The Peter Attia Drive - #76 - Kyle Kingsbury: Finding meaning, depression, and psychedelics

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

In this episode, Kyle Kingsbury, retired UFC fighter and director of human optimization at Onnit, discusses the purpose and meaning that football and MMA gave him but which also acted as a distraction from his inner demons. Kyle opens up about his use of PEDs (steroids, testosterone, HGH) in college and talks about some of the misconceptions around them. Next, Kyle talks about his battle with depression and a close call with suicide that lead to life-changing experiences with psilocybin and ayahuasca—which really became the turning point in his own journey towards being more emotionally healthy, finding inner peace, and being a better husband and father. *DISCLAIMER: The substances spoken about in this episode are illegal and by no means are we advocating for anyone to use them or experiment with them. There are physical, physiological, psychological, and legal risks around the use of these plants. This conversation is purely informational only. We discuss: Growing up in a volatile home [6:30]; Playing college football at ASU, and letting go of NFL aspirations [15:45]; Kyle’s experience taking anabolics (steroids/testosterone), misunderstood science, and fear mongering [23:15]; Kyle’s experience with taking HGH [35:30]; The Whizzinator [36:45]; Struggles with depression and drugs, and a lack of meaning after football [41:00]; Kyle’s close call with suicide, and a spiritual experience [47:15]; Finding refuge with mixed martial arts, and Kyle’s early success in cage fighting [52:30]; Lessons from Kyle’s first loss in fighting, and training for the UFC [59:45]; First experiences with psilocybin and ayahuasca, quieting the monkey mind, and finding inner peace [1:07:15]; Overt vs. covert depression, depression in men vs. women, and the transition from adaptive to maladaptive behaviors [1:16:00]; Peeling back the layers with ayahuasca: Kyle tells stories about the most transformative experiences with psychedelics [1:19:00]; Does Kyle feel like he has lost his “edge” as a result of his journey? [1:26:15]; Where would Kyle be had he not discovered the power of psychedelic medicines? [1:29:45]; Parenting: Stopping the cycle of trauma, reconnecting to our ancestral roots, and Kyle’s opinion on ayahuasca as a potential tool for kids [1:31:40]; Relationship with parents, blind spots, compassion, and forgiveness [1:37:15]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode:peterattiamd.com/kylekingsbury/ Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia. The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information

on today's episode and other topics at peteratia-md.com. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about, professionally, are how to live longer and how to live better. I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.

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content exclusive for members. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. I guess this week is Kyle Kingsbury. Some of you may recognize Kyle. He's a retired UFC fighter. He's been on the Joe Rogan

experience a number of times. He's currently the director of human optimization at On It. I first met Kyle in person during a hunting trip in early 2019, though we had both known sort of about each other prior to that and seen each other and interviews and things like that. So we immediately clicked and become very close since that time. Now in this episode, which truthfully, you know, when you're interviewing people that you know pretty well, you don't really know where you're going to go. And honestly, this episode and this interview went in places I did not expect it to go in, and for which I'm incredibly grateful. We could have spent a lot of this time talking about UFC and mixed martial arts and all of those things. And that would have been interesting, but we went to places that Kyle has never talked

about publicly. In fact, a couple of things that he hadn't even shared with me privately before. So I was incredibly moved by this experience. So, you know, we talk about his upbringing, playing football, going to JC, then college. We talk about his experience with performance enhancing drugs, something I don't think he's ever really spoken about before. As a little sidebar, we talk about something called the wizzinator, which is about the funniest thing I've ever heard of. Talk about his transition away from football after realizing he wasn't going to make it to the NFL. And it's during this piece that Kyle really opens up about this period of depression in his life and his thoughts of suicide that have been somewhat recurrent and had started as early as the age of seven. He talks about his close calls with suicide, his eventual transition into MMA and UFC.

We end our talk with a conversation around his experience with Ayahuasca towards the end of his UFC career and how that really became the turning point in his own journey towards being sort of more emotionally healthy and frankly, what's enabled him to become a father and become the father that he wishes he could have had. Now, before we get into this conversation, I feel it's really important to have a couple of disclaimers. First, in this conversation Kyle really opens up about his past depression and his thoughts of suicide and how close he was to it on a number of occasions.

There's a very heavy conversation and if you're currently experiencing any thoughts of self-harm or suicide, it is imperative that you seek out medical help immediately. Second, Kyle and I have a very open and honest conversation about psychedelics. The substances we speak about are illegal, and by no means are we advocating for anyone to use them or experiment with them. There are physical, physiological, psychological, and legal risks around the use of these plants. This conversation is purely informational only. Kyle speaks about his personal experiences and how it has shaped his thinking. So without

further delay, please enjoy my conversation with my friend Kyle Kingsbury. Hi brother. How are you? I'm doing great, brother. Happy Father's Day. Happy Father's Day to you. Thank you. I forgot it was Father's Day when I woke up and my wife left me this beautiful little note in the counter. She had gone out running before I got up and it was like, here's your coffee. It was like the sweetest thing.

What did you do for Father's Day today? Because you're not with your boy. No, we head back tomorrow to the bay and we'll get like a Father's Day celebration there. My dad's going to come up from Santa Cruz. So today is just living the dream. I mean, I'm on your podcast and stay in at your house. We're going to shoot arrows after this with a couple of great guys. So couldn't ask for much more.

