i have not told senator specter or congressman greenwood about what we found but if you don't but if you don't reply the need within 10 working days then i'm gonna have to bring this to center in the congressman five days seven days goes by we hear nothing my advice i have my vice president regulatory affairs calls the manager at the fda district office and she says the one who wants to destroy us she says fda's top priority is to give your company approval so that's so that when i and what happened to her she got promoted to another office this sub government really works so what i realized was it's not we run our iran our company honestly truthfully respecting everybody in every detail the company it's not enough to be honest you also have to have political connections otherwise you will have you'll get you'll get devoured by certain regulatory agencies that's why i first got involved in politics who knows of of politics there and your involvement in it but for all of our viewers out there that are watching this they're probably sitting here like okay i'm hearing about pharmaceuticals i'm hearing about politics what in god's name does any of this has to do with mixed martial arts well as it turns out we all can see that you're a busy guy you're a busy guy for your whole working career doing all of this yet for the last i believe you told me before we came out here 37 years you've been training mixed martial arts so i mean you could be doing anything in the world i mean like you you have it all you have a great business you have money you could be doing anything why is it that you're going to the gym every day and that you're still actively training so great question so first of all i've only been doing mixed martial arts for two years i've been in martial arts for 37 years i first started out in ruku kempo which is no canal in form that also includes pressure point techniques and street self-defense and i got a third degree brown belt in ruku tempo i then went through some different systems different belts i finally eventually got a black belt in golden fist martial arts which is really like an urban combat form of of karate and i've been doing it continuously for except for 37 years about two years ago i met george george sullivan and i was doing crossfit training in my home i have a significant martial arts a gym in my basement and you know i need to keep fit and it's good and i enjoy martial arts i enjoy also knowing how to defend myself uh some you know i might say at this point i could probably defend myself against a small gang but that's another story so um yes i met george sullivan about about two years ago that's when i started training in mixed martial arts i have to tell you um so i i remember most of what i've ever learned in you know martial arts i know an enormous amount of karate self-defense techniques in the in that in the 35 years before george he has i did not touch what he has contributed to me in the last two years in terms of understanding really how to fight um for example you know self-defense in karate you're always you're always you know moving out of the you're always making getting creating distance you come in you'll train someone will throw a punch slow motion and then you do things right and you get out well that's all great until you first get hit the first thing that george george not only knows all of the mechanical details of mixed martial arts and fighting he understands the psychology of it also which is tremendous so one of the first things he did with me was he said we're going to play patty cake so i'm like what's this guy about like i look like patty cake patty cake baker's man right no hand patty cake is you you you turtle up like this and he hits you in the head lightly well he thinks it was lightly my brain was jarring but um you have to get used to getting hit that's very different in much mixed martial arts than in general karate training and it's critical because as you know some martial arts some you know karate forms they have big ideas of i got this one strike and i'm gonna no baloney yeah yeah that one strike word straight on a bag or someone who's standing there not moving people move people dive people go back they change ranges so i can just tell you george has actually revolutionized uh revolutionarily improved my my fighting ability and i'm going to talk about george uh more in a moment here cuz i know you have some good george sullivan stories but uh i got asked too just along the lines i know we were talking about your business before and talking about politics all that a lot of people say that it's great getting involved with martial arts just because it can help you out in life and it teaches you different things that will carry on through life as any point during your uh amazing career in medicine and in politics has has there ever been a time that you reflected on something that you've learned from martial arts over these years that may have helped you i feel like i'm supposed to tell you yeah marshall let's help me to do this and that in business not really i mean it helped i mean it helped me what it helped me when i was walking through the parking lot at night that i'm i'm walking and i'm you know i'm using my peripheral vision if someone walks by the sidewalk you make sure i replace your vision and with my peripheral vision i see them continue on the sidewalk i'm watching between the cars but uh in terms of dealing with business situations no you don't go around hitting people i the one thing i would say was different is i wasn't living in fear i wasn't living in physical fear like an employee might come up and hit me or something like that matter of fact i remember once i was talking to two of our men two of our two of our directors there were younger guys right about 35 35 years old husky guys physical guys and they ran the manufacturing plant and we're talking the ufc was new at that point you know people think like the ufc or mixed martial actually it's always been around it's really new it's and you know and and when when before the ufc started um martial arts schools were filled with all kinds of false ideas and planes you know and and i could do this i could do that well now if you can't get in that in that ring you know you can if you can't get in that cage and you can't show what you can do you're just talking a bunch of baloney you're just a little dog barking from behind the screen and you know it's just not it's just not real so um so so we're probably talking to these directors and they come these guys as we're talking ufc just come out one of the guys went like this yeah like that and i immediately went like this excuse me tell me so immediately i lowered my i lowered my lowered my center of gravity and i like my card he said whoa dr roberts that was incredible but um yeah in general yes i don't really use martial arts in business i'm sure there's probably been times with the uh the fda back in the damsel that you wanted to use it but uh i guess i'm glad that you didn't do it