The Joe Rogan Experience - #989 - Dorian Yates

Episode Date: July 26, 2017

Dorian Yates is an English professional bodybuilder. He won the Mr. Olympia title six consecutive times from 1992 to 1997 and is tied for the fourth-highest number of Mr. Olympia awards. He is currently the President of Super League, a new event starting July 29 in Las Vegas and also available on http://superleauge.live

Push the sucker right up close. Three, two, one. And we're live. What's happening, man? How are you? I'm cool, man. Up here in L.A. It's nice to meet you in person. I've seen you in magazines. I've seen you since, man, like,

when did you first burst onto the bodybuilding scene? What year was that? I was reminiscing today. First time I came out here was 1992, Gold's Gym. So I came from UK to do my first professional bodybuilding contest. It was called Night of Champions in New York. And I got second place there and made a real big impact. And the Weider company that used to be based out here with the Flex magazine and Muscle and Fitness. They're right down the street. They used to be. I don't think they are anymore. No,

it's all closed down. There's a fence around it and everything but that's not that's less than a mile away from here yeah the weeder officers are out there and you know we know was uh it was a big name in bodybuilding the magazines and everything so they flew me out here did my first photo shoot at gold's gym 1990 so yeah 27 years ago man i remember watching you in those magazines you were the first guy well you know what were the first guy but you were one of the first guys that i ever saw in a magazine that i was like gee how the fuck is that a person you were so big man jesus christ you were big that's funny because i look back at some of the pictures now of me and I say what the fuck you know uh well you're going for it it's extreme it's um and I came into the sport and I wanted to see what I could do I wanted to like take it as far

as I could take it you know well you represented to me as an outsider looking in this insane determination you know like I felt like all the best guys, whether it was Arnold or you or Lee Haney, all the top guys, they always represented not just like the biggest and the most profoundly, ridiculously muscular bodybuilders thing. What separates the guy that's first from second from third or whatever? You know, you all got certain physical characteristics that help you in your sport and so on. So you're all gifted up there. So what can separate the guy from first and second and third? It's all up there. That's the key.

How did you develop your mindset? Was that something that you always had or was it something that you developed as you were training? I think it's something I already had. And I kind of left home when I was 16. So I was out on my own on the street. And, you know, you're either going to get smart and, you know, look after yourself or you're going to fall down. There's nobody there to catch me. So that was there from an early age, I think.

fall down there's nobody there to catch me so that was there from uh from an early age i think and uh i was just very determined to do this thing that i felt i could be good at in order to change my life and change you know uh the projection of my life around the people around me um i was grew up on a housing estate in uk i had no education i was in a jail when i was 18 so i had all that that was you know the people around me i was, I didn't want part of that future. I wanted to do something else. And I got this thing that I was good at. So I'm going to take it and run with it, you know. It's crazy how many people have similar stories like that, where they were in just a terrible environment.

And they realized that they had to toughen up. They had to smarten up. And they had to get out of there. And if not for those terrible situations, who knows if they would have ever reached the levels of greatness that they did. I can tell you from my point of view, I don't think I would have done because I would be too comfortable. If you're comfortable, you're not going to put yourself through that extreme kind of pressure and pain. And, you know, I wanted to improve my life, change my life. And through the sport, here I am sitting sitting talking to you on this show people are

listening to me I've been all around the world thanks to my sport so it's been great for me you know when you meet current bodybuilders are they like hey man what the fuck how could we not a gigantic huge Mr. Hulk anymore you're a regular size athletic looking dude yeah not really maybe some of the younger guys that are that are coming now. But, you know, people know me. I was a professional bodybuilder. That's what I did. And I was the best at doing that. But that kind of training and that kind of physique is not going to serve me now.

So I do training to be more functional. My goals are more health-related now. Whereas before, I was a young guy and I wanted to be the best at this thing i was doing i put everything into that um but you know that kind of physique is not practical for everyday usage you know i can hardly tie my shoelaces when i was 300 pounds oh i'm sure man and how tall are you like a 5 10 5 11 5 11 so like when you were that big you were just a ball of muscle, just a mass. Yeah. 300 pounds. I was 300, 310 in the off season.

Jesus Christ. Competing 265, but I mean, 265 lean as fuck, dehydrated, you know, shredded. So, yeah. God. That's all I did. That was all I did. I trained. I ate. I sleep.

I did. That was all I did. I trained. I ate. I sleep. I studied. It's just all my mental focus was like lasered on that thing that was doing nothing else. I wouldn't go to the movies. I wouldn't go to dinner if I got home after 11 because I got to be in a bed at 11. Wow. That was the regime that I lived for many years. And that's why I was able to beat other people that maybe it could be argued they were more gifted than me but they weren't willing to do that so that's that's what it's all about yeah

that's what I had always read about you and that's what I did like I said that was like the impression that I always got like what you represented is the pinnacle of extreme dedication yeah and and study you know um we had no internet then. Everybody's got coaches now and nutritionists. The thing that appealed to me is this was an individual thing. I had to learn about the training. I had to learn about the nutrition. I had to learn all this stuff myself. And that was, apart from the training, that was part of it as well.

You know, the learning part of it I enjoyed. Was it hard to get good information? Because I'm sure there's a bunch of, like, gym experts. There's always these bro science guys that are hanging around giving you shitty advice. Like, how hard was it to get the proper information when it came to training? catalyst machines. And this guy was like a billionaire, self-made billionaire. He just was fascinated with the bodybuilding, but had no business interest in it. So he just wanted to, you know, he studied it and it was like, what is it that causes muscle growth? What is it? And he found it was intensity of exercise. And then there was another bodybuilder, Mike Mensah, who went to compete in the Mr. Olympia, won the Mr. Universe. He took those principles and he used them. So I read all this stuff and it was very logical. You know, it made

sense. And then I tried it out in the gym and it worked in the gym. And if I trained more often or if I did more in the gym, my progress would slow down or it would stop. As soon as I cut back and I made the workout shorter and more intense, my progress went. So for me, it was pretty early on. I learned how to train properly. And that's why I was competing. I competed in a world championship after 18 months training, which is pretty much unheard of. That is pretty much unheard of. Now, when you say shorter, more intense workouts, how did you regulate that? That's a huge issue with martial artists is overtraining. They want to do more work than everybody else.

They want to work harder than everybody else. And they wind up breaking their body down and showing up for the fight exhausted. Overtraining is a big thing, yeah. And if you see the process for muscle growth is you go in the gym and you put stress on the muscle. If you put stress that it's not used to, then it's going to react. You're going to get growth. But you need to recover from that first. You don't go to the gym and grow and then recover later.

That's not the way it works. You go. If you give your body some stress it's not used to, you'll get a reaction. But before you get the reaction, you have to recover. So if you're not allowing enough time to recover, you just – I use this analogy at seminars I do. It's very simplistic, but it gets the point across. If you get a bit of sandpaper and you rub it across the palm of your hand and it's kind of bloody, if you leave it and let it heal up, what's going to happen? The skin's going to develop back a little bit stronger, a little bit thicker than before,

because it wants to protect against that stress. So that's the process. But if you go and you make your hand bloody and before it's healed up again, you go and rub it again, what's happening? You're not really getting anywhere. You're just going to have a bloody hand, you know? You think you're being tough, but you're actually just being silly. Yeah. And it's, uh, why are you going to the gym? Right. I'm going to the gym to get results. So I'm going to do whatever it takes to get results. And if it means training 30 minutes once a week, or it means training 10 hours a day, every day, whatever it takes, I was willing to do it and I would have done it.

But training 10 hours a day is not going to build your muscles. It's just going to burn out. So I was doing average 45, 50-minute workouts probably four times a week. Really? That's it? Wow. That's incredible. And everybody says, oh, that's it?

I write it on a piece of paper. What the fuck is that? That's nothing, man. I'm like, okay, but come and do it. Come and do it and tell me if you want to do more when we're finished nobody has ever said oh please can we do some more they're like no that's it that's enough because every set by the warm-up sets you got to warm up and you know to be safe and everything but the set the real sets i call them we're going to go to absolute failure and even beyond with force reps, with assistance reps, maybe extra negative reps, which is something most people neglect when they lift weights. They think, you know, I've lifted it. All right.

Boom. Let it go down. I've lifted it. But they're neglecting the lowering part of the weight, the negative. So I get people to really slow that down. So you're taxing that part as well. And even at the end of the set, on some exercises with machines where it's practical so you you know you can't curl anymore physically on the positive on the contraction but your

strength on the lowering is greater so if you did curls and you failed i could lift the weight to the top for you and you could lower it down for probably another three reps so if you just gone to failure here you wouldn't have exhausted the negative part of the rep. So my thing is exhaust everything. It's totally fucked. You can't lift, you can't lower it, you can't lift it. It's total failure. If you do that once on an exercise, then time to move on to another exercise. How did you develop your protocol? Just trial and error? Trial and error. And you know, I didn't invent this system of training. As I said, people there before me, Arthur Jones, Mike Mensah, I just took what they did and error trial and error and you know i didn't invent this system of training as i said people there before me arthur jones mike mensa i just took what they did and refined it a little bit

more for a competitive bodybuilder because arthur jones was a competitive bodybuilder people he trained weren't so his his routines were even briefer than mine but for a bodybuilder you know you got you got to work the side del you got You've got to work different aspects. So I probably did a little bit more than they did. So I adapted it to myself and my needs. Now, when you were at your height and when you're 265 pounds shredded and dehydrated and then 310 pounds in the offseason, you must be, like, used to looking at yourself like that. Like, was it hard to adapt to being – I i mean you're still obviously a very fit guy

but you're a normal side like if i saw you i'd be like there's a normal fit guy yeah that's what i want to be now i'm not training uh for bodybuilding because it's not what i want to do now plus i got a lot of injuries from all those super heavy weights i did i got a torn rota cough which is not i've tried i had a couple surgeries there. It doesn't repair. So, you know, I was trying to, you know, lift weights and continue to do what I do because that's what I'm used to doing. Right. Right. And when you're familiar with doing something, you're reluctant to change something else. But I noticed, you know, over the, my shoulders getting a bit worse, my hips were getting, you know, I'm like, hold on, is this serving me now? Why am I doing this? Am I doing this just to try and maintain something for other people, what they think I should look like?

Right. And I kind of came to the conclusion, yeah, you are. Because you're not a bodybuilder anymore. You're not competing. Right. So if doing this kind of training is not really benefiting you and it's maybe making your injuries worse, when you're 60 or something, you're not going to be able like lift your arms up or something like that so I'm thinking more practically and I started doing yoga you know really fell in love with that it's amazing

isn't it yeah it's amazing it's physically it's amazing I got much more range of motion mobility and then you got the spiritual aspect of as well so actually that I was inspired to do yoga from a DMT trip I did a DMT trip and I came back and I was like my body's all fucked up this isn't right like I got to fix some stuff here what shall I do and I didn't even I vaguely knew what yoga was but I don't really know what it was and I got to to do something. I got to do yoga or tai chi. I don't know what it is, but I started looking into it and then found a yoga teacher. And I do that a couple of times a week.

I find it's great. Every time I do it, I just think I should do more. I did one this morning. And I got up this morning and did yoga class at 8 o'clock, Gold's Gym. And, you know, on an empty stomach, just had some water and some tea. And I fucking feel amazing all done from that. Well, to me, it feels like it connects everything it connects all the tissue from the back to the legs to the arms it's like the neck and the core it strengthens all the

connecting stuff and yeah and you get your energy flow yeah it's going around and there's a thing with bodybuilding um because bodybuilding you're isolating the muscles, right? So you're isolating the bicep, you're isolating the tricep, you're isolating the deltoids and putting stress on those muscles to maximize the muscle size of those individual muscles. Right. Which is great for bodybuilding. But your body doesn't function like that, you know? Right. If you throw something or you throw a punch or, you know, you don't muscle you use a you know it's chain effects the whole body works together and the

bodybuilding you don't really do that you don't learn to do that so that's what i've had to relearn you know so when you exercise today like what kind of stuff do you do besides yoga i do yoga uh do some cycling i live in spain we've got some good hills there. So I do, because I like to push, man. I can't push the weights anymore. I can't get in that zone, you know, because of my injuries. So I've got to do something else. Yoga is a challenge, you know, and it continues to be. Like, if I do that until I'm dropped down dead, 80 years old, there's always more that I can do.

You know, you can always do a bit more range or a bit more difficult pose. So there's no ceiling there, you know. With the bodybuilding, I've already been on the ceiling yeah you know um i do cycling a couple of times a week up and down the hills so that's like you know it's almost like intervals because you do a hill it's intense and then you go flat and it's a bit easier so i enjoy doing that what made you move to spain um well i lived in UK and I started visiting Spain because it's in Marbella in Spain, the south coast of Spain. It's got a very big British community there. And the weather is amazing.

It's like LA. Marbella is like, for me, it reminds me a lot of LA, but a mini LA without all the bullshit and the traffic and the crime and all that kind of stuff, you know? Right, okay. So that's why that's why i moved there that's nice now have you ever looked in anything for your shoulder like stem cells or things like no i had um there's a new surgery now because what happened i tore my supraspernatus a couple of times and because the end was badly frayed there to chop off the end

so now it doesn't really bridge the gap to the humerus so it needs a bridge and apparently there's a new surgery that they can make a bridge now but I went to see a surgeon and he's like okay what's three issues here pain do you have pain I'm like no not really have range of motion actually I got more range than the other shoulder it's a bit loose so the only issue with mine is strength and stability um and he wasn't able to give me a hundred percent on whether the surgery would do that for me and i've had about six surgeries i had a tendon reattachment here about three on the shoulder had some on the hips and i'm like you know what unless you're going to tell me a hundred percent that going through the inconvenience and pain of a surgery

is going to give me what I need, then I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to cope with this. And I can't bench press, but so what? Like, you know, it doesn't really matter that much to me. Can you do pushups or just anything? I can do some pushups, but probably like 10 where before I'd do like 100 or something. So it's very weak and unstable. So yeah, sure, if I had a surgeon that says to me, listen, man, we're going to do this, and I guarantee your shoulder's going to be stronger and more stable after it because, you know, you've got to sit in a sling for like six to eight weeks.

You can't shower properly. You can't dress and pain and all this stuff. So for me to go through that again, I would have to have like, yeah, this is definitely going to help. Then I would consider it. Until then, I'd live with it. They're doing some pretty amazing stuff now with stem cells. Yeah, they can maybe grow some tendon tissue. Yeah, they can do a lot of soft tissue regeneration. They're also doing it now, the most recent thing is they're combining stem cells with platelet-rich plasma. They're doing it together and they found that by doing the stem

cells and the PRP together, it helps generate new tissue growth better yeah i know my wife had a knee surgery and she had the prp and the recovery was real quick so yeah it's nice it's a meniscus is that what it was yeah yeah so yeah if there's any surgeons out there that know how to repair repair dorian's shortened supraspinators let me know man now is your situation the very similar to what a lot of bodybuilders face after they retire? They're just so much stress and strain on the joints and the back. Yeah, well, Ronnie Coleman, who is Mr. Olympia after me, and known to be super strong. Yeah, he did a lot of really heavy squatting.

Also, when he was getting ready for a bodybuilding competition, basically doing powerlifting, which is probably not a good idea. So Ronnie has a lot of problems with his discs in his back. I'm not sure of all the details, but I know he's had a lot of fusions, so his mobility and so on is going to be very limited. More than one fusion? Yeah, several. So he can't really turn his neck and his back too good.

And he's had both of his hips replaced. Oh, Jesus Christ. He's a young guy, too. How old is Ronnie? He's like 36? No, no. Ronnie's like almost my age. He's probably early 50s.

Is he? Yeah. Why do I think he's younger than that? He's retired now. Maybe I'm thinking, I should have said 46 instead of 36. But, you know, he did, we both were known to be very strong. Ronnie even more so than myself because I did powerlifting before. So we moved some heavy weights.

And, you know, any sport, man, you're going to have some consequences. Yeah, no doubt. If you run, if you fight, play football, whatever. Everything has its downside. But all things considering, I think I'm doing pretty good. I'm healthy. And, you know, I've got a dicky shoulder, so big deal. It's okay.

Yeah, I'm telling you, man, just hang in there. They're on their way to figuring something out for that. Yeah, that's almost what I'm thinking. I'm thinking, like, don't do anything now because in a few years' time, there'll be something that can really do the job. So I'll wait until then. Yeah, the last thing you want to do is get something. I always tell that to my friends that are thinking about getting discs fused i'm like you know they're

so close they're now shooting um they're shooting stem cells into the discs directly and regenerating disc tissue the same way they've been regenerating meniscus tissue and tendon tissue and things along those lines i met a guy that trained out here many years ago in L.A., and he told me they were, and I've seen before and after, x-rays of joints. The joint's destroyed. You've got no cartilage. So you're looking at a replacement, and these guys have actually regenerated the tissue back. But it's quite a lengthy process of traction, like hanging upside down, hours of ultrasound, just to push a ton of blood into the area, blood supply, and then you can heal it up. You can actually regrow cartilage tissue, but it's not on the protocol of the medical

association. So they basically push these guys out of business with lawsuits. Well, you know, there's a doctor that we've talked about on the podcast before that recommends hanging from bars for your shoulders. It's one of the best things ever to alleviate pain and also to increase range of motion and reduce impingements. Well, I have to get in touch with this guy. Yeah, well, there's a bunch of videos.

For my back, I got the inversion table, and I do that a couple of times a week just to, you know, keep the mobility there. I know one of my discs, L5, is a little bit worn, but I don't do squats or heavy overhead stuff, so I think it's going to be okay. But, yeah, still, you know, it's all about prevention. Have you heard of the reverse hyper machine?

Have you seen that thing? No? We have one in the back. I'll show it to you. But it's a creation of Westside Barbell. You know Louie Simmons? Yeah, I've heard of him. That crazy bastard?

Yeah. Louie Simmons created this machine that when you lift your legs up, it strengthens the back. And on the down, when it swings down, it's active decompression. Okay, yeah. It's phenomenal for disc issues. It's like active decompression plus strengthening together. I have one back here. I love it so much.

Sounds great. Let's have a look at that later on. Yeah, there it is like this. You can see it up here. We've talked about this so many times. People would think this guy's hired me to endorse his product. But it's an amazing product. I see how that is.

Yeah, it's a reverse of the hyperextension almost. Play it so he can explain it, Jamie, so he can hear it. There's the range of motion at the top. Squeeze the glutes. Good. Squeeze, control, release. Squeeze, control, release. She drops her head, raises her head on the way up, drops on the way down.

