Explosive new podcast Powder Keg to launch this week

Powder Keg is the story of how the world’s favourite green supplement blew up, big.
AG1 boasts of being packed with 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source nutrients, to help with your focus, immune system, gut health and even hair and fingernail growth – just one scoop, in eight ounces of water, once a day.
Selling just the one product, the company has blown up into a US$1.2 billion unicorn, marketed by some of the world’s biggest paid social influencers: Joe Rogan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sir Lewis Hamilton, Dr Andrew Huberman, and more.
Marketing expert Will Evans says AG1 is a global branding phenomenon: “They’re like the OGs, the original gangsters, of influencer marketing. They do this extremely well.”
And the man who invented this green powder is “Chris the Kiwi” Ashenden. “I knew I had something within 10 days of putting the whole bundle together into one scoop,” he says.
The podcast launches on October 31 on DELVE, the home of gripping, in-depth investigative podcasts, or on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Our investigations revealed that the founder of the billion-dollar company has a criminal past and has left a trail of heartbreak behind him.
Investigative journalist Jonathan Milne and producer Mike Wesley-Smith travel from the cold of Invercargill to a record Mexican heatwave, from chaotic Colombia to the laidback Caribbean, seeking to talk to the elusive Ashenden – and to ask, what will AG1 really do for your health?
They talk with some of those who lost their homes to his property scams. People such as Michelle Young, from Invercargill: “I probably blamed myself because I just thought to myself, ‘oh, you stupid girl’,” she says. “You know, you got yourself into something now again, you didn’t think this through.”
And Anita Mika, from south Auckland, whose sister died without seeing justice: “We can forgive, but we never forget,” Mika says.
The first person to lift the lid on Chris Ashenden’s property dealings was Donna Chisholm, a life coach from the remote Southland community of Nightcaps. “I thought, I’m going to get to the bottom of this and some bank’s got to have this information and this money’s going somewhere,” she says.
Subscribe and listen early and ad-free on our channel DELVE+, the award-winning home of Boy in the Water, Fractured and now Powder Keg.
Powder Keg is reported, filmed and written by Jonathan Milne, along with Mike Wesley-Smith. The audio is edited by Dave Filoiali’i and Megan Cumberbatch; the video is edited by Trenton Doyle. Mark Jennings is executive producer.
This project received funding from the Brian Gaynor Business Journalism Initiative. Newsroom is indebted for this support for investigative journalism.