in that situation there um so yeah i guess we'll move on with george sullivan as everybody knows a long time ufc fighter uh like you said he's been training you for uh for a little while now uh kind of just tell everybody a little bit about george what he's like as a person and i know you have a fantastic george sullivan story to share so uh first tell everybody about george a little bit and then you could uh share that story with us as well all right so yeah george and i come from radically different backgrounds and our lives have gone in very very different pairs or directions uh but he's actually become a very close friend of mine um joy we forget the martial arts part george is a human being is completely full of integrity he's and he's he's loyal he's honest he's stalwart um he's just really a really fundamentally good human being he cares about people uh sometimes i try to get him to maybe not care so much because you know he tends to give things away too quickly that he can't afford to and i'm discovering somebody's giving away tens of millions of dollars to charity but he can't you know if you can't afford it he can't do it so but his heart just break he feels for everybody so he's just really a great person and there aren't many people in the world that i trust completely but he's one of them so that's george as as a as a person and now how about that story yeah if you could uh explain that story uh i know you have a fantastic george sullivan story where uh you had some people from congress over your house and you guys were having a meeting and you brought george into it so go ahead and explain that story as well okay i have a couple i have a few george sullivan stories i'll just have a quick one very quickly people say you know you know how does a 63 year old retired uh physician scientist businessman asthmatic fight with george sullivan i said the answer's simple i go easy on him um okay george likes that joke by the way uh make no mistake about it george would wipe me out that's nice okay uh so anyway congressman um mike mccall from texas was chairman of the homeland security uh committee in congress and i had him here in the home i have other congressmen senators presidential candidates governors come through my house so this is a luncheon we had for him and i put on the on the lead table today's table with with chairman mccall myself i put george and the mayor of our town and the police chief so when i got up to introduce everybody because we had a crowd of orthodox jewish men here uh who i invited about 40 people i say first of all introduce george sullivan he's um my my martial arts trainer has been my martial arts trainer for i don't know what is six months a year at that time and and he's going to be fighting for the welterweight championship in mixed martial arts the whole room ex exploded with employ flaws including from chairman mccall then i said now introduce chairman mike mccall chairman mccall you're you're chairman of the homeland security uh committee in congress you have the army you have the navy the air force the marines you have the fbi you the ci of the nsa but we have george sullivan the chairman said you're probably a lot safer i love that story that that's a hilarious story too well would you ever want to get into doing business with uh some type of uh mixed martial arts promotion it's so interesting to say that i've really thought about it you know because you know i'm how do i say i'm in a position in life where you know the money is not really an issue um and i hate to say that with so many people are suffering right now because of the economic downturn from covet restrictions but uh i've thought about it of course the number one thing is my lawyers and financial advisors are going to want to make sure that i have no liability you know if somebody gets hurt but um i thought about it the truth is though i'm very very busy i'm like i retired but things didn't slow down for me yet i can't quite figure out why things i'm involved in so but uh it was one of my fish tank and one of the things i thought about but um for now it's probably not in the cards just be the last thing here then uh obviously you're you're big with politics there obviously joe biden's coming into office do you still plan on uh on being active with the republican party over the next few years and uh try to make some uh i guess some push to get more uh it's a a red wave back now that we just have the the uh democrats have some momentum there picking up the presidency oh absolutely um yes yes absolutely totally no question about it um i'm i'm not involved in politics i guess i was involved in politics back with the senator and congressman in pennsylvania when i was with the company but companies sold i have no personal interests i just want to in politics i just want to save the country i'm going to save the integrity and the authenticity and the values of this country that made it so great and those those are clearly the values that that are are you know they're actually christian values and those christian values come from judaism right because jesus was around for 1 500 years before christianity ever started so there's jewish values and those values are the wholesome values that make this country great and i just see that you know a lot of the the more left radical wings the democrat party are really um uh trashing those values and i see the republican party as preserving and forwarding those values under president trump those values really make america win at everything we just got crushed by a pandemic who could predict that but um yes i'm i plan to remain active ongoing in the republican party dr roberts i appreciate the time today uh before you roll out you want to go ahead and plug your social media so if people want to you know see everything that's going on in your life and uh keep up to date with things uh they'll be able to check you out sure thank you for that offer i have a youtube channel which is relatively new you search under as a dr dr period dr richard roberts and um i have there's no commercials on my videos there's no place to give me money i'm there just to try to take different areas business life science medicine and just try to take very complex things that i've involved in how government really works and and try to bring them down to the concepts the fundamental concepts and present that to people so i um yeah if you can check me on my youtube channel i'd love for people to watch i do have a facebook page i barely use it i'm not really i'm just i'm busy i'm really busy so uh but yeah if you check my youtube channel out i appreciate it thanks for watching if there are any other videos or topics you'd like me to address whether it's in medicine or science or business or other areas of life please just leave it in the comments i read every comment i try to reply to everyone and i really appreciate your watching please hit the subscribe button and please come back again i try to make videos once or twice a week all the best to you bye