Full flexion and extension of the spine. This will absolutely help cure a bulging disc. This is traction. It's motion traction. I need to get one of those for my wife. She's got a disc, a bulging disc. Well, your wife looks very fit, so I'm sure she does a lot of lifting as well. Absolutely, yeah.

She was a world champion as as well in her field you know it's so common for anybody that puts any strain in their body usually the l5 l4 area on the bottom of the spine yeah one of the things about bodybuilding is that in isolation when you're you're constantly isolating these things do does that run the risk of like uh weakening certain areas like you have to be, I would imagine, very cognizant about balancing everything out. I think with bodybuilders, a shoulder injury is the most common

because you've got the rotacuff, which is small muscles and tendons, which gives you the mobility. That's why you can move it around rather than being a hinge. So what happens is your pecs are getting stronger, your delts, your lats. All these external muscles are getting bigger and stronger but these guys inside are not so eventually they get overloaded and you get some kind of issue there some kind of tear

um so when i'm training people now i give them rotation exercises just to strengthen those areas so they can avoid that but hey man i started training the haters like yeah we didn't know anything and when i got an injury and i live in england as well there's no sports medicine doctors dealing with you know strength athletes or so on so i just go to your doctor and he's like how do you do that lifting weights stop doing that shit why are you lifting weights take these pills and you know yeah that's it you know so so now we have much more information, much more, you know, sports therapists and so on. So there's a lot more things available now and a lot more knowledge and information that we didn't really have back then. Yeah.

That's the main thing. You neglect some of the smaller supporting muscles, I think, when you're doing major bodybuilding exercises. Do guys now address that? Do they do, like, a lot of rotation exercises, a lot of rotator cuff stuff? I see it more in the gym than, like, you know, if you did that back in the 80s, people were like, what the fuck are you doing there with that little weight?

Waste of time. You know, lift some weight. But I see people doing it now and with the bands and everything. So, yeah, people are doing more preventative stuff. It's fascinating because there was guys like Arnold who were like kind of the original pioneers and then guys like you who came after him. But you were still, again, pre-internet, figuring things out on your own, learning from the guys that came before you but taking it to another level.

That was the beauty of it for me. You know, I never really liked team sports because I just feel like this asshole is letting me down here, you know. And I felt like that through my life as well. I felt like my parents didn't really, you know, like everyone's fucking letting me down. Fuck this. I'll do this myself. And so I got to learn about the nutrition. I got to learn about the training.

I got to do it. I got to pull it all into action. And, of course, I had people, like, supporting me. But when I got on that stage, it was win or lose, I'm taking full responsibility for this. And we don't really have that now. And the guys don't learn anything because they've got coaches. So what should I do, boss? Do this, do that, and eat this and eat that.

Okay. And, you know, the beauty of it is gone. You're not learning anything anymore. And what if you fall out with your coach? Like, what are you going to do next contest? You know? So is that like a big thing now? Like there's like a series of coaches?

Is it like MMA camps? It's a huge thing. And it's like, I don't know. I think the guys are suckers because who's making the money here? The coaches. The coaches are making the money, not the, not the competitors. The coaches are smart. And I look at the coaches and I say, who the fuck are you? And what have you done? You know, which contest have you actually won? And most of them haven't done anything.

It's just all theory. So, um, so what are they exercise physiologists? No, they're just guys from the industry that you know they've trained a few people and they got a few results and uh it's more about the for me it's all more about the insecurity of the guys competing like why don't you learn yourself and listen to your body and i used to make notes you know every week i'd write down my diet i'd write down every single workout that i ever did from 1984 to 1997 I have in a training log. You should sell that. Print it.

Maybe, yeah. Print it. Put it in a book. It's in all these little exercise books, you know. And, like, you can see the first one when I'm, like, 21 years old is a bit childish with the comments. But it's like, you know, I felt shit today. This was a shitty workout. Never fucking let this happen again.

You know, all this stuff I'm talking to myself. So I all this and it's to go back and look at it sometimes and it's weird because i can go back to 1988 and i can look in my book and i look at that workout and i was like i was in this gym and i was training with this guy and i can't even remember like i was like what i was wearing and i can go back in time and remember that workout. Just from those notes? Yeah. Like every workout, as soon as I got home and I finished, I was like, hey, bench press, I did this. And every month I would make notes and I'd say, okay, this is what I'm doing now.

These are my goals for the next four weeks. You know, whatever. Like little goals. Like I'm going to put five pounds on my bench press. But if you do that every month, then at the the month you get you're in the year you got 60 pounds right so i did all these things like you know uh mental rehearsal um visualize all this stuff i did it i just i kind of learned it nobody nobody taught me so um that was one of the things goal setting right and writing it down on a piece of paper just and you can do this with anything, your business, whatever.

You're writing it down on a piece of paper. You make a commitment. It's fucking there on a piece of paper. Every day you can look at that. And that just gives you a stronger mental vision. And instead of saying, right, I'm going to win this contest in 18 months' time, yeah, that's cool. You're going to win that contest. But how are you going to get there?

It's like saying, I'm going to sail to Australia. Yeah, that's a good idea to win that contest. But how are you going to get there? It's like saying, I'm going to sail to Australia. Yeah, it's a good idea. That's cool. But how are you going to get there? Have you got a plan? Have you got a map? Like, fuck, you're going to go with no map. You're just going to get lost, you know?

So I found that very helpful. That's what I try to teach people as well, you know? Yeah, I think writing down goals is huge. And it's something that most people don't do. Yeah, I still do it now, like a daily thing. This is what I got to do today. Sometimes I won't get through it all. But, you know, at at least it's there i might put a couple of things off for tomorrow but i find it very very helpful yeah yeah and when you've read it down like you know like let's say uh i don't know you want to stop drinking or something

write it down i'm gonna stop drinking alcohol sign it you fucking put it there on your table you don't just have it you said that man you said that you've said it you've made the commitment you put on a paper so you're gonna you're gonna let yourself down you're gonna be a pussy you're gonna be weak and you're gonna break that you made that commitment man right you know it's there on a piece of paper so that's that's strong well especially for the type of person like you a dedicated focused guy like something like that is just extra motivation and and like a you know you it's a scaffolding yeah exactly it's there it's solid you know something i just say it casually i fucking committed to this i wrote it down you know yeah i'm a fair believer i think you should at least for a week you know at least for your week set it out and

have a little check box next to it and make sure you can look at that. Like, I did this. I got my workouts in. I got my whatever you need to get done, whatever you're trying to slack off. There's five things to do there. I did four of them. I didn't do the fifth one because I smoked a joint. Four out of five. Yeah, it's not bad. Four out of five.

I reward myself. If you do write things down, though, you'll just get more done. Even if you don't fulfill the entire list, you'll get more done. You're going to get more done than if you didn't do it 100 it's having a plan man everything needs a plan if you want to get somewhere i use that analogy if you want to get somewhere if you're a captain on a ship you don't just get on the ship and say hey ho let's go sailing and we're going to get there no you're probably not you need to you know you need a route to get there yeah and you need to know what it takes to get there. Oh, I'm going to do this.

I'm going to do this fight. I'm going to do this competition. Yeah, cool. But do you know what it takes to get there? Right? First of all, this is what it takes. Okay? Are you prepared to do this?

Are you going to do this? Yes or no? And if it's yes, go for it. If it's too much, be honest. Just don't fucking do it. for it you know if it's too much to be honest just don't fucking do it you know there was a time when you were uh at the top of the heap where there was there was debate as to like what a bodybuilder should look like there was like the frank zane look which was like a strong obviously fit guy but much smaller yeah and just symmetrical and then there was you that just came out like the fucking Hulk.

And then it was almost like overwhelming for a lot of people. And then there was this debate to try to figure out. Absolutely, yeah. Because when I look at a bunch of bodybuilders on a stage and they're trying to pick out who's number one, who's number two, I'm like, I can't. I mean, I always assume that it's like a lot of other things. Like the deeper you are into it, the more you can see the intricacies of it.

Whereas for me, a person is not a bodybuilder. I'm like, they're all fucking huge. How can you tell who's the best? Well, it's a matter of, you know, it's bodybuilding, right? Yeah. So it's muscle size is a big factor. It's not the only factor, but it is a big factor. If you look at the Mr. Olympias, for instance, in the era of Frank Zane, and Frank Zane is a body that probably most people

would look at and say, fuck it, no, that's it, that's great, you know? They'd probably look at me and say, it's too extreme. But in the era of Frank Zane, who was Mr. Olympia? It was Arnold.

Right. Arnold was Mr. Olympia. You could argue that Frank Zane, who was Mr. Olympia? It was Arnold. Right. Arnold was Mr. Olympia. You could argue that Frank Zane's body is more aesthetic and nicer and prettier than Arnold's. But Arnold beats him. Why? He just was bigger. More freakishly impressive. Yeah, he's bigger.

And Lee Haney was eight times Mr. Olympia. You could argue maybe Lee Labrada or somebody like that was better proportioned and put together, but he was much smaller. So, you know, Frank Zane looks like a guy you would see in a gym today, like a regular dude. There's a lot of regular dudes like that. There's a category now. So you've got bodybuilding, but you've got other categories now that you didn't have. So you've got men's physique, which is more of this type of physique they're looking for, very aesthetic, tight waist, everything like that. And you've even got classic bodybuilding now, which is height over weight ratio.

So, you know, the guys are not that big. So you've got different categories as a reaction to people not really liking the direction that bodybuilding went in. And, yeah, I'll take responsibility for it going the size route. And I had a nice physique when I started. I had a nice physique. I had nice abs and everything. But I'm like, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this to the max. I'm going to see how far, you know, how big can I get?

How ripped can I get? How strong can I get? I want to go to the max. And I don't want people to say, oh, wow, that's a that's a nice pretty physique i want people to say what the fuck is that yeah that's what i wanted to do well you succeeded in that you definitely succeeded yeah the guy that inspired me before that was tom platts i don't know if you know tom platts with the fucking freaky legs and you know he was the guy um when i started he wasn't mr olymp know, he was the guy when I started. He wasn't Mr. Olympia, but he was very inspirational.

And when he talked, he was just full of energy and enthusiasm for the training and pushing the body to its absolute maximum. And I remember Tom Platt saying, you know, when I walk out on stage at a bodybuilding competition i want to see those judges there with the pencil and the paper and i just wanted to fucking drop that pencil and just say what the fuck is that you know his legs were so big his legs were so freakishly big like that guy had like nobody uh has really surpassed tom platts's leg development i don't think to this day it's fair to say. Now is that just, it's weird because it's very rare that someone's known

very specifically for a body part the way Platz is known for his legs. But Platz made a whole career on the legs and not only the legs, this passion he had for like pushing himself into the gym to the absolute maximum and that

inspired me to do that and try and take it even further and that now is is missing that's not here anymore now for me the bodybuilding and the fitness industry people are just really more concerned with the cosmetic the look and you know taking their pictures and putting them instagram and all this kind of stuff they're not really into it's almost a spiritual side of it you know where you want to push yourself to that maximum and see how far you can go and how you know how far your mind can go into the pain and all that kind of stuff that's not really there anymore but what's what's missing like what's the element that's missing? Like, why isn't that there? I don't know, man. I mean, maybe it's just a reflection of society in general.

People just want stuff like, you know, they want stuff easy now. You know, everyone wants to be famous. Put the picture on Instagram. You don't need to do shit. Just be famous. Go on Big Brother. Be famous for nothing. You've done nothing.

Yeah, that's, I don't know. I think that's a reflection of the way things are perhaps in everything. But what's the difference in the way the bodybuilders approach it today? I mean, they're obviously doing something because they're still huge. And there's still, you know, these giant guys that are lifting weights. So what element? But if you look at the giant guys that are lifting weights now, they don't look quite like myself and the guys from the 90s. Now the guys are just big everywhere.

The waists are huge. Everything's huge. And it's 20 years since I competed in a contest, so I don't exactly know. But the guys are using a lot more different drugs than we used to. A lot more insulin and IGf things like that so um i think what you're seeing is in the big guys is somewhat systemic growth it's like they just got a bit bigger everywhere and that doesn't look uh so appealing i think right when like their guts extend yeah so maybe they're relying more on the chemicals and they don't really you know i haven't really heard

anything from any of the bodybuilding champions in the last 10 or 15 years i don't think um interesting or new or revolutionary in their training methods it just you know they don't really even talk about it that much now everyone just does the same stuff you know well it was at one point in time where no one talked about it at all right like it was Like you would get the magazines and they would tell you to take creatine and you could look like me. But everybody kind of knew. Everybody who knew people who knew people. It was somewhat of an inner circle.

I remember I started in the 80s. And I read the magazines. And I saw a few things by Arnold and Mike Mensah where they kind of admitted they used something. But they very downplayed it. Oh, it's only for the last six weeks before a competition, just to give us that last polish and stuff like that. And I asked a few guys in the gym, and when I first started, they were a bit cagey, like, no, no, no, no, I don't do that.

You know, later on, I found out they're all doing it, right? Yeah. And it was very much inner circle, in the gym, bodybuilders. Now everybody knows about steroids. Now it's mainstream. And guys take steroids now just for cosmetic reasons because they want to look bigger and harder and quicker. I just equate it to women having a Botox or having some implants.

The guys want to look bigger. They don't want to work so hard. They don't want to, you know, they just want it quick, right? So you get guys coming to the gym and they just take steroids pretty much straight away. And they don't necessarily learn how to train really properly. And it's not just competitive bodybuilders now. I mean, it's everywhere. It's everywhere.

It's mainstream. You look at Hollywood. You look at hip-hop now. I mean, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's mainstream. You look at Hollywood. You look at hip-hop artists. I mean, come on. They're all doing a bit of juice, man. Look at Nelly 10 years ago. Look at him now, man. I haven't really been paying attention to Nelly.

Whatever. There's a lot of them. Nelly, Cool J. I mean, you know, they're all jacked, man. There's no fault in me. I can see what's going on. Guys from Hollywood, they want to get in shape quickly for a movie. Right.

You know, guys just want to look good on the beach. It's everywhere now. It's mainstream. Of course. There's Nelly. Damn, Nelly's jacked. Yeah. We saw a picture of Hugh Jackman when he was preparing for Wolverine.

He was doing deadlifts. And he was in his 40s. Yeah. And someone was asking me, do you think he's doing... Yes! Yeah, why not? Yes, he is. I mean, how much did he get paid for the movie as well?

Fuck yeah. Yeah. Well, not only that. Like, for a guy that's not really that kind of an athlete to all of a sudden look like that, like, you've got to make some radical physiological changes. Yeah, in a couple of months. Yeah. Like, that's not even a good picture of him, man.

There's real good pictures of him jacked. But, I mean, there's pictures of him from the movie, too, which is, he's enormous. Like, he just became an enormous guy. What I'm saying is, like, how much did he get paid for the movie? My point is, you know, he got paid for that. So maybe he took a little health risk or whatever. You can debate that.

But he's getting paid for it. But is it worth it if you're just doing it? Just fucking look good on the beach or look good for the girls or something? Depends on how much pussy you get. You know what I'm saying? Depends. But here's the thing, man. Once you get on that merry-go-round, you don't want to get off.

That's the problem, right? You don't want to get off because you took some stuff. You know know you got bigger you're getting more attention from the girls now guys got more respect for you your self-confidence is up you don't you don't lose all that man well i'm not speaking personally because that was i took it for a competitive sport and when i stopped i stopped that was it but that was my that's my question like how did you just accept the fact that you're no longer a superhuman-looking freak show of a man? Now you became a regular man.

Was there a weird transition? The whole thing was, see, with bodybuilding competition, I never showed my physique. Even in the gym with the guys that I trained with, I was covered up all the time. If I want to look at my physique and practice my pose and stuff, I did it at home. So on the street, I always wore a long sleeve. I don't give a shit about anybody else. Why is that? Because I did it purely for competition.

But why did you cover it? Why didn't you just dress like with normal? Because it was too freakish? Because unwanted attention all the fucking time. I'm not interested in it. I'm a quiet guy and I just wanted to go about my business and reveal this thing i've been working on i didn't see it as being it's almost removed it's like a statue i'm working on you know so i wasn't tied up in like i was tied up in being mr olympia because that's who i was

and that you know somewhat a role you're playing um but the whole huge body and didn't need that for everyday use well that sort of fits with this whole Spartan image that people had of you the image of you was like this guy that was just doing work that other people weren't willing to do in some sort of quiet isolation somewhere in some dusty basement

a basement in Birmingham in the middle of England where it's not exactly a hotbed of bodybuilding activity, you know. You know, beaches or nothing. It's an industrial city. So I just locked myself away there and worked on this project. And I loved doing it. I loved, like, just being in that tunnel, you know, and seeing what I can do.

And obviously, the further you get along, the more difficult it is to make any kind of improvements. But I was trying. That's fascinating to look at it that way. It's almost like an art project. It was a statue. I was removed. I wasn't building this body so I could get admiring from the girls or the guys. I was already a fit, strong guy before I started.

So I didn't come from that place of like, I need to do this to make myself feel better. I need to do this because I have some talent for it. And I can change my life with this. Maybe. I didn't know it was going to be Mr. Olympia. But I just knew that if I put my energy into this, something positive was going to come from it. And after a few years, I won the British Championship. And because of that, you know, I was British champion. I didn't have a car. I went home to a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture. I didn't even have a proper bed. I had a mattress on the floor.

I didn't have a shirt, but I won the British Championship. And because of that, somebody put up the money for me to open a gym. Then I had a gym. Then I was making an income from my sport. So even if it went that far, it would have been worth it, you know? Wow. Well, I think that attitude is probably what's made you like very healthy like mentally afterwards well you know you're separate from your body and then it was a project there was a period afterwards

that was very tough because i was this guy i was mr olympia and this is you know it's all i've been doing like since i was 21 years old. And then I got an injury. So my exit from the sport was not calculated. It wasn't when I wanted it. I tore my tricep tendon on the left elbow. And this had already one injury, a bicep tear, but I kind of handled that. And it didn't affect my training too much. But this was almost a complete detachment that I have to have repaired. And after that, I just knew I couldn't lift properly.

And, you know, you can't compete with the best of the world if you can't lift properly. So I had to retire. And then I was like in limbo. I was like, who the fuck am I? And what am I going to do with my life? So it took me a few years to kind of slowly get back. But it wasn't about, oh, I've lost my muscles.

What am I going to do? Like it was more about, you know, I don't know what my role is in life. I don't know who I am. It took me a long time to find that. And I think a lot of athletes that retire from sport, they have the same issues. It's a giant issue with fighters. You know, you've got this fucking tunnel that you're in, right? It's almost like being at war.