So did you grow up in Santa Cruz or San Jose? Right outside San Jose and Cupertino and Sunnyvale. Got it. And you played a ton of sports growing up, I imagine, was football your big one? Yeah, I wasn't really good. I mean, I got into baseball late 12. A lot of kids have been playing for a long time. So I just played one year. Football got into it 10. And I just loved it immediately. Like I was playing at that point, you had weight classes and age classes. So for my weight and age, it was, I think, I don't know, right around 105, to 110 pounds when I was 10. So I was skinny like a bean pull. I mean, that strikes me as

big for a 10-year-old, but maybe I'm just comparing you to my daughter. I don't know. I think it compares to me. Maybe it was less, but at 12, we were on the Sunnyville micro-rockets. That was 118, because I remember that was the last year I could play. We had a running back that weighed the last year I could play. We had a running back that weighed the same weight we both had to cut weight. And he was a great deal shorter than me. So he was just stacked.

I didn't fill out too much later, like sophomore year in high school. That's interesting, kids at 12 cutting weight. Yeah, I don't know, that's great. We'd get the seeds or something like that that are salted and just suck and spit for hours, you know, on the drive out to games, that kind of stuff. So when high school you played football?

Football and wrestling and junior high in high school. Got it. So how'd you decide where you wanted to go for college? You know, I had for a long time wanted to play in the pack 10, it used to be the pack 10. I think every kid wants to get out of state when they go, a lot of them want to get out of state when they go to university as you call it.

And you don't want to go too far, obviously. Your parents will throw a fit, my parents would have, but a lot of my good friends that I grew up with I knew since I was 12 years old, they were like, dude, we're going to ASU, it's amazing. And I had to go to junior college because I was garbage, garbage academically. I didn't resonate a lot with the teachers I had. And you know,

we talked about this on my podcast yesterday. Literally, I can count on one hand. Everyone that stuck out and took me under their wing and saw something in me that more than I saw myself. So going to junior college, I went for one year and then I realized I can, if I transfer to a different junior college, it's right by ASU and my likelihood of getting in is much higher. So that's what I did. So why do you think that is, by the way, that high school didn't resonate? We had a pretty high academic school for a public school.

The Wall Street Journal published us as one of the top 10 public schools in the world. And we had a lot of people from China, and Asia, and India coming over. It's even higher now. It's about, I want to say, 70 to 80% Asian, including Indian. And the population is what roughly over the high school? It was huge. I mean, I think we had 2,500 people in our graduate class, senior year. 25?

So, what would it? You mean there were 10,000 kids in the entire high school? I don't think so. Maybe that's the wrong number. 2,500 total probably. Okay. Yeah. Couldn't have been 10,000. Wow. I just mean think so. Maybe that's the wrong number. 2500 total probably. Okay. Yeah. Couldn't have been 10,000.

Wow. I mean, regardless, that's still unavoidable. They couldn't build whatever the portables. They couldn't get enough portables one year. So we had breach the number that was allowed in the school district and the superintendent gave it an okay because his son went to school with us. And a high school that big, you don't actually know

everybody in your class. No, there's there's, I mean, many, many kids that I didn't know from that. But we kind of I mean like any high school you stick to your core group that kind of thing. And I was fortunate enough to have those guys all the way through college and after. I'm still close with a lot of them. I mean, obviously knowing you today you're intellectually curious and you know thoughtful and stuff.

I was find it interesting when you see people who have kind of gone through a transformation of not resonating with any of that stuff until doing so. But I often wonder, was there a precipitating event? Was there a bad experience you had with a teacher or something like that? You know, I wasn't nice in high school or prior to that. I got in trouble from kindergarten on. I'd get into the principal's office, at least three days a week, gotten a lot of fights going up.

I mean, more than the fighting just mess with the teachers. You know, got a lot of fights growing up. I mean, more than the fighting, just mess with the teachers. You know, as a class clown and pretty disruptive. And I enjoyed that. It gave me some sense of control in my environment. I was enjoyed entertaining people and making people laugh. So like, that checks off every box. If I can start riffing and clowning on people and everyone's laughing and looking at me,

then I can get a little attention and maybe be, you know, a little bit of a jerk to the teacher, but it was worth it to me. So it was actually at ASU, I was taking some psychology courses and sociology and communication where I was like, oh, this shit matters. Like, I will, it doesn't matter if I get a philosophy degree

or a communications degree, like, this is, these are things that I will use the rest of my life. And that was the first time where it really felt that way. A lot of kids complain, like, what am I gonna use algebra for? What am I gonna use this for? And I think that having that in college

really made me think, oh, there's a lot to learn. And it's really cool stuff to learn that resonates with me. And in all those classes, I did really well. It was all A's and B's as well for me. So, it's interesting because if it weren't for football, I mean, you jumped through a lot of hoops to get to ASU. You're going to JCs before you get there, right?

And a walk on at ASU. Okay, so it begs the question, right? If you weren't athletic, if you were the exact same guy, but you didn't happen to have ability to play, you know, Division One football, what would you have done after high school? Something Blue called her for sure. My dad, he had a Silicon Valley shelving was a company he created in the Bay, right as the tech boom started and all these tech companies

needed static control shelving. So he was making a lot of money and he would pay me and my sister to build a lot of this stuff. And it was fun for me. It was like giant erector sets. We'd play with life-size LEGO. Yeah, huge stuff. Even, you know, like we'd get into a warehouse,

and Tien, I would be drilling in a concrete and pounding giant hammers down to get this stuff anchored. And that was always cool, and it paid really well, but I enjoyed it. So I liked working with my hands there, and he came from a different era, you know, as every dad is, but he always worked on cars and he knew a lot about things

and then he would kind of shun me from living the same life as him. He was like, no, you're gonna go into sales, you're gonna make a ton of money, you'll just pay a guy to work on your car. You just pay a guy to fix your house because he did all that. He did construction since he was 20.

