Danny Jones Podcast - #325 - 5 Performance Drugs Big Pharma Doesn't Want You Using | Chris Bell
Episode Date: August 22, 2025Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Chris Bell is a writer, director, and filmmaker known for the documentaries "Bigger, Stronger, Faster", "Prescripti...on Thugs", "Trophy Kids", "Prescription Thugs" & "A Leaf of Faith". SPONSORS https://shopify.com/dannyjones - Start your $1 per month trial TODAY! https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://www.instagram.com/bigstrongfast FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - How Chris discovered John Cena 09:11 - The magic of WWE 21:16 - The steroids crisis 28:24 - The top buyer of testosterone in US 32:04 - Did Bruce Jenner use steroids? 40:04 - Stem cell & peptides 47:27 - How Joe Rogan helped keep kratom legal 53:19 - Is ibogaine a miracle drug? 01:06:19 - Metallica in 2025 01:14:41 - Most dangerous concerts in history 01:19:59 - The one source of all addictions 01:30:08 - Are drugs good or bad? 01:43:12 - The Ozempic epidemic 01:48:34 - Why the MAHA movement is failing 01:54:14 - The carnivore diet 02:09:18 - The liver king 02:15:45 - The enhanced games 02:26:58 - Testosterone in women 02:35:22 - Bryan Johnson 02:46:54 - Trophy kids Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Were you a ringsider?
I was a ring cider.
It's amazing.
Yeah, I have a good buddy of mine, my friend Mark, who is a huge wrestling fan.
He actually used to be a wrestler when he was younger and was trying out for the WWE.
And he brought me to WrestleMania in New Orleans a few years ago.
And then whenever he gets dope ringside tickets to anything in Tampa, sometimes he'll invite me.
And that's where I got that chair.
He's down here in Tampa?
Yeah, he's in actually St. Pete.
What was he?
Did he have a gimmick or anything?
Oh my God.
What the f***?
Yeah, he did.
He had a, he had his whole name and he had like a whole gimmick.
I forget the name of his wrestler now.
He was from, he's actually, he was from Ohio, I think.
So he was based up there.
And then he came down here.
And then he actually started a company called Hostomania, which was a web hosting company.
And they got Hulk to be the face of it.
And then they asked me to make like a marketing campaign for Hostomania.
So me and my buddy were trying to come up with an idea for this commercial to sell this web hosting company that was Hulk Hogan themed.
Yeah.
So we came up with the idea to put – this was right when Miley Cyrus came out with her wrecking ball video.
She's like, I came in like a wrecked.
She's riding that thing.
So we're like we're going to have Hulk coming in like a wrecking ball and smashing John Claude Van Dam.
because he was the face of, I think, GoDaddy at the time.
Okay.
So, and Hulk's like, yeah, brother, that's cool, but I think I got to do it in my birthday suit.
I'm like, really?
I'm like, okay.
So he ended up doing it in just his, in this little speedo right there.
And we put him on a wrecking ball.
We built a wrecking ball.
Went into a production studio.
And we put it on top of a crane.
And we had him, like, swing across the stage on a wrecking ball and smash this dude.
And it went on, I think like TMZ picked it up.
And it got like millions of views overnight.
It was wild.
Yeah.
We have a long history with wrestling, my brothers and I, so I don't know if you know, but, you know,
my older brother, Mad Dog, in bigger, stronger, faster.
He was a wrestler.
And I don't know if you talked about it with Mark, but he was a wrestler also.
It was really interesting.
Mark was a wrestler?
No, he didn't mention that.
Yeah.
And his nemesis was John Cena.
So what happened was Mark wanted to be, Mark moved out to California.
He sort of followed me.
I went to USC film school.
I was trying to make it as a, you know, filmmaker.
and but we always loved wrestling so mark wanted to get into wrestling and i said hey you know we know
all these people from gold's gym and stuff and i said i know this guy he was actually uh latimer in the
program the movie the program it was the big jack guy that was like putting his head through the
through the car remember he's through the girl around he's like the program but it's not ringing
the bell it was the big giant jack guy putting 315 up over his head and that shit was all legit
he really was putting that weight over his head so his name's andrew bernarski and he invited us to
go down to this wrestling school and check it out. So we go down, we check it out. It's awesome.
You know, Mark's like, hey, I want to sign up. I want to do this. So Mark starts wrestling.
And then a couple months later, we were working at this company where we moved fitness equipment.
And it's just the oddest coincidence. We had a friend that worked there, a girl that worked in the
office. Her name was Casey. And she said, hey, you know, you guys got to meet my friend John.
He's like really buff and he's awesome. He's just like you guys. You'd get along great.
we're like whatever because we always hear
oh these guy's jacked like you and then the guy comes in
he's not jacked at all or something you know
that's what you think we are usually right
but this guy comes in and his arms are just gigantic
he's like looks like a cartoon character
and it's john sina before he was john sina
he's 22 years old
and mark and i were like
what the hell is this guy all about you know we start
talking to him we become really good friends with them
and we're like hey well mark's in this wrestling school
and you would be awesome at it
Like you're just your personality, like the way you look.
Like you'd be awesome at wrestling.
And he's like, yeah, I'd love to try it, but I just, I don't really know how to get into it.
I'm like, no, that's what I'm telling you.
We know how to get you into it.
And so we brought John into his first ever wrestling class.
He basically, my older brother, Mad Dog, was like one of his first trainers along with this other guy, Tom Howard.
Mark was like his nemesis.
And I would write all the storylines, you know, for the wrestlers, for this.
company called UPW.
Yeah, so there's, I think, probably you could probably find matches online and Mark
Wrestling Cina and stuff like that.
And it was just kind of fun.
Like, we pointed him in the right direction and then he just took the ball and ran with it
because he was, within four months, he was signed to the WBE.
You know, like, they came in, they saw him.
They're like, we want that guy.
I mean, like, you know, you could just tell.
He's like one of those people.
There's certain people in your life where you meet and you could just tell.
Yeah.
And then a couple years later, John actually brought me into WWE.
I didn't last very long. I was a writer. And at the time, they were going through writers
like crazy and I was just one of them. So I got to see how it all works backstage and got to
hang out with everybody. But the cool thing was that I got fired. I didn't get fired. It's just like
they give you like a six-month contract and then it ends and they're like, hey, you know what?
Didn't really work out, whatever. The reason it really didn't work out was more just the fact that
they had kind of headwriters and they just listened to the headwriters and they wouldn't listen
to you at all if you weren't a head writer. So it's like you just didn't stand a chance, you know.
So that's the way I look at. I didn't take it, you know, hard, harsh or anything that I got fired
or whatever my contract ended. But what was really cool is that I went off and I made bigger,
stronger, faster. And after I made bigger, stronger faster, I got invited to WrestleMania. I got invited
to be backstage at WrestleMania, like in Houston.
I think The Undertaker wrestled Sean Michaels on that card.
It's just cool.
It's like afterwards everybody was like, hey, man, you made it.
And then the real kicker was that I was in the bar the night before WrestleMania.
And the guy who was the executive producer, Kevin Dunn, he came up to me and said,
hey, I guess they fired the wrong guy, huh?
And that was just like really cool to hear it.
And also Vince McMahon had called me on the phone.
Like after I made the movie, Vince McMahon called me, The Rock called me.
Really?
Yeah, so it was really cool because I was like, these are guys that I idolize.
I look up to.
So Vince called me and said, you know what?
I actually, I honestly thought that he was calling me to tell me he was going to file a lawsuit
because we used a bunch of footage in the movie.
But instead, what he told me is you said everything I've always wanted to say about steroids.
And you said it so wonderfully and such a unique and fun way.
and I just wanted to tell you, you just did a, you made a great movie.
And I thought that was, you know, great.
And then, you know, the Rock also called me and said,
hey, brother, I know you told me you were going to make this movie,
but I had no idea it was going to turn out like this.
And, you know, he did a great job.
And then also, Sina, he had told me, because we were buddies,
he told me like, hey, man, if you ever make a movie,
I'll be there the first night it comes out.
And he was there the first night it came out in Los.
Yeah, in Los Angeles.
flew to Los Angeles on purpose just to come see the movie, which was cool.
That's fucking incredible, bro.
That was a really good movie, too.
Oh, thank you.
I mean, like everything about it, it's like my favorite style of documentary.
It almost reminded me of like a one of the early like vice style documentaries because it's
kind of like you're walking around, kind of like trolling people a little bit, like the way
it was edited.
Like there was some fucking hilarious moments in there.
I think you were making fun of your brother.
You were saying something like, you know, he started out wrestling in front.
in front of 200,000 people.
Now tonight, he's wrestling in front of 50 people.
Yeah.
Behind a fucking gas station.
He was wrestling a midget.
Right.
Yeah.
He was throwing the midget in the crowd.
I don't know.
Are we allowed to say that anymore?
Yeah.
We're allowed to say it.
So he was, you know, a midget wrestler and he picked him up and threw him, you know,
and the crowd.
Yeah.
You know, and you get paid like 50 bucks.
And that's the truth of wrestling is like, there are very few John Cinas.
Even my brother, Mark, who looks fantastic, he's jacked and shredded.
and he was in pretty good shape back then as well.
Yeah.
Even when he was thicker.
He was like, he was like puffy.
And even when he was,
before he got on the juice,
when he was natural,
he looked really good too.
And the thing is that at the time,
a guy that was like barely six feet tall,
you know,
210 pounds wasn't what they were looking for.
They were looking for,
they wanted to see John Sina.
They wanted to see like,
you know,
somebody who's like super jacked.
And Mark just didn't have that,
that look, I guess.
And he was really,
really good at wrestling, really good at cutting the promos and doing all that stuff.
But he gave it up for powerlifting, which as soon as he gave it up for powerlifting,
I'm like, what are you doing, man?
There's no money in powerlifting.
You'll never make it in powerlifting.
And he's made, you know, probably more money in powerlifting than he would have ever made
if he'd gone into wrestling, you know?
Right.
Because he turned it into a business.
Yeah, it's really crazy the lifestyle that some of these pro wrestlers had in the 80s and like
the early 90s, you know, it was such a different one.
world. And wrestling was like on a completely different level like WWWF than it is now, you know?
Like and like just from the stories I've heard from some of these guys because I've spent a lot of time around Hulk.
Um, not like a lot of time around Hulk and Jimmy Hart and like this there's this another dude Bushwhacker Luke who lives down the street.
Yeah. I know the Bushwackers. He had a gym right down the street in Clearwater. I used to go to that gym every single day.
Our uncles used to call us the Bushwackers. So we would come to, uh, you know, we come to Thanksgiving and like, you know, my uncle would be like, oh, the Bushwackers.
are here and we're like, the bushwhackers are, we're like the worst.
Yeah, why are we the bushwalkers?
Whoa, matey.
Yeah.
Yeah, those guys are hilarious.
And I've spent, you know, I kind of like spent a lot of time working with those guys and like, spent, you know, filming like commercials and little ads and stuff with them and like around all Hulk's little companies that he was doing over the last, you know, probably like 15, recently.
Probably like, probably 15 years, 10 years ago, maybe six years ago.
And he also had like a little restaurant bar down the street.
but like I was never a fan of it
I just like heard the stories
I spent a lot of time around these guys
and all this stuff
until my friend Marco was telling you about
brought me to WrestleMania in New Orleans
and that experience made me a wrestling fan
like it was like the opposite for me
yeah you know what I mean
who was the main event at that one
oh god it was
I want to say it was John Sina
and somebody else
it was definitely John Sina and somebody else
but I remember like I remember walking down the steps
of the stadium
to like the floor where we were sitting
because I went to the bathroom and I was coming down
and then all of a sudden all the lights cut out
in the whole arena I'm like what the fuck happened
and all of a sudden it was like gong
Oh the Undertaker came out of it was like whoa
dude that was insane dude
It just like fucking rattles every fiber
of your being and everyone in there like all
the energy is and it's like
it's palpable the energy in there
and like it's such an incredible show
with the pyro and everything
They say that wrestling's fake
you know and um i don't know like i've seen like dana white talk about it in interviews i love
dana white i think he's incredible and mark and i have had the chance to like sit down with him and
he's he's just a great guy but um he's not for the theatrics of like the guys coming out and stuff
and i always said like man one of these days they sort of should go that way because it's so it's so
interesting it makes it so much more fun when these guys have these big entrances and you know
it's it just it feels gigantic and they used to do it um
back in pride.
So I always hope, like, maybe one day they'll start sneaking that stuff in there now that they're sort of all one company, you know, like WW.
Because WWE, even right now, I don't think necessarily the product is better than it's been.
But the way it looks is incredible right now.
Like the things that they're doing, you know, visually are really cool.
It's unbelievable.
I was just watching a clip on Instagram yesterday of the Undertaker coming out on a fucking Harley with A-Pen.
with limp biscuit playing in the middle of the stage and like pyro going off everywhere.
Like that's just like that's such a high level of production and entertainment and money they put
into that.
Yeah.
And then the, um, the entrances, like the other day on wrestling, they did a promo where it was like
Cody Rhodes and Seth Rollins and, um, uh, it was, uh, whoever the, all the top guys are
right now was, Sina was involved, right?
And everybody got their own entrance.
And so like, this promo was like 20.
many minutes because it's like oh now cody roads has to come out like his music comes on he does the
pyro gets up on the ropes and then i think it was randy orton he comes out he does his whole thing so
the whole promo took forever just because everybody got their own right you know full entrance but it's
kind of i mean i think that's what the fans come to see yeah it is and they all they all know they all know
it's not real they're there for the internet it's theater to them you know what i mean yeah it's super
fun. Those people are there for the thrill of it, the entertainment, the camaraderie of everyone
getting together, picking their team, picking their wrestler. It's like going to go into that event
in New Orleans was. Yeah, we had a completely different experience. So we grew up in
Poughkeepsie, New York. And Poughkeepsie, New York was the sort of satellite. Like, it was the home
base of the W.W.E. for television. So every month, they would tape four hours of wrestling in
the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie,
and those four hours would be split up
for the next four weeks every Saturday morning.
The Saturday morning, you know,
wrestling used to be on Saturday morning at like 10 o'clock in the morning.
Right.
And, you know, every show, like, we saw it get taped.
Like, we were there.
So, like, when Hillbilly Jim came out of the crowd
to save the holster, like, we were little kids and we were there.
You know, and Mark's, like, four years younger than me,
so he was like a little rascal.
and my older brother and I are like a year and a half apart.
And it was just so much fun for us to sort of grow up
kind of as a part of the WW even, you know?
Yeah.
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Now back to the show.
Totally.
And, you know, the amount of stuff those guys were taken in the 80s was probably like on a whole other level.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, not just the performance enhancing drugs, but like the drugs you got to take to fucking get rid of that dislocated hip or your knee or all the crazy injuries those guys would have.
Speaking to that, I worked at WWB as a writer in like 2003, 2004.
And I'm not going to mention any names, but.
I was backstage several times watching people chew up handfuls of Vicodin.
It was like, it was no big deal.
It was like.
What were the other ones?
What was the one in Wolf of Wall Street that he was eating?
It's like Vicodins, Perkissettes.
No, what were they called?
Quailudes.
Quayludes.
They didn't have quailudes then.
I think quailudes have been illegal for a certain amount of time since like the 80s or something.
But yeah, everybody always talks about, man, do you ever, you, everybody says you missed out if you haven't tried ludes.
Right.
Yeah, I heard a lot of stories.
I have no idea what that would.
feel like. But yeah, I mean, I just used to see it all the time. You know, our older brother
Mad Dog who passed away, unfortunately, he would be a, he was a WWE like jobber where he'd come in
his enhancement talent. He'd come in and get beat up on TV and whatever. And he used to tell me like,
well, the main reason they hire me all the time is like, A, I usually make people look really good
and B, I always have pills. And I'm like, what's that mean? He's like, I just bring the pills,
you know, backstage. And back then it was a first.
free for all. They don't play any of those games now. You know, that's all sort of like gone,
but it used to be crazy. It used to just be a free for all. And not like it was encouraged,
but it just wasn't, it wasn't stopped. And it was some of the top guys, you know, that were
involved in it. Yeah, it's kind of crazy even today. There's such a stigma around it, you know,
like look at Logan Paul since he joined the WW. Oh, yeah. The transformation with that guy is
unbelievable. You know, Logan Paul, I think a lot of people will come down on him. I don't care about
his crypto scams or anything like that. He is the best wrestler in the history of wrestling.
Really? He's the, oh, like real wrestling. The best, like, you go back and watch his first match
against, like, Ray Mysterio, I think it was. It's incredible. Like, it's incredible. Like, I have,
I've worked with a lot of wrestlers because we used to run a wrestling school. And I've seen people come and go and
seeing people come in and see people do some amazing things.
What Logan Paul can do in the ring athletically is it's insane.
It's like there's nobody like him.
So people can talk shit about him all they want,
but he's going to end up being the face of the WWE in the future, I think.
Really?
See, I haven't watched any of his matches.
I saw the flying flips and stuff that he's doing like the,
I saw a video him practicing, like jumping off of something
and like practicing doing these flips onto a mat.
Yeah, I think you'll see Logan Paul, you know,
basically shoot through the roof as far as WWU.
egos.
Interesting.
As long as he keeps everything else clean.
I know he's got a lot of other scandals and things going on all the time.
Yeah, he seems like he can't escape all the scandals, man.
Yeah.
The crypto stuff and all the all the other things that he's doing.
I think when you get that big, it's probably hard to.
It's hard to say no to people.
Yeah.
You've probably got too many bad people around them.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the problem.
You get too many leeches and too many, you know, motivated people,
people that are motivated just to make money and they don't give a fuck about the longevity of
your career or your legacy.
But I mean, that's like,
that's kind of like one of like the first things you got to figure out
if you had that level of fame, right?
Because that's the one thing that could kneecap your career.
There's not a whole lot of people that figure it out.
You know, most of the people end up, like most stories end tragically.
You know, it's.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing like, you know, people get greedy.
It's like you achieve, you can get somewhere, you know, achieve a goal
or get to like a certain level where you're like,
you're comfortable, you're happy.
You don't have to worry about how much money you have to
pay to go off. If you're going out to dinner with much people, you could pay the bill and not
have to worry about how much it costs. And then like, you know, people think about, oh, now,
now I got to start 16 businesses so I can monetize this from every possible angle, you know,
and me, because eventually it's not going to be here anymore. So I got to make sure I, you know,
create a good retirement and all this stuff. And then that's when you start letting in people who
are just in it for themselves or just in it for the short term gain, which it never ends up well.
Yeah. And it's crazy now because, you know, because, you.
you can get famous off of almost anything.
You know, if you look at, back when Mark and I were growing up,
we didn't have social media.
I never filmed, I must have worked out 10,000 times
without ever filming one thing, you know?
And so we used to go into the gym,
put heavy weights on, work really hard,
outwork everybody around us.
And it wasn't for the gram.
It was like for us.
It was like for me.
Like I want to do this.
You guys weren't in there with a tripod,
like filming yourselves?
Yeah, even now it's kind of surprising
because Mark does do a lot of social media.
media stuff.
Yeah.
But for the most part, he's not filming all the time.
You know, he's, uh, he's got a guy that will come and, and film with him now.
Um, but even during the times when he was getting all his stuff like online, it wasn't
like he was constantly filming, you know, or, you know, and he also, he, he always had his
own gym.
So it was never in the way of anybody or anything.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but I just think now that people go to the gym literally just for the workout, you know,
for the, for the, to get the workout.
Yeah.
on tape so that they can do a, you know, a social media post.
And that's not going to help you get jacked and tan.
You know, you got to put in the work to do that, you know, and that's the thing is like
steroids are at an all-time high, in my opinion.
You go on the internet and just everybody's juiced up, you know, from 20 years old on
up, you know, 18 years old on up.
And it's just sad to see that it's gone that way and that people aren't really putting
in that kind of work anymore.