Like, it's stressful. But, you know, you've got this role and there's this thing that you're just aiming for all the time. And now, it's almost like being at war like you're stressful but you know you've got this role and there's this thing that you're just aiming for all the time and now it's gone like what the fuck you're gonna do who are you what you know it's all about you know so it took me years to to kind of you know come to peace with that but it wasn't about losing the muscles it was about losing my goal and my focus and my role in life I think yeah the for a lot of athletes it's the intensity of life is all of a sudden reduced down to a mundane yeah you know come a normal guy there's no highs and lows it's just mediums yeah time but I turned it round because when I was doing

bodybuilding my life was very restrictive like a fucking monk you know I just had this regime. And I didn't want to socialize. I didn't want to do anything outside of that. So after some time, I came like, hey, man, so you can't do that anymore. But how about the 1,001 things you didn't do when you were doing that because you couldn't? Now you can do all those things. You can go where you want.

You can not eat all day if you don't want to, like eat six meals a day. You can go where you want. You know, you can not eat all day if you don't want to. Like, eat six meals a day. You can do what you want, you know. So I started looking into some other things I was interested in. I was always been interested in wildlife. So I started going on a few safaris and things like that. And, yeah, slowly I realized, like, hey, you know, there's a million and one things you can do in life. Like, this, you know, I get over this.

So just a transitionary period. Transitional period, yeah. But I can absolutely see why many athletes struggle. Frank Bruno, who is, you know. Boxer. World boxing champion from UK. I know he had a really hard time. And almost like he was world champion when I was a Mr. Olympian.

We retired at the same time. We both got divorced. Like everything falls apart, man. Like, you know? And then you hopefully rebuild back to something else. Yeah, it seems that very few athletes have a smooth process into retirement. And fighters in particular, they always come back when they shouldn't. Yeah, well, I know why they do that.

When I was a kid, I i was always like why is ali coming back man like just you know he's the greatest and now he's gonna get beat by some guy because he's coming back but you miss the fucking adrenaline or whatever it is of that you know of that all your focus all your soul everything is going into that one point and like it's it's tough to replace but you've got to know when it's time to step down i think you know now when you did decide did you have a plan did you write out a plan like how to step down because you wrote out a plan for the rest of your life no because it was it was like new territory was like that you know it was like i didn't have a plan right after the injury yeah

vaguely i had a idea in my mind that i would like to open more gyms when I finish bodybuilding. Actually, that didn't happen. But I started my own nutrition company, which is still doing sports nutrition during sports nutrition. So I put a lot of energy into that and different things and being able to experience things in life that I shut myself off with. So that's how I dealt with it. And now I feel great about it. And I can look back and I can sit back and say, you know what, I couldn't have given any more to that thing.

I couldn't have given any more. So there's no regrets. Like a lot of athletes, you know, when you're young and you're there, maybe you don't really appreciate it so much. And then when it's gone, you're like, shit, man, what if I'd have done this? What if, what if, what if, what if, you know, I don't have those what ifs, man, I did 100% even too much to the point where I got injured. So, you know, I'm happy with that. I can put that to rest. That's a great lesson. That's a great lesson for young people coming up. If you just do all the work, when it's over, it's over.

Do what you can do, man, win or lose, it's all you can do man win or lose you do what you can do and then you have the self-satisfaction the pride to look back and say you know what i fucking give it everything i had and no regrets and that's the way i feel about it and i know there's a lot of my uh contemporaries that compete against me i don't really feel like that that's why a few of them are still they're in the 50s and they're making comebacks that's one of the most horrible things to see someone who's lived a life of regret yeah this house is just nagging or even i don't like to see athletes coming back when they're not as you remember them at their best and they're coming back and they're not so good which i'm sorry but inevitably at 50 years old is going to be the case. Is there any bodybuilders doing that now at 50? Yeah, Kevin Lebron, who came second to me, and Mr. Olympia, he made a comeback last year.

Really? Yeah. How did he look? Well, it depends how I answer that question. How did he look compared to previously? Not good at all. How did he look for a guy that's making a comeback at 50 years old? Yeah, great.

But it's not a 50 year old guy looking good contest it's mr olympia it's the best in the world so um you know but if you just tried to make a comeback within a year doesn't it take like many many years to get to that kind of shape so there's a thing with bodybuilding um you've got a thing called muscle memory. So maybe it took me 10 years to get to be 260 pounds ripped. But now that information is in my DNA. It's there. So I could theoretically not train for 10 years, lose all that muscle, and probably get that back in 6 to 12 months.

Really? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I've heard of muscle memory and I know that it's a thing, but has it been physically, if they isolated, what causes that or how it is in your DNA? I'm not really sure if they have or if they're interested enough to do the studies that's necessary, but those of us that are in the sport, we know it happens. I mean, Arnold did it like 1974. I think Arnold was going to retire. But then he got this Pumping Iron movie that everyone's familiar with.

So the 1975 Mr. Olympia, which the Pumping Iron runs around, he basically made a comeback for that just for the movie. And previous to that, he did a movie called Stay Hungry with Sally Field and Jeff Bridges. And I think he had to get down to like 200, 210 pounds because the director didn't want him to be too big for that. So he came off the back of that and then he just put all the size back on for the Mr. Olympia for Pump and Iron. Really? So the director made him sort of emaciate himself? Well, he still looked pretty big, I guess, for the average person.

Yeah. Oh, man. That's nothing compared to how he looks. But he still looks big next to Jeff Bridges. Yeah, I mean, he looks like a really big, fit guy that you'd see at the gym. Look at Jeff Bridges. The dude abides. I like Jeff Bridges, man. He's cool.

I love that guy. He's still around, man. Still banging out great movies. We're talking about how many great movies that guy's been in. Absolutely. What's the one where he's a country singer? That was great. Alcoholic singer.

Yeah, that was recent. Yeah. God damn it. I saw that. That was a good movie. He's just fantastic. They're all good, man. He's a good actor.

Yeah, he's good at choosing roles. So when a guy does get down to something like that, is it a matter of taking less steroids, working out less, like your body just naturally starts to shrink? If you're taking steroids and you stop, then you're going to lose a lot of weight pretty quick. And maybe just don't lift weights. Play tennis, do swimming, do something else, and your muscle mass is going to go down. So I'm guessing that's what it is. Now, when you first started bodybuilding, how long did it take before you did take something?

After about 18 months, I decided I want to do a contest. And I knew the guys in the contest were taking stuff, so I just want to be on a level playing field with them. So like two months before my first contest. Which take? A little bit of D-ball, 20 milligrams of D-ball a day. That was the first thing I ever had.

And then nearer to the contest, I switched to some Anivar and Prima Bolin. But I mean, 20 milligrams a day is like, fitness chicks take that now. Do they really? They do. Fitness chicks do take steroids, right?

I mean, it's pretty common. 100%. 100%. Even bikini chicks. Really? Like skinny bikini, because they want to look hotter. They want to look leaner. You know, I get girls that are fucking strippers and all kind of chicks asking me,

oh, I'm going to take this wind stroll stuff. You know anything about that? I'm like, I do. Do you? Oh, the guy just told me it's going to make this Wenstroll stuff. You know anything about that? I'm like, I do. Do you? Oh, the guy just told me it's going to make me leaner and everything. I said, all right, let me explain what this is. This is an anabolic steroid. An anabolic steroid is a derivative of testosterone, which is a male hormone.

So what they try to do is minimize the androgenic part of the testosterone, the male-like. And so you're left with more of the anabolic, the building part. But they can't completely minimize the androgenic part. So even though stuff like Winstroll and Anivar is less androgenic than testosterone, it's still derived from a male hormone. And if you take enough, you're still going to get the male side effects, which is pretty common in women's bodybuilding and fitness and so on. It's common in athletics across the board.

You know, we see it in MMA. We see it in women in MMA as well. Look, man, if you're a competitive sport, a competitive athlete, you're going to do whatever you can do to win. There was a study once done by a guy called Dr. Goldman, and it's called Goldman's Dilemma. And he asked a bunch of athletes, including, I think, Olympic-level athletes,

so if I could give you a pill that would guarantee you would win the gold medal or whatever the equivalent is in your sport, but you would die at like 40, 45, would you take it? The vast majority of people said yes they would take it that's the mentality you're dealing with especially when when you're young man yeah like you feel indestructible like nothing's gonna you know yeah it doesn't seem real too right it's like global warming will one day make the seas rise yeah but not right now so fire up the fucking right now i want a fucking gold medal that's all i'm interested in i'm not even that doesn't even exist i'm here now i want the

fucking gold medal and this is the mentality of the you know the successful athlete and you know maybe it applies to everything maybe it's a fucking businessman if you said you take this pill and you'll fucking make billions. Like, would you do it? You know, a driven businessman would probably say, fuck yeah, I'll do it. If it's a solution that'll allow you to win. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I did. I consider that I did a calculated risk, you know, as far as taking steroids with the possible negative health effects, which I tried to monitor.

I had doctors, you know, blood tests and everything like that. So if something really was going wrong, at least I have to, you know. Did you ever find anything wrong? No. Some things were a little bit out of the normal range when I was heavy. My blood pressure went up, like, not sky high, but it was, you know, 140 over 90, 150 over 90. So it was edging up there. But I was 300 pounds, so, you know.

And a couple of other readings were a little bit, but nothing of great concern. But that doesn't mean to say that they're harmless because it's over a period of time. I equate it to smoking. If you smoke for 10 years and then you stop, apparently after 15 or 20 years, you're back to like, you know, a guy that didn't smoke. If you smoke for 20 years, 25 years, then maybe it's a different story. Have you ever seen Chris Bell's documentary, Bigger, Stronger, Faster? I haven't, no. I think I'm due to speak with the brothers, right?

Yes, Chris and Mark. I think I'll be going on their podcast at one point, but actually I haven't watched it. Great guys, really great guys. They've both been on here a couple of times and very knowledgeable. And Chris just did a great documentary called Prescription Thugs too

about the prescription drug industry and getting people hooked on these pain pills. But in Bigger, Stronger, Faster, one of the things that was fascinated about it was he was going over like we were told that this is going to kill you we're told that all these health negative health effects he's like but where's the bodies where are the bodies like you think about all the things that kill people obesity crushes human beings i mean it is one of the number one causes of death in america but yet it's looked at like obesity, smoking, alcohol, prescription drugs, all those things, all these things. There have been

some deaths in bodybuilding that may be attributed to steroids. And there's been a couple that are definitely attributed to diuretics, which is, you know, diuretics, you lose a lot of water, you can lose electrolytes you lose potassium and sodium which regulate your heartbeat so then you're playing russian roulette a little bit and a couple of people played that game and lost so yeah that's an interesting thing to point out because the diuretic aspect is is critical when you see someone on stage and you see them shredded those guys are basically like almost dead right i mean well you know like

probably the least healthiest fucking point you've been at all year is is when you're looking like that on stage amazing yeah you look amazing but i can tell you you know you feel weak as a kitten you don't feel real good at that point but you know you do whatever you gotta do yeah it's required um 1996 when i was competing they had actually testing for diuretics because there was a couple of deaths and the people in charge started getting concerned you know this doesn't look good and that affects your revenue and all that's right they didn't attempt they attempted steroid testing in 1990 but it affected the guys look so much that you know once you've

seen a guy like this or once you've seen a guy fight like this or once you've seen a guy run this fast nobody fucking wants to see anything slower than that or less than that right right the audience is not interested so they realize that real quick like fuck this we just forget about the steroid testing and anyway steroid testing is like it probably just makes it more unfair because the guy that's got more information and like the clearance times and all that stuff they're going to stop people from taking it they're just going to take it and try to avoid get around the test and it's the same in all sports and i don't care if it's fucking running riding tour de Tour de France, whatever it is. It's going on to some degree. Well, what the UFC has done, and they've self-imposed this, is they've hired Jeff Nowitzki,

the guy who went after Lance Armstrong, and he's the head of USADA. And they just do random tests on people. And the punishments are terrible, like two-year suspension. I mean, I think first time, if you get popped first time for steroids, I think it's a two-year suspension now for the UFC. And this is, again, this is self-imposed. This is not even the Nevada State Athletic Commission or any other athletic commissions and positions.

And they've radically cut back on the amount of people that are, first of all, caught, and second of all, doing steroids. They're just not doing them anymore. Well, if you do real random testing you're around yeah then you have a better chance of you know eliminating something it pisses athletes off because you're waking these fighters up at six o'clock in the morning they need their rest but they take the blood they take the urine see you go back to sleep and you know that way nobody can be safe and you've seen a radical change in performances in some athletes that people were suspecting of doing steroids. They changed the way they look.

Like, there's so many pre- and post-USADA pictures of people that post them on, like, Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that. Where they, you know, in these groups where they talk about fights. Like, who's, you know, which athletes have been hurt most by USADA. It's like, it's interesting because... Would it be more of the bigger guys or it's across the board it's bigger guys but it's also epo like a lot of guys been popped for epo they've been popped for uh what is that other side mel meladonin there's another one god damn it i'm trying to remember it but it's a similar thing to epo epo increase your red blood cell count so you you get more oxygen, which would give you more endurance.

Yeah. I mean, that's giant in the sport. I mean, physical size is not really that much of a consideration. There's very few guys that are, like, big and muscular. Well, here's the thing with steroids. I mean, they can give you muscle size, but it depends on your training, the kind of training you're doing. Right. So it can also help with your endurance. So just because

a guy is not big and muscular doesn't mean there's not benefiting from steroids you get runners and cyclists and yeah like lance armstrong is like you know he was on a pedestal and then he's demonized and he's down here like was he the only guy using a bit of testosterone or you know no he was a you know bill burr was a good friend of mine a stand-up comedian had a hilarious bit about it and he's like our psychopath was better than your psychopath yeah you got a dirty sport yeah he's like we just had one psycho that was more psycho than your psychos and uh he had testicular cancer right yeah so i'm assuming then you're not producing any testosterone so you're gonna have to

put it in from outside how much i don't know well they had it in they used to allow testosterone replacement therapy for fighters they don't allow that anymore because guys are abusing it and also there was questions of why they were losing testosterone in the first place and one of the thoughts was damage to pituitary gland, because that's apparently a big factor with fighters. Once they develop damage to the pituitary gland from head trauma, they start decreasing the amount of testosterone their body produces. And so the thought was put it back in.

But other doctors are saying, well, maybe you shouldn't be competing anymore. Maybe put it back in for general health and wellness. But you probably shouldn't be competing anymore. Maybe put it back in for general health and wellness, but you probably shouldn't be competing anymore if this is the way your body's responding to head trauma. Yeah, and you shouldn't really need replacement testosterone until you're like 40 or thereabouts, you know, because you should be producing still. And there's ways to up it, right?

Even, you know, like in your 40s. Yeah, there's natural supplements to up it. Diaspartic acid is one. What is diaspartic acid? Diaspartic acid is a compound. I think it's from amino acids. But anyway, they've done studies on it that shows that it can raise your own natural testosterone. Some herbs, tribulus terrestris also has some studies to back that up.

Also exercise, right? Like high-intensity exercise, sprints, certain kinds of squats and deadlifts. How much is going to make a difference? I don't really know. But, yeah, heavy exercise would raise your testosterone over a normal baseline. But once you get to a certain age, it starts declining in any case. Now, when you started taking stuff and you started off with d ball what like at the height what was the craziest amount of shit you were taking

the most stuff i took was in the off season when i was training real heavy trying to build size because i had a regime that i used to get ready for contests and i was always known for like for contests and I was always known for like really coming in shape so I didn't use so much stuff getting ready for a contest use more in the offseason so like a thousand milligrams of testosterone a week some decadurabalin maybe 500 milligrams and debol maybe 40 50 milligrams is average and growth hormone in the offseason that's a lot of shit it's probably about 30 percent of what guys are taking now god really yeah 30 percent i think so based on what people are telling me i mean i have come people come to train with me that

haven't even done a competition let alone a mr olympia and they their stack is more than that because they found it on the internet i'm like what the fuck you know why i just saw it on the internet somewhere somewhere yeah there's there's i mean you go on the internet and have a look for dorian yates stack i mean i've been on there and it's i'm like first of all 50 of this stuff i don't even know what it is right so i don't even know what it is. Right? So I don't even know what it is. And the rest of the stuff that I do recognize, like if you take this, you're going to get real health problems. Like insulin is an issue, right?

I mean, insulin, you take too much insulin and you fucking keel over in a coma. I tried insulin the last couple of years I was competing because there's a few guys started using it and so on and I don't feel that I benefited from it I got a bit bigger I got more bloated the conditioning was harder to get um so for me I didn't feel I got any benefit from it you can get bigger but it's not the quality you know it wasn't I was known for like super hard grainy quality and I was felt i was losing a little bit of that using insulin so that's my opinion i wouldn't recommend i don't recommend it to people that i train with because it doesn't have any real benefits and has it has

a risk so why you know that's fascinating like the quality like what constitutes the quality of muscle that you're looking for well i, I think in my case, I was known for muscle density. So you could have a 20 inch arm that's like got good volume, or you could have 20 inch arm that looks like a fucking block of steel. So how do you get that look? What's the difference? I think the difference is in the training that I trained very heavy and primarily quite low reps compared to bodybuilders. I was working in six to eight, mostly six to eight, a little bit higher on the legs, 10 to 12. But everything I did was like six to eight reps where most of the guys are doing 10 to 12

and they're relying more on pumping, just getting a lot of blood volume into the muscle rather than overloading it. Um, so I had a density and a powerful look to my physique that the other guys when they stood next to me they didn't have that and that was just from really heavy training I think so you get the density of the muscle rather than just pumping it volume how did you figure out how to make that number like six to eight like why not three to five like what you know what I'm saying like how did you just over over many decades first of all people in the gym and also studies as well most studies would say for muscle growth you need to keep the muscle under tension from probably 40 to 60 seconds which in most cases would be 8 to 12 reps

so i went a bit lower like 6 to 8 uh that worked really well for me um but not on legs i went higher 10 to 12 on on the legs so just a bit of trial and error uh we know um the lower reps will give you more strength and more power without the hypertrophy or the growth of the muscle so that's ideal for fighters i work with a few fighters in the uk and i try to explain this to them and it's hard for them to grasp because they think i'm in the ring i'm doing doing a lot of, you know, I need endurance. Yeah, you do fact that you're fighting heavier guys so if you could stay the same weight but be more powerful and stronger without building muscle size uh that would be the key and uh that's basically like powerlifting low reps like three reps and then have a really long rest totally foreign to mma training yeah you're gonna, boom, boom, put it back and wait for three or four minutes

and do it again. So you get that pow, the power behind the punch but without increasing your muscle size. Yeah.