And I was just laughed at, it was like, these are like really usable skills. It's nice to know how to change the oil in your car, you know, like, why aren't you teaching me this stuff? So thankfully now he's kind of that have had a little bit of success He's happy to show me those things. Why do you think he felt that way? We're jet-grroped. You grew up in the same area? He grew up in all my families from Oregon in the Pacific Northwest and then they moved to California My parents met in Alaska and then moved to California. I think in large part to be by the sun and to get away from their families. And so, you know, I grew up there and I just think all parents want better for their kids.

You know, in that regard and he saw that as better, you know, financial success, stability, those kind of things as better. And were they upset then in high school when you weren't doing well academically? Kind of. I mean, they paid attention and I'd get in trouble a lot at home. I think for them it was really hard to kind of wrap their brain around how you can wrangle someone in at that point because, you know, they fought a lot growing up. I talked about this before, but one of the books that I really have a lot of love for is nonviolent

communication by Marshall Rosenberg, who recently passed away. And whatever that is, my childhood was not. So they really didn't know how to communicate with one another and it was like two rams butting heads all the time. And then they got divorced when I was 13. And from there, that was like the deepest sense of peace I had ever had because it was less stress on both of them. They didn't know how to communicate with each other. And did you and your sister spend time with both of them? Or you said pretty much mostly with the poor? We've had mom got full custody, but we'd see my dad every week, you know, twice a week, something like that. He was still a big part of our lives. And he lived

right down the street. So, and I wanted to see him more because he was a gentler, kinder dad at that point. It was one of your parents more strict than the other when it came to trying to keep you in line at school. I'd say I went back and forth, and who took the cake there? They had different ways of discipline. But yeah, I don't know.

I think they were at a loss, really. But they still, they never said, you're not gonna go to college. The entire time it was, you're still going to college. I don't give a shit if you have to go to junior college for three years. You're going to go to college. So they were pretty pumped when I got a day as you, which is funny. There was a Simpson's episode where there was the great flood and Ned Flanders.

It was like, thank you, Lord. You've spared the righteous and damned the wicked. And he sees Homer floating in a raft and he's like, looks like heavens, easier to get into the narrow zone of state. We played that clip all through college. It was, it was great. It was a feather in our cap. But yeah, it is, it is an easy school to get into.

Yeah, but I mean, it's a, it's a school that also has a great reputation as well. You get in there and, and what ASU's got to be huge. It was massive. It was still, I mean, still to this day. And even at that point, when I was there, one of the most highly populated schools in the country. Huge campus, gorgeous campus, hot year around for the most part. And, you know, the draw for a young male is that a lot of the ladies there, they can't wear much.

They can't hide it, you know, because of the heat. And that was definitely, there was some good times there for sure. So you walked on, and what position do you play? I was defensive end and defensive tackle, I was probably, not probably, I was for sure, undersized to play detacled, but too slow to play dend. So it's kind of an in-betweener. And thankfully you were talking about these great teachers that you've had. One of them was my Strength and Conditioning Coach. Actually, both Strength and Conditioning Coach

as I had it, Arizona State went on to become Strength and Conditioning Coaches in the NFL. And the head of the Strength and Conditioning Department is going to be Joe Ken, Big House Power, as kind of his moniker now, was then to Big House. He's the only guy in Division 1 football history and the NFL to win strength coach of the year in both Division 1 football and the NFL. And he's the coach, he's the strength coach for the Carolina Panthers. Mark Uiyama, he went on to become the head

strength coach for the 49ers. He's I think he's now with the Vikings. And both those guys really pushed me past whatever limit I thought I had. If there's a ceiling, they would push me so far past that I just began to realize there is no ceiling. And you were how old when you showed up? You're two years older than the other one. Yeah, I think I was 20. Yeah, it was definitely an impressionable time.

And I was still working through a lot, not really knowing how, drinking a lot, doing the party thing. We were number one party school in the nation if that's any claim to fame. Twice. I know one of my friends at Med School went to ASU and the stories he told were, I mean, I couldn't, I couldn't fathom what he was talking about.

I mean, I was sort of like, he was speaking in other language, I was like, what did you guys actually do? Who was my uncle? Well, I mean, I can give one example. They filmed a porno at one of the fraternities that my friends all went to a theta chi and they actually shut down all fraternities. Like they don't exist there anymore because of that. So there was there was no extreme. You couldn't think of that that

didn't happen there. I mean, it was really it was wild and fun and I've lost some friends to drug overdoses and many, you know. It was polarized for sure. You know, and there were still people that went there that were, you know, on the grind, and they had all their ducks in a row, but I think there was a lot more people just exploring what it felt like to be an adult for the first time. Did you sort of think about this at the time, like, I'm escaping from something, I'm running from something, or did you feel like you were running to something? I didn't feel, you know, it's funny because in those moments of play and pushing the envelope,

it just felt like we're gonna tear it up tonight, you know, and it was more of a celebration. Like, I never was an angry drunk, I never saw myself as leaning heavily on a crutch. I mean, for a whole year in junior college, I would wake up and smoke pot every day, I'd have to wake up my roommate to light the four foot bonk for me because I couldn't reach it with my hand. That's how I'd start today. And I had all my classes on Tuesday, Thursday schedules, so five days off a week. And even in that whole year, I never thought like I'm over doing it. It was just the thing to do. And now obviously that's, that's, it's all much different. But we'll get into plant medicines, but I think

that was really where it lifted the veil and showed me how much I was destroying myself without realizing it. When you decide I want to go to ASU to play football, was that a means to an end? Where did you think that was? Was there some thought you had him back your mind? I might make it to the NFL. Yeah, I always wanted to play in the NFL. That was the latitude of the tunnel.

And I think there was a lot of things driving me for that one my love of the game like it was it was my greatest joy It was my first legal outlet to let off the steam and because of the positions I played I Really got to you know, I was button heads every single play of every moment. I was on the field once I got to ASU I didn't play much. I really was a bench-warmer and Once I got to ASU, I didn't play much. I really was a bench-former. And at ASU, I had to embrace my role as a secondary guy for the first time in my life. Everyone who makes it to college was an all-star in high school.