Yeah, well, not only that, but it's sad to see when kids that young are doing it and they're trying to, they're trying to do it the cheap way and they're trying to do it, you know, because when you're 20 years old, no one's going to prescribe you steroids.
So they're buying it behind the gym from some guy who works out at the gym, right?
They're buying it probably for somebody who just cooked it up in a bathtub or something.
They don't know what it is.
They've never gotten their blood work done.
They don't know anything about their metabolism or their, you know, any of their levels, their hormone levels or their lipid levels or any of this stuff.
they're just haphazardly doing this.
And then, you know, eventually it's like for some reason they may have to stop or they run out or they move.
And then your body's doing all kinds of crazy shit trying to like rebounds itself and, you know, who knows what could happen.
Yeah, they have no idea what's going on.
And, you know, that's the thing is I encourage everybody who's over the age of 18 men or women, you know, I think everybody should go get their blood work done.
I think that there's a lot of people out there that are struggling with low testosterone.
We drink out of a lot of like plastic bottles, you know, like I'm guilty of it too.
It's like I think we all are.
There's so many things that will lower our testosterone and both men and women are walking
around with low testosterone with all these symptoms of depression.
One of the best ways to beat depression is have a good testosterone level, you know?
So I always argue that like I always say the world needs a shot of testosterone.
You know, it seems like we've gotten a little weak and wimpy and a lot of the things we
do and I think that relates back to our testosterone levels have dropped 50% in the last 50 years.
So I think people, they don't need it.
If they go and get checked and they don't need it, that's great.
But I also say like, if you're, even if your levels are like 600, 700, why not have it be like
a thousand, which is optimal?
You know, why not have it be in that 900 to a thousand, which is optimal?
And so there's, you know, there's a debate to where, like, I just think it can help so many people.
I've seen it personally help hundreds of thousands of people, like, and, you know, just through what I do, you know.
And when, you know, when I made my film, I had no idea the impact it would have on the world.
I think you don't know, you know, what impact you'll ever have on the world.
But I've talked to so many people that are, you know, pretty, like, high up in what they do.
for example like I work now I work with a compounding pharmacy now in Houston called Empower
pharmacy my boss saw bigger stronger faster and said like I need to like I need to work with you
like we need to do stuff together because like you like your film changed my life the reason I
have this compounding pharmacy is because I watched your movie and and when I watched your movie
I was like that's what I need and this guy's message is right like steroids aren't the bad guy
The bad guy is like using these things, you know, without any sort of indication that you need them, you know?
Right.
And I think that's like sort of my message is like, don't make testosterone the bad guy.
Use it if you need it.
If you don't use it.
If you don't need it, then don't use it.
What's the problem with any drug?
The biggest thing is education.
You got to have the education around it.
People need to be able to understand it.
And you can't just blackball it.
So people are forced to buy it on the black or gray market.
Yeah, it's a huge problem when people are buying it behind the gym.
Like I said, yeah, I have a guy that came to me and said, uh, he said to me, he's like,
if you're not home brewing, you're doing it wrong.
And I'm like, what do you mean?
So I was like, what do you mean home brewing?
And this guy, like, no offense, but he looked like he came straight out of like a trailer park.
And I said, what do you mean like home brewing?
He's like, oh, I just make my own.
Yeah.
I'm like, you make your own.
And he starts telling me like how he makes his own testosterone, like, you know, in his sink.
And it's like, that's not the way to do it, dude.
Right.
You know, but I guess it is a lot cheaper.
And then I told my brother about it.
My brother's like, oh, that's great.
I used to get stuff like that all the time.
When I was powerlifting, I had a bunch of guys that would make their own.
And I'm like, yeah, I don't know about that, you know.
Yeah, I got some friends who buy their shit from guys at the gym.
And they, you know, they never got their blood work done.
And they seem to be doing fine.
I mean, they're huge.
Yeah, steroids work.
You know, that thing is they work.
But at some point, you're going to hit a, you're going to,
to hit a limit, you know, and then like, how big do you want to get? You know, I think I used to think
it was really cool, even the name of the movie's bigger, stronger, faster. I said, I think it was
like really cool to be really big. Now I'm like, how do I get smaller? How do I get leaner? I want to
get skinnier. Right, right? You know, be functional, right? Be able to do shit. Like, I, I'm, like,
I've worked out my whole life. I've been going to the gym, at least since I've been in high school,
I've been, I've gone to the gym. Like, I've never been one to want to get really bulky or
jacked, but, like, I grew up skateboarding and surfing and doing stuff like that. So I
always wanted to be like be able to swim fast and be agile i never wanted to be so freaking jacked
that i couldn't move yeah so um i think genetics has a huge hand to play in that as well you know
yeah definitely um but like i think it's uh you know it's changed like the culture has changed
like i think the you guys talked about this in the bigger stronger faster documentary but you
were talking to somebody i think it was like a lawyer or a doctor or something
and like that. And he was showing you the GI Joe's.
Oh, yeah.
Here's the original GI Joe.
Then look at the next one.
He's got serratus muscles.
He's got a six pack.
And here's the new GI Joe.
And it just talks about how like Arnold was big in the 90s or whatever.
And that and then there were Stallone and that kind of like the evolution of culture and movies in Hollywood kind of like played a role and pushing that mainstream.
And, you know, now it's kind of like we're on the backside of that now.
We're on more of a dip, I feel like.
It's not a super popular thing to be jacked out of your gills anymore.
You know what I mean?
I think people realize it's not attractive.
Yeah.
Like the other guy, the documentary with the freaking biceps like this.
He's like, you think any girls walk up to me saying, damn, that guy's hot?
Yeah.
No, their freaking boyfriends are face palming them and coming up to me and saying, bro, how did you do that?
Exactly.
It's like, dude.
You attract dudes.
You attract guys.
You know, and that's the thing.
It's like, even with the movie, after I made bigger, stronger, faster, that's all that would come up to me.
I don't think I've ever, I maybe had like one girl come up and say like, hey, good job on that movie.
It's all dudes that it's like they come up and they're like, hey man.
And they're like, you know, you'll be out somewhere and they'll just corner you forever and want to talk to you about your, you know, your movie.
And you're like, eh, I don't know.
I don't really care that much like get away, you know.
But it's just, it's just funny how it is like such a guy thing, you know.
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And also like, testosterone is such a weird thing.
It's such like a weird hormone.
Well, you know, you know, like it's like...
The biggest provider of testosterone and the entire, the biggest customer for testosterone,
the entire United States is Planned Parenthood and it's for gender transformations.
Is it really?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
That's the number one.
They're the number one like user of testosterone.
Really?
Yeah.
It shows you how out of control crazy.
And it goes to planned parenthood?
Yeah, it's planned parenthood.
I don't know why.
I guess that's where I guess they give it out or they dispense it in some way.
But I remember like one of the really interesting things is Joe Biden was a guy who said,
there's something simply on American about this.
And he pounded his fist on the table.
But back before that even in 1990, he's the one that was a senator that pushed so hard
against the advice of the DEA and the Center for Human Health,
what is it, Health and Human Services.
HHS, yeah.
He went against their recommendations
and the American Medical Association.
All three of those recommended that they don't make steroids a Schedule 3 drug.
They don't make them illegal.
They don't put testosterone in this, you know,
class where nobody can get it.
And he came out and said, no, you know,
we're going to go against that.
And then he...
Biden wanted it to be scheduled to me.
Biden got it scheduled. Yeah, and he got it scheduled. And that sort of like was his claim to fame. But then
just recently, you know, before he went out of office, his administration was pushing hard to now
legalize testosterone for these gender affirming care patients. Oh my God. So guys playing baseball can't
use it. But kids, minors who want to change their sex. Yeah. And I'm not sure like the
ages or anything like that. You know, you hear a lot of crazy things like, oh, 15 year olds are
I don't know if that's true or not, but I've heard the stories and like, who knows what's true.
I'm sure it gets blown out of proportion, you know, on in the media, like the mainstream media.
People like to use that as like a rallying cry to their team, you know, like, oh, we got to fix all the trans, all the trans.
But, you know, sometimes the truth is in the middle.
You never really know where what's the real numbers are.
And to be honest, if that's making people happy, I don't care what it's being used for.
I just don't want it to be illegal for me.
I don't want to be hard for media.
It shouldn't be fucking legal for kids, though.
For people, not for children.
There's definitely, yeah, that's definitely, you definitely need a age limit and a parental consent and probably like some sort of psychological evaluation, I think, as well, you know.
I think a lot of people get into that and they don't know what they're getting into.
And yeah, so yeah, definitely not for kids.
A lot of people, a lot of smart people think that like when these people are going through this, these psychological issues where they think they're a different gender or they're like a man in woman's body, woman in a man's body.
people have said that they're just mentally ill gays
or just like gay people who are
you know going through depression or going through
any kind of thing and they're just confused they're young
I mean that's being being like that
when you're young is normal
right you just need the proper guidance
yeah I think a lot of times time would be the
the key factor you need time
you know like you feel like that
are you going to feel like that in five years from now
probably not you know right
right
just the same thing with getting you know your face tattoo
Like you're not going to let fucking five-year-old Johnny get a Spider-Man tattoo on his face, just because he thinks Spider-Man's cool.
We're going to regret that when he's 12.
Kids would ask for that, you know, if they could.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But so also, Bruce Jenner is an interesting one because Bruce was taking steroids, right, when he was in the Olympics.
So I heard, I have a friend.
His name's Tom File.
He's amazing.
He's hilarious.
He's this jacked powerlifter.
And he's like 60 years.
years old now he's still squatting like 600 pounds he's just one of the most maniacal people ever met
he used to work the front desk at gold's gym and he used to train bruce when it was bruce really
yeah and um i think that bruce was on the juice um that rhymes that sounds cool uh he used to train
bruce nobody else would train bruce um he has not confirmed to me whether or not he was on
uh steroids but basically like when you hang out at gold's gym in venice you're on stage
I don't care who you are.
I worked out at Gold's Gym Venice for probably about 22 years straight.
And I've met everybody that's come through those doors.
And most of the people that come through those doors are going to end up taking something, no matter who they are.
You know, it's just that's the environment that that place gives off.
You know, really kind of in a weird way, when I shot bigger, stronger, faster, they let me shoot in there.
And then I was so excited that I made the movie and it got in the Sundance Film Festival.
and like, hey, this is going to be, you know,
a bit, you know, on Netflix and all this things.
And so I got all excited and I went in with a poster
and I was like, can we put this poster up in there?
Because I have all these posters of like all the famous people
that have been through Gold's.
And I'm like, I'm finally going to get my poster on the wall,
Gold's Gym.
And they were like, hell no.
You said in your movie that, you know,
people come to Gold's Gym and take steroids.
I'm like, where did I say that in the movie?
I've never actually, like I never said it.
I never even equated it.
I just said, you know, like the movie was about,
steroids and gold's gym is in it because i work out at gold's gym but right i never said anything
derogatory about gold's gym and people going there using steroids but now i will because
people go there and use steroids um but you know it's it's no it's just interesting that like
they wouldn't hang my poster on the wall so they have the posters on the wall of all the guys
that have used steroids worked out at gold's gym and their posters on the wall what's so funny
but my poster's not supposed to be there yeah that's so that's so that's so
silly. I can't believe they would do something like that.
But as far
as like Bruce, so do you, what do you make
of, is there any connection
between people who would,
allegedly if Bruce was using steroids
or doing something to him like
all of a sudden going trans? Is there any sort of
pattern there with people? I don't
think so. I don't know. I know I've heard
people say like, oh, he shot up so much
steroids that it turned to estrogen
and it turned him into a woman. I just think
he would have to be doing a ton though. Yeah, I mean,
I don't think he would be taking that much testosterone.
especially for like what you know what he was doing it but if you look at his comeback story there's a
great documentary about um Bruce Jenner on Netflix um and it's amazing to see like what he did like where he
came from he was like uh and so I don't think somebody can come from like I think he was 10th you know
maybe 10th place the year before and then he just shot up to like first place so I don't think you
do that naturally you know I don't know I mean maybe you do maybe you don't you know I know that
like certain people, like when I grew up, I was a huge Yankees fan.
And Reggie Jackson, we would go see Reggie Jackson play.
And he'd always be cranking home runs.
And he owned a Gold's gym.
And I'm always like, whether there's smoke, there's fire.
Like, we don't know that he used steroids.
But you've got to think, like, well, Reggie Jackson owned a Gold's gym.
You know, Rick Flair owned a bunch of Gold's gyms.
And you're like...
Did he really?
Yeah.
Who are these guys that, you know, they're...
I just think that, like, whether there's smoke, there's fire.
There's no reason to think.
that they wouldn't, you know, wouldn't do it.
You look at a lot of people, like, for example, I've done an interview with Lance Armstrong.
He was awesome to talk to.
But Lance Armstrong is not a very big guy.
Right.
You know, like he doesn't look like.
And I've done an interview with Floyd Landis, who was, you know, the subsequent winner of the Tour de France after Armstrong.
And he doesn't look, you know, he's 145 pounds.
So it's like not always like the person that looks like they take steroids.
Right, it's not yet.
The goal is not always just to get super jacked.
Yeah.
Like, like NBA players, right?
Like, I'm sure LeBron James is on a whole bunch of shit.
Well, he has to be.
But he's not super jack.
I mean, he's muscular.
Yeah, he's muscular.
He's muscular.
But more than anything, he needs in Dart.
He needs to be able to fucking play full court basketball for two and a half hours.
I would say that anybody at that level, if they're not on it, they're kind of stupid because
the NBA actually has, like, a therapeutic use exemption where you can use testosterone
grown up to a certain amount.
I think your levels can't be.
Do they really?
Yeah, I think it's like a low-key thing.
I know they don't really test for it.
I thought EPO was the big thing with basketball players.
I don't know if they're using EPO, but why wouldn't they?
Right.
If they're not testing for it, you know, who cares?
I mean, I don't think anyone's looking at the NBA's drug testing close enough to monitor.
I could be wrong.
But I know people that have played in the NFL.
You know, I know people that went to Belko when Balco was in session.
and they never got tested, you know, so they've told me, you know, oh, yeah, like, I used to go to
Belko, and I'm like, well, how many times you get tested there in a year? Like, none, you know,
like, never got tested. And so I, I've just heard so many stories. I don't think, I also went to
USC. And when I went to USC, we had a great football team. And these, a lot of these guys that are
like offensive linemen, defensive linemen, they're just huge guys. And I would talk to them about
steroids and they'd have no clue. I'd talk to the second stringers, third stringers, they'd know
everything about steroids. So I think it's like there's these in the NFL, NBA, wherever, you're
going to have like all these freaks, right, that aren't taking anything, which is surprising and
shocking. And then you're going to have some people that take stuff that it makes them better.
It makes them good enough to be on that starting team, you know? And so, I don't know,
It's just so hard to tell because I used to be one of those people where I used to think everybody was on something.
But I've met so many people that when I talk to them, I get a sense that they don't know enough about it.
Like, I mean, if they're taking it, they're taking it maybe through some sort of coach.
Because they just don't know anything about it.
And maybe they're playing stupid.
Right.
But I don't think.
A lot of people don't care.
I know how people do it all the time.
I don't know shit about it.
Like, I don't know.
If they fucking send it to me and I jamming in my ass.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it could be, you know.
Yeah.
But I also just think there's.
I think there is a good amount of natural people out there, but it's dwindling.
You know, I think it's getting smaller and smaller as we, you know, as we move through time.
But it's like, you know, my brother had a gym in Sacramento and we'd have all sorts of people come through there and train with us.
And I couldn't tell you how many guys would say they're natural.
And it's like, what are you going to do?
Confront them to their face and be like, no, you're not.
Show me your blood work, you know.
Yeah.
And it's just, it's not even, at a point, it's like not even worth it.
Right.
to worry about it's like i always tell people just worry about yourself yeah you know totally and there's
um you know for things like the NFL i don't like i don't know what the optimal steroids or um
human growth hormone with the optimal like stack would be for an NFL player or an NBA player
but i would imagine at least for NFL players dudes who are getting the shit beat out of them every single
week that they would at least need testosterone and like some sort of growth hormone just to be able
to just to be able to heal their body every week right maybe some peptides to turn around in seven
days is a lot to ask when you're really crushing your body like that there's some peptides that can
help like bpc 157 oh yes is that considered a steroid or is that just a peptide they're peptides
okay um i have tried honestly like i have a really bad shoulder um i tore my rotator cup and
I tore my tricep and it just never healed right.
And so I've tried gallons of BPC 157 in my shoulder.
I've tried literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of stem cells.
Luckily I make documentaries and I've gotten them comps from some different people.
And so I've made it.
I've had probably $100,000 worth of stem cells in my shoulder with no, not one positive effect.
Really?
I have a good friend who also paid tons of money for stem cells and he said he in his back and he said he never felt any sort of effect.
Yeah, I felt zero benefit.
I felt zero benefit from BPC 157.
Maybe the injury is too intense.
But I have other people that say they've injected it in their knee or something and all the pain went away.
Yeah, I've injected a BPC in my hand before when I like fucked up a tendon in my thumb and it helped a lot.
Yeah.
But that's the only place I don't I don't doubt it.
It's just like, it's not something that worked for me.
Yeah.
Well, there's a different.
The stem cells, though, the interesting thing about the stem cells is there's, like, the general, like, general population stem cells.
And then there's the ones that you can get that are actually, like, you can get from, like, your own wife's placenta.
Yeah.
That are like, or I guess that would, would that work for the dude, though?
If it was from, oh, no, no, I'm sorry.
It's the cord blood from, if you have a baby, you can get the bank the cord blood, really umbilical cord.
and if you use those stem cells, those match your DNA,
and those apparently are like 100% effective.
But like the general mill stem cells,
like the general population of stem cells aren't necessarily.
I used two different kinds.
One time I went to Mexico and went to a place called Eterna Health.
And like I said,
they had all these other treatments that I got.
It was great,
but the stem cells did not work in my knee and in my shoulder.
Then I went to another place in Austin
where they're not allowed to use the same,
kind of stem cells they use in Mexico.
But I was told that the ones that in Austin are actually from, like I think, like he said,
like a placenta or something, whereas like the ones in Mexico were like they drew them from
me and then they spun them up and they injected them back into me.
Yes.
And then the one in Austin, they just went, you know, boom right into me.
And the ones that they went right into me in Austin, those seemed to work for my knee,
but they didn't do anything from my shoulder.
So it's weird, right?
Because, like, I feel like they helped, but I don't feel like they helped.
They don't help enough for me to, I couldn't recommend it to you.
Right.
It's probably a little bit of placebo effect.
Yeah, I wouldn't tell you like, oh, man, go get stem cells.
It's going to be great.
You'd probably kill me if you spent the money and went down there.
Right, right.
Yeah, there's got to be some level of placebo effect to it.
But that's interesting.
You worked on your knee and not your shoulder.
Maybe your shoulder's just completely wrecked, you know?
That could be it, you know?
Yeah.
I had a dude in here.
I was telling your brother about this.
But I had a dude in here who was a coach for, I think it was University of Florida, the Gators.
It was not like the head coach, but he's like one of the coaches.
You know, they have a whole team of coaches.
And he was telling me all of the like the receivers and the running backs are jacked on Adderall.
Oh, yeah.
And I was like blown away.
I'm like, what?
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Adderall is a huge drug everywhere
I mean I think that's
You know
It's everywhere
Yeah and like if you watch the videos
Like some of the slow-mo videos
Even the guys in the NFL running like
Like Antonio Brown or who's the other guy
Derek Henry
You see the videos through his helmet
Their freaking eyes are like saucers
When I said in bigger stronger faster
We show like
Okay well
If this is cheating why isn't this cheating
And we show all these other industries
Where they use beta blockers in like
For musicians
Well you're in an audition
that's a competition you know like um what is a beta blocker a beta blocker calms you down so people will use
them in like even in like golf i think they're banned because they calm you down so much that you're
you don't like have like jitters you know yeah and so um people use beta blockers for stuff like that but
they'll use it for like to like if they have an audition for the cello you know they'll go in and
they'll use beta blockers so they're not all shaky just to quell the anxiety yeah yeah and so it's like
a performance enhancing drug you know we showed that that all the
fighter pilots have to have Adderall with them.