Because that would, you know, if you get more power behind your punch but you've got up a weight class, like, so what? You know,

you want to stay in the same weight but be stronger. That would be ideal for a fighter. So, that seems counterintuitive for a lot of people because they assume that bigger muscles mean more power. Not necessarily. I mean bodybuilders have got bigger muscles than powerlifters, but powerlifters can lift more weight at least for one or two reps. They're training for that power, boom.

Same thing with weightlifting. It's a couple of reps but very explosive and powerful. That's hard for people to understand. Kettlebells as well. Like, throw it up, you know? Power. Well, that's the thing about kettlebell competitors. They're not the biggest guys.

No, but they got the internal musculature, the core that does a lot of the lifting, right? Yeah. You know? If you're throwing a punch, I mean, who cares if you've got huge biceps? It's like the's the internal right it's right toe all the way up through the core that's going to give you that power so you got the guy's like fedor emelianko i'm a huge fan of him i like his fighting style me as well you know uh i mean the guy looks like you know he's got arms like sticks he looks like he's got a pot

belly it looks out of shape but fucking hits like a baseball bat man well early in his career he was bigger yeah you know and he stopped training weights and started training only sports specific which is it's a very controversial subject because if you talk to modern strength and conditioning coaches they say it's absolutely the wrong approach and if Fedor continued to do strength and conditioning along with his martial arts training he probably would have been able to prolong his career but who the fuck knows if that's true that seems like a very it's it's very hard to say what would have happened but the modern approach seems to be do you have to consider strength and conditioning as a huge part of any regiment.

In terms of like, some of the elite athletes focus primarily on strength and conditioning in camp and not really on skill work because they feel like they already know how to fight. It's already there in the brain. Well, it's already, the conditioning, it's all about, I mean, as far as the, you know, the conditioning of their motions

and their ability to react is already there. It's just a matter of building the ultimate gas tank and having the body that can perform and react as quickly and as fast and recover as fast as possible. But the guys that hit the hardest, they're not necessarily the most muscular, though. Some of them are. Like Tyron Woodley, who's the UFC welterweight champion. Some of them are like Tyron Woodley, who's the UFC welterweight champion. He's one rare guy that kind of violates the normal build of professional MMA athletes because he's fucking jacked. But he's also he's also very smart in his approach, whereas like he's the consequences of engaging with him are extreme because he has tremendous power.

So he can pace himself more than maybe some guys can. Because if you get in a firefight with him, one shot from him puts the lights out on you. So he's got this ability to... And he's developed a very interesting way of fighting where he just paces his bursts. But his bursts are so terrifying like when he comes at you when he can't when he does sprint your way he's so much faster than the average fighter and so much stronger that i guess in his mind having all that muscle and he says it's actually natural he's just like in his son you know it's a genetic uh yeah my son is is doing bodybuilding and uh you don't have a particularly good diet he fried chicken and burgers and stuff and his like

shredded all the time well Tyron's son is Jack and he's a little kid he's fucking yeah genetics are real there's no that's like me when I started I had already a physique I had the ABS I was lean I had the shape everything was there just had to get bigger. So, yeah, jeans are a big thing as far as your body type. Is it insurmountable? Like if a guy has shit jeans, can he become like a jack? No.

No. No. Whoa. He can get better. Everyone can get better, but... You can't be Lee Haney. It's a rare individual that, you know, can get up on the Mr. Olympia stage there's probably hundreds of thousands of maybe millions of guys around the world that are in the

gym training and maybe would like to compete can everybody be a UFC champion can everybody be a basketball player you need certain tools to start with and then you've got to work on that and build that.

But at least for athletes and fighters in particular, you see guys who don't have impressive physiques that have incredible records and wind up doing really well with their skill and their tactics and their mindset and their understanding of when to engage and when not to engage. With bodybuilding, though, it's a very specific. Look, if you're born with, like, sloped shoulders and small hands, you're fucked, right? First of all, you need the frame, right? The frame, it's the bone structure. You can't do anything about that with your training, right? So you need a relatively wide shoulders to smaller hips. You need the limbs to be proportional for bodybuilding.

Most of the successful guys, they tend to have a little bit longer legs compared to the torso because it just looks more aesthetic and makes the upper body look more like that. So that's a bone structure. You can't do anything about that. You need to be born with a bone structure.

And then you've got muscle bellies. So you've got the length of the muscle belly, which is genetic. So if you've got a short bicep, you know, they used to tell you, I'll go to the gym and do preacher curls and that'll work, you know, you get along. No, your muscle attachments are genetic. So the longer your muscle bellies are, the more potential they have for volume. So somebody that's got uniformly long muscle bellies with a good frame

and a good metabolism that tends to have naturally low body fat then you're looking at somebody with potential to be a good competitive bodybuilder if they don't have all those things everyone can improve but are you gonna go win contests no have you ever had a guy come to you and said dorian i want to be a champion and you're like kid you're fucked yeah damn i mean why you know you're like, kid, you're fucked. Yeah. Damn. I mean, why, you know? Dorian Yates tells you you're fucked. I don't say. I try to be a little bit more subtle than that, you know?

But I'm like, you know, I'm not here to bullshit anybody. So if somebody asks me, I'm just going to tell them, like, yeah, you can improve, man. But, like, you know, you're just going to waste your time if you dream about being Mr. Olympia. Because, you know, I don't want to be rude, but you just don't have what it takes. Like, you know, enjoy your training, you know, be healthy, have fun in the gym. But, yeah, forget about that because it's not going to happen. That's hard for people to hear, though. Yeah, it is. But it's better than me blowing smoke up their ass and saying, yeah, you know, yeah, pay me.

And, yeah, you can have whatever you want, man, because somebody else is going to tell them that. Have you ever seen a guy that you thought, man, I don't think so, and then he became a great bodybuilder? No. No. Jesus Christ. I can pretty much. I mean, I've been around like, you know, 35 years I've been in this game, man. So I can see people. And I've seen people probably with more potential than me,

but they don't get anywhere because they don't apply themselves. So, you know, you've got to have the physical stuff, but the glue, the thing that holds it all together is this. So I've seen freaks in the gym. But, you know, first of all, they're not that smart. They don't really, you know first of all they're not that smart they don't really you know understand everything that's going on um and usually when somebody gets something real easy they're not you know they're not really that hungry right so it's not necessarily always the

guy with the most potential that you know you can beat somebody with more potential by being smarter and working hard but it's you know it's only two degrees, right? Yeah, that's what I've always said. You can get a guy who's the most dedicated, the most hungry, wants it the most, but when you're competing in basketball against Michael Jordan, you're kind of fucked because he wants it bad too, and his genetics are just so superior. There's just no way around it.

So you can't equalize that. What are you going to do? I saw this thing in England recently. A guy came over from the States, real, I don't know what his name was, but he was a good martial artist. He was a kickboxer. He was dedicated. He was lean.

He was fit. And he came over to fight this gypsy fighter over in England. And this guy is like fat, out of shape. He turned up like 45 minutes late for the fight because he'd been drunk the night before. And he came in and he's just fat and looked of shape. He turned up like 45 minutes late for the fight because he'd been drunk the night before. And he came in and he's just fat and looked like shit. And for like half an hour he's getting his ass kicked.

Well then I think he woke up, you know. And he kicked the other guy's ass. So this guy's been training, he's been dedicated, he's doing all this stuff. And this guy the night before is getting drunk. But he's still coming and kicking the guy's ass. So, you know, he probably just had more potential

or he had a hard head or something. I don't know. There's a lot of factors involved in fighting. I mean, his experience, his ability to take punishment, that some of it is just inherent. Some people just have a wider face, stronger neck. They can take a shot better. Yeah, these are all genetic.

Some of it is. Genetic characteristics, right? The ability to absorb punches, it seems to be, or at least the variables seem to be a lot of it based on genetics. Maybe you've got thicker bones or a shorter neck so your brain doesn't rattle as much or something. Mark Hunt's a perfect example of that. He's one of the best kickboxers of all time.

From New Zealand. Yeah, just a tank of a man. Five foot ten ten 265 pounds just built like a brick shit house to take him out oh dude cro-cop head kicked him and he went down and got right back up it's like nobody does cro-cop head kicks you that's a wrap you know and he's one of the few guys that survived it well i got a my friend a business partner from new zealand i don't know if it's true, but he told me about Mark Hunt. He's got a brother.

And the dad used to get him in the backyard there and just, like, knock the shit out of each other. You know, until they're, like, immune to getting hit. Yeah. They don't feel it anymore. Well, he's been knocked out a few times recently. But, you know, he's in his 40s now. But isn't that the case with fighters? I don't know.

I noticed anyway. You get a guy that seems to be invincible. Then he gets knocked out. And then after that, he's in his 40s now. But isn't that the case with fighters? I don't know. I noticed anyway. You get a guy that seems to be invincible. Then he gets knocked out. And then after that, he loses it. Like Chuck Liddell, for instance. Perfect example. Yeah, unquestionable. What is that?

Well, your brain does not want to take that kind of punishment anymore. And what Chuck explained to me was that what it gets to is a point where your brain realizes that you're too tough and you're just going to absorb this punishment and it just shuts itself shuts down to protect itself and that's that's how he described it now obviously that's not like a neuroscientist describing it there's also the connective tissue that keeps the brain connected and stable inside that it gets looser and more torn have you ever seen connective tissue that keeps the brain connected and stable inside that it gets looser and more torn have you ever seen connective tissue it's almost like uh like a strong version of cotton candy is what it looks like it's not it's not the toughest stuff in the world and it's not supposed

to take that many beatings like in the wild if you had that many beatings over a certain point you'd be dead already somebody Somebody would have already eaten you. But MMA seems to be safer than boxing because you don't get hit as many times. I mean, sort of. Yeah, I would say probably overall safer. But that's like saying motorcycle racing is safer than going downhill on a skateboard 60 miles an hour you're kind of fucked it's all relative right yeah it's all like the study that they did that just came out this week on football players which show they did they they did uh a test on 111 fighters or 111 football

players 110 had traumatic brain injuries i saw the, I can't remember what it's called now, with Will Smith. The brain damage was causing the guys to be violent and all that kind of stuff. They were saying that 87% of football players at all levels, high school, college, all levels have traumatic brain injury. 87%. What are you going to do? Stop football? Stop football? Stop MMA?

That's the question. Stop rock climbing? Everything's got its risks, right? Every sport. Unless you do it moderately. If you do things in moderation, they're good. You'll never be Dorian Yates in moderation. Competitive sports are not the healthiest thing in the world, right?

No. I mean, you're dealing – well, I guess there's injuries involved in basketball, right? But you're not going to lose your ability to think. But even like endurance sports, marathon running, stuff like that, these guys die younger than a sedentary person because of the massive amount of free radicals they're producing, which is aging the cells. Is that what it is?

Yeah, a massive free radical from all this oxygen. So you're aging your cells. You're wearing yourself out doing all these endurance sports. I think what's going to come out in the future, and I've been doing this myself and getting great results, is very short interval training. They've done studies with five-minute cardio workout, and it's getting the same results as an hour. What?

Yeah. I do 10 minutes. What? I do 90 seconds, like, you know, moderate. Then I do a 30-second all-out sprint, whether it's on a cross trainer or a rower or kettlebells or whatever. Get the heart rate right up, like 160 or something. And then go back down.

Do that a few times, like 10 or 12 minutes. And my resting heart rate was pretty good for a bodybuilder. I guess it was like 54 or 55 in the morning. I've had it down to, like, low 40s, 45 in the morning. Really? Yeah. And that's just from doing a couple of times a week, a 10 minute workout. And once a week I do a hard bike ride, but yeah, absolutely. Because you want to get the benefits from the cardio exercise, which is a more efficient

cardiovascular system, but you don't want the negatives of all that free radical. So if you can get what you're looking for in a 10-minute workout, why are you going to do an hour or two hours? I don't know if it would be useful for a fighter because you're going to be in a ring for all that long, so you've got to condition yourself for that. I'm just talking about for general health. Wow. I've never even heard of such a thing.

Yeah, interval training. But 10 minutes? 10 minutes. They've done studies on the four- and five-minute workouts. Wow. So I done studies on the four and five minute workouts. Wow. So I think that's the future. Where you want to get the benefit without the negatives. Do you think you could run a marathon right now?

Could I run a marathon? No. No. Running is not for me. No. Well, definitely not for you when you were in your prime. Yeah, fast walking. That's good.

When you were in your prime, how much endurance did you have like if you had to do something if you had to go up a flight of stairs we like it wasn't too bad because i always did some cardio i did some cardio and stretching so it was a bit unusual for for body builders because that doesn't give you bigger muscles but i saw the the other benefits of it because if i got more efficient cardio like i'm training legs and back stuff like that that's huge amount of oxygen you go to failure on squats or back stuff like that that's a huge amount of oxygen you go to failure on squats or leg presses you know that's a huge amount of oxygen so for me to recover from that i needed a bit of uh cardio so i was doing three or four times a week in off

season every day getting ready for a contest but it wasn't very intense it was more like moderate i did like fast walking for an hour or do stationary bike for 45 minutes, sometimes twice a day. So I was doing quite a lot of cardio work, getting ready for a contest rather than starving myself. Oh, I see. You know, I was bringing the calories down a little bit and bringing the activity up a little bit. So it was a bit of both, a bit of calorie restriction, a bit of more activity, more calorie burning. Now, when you're doing calorie restriction, but you also have to keep all that mass, how did you kind of balance?

Contradictory goals. Yeah. You know, training we can debate because I trained with some MMA guys in England. Bit of jujitsu, but mainly conditioning stuff. And it's fucking hard, man. It's hard training, right? It's a super hard cardio, and then someone's trying to punch you in the face

at the same time. That's hard. So we can debate about the training, which sport is training, right? It's a super hard cardio, and then someone's trying to punch you in the face at the same time. That's hard. So we can debate about the training, which sport is harder, yeah? Because I've done a little bit of both. But what's harder in bodybuilding is when you leave the gym, it's still with you. And when you're getting ready for a contest, you're going to do more training,

and you're going to eat less. So most sports, you can go train hard, and then you can go home and eat. So most sports, you can go train hard, and then you can go home and eat. With bodybuilding, you know, two months before a contest, you're hungry all the time. Because you're trying to lose... You're trying to lose, slowly lose the body fat or maintain the muscle.

If you're trying to lose weight too quickly, your body will preferentially burn the muscle because it's like... Body fat is an emergency store, right? Your body doesn't want to give it up so you gotta like coax it out slowly you know um but yeah you're going to be hungry and you're going to be tired for a couple of months going for a for a contest that doesn't sound like fun it's not fun man it's it's a constant mental battle as well because your

body's telling you to eat you know you gotta eat you gotta eat and at night you can't sleep properly because you go to sleep a little bit and then your body's like internal alarm clock will wake you up hey you're fucking starving go eat and you're like no i ain't doing that but how do you keep your body from absorbing all that muscle because you're carrying so much muscle is there a drug that you can take that keeps the mass uh well you know you're taking steroids which are anti which are anabolic and anti catabolic. So that's going to stop you from losing muscle. However, you know, if you restrict your calories too much, or, you know, too much exercise, and none of you're still going to burn muscle, it's just going to lower the chances of it. So, you know, you got to stack

everything in your favor, you're taking steroids, just, you steroids. Try to keep the muscle mass and stop losing it. But if you restrict too much, you're still going to lose it. So you need to like one or two pounds a week very slowly. Keep your body from going into shock. Yeah, that's where a lot of fighters go wrong because they starve themselves for a couple of weeks. They lose muscle. They lose strength. They lose glycogen from the muscle.

And, you know, they're weaker. Yeah, they fight very weak. That's a huge issue, and a lot of fighters are choosing to go up a weight class, and they're having big success. Donald Cerrone is a great example of that. There's been quite a few fighters. Or you lose that weight very slowly,

so it's not depleting you down, you know? What kind of diet were you on when you were competing? High protein, pretty high protein. Off-season, I still had a lot of carbs, medium fat, and then getting ready for a contest, the carbs slowly come down. But I was a big guy, 270, 280. I was still eating probably 3,500 calories a day, which is probably more than I eat now.

But when you're that big, you're starving. What do you weigh now? thousand five hundred calories a day which is probably more than i eat now but you know when you're that big you're starving because what do you weigh now uh weigh now 230 something like that so yeah all that extra mass needed to be fueled yeah exactly now what when you were in say like out of contest now what your goals were to put on muscle that you would eventually like you would get bigger and bigger every year. That was one of the things about you. I would try to, yeah. And then maybe there's certain areas where you want to like work on at some point.

That's a bit behind. So you put more focus on that and a bit less on something else to try and keep the balance. It might sound strange now, but when I first competed, my first contest, I lost to a guy called Mohammed Benaziza and his back was just like freaky thick it was like 3D coming out and that just stuck in my mind I'm like fuck that I gotta I put a picture of him on my fridge at home I put a picture in the gym and funny enough later on in my career I became you know, for the guy with the best back kind of thing. So, yeah, I was inspired by other people to do that. So I worked on the back for a couple of years.

What is the difference between the way you approach nutrition when you were competing versus the way people do it today? Because so much changes in nutrition. I mean, it seems like every five or six years, like, you know, oh, no, low fats out. Now you go high fat, you know, high carbs are out. Now you go low carbs and it could change back and forth again. I mean, I think the seven is like Arnold area, Frank Zane, they go more low carbs, getting ready for a contest. But then you lose size more quickly. Why do you lose size more quickly that way? Because you get catabolic. You haven't got the energy.

So your body can use the amino acid from muscle for energy. So there's a balance there. And also you lose the glycogen storage. Your muscle is 70% water. And the water holds carbohydrates in the muscle, glycogen. So you lose that as well. So you lose that bit of volume. When you lose the glycogen, you lose the water. So you shrink down a little bit.

So my approach was higher carbohydrates, especially in the off-season, getting ready for a contest to cut them down, but not zero. And fairly low fat. I think people now realize that fat's more important and there's probably more fat in the diet than there was back then uh which which i think is healthy and fats have just got a bad rap and

it's bullshit you know well that's um we've talked about that several times in the podcast but there was a new york times article recently about how the sugar industry paid off scientists to fake results and that was done in the guess, the 50s or the 60s. And that's haunted people to this day. They think that fats are bad for you. I think it was essential. I may be wrong with the organization, but I think it was World Health Organization.