You know, and the jump is even higher to the NFL. And I remember seeing a guy who graduated a year before me who had played, he started every game all four years in defensive line. Which if you're a wide receiver, that's fine. But defensive line, that's pretty tough to do that to start every game your entire and he didn't make it to the NFL. And that was like, oh, shit.

All right. Maybe I should think about something else because even if I get playing time, I see your year, it's pretty unlikely that that's going to happen. And there was a lot of guys going into a arena league and Canada football and things like that. And it was like, I don't know. There was a piece of me that wanted to be the best or at least play with the best.

And if I wasn't gonna do that, there was no point. And I think that there was a decision because I could have gotten a scholarship to play at like a D2 school or D1 AA. And I said, no, I'd rather walk on and play with the big boys. So kind of having that mindset going in, I knew I wasn't going to play some subpar level of football, even though I probably could have extended my career there.

It's amazing, I think, for a lot of people that maybe aren't as familiar with that, what those jumps look like between high school division one and the NFL. I think I was having this issue with my daughter a while ago. It must have been during the college football season, and I don't remember how it came up, But the point I wanted to make to her was if you take the very very very very best team in college football The team that's gonna win the national championship and you put them against the very very worst team in the NFL It would be the biggest blowout in the history of football I mean it in as many possessions as you could have that's how many times the NFL team would score and she just like couldn't Understand like how that could happen.

And I didn't have a great explanation for it. I said, I think one, it's just a much tighter selection process. And at the end of the day, once you reach the NFL, you're a professional. And nothing else matters. Like this is your job. But it is interesting. It must be sobering to get there and sort of realize, oh my God, like even if you're exceptional in college, it doesn't guarantee you get to this next level. Yeah, it doesn't

guarantee that you're practice squad. And that's where I was like, damn, and I had a lot of guys from our team did go pro. Some of them played for a few years on practice squad. Other guys actually had like decent careers playing starting in the NFL, a couple started for the dolphins, different teams. And it was cool to watch that, but in the NFL, a couple of starters for the Dolphins, different teams. And it was cool to watch that, but it was like, it didn't seem like there was rhyme or reason to me, because a lot of these guys in college,

they were good and they made progressions, but they just kept getting better. That was the difference. They were late bloomers, whatever you wanna call it, but they kept improving, kept getting faster, kept learning the routes better, or whatever the position was. And I think a big part of it is they also are the guys that don't get injured as much.

I think injury avoidance is such an underappreciated piece of professional sports. I don't know the exact numbers, but the median duration of an NFL player is staggeringly short. It's like three to five years. And so we can sort of celebrate these people that spend 10, 15 years in the NFL, but there's such outliers. You know, the name of the game first and foremost, once you're there, is just figure out a way to not get hurt. And you talk to Joe Can or anybody that's a strength coach, that's all they're focused on. And it's really even in the off season, they might have top periods of time where they're working on guys getting a little faster or guys getting a little stronger, a little more

weight, that kind of thing, but come season. It's just preservation. That's it. Had you done any performance enhancing drugs in high school? No. I mean, I played actually senior year, started with testosterone, I had a guy with susten on 250 and I realized I wanted to play college football, so that was the place. Like, all right, I got to put on some size.

I've weighed about 220. Prior to or after? Prior and then two 30 year was six four six yes, six three and a half. So like that was the time where I think for me it was about if I'm going to do this, let's do this. And being thin, you know, it was like, all right, I got to put on some size, unless I'm in a changed position entirely, but I enjoyed the positions I played. So let's, let's pack on the pounds and I was pretty disappointed only getting 10 pounds. But there was, that was a catalyst to what sleep was. And I had my dad telling me like, you got to sleep better, you got to get to bed on time, you can't stay out all night, those kind of things. And you got to eat well, you got to eat more. And at that point, it was just a numbers game. You know, it didn't

mean eating the food that I eat now is just eating more, you know, getting more protein and more calories in general. So I think once I started to pay attention to that stuff, that's where I was starting to gain the size. And then throughout junior college was testosterone still kind of the staple of supplementation. Yeah, no doubt. And I gained fairly consistently, still kind of undersized. So I think by the end of my junior college, I was about 250, you know, and put that in perspective. I mean, that's big for a lot of people, but there's linebackers that are 250 pounds,

plenty of middle linebackers that are that size. So for the position, still small. Yeah. And then what's it like when you get to a place like ASU, not again, I'm not singling out ASU, I think this is probably true. It has to be true of every division one school, right? Yeah, and I don't want to come across this Floyd land as some. I'm not going to paint a picture of what other people are doing. No, no, yeah, just for yourself.

Like what? What was that step up? It was good because I was introduced to a doctor, a natural path, and he'd for better and for worse. And we'll talk about what that worse looks like. He would give me anything that I wanted. Thankfully, we were doing routine blood work to look at something my father,

who I included on this. We were pretty adamant about. So that's when I first experimented with growth hormone and IGF1. Different things. I think when I realized I wasn't gonna go pro, that was when I started taking a decadurable and with testosterone. And that was when I started taking a decadurable and with testosterone,

and that was great for inflammation and just feeling better. At that point, it really was like, how big can I get? And I still had a ceiling. You know what I mean? I seen your year, I was 268. It couldn't gain a pound more.

And I was having just... And just give me a sense of dose. How much you were mixing decadron and SIPIN85050? Or like a one-to-one ratio of those? No, it was probably 600 milligrams of TESSA PIN8 You were mixing decadron and Cipianate 5050? Or like a wonder one ratio of those? No, it was probably 600 milligrams of test Cipianate and 400 milligrams of decadron, and we... And you would take a week on that.