They have to have it with them.
What's it called?
There's one specific we learned about recently called ProVigil or something like it's
Modafinil, pro-vigil, same thing.
Madafinal is a pretty safe drug from what I know.
I know Dave Asprey recommends it highly.
He talks about it a lot and he says it's fairly safe compared to all the other ones.
I don't know.
I'm not promoting it in any way.
I'm just saying I know that he uses it and he's a high functioning guy.
It's basically a watered down Adderall.
Is it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've had, I've taken Adderall.
Adderall's crazy.
Like, I've gotten.
I hate Adderall.
I can't stand it.
Yeah, I got pretty spun up on it for a while.
Like, I don't know.
You know, I used to live in L.A.
And I went through this whole period of time where I had a double hip replacement
surgery.
And for a while, I was just searching for anything that could help me feel better.
And so I would go to these doctors that would prescribe you anything.
And I would get anything.
they'd be like, oh, how about this?
Okay, great.
How about this?
How about this?
And so I was taking like Xanax and Adderall.
And it's like, you take one pill to go up, one pill to go down.
And it gave me a great education on drugs and what they can do and how they can help people.
But I am so far from that guy, you know, because I was a mess when I was doing that.
You know, and I think that people that mess with stuff like Adderall, I sort of feel bad because it'll suck you in pretty.
quick. Yep. You gotta be careful. And I think people really need to be careful with that one especially.
I keep a couple, I got some from a friend and I keep a couple like with me because every once in a while
I need one. Like the other day I needed one because I didn't sleep at all because we went out to,
I went out to my Catalica concert and we were up all freaking night and then it's my favorite band.
Is it really? Oh yeah. It's awesome. Oh my God. I just had the craziest weekend hanging out
and you got to hang out with them. I was hanging out with Kirk all weekend. It's amazing.
Yeah. And anyways, I so I didn't sleep that night. And. And,
And then my kid woke up at like, freaking five o'clock in the morning.
And the next day I had to work.
So I was like, fuck it.
I took a quarter of a 20 milligram matter off, five milligrams.
And it's just like, I mean, I'd take it in the past.
When I was younger, I used to take it a couple times a week just to get work done.
And it just, it sucks the soul out of me.
It just turns me into a robotic machine that can just complete tasks.
But it helped you get through the day.
It helps you get through the day.
Yeah.
But then the next day, I feel like shit again.
Because you're robbing from, you're robbing the dopamine from tomorrow for today.
I think there, there's no drug on the planet that doesn't like, it gives and it sucks.
You know what I mean?
Like, gives a little and then it like sucks a little.
And that's what I look a little bit differently towards like something like testosterone because testosterone is a hormone.
And it's a hormone that we need.
And it's hormone that helps us like, you know, perform better.
And I don't see that many drawbacks to it.
Whereas like with a lot of these other pharmaceuticals, I see like they have a great.
upside but they also have a great downside even things like we were talking about cratum before yeah um
i think i was kind of the catalyst for why cratum exploded in this country when i made the movie a
leaf of faith i was on joe rogan's podcast uh talking about cratum yeah you were on rogan's podcast what
like three times think four four times and i was a huge proponent of cratum i told i was by the way uh
quick side note i was telling your brother i was laughing my ass off when he was talking about his
kale salads you're like what the fuck yeah yeah yeah
That's a team bone, pussy.
Yeah, yeah.
He's like, what, I feel great with my kale shakes?
Yeah, yeah.
So, um...
It's funny, the evolution.
Yeah, and so Rogan was instrumental in actually keeping Kratum legal.
This is pretty insane, but...
Really?
Yeah, so when I was making the movie, I, I had become friendly with Joe from the UFC, from being
on his podcast.
And then he invited us to go to, like, a UFC.
And so I, like, went to this UFC and I saw him there and, like, chatted with him.
and whatever.
And I told him like, hey, man, they're going to like ban cratum.
Like literally in a couple days, can you mention this on your podcast?
And he's like, oh, yeah, sure.
Why don't you come in?
Like, come in.
Like, come in.
You want me to be on your podcast again?
He goes, yeah, just, he's like, we'll just do like an emergency podcast and we'll talk about
the cratum problem.
If I can help, that's great.
And so I went in there and I talked about it.
And I basically told everything I know.
I mean, this is a natural plant.
And this is before they've made.
all these cratum extracts and all these really high potency cratum products.
This was just like simple like leaf cratum, you know, a ground up leaf.
If anybody doesn't know what cratum is, it's basically a plant from Southeast Asia
that's in the same family as the coffee family.
And it is a mild opioid that will make you feel really good.
But if you take a lot of it over a long period of time, it will become addictive,
just like anything else, habit forming.
it's hard to get off of if you're taking a lot of it.
But we've always saw that like, hey, if you keep it under like 10 grams a day,
you'll never have a problem.
Like it's not going to be, I mean, I shouldn't say never.
But for the most part, if you keep it under a certain amount of day,
you're not going to have a problem.
And what the problem is, people start making, you know, all these concoctions
where they're taking 50 milligrams of cratom, 100 milligrams of cratom,
becomes very addictive, right?
but back to what I was saying with with Joe is I went on the podcast and I said listen the
DEA is going to schedule this as a drug unless we can get like 25,000 I think it was 10,000
if we can get 10,000 signatures, you know, not even signatures like you had to like write like a
short email to the to the DEA.
If you write a short email of the DEA saying they should keep Kratom legal, you know,
say something like, hey, Kratom.
my brother's back problem.
Cratum helped me, you know, get through school.
Cratum help me with it.
Tell them why, in an honest way, it helped you.
Yeah.
Or even tell them why you don't think it should be legal.
I don't care what you tell them.
Just tell them something because if they get more than 10,000 comments, they have to read them
all.
And if they have to read them all, most likely they'll just back down because they're not
going to want to read them all.
And so the next day, we went and checked the website and there was like 28,000.
thousand people that sent emails.
No way.
Yeah, into the, into the DEA to say, hey, we, you know, we should keep cratim legal.
We should keep looking at it.
The problem with cratum is the same problem we have with weed in this country is like,
you know, cratum used to be this wholesome plant that was, you know, did so much good for so many
people.
But then they start making extracts.
They start making concentrates.
They are now making, taking alkaloids of cratom.
and separating them out
and making really super concentrated forms of cratum,
which I'm not against.
What I'm against is that they sell them in smoke shops
and they don't tell people how addictive they can be.
They're not educating people on them.
There might be a reason for me to do another documentary
that would follow up a leaf of faith,
which is my documentary on cratum,
to sort of really just educate people about it
so that we don't get ourselves into another opioid epidemic.
Because I do believe that,
that this new product, it's called 70H or seven hydroxymatrogenine.
It's an alkaloid of cratum.
I believe seven hydroxy matragenine.
Yes.
You can buy any smoke shop.
You walk into a smoke shop or even gas stations now.
You'll see tons of it everywhere.
And the problem is people are spending, you know, it's expensive.
It's like for, on average, for five tablets, it's like 35 bucks.
So it's like seven bucks a tablet.
People are taking five tablets at once.
You know, they're taking it all at once and they're...
What's the effect?
It'll get you high like an oxy cotton.
Okay.
But if you take it in like a lower dose, just a normal dose, it'll kill pain like crazy.
So that's where I'm coming in saying like, we're not supposed to take the whole damn package.
Right.
But like I can't control that.
And so in order to control...
And the companies that are coming out, they're coming out and they're called opia or they're called pressed or they're called, you know, blues.
They have these names that sound.
like drugs. And when I have names that sound like drugs, it can turn people off. You know,
it's sort of telling you like, hey, man, you're buying a drug. And if we want to make this a
potent painkiller that can really help people, there needs to be some sort of process or some
sort of, you know, way to do that. So I'm actually talking to some people about possibly doing
another documentary about Kratum because I do think it can really help a lot of people, but it needs
to be there needs to be education on it.
The same thing also, like on the flip side of Kratum is ibogaine.
Yeah.
And I'm also talking to some people about doing a documentary about ibogane because if people
don't know what ibogaine is, it'll flip an opioid addiction in like 48 hours.
It's one of the most insane drugs I've ever dealt with.
It will reset all your neurotransmitters in your body.
It'll kill pain in your body.
for me, I did a iBogane trip.
You can actually watch it on YouTube.
It's called Ibo-G-G-A-I-N-Z.
I love it.
And it's just a little short film I put together about my experience.
It's gotten ripped off of YouTube like several times.
So it's been on there and off there and it's back on there anyway.
So I just made this short film about my experience with Ibogain.
And the reason I did Ibogain was simply because I have such bad chronic pain.
And like I said, I was going through a period of time where I was doing whatever I could to try to get out of chronic pain.
After I did ibo game, the day after, this is stupid, right?
I went from not being able to walk, like barely able to walk every day.
I'd wake up.
And I'd literally be in tears walking around.
And I'd be just walking around doing my daily stuff.
And this is going to sound like a pussy.
But I'd be crying going like, I need help.
Like I need fucking help.
I can't do this anymore.
You know, like I'm done.
And if this doesn't help, I don't know what I'm going to do.
Like, I'm done, you know?
And I was like, don't want to even say it, but I was like suicidal, you know, to a point
where I was like, this pain is so bad, there's nothing I can do to heal this or fix this.
So I called a friend.
He lives in Boston.
His name is Jim.
And Jim is like, he's amazing.
He's got this thick Boston accent.
He's like an old school bodybuilder from Boston.
and Ibo Gain saved his life.
So he came out to visit me.
It was the day before the world shut down for the pandemic.
So it was March 16th of 2020.
He flew out like last minute,
administered Ibo Gain to me.
I went on a trip that lasted,
I want to say like three or four days
where I was like in the clouds.
Like I don't know where I went.
It lasted that long.
Yeah.
My soul like left my body.
How do you take it?
It's just a pill.
Just a pill?
And it lasts that long.
Yeah.
It was a series of pills.
So what it was, I took like 250 milligrams, I think every, like every hour maybe for five or six hours.
So what happened was I dosed it at a really, really high level because my pain was so bad.
And I kept like asking for more.
I don't know why because I was in the middle of the trip.
and I ended up taking about two grams of it, which is a lot.
Like if you go to a clinic in Mexico, they'll probably give you one gram.
But I think because I got two grams, I blasted off to the moon.
It was, so in the beginning of it, it was the most horrific, like horrible.
You see every tragedy in your life, every bad thing that's happened in your life.
And you just keep turning the page and then something worse comes up.
And then something worse comes up.
And it's like you're reliving all these past memories.
But then all the sudden, like I got through all these like bad memories of like being picked on in school.
Yeah.
You know, like you remember the most unique, like weird things.
And then all of a sudden, like I saw like a flash bulb go off.
And I'm like, oh, there goes all my depression.
And another flash bulb goes off and goes there goes all the anxiety.
And another flash bulb goes off and goes there goes all the pain.
Hey, you're free.
You're free to go.
And then I saw my older brother who passed away.
and I was telling your producer, Steve, before,
it's not like I felt like I saw and talked to my brother.
I talked to my brother.
Like, it was real.
It was so real.
I can't describe how,
it's hard to describe how close it was to, like, a real interaction.
Like, I feel it was real.
You know, like I feel like my brother came to me and said,
hey, I know I fucked up and I did a lot of drugs
and I did a lot of crazy things in my life,
but I'm here where I am
because this is where I'm supposed to be.
And none of this is your fault.
And that was so profound and crazy.
It was like literally the most profound thing
that ever happened to me.
It was like, wait, what just happened?
Like all this stuff that I was holding onto for years
just left my body.
You know?
And then the day after I did eyeball gain,
I walked into the gym
and I put four, like, you know,
I was always a power lifter.
So I put 405 on the bar and go, let me just,
like, I just started working out.
I was like, okay, let me do one plate.
Okay, two plates, three plates, four plates.
I go up to four plates the day after I did Ibogaine
and I do, you know, a set of 10 with 405.
Going from like, I can't walk to like,
let me lift 405 for 10 reps.
To me, it was just like the most insane thing
that I've ever, like, ever happened to me.
And I'm like, this drug needs to be explored.
This needs to be looked at.
This needs to be something that people can have access to.
Because I don't know what the fuck happened.
You know, like, I still don't know.
That's so wild, bro.
You know, Mark always says, be careful.
Because like for six months afterwards, I was telling everybody.
I was like, Ible-gain preacher.
Like, everybody needs this, you know?
And then you're sort of mature.
you learn like, hey, just chill because like, what is it going to be like in six months?
And that's where my brother comes in. He's really wise with all that stuff. And he said,
give it some time before you tell everybody. Right. And so I just started like, you know,
I calmed down a little bit, like telling people about it. And then of course, the pain came back.
You know, it came back again. How long did it take? About six months.
Wow. But if we could find something, there's something in there. If you could find,
something that can kill pain for six months and he only had to do it once, why can't you figure
out a way to make that molecule into something where you don't have to have that, you don't have to
maybe go through that trip again. Like maybe there's something, there's something there's something
there, put it that way. And big pharma is not looking into it. You know, nobody's looking into it.
They're looking into it. They're looking how to subvert it. Yeah, how to shut it down. How to keep it
shut down. And there's a guy I'm helping, I've been helping and working with a little bit. His name's
Brian Hubbard. He's amazing. He's like, he was on Rogan before. Okay. I think he might be the
longest speaker on Joe Rogan with Rogan not talking. Really? Oh yeah, you talk for like 25 minutes
straight about iBogaine and how amazing it is. Oh yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, that guy is
gonna I both so right now in Texas where I live um ibogain is up to be legalized for uh,
you know, clinical trials.
So we might get some clinical trials soon.
If we get clinical trials, it'll be, you know, available for people to use.
But I think we need to expand it.
Right now, it's like they're really focusing on veterans with PTSD and they're focusing on addicts.
More on veterans.
Yeah.
I think people, with addicts, unfortunately, I think people throw them away.
Mm-hmm.
You know, who cares about the addicts?
Like, let's help the veterans, you know?
There's this dude, Dana Beale.
I think that's his name, Dana Beal, who,
is this he's this hardcore
psychedelic guy from the psychedelic
renaissance old school guy who is
allegedly piloting
he's flying
Ibogaine from Africa
to the Ukraine to give Ibegain to the Ukraine
soldiers wow to help them
like to treat their not only like
battle fatigue and the PTSD
to like help them process that and like
get back out in the battlefield
which is wild so he's given them
Ibogaine and then I think the Russian
soldiers are getting some form of like meth.
Wow.
Yeah, it's insane.
But like that's super helpful.
And I know the government is definitely spending a lot of money studying this shit, especially
there is this lab, chemistry lab, I think it is, up in North Carolina that DARPA gave
a $20 million grant to to figure out how to take the trip out of a, uh,
psychedelics, certain psychedelics.
So they could basically give soldiers this, the psychedelics and have the benefit of the
psychedelic for, for, you know, PTSD recovery, things like this, but without having the, like,
hallucination.
Yeah, you know, they actually did it.
And it's really interesting.
So I talk to this guy, I want to say his name's Dr. Olson.
David, I think his name's Dr. David Olson.
He's in, yeah.
Nichols, David Nichols?
I think it's Olson.
Okay.
And he's in, so there's Nolan Williams.
He's at Stanford.
He's doing a lot of the iBogine studies.
But this other guy at UC Davis, because I used to live in Davis.
That's kind of where Mark lives in that area.
And so when I was there, I talked to this guy who basically was able to synthesize ibogene.
It's called like Tabernatholog.
And Tabernatholog is available on, um,
You know, like the research chemical sites where you can buy, you know, all the peptides.
Yeah.
You can get this stuff called tabernatholog.
And it's like-tabernatholog.
It's like $700 a gram.
But it's ibogaine without the high.
They've basically said that they can take what happens with an ibogane trip and put it into a pill.
But you can buy it as a research chemical.
It's just that like-
Not for human consumption.
Yeah.
Well, here's the thing.
Like, my girlfriend doesn't like me doing any of this stuff
and experimenting and messing around.
So I try to stay, you know, true to that.
I would love to order it and try it.
But if I order it and try it, I'm going to get in trouble.
So I need somebody else to try it for me to see, like, hey, man, what happens?
You know, because I understand.
I understand, like, not, you know, hey, don't try this, don't try that.
Because in the past, to be honest, I had been very reckless with, you know, different
substances and I think that being reckless though has brought me back around to like now being
a lot more responsible with stuff sure you know because I'm like whoa man that was wild you know
like I've when I experimented with psilocybin mushrooms I really experimented I've gone up to I've
talked to my friend Kyle Kingsbury he told me like oh yeah I've taken up to like 20 grams of mushrooms
so my stupid ass is like I'm gonna try that you know for the first time no not the first time but for like
maybe the fifth time.
It wasn't,
I wasn't that far in enough to do it.
And I didn't have anybody like trip sitting me,
you know,
and like,
you know,
it's just,
this dumb.
Right.
But I had one of the most amazing experiences ever.
I felt like we,
I thought,
I thought we were being invaded.
First of all,
I thought we were in a simulation.
I would like look at the wall
and I'd see a crack in the wall and go,
and I,
and for some reason I thought I had to like go talk to like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk about it.
Like,
they must know.
They know about that.
I got to get to them.
They have to, you know, and then I, like, everything around me would just crack and fall.
And, like, it was wild.
And then I eventually went, I got my blanket and my pillow.
And I walked outside to my car and I started packing things in my car because I thought that the Russians were dropping a bomb on us.
I don't know why.
It was, like, cloudy out that day.
And it was dark out.
And I thought, like, you know, and Joe Rogan said, oh, before you even know it, before the sky even becomes dark, you're going to be dead.
and I'm like, oh shit, like they're, you know,
and this is all on a mushroom trip.
You know, this is just like,
that's what happens when you're a little bit reckless.
Yeah.
It was fun, but like, you know,
what did I get out of it?
Probably nothing.
Yeah, that's why it's good to, you know,
have somebody, if you're going to go that hard,
like to, you know, be in a safe environment
and have somebody like who knows what they're fucking doing
because, I mean, like, no one's ever died for psychedelics.
The only thing that kills people when they're doing these kinds of drugs
is like being around a large body of water
and not knowing how to swim when you're fucking,
zonked on.
Yeah, and like I said, like I went and got stuff and walked out.
It's like, you don't know.
Like, you know, you're not paying attention.
So it's like, you should be paying attention.
You know, I, yeah.
So I definitely don't recommend that, but I've, I've walked that path.
And I think it's good to be honest about that, you know.
Yeah, totally.
I can take a leak real quick.
Go ahead.
I made the mistake of breaking the seal before he started and I'm fucked.
We'll be right back.
Metallica is your favorite band.
Oh, dude, I love Metallica.
I can't believe you got to hang out with them.
You know, I worked.
So we, we've had just.
a fucking crazy story life.
Uh-huh.
And I worked at Woodstock.
Uh-huh.
I think it was like Woodstock, like they redid it in like 94.
I think they did it again in 99.
Uh-huh.
And so we worked as like security guards for Woodstock.
Really?
And Metallica played at Woodstock.
And like my brother's mad dog, his claim to fame was like, he was like, he fell asleep
because he was like, we were doing security.
He fell asleep.
And he got blasted with like super soakers.
And,
And he fucking woke up.
I was like, who the fuck did that?
He was all, you know, Mad Dog was huge.
He was all pissed.
And he's, like, looking around.
And he looks, and it's the tour bus.
And it's Metallica out the windows of their, of their bus shooting my brother with fucking super super super.
Oh, my God.
Like, oh, hey.
Woodstock, 1999?
194, I think.
Oh, 1994.
Yeah.
And they were like, look, this guy fell asleep, but fucking blasting him.
Holy, bro.
So that was a closest we've ever got to Metallica.
Find a video of Woodstock 94.
I believe it was Woodstock.