They basically submitted a study that showed how bad sugar was. And some department of the U.S. government, which is getting a lot of money how bad sugar was and some department of the US government which is getting a lot of money from the sugar lobby basically said I think you want to reconsider this you know can you like so that's where the whole fats are bad you know low fat came from they knew back then that's how bad sugar is so I found it amusing when I first came to the States in 1990. Got all these low-fat products.

I called my friends at home. I'll be how fucked up this is, man. They got low-fat muffins. Of course they're fucking low-fat. They're full of sugar, though. People are bored. Low-fat yogurt, low-fat muffins. It's fucking full of sugar. It's the worst thing you could have.

You know, so people thought they were being healthy, but they were being misled. And it makes you fat. Yeah, nothing wrong with fats as long as they're natural. You know, if you get the fats in baked goods and all this shit, you know, that's not good. But natural fats in animal products and coconuts and all that stuff, it's great. Now, what would you use for carbohydrates so did you have a preferred method or did you vary complex stuff like oatmeal was a big thing he was oatmeal brown rice sweet potatoes and some fruit and fibrous vegetables over those are the main things that I use makes nothing

fancy you know did you mix your portions up and like little Tupperware boxes or something like that so that you could know exactly what to eat? I used to weigh my food pretty much all the time. I didn't eat in restaurants very rarely. And yeah, I used to pack them up in boxes because you've got to have it all the time, right? Yeah. So that was one of the things I didn't miss, man. I'm so relieved.

I don't carry no fucking plastic boxes around with food in it. I just go to a restaurant and eat whatever I want you know and have an ice cream if you want yeah exactly that must have been nice when you realize you could just just eat yeah um i mean off season wasn't too bad because i've eaten good food but a lot of it but yeah getting ready for a contest i mean that was the real uh mental test you know because your whole body's telling you you've got to eat man and even at night i said you wake up you could you've got to eat no no you're not going to eat i'm going to watch mtv for half an hour i'll maybe fall back to sleep a little bit hopefully you know um so yeah the diet thing i don't miss that at all it was you know it was a tough mental

challenge and i did it and you know whenever you get through a challenge, I think it makes you stronger. But, you know, I don't want to ever do that again. of a holistic approach to life now. You're about health and wellness. But when you're coaching these kids or talking to these kids about how to be successful in competitive bodybuilding as a multiple time Mr. Olympia, one of the greatest of all time,

if not the greatest, you can't have a holistic approach, can you? You kind of have to be a savage. No, they come in to me for bodybuilding advice. Right. And I don't have the body now necessarily, but I got all the information here that I can put across to people for the training, for the nutrition. But it's goal specific, you know.

You want to be a competitive bodybuilder? This is what you've got to do. I'm not a competitive bodybuilder now. My diet and my training is geared toward what my goals are, which is functionality, health, and well-being. And that's what I'm into now. That's where I'm at. I'm not a bodybuilder anymore. I'm a body reducer, if anything.

Right. And I feel good, man. I fucking got a suit from Hugo Boss a couple of months ago off the rack. And this was like so happy. I could just buy a suit off the rack you know before i had to have it made and if you go for a fitting go for another fitting all that i'm sure if they looked at the measurements on paper they were like what the fuck what is this suit for what is this you know it's like this wide going down what is this a wardrobe what is it you know so uh yeah i

look on the other side of it you know young, young guys coming up, maybe they think, that's strange. And they ask me, you don't look at the pictures back and think, wow, it looked like that? I'm like, no. I don't look at it. I just look at that and I think, wow, that was fucking extreme. And what I did, and that's crazy and that's incredible. But does it weird you out to look at pictures of yourself? A little bit sometimes.

When I look at those black and white pictures. A giant picture of Dorian yeats and his if you got any of those black and white pictures man that's just like there you're saying there it is look at that oh that's insane man that's like you couldn't really fit any more muscle on onto that frame really you're not really no like i know i went to places and i did things that other people, you know, in the gym. Look at your fucking forearms. Well, there's a thing, forearms. I never did any training for forearms.

All that was just from gripping the bar when I was doing back training mainly and some bicep training and stuff. So I had 19-inch forearms and I didn't do a single fucking exercise for them apart from gripping on to stuff. Look at that. It's so ridiculous. Well, that's a good picture, but it's not me. Who is that? I don't know.

How dare you, Jamie, pull up a non-Dorian. Somebody put it on Google. Put up that one. Keep going to your right. No, no, no. Down where you were. Yeah, go to your right. One more. That one. Bam. Side tricep jesus christ that's from a onstage picture from mr olympia so what you can see if you look on the

legs you can see the thinness of the skin and the like density of the muscle underneath like there's no fat there's no water between the skin layer and the and the muscle layer um what body but what percent of body fat did you get down to? Well, I don't really know because I had skinfold calipers. I used to do the skinfold calipers. And they're not accurate. They used to get down to like 3.5, probably like a month out. But I know I got leaner after that, but they didn't really register

because they're not that accurate after that point. So I don't know, maybe 3%. But nobody measures your body fat it's what you look like it's a visual thing right it's really what you look like in the mirror but how did you know like how much water to drink and when to back off and um experience i didn't really uh your fucking legs dude i I don't restrict water intake until like maybe 24 hours before the contest. Look at your right leg there. That's preposterous.

Yeah, that's a huge medialis right over the knee there. Yeah, that's a lot of sick work, man. That's like I used to train legs pretty much once a week. And for four or five days of every week, I had trouble sitting on the toilet. I had trouble moving around. I mean, if I didn't, I wouldn't be happy, man. I had to feel that fucking pain. Pain in the ass, pain in the leg, just to sit down.

But, hey, satisfying because you know you've fucking done some damage, right, if it's like that. And the damage repairs itself to get slightly bigger and stronger. Bodybuilding is just an adaptation to stress. You put a certain stress, your body's going to adapt to it. Fuck, I need to get bigger and stronger so I can handle this stress next time. That's basically what it is. So you're continually trying to stress yourself. Like anything, like you want to get better cardio, you've got to stress your cardio system so it adapts.

Yeah, there's no other way, right, to get that big? I mean, there's no shortcuts. There's nothing you can do. There's no easy route. Well, I don't know. It looks like guys are looking for the easy route now because I don't see them training that hard. But then you don't see the quality of their physiques.

The guys are big now, but look at the quality. It's not the same. It's not the same. It's not the same. It's generally accepted in bodybuilding that the 90s was the peak of competitive physiques. As far as the standard and the depth of the standard, there were like six to eight guys on that stage that were like really, like if you were off, you know, places could change. Now you've got one guy, Phil Heath, who's a Mr. Olympia, and it's pretty, like, distance between him and the next few guys. Now, what is it, though?

I mean, doesn't it open the door for a current modern-day Dorian Yates, like some super dedicated person? I mean, physiologically, people can still do the same things that you did. Yeah, but things have changed since the 90s. There's a lot more avenues that people could choose to go down as like doing a sport. I mean, for instance, UFC didn't exist in the early 90s. I remember watching the first show. It was in New York.

I watched it on TV, the very first one, you know, with Royce Gracie. So you've got MMA, you've got CrossFit, and you've got all these other competitions now in the bodybuilding arena that's not bodybuilding. It's men's physique, where they wear the board shorts and they've got to have the nice physique and abdominals, the kind of physique that most people aspire to have, I guess. You've got classic bodybuilding.

So you've got a lot of different avenues and I think the interest in pure bodybuilding is a lot less than it used in the 90s everyone wanted to be a bodybuilder it was like hugely popular yeah what's interesting now what is this jamie what are you pulling up here this is a mr olympia from 1996 is myself sean ray in the middle and that's ronnie coleman on the end who became uh an eight-time mr oia. You guys are all jacked. It's so hard to tell. See, I'm looking at this and I'm like, how the fuck do you pick?

I'll work it out for you. The guy on the end is the best. That one right there? Well, it's also got to be hard for that tiny dude that's next to you. Because you're just so much bigger than him. The tiny dude has always been unhappy because he got beaten by me. But the is he had a great physique just like frank zane had a great physique right you know if he was the same size as arnold maybe he would have

beat him but he wasn't the same size as arnold and right same goes for the gentleman up there mr sean ray he had a great physique but you know i twice as big. So a big guy always beats a good little guy, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a crazy sport, man. Now, what about the top guys today? Like you said, Sean Heath is the number one guy today? Phil Heath. Phil Heath, I'm sorry. Now, there's so many different avenues now. And a lot of people are going towards the internet route because you can make a lot of money as an internet famous person for being a bodybuilder. Then you're selling things and selling – there he is, Phil Heath. Pretty jacked. Yep.

He's pretty jacked. Phil Heath is not very wide in the shoulders. That's his weak point. But he's got huge long muscle bellies on most of his body. His pecs are not great, but the rest, you know. The rest is he doesn't really have any weak points. That's why he's ahead of everybody else. And you just think there's just less people doing it now? There's less people going into competitive bodybuilding because there's a lot more avenues.

And I think it's less popular now because it's almost like peaked out with myself and Ronnie and gone down a little bit. It's like how do you surpass – it got to a peak. And guys are trying to do that. So they're trying to get big and they're getting big. But they're getting big with a big waist and everything as well so it's not the same it's not the same look it's not the they don't have the same quality that's got to be super dangerous isn't it when you see those guys those enormous bloated bellies yeah there's a huge debate and like what is that you know what is it um i don't know is it internal organs that are well here's the thing initially uh that's what people

thought right and um i my waist started to get a little bloated around 96 97 maybe 97 um when i was using insulin right it got a little bloated a little distended um but when i retired it went down and i actually in england well because i was always like i'm taking steroids for this sport because i'm a professional. When I'm not competing, I'm going to take them. So I stopped taking them. And also I took growth hormone. And that was the thing. A lot of people think growth hormone is going to increase the size of your internal organs. And that's why guys are getting blow to waistline. So I went and had a real, I mean, a battery of tests where they actually measure all your internal organs. And mine were all totally normal, apart from my heart was a bit bigger and stronger, but

that's just normal athletic heart. So that wasn't the case. So perhaps it's fat that's building up around the internal organs, or maybe it's just a lot of water in the intestines and it just bloats the waste out the short answer is the short answer is i don't really know who's that guy in the far left uh that's like a turtle shell doesn't look like a turtle shell yeah jesus christ so that could be insulin that could be a variety i think this is we only seen this kind of thing happening since the guys are using insulin and IGF, which is insulin-like growth factor. Wow. So, yeah, it's not a good look.

It's not a, you know. It's weird. The turtle shell look is so weird. It literally looks like someone. It's like the guys have got big, like, but everywhere, systemic, like, growth. You know, when you're training with weights, you know, your major muscles are going to grow, but not around the waist can thicken a little bit, but not that much. Now, when you got off of everything, when you retired, what was the crash like? Well, it wasn't something I was ready for.

I had a lot of things going on in my life. I had a divorce. I had somebody close to me pass away. And I'm, you know, retiring. close to me pass away and I'm you know retiring so you know they say a death in the family or divorce or retirement is like a major stressful event or how about having all fucking three at the same time while you're not while you're coming down from steroids so yeah I definitely suffer from depression anxiety I don't like I don't know what's going on like why do i feel like this i didn't even like now i know right because you fucking stop cold turkey because i'm extreme i'm like i'm using them because i'm doing this i'm stopped now i'll stop so and i had no real help there was no real like

there's guys now in especially in the states that you know they they specialize in you patients that are using steroids and all you know possible side effects and coming off and all that stuff. I don't really have any of that. So I just went cold turkey. And after about two years, my normal testosterone was still not coming into the normal. So then I went on the replacement therapy, which is like twice a month testosterone replacement. And, yeah, then I felt normal again. So the, the come down, like you, you're taking this, what were you taking like right before

you stopped? Like what was the, do you remember? Probably about a thousand milligrams a week total. Of testosterone? A total. Of everything. All kinds of stuff. D-ball, everything.

A bit of testosterone, a bit of Decker or something like that. And then stop. And and then you know was it a gradual effect where your body's freaking out or was it like almost instantaneous um it's probably after a few months i started like noticing i wasn't feeling too good funnily enough like sex drive didn't totally disappear and actually had my daughter was conceived while i was not on anything so i mean they did trials with testosterone as a male contraceptive and it was moderately effective but not enough that they would market it so um yeah probably like six to nine months i was really not not feeling good at all. And, you know, there's a lot of factors there. If I was still taking steroids, but those things happened in my life, would I have

felt as bad? I don't know, probably not. But there's definitely a lot of traumatic stuff going on all at the same time. Now, was there any conventional wisdom in the bodybuilding community of how to slowly cycle off or what the factors would be and how you could mitigate them? Not at that time. Now, 20 years on, I mean, you can go on the internet and find a ton of information. But not really then. The only things guys were using was HCG, which is like helps to reduce your own testosterone. Clomid.

Clomid and some natural stuff like that. Right. I remember going to an endocrinologist and asking him, what should I do? Should I do HCG and this and that? And he's like, look at me. And I said,

you know what, Dorian? You probably know more than me about this. Thanks for that, man. He's talking about this situation with somebody coming off sterile. He didn't have a clue, man. Right, it's a different thing. But now, yeah, you've got guys out there that have a whole...

I did a seminar in Canada, and Ben Johnson was there, actually, the guy that... Oh, the Olympic gold medalist? Yeah. Well, for a while he was. He was there with his doctor, and there's a couple of other doctors there. And one of the doctors told me that absolutely every guy

that was in that 100 meters race tested positive. Every guy. But I think it was CBS was covering the contest. And they're like, we can't fucking, you know? We can't have every guy. We've got to choose one and make sure he's not American. Really? That's the story they told me.

I believe that, man. There's definitely some real good evidence that they're all doing something. The guy was just a scapegoat. I feel bad for him. He was like fucking demonized. I remember all the newspapers. I remember my son went to school and they did a whole thing at school about, you know. And he came home.

He must have fucking known his dad was jacked up like that. Like the guy was cheating and he shouldn't do that and all this stuff they told him at school you know like all right son i'll explain to you when you're a bit older and he also had no recourse like lance armstrong today has a podcast he's done a bunch of interviews he can tell his story and now you know i mean i think there was a period of time where lance was demonized but over time that has greatly subsided and people now recognize, no, he literally was in a sport where everyone was cheating. But is it cheating? If everyone's doing it, is it cheating?

The real issue, I think, was deception and lawsuits and saying that he didn't do it and suing people who said he did. And there's a lot of stuff that wasn't exactly the smartest thing to do. But you're dealing with a cornered person who's a super competitive alpha male trying to figure his way out of this mess that he's found himself in and this mess that exists systematically or systemically in this entire industry, the entire sport that he's involved in. Yeah, I remember there was a car that got stopped in the border a few years ago on the Tour de France, going from France to somewhere, across the border anyway.

And it was a team car, right? And they stopped the team car, and it was just full of EPO and steroids and all this stuff, you know? So it's, you know, when was the first Tour de France? I don't know, but I in one of the very early ones, I think the guy that was winning, he died because he was using amphetamines. Back in whatever, I don't know, 1910, 1920 or something like that. So it's there. It's part of the sport.

When I came into bodybuilding, it's not like I invented steroids. They were already there. You know, my first Mr. Olympia is in 1965. sport. When I came into bodybuilding, it's not like I invented steroids. They were already there. You know, my first Mr. Olympia was in 1965. Larry Scott was the Mr. Olympia in 1965. And he said he was using steroids then. That was 1965. So when did they start being used? I don't know, but for sure in the early 60s. 1965, they had steroids. When did they invent steroids? I believe, well, you had testosterone. I mean, testosterone was used in the Second World War. The Germans were using that with the SS soldiers.

So injectable testosterone was available then. Steroids, which are a more refined version of testosterone, I think late 50s. How is it more refined? In what way? So you've got testosterone as a male hormone. So it's basically 50% androgenic. That's male-like characteristics. 50% anabolic, repair, build.

So they wanted to take this part, the anabolic, and minimize the androgenic because that's what gives you side effects prostate growth and all that stuff so they try they refined it so that those effects were minimized and more of the anabolic effect that was the idea and there's a guy called john siegler i think and because they found out the eastern block they had their own had their own stuff called terenobol so siegler invented dinobol and i don't know don't quote me if i could be wrong but i think it was about 58 or something like that he developed that for the u.s weightlifting team 1958 i think it was 58 yeah but before that you had testosterone so who knows what uh when people started using it but for sure from the early 60s it's been a part of bodybuilding and then other sports and there used to be a disclaimer inside the steroid thing saying anabolic steroids do not increase athletic performance.

That's hilarious. Right? So they stated this. And they also told guys, if you take this, your fucking balls are going to drop off. You're going to fucking die. You're going to get liver cancer. So guys started using them and seeing that that's all bullshit, right? So then they don't want to listen to anything these medical guys are going to say because you were lying to us then.

So you're going to be lying to us all the time. Not necessarily so, yeah, because you do have chances of side effects. But you could say it's been greatly exaggerated in certain areas. That's the problem with propaganda and deception, right? Yeah, just tell people the fucking truth, man, and let them deal with it. And that's what I do. Because I saw all this stuff on the Internet about what I'm supposedly doing, and I thought young guys are going to read this and maybe they're going to do it.

So I did an article in a magazine, Muscular Development, and I said, here, this is what I did. This is what I did. This is what I did. This is what I did for a contest. And these are my opinions. And, you know, my honest opinion is, like, I don't think it's worth it unless, you know, you're competing and so on. But ultimately, it's up to you. Let me give you the information. What you do with it is up to you.

And I don't know, 70% of the people are like, this is bullshit. He didn't really. He must have took much more than this. Because I'm taking this. Actually, I'm taking more than this. And I don't know, 70% of the people were like, this is bullshit. He didn't really. He must have took much more than this because I'm taking this. Actually, I'm taking more than this, and I don't look like him. Oh, tough shit, man. You know? Right.

I know a lot of guys that take more stuff than me. They couldn't even compete in a contest. They're not even good enough. Is there a certain amount where it doesn't help you? I think it gets to, like, the cup is full. Right. You know? It's just a matter of hard work. The cup is full, and more than that isn't going to help you? I think it gets to like, the cup is full. Right. You know? It's just a matter of hard work.

The cup is full and more than that isn't going to help you anymore. It's just going to increase your chances of negative effects. So when I was an amateur, my policy was always to take as little as possible to get the maximum effect.

And when that's not working, then you can go up a little bit more, you know? But if you go a day one and just throwing everything in there like your body's gonna get used to that way you're gonna go where would you get steroids where where did I used to get them yeah I mean when I got them in in UK was just from the gym when I first started I mean people were bringing them in with trucks loads full from Europe and there was not, you know, the authorities are not even aware of it or concerned about it or anything.