It's about a gram total. Yeah. Which is just amazing. I want to put this in perspective for listeners. I have a subset of patients who are getting testosterone replacement therapy for, you know, hypokinatism, right? So middle-aged guy who's, you know, you can't get his testosterone back into a normal range with

all the usual stuff. Beginning, by the way, would sleep as sort of rule number one. You don't run a place testosterone until a person's sleeping reasonably well. But to put this in perspective, I would say a normal starting dose of testosterone, Cipian 8, is somewhere in the vicinity of 80 to 100 milligrams a week. And we like to divide that twice a week because the half-life of Cipianate is about three days. So you'll get a smoother dose, a couple of patients will even do it daily.

You know, they'll put in sort of a Cipianate. Cipianate. Yeah, sub-Q injection and they'll do 10 to 14, 10 to 14 milligrams a day, would be sort of a daily dose. And then that's, you know, it's really interesting, by the way, with that. You see no FSH, LH suppression. The natural range is about 11 milligrams a day.

Give or take for men. So that's like where you're kind of me making that. Yeah, that's the part that blows my mind is, we just discovered this by accident, when a patient just on his own decided to start day. Like he felt, started out doing it and injecting once a week and then twice a week and you're cutting the dose down of course each time and then he decided, well, daily must give you the most perfectly smooth way to do it.

And I said, well, yeah, if you don't mind giving yourself a little shot every day, but it's actually pretty, the sub-Q with the tiny needle is not a big deal. So when we looked at his blood, it was really amazing. He was like, it's only paste I've never seen on testosterone-sypionate who had normal FSH and LH. He'd looked like he was not taking exogenous testosterone. And then we tried this with a couple of other patients, insure enough that's the case. I think the highest amount of testosterone I've ever prescribed to a patient is probably

in the neighborhood of 100 and 40 to 160 milligrams in a week. And if you're talking, did you say 600 of Cipune 800, a DECA or vice versa, but they're one to one equivalent. So it's 1,000 a week, right? Which is, I've seen that a lot in athletes and bodybuilders and stuff like that. What kind of side effects do you have

from a dose that high? Well, that's where I capped it. You know, and there's bodybuilders that'll go in the three to five gram a week range. And from what I know loosely, they likely have more receptor sites. That's where I capped it. There's bodybuilders that'll go in the three to five gram a week range. From what I know, loosely, they likely have more receptor sites. They're going to deal with the side effects no matter what's coming up for them. I'd get acne in season, but I think it was from the shoulder pads.

I never washed those kind of things. I'd get acne and stuff like that on the back. I don't know how much that affected my mind because it felt good. With the amount of training that I was doing, it was a positive. Did you understand what testosterone at the time, I know today you have a much better understanding, of course, but at the time, did you understand what this molecule is doing to transcription factors in your, you know, cells and how it's helping you recover better, like, or was it, were you not, I mean, that's maybe a dumb question, what kid in college is thinking of that? But did you just think like, taking this makes me bigger and stronger.

Did you have a sense of why? Well, I understood an increased protein synthesis, things like that. I think there was a book called Anabolic's 2000 by Dr. William Lohelin, which is where I started to take a deep dive. You know, that's the funny. So Lohelin's Principles of Pharmacology is one of my favorite books on the entire study of anabolic. I have, like, it's like, you know, the volume. It's like a Bible. It's a Bible. is one of my favorite books on the entire study of antibiotics.

I have, like, it's like, you know, the volume. It's like a Bible. And it's long and wide. It's not just thick. Like, it's a really, it's a great place if anybody's looking to do this. No, I can't recommend it highly enough, because one of the things I love about Luelon is totally

unemotional. There's no editorializing, right? It's not like these things are horrible, these things are wonderful. It's like, okay, let's go through every single one of these molecules painfully deep and we'll just talk about the relative differences, similarities between them, what they do, what they don't do. And yeah, I'm a big, I'd love to meet Lohuel and I don't know if he, he must be still alive. He's got to be young. He's got to be. He was doing. I think the last one I read was I think he had 2007 was the last one that I have no more recent one than that and I've seen pictures of him and he looks like he's young

If what he in mind had like 2011 so like he's for sure still around if he's writing books He's not in his deathbed, you know hard it is for a book So you're reading the well, which is actually kind of interesting. I'm guessing not everybody who's taken testosterone is reading Lewellen's principles of pharmacology to understand what's going on. One thing I just curious about, you mentioned you were never the nasty drunk, right?

You were, so one of the things that people talk about is well, if you take that much antibiotic steroid, it must change your mood. Did you experience that? I didn't feel it. And that's what I was alluding to with that positive well-being. I couldn't wrap my head around road rage for the life of me. And then to that note, I began to see whether the guy was on like fide friends that had

that particular outcome from anabolic, they were that way without it. They hadn't unpacked their shit to begin with, and that's why whatever amplifiers in them is gonna draw that out. Same thing goes with alcohol or anything else. You know, you give somebody a little fuel to the fire and I think it was Wayne Dyer who said, if you squeeze an orange, what do you get?

Orange shoes. If somebody squeezes you, what do you get? Or whatever's gonna come out of you, right? And that's the difference. Not that I was all rainbows and fucking clouds in the inside, I still had a lot of work to do, which wouldn't come for years later. That's interesting to see at that dose,

because I mean, I don't have experience clinically with those doses. I've seen it anecdotally like in cases like yours, but I've never had the ability to clinically observe what happens at what we call superphysiologic doses, but at physiologic doses, which I have lots of experience with patients, I've never once seen any of these horror show side effects that people talk about. And I've come to the same conclusion, which is steroids are a lot like money. People talk about, well, I like as a rich asshole.