I was watching a video of the 1999 one in the air.
and it was totally insane
the amount of people that were there.
I always used to work security
for all these concerts.
So you see where like the people are sliding in the mud?
Steve, find a photo like the crowd, like a big wide.
See that guy in the mud?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The funny thing about the mud that people didn't know
is a lot of the mud came from people
knocking over outhouses.
No.
Yeah.
So people were like sliding down the hill in the mud
and it was like poop, but they didn't know it.
That's fucked, bro.
Oh, my God.
Is that Limp Biscuit on the top left?
Is that Fred Durst?
I think I might even still have my shirt from it.
Like, I had a shirt and said Peace Patrol on the back.
Look at that, bro.
Yeah, so we grew up in like Poughkeepsie, New York, and this was in upstate New York.
Woodstock's not very far.
That's it.
How many people are there?
99 or 94?
99.
Yeah, you had the wrong photo.
Pick up Woodstock, 94 Metallica.
I think it was, I think, I want to say it was like, uh,
Nine-inch nails, Metallica and Aerosmith, like all in a row.
It was pretty dope.
Yeah, I got to, I met Kirk not too long ago because I guess he's bizarrely a fan of this podcast, which is,
I don't find that to be bizarre at all.
It blows my fucking mind that that guy of all people.
I find, I think he would be a huge fan of this.
He's really into, you know, a lot of like the esoteric stuff and a lot of so, like, you know,
some of like the, you know, more of the fringe podcast that I've done.
And he was like, dude, he is, uh.
I think he's the best guitarist in the world.
I think he's.
fucking beyond so many other people.
I think he never gets like the credit really.
I'll tell you what, dude, I've never met anybody who is that emotionally connected to their craft,
especially after doing it at the highest level possible for over 40 years.
And he's so like low key.
Yeah.
Like he's never causing a problem.
Right.
He's never, you know, the asshole.
Right.
No, not at all.
It's like there's that one scene in the movie where they, it's amazing.
There's a scene in, I want to say it's in the.
of the black album.
Yeah, it's in the making of the black album,
but I forget what the documentary is called,
but maybe a day in the life of Metallica
or something, day and a half in the life of Metallica.
So anyway, he gets all flustered
and he gets all pissed.
And he's like, I can't do this, man.
It's not like coming through
and they're like trying to record the Unforgiven.
They're trying to record his soul.
He does it a couple more times
and he like throws his guitar down.
And he's like, I'm coming back tomorrow.
And then he comes back in the,
next day and he just goes, I'm fucking, I'm so ready. Let's just go. And he just jams that like
first take of that like solo for the unforgiven. He just jams it in one take. And then sort of
goes, okay, cool, we're good. And he couldn't get it like the day before he just couldn't
crack it. I never thought they made music that way. I thought like they had it maybe written out.
I don't know what I thought. But just seeing that process was really cool. Yeah. What really shocked
me the most about him was just like
after all these years
like touring and creating all these out
for ever touring across the country being in front of
you know stadiums full of you know hundreds of thousands
of people millions of people
the fact that even today
like I think he's in his 60s now
yeah he still has that
insane creative spark
where he's like connected to the muse or whatever it is
where he's like super motivated to
create new shit come up with new
new music put he still
trying to push the envelope as far as he possibly can he's trying to he's thinking about you know doing all
these other kinds of projects and he's so interested in all kinds of stuff when typically people at that
level you know who have reached that insane level of success they they kind of lose that spark you know what
I mean they get comfortable and they just kind of like settle into success and the comfort I think
Metallica I think a lot of people have like written them off too if you like listen to their last
album it's amazing oh my god it's incredible it really is I think that
People have gotten, people have written them off and like, ah, I listen to the old stuff.
I'm like, no, the new stuff is really good.
Yeah.
And this, that concert I was telling you about, like, the way, there was two shows they did.
They did a show on Friday and a show on Saturday.
And I've never been to a Metallica show before that.
Oh, really?
No, never.
Yeah.
I mean, I remember getting the black album when it first came out.
It was like one of my, the first CDs I ever, it was like one of the first three CDs I ever owned.
And, like, going to that concert at Raymond James Stadium, there was 90,000 people there.
And it was kind of like how I was explaining to.
to the the W.W.
Uh,
WrestleMania.
It was similar,
but it was just like on another level because there was
90,000 people all shoulder to shoulder.
And the music is fucking like the, the heavy metal is blasting.
The pyrotechnics is going off.
There's the,
there's the light show that's happening at the same time.
And everybody, it's like,
it's like every atom of every human being in that entire stadium is resonating at
this frequency.
And you can fucking feel it.
And like, bro.
If I was from 2000 years ago
And I took a time machine to that concert
That Metallica concert
Those dudes are gods
Yeah
Those dudes are fucking gods
Yeah it's wild right
How they just command
And James Hetfield's so cool
Like we went to
I went to the
The most recent
San Francisco
Orchestra thing that they did
In San Francisco
And when they played with the orchestra
And it was just so well done
You ever seen that?
I haven't seen that
Oh, you got to see it.
No.
Pull it.
Pull it up.
They play with the orchestra.
And it's just so, it's just so well constructed.
The way that they flow with this, you know, they're playing with.
How long ago was this?
A whole nerdy San Francisco orchestra.
This is a couple years ago, like maybe five years ago.
A friend of mine, like, just got tickets to it.
It's also amazing.
They've been to stay together.
They've stayed, you know, as a, like a solid crew for so long.
Yeah, like if you look at a no leaf clover.
That's what, like, see that San Francisco.
Symphony, S&M 2, full concert.
That's, he says when it comes to being, the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way.
That's so deep.
You know, like you think you're going, hey, go to the light.
Go to the light.
It's just a freight train coming to run you over.
So like you feel like I'm going towards the light and then.
Wow.
So that's like one of my favorite lines, you know.
Yeah, man.
Yeah, Metallica is dope.
Yeah, Metallica is the fucking shit.
You know, I've been a fan of Metallica since I was a kid.
And so I remember going to the And Justice for All concert where they had like the giant lady justice and it like blows up on this, you know, it's a giant statue like lady justice and it like falls apart and like the whole stage starts coming apart. And you think it's real.
Oh really?
The stage blows up like the, um.
What year are we talking that you're going to these shows?
1990.
90.
Yeah.
Like I want to say even maybe.
Yeah, that was like late 80s.
I thought Justice for all.
And justice for all might have been 88.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So I was a kid, you know.
going to that shit.
Also,
my brother went to all that stuff.
So he was like the one that led us into all that stuff.
You want to talk about like wrestling being a different thing in the 80s.
This Metallica and like metal in concerts was like a whole different fucking beast in the 80s, I bet.
Yeah.
And like I said, we worked all the concerts.
So like we were my brothers and I were always like, you know, we were always big dudes like compared to most other people.
And so I'm short, but I was jacked, you know.
Yeah.
And I was strong.
So we always got hired to work concerts.
And so we'd work all these concerts.
And they'd be like Iron Maiden concerts, Beastie Boys.
You know, I've worked, like, name it, lip biscuit, like, kid rock, like, work all these concerts.
And usually we were put in the spot where you're in between the audience and they band.
Right.
So, like, there's usually like a little gap there.
So, you know, in case, you know, people get crushed up against the wall and you've got to pull them over the wall.
Other times people are fighting.
You've got to pull them over the wall.
Other times people are trying to get on stage.
You got to, you know, get off stage.
But you know what's crazy?
The craziest concert I ever worked by far was in Vermont, and it was a Grateful Dead concert.
And, yeah, and it was supposed to be like 25,000 people outside, peaceful, you know, little grateful dead concert.
250,000 people showed up and just rushed the gates.
And we just basically took our jackets off and went in and hung out.
Like, I don't, I didn't.
There was nothing you could have done.
No, I mean, what are you going to do?
You're making like, you know, 10 bucks an hour.
So you're like, I'm not fighting this whole crowd.
That's insane.
At first, we were running and grabbing these guys off the, you know,
they're trying to climb a fence.
Yeah.
And so you run and you're like, okay, cool, I got one.
And then cool, I got one.
Yeah.
And then one of my friends climbed the fence after a guy,
went to grab them and ripped his, like, arms up, like, like just blood.
And we're, that's when they're like, hey, man, it's not worth it.
Right.
And what am I going to do?
These people want to get in, let them in.
Yeah.
I don't care.
Yeah.
Jesus, man.
So it's like when crowd control becomes impossible, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine the, the, have you seen the, um, the video of the crowd that was in Moscow when they played in Moscow?
No.
Metallica.
Type in Metallica, Moscow.
It is the most out of control, like insane crowd.
I've ever seen at a rock show.
Look at that.
Some of those photos, bro.
Look at that one of the bottom right.
Battalica's biggest concert in 1991, Moscow.
Look at that.
Yeah, it's a weirdest thing, too, because, like,
I think it's a very American thing.
Like, we don't really listen to other people's music.
You know, there's nobody that comes over here.
There's a lot of, um, there's a lot of European death metal bands and heavy metal bands.
Yeah, what I'm saying, though, is like, we don't really listen to it like they do.
Like, that, that's, you know.
That is another level.
I don't think I've ever seen anything.
I've never seen a crowd like that.
I wonder how many people that is, did they say?
Yeah, is there an estimate
on how many people were there in Moscow?
You can ask Trump, it'll be two million.
The Moscow Metallica show didn't even...
Metallica, Moscow, paled in comparison
to the inauguration.
One point six million people,
the Monsters of Rock Festival.
Oh, yeah.
I remember they did a...
Monsters of Rock in, I think it was a monster.
Oh, yeah.
Wait, wait, no, no, no.
What year?
No, no, no.
What year?
91.
That was after the fall of the Soviet Union, right?
Well, they also did a concert with guns and roses where there was a riot.
Remember that?
Uh-uh.
Yeah, there was a Monsters of Rock.
It was in New Jersey, I believe.
Oh, really?
And Axel Rose came out and the microphones didn't sound right or something.
And he...
Oh, yeah, I remember this.
Yeah, he was just like, he just left.
and when he left it caused like a riot and then Metallica I guess like made up for it kind of
but yeah they hated Guns and Roses after that there was a big uh big battle of the bands you know
and those were like my two favorite bands you know guns and Roses oh yeah back in the day yeah
yeah yeah yeah it's uh it's crazy man it's crazy how um how those dudes have managed to keep it going
for so long and
still put on
these crazy shows selling
out arenas all across the freaking world.
Yeah, everybody else falls apart.
Yeah, they do. And it is, you know,
like the amount of fucking
like discipline it takes to keep
your core group of guys
together and like manage those relationships
for so long for decades.
You know? I mean,
rock stars aren't like
the most
stable people in
history. You know what
To be able to do that and manage that is pretty insane.
Yeah, it's interesting to see that, like I said, the growth, like how, you know, how far they've come.
They've been through, like, addiction.
You know, when I went to that concert in San Francisco, it was the last day before James Hetfield went to rehab.
And I felt so bad, man.
I was like, man, I didn't know he, like, he played his heart out.
I'm like, I didn't know he was struggling like that.
Like, there's something about addiction with me that, like, if somebody's an addict,
It's like I have such an empathy for that because I've been through it.
You know, I've been to, and I've been through like every way of getting over it too.
You know, I've been to, I've been to one of the, when I, so I'll tell you my quick story of like when I was addicted, I was an alcoholic and I was a drug addict because I had a double hip replacement surgery.
It got botched where they messed up one side and it never really took.
But they didn't know why I was in pain for two years.
They didn't know that.
For two years, they didn't know that they messed up.
For two years, they just kept feeding me pills, the doctors.
And so I was addicted to opioids.
But along with the opioids, I was also drinking, you know?
And that causes, like, big problems, you know,
where you just wake up and you don't even know where you are
and, you know, just all sorts of huge problems like that.
So I had to go to rehab.
I went to rehab in Malibu.
So I made a documentary about how,
to get sober from pills and booze.
And I relapsed on pills and booze.
And I ended up, you know, it was in the middle of making a movie.
Wow.
You know, so I had like people invested money into this movie.
I was making it.
Everybody was happy with the progress.
And then I relapsed.
And when I relapsed, I was so scared to tell the producers what happened.
And like, hey, man, like, listen, I kind of messed up.
And if you go back and watch my movie prescription thugs, it's all in there.
I basically just said, let's just put it in the movie.
because it shows how hard addiction is.
It shows how like even though I know I'm doing wrong,
like I can't stop it.
Like it's a monster.
And, you know, I was able to basically get better.
But the way that I got better was really interesting
because I went to a rehab in Malibu
because I was making a movie,
I had interviewed this guy Richard Tate.
And Richard Tate's still to this day,
one of my good buddies.
he owned Cliffside Malibu.
It's like one of these hoity-toity, like high-end, you know,
celebrity places where all these celebrities go,
Lindsay Lohan and stuff like that.
Like a celebrity rehab place?
Yeah, kind of like that, right?
And so it's really expensive usually,
but he let me go for free because I was making a movie
and he knew I was still filming it.
And he's like, let's see what happens.
You come to my rehab.
I'll fix you up.
So I go to his rehab and I'm there for 11 days.
And after 11 days, he's like,
hey we have a problem we need more space and since you're not paying i need to move you somewhere
else and i freaked out because my brother had died in a sober living facility and they wanted to move me
to a sober living facility so he said well instead of moving you to a sober living facility i'm going
to move you into a different place that is like a what do you call it sober living right so it's like a
sober living where you um no not a sober living it's a sorry i i didn't want to move into the sober
living so i ended up moving into a rehab that was like state run like a state run rehab where people like
go to jail you know what i mean like if if it's either go to rehab or go to jail it's like one of
those rehabs right and so i went to that rehab for 22 days and when i was in that rehab it was like being
in like some sort of boot camp you had to like make your bed every morning you had to you know all these
The Malibu one was fluff.
And so for 11 days, I had like a fluff rehab.
And then I had 22 days that felt like hell because I was just, you know.
It's probably better.
Yeah.
No, it was amazing.
It kind of like all worked out for the best because like I saw the best rehab in the country,
the worst rehab in the country.
I wouldn't say the worst because they did a good job of setting me straight.
You know, I didn't want any drugs after that.
I didn't want any alcohol after that.
I just wanted to go home.
And then the last thing.
30 days I spent in a sober living facility that's owned by cliffside Malibu that was like right on
the beach in Malibu and it's beautiful and it was like you know you couldn't really get any any better than
that and so when I when I walked out of rehab like I just knew I wasn't going to go back to that again
like I knew that that wasn't you know wasn't for me but I got to see all the ways in which it worked
and I also got to see all sorts of different addicts and like what their addiction is from
and every single one of those addictions
they spring from some sort of pain
you know somebody's in pain
whether it's mental pain
physical pain it doesn't matter
they're in some sort of pain
and it launches this addiction
and all they're looking for is to get love
you know to get compassion
to get empathy
and for some reason
they're not getting that in their life
and they have these bad habits
and so it's like
I don't know I've just always been so
empathetic towards
those people and always felt like I, you know, I can help.
I can help those people and I want to help those people.
Right.
And I've had so many people hit me up after my films and say like, hey, man, you, you know,
you saved my life or they'll hit me up on Instagram and say, like, how do I get sober?
And I'll tell people, like, there's a lot of different ways to get sober.
But the one thing I think people need to remember is like, don't discount the fact that AA is out there.
A.A. is been around forever and A.A. is free.
So if you're at the depths of depression and addiction,
you can walk into an AA room and they will accept you.
They will help you.
It's not the best way.
You know, it's definitely like it's,
there's a lot of stuff that you got to believe in to.
Yeah, isn't there some crazy story behind AA?
Well, the AA started with LSD.
Oh, really?
They start, yeah, it started with like a group of people getting together
and using a little bit of LSD.
and LSD seems to really be a way out for addiction,
but since it's so demonized.
How long ago?
In the 60s, I want to say.
Okay, that's what AA started.
I think it started in like 1934.
Oh, okay.
But if you go back and read the, I just tell people this,
the best place it started is pick up the AA big blue,
it's called the big book of AA.
It's just this big blue book.
And you read through that book,
and it was written in the 30s.
And when you read through that book,
it'll tell you everything about why you're an addict.
And you're going, how do they know?
This is like 1934.
It's literally like prophesizing things.
Yeah.
Because addicts have not changed since then.
And that's the one thing that remains constant is like,
the addict is always the same.
The behavior is always the same.
Yeah.
You can tell the behavior.
People become very manipulative.
People will get their own way.
People learn how to lie for what they need to get.
and when you're helping those people you got to like learn how to shut those things down you know
and sometimes you got to be a little bit a little bit mean you know um but i'm telling you like
it's it's so rewarding to help people you know and that's why i make the documentaries i make
and do what i do and i'm working on uh some future projects that i want to really do and i really
think that i have a lot more in the tank to tell you know yeah it also makes a lot of
sense the way you're explaining your ibegain experience you know how it kind of like it exposes all of the
deepest darkest shit in your life right it like pulls the band-aids off all the scabs and it like
exposes it's like a mirror where you have to really confront your deepest issues from a different
perspective right from like outside your typical perspective it gets you off like the normal vibration
of just your daily humdrum life that you get used to and you know
that is a super beneficial way.
I can see why that would be a super beneficial way
to kicking some addictions.
You know what I mean?
Like, I know there's lots of different types of therapies.
There's like I began.
I know MDMA is one of them,
but you're just from my personal experience
with just like edible marijuana.
I eat a fucking marijuana gummy and I get blasted.
I start,
I end up in like the fetal position in the corner
seeing all like the worst parts of my life.
And I see like the worst case scenario in every part of my life and I can find the direct path to the worst case scenario.
I'm like, oh my God, this is crazy.
Like everything's caving in on me.
And, you know, at the end of it, I always come out with like some sort of revelatory aha moment or I've taken something useful out of that experience that can like help me in my everyday life.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So, you know, I can see why something like that would be.
a super effective tool for kicking things like some of these
infections and opioid addictions and marijuana.
Yeah, marijuana gummies are interesting because it's kind of the same thing with
like Cratum, like I said, they, in Texas where I live, it's illegal.
Like, THC is illegal for whatever reason it's illegal.
So I bought these like Delta 9, you know, gummies.
They just seem like any normal everyday gummy.
Yeah.
And I ate one and I was like out of it for three days.
straight. I mean, I mean, and then I looked at it and it has like, I want to, I don't know how to
compare Delta 9 to like whatever, but I think Delta 9 is so cheap that it says it has like 20,000
milligrams of Delta 9 in it. And I'm like, this is insane. How is this legal? How do they, you,
you can't sell THC, but you can sell this. And it's so powerful. So like, I can't even take them
anymore because I'm like, that's just way, you know, way too potent. And yeah, I mean, they,
they don't give you the greatest feeling.
They give you, like, you know, they'll make you happy for a little bit, but then you kind of,
same thing, you see your darkest.
Yeah, but I think that, I think that shit's beneficial.
I think, you know, I don't think it's designed to just make you feel good and happy.
It's a, it's not supposed to be an escape.
Like, I think I get, I get the most out of, like, the darkest trip.
So the darkest experiences, you know what I mean?
Like, you know, like one of the recent ones was just, I was, I fucking took one and it was like,
showing me, it was telling me that
I need to spend more times with my kids
and less time on bullshit. Yeah.
And it's like, wow, that's great. That's not the devil.
Yeah. That's something that's good.
No, I think so, yeah. Like, I think, um,
well, I think that like there's, with all drugs and all things, like,
uh, there's good and bad to them. You know, the bad for me of that
gummy is more like, it just made me a zombie for three days and I don't,
I, you know, it's like, and so then I've, I've taken like half of it and it's made me a
zombie for a day.
And I'm like,
maybe I need to take like an eighth of it.
You know what I mean?
But it's crazy because you get this whole big bag of like 20 gummies.
It's like,
I'm going to take an eighth of it.
Yeah.
I love that there's this company called Vaya.
That's actually sponsored the show before,
but they send you,
they send me this giant kit of all these different types of gummies that are
beneficial for everything.