Now, the policy, at least in the UK and it depends on every country in Europe, but in the UK, it's perfectly legal to have steroids for your own use. So you can be driving your car with a bunch of steroids on the fucking passenger seat and the police call you and they're like what's this and these are my steroids okay for your own personal use is what selling making money and not paying your taxes that's all they care about well that's i think how it should be you know as long as there's education as long as they're not lying but the problem is when you lie to people about the effects of things then they think you're lying to them about pain pills you're lying about all sorts of other stuff that is actually deadly i think all fucking drugs should be legal and you should put money into

education and treatment and that's what they did in um portugal and then the results right down glenn greenwald actually posts something today that, showing how it's changed over time and gotten actually better. Since they have made, especially in particular, marijuana. So they've made marijuana legal and started legalizing drugs in Portugal. They've had far less incidences of people having real issues. Absolutely. And the money, they're using it to re-educate people and get them out of that cycle

and try and get them back into society, trying to get them a job and all that stuff. You're just going to punish people for doing it. How the fuck are they ever going to get better, you know? Well, there's also a problem with telling people not to do something and they want to do it. Yeah, it seems more appealing,

especially when you're young. Sure, this is illegal. Oh, let me do it, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like, here it is. You can fucking have it if you want. But this is all the negative consequences. And what do you want to do?

And people are choosing not to do it. The bodybuilders that died, did any of them die from steroids? Or did they die from complications involving a host of different issues? Well, that's hard to say because there's been quite a few bodybuilders, and mainly male and mainly the bigger guys. Well, there's been a couple of women that have died from heart attacks. So did steroids contribute to that possibly? What else were they doing?

You know, they're individual cases. Who knows? Were they taking pain pills, anti-inflammatories? Were they doing recreational drugs? There's a lot of factors there. But I think it would be probably fair to say that using steroids over a long term will probably increase your risk of heart disease, perhaps. I think it causes some inflammation in the line in the arteries, can raise your blood pressure a little bit, and so on.

So, yeah, I compare it to smoking. Probably not as bad, though. Yeah, probably not as bad. The way I look at it is I smoked for 10 years and then I stopped. So now I smoke good stuff. Now, speaking of smoking good stuff how did you get how did you find out about dmt and how did you get involved because i i read something about you having these positive dmt experiences yeah wow how how strange is it reading about you know this

massive bodybuilder now getting into psychedelic drugs and speaking openly about it. Yeah, first time I did ayahuasca was in Brazil. I met my wife who's outside. She lived in Brazil, so we went out to the Amazon. But this was like 10 years ago, you know? So people weren't really, not like now, people know what ayahuasca is because there's so much information out there, yourself talking about it, I'm talking about it. There's a ton of stuff on the Internet.

It wasn't so much then, i'm talking about it's a ton of stuff on the internet um wasn't so much then but i heard about it and i heard about this it's life-changing experience and all that stuff so we're out in brazil and we got this guide and i asked him for ayahuasca and he's like bring me these two bottles of brown stuff i don't even know to this day if it was really ayahuasca but i just got really sick and didn't see any great revelations apart from i got this thing in my head stop poisoning yourself but the night before i'd been out drinking getting drunk and everything so you know that was my experience with that then a friend of mine out here in california actually i knew about dmt i used to live in amsterdam and like i read the dmt spirit molecule and all that stuff. So I knew about it, but I had no idea to get this stuff away. You can get it from anything.

So a friend of mine got it. And that was my first experience of like leaving the room, so to speak. And then since then, I had some very positive ayahuasca experiences, but with a shaman and doing properly and preparing like five days of, you know, restricted diet and no sex and all these kinds of things you do to prepare. And also afterwards. So DMT is like blow the fucking doors off your perception and realize that

this world we're in is like, you know, it's nothing. it's just a little illusion right there's so much more outside of it um so there was that but with the dmt i think it's like you've got a computer with like so much storage space and you got it's like a thousand times more than you can retain so you see all this stuff and while you're there you're like i know everything oh yes but when you come back how much of it can you hold on to you know right uh so you've seen it and that's like makes you look at everything differently but the ayahuasca is over hours so i feel like from the ayahuasca i actually benefited more it was like going through

therapy or something because it was much slower and i could digest it you know right so um but doing it with the shaman uh i did it with a guy called guillermo avarelo and he's one of the top guys in the world from peru he comes to spain a couple of times a year so i did it with him and um yeah it's probably i don't know it's probably two or three years since i did dmt because i sat down one day and I said, right, actually I fasted for two days before. So I'll be like just in the zone. And I said, right, I'm going to sit down. I got my DMT here. I got my vaporizer here.

I'm going to fucking smoke as much DMT as I possibly can to like, like, you know, to like go on and pass out. So I had that experience. And since then, I just, I don't feel any need to do it. I don't think there's anything more I can take from it. I've had many people tell me the same thing. They had such a profound breakthrough experience that they're like, okay, I get it. I had a crazy one in around, I want to say like 2008 or 2009 or something like that. And I took a long time off.

I didn't do it again until like five years later maybe. Yeah, it's pretty intense, man. I mean the ayahuasca is nice because it comes in nice and subtle and you go through hours of this thing. But DMT is like – Last time I did DMT. You feel very anxious when you'd like – it's almost like you're leaving your body and you're like,

I don't want to. You know? Yeah. So you get that bit of anxiety. But once you go, you feel okay. Once you go, it's cool, yeah're leaving your body and you know i don't want to you know yeah so you get that bit of anxiety but once you go once you go it's cool yeah yeah it's cool but have you done it more than one time in a day like multiple times in a night no i just you know just blasted it as far as i could go and that was it i've done it several times over the course of a few hours and uh you know you're more comfortable letting go that way in some sort of a strange way but it never gets less alien well we had a i'm not going to mention his name i don't know

his name but we had an experience me and my friend a few months ago um that i've never seen before because usually people take dmt they're very calm and sit in the chair and you go off and you might start laughing but you know you don't move much right and this guy he just like freaked out like it wasn't for 10 minutes for half an hour my friend was a former mma fighter used to fight with shamrocks so he know he knew wrestling techniques so he had to hold this guy on the floor to stop him from hurting himself because he was probably freaking out so i could see the guy was going through some something traumatic from the past so yeah today i messaged him i say hey did you ever find out what the guy what what what was that you know because it was he said yeah it was from his birth what he was from his birth when he was born he had the cord around his neck oh jesus and he went

back and he relived this and like so that had been in the back of his mind all his life, subconscious. Subconscious has a huge effect on us, but we don't know. It's there. So now he opened that box and let it out, and it's gone now. Wow. So it can be therapeutic. I thought, this guy is like, wow. But when he came back, he was like, hey.

I'm like, you good? He's like, yeah, I'm good. I'm like, do you know what just happened? He's like, no. I said, good thing we filmed it then, man. Go home and watch this. I had a friend who freaked out, too. He freaked out.

He threw up. Took his shirt off. Was running around saying a bunch of crazy shit. And then after he came down, we calmed him down. It took like 10, 15 minutes. He goes, okay, well, obviously I'm a work in progress. I'll never forget that. I'll never forget that statement.

Did he know what it was that was troubling him so much? Well, he had a bad childhood for sure. Well, everything is like most of our shit is from there, right? Yeah. From the developing years. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, especially like real traumatic ones, abuse, being beaten by his stepdad and a bunch of fucked up shit that was just haunting him.

I was a different person the next day I felt like I'd done 20 years of fucking therapy or something just a lot of stuff I'd worked out in my mind I could even see other people's point of view

on things and that I couldn't see before that's huge right seeing other people's point of view because especially a guy like you who's so determined

and goal oriented and just cut out all the bullshit and get it done yeah it can be a little insensitive to other people's feelings around it because it's just like, nothing, keep out of my way.

That's a male thing in particular anyway, right? And then add steroids on top of that and bodybuilding and intensity and competition and then being the best, arguably the best ever, and just fucking grinding every day. My son said to me a couple of weeks ago, he's like, Dad, you don't see yourself as other people see you. I said, what do you mean? He said, like, I remember when I was a kid,

first of all, the size, you know, it was fucking huge. But it's your persona. You might have said to me something very, like, normal, like, you know, you know, whatever, what are you doing with a dog like just something normal and he said i'll be like because just your your your presence made me feel like that you know right that's got to be weird when you're a little tiny kid and your dad's a gorilla yeah i remember he did uh he did kickboxing right so he got his black belt when he was about 11 or something like that and that was my thing i used to take him to kickboxing and pick him up and he's like dad

can you just can you wait outside i'm like what do you mean you don't want me to come in and like can you just wait outside like you don't want me to come it's like yeah but everyone's like freaking out and looking at you and well it's got to be nice like no i'm fucking coming inside man semi-anonymous in crowds now yeah yeah i mean unless someone's a hardcore bodybuilding fan well there's the thing uh not necessarily slow because uh because of the interviews i did on london real um and i talked about ayahuasca and DMT and spirituality and reality and all this stuff. I get so many people coming up to me like they're not from the gym. I get housewives, young kids. It's almost like you're the guy from London Real.

You're the guy that, you know. So I get a whole bunch of other people that appreciate what I'm saying about spirituality, about reality and life. And they're like, fuck, man, what you said there really helped me. I got so many letters and emails and stuff. People, you know, like they just took something away from what I was saying. So, I mean, that's really why I do these interviews. It's trying to help the whole general vibe and, you know, put it out there. And there's a whole consciousness awakening a revolution going on now and

I'm just want to push some dominoes you know and like create that effect and then you know if you touch one person they touch somebody else and it's like you know the butterfly wings flap here and the other side of the world is a you know yeah it really army or something it does seem to be working in that in that regard it is it is the man. It's the time. There's so many people that are more aware now than like 20 years ago. Isn't it kind of like, I mean, there's parallels to bodybuilding, right? When Arnold first started doing it, there was very little information.

And you guys got to see what they did and build upon that. And more information came out. And now because of the internet, there's so much information. Almost almost too much information people are aware more of what it's all about well with psychedelics i mean 20 30 years ago there's so much ignorance and so little understanding of and also so little understanding especially when it comes to something as extreme as dmt there's still a giant percentage of our population doesn't even know what it is. Yeah, I mean, they should all take it, especially the fucking politicians. I like to get those politicians, man, and fucking get them in a room and force them to take DMT and then see how they're going to behave afterwards, how they're going to

look at the world and treat people after they had that experience i don't i don't think it can be uh you know so self-centered and unfeeling as most of them are after you've had that experience i think that any breakthrough psychedelic experience whether it's psilocybin or lsd or dmt there's they're all pretty much you know ego dissolving road to the same place you know well terence mckenna used to say that dmt is the center of the mandala the way i describe dmt is it's like mushrooms times a million plus aliens yeah and then it just it seems so titanically bizarre that there's like i've tried to describe it to people but i always say look i'm gonna tell you i'm gonna do it yeah i'm gonna give you some

bullshit words yeah you can't really do it because you can't, I'm going to give you some bullshit words. I'm going to try. You can't really do it because you can't. There's no way. You don't have the words to put it into words. You can attempt to, I went to this place. Well, it's not a place, but I don't have the word for it. The place is everywhere. Yeah, it's like, and there's colors, there's numbers, there's shapes. People, things.

There's things, and there's gestures. Everything is all one fucking thing. And what I noticed is my breath was connected to it i don't know how it happened but i was in the trip and i went like that and the whole thing moved yeah really let me try this then and then the whole thing moved and then there was music playing and music was part of the thing as well yeah like the thing i don't even know what to call it the thing as well. Yeah. Like the thing. I don't even know what to call it. The thing, the place.

I don't have a word, you know? We played a bunch of these shaman Icaros. Yeah. And the shaman Icaros, this is the last time I did it, and the shaman Icaros literally made the DMT images dance. They had figured out a way with these sounds and songs to integrate these beats into dmt trips and as you would take these trips these shamans had figured out the right sounds and

songs and how to make the trip more intense and sort of guided in a strange way well that's what i had with um with the shaman with the ayahuca. He comes around and he sings these acaros and it's like changes tone. And then it goes deeper bass in his chest and it's like it becomes part of it, you know. And I was even moving involuntarily. I was, my arms was going up, my body was moving and it's like, I'm not doing this. I don't even know how it's happening. It's like somebody's picking my arms up and i'm moving i was you know started dancing around with this becoming part of this rhythm wow i had experience once one of the first times i ever did dmt where

i saw the difference between negative and positive thinking like i started thinking negative and there was all this like black and dark green and like these uh threatening shapes and colors and then something recognized what was going on in my brain that these shapes and images were connected to negative thinking and i relaxed and the the shapes kind of like settled down and then i started thinking positive like i heard all these like expressions of love, but like you're hearing it, but you're not really hearing it. It's like the thoughts are getting into your head. Like someone's trying to say it without using words. And then I started thinking positive.

And from those dark images blossomed these like beautiful, like geometric flowers and colors and impossibly spectacularly beautiful images. And I was like, oh. And I recognized in my mind there is an actual thing that happens when you think negatively. It's not just some sort of an abstract idea. You affect the program. You're in a program. And your thoughts, the program's coming towards you. And your thoughts are going. And it's interacting with the program.

And that's why conflict, like interpersonal conflict between people can be so negative. It's not just as simple as you and some person getting into an argument. It's those dark images and those negative forces. It becomes a part of your system. I had exactly the same thing. So, but it was almost like a tunnel. I was in this tunnel and it was the same thing. It was like, yeah, all these images around and scary and everything. And I was like, I instinctively, I knew to be very relaxed. Yeah. And I started laughing like, fuck you. You're not even real. You're not even real.

And when I said that, it went away. And I just got this thing that came to my head. You've just been in the valley. What's it called? The valley of the shadow of death. It's in the Lord's Prayer, I think. Yeah, you know, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You should fear no evil because God's by your side.

Right. I vaguely remember it from school or something. But I got this thing like like you were there and you're in the valley of the shadow of death and because you like fuck you were like oh it's not even real it just it just disappeared and then i went to somewhere really nice wow yeah i just wonder how much is real you know it's it's such a hippie thing to say like how much is real i don't know you know i've been having these thoughts a lot lately like how much of how much of life do you manifest how much of life is real because it's such a bullshit thing to think it's such a hippie thing to think and so many people that say that are so annoying yeah but scientists are saying the same thing now quantum physicists physicists are saying, I think his name is Professor Gates.

I don't know if you're familiar with him. Professor Gates. And he said that they've broken down reality into the smallest level. And it's a computer code. Yes, I've seen that guy. Not only is it a computer code, it's a specific computer code of zeros and ones, and it was invented in the 1940s by somebody. Yeah, I've seen that guy being interviewed. We actually talked about it with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I tried to get him to sort of break it down and explain.

But what it is is essentially that when you break reality down to the smallest level, it mimics a self-correcting computer code. Not just a computer code, but a computer code that's self-correcting, which is right there I just said a bunch of noises that I don't even understand. It's gone beyond my... But now you're getting spirituality and science coming together because the scientists are saying what spiritual masters... Well, they're already telling us that we live in an illusion and everything is inside, not outside. They were saying that thousands of years ago.

But some of it is real. Like you have to work hard or you don't get results. Yeah. Like your hard, fast, pragmatic reality of being the best bodybuilder in the world revolves around actual work, real results. In this reality and this program. But also probably there was a lot of mental shit going on there too. Absolutely. The work was being done, but also there was probably a lot of... Thoughts all day.

I mean, that's all I thought about. Literally all fucking day. So, you know, I had to have the physical goods to make it happen i could dream about being a basketball player all day probably wouldn't help me because i'm not built to be a basketball player but those thoughts were just going out all the time and i was a kid in birmingham industrial city in england and i was thinking i'm going to go to america and i'm going to be a bodybuilder and everyone around me was like the fuck you talking so yeah that was there was those thoughts all the time so I think it's like a holographic

program we're in what we influenced it we interact with it with our thoughts that's kind of where I'm getting that now. Yes, in some way. And the guys that were spiritual masters like Buddha and the guy they called Jesus and all that apparently did things that were called miracles because they were outside the box, outside the physical reality we live in. How can you walk on water? That's not possible. Right. Physical reality we live in how can you walk on water? That's not possible, right? But if you were so advanced that you really knew it was a program then you can like hack the program And that's how they're able to do it. They kind of remove themselves out of the program

Hmm Yeah, how can it how can you you know, how can guys levitate or walk on water? I don't know if they can. Yeah, well, I don't know. I wasn't there. See, that's the thing. There's no evidence whatsoever that anybody actually can levitate. Well, people have witnessed people doing it, but I haven't. Yeah, people have witnessed Bigfoot. There's a lot of people who said some weird shit. The problem with people saying things is they might have literally seen that, but it doesn't mean it wasn't a hallucination.

And then again, it doesn't mean that a hallucination is an alternative reality that you're experiencing. Yeah, what't a hallucination and then again it doesn't mean that a hallucination is an alternative reality what is it you know people say you hallucinate when you take lsd or dmt you're just hallucinating right what are you or you're just seeing more stuff that you can't normally see because now you've shifted your your uh your vibration you know yeah well i one of the things that i tried to explain to someone about DMT that I've kind of used over and over maybe perhaps there was something even more profoundly more powerful and knowledgeable and wise past that but i wasn't ready to perceive it that maybe there's levels to that that it's fractal just like everything else and someone said like well you know how do you know that wasn't a hallucination i go well it could have been but here's the deal whether or not it was or wasn't the experience experience is the same. Like if you really go into some other dimension and meet God, or you take a drug in which you experience going to another dimension and meeting God, it's still the same experience.

The exact same experience. And why is everybody's experience kind of similar? Right. You know, we're going to have a whole totally different fucking illusion. No one seems to think it's no big deal yeah no one that i know who's ever done dmt is like yeah yeah it's no big deal you're not going to be the same afterwards no you get your your perspective is going to be different your point of view is going to be different and uh it can only put i've never

i don't know anybody that's done dmt and and they've said that was not a positive experience. I didn't get anything from that. Every fucking body I know has said that. What? Wow. The fuck? What is this? Where am I?

Who is this? What are noises that come from my mouth? Nobody's ever said to me that even the guy that i saw that looked like he was getting raped by the devil because that's a guy getting raped by the devil i didn't see that but i saw his eyes and that's how i imagine somebody's eyes would look like that was happening so he looked like in absolute terror is all i can say. Absolute terror I saw in this guy's eyes for like 20 minutes. But when he came back, he was like...