And it's like, I don't think those are necessarily the same thing. He's an asshole who then got a lot of money. And that just allowed him to amplify his ass hole, as ass hole witness. Right. That's holding us. And similarly, like, I think if you take a really aggressive, angry person and you give them more antibolic steroids, you can probably amplify that phenotype. But you don't create that phenotype. That's why I've seen some of the most beautiful people in the world I've seen or some of the wealthiest people as well, because they were just happened to be good people. You give them a bunch of money. Now they can amplify their good through that. So yeah, I think of those the same. But what's interesting is that at such high doses, my observation, at least anecdotally and you, is still the same, which is... didn't... it actually seemed to be quite positive.

This is a topic I'm super interested in because I think that the science on this whole topic is so misunderstood. I think that the fear mongering around these drugs, and by the way, to be really clear, I have no idea if the doses you were taking are safe. My intuition is it's probably not a good idea to be clear. So anybody listening to those who thinks that me having a discussion is somehow endorsing taking a thousand milligrams a week of testosterone, testosterone equivalent is a good idea. I don't think it is, but that's mainly because I don't have data. I don't have long term data. I've seen short term data, right? I've seen studies of eight, 12, 16 weeks where you put athletes on those kinds of doses,

which is effectively 10 times the normal amount of testosterone. These studies don't find bad outcomes. Of course, you were probably taking it for longer than 16 weeks, and that's my whole point, which is I don't know how to extrapolate outside of the normal window. But when you start to talk about normal physiologic doses and all the fear-mongering that comes with that stuff, I don't know what it is about our society. We really love to misunderstand things.

There's a very famous story that was talked about in that documentary that Mark Bell, or sort of Chris Bell made. You know the story about that today. Bigger start, yeah. Forget the boy's name. Taylor, the press when he jumped off because he didn't have post-cycle therapy.

Yeah, I would even put a different spin on that, which is, and again, this is, I don't mean to sound unemphathetic at all, because I know that in the documentary, they feature very prominently his father, whose adamant that steroids killed his son, and if I were in his shoes, I think I'd probably say the same thing.

But this gets to the point of, I would argue that people who are going to take steroids for non-medical use are probably searching for something anyway. There's a void that's probably trying to be filled there. And in the case of this boy who, I forget his name, begins with a T, I think it was like Tyler or Taylor or something like that. You know, high school kid, I think it was a baseball player if I recall. You take 10 kids who play high school baseball. There's a subset of them that are going to gravitate towards wanting this. Maybe it's because they want to be better. Maybe they want to be better because they're sort of filling some other

void. It's probably that that at least increases their susceptibility to depression and not that not that the testosterone is causing the depression. That's sort of my view on that. And I think that's a bit too nuanced to explain, but it feeds into this discussion of which one's driving the other. And that's why when you look at studies of this stuff, where you get the luxury of not having to rely on a person self-selecting into it, and instead you can use the process of randomization, I just think these findings just they never show up in the medical literature of testosterone use. Now you mentioned growth hormone as well. Why

growth hormone? What did it offer above testosterone? I think from a recovery standpoint and I don't know how much of that was placebo effect. And I was taking probably four I use a day, which is not that much actually in the big picture, isn't? No, but I could feel the side effects, you know, like little tingly fingers in the middle of the night, some level of carpal tunnel, and that's also for sure how to do with the waterway I was carrying, and you know, just being a swole for lack of a better word. Did you ever take growth hormone without testosterone?

No. So we don't know what growth hormone alone would have felt like. Yeah, but I do remember, I mean, playing defensive line, you get bumps and bruises every day and I rolled my ankle really hard in the next day. It was like nothing had ever happened. And I was astonished. I thought I was gonna wake up and have blue and purple around my foot for a month. It was a bad, bad spray and literally the next day like there was no swelling. It felt great. I went right back to practice and I could do everything again. So I was like, okay, this is worth a thousand dollars a month.

Like it just made perfect sense to me at that point. How did you come up with the money for all this? Was the growth hormone alone a thousand dollars a month? It certainly was. So without, let's just say that part was sponsored. Yeah. I don't know what it's saying. Let's leave it at that.

And the testosterone, while nowhere near is expensive, at the doses you're taking can't be, that's still gotta be a couple hundred bucks a month, right? Yeah, especially because it's through a doctor and obviously insurance isn't covering any of that. Now, did you guys get drug testing in college? We did, and I don't know if you remember this, but there was a thing, what, I think it was,

I don't wanna get the guys name wrong, maybe we can look it up. Ryan, can you look up if it was Ontario Smith, they got caught with the Wizardnator. So the wizzinator five. I forgot about the wizzinator, the old wizzinator, you know, it was so great. I remember going into the weed shop back then, of course, they didn't have cannabis there. They just had bogs and whatever. And I saw this thing and they had like seven different colors of a penis. Like what the hell is this doing here?

And they're like, oh man, this is for your piss test. And I was like, are you serious? Okay, all right, we got confirmation. It was on Terrius Smith. He fucked it up for everyone. But, you know, I've seen all the different colors, and I'm like, huh, so how does it work? You get somebody's clean urine and he's like,

no, you don't even have to do that. It comes with synthetic urine. And then there's a Japanese heat pad that sticks to the outside, and then you have the other part of it pressed against your pubic hair or whatever, and then when you're asked to pull it out, you just pull out that one,

and it's kind of like, do you remember the Toei water weenie? Back in the 80s, it's got a little click in. It's like surgical tubing, you'd fill with water and then squirt people. So anyways, you don't click click this thing and just free flows and you can push on it a little bit to get it out. But it's always like one and a half X,

whatever the 100 milliliter standard is. Does the drug test or not actually look at you voiding? I mean, I had a guy look at my penis and he saw the wizzinator, but I had my pants on. He didn't make me drop trial. You know, whereas- So what does he do when He sees a purple penis. Well, I have a funny story about that. So my penis, the my fake penis didn't, didn't look far off.