There's like,
and there's THC or CBD ones.
They have ones for sleep.
They have ones for like creativity.
They have ones for like,
called the love.
gummies that like get you get you all horned up they get you a little bit high and horny at the same time
fucking phenomenal they all highly recommend them oh my god they fucking work they're amazing and they're not
they're not overly potent to where you're going to like blast off to the moon you know so um
i really like those ones but like yeah you can get some of these gummies like the fucking
death star or like some of these crazy gummies you can find from you know underground people
that will just be like jesus christ you'll be fucked i used to be into like you know like i said
I used to be into that kind of stuff for a while.
And then I got to a point where, you know, like, I've been sober from alcohol and pills, like prescription painkillers for like 11 years.
So since that movie, that movie last time.
Yeah.
For pain.
Yeah.
And but I've done every psychedelics since then.
So I, but I don't.
Well, the psychedelics are different.
Yeah.
I look at it as different as well.
You know, it's like I definitely look at it as as being a different thing there.
are non-addictive and they're not, you know.
And I've taken cratom.
Some people will say, actually, even when I was in rehab, after I got out of rehab,
I was supposed to go speak at an AA meeting.
And they didn't want me to speak because at the time I was taking cratim.
And I had been talking about it.
I had talked about it on Joe Rogan.
And they're like, oh, you know, we don't, I'm like, you don't think I'm sober.
I'm like, I take cratim for pain.
Yeah.
And I think people have such a hard time deciphering the fact that, like, you're in physical pain.
and they don't care though they just they just go crate them bad you know right and i think we need to
stop putting substances in these bad good or bad categories it's crazy because they just are you know
cratim is no more dangerous than caffeine like when's the last i don't know if you're a coffee drinker
but i don't remember the last time i went a day without drinking a cup of coffee yeah i just
been it's been maybe two days in the last five years i haven't drank a cup of coffee it's as like
i had hamilton morrison here recently he was like a chemist yeah i love him yeah he was explaining that to me
He was like, I don't think cratum is any different than caffeine.
He's like, if you enjoy cratim and you want to have a couple cups of cratum or pills of cratim every day, it's like there's no, you know, there's no studies or scientific papers that show it's any more dangerous than caffeine.
It doesn't kill anymore.
It doesn't kill people.
It's just like, you know, if it's useful to you, then take it.
The difference is the stigma that's attached to it or, you know, the different types of pharmaceutical companies that have been known to demonize certain drugs because it's not good for business.
Yeah.
I would say the only thing with cratim that I do.
just warn people about because I've been through it is uh it can be addictive and getting off of it. So can
caffeine. Yeah. And getting off of it just like is not fun. So I had to, you know, when I was told you,
I was taking, uh, at one point I got to taking these extracts and I would take several extracts a day.
And when I was coming off of them, I was just using capsules to come off. And so I would take like,
one day I would take five capsules twice a day. Then I'd take three capsules twice a day. You know,
And I would taper down.
And my girlfriend helped me taper down off of it.
And I told her like, hey, this is what's going on.
I'm trying to get off of this.
Because I just wanted to reset my body and be off everything.
And I must have went through a good five or six days that were really, really rough days.
And so I just want to tell people like, you might go through some tough days, get yourself some magnesium, get yourself a bunch of vitamin C.
Okay.
You know, and then the bigger problem with coming off of daily cratom use, I think if you're not using it daily, I don't think you're going to develop a problem.
I drink these every day.
I don't think you're going to develop a problem with those being such a low dose.
And this is an extract.
Yeah, I know White Rabbit.
They're great.
Yeah, they're fucking delicious too.
Yeah, they taste really good.
Mitrogena speciosa extract.
Yeah, I've actually talked to that company a couple times.
I should probably do something.
I drink one of those.
every day except for the weekends.
Did Mark send you some of those new brews?
Those are good too.
He did.
He sent me the mind bullet gummies too.
The gummies are a little bit weird at first.
They're like, at first I was like, oh, I don't like this.
And then after a while, I just got, I really like the taste of them and I like what they do.
You know, they feel good.
I notice, I know you can drink like more than one of these white rabbits and it's
supposed to be like it even says on here.
It says, drink one of them.
And it's like a lightning bolt of energy.
Drink two of them.
You're on the couch.
Yeah.
I never drink two in a day.
I only drink one because it's like a mild stimulant.
but it's also like calming, right?
So it's not like I'm like super jittery,
like if I drink a Red Bull.
But I notice sometimes I notice myself,
like if it's a Saturday and I haven't drank one in a day,
I'll be like, man, I could go for a white rabbit right now.
Then I'm like, just because I knew that popped into my head,
I should go maybe two extra days without drinking one.
And that's what I'm saying is like if you do that,
you're going to be fine.
The problem is when people,
they'll take Kratum capsules,
they'll drink two of those.
Yeah.
You know, and then it's like piling up.
And then it's like, I just want to be sure that we're not telling people to take something that can hurt them because like if you're not taking cratim right now, don't get in.
If you don't need it, don't get into it.
But if you're in pain or you need like, even if you just want a little bit of bounce of energy, it is great.
Take it once in a while.
Use it once in a while.
But use it like responsibly.
People tend to take that and say, well, you said I could use it every day.
Right.
And we didn't.
you know yeah what did um what did the mayo clinic say about cradum to say something about them being
dangerous are you aware of that no like recently yeah i don't know i heard the mayo clinic was saying
the cradum was dangerous there's all sorts of uh things saying it's dangerous like there's all sorts
of people trying to ban it you know it happens all the time but i think the reason that they are
trying to ban it is because what is this steva yeah unsafe and ineffective who's this from
oh this is a mayo clinic website yeah yeah you just can't believe that when you say when it's
says it's ineffective.
Users swear by Cratum
for lifting mood and boosting energy, but there
are many safety issues to question about
whether Crotum works. See, we're at the top
is unsafe and ineffective. Right.
It's the same thing they did with steroids. They would say,
oh, they don't work. Right. Oh, look, my
what does that say? Cradam is an herbal
extract that comes from the leaves, an
evergreen tree called the, okay, Mitragyna-Speciosa.
That's what it says on the can. So that's just
like the scientific name for Crotum.
So why are they saying it's unsciliated?
safe.
Weight loss.
Cradum is known for side effects,
including weight loss, dry mouth,
nausea, and vomiting,
constipation, liver damage,
muscle pain, high blood pressure.
Okay, so one-tenth of the pharmaceutical products
they advertise on every single football game on TV.
Yeah, basically.
Yeah, if you look at this,
LIS.
Occasional pregnancy.
See at the bottom,
it says,
Cratom products have been linked to a small number of deaths.
Well,
when I did my movie,
I went and I scoped out every single death.
There was like 44 at the time.
there was one guy.
44 cratum deaths?
Oh no,
steroid deaths.
No,
this is the cratim movie.
Oh,
okay.
So my movie,
A Leaf of Faith,
which is about Kratum.
Got it.
Which is actually available on YouTube.
If anybody wants to see it,
I think you can probably find it easiest on YouTube.
But in a leaf of faith,
I went through and I looked,
and I actually had a medical researcher that I was working with.
We went through all the deaths,
and we sort of vetted them all and said,
like,
okay, let's see.
This guy had 10 drugs in a system.
This guy,
you know,
them all and there was one guy who was a 28 year old police officer from New York State who died
officially from ingesting cratum but you know why he was dry scooping it and he choked on it and died
that's what he died from and so it's like when you look at that and you go well okay that that's a
cratum death it counts but that's like somebody falling down the stairs and dying and saying that your house killed
right yeah holy shit I had one guy on this podcast
cast once. Remember? I forget the dude's name. He was dry scooping cratum right before we started
the show. He was not only that. He had, I think he had capsules. He had a cratim drink, like his own
custom crateum drink that he mixed together himself. And right before we hit record, he's like,
hold on, dry scoop, two giant scoops of crat. I'm like, holy shit. We don't, we don't need to
cut that out. We don't need to. We don't want to sell him out. But let's, uh, he was, uh, he was,
it right before we started. Oh, okay. Um, but, um, we don't, but. We don't want to sell them out of
before we started.
Oh, okay.
But yeah, like,
that's a lot, bro.
I would be,
I don't know what would happen to me
if I took that much.
God,
because the cratom is what they call hydrophobic.
So, you know,
you can't mix it in water.
It's like cinnamon.
When you try to mix cinnamon
into your Starbucks,
you ever notice like it won't mix.
Things are either fat soluble
or their water soluble.
Maybe it was tea he was drinking or something,
but he had some sort of crateum drink.
You can mix it up enough to make it kind of mix in,
but it's always sludgy.
It's always,
it's always gross.
Right.
There are a couple companies, like I have a friend that has a company called Happy Hippo.
I know Happy Hippo is like, I don't know how well it works, but they've made some
micronized cratom that you can dissolve.
They also make cratom, what do you call it, like pouches?
Yeah, they make cratom pouches that are pretty good, but I think they, if they were a little
stronger, they'd be better.
But it's just another cool idea, you know, it's like put a little cratum in a pouch and, you know.
But yeah, I think that the deliver.
methods definitely for
Kratom need to be improved because
Kratom itself is just like it's hard to take
that's why you know people take it in
capsules because it's
it doesn't mix in water. Right.
Yeah I just love the fucking energy drinks man
just tastes delicious. Yeah you got to do a lot
to get to that you know to get to that
point to make it taste delicious
Yeah they did a really good job though
They did a fucking phenomenal job dude because before
I had a white rabbit I had never had Kratom
Yeah. Like that was my first Kratom ever
was that thing and I was just like I remember
I was doing it. I literally had it right before a podcast. And I was like, what is happening to me? Why, why do I feel so fucking, like, calm, but like focused right now? This is crazy. So I made an energy drink, actually. I made a crate of energy drink that I was selling for like a little while. And it just kind of kind of, it's a lot to that business. It's really difficult. Right. I bet. Get in that business and then, you know, scale it up. So we made a drink called full bore. That's a great, it's a great drink. They actually sell it here in Florida.
still I think.
But my friend of mine owns a company and he saw, you know, I was basically like just
a small part of it.
But yeah, there's a lot to make that happen.
It's, there's a lot that goes into it.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's so many different Kratum products, man.
It's crazy.
Especially when you're getting into like all like the different types of pills and stuff.
They sell at the gas stations.
It's like, you know, it's a, it's a minefield.
If you want to navigate it and like, you know, figure it out.
Yeah.
And that's the one thing.
Like when I made the film.
a leaf of faith, I said like, hey, I'm not going to sell cratum. I don't care about it, you know.
And looking back at it, I probably should have because it could have made a fortune off of doing it.
But I think things work out for a reason. I think like the, I don't, I don't think it's good to be a
proponent or advocate of something and be so heavily involved in it. I agree. You know, so it's like,
I totally agree. And I'm also trying to like be honest is like when I made that movie, we didn't have any
research on addiction for cratim.
Like I went on Reddit and I would look up all these people that say they were addicted
to Kratum and I'd contact each one of them.
And I couldn't get one person to talk to me about addiction.
Now I think it's a different story.
So I think it warrants like doing some sort of update because like nowadays there's so many
people saying that they're addictive.
There's got to be people that'll talk.
And I want to get their stories.
I want to know like what, you know, what the deal is, what's going on.
Is it addictive?
Is it not addictive?
Is it good?
Is it bad?
like let's let's talk it out you know yeah well i mean it's like i think this was stated on your on the
bigger stronger faster documentary but like drugs aren't good or bad right they just are there's a
there's a risk and a reward all drugs are is a risk reward measurement some have more risk others other
others have a high reward with less risk it's just it's all about you know what's best for you in your
body and like what helps you get through the day better without risking too much or falling down
the fucking the slippery slope when you look at it like in our country it's uh you know praise to be skinny
so like ozempic is this gigantic drug manjarro god that's so crazy is a monster drug and
isn't it funny how you can fucking tell who's on ozepic oh yeah you can just like see them you're
like oh that's ozepic the trade off is because they look like a melted candle they look like a
melted candle yeah the tradeoff is that you don't enjoy
anything anymore, you know? So while like, so micro, so I actually think the GLP1 drugs are great,
but I think they're great and so does Mark too. We've talked about this a lot. We think they're great
in micro doses. I think the doses that people use to go from being fat to being skinny, it's just,
it's like it's too much and it's too much of a change. And there's not enough of a, there's not enough of
yourself in it. But if you use it in smaller doses, like one milligram a week, say,
and you and you and you instead of 2.4 right you use like half the dose even less even like a quarter of the dose uh when you use it in smaller doses i feel like
you have to put in some work also and i feel like it's just a you don't get any of the side effects you know what i mean
there's there's there's i think there's i think when as we learn more about these glp1 drugs we'll see people
uh microdosing them more often than using them in the full sense and they're way cheaper that way too
yeah it's just crazy
to see drugs like this like come on the scene and just explode and change everything and if you look at it
they you know big pharma charges like 1600 a month to for you know something like ozempic or manjaro
is that really what it costs it's it's anywhere between like 900 and 1600 dollars a month and the compounding
pharmacy like in power pharmacy for example you can get that for like 100 bucks a month so it's like
you got to go to a doctor and tell your doctor like instead of ask your doctor if this drug
right for you, ask your doctor if they can use a compounding pharmacy.
Because almost any drug that's approved by the FDA can be compounded.
Like, they can make anything.
So if you want your drugs cheaper and you're more knowledgeable, I, like, I used to be
so against pharmaceuticals, like I made a movie called prescription thugs.
Yeah.
But as I understand pharmaceuticals more and understand, like, how they can be used for good
when they're used moderately and for the right things, like, I don't think anybody, like,
when I just came here in the Uber,
I had a guy told me his mother was on 37 medications before she died.
I don't think that's cool.
I don't think that's the way to use medicine.
But when you use medicine in the right way, like if somebody microdosed a GLP1 drug to lose 50 or 60 pounds,
and that's going to really improve their health, I think it's worth it.
So like you said, what's the risk and the reward?
Yeah.
You know, I also learned that recently that UV light kills cholesterol or lowers your cholesterol.
Really?
Yeah, like the more exposure your skin has to UV light, like during the day, like UVB light, I think specifically.
It actually legitimately lowers cholesterol.
Did you learn that from Jack Cruz?
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's incredible, huh?
Yeah, he's something.
Yeah.
He's definitely a super, super sharp dude.
He's a little abrasive, seems.
A little bit.
Well, he's from New York.
Yeah.
So I think it comes to the territory.
And I think also there's something to do with being a,
I think something comes with people who are high level surgeons that are like doing crazy brain surgery or heart surgery on people where your whole entire career, you are at, you are like the boss in the operating room and all these people are answering to you, taking orders from you and this is life or death situation.
I think there's a psychological thing that happens to people where it's just like you have to be abrasive.
And there's like no room for bullshit or like trying to be nice, you know.
Yeah, when he was pushing Cali Means on like the vaccine stuff.
Yeah.
It was just like hard to watch.
It was like, oh man, he's like.
It was hard to watch.
He wasn't like, you know.
You were here.
Yeah, I was here.
It was rough.
It was rough.
You know, I think.
And I think also like.
You know what though?
You changed my mind a lot on what it means to be in charge of something that big for this country.
And when I thought about it, like I think Callie means how I think he means well.
No pun.
I think his sister has a lot of great I think they both have a lot of great things to say
but when you think about like they're the highest like now his sister is like the highest person
in the land yeah what is she at the head up now she's never treated a patient really right I mean I guess
she has in her like in the residency but like she never even made it through that and it's like
maybe we should have somebody that's a little bit more yeah invested yeah politics is a fucking
dirty game man that's the problem with it and you know i understand jack's perspective but then do you
want jack cruz in charge of that i understand like i understand he doesn't want to be a part of it and i'm saying
that's why i move el salvador yeah i mean that's that's that's the like the dichotomy there is you have like
i understand jack's perspective is he cares about patience right like his number one priority is his
patience and people but like that's not how that's not how fucking hollywood same thing that's not how
fucking Washington works, right?
Politics, like, you kind of, to get shit done, you got to play the politics game, unfortunately.
That's how it is, you know, and I think...
Well, all these people going crazy about seed oils, I'll tell you right now, seed oils are not
the problem with America. Right. They're not even a problem. Right. Like, to make it a problem is stupid.
And so all these people like, seed oils, ah, seed oils. It's like, that's not what's killing America.
Right. Food dies. Okay, let's get rid of all the seed oils. People are still going to be fat.
I just saw this fucking thing on Instagram there today, how, like, RFK met with the CEO of Starbucks to, like, get rid of dies in the drinks and get rid of, like, the high fructo stuff.
And it's like, come on, man.
Is Starbucks really the fucking bane of all the health problems in the United States?
Yeah, I think there are ways to make things healthier and there are ways to make things better.
And, like, again, it goes to, like, education, you know, educating people on certain things.
Like, educating people that red meat isn't so bad for you.
and educating people on, you know, different diets and different ways of eating.
You know, it's just, I think that we need more education in those areas rather than, you know, just trying to ban things.
Like banning things doesn't make anything better usually.
Right. And then like, then there's like, what's the right way to educate somebody on this stuff, you know?
Like there was a Stanford surgeon.
I forget what kind of surgeon.
I think he was maybe a heart surgeon.
And this came from, this guy's like really good friends with Andrew Hewere.
And I think this was on the podcast with Andrew Huberman or no, I'm sorry, this was on a podcast with Jack, R.FK Jr. and Rick Rubin, where he was saying this dude said that this high level heart surgeon from Stanford, I believe, I might be getting that wrong. You might not be from Stanford. But anyways, he said that out of all of the medical literature and medical textbooks that are available today in all the universities, he said, he said that,
said that more than 50% of it is wrong or outdated from new research that's come out and prove
that it's like it's not correct.
I've heard John Ionitis who is from Stanford.
He's a professor from Stanford.
And he basically says if it was up to me, I would take all of the nutritional research that
has been done in this country and I would throw it in the garbage.
Yeah.
because he's like that's how much value it has you know i think that might be a little bit overboard
i think we we do know certain things um but like at the same time like even if you look at what
my brother mark is doing he's telling people like hey man maybe it's okay to eat sugar oh the sugar
diet in the form of fruit did you guys discuss that we didn't yeah i don't think we talked about that
when he was in here but i just saw that uh i saw my friend nick norwitz yeah i know nick's great yeah
Yeah, he's awesome. He made a video about it. And he was like, it's not as bad as people think it is.
Well, I recently, I, like, recently I just went through some, you know, just some health issues with pain again.
And because I was going through all this pain, I wasn't lifting. I wasn't really eating great. I wasn't eating bad. I was doing like a still doing like a carnivore diet, but I would just eat way too many calories. And so my weight got up to about 234 pounds. And normally I weigh about 190.
Today I think I weighed 204, 203, something like that.
But the way I lost all that weight was fruit and fruit smoothies every day.
Like just, yeah, just with sugar.
And so what is the idea behind that?
I went out on a podcast and talked about it and everybody hates you for it.
Like, you're like, listen, don't hate me.
I'm just delivering a message.
Eventually I'm going to start losing muscle.
But I'm also on testosterone.
I'm also lifting.
You know, so it's like I just wanted to drop a bunch of weight fast.
So I basically did that every day.
And then three or four times a week at night,
I would have a meal of maybe like rice and chicken.
And that was it.
And so it was like,
and I would actually drink three or four fruit smoothies in a day.
I'd make them myself at home.
I just buy a bunch of different juices and a bunch of frozen fruit.
And I blend them up, cool, drink a smoothie down, go about my day.
I don't know enough about it like Mark does.
Mark's like the sort of expert on it.
The idea behind the sugar diet is it's supposed to be,
to be dropping weight when you're doing it, right?
So you're doing, you're basically like fasting,
but you're getting glucose in,
so you're not really fasting.
And I don't know.
I don't even really could tell you like exactly,
like how and why it works.
But what you're doing is like your body can't store,
your body, it's really hard for your body
to store carbohydrates is fat.