Oh, this is the guy that was reliving his childhood. Yeah, he didn't even know. I'm like, you okay, dude? Yeah, man, that was fucking great. I'm like, do you know what happened? He's like, yeah, it was great. I'm like, okay. You need to watch this video when you go home

because we filmed you man i had a friend my friend doug stanhope and he's talked about this many times on stage i got him high on dmt at my house and uh he's the only guy that i've ever got high on dmt that i worried about because he fell over on the couch and started moaning and like foam was coming out of his mouth he was moaning but he's so unhealthy he smokes cigarettes he drinks constantly and i was like oh my god did i break my friend that i i was really worried i was like maybe i should have considered the fact this fucking guy doesn't really take care of himself i think when your system's kind of toxic yeah you don't get the best oh he came out

of it he got great results he came out of it it was a fantastic. Oh, he came out of it. He got great results. He came out of it. It was a fantastic experience for him. He came out of it with all these revelations. We had great conversation about it. But in the moment, he was like, and I was like, oh, no, I've killed him. Oh, this guy was like spasming and kicking. I mean, my friend had to hold him on the floor to stop him from smashing the furniture or hurting himself.

Wow. So he was thinking he was being choked. It was like 10 minutes, 15, 20. Oh, God. I was starting to get concerned. Jesus Christ. Half an hour later, he came out of it. But he's glad he did it now.

Glad he couldn't see himself at the time you know do you ever uh float uh flotation tank yeah i did it once and you know funnily enough like when i was a kid i read frank zane frank zane was doing flotation tanks back in the 70s yeah those samadhi tanks um so i always wanted to do it and i saw this place when i was over in england so i went in there and i said to the guy, like, talking about it. I said, listen, man, let me ask you a question. I said, is it good to smoke weed before you go in there? And he's like, I'll tell you the truth.

He said, a lot of people come here, they smoke weed outside before they come in. He said, but the first time, I think you should just go with nothing and see how it goes. And I'll be honest, I was in there for like, it was an hour thing. After 40 minutes, I just got really fucking bored. I thought to myself, I meditate every day, yeah? So I was like, this is like, I don't feel this is any better than me doing my meditation and just getting kind of the same thing. So I didn't really, I wasn't blown away by it like I expected to be, to be honest.

But then, you know, done DMT and ayahuasca and acid and everything. So maybe my expectations were too high. I always give the same advice. I say don't smoke weed the first time. Just go in and experience it. But my thoughts are that isolation tanks and the isolation tank experience is something that it takes time to really fully relax and settle in and there's layers to the onion and you got to go deeper

and deeper and peel those layers away and i've done it so many times i have one in my basement so i've done it so many times now that when i go in i can slide right in almost immediately but i'll tell you this i rarely go in sober i almost always go in high as a kite and edibles preferably are the best way to really i can have full-blown psychedelic experiences in the tank on edibles full-blown visuals well going into the jungle experiencing the center of the universe like intense intense stuff because the relaxation the fact that you're the only information you're taking in is like there's a mild feeling of the water on your body very mild that you have to think about to be aware of and occasionally you'll touch the sides yeah of the tank and you have to kind of

right yourself there's no some water gets in your ear or something. But other than that, don't rub your eyes. Get salt in your eyes is a bad one. But other than that, you're experiencing no sound, no visual input. And in the absence of that visual input, I think all those other thoughts become more powerful. So whatever the effect of marijuana is on a regular body, when you're just hanging hanging out sitting around, that effect is intensified in a big way when you're in the isolation tank. Well, I plan to go back and try that next time. Well, when you're in town, I can hook it up.

All right, cool. If you want. How many times are you in town? How long are you in town for? We're only here until Thursday evening. Then I go to Vegas to do a competition there. Well, they have them in Vegas too now. They have them everywhere.

When I first started doing the tank, my first experience I think was in the early, early 2000s. And I got my first tank in 2003. Because when I bought my house, one of the reasons why I bought it is it had a basement. And I was like, I want a place to put the tank. Because I had done the tank a couple of times at this place called soothing solutions in burbank yeah if you got it there and you can do it every day then oh it's the best i'll do it and i get home from a comedy show and i'll say i need to process my thoughts and go over my

material and i'll climb in that tank and just take off to the center of the universe and figure things out it also makes me reconsider like how my thoughts are being like one of the things about comedy is you know you have an idea and you've got to try to figure out a way to get that idea into people's minds and sometimes it's the wrong way like sometimes it's like too abrupt yeah or too corrosive or it's too it's just not it's not it's not smoothly getting into people's minds so you have to like really consider it so that idea of seeing other people's perspectives like that we were talking about earlier, that's huge with stand up comedy. And one of the best ways to kind of get out of your own way for me is to explore things in the tank.

Because in the absence of any physical input, you kind of stop thinking of your body and your brain and you as an individual, as like the captain of the ship and all the other things start to become more and more. So you got more room to process. Well, that's the idea is like you and I are having this conversation, but one of the reasons why I like to do it in this room with no one else here, but us, because there's no distractions, right? But if there was a guy in the other room with a jackhammer, it would fuck us up. We'd want to get out of there, right? Let's go over here so we can talk more quietly. Same in the gym.

You want to get in the gym. You want to be in your bubble. That's why a lot of guys put headphones on, right? You just want to fucking grind and get in your own head. Well, in life itself, like while we're sitting here, your chair is sending signals to your ass, your hands on the table. It's all data. In the tank, there's nothing. And in the absence of sensory input, I believe that your brain becomes super charged. And I think you can consider things in a much more clear way. I think you have more

resources. I find the same with meditation. It's like when I try to explain to people, I said, it's almost like I feel like it's slowed down my thought process. So now when I have thoughts, I see them coming in. Yeah. I'm like, do I want to act on this thought or not? Right. Whereas before I already acted on it before it was, you know, I recognized it. That's a huge problem is being a reactionary person and constantly dealing with input coming in and like instinctively batting it away or instinctively arguing.

And if you're like stressed and anxious, you're always going to react like that. So you need to get rid of all that. And people know that. And I think that's one of the reasons why people have a real problem with President Trump. One of the real problems people have with him. This is the guy that argues with people on Twitter. Gets mad. Wasn't he on the WWE?

Yeah, he was. Wasn't that perfect training to be president? But that's fun. That's silly to me. Yeah,'s yeah but it's the same thing man you're performing it's you know for me that's just what uh you know the president how much power does he really have how much you know influence or is it just a it's just a pantomime a distraction for people but that was before he was president what i'm reacting to is like him tweeting things today like shitting on people insulting people like when you're the fucking president of the united states you're the leader of the free world you can't be going on twitter and just insulting people putting out that conflict energy that we were talking about

for what reason and people recognize whether they know it or not inherently they know that this is not the way to lead this is not the way to be above it all this is not the wise person that we want at the top of the hill setting the standards for all the people yeah but which where's your alternative there's no alternative there you go i don't think there should be a president i've said this a million times i just think there's how much power does the president really have i mean you, you had Obama, right? He said he was going to close down Guantanamo Bay. Yeah, great.

But it didn't happen. I don't know why. Did he want to do it? But he couldn't because other people are really in control? Or maybe they explained to him why they shouldn't do it. There could be a bunch of factors. I don't know. But I think maybe you go there with good intentions, but there's other people that pull the strings.

And, you know, the president's just a front guy. In that sense, one of the things about Trump being so bold and so egotistical, I think that's probably a positive, is that he's resisting the deep state. He's resisting all of these other outside influences. all of these other outside influences. And he's so wealthy that he has the financial power to like insulate himself from these other people that are like him. Well, I, you know,

I got friends in the States and that was the feedback that I got that the guys that like Trump, they liked him because they felt that he wasn't going to be controlled by the, you know, the big money, the guys that own the Federal Reserve and all pulling the strings on the military and all that stuff.

But I don't think you can beat those guys. They control the money system. They control everything. It's a mess. I think I like your idea. We need to get them all fucked up. Yeah, get them all fucked up. Let's get Hillary stoned and make her a real nice, cool lady.

She would just go, I've killed so many people. I confess. There's a picture of a deer that was on the side of the road that was dead. And you know, there's one of those comic memes. And it said, what did this deer know about Hillary Clinton? It seems to be dangerous to know too much about Hillary and Bill Clinton. Two people were killed just in the last couple of weeks. They committed suicide.

A lot of people know this shit, right? So they're like, we've got this fucking psychopath. We've got this idiot guy. But maybe he's a better alternative than the psychopath. So let's go with the orange guy. Let's go with the orange guy. Because he's you know he's not part of this cabal and maybe he's gonna you know he's gonna change things for

the better so that's why people went with him i believe because he was seen to be not controlled by the same forces if you like yeah you know the clintons the bushes the fucking all these people they're on the same club right well it Well, it just seems that change, especially change over our culture, you know, over civilization happens in these like slow ticks to the right or ticks to the left, moving in a good direction or a bad direction. So it's so slow to change. change and like so when something like this comes around that is perceived to be a negative thing and is perceived to be a negative thing moving in a terrible direction and quite rapidly it scares the shit out of people well that's uh feedback i get now if people over here they're concerned you know yeah well you know personally i don't think it makes that much difference who's president so it's just it's just a fucking sideshow to you know entertain people keep them distracted do you think that's on purpose yeah

get all emotional like oh trump is and then it's like it's just bullshit it's a pantomime it's just to keep you distracted you know keep you entertained just like football and everything else like don't look over here look over here it's a magician's trick you know wow i like to think that way sometimes then other times i think it's probably just too complicated for anybody to really orchestrate and we're just reacting to these wants and needs and human instincts and all a variety of factors that have been set in motion like the the momentum of these things that have been set in motion forever and people trying to profit, people trying to figure out how to control various factions of it. But the idea of like one person or one group pulling the strings as time goes on. It's not as clear cut as that.

Yeah, I find it less and less plausible. Yeah. There's one small group that controls the debt. Yeah. It's not even money. It's debt. Yeah. So if you control that, then you control pretty much everything right?

There's an everybody in debt is every country in debt isn't China in debt to who exactly? If everybody is in debt to everybody like is that really dead I just fucking print money and put a number on a thing and you know you always X amount. Let's just cancel all the debt a number on a thing and you know you owe us x amount let's just cancel all the debt yeah no that's why they distract you with things like we're gonna go after medical marijuana like that jeff sessions guy he's he's the ultimate distraction he's gonna start cracking down cannabis is like that's a huge thing in the evolution of consciousness and it's getting more available and more accepted and uh there's so many layers to it man it's like medically it's amazing spiritually it's amazing the hemp plant can

fucking supply what you know henry ford built a model t ford out of hemp hempcrete right not only that it's way stronger it's way stronger when He hits it with a hammer. He hits the fence doesn't rust It's lighter, you know everything he fueled it with hemp ethanol as well So did you ever see them make that a video where they have him hit the hammer against the fender? It's like the first Model T. They had met fenders they had made him out of hemp and he's whacking it with a fucking hammer and had made him out of hemp and he's whacking it with a fucking hammer and hemp people don't understand if you've never experienced it the hemp stalk the actual stalk of the tree itself it'll get very big and thick and it's extremely hard but extremely light it's not like any other wood it's light

hard like oak but light like balsa wood. Look at this. That is hemp. So he's banging his hammer against this fucking car, and it's not even making a dent. So tell me why he didn't build the car out of hemp then. Because of William Randolph Hearst, that fucking cunt. William Randolph Hearst was the guy who owned Hearst Publications. He also owned a bunch of paper mills. And he's the guy who demonized hemp he's also the guy that was the motivation for Orson Welles to make the movie Rosebud you know or the movie Citizen Kane rather he was

something to do with the oil and steel industries as well it has to do a lot of things but a big part of it was William Randolph Hearst because they are to cover a popular science magazine that was like hemp, the new billion dollar crop. And they made that because there was a device that was invented called the decorticator. And what a decorticator was, it was a machine that allowed you to effectively process the hemp fiber without the use of slavery. See, for years and years, they had used slavery to process hemp, and hemp was what they used for cannabis.

That's why the name cannabis comes from the word cannabis. That's literally La Monalisa. And they write the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper or something? So the first drafts, yeah, on hemp paper. It's a far superior paper than wood pulp paper. Well, when they had come out with this article in Popular Science magazine, Hemp, the New Billion Dollar Crop, they were essentially saying that hemp, because of the decorticator, now hemp would replace wood for paper, for all these other things.

So we don't need to destroy the forest anymore? William Randolph Hearst not only owned these newspapers, but he also owned these paper mills, and he owned these forests. And he decided to combat this competing industry with propaganda. So they started printing these stories about how these black people and Mexicans were taking this wild drug called marijuana. And then everybody was like, Jesus. So when Congress first made marijuana, first of all, marijuana was not even the word for cannabis. Marijuana was a word for a wild Mexican tobacco that had nothing to do with this. But it's Mexican.

Exactly. Careful. Danger. Danger. Across the border. The brown ones. And so people responded to this. And when they made it illegal, they didn't even understand that they were making cannabis

They didn't know just understand they were making the the commodity hemp illegal like to this day until recently like on it We sell hemp protein when we first started on it several years ago We had to buy all of our hemp from Canada because even though it's not psychoactive. It was illegal still to grow in America It's so stupid. It's just so Because even though it's not psychoactive, it was illegal still to grow in America. It's so stupid. It's just so titanically stupid. But, you know, there's a crack in the dam now. Oh, yeah.

You can't stop it, man. That ball was rolling now, and people are waking up to the benefits. You know, how many states you got in the U.S. now that's legal? There's quite a few medical, and I think there's something like, what is it, like nine? Recreational, Nevada, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Washington State, Washington, D.C. Did I say that already? I don't know how many other ones there are. Maine? Alaska. Colorado, of course. I don't know how many other ones there are. Maine? Alaska?

Colorado, of course. Yeah, so how many of them? Legalized cannabis, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven legalized. And then jurisdiction with medical decriminalization. There's a lot of funky, weird shades to that. There's more than three shades there. I saw bullshit. they just make it

legal yeah across the board well it takes time man the amount of money what's fascinating is the amount of money that is coming in and that's affecting it because these people are getting involved in colorado colorado is massive they put it back into the school systems and the medical they're giving people tax refunds sorry we made we made too much money. Well, they tax it 39% and everybody's like, okay, nobody gives a shit. I read that in Nevada and Vegas, they're literally running out. Oh, yeah. They call it a state of emergency. Yeah, that's right. Hilarious. They're out of weed.

Yeah. Well, I hope not because I'm hook it up. I know people. Nevada declares marijuana a state of emergency to avoid $100 million tax shortfall. Because they wanted the money from the marijuana, because they were making so much money in taxes. Because I think Nevada has 39% as well, right? Are they at a 39% tax rate? It's 15% for recreational, I think. Only 15%?

Yeah. Really? I think so. Well, they fucked up. They should have went 39%. Nobody gives a shit. It's still $5 for it. When you're buying, I don't know if the stores are getting taxed, too, for what they fucked up. They should have went $39. Nobody gives a shit. It's still $5 for it. When you're buying. I don't know if the stores are getting taxed, too, for what they sell recreational. They might get an extra tax. The thing is, the ball is rolling. It's not going to stop now.

And so many people out there have cured cancer as well by using the concentrated oil and stuff. I've got a couple of friends that have cured their own cancer from changing the diet, going to a plant-based alkaline diet and taking the cannabis oil. And the doctors are, like, baffled. So there's that. And that's a powerful thing. If somebody cures their cancer, they're going to tell everybody. They'll tell everybody they know, all their family, and it's just a matter of time.

Yeah. They just had something on a on a mainstream which i was surprised a mainstream uh news show in england where they had this case of this kid who was in hospital was dying from i don't remember what it was but anyway this the point is his mother was sneaking in the cannabis oil and he got cured for that and then they did this whole thing on the breakfast tv about how the you know the kid was got rid of his cancer now but i noticed they still you know they're obviously told to say this that you know they told this whole story about the kid is like you know his cancer's gone now because his mom was sneaking in the cannabis oil and wow we need to look into this but but we must state everybody people we must tell you uh we must you know it's not a cure right what the fuck you're talking about the kids it's cured what you're talking about it's not a

cure but it's obviously something they've got to state you know because it's actually illegal to claim that you can cure cancer well it's illegal to possess the marijuana so it's illegal probably to use it as a treatment even though it's effective you have to say it's not a cure exactly and there's the influence of the pharmaceutical drug companies that will come down i mean there's pharmaceutical drug companies that advertise on these networks which becomes a huge problem because if they're advertising abilify and fucking well butrin and all this different shit that they're selling they're not going to be interested in you telling positive stories

about abandoning all pharmaceutical drugs and then taking natural remedies. Of course not. They can't patent it. So what they're trying to do now is make, you know, slightly different versions of it that they can patent. Yeah. There's one company, I think it's GW Pharmaceuticals in the UK. But guess what?

It doesn't fucking work when you do that. No. So I'm laughing at them. Waste all your fucking money. The plant is perfect as it is. It's a perfect balance. It works as it is. But they can't trademark it.

You can't trademark it. So you want to change it a little bit to create something you can trademark and make tons of profit off. But guess what, suckers? It ain't working. Once you change it it doesn't work the way it's supposed to work it's all people trying to control shit you know it's people that are trying to control how much agriculture you could sell i mean that's what it is it's agriculture with marijuana really is a psychoactive agriculture it's plants like the

idea that you tell someone they can't grow tomatoes in their backyard is fucking bananas. It's ridiculous. It's a plant that grows from the ground exactly as it is. God fucking made plant grows from the ground. How can that be illegal? Right. So if you have tomatoes in your backyard, everyone knows tomatoes have lots of vitamins. They're healthy for you. And no one would say, oh, you can't do that.

Like, we're going to stop you from doing that. Fucking Chinese have been using herbs for thousands of years. Sure. Marijuana is just the same thing. But it's the mother of all of them. It's like the fucking top. You know, sometimes people get confused about, like, oh, you know, you're supposed to be healthy. You're supposed to

be an athlete. What are you doing smoking marijuana? I'm like, that's the fucking healthiest thing I do. Every day, I got, like, 40 tablets here, yeah? I got fish oils. I got vitamin C, I got resveratrol, I got herbs, I got everything, you know. But guess what? More powerful than all those fucking things together, although they're beneficial, is my cannabis oil I take every day. This is like, I don't know if you're familiar with a guy called Bob Malamade, Dr. Bob Melamed. His study is free radical. He's a human biologist,

I think. And he states that cannabis is the most powerful antioxidant, most powerful anti-aging substance on the planet, period. That's it. So I consider it a health supplement. And yeah, I get high and I feel good. It's a health supplement too. And there's also ways you could take it that are non-psychoactive. You know, people that take CBDs or I take this stuff, Charlotte's Web Hemp Oil. I take this everyday plus stuff. That's a high CBD. It's fantastic.