This discussion is taken out of context is out of control. Okay. We'll have him clip this for social. My fake penis looked very similar to my actual penis in terms of color. Loaning that out to one of my teammates who was half black, didn't go so well for him. Thankfully, he said it as long as the test is clean when he got caught, I won't be in trouble. And of course, he got off because he had clean piss. The issue what we saw with the wizzinator in pro sports is that the synthetic urine contained no levels of hormone.

So you'd show zero on testosterone. You'd have zero testosterone, we'd think it was. Zero sex hormones across the board. So then they'd know something was up. That would qualify as a positive test. I was kind of rolling the dice with NCAA. I figured at that point I wasn't going to get, you know, what are they going to do? Bust the guy who was fucking third string, barely made travel squad.

So I was rolling the dice there, they make you go to your ankles with your pants or whatever you're wearing. The team guys, they just glance down, see what you got, as long as it's a penis and you're not pulling something out of a cup, you're okay. In other words, there was sort of, was this the NCAA that was basically

turning out blind eye to this then? The team guys, and then the NCAA, they would have you pull your pants down, but they're, you know, I don't from what I I understand not super weird about it because it wasn't invasive like I hear horror stories from from the guys that are fighting now and have you sought a knocking on their door at 3 a.m. Yeah, the wizzinators not going to work when you saw that or WADA comes right now not even close never would have.

I mean I mean I never really thought about this problem specifically but I mean may people haven't come up with artificial bladders and things that are more nuanced. Well, I think it was, what was that movie with deal football movie? I think it was in the 90s with Latimer. Oh, Latimer. Yes, yes. Jack to the Gills. Yeah, he did the oil change where he pulled urine out of his bladder and then have someone else's injected in with the TCCS.

Yes, yes, how can I be blanking on what that was? It wasn't any given Sunday, was it? No, the program. Yeah, yeah, James Conn. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how often that was going down. I don't think people were going to that with those kind of extremes in college. Maybe at higher levels of sport, but is growth hormone detectable on any other tests?

It certainly wasn't even something they were testing for in college. I know a couple of people who have had that come up for them in fighting now with Usada, to what degree that's accurate, I'm not sure. So, a lot of these guys have lowered up and are fighting it. Whether or not they are successful or not, I have no idea. So college comes to an end, you sort of realize you're not gonna make it to the NFL. What do you think about as an X chapter?

I was just a model, the wizzinator. That's always got to be on the table as an option, a work opportunity. That's all right. That was my next venture. You know, I quit going after my senior year of football and I was really starting to battle my own personal demons at that point, that same doctor. So I talked about the better and worse of having a doctor that would give me anything. He was prescribing me two milligrams an ax, columns, any bars, because they had the four

squares, 60 at a time, 10 milligram, volume, 60 at a time, with fibery fills on both. 10 milligram, no, I don't know. I didn't know it was even legal. Meaning, I didn't know the farthest. It's not legal. He went to jail later. Okay. So he gone, one of my friends died.

So that guy, I'm sure he's out now, but needless to say, also 10 milligrams of Ikeden, 68 a time, five refills. Now thankfully for me personally, and I've lost a lot of friends to opiates, it was very hard for me to take a high dose and feel good. I would get nauseated and puke violently. So there was always like this. You had a built-in governor. Yeah, a built-in governor when it came to opiates. But having had a lot of stuff that I hadn't

worked on internally, and we can dive into that, but it just, these anti-exotic medications were fucking perfect. Like I would feel great. There's a euphoria. I'd sleep very well if I was using cocaine or ecstasy and these are pressed shitty pills, not the type of MDMA we talk about with Rick Doblin, just a whole different ball game. I'd be up till 5 a.m. then I'd take my Xanax, something like that, and that's, you know,

you're playing that roller coaster. So you're already done with football, but you're still like finishing college at this point. And that's when I quit going to school. So I didn't see, I'd finished 95% of my communications classes and sociology. And at that point, in order to stay eligible, I'd switch my degree so many times. There was this bullshit degree called a bachelor and interdisciplinary studies, which is fine. It's like two minor, St. Colum major. And I enjoyed the coursework. But once I got

to my senior year, a lot of the classes became actual BIS classes where you would go in and have to write these long ass papers that you'd present to a potential employer on why it was actually better that you had a basket weaving degree and not an actual degree. And I couldn't stand it. Like it was just so fake to me

and really like not enjoying school at that point, not having a reason to be there, not having a reason to stay at home. Are you taking loans out to be in school at this point? Yes. Oh, yeah. So you're paying to do this thing that you think is not helpful. Correct. You know, I said I'd take a semester off. My parents didn't really fuss over it and really got into pills with alcohol and cocaine and ecstasy. And that was something that I've been doing, but because of football, keeping me, there was a point in time where I knew I had to straighten up each and every year. And really being a fan of the gym and who I was training with, that

also would kind of regulate me. So even in the off season, I was still kind of, I was mindful of the debauchery. And then without that, it was mindless debauchery, really. And I was very depressed. I didn't know what I wanted to do from that point on. And probably came to one of the most depressing points in my life. And to give some background from, and I've talked about the Sonosolo podcast I did a long time ago, which for sure, I don't think anyone here has heard it. But from about seven years old on, I had thoughts of suicide. And like pretty vivid, like thinking of my dad's handguns or his rifles, or how I would use a bow and arrow, put it plainly, I remember having a conversation with my dad on the deck of our condo, and I asked him what would happen if I fell off of this and landed face

first in the concrete. And he said, you probably wouldn't die. You'd just be really messed up from that point on. And but that was me. He didn't realize at the time. That was me checking to see, like, can I kill myself by jumping off this fucking balcony? And how old were you seven? Seven, yeah, six, seven.