So although, and Mark and I have been guilty,
of this. We even launched a war on carbs a long time ago. We would always tell people, don't eat carbs,
you know, you don't need carbs. And I still don't think that you need them, but this way works
also is what I'm saying. Yeah. You know, so the way, basically, I think the way that it works is
you're still just lowering your calories. Like if you're just eating fruit and fruit smoothies,
it doesn't have that many, doesn't have that much calories in it. Right. I'm not dumping sugar in there
or anything else.
Yeah, I mean, I just started last week.
I just decided that I'm going to go back
to like hardcore low carb diet, like almost keto.
And it is just, the thing about it is it's so hard.
It's so difficult, especially when you have three fucking kids
and your wife doesn't give a shit about any diet you're doing.
She's just like, there's stuff everywhere.
There's pasta here.
There's chips over here.
There's like, I did peanut butter and jellies laying around my house.
And it's like, you know, I helped like,
I helped like Sean Baker sort of spirit.
had the carnivore movement in the beginning.
You know, like I, what happened was like,
um,
so I saw Sean Baker on Joe Rogan's podcast.
And I had also done these diets where you just eat meat like back in 1992.
I did it like when I,
when I was at USC film school,
I was also power lifting and competing in powerlifting.
And I met some other power lifters that told me I was too fat and I needed to lose weight.
And I said, well, I don't know how.
And the guy just said, eat red meat, drink,
water okay for how long he's like till you're not fat so i did it and i you know i went from maybe
two forty two down to like one ninety eight and i would lift at one ninety eight so i'd lost like 40 something
pounds doing this so i knew that it was effective but i didn't really know it had any health
benefits until i saw dr sean baker on joe rogan's podcast i said like this guy's really on
something i used to do that a long time ago but i stopped doing it blah blah blah so i did the carnivore
diet for the past like seven years and I've gone off of it here and there I'd go like off and on
and try different things but I think a carnivore diet is a great base but what I've what I learned
shortly after being on the carnivore diet for I think it was on the carnivore diet for two or three
months and Mark and I went on Joe Rogan's podcast and we talked about eating a diet of meat and fruit
and I don't know if it went over everybody's head or whatever but like basically uh you know
we've had people like Dr. Paul Saladino come to our gym,
and he was having some problems with his hormones.
And so Mark and I told him to eat fruit,
like, hey, try to eat fruit.
He was totally against it.
But now he's all for it because he's went and researched it.
And I think that kind of is the best diet,
a diet of like meat, fruit, and vegetables.
You really can't go wrong.
I don't think you need to cut out all your carbohydrates,
but you need to find better carbohydrates.
Better carbohydrates.
Get them from your fruits and vegetables.
I think they're in your fruits and vegetables.
Yeah. I mean, that's the problem.
You might have to cut some starches.
Starches tend to hold weight on people.
Is Paul Saladino, is he the dude who made the video about how he goes on when he travels,
he brings a backpack full of coconuts with him?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's made all sorts of crazy, you know.
Like, how are you cracking the coconut on the plane?
Do you have a knife? Are you allowed to bring a fucking giant machete with you on the
plane and chop those coconuts and have? Like, what are you doing?
Yeah, I'm not really sure.
Seems a little unreasonable.
Paul's a good dude. He, like, he's a guy that was.
you know, sort of at the head of the carnivore movement.
He even wrote a book called The Carnivore Code
and then completely changed his mind
and added a bunch of fruit to the diet.
But see, I understand that.
I think that's the way people should evolve.
Yeah.
But I also really credit Dr. Sean Baker
for sticking to his guns.
Yeah.
So like the carnivore diet is, it's fucking awesome.
It works.
It's effective.
You can tell the difference.
The way you feel, your energy,
your mental clarity.
Yeah, that's the thing.
It requires.
so much fucking discipline.
It's crazy.
If you have a family,
like I live in my girlfriend and like,
she doesn't want to eat meat every year.
And she doesn't have to.
She's in great shape.
Yeah.
Like, what am I going to tell her to eat me?
Like, hey, it takes a lot, man.
She doesn't need to get in better shape.
So it's like, what am I going to tell her?
So it's like, I don't know.
I think if it works for you and you're single and you can just do it,
I think it's great.
But I also don't think you need to do it.
Even Dom Degistino when he was in here.
He was like, yeah, he's like,
me and my wife will be driving and she'll go to McDonald's for lunch and she'll eat McDonald's
and I'll just, you know, I'll bring my can of sardines and I'll throw my sardines on some lettuce
on a salad and I'll just have my sardines while she eats her Big Mac.
Yeah, well, Dom's insane.
Oh, my God.
That's what you realize in this world is there's a couple people that are just insane and they'll do whatever it takes.
Yeah.
You know?
He's a, he's a beast, man.
He's awesome.
He's a great, great human being.
Yeah, he is.
The research that, and again, like, dude, I've gone into like deep ketosis where I've been in
ketosis for like three months straight.
And I felt phenomenal doing that.
But it's just hard.
It's hard to stay there, you know.
Yeah.
Did you measure it with like the,
with the thing you blow into?
Yeah,
I used to do the prick my finger on them.
So Dom Degistino was when I,
okay,
so in 2016,
I was pretty fat and out of shape.
Basically through,
like,
because of coming out of rehab
and all the addiction and everything.
And I was coming out of,
I basically,
it was the day that Trump got elected the first time, 2016.
I was actually walking to go vote.
And when I was walking to go vote,
I had to stop and like I couldn't breathe.
I felt like I was like maybe having a heart attack or something.
I'm like, man, I'm really out of shape.
Like something's wrong here.
And so I don't know what happened.
I basically sat down for 10 minutes.
I got up.
I felt fine, you know, after that.
And I went home and I'm like,
I really need to make a change.
And the first thing I could think of is like,
I need to go back to like keto, like back when I used to do this meat diet, you know,
and I need to go back to keto.
So I went back and I started reading some keto information.
I found Dom Dagestino's information and I called them because like, you know, I make
film.
So it's like kind of easy to pick up the phone.
Yeah.
Call somebody and he's like, of course I've seen your movie.
I love it.
You know, like let's talk, you know, whatever.
So me and Dom started talking.
And I was like, can you be in ketosis for more than a week?
And he like laughs at me and says, I've been in ketosis for seven years.
You know, and he basically tells me that.
And I'm like, oh, this is interesting.
So then I took off on like, you know, the keto thing.
So people think that I jump from thing to thing to thing.
But I kind of do because I'm kind of learning each time.
Right.
You know, so like I don't know, people in the comments,
but this guy jumps to this, this, this.
It's like, well, you're trying to like learn how to utilize things.
And I think to be honest, even going back to like the sugar diet,
what the sugar diet has taught me is like,
hey, you don't need so much fat.
Like I've been eating literally zero fat every day.
Zero.
And I'm plowing through it and I feel fine.
So when I go back to a regular diet, which will probably be in another couple weeks,
my diet will be much lower fat, which will allow me to burn more fat, like basically use more
body fat instead of burning the fat that I eat.
You know, so I don't know, I think like each stop you make along the way,
you learn something.
Like I learned something with keto.
When I did keto, I did that to a point where like I did it to the max.
I was testing my blood every day.
Yep.
And I got skinny fat.
So I did keto.
And then I went carnivore.
And when I went carnivore, I started like lifting a little bit harder.
I felt a little bit better.
And then I started getting like really muscular and jacked.
And like the best shape I was ever in my life was probably 2018 to 2020 doing, you know,
just eating red meat.
Right.
My problem with the keto was the last time I went super keto.
I got my blood work done after and my cholesterol was like through the, it was off the charts.
It was like in like, it was like 250 or something crazy.
And my primary care doctor was like, you need to stop what you're doing.
You need to go on statins.
You need to freaking get your, the x-ray on your coronary arteries, make sure you don't have any plaque and all this stuff.
And I'm like, I called Dom.
My text, Dom, I sent down my.
blood work. I'm like, dude, am I going to die? He's like, no, my cholesterol is the same.
And that's the thing is like, I have read, because I always just try to find the truth.
I try to drill down into the truth. And I have tried everything to find, like, what is it with
cholesterol? Do we need to worry about it or do we not need to worry about it? And I still can't
figure out whether or not we need to worry about it. You know, I look at guys like Lane Norton's a good
friend of mine. He lives right here in Tampa. And I, he, do you know him? I know who he is.
Yeah, Lane, a lot of people hate,
Lane Norton because he's kind of a dick to people, but I like that.
Because he's so blunt and he's so honest.
But Mark and I have known Lane for years and he's been a great source of information to me.
He'll tell you, hey, man, your cholesterol matters.
There's a linear line between like people dying and their cholesterol being high.
And then you'll talk to other people to say, don't worry about it.
It doesn't matter.
You're a carnivore.
You're a what they call lean mass hyperrespondent.
That's what I am.
That's you'll hear like Nick Norwitz talk about, right?
But I also never heard Nick Norwood say, don't worry at all about your cholesterol.
Right.
You know what I mean?
So I'm like, there's somewhere in between.
It's always, the truth's always in the middle.
Yeah, it's in the middle somewhere.
You should kind of worry about it.
The problem is that especially the problem with the internet is that you'll just find people that like to cling on to certain ideas and they treat it as like it's their religion.
And it's easy to say, go over here, eat just fruit and fruit juice and do that or go eat just meat, do that.
the nuance is hard and the nuance doesn't sell.
The fact of the matter is the sugar diet's not the best.
The carnivore diet's not the best.
The keto diet's not the best.
To utilize each one of these things as tools in your toolbox.
And when you can understand each diet and how to utilize it,
I think that's what's really important.
And if you, I mean, look, you could do sugar fasting one day,
which they call it sugar fasting.
If you just, you could do that one day just to get your calories down for the week.
You know, where instead of like, look at it this way.
You're doing a fast, but instead of a fast, you're drinking three smoothies a day.
I can do that.
That's easy.
But what's fasting?
Fasting sucks.
But sugar fasting doesn't suck.
So let's do something that doesn't suck and can get, you know, pretty much the same result.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And it's good to experiment with shit too.
Like even just like straight up water fasts.
Yeah.
Have you done like a long-term fast with no food?
I've done those.
And then in talking to Mark, he's like, I don't think I'll ever do those again.
It doesn't seem to make sense.
He's like, I think you get the same, you know, you might not get the same health benefits.
You know, people always want to talk about autophagy.
Well, you get autophagy when you lift weights.
You know, you get autophagy when you exercise.
What is autophagy mean?
It means that your old cells dies.
Oh, yeah.
Your old cells die and your new cells.
Yeah, and so that's all it really means.
And, like, that happens when you lift.
It happens when you exercise, you know, do cardio.
So why worry so much about this autophagy that's, you know, comes about through not eating
because like not eating sucks.
So, but I do believe also in,
if you want to lose weight,
you got to be hungry a little bit.
You can't be,
you can't have a full belly all the time
and still lose weight or get ripped.
Right.
It's not going to happen.
Yeah.
You got to live to eat.
You got to eat to live.
I did a seven day fast once.
And I think it was,
I forget what I was,
I was drinking this like water concoction
that was like,
It was like lemonade mixed with syrup in there.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And cayenne pepper.
And cayenne pepper.
Yeah, I guess it's like the Beyonce.
I don't know what it was.
It wasn't labeled the Beyonce thing, but I guess Beyonce has like a diet where she does that.
Same thing.
I forget what that's called, but it's some sort of fast.
Yeah, I learned it.
I learned about it from Kelly Slater on Rogan's podcast.
Kelly Slater was telling him all about how he did this and it like got rid of this stuff
called mucoid plaque that builds up in your intestines.
And he's like after seven days, you'll start shitting out this like black stuff.
Well, I guess after.
And you're like, I really want to do that.
Yeah, I was like, yeah, because the way he was explaining it was that like over your lifespan, when you eat, you know, you're constantly eating shit all the time or whatever it is, whatever you're eating, your intestines build up this layer or this liner of like plaque to where now you can't absorb all the nutrients from all of your food as much anymore.
Yeah.
So he's like, when you do this, this seven day fast with this lemonade syrup stuff, eventually that plaque will like strip its way out of your intestine.
It's like resetting your digestive system.
And that's the reason I did it.
That's the why reason I tried it.
And on day five, I remember I stopped.
I started the fast on Monday.
And on Friday, I was able to go to the gym and do like three times as many pull-ups
as I can normally do with like no fucking fatigue.
I was, I did like 50 pull-ups and I felt great.
And I also was able to play full court basketball, a full game of full-color basketball
with like no cramps, no, I mean, typically, you know, I'll start like getting the side
cramp when I'm doing that and I'll start to get really fatigued to have to like stop.
and take a breather.
None of that was happening to me.
I felt like superhuman on day five of that fast.
I felt like phenomenal.
Yeah, I've had experiences like that on carnivore where like the strongest I've ever
been in my entire life was like recently in my 50s on a carnivore diet, which is insane.
And like people like, well, how do you deadlift?
You know, I was doing, I was doing like trap bar deadlifts.
Like I'm just good at them for whatever reason.
I'm not good at regular deadlifts.
The hex bar?
Yeah, I go up to, I go.
I'm going up to like 700 pounds.
I like the heckstar the best.
And I would,
I go up to like 700 pounds on that.
Jesus Christ.
But here's the thing is,
I would do it with no carbs.
And people would be like,
how are you doing that with no carbs?
I'm like,
I just don't think it takes carbs
to do like a one rep,
you know,
max or I do like sets of three
or something like that.
And,
and so that it's like,
you know,
I don't know.
It's,
it's,
I think Mark and I,
I think genetics.
I was talking about that before.
Genetics plays the biggest role in anything.
I watched my younger brother, Mark, bench press, 315 pounds in ninth grade.
You know, he wasn't on steroids.
Like, he's 14, 15 years old when he's doing this.
You know, so when I tell people like, hey, man, you have to have genetics.
I wouldn't be good at squat.
I have two fake hips.
And when I, with two fake hips, I, you know, I don't do it anymore just because, like, the pain got so bad.
and it's probably not a great idea
to be putting 500, 600 pounds on my back
but I would be squatting
with like working out with like 500 pounds
with fake hips, right?
So like that's fucking insane.
That shouldn't happen.
But that's genetics.
That's something genetic in my code
where I'm short and squatty
and I can get under the bar
and I can do that.
And other people will never do that
but I'll never ride a surfboard.
You know, like I'm seriously.
Like I'm not built for that.
And I think that that's another
I think people need to realize in like building their physique or doing whatever they want to do.
It's like go to your strength.
Go to like what you're what you're good at and utilize that.
Like nobody cares how much you deadlift or squat really.
Again, it's only only a dude will care.
Yeah.
No girl ever care.
So it's like don't worry about that stuff.
Worry about like what are your strengths and play to your strengths.
Yeah, totally.
And, you know, being able to be, have that movement too.
Like the most jacked dudes, they walk around like.
You know, like that kangaroo.
Have you seen the jacked kangaroo videos?
Yeah.
Like you look like the fucking kangaroo where you have like no movement.
You see the dudes that can't turn their neck.
Yeah.
My brother and I went to visit Liver King.
And we went down to his ranch and hung out with him.
He's great.
He's cool.
I don't agree with what he did, but basically like.
What lying about not doing steroids?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We thought it was stupid even at the time.
For some reason, I think Joe Rogan thought we believed him,
but we were just kind of like,
I wasn't even involved in the interview.
We were just kind of going,
you know,
it's like when somebody tells you like,
yeah,
I don't take steroids,
what are you going to do?
Tell them, like, yeah, you do.
Right, I'll improve it.
Right.
Mark asked them all the questions.
You never took SARMs.
You never took, you know,
HGH.
Was this before he came out to do it?
Yeah.
Yeah, and he was,
Mark was one of the first people to interview him.
I think Logan Paul might interview him first.
And then like Mark and I did.
The point of it was,
when we went to see the liver king um mark realized right away like this guy didn't have good movement
like he's all like he looks great but he can't he can't move you know yeah and um i don't know i think
like that's important to look at you know like liver king looks amazing he's all jacked it's like
but if you can't move what's the purpose of it you know and he was on a whole laundry list of
stuff like wind stroll hg he was i think he was spending like 25 000 a month on all the shit he was
taking? Well, a lot of it was stupid because I think HGH human growth hormone I don't think is very
effective for muscle building at all. You know, I don't think it's really effective for
maybe it's going to help your joints and things like that. But it seems like to me, I'll give
you an example. Like I work at this compounding pharmacy and I talked to some of the higher-ups
there and they basically just say like, yeah, it's kind of a waste of money. You know, like,
and they have plenty of money to be able to do it. But they don't, they're not doing it because
it's like, ah, it's not really worth it.
And when you see people that have access to it can get it real cheap, you know, still not using it.
Yeah.
You're like, it's probably not worth it.
So that's where it falls on me.
Don't know a lot of like NFL players and NBA players use HGH or growth, or growth, hormone.
Like my brother, I don't know where he got it from, but he gave me a ton of growth hormone.
And like, I haven't used it either.
And I have it.
It's free.
But I haven't used it because I don't think it's going to do anything.
Have you ever used it?
I've tried it.
Yeah, I've did it for like a couple weeks.
And I think it can mess up your insulin resistance, like your insulin sensitivity.
So I don't, I don't know.
Maybe in a giant stack with insulin and everything else, it would be worth it.
Maybe you might talk to a bodybuilding coach or something, but like a bodybuilding coach, you got to remember, is not a health coach.
Right.
So I'm trying to be healthy.
I'm not trying to be like as jacked as I can.
Right.
Yeah.
You want to live long, right?
You got to balance, like, living optimally and feeling your best and performing your best, but, like, also you don't want to die early. That's never good.
No, and, like, people need to realize, like, so if you look at my brother Mark, he's probably about 5% body fat right now. He's in crazy shape. That looks great, you know. It's great to be ripped on Instagram.
But a healthy human being is about 12% body fat. And I think that's what men need to realize is, like, 12% is the goal.
It's not 5%.
It's 12%.
And if you can get to 12%,
most people are going to be above that.
But if you can get to 12%,
you're, that's right where you want to be.
And that's the preferred,
if you're a single guy out there,
that's what women prefer.
They prefer 12%.
Right.
Over any other body fat, they say, you know.
What specifically does EPO do?
It basically gives your blood more oxygen.
So you can go.
So, like, if you can go.
So it's endurance.
Yeah.
There's a SARM out there.
It's not necessarily a SARM, but it's in the group of SARMs.
It's a GW-501, something like that.
It's called Carterine.
If you look up Carterine, C-A-R-D-A-R-I-N-E,
Carterine is a, I don't want to call it a SARM because it's not officially a SARM,
but it's sort of in that group.
It's something you could take that will really, really enhance your output
on cardio. So like if you're having a hard time with your cardio, you were doing jujitsu or you were
surfing or whatever, you have a hard time with cardio, cartering can really, really help. The problem,
I guess, is if you look at videos from like Derek from more plates, more dates, he sort of shows how
in these studies where it caused cancer in rats. But then you look at the studies and the studies
are like, well, they did feed a lot of this to the rat.
It's like no human would ever take that amount.
Right.
That kind of thing.
So it's something that's like, like, again, I'm not recommending anything.
I'm just saying like, that shit works.
It works really, really well.
I would imagine it's banned from competition because it is very effective, you know.
The one thing I think maybe Mark talked about this on your podcast as well is like,
it's hard for me to believe that cratum is not banned from the olympics it's not banned from any major
sports entity at all it is so performance enhancing like really cratom is oh my god yeah yeah i take
like i would load up on cratum before i go work out and my lifts would be through the roof
because it just gives me energy it gave me um it took away all the pain so like when you're you know
if you're playing football
and every play you've got to get down
in the three point stance
and it hurts to get in a three point stance
we'll imagine if I take that pain away
it's going to be easy you're going to feel so
it might have consequences later
you might lift too heavy
you know you might whatever but like to me
it's it is the performance
enhancing drug that is
just so underrated and underutilized
yeah it's crazy
it is it is insane how like we want to come up
these rules to ban these performance enhancing drugs for things like these entertaining sports,
like for a guy to hit a ball with a stick or, you know, to play football.