It makes you feel good. It alleviates aches and pains. It's good for anxiety. It's good for mental clarity. It's just great for your body. It's an essential oil for your body. I got my left knee. The cartilage is nearly gone. clarity. It's just great for your body. It's an essential oil for your body. I got my left knee, the cartilage is nearly gone. The shoulders, not only the supraspinatus is gone,

when I go for a scan, they're like, oh, your shoulder, the arthritis is really bad. You must be in a ton of pain. I'm like, nothing. I don't have any pain. I don't know if that's down to my cannabis use, but it's definitely a factor in there, you know? I'm sure it's a factor. Do you think also a factor is mental toughness? Because the fact that your understanding of pain is probably way different. Yeah, how you perceive pain, you know? You're not going to dwell on it the way the average person. A little amount of pain is not a big deal. I mean, I live with that every day from training training so right and actually look forward to it in a way

yeah so probably my perception of pain is like is less than everybody else's but for sure you know when i'm asleep if you had real arthritis i mean it's going to wake you're going to get pain i don't get anything so uh something i'm doing is helping yeah Yeah. Yeah, I consider cannabis to be the most powerful health supplement you can take. Better than all the other stuff, but I still take all the other stuff as well because I'm stacking all the odds in my favor, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important, guys like you, that are going against the grain, explaining your position, and also you as a respected professional athlete where people will listen

to you and they go oh well this guy is such a straight shooter about steroids and about training and about injuries and all these other things he's not gonna lie about this well the people have just been had this misinformation for so long so strong in their brain it's like it's it's hard to change it's hard to change that you know especially if you don't have any experience with yourself like this fucking drug like i don't know if somebody put on instagram i can't believe you ate smokes weed i just fucking hate lazy stoners like that's a pretty strong reaction man like you hate somebody because they're smoking a fucking plant calling you lazy is hilarious

I need to smoke weed to stop me from doing too much fucking stuff just to slow me down to like a normal level and listen yeah it can fucking slow you down you can sit and smoke fucking weed all day and sit on your couch and watch TV and eat pizzas if you want like you know but if you're smart you use it when it's the time to use it you know like uh sometimes i like to smoke a little bit before i do cardio because it opens my broncos and i get a better fucking workout or it's generally in the evening when i'm

relaxing or if i want to do something creative, like I'm writing or something, it helps me, like, think a little bit. But there will be times when it's appropriate and times when it's not appropriate. And that's it, you know? No, I completely agree. I just think that it's a lot like what we were talking about earlier with fats and sugar, that there's this misinformation that continues forever. It's like once you get an idea in your head Yeah, Oh low fat is good high fat is bad and then somewhere along the line you realize that that's bullshit Like what you might realize that you might do the research you might go into the article and then look at the studies and go

Wow, this is insane and how this happened and go into the New York Times article about the sugar industry bribing the But once you get to a certain point in time you realize like most people are not going to do all this they're not going to look into this they're not going to look so most people are going to hear what they heard when they were little marijuana is for losers marijuana makes you lazy you're going to be a lazy stoner i don't want to be that marijuana is bad like jeff sessions the fucking the guys on record saying good people do not smoke marijuana dude you're talking about millions of people you're saying none of them are good people you know how fucking crazy that is i think the people

that smoke marijuana are generally nicer kinder more thoughtful um people and realize that in some way we're all connected we're all we're not fucking independent so how's that a bad thing because he doesn't smoke pot that's the problem oh we need to fucking hold him down and make him smoke pot that's what we need to do but he'll freak out apparently Joey Diaz gave Pauly Shore some stars of death on his podcast and now Pauly won't release the podcast he's like hide it burn it, burn it, burn it with fire. Kill it like a demon. I mean, cannabis is so good

that when you smoke it, which is full of fucking tar and carcinogens and everything, you smoke it into your lungs, it doesn't even damage your lungs. Yeah, I think it's supposed to be a different type of smoke though. Like the smoke that you get, it's probably harsh, but it doesn't even damage your lungs. Yeah, I think it's supposed to be a different type of smoke, though. Like the smoke that you get, it's probably harsh, but it doesn't have the same. Yeah, but the properties of it don't have the same. Like the issue apparently with tobacco in particular, like just regular tobacco,

if you're smoking a regular rolled cigarette of hand-rolled tobacco, just pure tobacco, no other bullshit ingredients, is not as bad for you as a cigarette, but still bad for you. Cigarettes got a ton of chemicals in there. Hundreds of chemicals. By the way, approved by our government. They're like, yeah, pour it in there. What's it going to do?

The government says it's good. It must be good, man. It's going to get people addicted? Throw it in there. Government. Govern what? Government. Ment is your mind.

But marijuana smoke has been shown to be an expectorant, actually can clear the lungs of certain issues. It dilates. It dilates the bronchals as opposed to tobacco is closing them up all the time. I don't know if you're familiar with a study that was done here at UCLA, I believe. A guy called Donald Tashkin. He did it over 20 years. It was a properly funded study. Why was it properly funded?

Because it was funded to look for negative results. So the purpose of this study was to prove that smoking cannabis damages your lungs, just like cigarettes, right? So they followed three groups over 20 years, cigarette smokers only, or tobacco, tobacco and marijuana together together and marijuana only. And the tobacco smokers over 20 years, of course, loss of lung function, a lot of cancers, all the stuff we already know. The middle group was way less. And the marijuana group smoker, like daily smoking over 20 years, there was no increased cancer, there was no loss of lung function.

In fact, slight increase in lung function as compared to non-smokers. Well, they're exercising, taking big tokes. Yeah, that's what he guessed because you're taking in. But not only that, because the cannabis is dilating the broncos all the time if you keep dilating it keep dialing it keep dialing it's going to get more you know it's going to get more functional well it makes sense i mean just it's counterintuitive to a lot of people that think that's negative it's bad for you so i just see it as a super health supplement i don't see anything negative i don't see it as a drug it's just a plant and yeah you get high and you feel good so what's in your laugh it's

silly shit it's gotta be good for you right i agree and i think that people are starting to understand that more now than when we were kids for sure yeah i used to smoke when i was a teenager and in england we mix it with tobacco that's just right until i came here i don't know like people smoke it pure um i don't mix with tobacco now because I realized the weed is good and tobacco is bad. Before, I didn't know. Both are probably bad for you. I don't give a shit. Yeah, how did that get started in England?

Because every time I've been over to England, they do that too. They're like, do you mix your weed with tobacco? I was like, what? Yeah, I don't know, man. It was like I was always done that way when I grew up. I grew up in Birmingham. There's a ton of Jamaicans, you know. So the Jamaicans were the guys that brought the weed in and stuff like that.

But even they used to mix with tobacco. And a lot of people smoke hash. So hash, you've got to mix it with something, right? So people mix it with tobacco. But I think the last time I smoked tobacco was probably like eight, nine years ago when I became educated. And I was like, wow, this cannabis is really good on its own. A lot of people in America, they take a cigar. They take out the tobacco.

They put the weed in. Yeah, and they make a blunt out of it. But you're taking in tobacco and the pot too. And it gives you this weird high. Yeah, because you're getting that nicotine buzz, like head buzz. But you're also inhaling in a way that you don't do with cigars. Yeah. You don't usually inhale. Cigar, you puff it out, right? Yeah.

You get the tobacco, it gets into your body from your mouth, but you don't really inhale deep into the lungs. I like to use hemp papers and also a vaporized extract as well. Yeah. Like dabbing, they call it here. Right. So I do that.

I find the, I don't know, I find it's a bit different between smoking weed and dabbing the extract. Smoking weed, I find a bit more relaxing. Dabbing the extract is like, I'll do that before I go on a bike ride or do cardio or something. And I'm like, whoa. Ready to roll, man. You don't get tired. It freaks you out, too. You literally don't get tired. I know, right tired i know right isn't it amazing uh you can you know whatever you're doing running first of all it's it's dilating your bronco so you can deliver more oxygen but i think also it's the mental thing

they like getting that zone and perceived pain is lesscomfort is less. So you just keep going. Yeah, the guys in Brazil, they all smoke before they do jiu-jitsu. Oh, yeah. Because it helps to be relaxed, right, when you're doing that. You don't want to be all tense all the time. Not just relaxed, but also singularly focused. Focused, yeah. That's America, too.

A giant percentage of people smoke pop before they do jiu-jitsu. Yeah. Yeah, it's a big big thing here yeah bodybuilding as well really i mean i'm the only one that talks about it because all those guys are like scared like uh it's going to be viewed negatively or their sponsors are gonna like you know drop them or something like that yeah well i can tell you like half the guys on the olympus stage they're all stoners because you know it helps you relax after training you can't drink right you know because the calories and if you drink the next day you're not going to perform

so well i mean you can get totally fucking high tonight and you can go in the gym tomorrow morning 100 zero negative effect right zero do you remember the arnold i'm sure you do arnold is numero uno serious token on a little one there i mean that was people were like what is he doing back then yeah it was almost like he was getting drunk or something like that yeah yeah people didn't even think about it and he was the only one it wasn't he wasn't like passing around other people he was the only one on camera smoking yeah the other guys were probably scared on the smoke it when they're not on camera, you know? Yeah.

Well, it's weird. But, yeah, it's still viewed negatively, you know? Like an athlete saying he smokes marijuana, he's risking maybe losing his sponsorship. And I don't give a shit. I don't have sponsors. I'm independent, so I'm a bit more free to speak out. Well, the crazy thing to me was the nfl the nfl saying that these guys can't smoke pot and they suspend them for smoking pot meanwhile it's okay to run full speed at each other and smash into each other

and the massive amount of damage that's doing that's that not a problem. But the problem is the marijuana. Well, maybe the cannabis would actually help them with the brain injuries. Because a lot of studies, you know, with Alzheimer's and stuff like that, it's very protective on the brain. So maybe it could have helped them, if anything. It definitely wouldn't harm them. And even if it's just CBD oil, it's a neuroprotectant, you know, cannabinoids. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we're living in an age where information is leaking out there and people understand things more today than they ever did before. But there's still a massive amount of ignorance that you have to combat. But it's, you know, it's ahead of 10 years ago. Yeah. Right? And I live in Europe. I live in Spain now. I live in Spain now.

And in Spain, it's not legal, but it's legal to grow in your house for your own use. It's legal to smoke in your house for your own use. So what's happened is these collectives have been created. So, all right, so I can smoke in my own private residence and I can grow whatever. Let's say three plants for myself, arguably. So what if there's 100 of us now in this collective, in this club? So now we can grow 300 plants. So that's how it is. It's supposed to be a nonprofit organization.

So when you go and you buy a weed, you're not technically buying a weed. You're contributing to the upkeep of the collective. That makes sense. So that's how it works there. And then in Holland, it's tolerated, they call it. Technically, it's not legal. It's tolerated so they can sell in the coffee shops there and whatever in Amsterdam. So those two countries a little bit ahead, but everywhere else is still not legal.

Like in UK, where I come else is still still not legal like in uk where i come from it's not legal but the police have already stated they're going to arrest people for smoking weed because they consider a waste of their time um so any major city in england you go walk down a street you can smell weed people just walk down the street and smoking weed if the police are there they might say hey you know come on put that. But that's as far as it goes. So technically, it's still illegal, but it's kind of like, you know, the police are not, they don't care about it unless you're selling it. I think Canada is set to essentially legalize it nationwide. I think that's the most recent revelation from Canada. They're essentially ready to just... Canada's always been a pretty good weed country, right?

Yeah. Well, Vancouver in particular. There's a great documentary about the marijuana industry and its impact on Vancouver. It's called The Union. Fantastic documentary just showing how ridiculous it is and how inexorably tied marijuana is to their entire economy in

Vancouver. I mean, it's... The money that comes in from marijuana is just a gigantic portion of their economy, and it's all this underground. Money talks, right? That's why, you know, Colorado is setting such an example of making so much money. Like, there's got to be other states looking at it like,

oh, I think fucking Detroit should get on that train. Fuck, yeah. Yeah, Detroit's a mess, right? And coming back with, like, handmade stuff, there's a bunch of things, like, different industries and different, you know, small businesses are starting to emerge in Detroit that are kind of very promising. But, yeah, that would be a huge factor. Yeah, there's a huge industry out there. Not just growing, all the other. I come here and it's like i'm a kid in a candy shop

you know right you got chocolate and it's like tells you how much thc is in each square we got breast spray man you got butter you got cakes you got everything man you know like yeah gotta be careful with those cakes though yeah well edibles and i always tell people be careful with edibles because if you're smoking a joint and you take a couple of puffs it's going to hit you pretty much immediately to your brain so you're going to feel it and you're going to decide whether you want to smoke some more or not or maybe you want to just put it down right and chill but when you eat it it's going to take 45 minutes to an hour to hit your system. And you don't know what, how strong that's going to be. And if it's too strong, which most of the time it is, if you're not experienced, then you're on that fucking ride and you can't get off for hours.

For hours. And it can be pretty unpleasant. I mean, like too much THC for somebody that's not used to it. You can feel very paranoid very uncomfortable you can feel nauseous you might vomit you're going to get low blood sugar uh all this stuff is not going to be a nice experience and probably then you're going to have a negative view of cannabis like fuck that shit i'm not going anywhere near that again um so unless you're experienced i would just say stay away from edibles or like just have a small piece and wait a fucking hour don't don't be tempted to like oh i don't feel anything i'll take another one yeah then you're gonna be fucked that's great advice go step gingerly yeah go very slowly on edibles

because it takes time to digest it time to get in the bloodstream and time to feel it so most people will eat some and say, I don't feel anything. I'll have another one. And then, boom. I've seen it happen so many times. Then it's too late. Yeah, and it's not going to be over in five minutes. You're going to have hours of that.

And then they're just going to say, that's cannabis stuff. It's bad. It's horrible. But you're fine. That's the beautiful thing. Even after a horrendous, terrifying ride. Nothing bad can happen to you physically.

You might vomit. It's like the worst thing that can happen. But you've got to be careful because I read the other day, right, that there is a level at which cannabis can kill you. So you've got to be careful that you don't smoke 628 kilos of cannabis in 15 minutes. Because if you do that, that could be toxic. That could be lethal. Someone out there is going to try to prove you wrong. Yeah, 1.5 fucking tons in 15 minutes.

If you're going to handle that, good luck to you. I think that's actually the LD50 too, which means lethal dose for 50% of the population. And 50% of the population are most definitely pussies so you probably survived that anyway i've i mean i couldn't smoke a fucking i don't know in 15 minutes how much could you smoke like five grams or something like yeah i don't know in the bong you could do more than that but in a vaporizer you can get pretty deep but you're not gonna get anywhere near 628 i don't know where they came with 628 well it's 627 or 629 i don't know it's theoretical anyway because no one's ever died from it no one's

ever died from it so like what other substance can you not die from it even water is like you have too much water you drown right so i I mean this is pretty harmless fucking substance if there's no there's no feasible toxic level all right 628 kilos I'm taking the piss like you know I couldn't smoke that in my lifetime how often you smoke pot every day damn every day man gentlemen every day take my vitamin C every day as well fish oils resveratrol like all the antioxidants it's a daily thing man i might go i go sometimes with not smoking for a week or two just because i want to have the discipline just right you know to say i don't need to do this every day but i fucking like to do it every day so why not you know i hear you man and and we're not you know i don't get up in the morning and

smoke when i got shit to do because it might not help me do that stuff but if i'm working out or if i'm going to lie on a beach i'm going up the mountains yeah i'll take a joint with me why not why not it just enhances everything you know enhances your your experience enhances food enhances sex enhances music you're preaching to the choir man yeah i know i know you know other people are listening i know i'm saying i'm with you i'm saying i'm with you yeah no uh i mean i couldn't agree more listen man we just did three hours wow crazy fucking went quick right like that yeah i would say that's like an hour and a half or something anything else to say to the people before we wrap this bitch up?

I hate to be the guy that goes on chat shows and promotes things, but I'm going to have to do this. Please do. Yeah. I'm going to be in Vegas on Saturday, and we've got a thing called Super League. What's the date, actual date, Saturday? Saturday is 29th. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to be in Vegas.

We've got a competition called Super League. And this is for bodybuilders slash strength athletes. And it's somewhat functional because, you know, you get a bodybuilder on stage and the general public look at that and they say, what the fuck is this? This is like strange and maybe a product of just taking drugs. And they don't appreciate the work that goes into that and how strong and athletic some of these guys can be. So this competition has two rounds. The first round is lifting. So you get judged on eight different exercises.

You score a maximum of a 12-rep set. So there's that. And then there's a physique round, but's it's done by a computer so it scans various areas of your body and gives you a score on that uh it sounds a bit complex but if you want to go on super league live uh it's got explain everything how long have you been doing this for this is going to be the first one and uh we weren't sure like what reaction we get with the first one, but it's been off the fucking hook.

And I think we're going to get a new breed of athletes that are maybe not purely physique bodybuilders as like the Mr. Olympia. We've got guys coming from powerlifting. We've got guys coming from bodybuilding. There's a lot of guys out there in the gyms around the world that are fucking athletic, strong, freaky guys and girls. We've got both categories that maybe don't want to compete in a bodybuilding competition for various reasons

or they do want to compete in a bodybuilding competition and they want something alternative to do. We've got a competition between Team LA and Team Atlanta as well and we've got interest for the, roll this out internationally. So keep your eye on that man so how do people go to it where what casino is it at super league live and the the contest is in the

city athletic club gym in in vegas which is like one of the biggest gym in vegas okay and so the website for it would be super league live or super league dot live i'm not sure what's super league live dot live yeah dot live super league dot live super league dot live and uh i'm gonna Superleague.live, I'm not sure. Superleague.live..live, yeah..live, Superleague.live. Superleague.live. And I'm going to be there Sunday and a lot of other people from the sport. And I'll invite Joe Rogan if you've got spare time. I'm actually going to be at the UFC Saturday. It's in Anaheim, California. Fuck the UFC.

So, unfortunately, it's a good card. I'm very excited about it. Very excited. John Jones and Daniel Cormier. Oh, great. Is that in Vegas as well? No, that's out here in Anaheim. Ah.

Cowboy Cerrone and Robbie Lawler. It's a great card, actually. It's one of the best cards of the year. I'm just joking. So, do whatever you want, folks, but Super League is going to be awesome, I'm sure. Listen, man, it was an honor and a pleasure. I really, really appreciate you having me. Thanks, Joe.

It's been, yeah, like three hours has gone like nothing. Like nothing. I'm sure we could talk for fucking 24 hours, but it's time to smoke a joint or something. I agree. All right, everybody. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it. See you guys tomorrow.

That was cool, man.