Like what, like, what are you doing?
Like, why are you trying to do that?
If it's going to make these people healthy and it's going to make your fucking, it's going
to make this sport and this business that at the end of the day, all that matters to them
is their advertising dollars.
Like, what are you trying to do here?
Well, pretty soon we'll have the enhanced games.
Oh, I heard about this.
Yeah, it's interesting.
So I've actually been helping the enhanced games.
Because I always have the inside scoop on, you know, different performance enhancing drugs and, like, who knows what and who does what.
And so I got a couple phone calls from people that work for the enhanced game saying, hey, we'd like, you know, can we pick your brain?
Who's this guy in your movie?
Who's that guy in your movie?
So I told them all that, but I'm like, you know what?
You want an expert.
You need to talk to Vigorous Steve.
If people online or anybody watching this wants to know about steroids, you have to look up Vigorous Steve.
He knows.
Figuorous Steve.
Oh, yeah, he'd be great on your podcast, too.
He knows so much about performance enhancement.
It's incredible.
And he's from Canada.
He's a very fast talker.
Yeah, he's jacked.
He's just awesome.
He just knows everything.
So, like, how old is he?
He's probably 40.
Oh, wow.
You know, so I basically, you know, said to the enhanced games, like, you don't want to talk to me.
You want to talk to him.
Right.
And then there's a couple of other.
other people I've sent over to them, too, like Patrick Arnold is a friend of mine.
Oh, really?
Patrick Arnold's the guy that designed, I'm like, he designed drugs.
Arnold's son?
No, no, Patrick Arnold.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, yes, yes.
Arnold's son is Patrick.
Arnold's son is Patrick Schwarzenegger.
Yeah, sorry, my brain.
So Patrick Arnold is the guy who created the cream in the clear for Balco.
I remember I talked him on the phone once.
Yeah, he made the drugs.
Dom, he helped Dom, I think.
Oh, yeah, you helped Dom with the ketones.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, Patrick Arnold's great.
So it's like, I sent him, I'm like, hey, enhance games.
Like, if you really want to do this right, you need to talk to these top people in the performance enhancing drug field.
There's another guy named Alex Kikel, K-I-K-E-L.
He's just a bodybuilding coach.
He knows everything about every peptide.
Like any substance you could possibly put in your body, he knows what it does and why people would use it.
And so when you get into these enhanced games, my, my gripe.
with the enhanced games is like oh you can take anything a doctor can give you and i'm like well it
needs to be different than that because like what about trend balone you know what about what about these
drugs that people are going to use to enhance their performance that aren't you know aren't doctor certified
you know like um i don't know in my opinion if you're going to have if you're going to do the enhanced
games and you're going to half ass it by having everybody be safe then it's like it's not is it really
the enhanced games, you know?
Like, we want to see like the all-drug Olympics
in Saturday Night Live where the guy rips his arms off.
That's in bigger shorter faster.
I mean, we don't want to see that necessarily.
But if you're going to have the enhanced games,
it should be, we should know like, hey, man,
these guys were pretty much allowed to do whatever they want
as long as they maybe got a physical beforehand
and came in healthy.
You know?
Because why can't a guy, like, look,
if you can snort a line and run fast,
right
and your vitals are in check
why not
maybe your vitals
won't be in check
when you do that
I don't know
where are you going to draw the line
yeah
I mean there's got to be a line
somewhere obviously
and obviously like
advertisers are not going to go for
and this guy just snowed at a line
before he came up
to the line to run
but they're like like I said
I'm probably being like a little exaggerating
but like
that's funny though
there's something too
like if you're going to have the enhanced games
make it enhanced.
Yeah.
It doesn't just enhance athletics.
You know, I think they also enhance creativity.
Oh, yeah.
Like some of the best music is done on people with, you know, people on drugs.
They make the best music.
You know, there's a lot of bands and there's a lot of musicians who, once they get sober, they're not creating the same kind of art.
Yeah.
Even testosterone, though, has such a tie in to the brain and depression that people that take testosterone usually are less depressed.
You know, have a better, better outlook on life, are more motivated, are actually nicer.
So people think, like, people take testosterone and turn into assholes.
It's kind of the opposite.
They usually turn, they usually become nicer and more generous.
And there's a lot of things that are, you know, that testosterone can do that can really help society, you know, where people aren't such bad guys, you know.
And when your testosterone is low, that's, that's the people that are.
that are, you know, it's not that if your testosterone is low, you're going to be a troublemaker or an asshole,
but your chances of being depressed are a lot higher.
Right.
And if you're depressed, you're not going to be very nice all the time, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've always been interested in trying it again.
I tried it once.
Testosterone?
Yeah.
How old are you?
I'm 37.
37, yeah.
So you're right about the age where, like, you should go get it checked.
And if it's not?
I get it checked all the time.
I get my blood work done at least twice a year.
And what's your testosterone?
It bounces between the highest it's ever been is like 850
And the lowest it's ever been is like 600 I think
Yeah
So yours is pretty good and I'm like I'm saying like I'm not a doctor
I'm not gonna tell you to go on it or not
Well I did it for three months
My recommendation is I think it's great
Yeah I mean right and I feel great when I'm on it
So it's like that's just my recommendation it's like
You're gonna you're gonna have to pull that card at some point
Yeah
So I think so
Why not just pull it now?
Totally. That's my thought, but I'm not telling you to do it.
No, I did it for three months and I tried it.
And I was like, you know, I want to see.
I hear all these people talking about it.
And I'm like, you know, I think what really got me interested in was listening to Derek,
more plates, more dates.
And I was like, God, I got to fucking try this.
It sounds amazing.
At the same time, it's not the panacea of like all of a sudden the whole world opens up to you and things are great.
That's what I thought it was going to be.
Things just are a little bit easier.
Yeah, I didn't feel that.
I didn't feel any difference.
If anything, I felt, I felt more tired.
Yeah.
I felt more tired.
But that's the beauty of it, right?
Because it's your choice and just come off of it again.
Yeah.
And I just can't.
I just stopped it.
And I never noticed any kind of difference.
You know, I felt probably better once I got off.
There's some new drugs that are going to be a little bit better because even though, you know,
I still hate needles, no matter how much, you know, whatever.
So like, there's some new oral testosterone coming down the pipeline.
That's supposed to be pretty good.
Really?
Yeah.
So like, I just think it'll help compliance, you know, because it's hard to, testosterone's like, it's a pain in ass.
You got to keep injecting it.
But that's the safest way to do it, though, right?
Yeah.
The injecting, because you're injecting the exact same thing because people mess around with like the sarms and stuff and like antagonizing the...
You know what's crazy?
When I was in the best shape of my life, I was on a bunch of sarms that I got from my friend Dr. Tony Hughes, who's not a doctor.
I know who that guy is.
Yeah.
So Dr. Tony Huge gave me like, here, here's a box of sarms.
And I'm like, what are I doing him?
He's like, ah, take one of these, take one of these, take one of these.
And I did it.
And like, I was fucking jacked and shredded.
And I don't know, man.
Like everybody's like, ah, SARMs are garbage.
And given my, I wasn't doing my blood work.
I don't, it might have been in the gutter.
I'm not really sure.
Because then after that, I had done SARMs.
I did a SAR-140 and it plummeted my testosterone down to 51.
Wow.
And then I got back on TRT and I've stayed on TRT since and not messed with SARMs.
But I have to say the best shape I ever was in was on SARMs and not on anabolic steroids.
Interesting.
And that's just my own anecdotal.
I have a really good friend who I was trying to educate him about testosterone.
And I was like, because he was like, he went through this like a couple year phase where he just was like not interested in going out, not interested in doing any kind of like.
activities with anyone. He didn't, wasn't interested in chicks anymore. It didn't seem like he hadn't
had a girlfriend in a couple years. And I'm like, bro, you should, uh, you should get your blood work
done, like, what your testosterone level is. He's also, he's fucking huge stoner. He smokes weed all day
every day. And he got his blood work done and his testosterone was 50. Yeah. He's my age. Yeah,
that can happen. And he got a testosterone. Now he's like back to normal. And I was like,
got a girlfriend. He's like motivated again. And his life changed. Like when I, when I, when my testosterone was
that low, I felt just terrible. Like it could.
even do anything.
Mm-hmm.
Couldn't function, you know?
Yeah, I can't imagine what that must feel like for some people.
But, like, you know, I mean, and it's prescribed in Europe, I think, for ADHD or ADD.
It's prescribed for, like, like, normal things.
Yeah.
You know, what's interesting, too, is that they make it, they make it kind of like you
have to jump through hoops to get testosterone.
Yeah.
So, like, I go to a telehealth clinic because it's easy.
Yeah.
So I have to go to a doctor at, like, for some reason.
And I've been on testosterone forever.
Because I just moved to Texas, I have to go to a doctor and get a physical and send that physical to my telehealth person so that it can prescribe me testosterone, which I've been on forever.
Right.
It's like, why are you making it hard?
You know?
I think that's one of the problems with the healthcare industry is they make it hard to do anything.
Yeah.
Everything's impossible.
You know, and it's like if I want to get on a GLP one drug to drop a ton of weight, I don't have to get any blood work done.
But for testosterone, I need blood work.
I don't know why.
You want to be safe, but it's like they make it so difficult to do it the proper way, which sucks.
They make it difficult because there is too much of a barrier to entry to most people because they just give up and they go, well, I don't, I don't, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And one of like the biggest fears with it is like, you know, is there any, is there any truth to some of these facts that, like, it can increase your arterial plaque or it can increase heart disease or it can shorten your.
lifespan. There's really no evidence that at the levels of TRT. Right. That'll do anything negative.
Well, look at fucking, how old is Arnold? He was doing like, 80? How much testosterone was he fucking
doing in his teens in his early 20s? He was probably doing an insane amount. He's probably doing
grams. Yeah. The drugs were different back then. They would take D-Ball. Yeah. They would take a little bit.
Again, though, go back to genetics. Arnold would still look awesome if he never took anything.
Yeah.
Like he'd still look, I mean, he is a genetic freak.
Do you think he still takes it though now?
I'm sure he's taking testosterone now still, yeah.
Even at this age?
Yeah.
In his 80s, you think he still takes it?
Yeah, just probably a lower amount just to like.
I think he takes it.
I know Stallone takes it.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know for a fact, but I mean.
That's, you know, the fact that those guys have made it to their 80s.
Yeah, I don't know for a fact that Stallone takes it, but I know he has been on it.
And so they're like, again, what reason is there to go off if you're, you know, at that age?
I know Vince McMahon, he's got to be still on it.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
It's just, you know, it's a funny chemical, man.
It's such a funny thing that like what the fuck happen?
Like, like, why do human beings, why do we have this fucking weird chemical in our body that just makes us horny?
Yeah.
And the other, it's sort of the male.
purpose of it.
Like, why?
Yeah, the male hormone.
Why do we have that?
Like, why, what part of nature is it just because, is it, is it, is it an evolutionary process
that just helps, like, makes us want to reproduce and propagate our species?
Like, it seems like that's the benefit of it.
It's like a sliding scale, right?
Because, like, men and women both have testosterone and estrogen.
And so our.
And the higher is the testosterone and the woman, the more horny she is.
Yeah.
Our testosterone is high.
And, you know, it's funny because, like, we actually make products for that.
Like, when you're talking about, like,
how horny a woman is.
Stenazanol, which is winstrel.
They actually make a formula of stonazanol
that is a
like a rub, like a cream
that a woman will rub on their clit, basically.
Really?
And it makes them really horny.
And it's supposed to like,
it's supposed to like heal relationships
from what I hear.
Wow.
Because like it'll just make
the woman like really like aggressively
horny.
And you can get that at a compounding pharmacy.
You know?
Wow.
But yeah, it's like there's levels of like, you know, a woman will have high estrogen, low testosterone, and a man is the opposite.
Yeah. But if you give a woman just a little pinch of testosterone, a lot of times that gives them a lot of energy, makes them feel a lot better.
So it's like the problem with women usually, and this is another reason for compounding pharmacies, the other reason is dosing.
So if you go to a, if you ask your doctor, can you use a compounding pharmacy and you're a,
woman and they give you testosterone they can give you a more precise dose because they can make it
for you so they can like instead of you trying to draw out like one tiny little milliliter
out of a bottle and taking too much and starting to grow hair places you don't want to you they make
it they make it more watered down basically yeah oiled down yeah so that you can take a bigger
chunk of it and inject it so it's more so it's more so it's more normal yeah you know so it's
more like the same way a man would take it. It's just that it's watered down so that you can,
you can measure it. You know, like sometimes things are just immeasurable, you know? Right.
You know, like, did that even work? Did I even put it in myself? I don't even know.
Yeah. And the compounding pharmacies, I don't think they can get it as accurate as like
pharmaceutical grade, right? There's a difference between. Like, so, uh, the place where I work in
power pharmacy, it's the, it's probably the largest compounding pharmacy in, in the world. I know at least
probably in the country.
But everything we make is to GMP standards.
So GMP is general manufacturing practices.
We can't make anything FDA.
It's not FDA approved.
The ingredients are FDA approved.
But the actual final product that we make is not FDA approved
because the FDA would have to come and check it
and they don't check on compounding pharmacies.
So like it's a weird thing.
It's like...
Yeah, but it's made...
So the stuff that you buy from a compounding pharmacy
versus it is of the highest quality
you can possibly get in my opinion.
So it's produced the same way
as the stuff you buy from like Walgreens or CVS?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, produced the same way.
And they make it from how do they make it?
Isn't it yams or something?
It used to be.
It's really weird because I've had this question for years, right?
And no one can ever like really answer it
because they're like, well, it's synthetic.
I'm like, but what's it from?
Like, it's got to come from something.
And it comes from chemicals.
I'm like, I don't know.
So it used to be, it used to come from,
they used to take extracts of Mexican yams
and use those molecules to make synthetic testosterone
which they turn in like, you know,
a keg of powder, you know, 55-gallon drum of powder
and ship it across the country
or, you know, from China or wherever they make it.
So I don't know exactly,
it's still a mystery to me because everybody I talked to,
that's a good thing for me to investigate now
because everybody I talked to is like,
oh, it's just from a factory.
It's a synthetic.
And I'm like, what is that mean?
It's a weird thing to wrap your mind around that, though.
Like, do I want to inject my body with shit that was made in a fucking lab?
And like, what am I doing to my body?
Am I turning myself into like some sort of a genetic cyborg by doing this?
Yeah.
But like the crazy thing is, though, when you measure it, it's literally bioidentical.
That's what I'm saying.
It's bioidentical.
So it's like they've basically found a way to trick the body.
Yeah.
into well it's the same thing like yeah it's it's it's it's amazing that we're that they can do that
and you know so the other thing is that uh at empower we have these testosterone versions that are
so great because you can take an insulin pin which is like really tiny a little tiny insulin
pin yeah you know prick the bottle draw a little bit out and inject it with no problem because
it's so ours is so thin it's made to inject it's it's made to be easy it's made so it doesn't
We have a different kind of carrier oil or something?
Yeah.
It's made with specific, we have a specific formula that only we have that makes it easier to draw out so you can use a smaller needle.
Right.
I wonder how far away we are from just being able to create our own genetically modified babies, you know, that are just like those jacked cows.
Oh, that's coming.
Yeah.
With like CRISPR and all this stuff.
The Belgian blue cows.
And the melaton blue cows with the myostatin.
It's a myostatin inhibitor.
Yeah, right.
So myostatin limits how big something can get, how muscular, something you get.
And if you inhibit that, it'll just keep growing and getting bigger.
And the myostatin blockers and things that are on the market right now are all garbage.
None of them really work.
I remember, like, Rich Piana was a friend of mine.
I love Rich Piana.
He was a giant, jacked, you know, huge bodybuilder.
You should maybe pull him up because he looks amazing.
but Rich Piana, before he passed away,
he was messing with this stuff called Falostatin
because he thought Falostatin.
I've heard of that.
It could be like the next big thing for, you know,
really growing, you know.
Yeah, unfortunately.
Oh, I remember this guy.
Fortunately, he passed away.
What did he die of?
So I don't know exactly what he died of.
I think it was an opioid overdose, to be honest,
from everything I've deduced from the case.
He basically took something,
started foaming at the mouth.
and fell on the table.
And he was with his girlfriend.
She was cutting his hair.
And then he went into a coma.
Or maybe they did an induced coma with him.
And then like 10 days later, he passed away.
He was just a really cool guy.
But he had told me in Gold's gym that he was messing around with this fallostatin stuff, which...
Follostatin?
It's F-O-L-L-I-S like statin.
Folly-Statin, maybe.
Anyway, pholostatin is basically a, it's going to inhibit myostatin.
But here's the deal.
I went to Mexico, when I went to Mexico to get those stem cells, I also did a pholostatin
shot that has a technology called mini circles.
And what many circles do is replicate the drug inside your body.
This is like another technology that's nuts.
But basically like, so instead of the phallostatin shot having only a 90,
usually has a 90 minute half-life,
which means like it's active in your body for 90 minutes
and then it goes away.
So instead of being like this active,
instead of only being active for 90 minutes
and you have to shoot it again,
these mini circles keep replicating the substance in your body
for like a year and a half.
So it's like you take a phallistatin shot
and it keeps replicating for a year and a half.
Now that shot is $25,000 to get one shot
and it's supposed to last a year and a half.
I have not seen or felt any benefit from it.
You know, like I didn't get super jacked.
So I don't think it did anything.
So I don't know the jury's still out on Falostatin
of whether or not it works in humans or, you know,
I'm just saying like I'm just one case study.
Brian Johnson, the guy who is trying to live to be 200 years old or whatever.
He's also done it.
I don't think it did anything for him either yet.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I've not seen a follow-up video from him about it.
What do you think about that guy?
I think it's great what he's doing.
I watched a documentary on him,
and I think he's just like a lot of people.
Isn't he taking his kid's blood and injecting?
He's a very, like a very emotionally hurt person
who is made a lot of money
and is like taking that and turning it into something
that he can believe in
and something that, you know, makes them happy.
And, like, I'm all for it.
I'm like, you know what?
Go for it.
But, like, you could tell he's broken.
He's like a broken person who didn't get a lot of love from his dad.
Like, I don't know if you saw the documentary they did on it.
It was really good because it sort of showed, you know, both sides of it.
He didn't get a lot of love from his dad.
He was never the cool kid.
And now he gets, you know, he's got hundreds of millions of dollars and he gets to play
the cool kid, you know?
and people want to know what he's up to and what he's doing.
I think it makes him feel good.
Will he live to be any longer than anybody else?
I don't think so.
I think he's making a big mistake by being on just a vegan diet.
You know, I think there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of...
And he doesn't do any testosterone or anything like that.
He does testosterone.
Oh, does he really?
Yeah, but I think there's a lot of big advantage to eating animal protein,
even if it's just minimal, you know?
Yeah.
And he also,
he always defers you ever watch the
watch the video of him and Derek
for more plates more dants i watch part of that
Derek destroys him so many times
and i'm not out to destroy anybody i think
i think what he's doing is great i think it's great to
experiment and learn different things
but Derek just ask him like well
who's your team he goes well you know my team they have it you know
and it's like okay this is another charlatan con artist
trying to make money off of people right and so you go
is it that or is he just another hurt guy who's trying to get some attention?
I don't know. It's one of the two.
Well, is he selling a bunch of shit? Yeah, he's selling a bunch of shit.
Okay.
But like I'm not going to follow, you know, it's like I'm not going to be gullible and buy the
shit that he's selling because I know that doesn't work, you know?
Right.
I don't know. A lot of these people don't bother me as much as they bother other people
because, like, I'm never going to buy the thing that they're selling ever in a million years.
Yeah.
So it doesn't bother me that they're making money off people, you know.
I've, you know,
there's a lot of people who just like come onto the scene out of nowhere.
Well,
that they come up and they,
and they happen to be bringing a amazing online store
with tons of shit you can buy from them.
And one of the things that,
uh,
is just mind blowing to me is that there's people out there that are carnivore coaches.
And it's like,
what do you do if you're a carnivore coach?
Like,
eat more meat.
Right.
You know,
oh,
you're not eating enough meat.
Eat more meat.
You know,
and it's like,
I get it.
Like people need support on their diet or,
whatever but I just think it's there's just so many grifters yeah that the last thing you need to do
is have somebody tell you you're eating meat and water wrong you know like that's not like it's not a thing
it's like it's all you can have that's it that's all you need to know you know and you might have
you might need a little coaching through well yeah I mean the beginning of it and the and the transition
yeah but there's enough there's a million videos online too so the fact that people are making
money off of it always just makes me shake my head and you know
I guess if you have the money to pay somebody to like, you know, walk you step by step into like how to like meal prep and like how to buy the right kind of food and how to like what time of day to eat it.
Yeah.
Because there's so much more that goes into it other than what you're eating, right?
Like there's like, again, something else I learned from Jack and this girl Alexis who Alexis Cowan who came in here, which they were, she was explained to me how like you're supposed to eat during the time when the sun comes up before the year.
UVA light kicks in.
So like there's this short window of time, typically like an hour and a half, depending on what part of the world you're in, where the UV and infrared light is coming out of, you know, coming from the sun.
And when that sun is low in the sky, apparently is when your metabolism is working at the highest possible speed.
So that's when you're supposed to eat when your metabolism is really kicking in.
And then once the UVA light kicks in, like around here, I think it's like 10 o'clock.
that's when you're supposed to eat less or not eat as much because that's when you're like high noon is basically the slowest point of your metabolism during the day so that's the point of time if you're optimizing for energy that's not when you want to eat so like a lot of people like to skip breakfast and you know eat lunch and like when I learned that I started eating a huge breakfast you know after I wake up and then skipping lunch and personally for me I felt a hundred times it seems like it works way more fucking energy you know Rob wolf eats like that
Rob Wolf's really smart.
He's one of the top guys.
You know, he was on the first person.
I followed when I did like paleo and stuff like that.
And then we became friends with him.
And Rob Wolf told me something that stuck with me forever.
First of all, he said just what you said.
Maybe you're better off like eating breakfast and eating dinner.
Yeah.
And like sort of intermittent fasting in between, you know, where you don't eat anything.
Right.
And they also said, I think if our country just simply ate from like from when the sun comes
up until the sun comes down and not a minute before, not a minute after, we would solve like 80%
of our health problems. And I'm like, that's a pretty bold statement. And he goes, yeah, but I think it's
true. He's like, I think the fact is, most people eat, you know, when they're not supposed to eat.
They eat too late at night. Like, you got to, when the sun goes down, shut it down. Right. And that's like
our circadian rhythm. Right. Totally. I don't know if he said 80%. I don't want to misquote him, but he said
a majority of our health problems. Totally. The other thing is that I think people need to understand, because
we've talked about all these different diets and different plans.
And like I said, I think they're all great tools.
But the thing that I think people really need to understand is that like literally losing weight is the number one way to cure your health problems.
So like if you have any kind of health problem, no matter what it seems to be, it seems that like losing weight will almost always help it.
You know, and that comes from our friend Stan Efforting, who's a gigantic bodybuilder.
but he's just very intelligent.
That's like another thing that's always stuck with me is like,
if your body's failing, you lose weight because it resolves so many problems.
Like for most people, it's because they're overweight.
Right.
You know, some things are not going to be because you're overweight.
Like you may have a gut issue.
Right.
Things like that.
But like a lot of our health problems resolve when we simply lose weight.
Some people get some sort of issue and they go, I don't know how to fix it.
It's kind of like, well, just lose weight.
Right.
Well, it's saying just lose weight, though, like how?
Like what's the best way to lose weight?
Like what part of your lifestyle do you have to change to lose weight?
That's another thing.
Like just taking OZempic is not only going to be the right answer.
Like you got to there's got to be like a decent balance of lifestyle changes that you incorporate to losing weight.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, fixing your circadian rhythm, being outside more eating the right times of the day, not eating processed junk food, not eating out every single day.
And then, you know, as well, another thing that I learned is like eating native shit, like eating native meats.
like eating like around here
the fish that is caught
around here and not salmon
that's imported from the other side of the
you know from a fish farm in fucking
Michigan or something like that
that's you know another huge thing
that I learned about. Well it's like where did your food come from
right? Right. That's like that's a huge thing for me
is like I really only eat food
you know food from like I said I eat like meat, fruit
and vegetables so it's all pretty much
right you know things that are fresh
things that are local things that you know
With the fruits, I'd say that's probably not local because that's coming from like all over the place.
Yeah.
But you really can't help it in today's day and age.
I mean, like, what do you do?
You can't really go.
The way the world's built.
It's hard.
It's like you go to the store and you're like, well, I'm only going to buy strawberries because that's what grows around here.
Yeah.
And it's like you're going to limit all the rest of the stuff that doesn't grow, you know.
That's why I like living near the ocean.
There's so much good seafood right here.
So much good shit.
Yeah.
You know, that's one thing I miss about California.
And California, I'm right by the ocean.
So all the seafood was good.
I don't eat a lot of seafood.
But now that I live in Houston, it's like there's no, that's like landlocked kind of.
Yeah.
You know, it's like not.
Yeah.
I don't trust it.
This is the actually right down the street here is the biggest grouper port in the world.
There's more grouper caught out in the Gulf of Mexico right here than anywhere in the world.
Do you eat a lot of fish?
Yeah, I eat a ton of fish.
That's right.
A ton of grouper and snappers mostly.
Yeah.
Because that's from around here.
And then, you know, like the tuna is good, but like this, all the salmon.
all the salmon's dog shit around here there's very i mean there's some of it that's imported from
alaska that's like you know king salmon but most you know 99% of the salmon that you go to any
sushi restaurant all of that comes from these salmon farms and that's so hard right because salmon
is so good for you yeah but also so bad if you're like if you're getting the salmon from
salmon farms it's not eating what it's supposed to eat so what happens is in the stomach of that
fish it's monogastric it has one you know one intestine like a cow
can take almost any food you give.
You can give a cow corn.
You can give a cow old skittles or old M&Ms,
and it's going to turn it into high-quality beef,
no matter what you do.
That's interesting.
It's got four stomachs.
And so...
A cow has four stomachs?
Yeah.
How did I not know that?
I don't know.
That's crazy.
But what it does is it can take anything,
anything it eats,
and turn it in a high-quality protein for humans.
Whereas a pig can't do that
and a, you know, a pig can't do it and a, you know, a sheep can do it, but you're not going to,
people don't really feed sheep, crappy stuff.
But a lot of times, like, you see cows, like, on these, you know, in these feed lots,
and the feed they give them sometimes is crap.
You know, like they give them, like I said, like old skittles, old, like broken M&Ms,
and they throw it in a bunch of feed and they'll throw it in for the cows to eat.
And, like, to be honest, it doesn't really make a difference in the health outcomes that we,
we've seen, you know?
I don't know if they've ever done a study specifically on that,
but it doesn't seem to matter when you stack up the benefits of grass finished beef to, you know,
it might, there might be some differences in it.
Like, okay, you get healthier fat from the grass finished beef.
But first of all, they just did a study that found out like 80% of the grass finished beef in America,
like isn't really grass finished beef anyway.
So first of all, you're dealing with that.
And then second of all, you're dealing with like, well, how much of a difference does it make?
because it's like $2 a pound more for the grass finish stuff.
So you got to like weigh out those issues.
And like with the salmon, since it doesn't have anywhere to go,
it will digest the corn that they're feeding it
and it'll turn into the wrong kinds of fat that you don't need.
And so now you're having like salmon that instead of being high in omega three fat,
which is good for you, is high in omega-6 fat or omega-9 fat,
which we already have too much of.
Right.
So it kind of messes up everything.
Yeah.
So I think we covered everything.
I covered a bunch of your documentaries, but I don't think we covered the trophy kids documentary.
Oh yeah.
Trophy Kids was fun.
At what point did you do the Trophy Kids documentary?
Yeah.
So what happened was I did Trophy Kids actually second.
That was the second.
That was after Bigger, Stronger, Faster.
Yeah.
So what happened was I made Bigger, Stronger, Faster.
And it went to Sundance.
It did, you know, it did great.
Yeah.
And basically, like, I was trying to figure out, like, what to do next and couldn't really figure it out, didn't really get anything going.
Like, I was represented by William Morris.
I was actually trying to, they were trying to sign me on to, like, direct some big, pretty big movies.
But it seemed like one after the other, they just kept, like, falling apart.
So in the meantime, I was hanging out with my best friend who was a six-foot-eight, you know, basketball player from Michigan.
big dude and he was coaching
kids basketball and I go
to go like hang out with them
maybe coaching like AAU practice
and I watched the parents arguing
yelling at him telling him like hey what are you doing
my kid's really good he needs to play
all this stuff like dude we should film this
this is crazy because like it's nuts
you know and one mom coming to him
saying you know I don't know if I should hold
them back this year because I need to put some weight
on them and you know like
they're basically like fattening their kids up
for the slaughter you know
and I just thought it was an insane world
and so I just started bringing a camera
and started filming it
and then because I worked out at Gold's Gym
I would see Pete Berg all the time
and I go hey Pete I got something for you to see
and he's like okay
email it to me so I emailed him like a little trailer
because I just like took some of it and cut it together
I said you think this would be a good movie
and he's like oh this would be a fucking great movie
like we got to do this like and so
he basically just said
go ahead, go out and just like shoot a bunch of stuff and then bring it back to me and we'll see
where you're at and whatever. And so I went out and shot a bunch of stuff basically for free,
you know, like went out and shot it with like the hopes of like, hey, hopefully this, you know,
gets picked up or something. Yeah. And then what ended up happening is he saw it, he saw like a longer
trailer, like a three minute trailer once I had everything cut together and he just loved it.
So he basically brought it into his company and turned it in.
into like a it was it was a twofold thing it was a it's a documentary called trophy kids and then
people can still see it right now on hbo max it's part of a program that peter did called state
of play you can look up trophy kids on hboh max and i'm sure you'll find it and that's a shorter
version of it um unfortunately the this happens a lot with documentaries and movies the the
company we were working with on trophy kids basically
imploded and no longer exists.
So I don't even know.
Yeah, the production company.
And it was on Netflix for a little while.
It did pretty well on Netflix, but then, you know, Netflix has terms.
I think it was on there for two years.
And it got pulled off.
To me, it was an amazing movie because the following these kids and their parents was crazy.
And then the HBO version is only like a 40-minute version of it.
So it was like an hour and 15-minute, hour, hour.
hour and like 45 minute movie cut down to like 40 minutes.
Yeah.
Which is just kind of the highlights of the parents yelling at the kids, which is still a lot of fun.
Yeah.
But that's the version, I think, that lives on HBO.
And like the full version, I don't even know whatever happened to it, but that was just a crazy project to make because it was, you know, to me it was cool because it got on to HBO.
Yeah.
And like, you know, I, but, you know, the problem is I never got any credit.
Zero credit.
Oh, really?
So like when you go on HBO and watch it, my name's not even on it.
Oh, wow.
Because I got, so here's what happened.
So to be honest with it, here's what happened.
When we finished that movie was when I was, when we finished trophy kids, that's when I
needed to go to rehab.
And so actually, in a weird way, I think Pete Berg helped like save my life, to be honest.
So like he was the one that, he was the one that told me, hey, man, you're pretty fucked up.
Like, you need to fix yourself.
And he's somebody who like, I.
I was so excited that Pete Berg wanted to work on my mood.
Like he wanted to help me with this movie.
I was so pumped about it.
And then he tells me like, hey, man, you're pretty fucked up.
Like, you smell like booze a lot.
You look pretty disheveled.
Like, what's going on with you?
And like, I was just like, man, like I just got kind of yelled out by Peter Berg.
You know, like he's a big time director.
Like, you know, and I just like took it to heart.
And like two weeks after that I was in rehab.
So the reason, there's a reason why my name.
name wasn't on that part of the movie.
But I still think it's fucked up and my name should still be on it.
Yeah.
I directed the entire thing.
I shot the entire movie.
Like I shot, physically shot it with, you know, with my own camera.
So I think my name should be on it.
Yeah, I would say so.
So the full version it is, but not that, not on that version.
So what, what was it about these parents that made them such psychos?
They just, uh, they think that they love their kids.
They think that they love their kids.
Yeah.
They don't know how to love their kids.
And so they think like, well, if my kid's good at basketball and I can get them a scholarship, you know, it was like instead of putting them on, like it was kind of funny because it was a follow up to bigger, stronger, faster where I said, well, if you can't put them on steroids, just start them younger.
And it was like, I was just watching all these kids starting younger and younger and younger in different sports.
And, you know, it got to a point where it's like ridiculous.
You have like five and six year olds who can't even throw a ball and their parents are like yelling at them to do better, you know.
And I watched it from all different angles.
Like we have a parent in the movie who's a tennis mom.
And she's like a born-again Christian.
And she's got all these wacky thoughts about like,
my will for my boys is that they're going to be number one in the world in tennis.
And I've asked God about this.
And I've prayed to God and said, they're going to be number one in tennis.
And it's like, lady, what are you thinking?
You don't pray to God for your, you pray for your kids to be happy and healthy.
You don't pray to God for your kid to be good at tennis.
And then, you know, to be honest,
your kids kind of suck at tennis.
They're not that good.
They'll never, they'll never, like, we knew that these kids would never make it in the big time.
Like, you know it.
Like, you know when you play sports when you're a kid.
Yeah.
You know when you have that kid on your team, like, that kid's going to go somewhere.
Oh, yeah.
You know, and like when we were, it's kind of funny because, like, when we were younger,
we saw it with my older brother.
My older brother played football, and he was really good.
And we're like, Mad Dog, like,
he's going to probably go somewhere and do something.
But then we had this kid that came in from another school who was like six foot two.
This jacked black kid named Dwayne Gordon comes in.
He's six foot two, 240 pounds in high school.
And we're like, that guy's going to, like, he's going to go to the pros.
And we knew, you just, you knew, you know, like, those are the guys, those two guys on that team were going to go somewhere.
And so my older brother ended up going to the University of Cincinnati.
He's the first person in the history of our high school to ever go play Division I football.
But he dropped out in a year because he hurt his knee and he wanted to come home because he missed his girlfriend.
And then he went and wrestled for WWE.
Dwayne Gordon, on the other hand, went to New Hampshire, which is Division I, AA, played linebacker there.
He was awesome.
And then he went on and played for the Jets for a couple years.
But you just knew.
Like when Dwayne Gordon stepped on the field, you knew like that guy's going to be a pro, man.
there's no doubt about it.
Yeah.
And I think like even when I went to USC,
I knew the kids that were in my classes are like,
okay, that guy's going to be a pro.
There's no doubt.
Like he just holds himself in that way.
Yeah, there was a kid I went to school with in like fourth,
fifth and sixth grade.
And he was clearly,
did not belong in that class with us.
Like he towered above all of us.
He was just like super athletic,
super freak fast.
And even the teacher was like,
this guy's going to be.
in the fucking NFL.
Like,
even we were playing,
like,
uh,
like flag football.
Yeah.
And it was just like,
completely unbelievable how this kid,
he wasn't even in the same universe as us,
athletically.
And he ended up going to the NFL.
He played for the Gators and then played for,
uh,
an NFL team.
And the thing is,
you see it with their,
with their parents are usually cool.
Like they're not.
Well,
this kid's parents,
they're not usually nutty.
This kid's parents were both athletes.
Like the dad,
I think he was like super tall,
athletic dude.
And the mom was like a former WMB
player, I think.
Really?
So it's almost like, you know, these two super athletes got together to create a super athlete
child.
Well, there's going to be a lot of more, a lot more of that coming up.
I mean, that's going to be like the next thing is like, you're going to be able to
design whatever kind of kid you want.
So there's an old HBO real sports thing that when I was making, so when I was making
trophy kids, I originally was going to make it more like bigger, stronger, faster.
So I had all these clips that I found.
And I found this clip of a sperm bank in, it's a,
ESPN clip of, whatever, HBO Real Sports maybe or one of those.
And it's basically a story about a sperm bank where you can go and you can say,
I want my kid to have big calves.
I want them to have, literally, I want them to have blue eyes, blonde hair, B63 with big calves.
And they'll like, what they do is they match up donors, different, like women and men donors.
And they try to give you the best shot at what you want.
and it's like
Oh my God
And that's, that was like maybe
That clip's like 10 years old
So like I'm sure that that's going on already
And does it work?
Well, it's not gonna guarantee
That the kids good at anything
You know?
Like we had a bunch of kids in our school
That were like really big
And they should have played football
Or should it you know
They never just never did
Because they were lazy
Right
That's crazy
So you can't predict that
You can't predict if somebody's gonna be lazy or not
Yeah right
Yeah you definitely can't pick that
But, like, I mean, when we get to the point where people can just go to a clinic and just, like, choose from a menu all the traits that they want their kids to be.
It's going to be, like, order in a smoothie.
Like, do you want bananas, strawberries?
You know, what do you want in it?
It's like, yeah, I'll get, I'll take the big calves, you know.
I'm like.
The big calves.
Why would you want big calves?
It's the benefit of that.
I don't know that because I have big calves and they don't do anything.
Right.
The most athletic people have small calves.
No one ever, no one's ever stopped me and, like, wanted to take a picture of my big calves.
You know, no one's ever, yeah, there's never really been any advantage to it.
Right, right.
It is there.
And it's just genetic.
Like, I've never done a calf race.
I shouldn't say I've never done a calf raise in my life, but I haven't done calf raises in like 20 years.
Well, like the most super athletic athletes, right, in America at least, the most jacked superathets like LeBron James for a...
The best example is Bones Jones.
They have no calves.
Yeah, nothing.
Right.
But you're not going to tell them.
Go tell them you have no calves.
get kicked right in the head.
Exactly.
You know what I mean?
Or like Usain Bolt, you know?
Like these guys, like interesting.
What would be the benefit of having big calves?
I wonder.
They don't really, it doesn't really make them stronger, I don't think.
I don't think I can like out-cave anybody.
You know what I mean?
Oh my God.
That's so funny, bro.
Well, Chris, dude, thanks for doing this, man.
This is awesome.
Fucking amazing conversation.
I appreciate you coming and doing this.
It's a fun podcast, man.
I really appreciate being on here and the opportunity.
you talk to you.
Hell yeah, man.
Your documentaries are fucking fantastic and everything else you're doing.
Is there a way people can get in contact with you or watching your stuff?
Yeah, I'm on Instagram at Big Strong Fast.
That's pretty much the only place I am at right now.
I am going to be making a couple more movies.
I'm just trying to decide on what to make and what to do, you know, like in the meantime here.
So I'm definitely looking into that.
You know, I've been wanting to make a sequel to bigger, stronger, faster for quite some time
because I think there's such a divide between steroids then, like when I made the movie and where it's at now.
Yeah.
And what, you know, and what can be done through modern medicine, like with all the stuff I'm talking about, like, what's the difference between replacing your testosterone and showing people what that story is and, like, people juicing.
Like, no, I don't want people.
to juice. I want people to use testosterone and sort of telling that story, you know, and, you know,
I want to do something about ibogaine. I want to do maybe something again in this, you know,
cratom space. So it's just like figuring out what to do next is sort of what I'm trying to,
that's where I'm out right now.
Should do a podcast. Yeah. I'm working on it, man. That would be fucking phenomenal. Yeah,
I might need your help. We could hear everything, you know, everything you're doing every fucking
day of the week. We don't have to wait, you know, a year for a documentary. I might need your
help. I used to make documentaries and that's how I created this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Well, help me out.
Yeah, dude. Say the word. Let me know. I'm down. Yeah, thank you, buddy. Thanks again, brother.
I love it. All right. Good night, everybody.