And that would circle back at, I mean, many times throughout the year, that would circle back. What do you think was at the root of that? Ah. It was really hard. It was really hard to see my family fight so often, you know. It was constant.

And my little sister is just a year younger than me and I could feel her shift. I could feel her clothes inside and wall off. And you know, being the oldest, my dad was the oldest. He was a little bit harder on me than her. And that stuck out. It was just really, I mean, without too many details, it was very, very difficult. And it really felt, I think at the root of a lot of depression is this concept that it will never get better. There's no latitude into the tunnel. There's no way out of this. And that's, that's how I felt most of my childhood was just like this is not going to get better.

I remember when I was 10, my mom said, I'm thinking about divorcing your father and I said, yes, do it. And my sister was in panic. She didn't want her family to get broken apart. But a part of me knew once that happened, like they would be better people for it, because they weren't meant to be together. And it took three more years for that to actually happen. But yeah, it was incredibly difficult and I think coming to this place now,

where once again, I felt like I didn't have any viable option of doing something that was meaningful with my life. And not to mention, from a neurochemistry standpoint, just playing with all the buttons, up, down, up, down, lack of sleep. You had Matthew Walker on three episodes. I now see that very clearly when I read his book where we sleep, I was like, well, yeah, no shit. No shit, I was messed up in the head. I watched the sun come up many, many nights.

In the beautiful Double-edged sword of an anti-exity pill is that you feel fucking great while you're on it And the second you stop taking it all that unworked through stuff is still there. It's just waiting to come up once that chemicals out of your body and so I had a fight with my girlfriend at the time and There really was this thought in my head the time and there really was this thought in my head that I'll never be loved. I will never find love. And with that, I took every remaining pill that I had and I drove up to the top of parking lot seven at Arizona State. Thankfully, I secured a guard saw me pulling up like 2 a.m. Got out of the car, stripped down naked and walked, climbed one more flat

of stairs and was standing on the edge. About ready to jump and I heard, hey, what are you doing up there? And I looked back. Actually, let me rewind that. I had been to church growing up, but I didn't consider myself a religious person. Most of that stuff didn't resonate with me at all, particularly with regarding gay people going to hell, like I was from the Bay area that really didn't resonate with me. And there was a lot of other things that stood out to me as it didn't make sense. Yeah, hypocritical that kind of stuff. And but as I was standing there before the security guards said anything, that was my

first real spiritual experience. Like this, I don't know if it was the chemicals kicking in, but this wash of warms came through my body from head to toe and it was the most piece that I had felt ever in my entire life. You think it's because you sensed it might be over? Yeah, it was the time to go. For me, like, there was no no reason to stay. And this voice, and it might have been a voice in my head it might have been outside of me I don't think that's the point the voice just said not yet it's okay all right so this guy gets you off the ledge literally gets me off the ledge and I wake up in a hospital

with all my family there. They flew out from California, obviously, to Arizona. I don't really have a recollection of what happened after that other than I remember asking my mom, like, why is this male nurse such a dick? And she was like, you, you weren't very nice to him. You weren't very nice to anyone here. And knowing myself, I just kind of laughed and said, yeah, that's for sure what happened. So I spent about a week in a detox center. They had everything from group therapy to activities. They wanted to wean me off the anxiety medication knowing how long I'd been on that. And then like I had mentioned, there was no real problem

with the opiate. So they didn't wean that. but put me on Klonopin for the week and the first dose I took, I remember walking up to the nearest like I'm fucking high right now. I don't want to be high. I want that. I want to go cold turkey and they're like no it's really important that we win you because you can have potential side effects here and I was like I don't care. I'm not going to take it. I'm telling you right now I'm'm not gonna take it. So thankfully they cut my dose to nothing. That was an interesting time because there was a lot of people there that who had, I mean, not to make comparisons, but people that didn't have all the same opportunities that I had and didn't look the way that I looked and weren't as young as me or as fit as me or any of the things that I had going on.

A lot of them didn't have family there supporting them. My family would come in every day. They were staying in a hotel. They had nothing else to do, but but check out after me. I think at that stage, you know, when you have other people saying, like, what are you doing here? You have so much going on. It's like, you don't fucking know. And that's to my point, when someone's depressed, they see through their lens. They don't see through anyone else's lens. It's just like this is water, right? And so you could have everyone on earth

fucking Obama could show up and say, like, look what you have going on for you. And you'd say, you don't know what's going on for me. And that's really how I felt. When I got out, I had a psychologist and a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist, I was pretty adamant that I didn't wanna go down the SSRI rabbit hole. I had family members that I'd done that and I thought it was just a merry-go-round of

different things. And finally, when they found something that would work, they didn't inevitably have to increase the dosage. So I said no to that. I was prescribed lithium. And I took it for about a week and I remember thinking like I am a fucking mute. My whole life I've been an extrovert. I've enjoyed talking to people.

I've walked through public speaking classes in college. Now I'm a mute. There was no high. There was no low. The diagnosis was bipolar. What dose of lithium did they put? They must have put you on a very heavy dose. Sounds pretty.

I know some people that benefit very greatly from a low dose of that, but at the time it was like, I can't do this either. And I remember talking to the psychiatrist who actually resonated more with me than the psychologist. I've had great therapists, but that guy wasn't it. Psychiatrist was like, all right, if you don't want to take anything, read these. He handed me six studies on fish oil and the brain. And that was my first like, okay,

from like a holistic standpoint of what supplementation can look like rather than just create teen and testosterone. Maybe there's something to this and started something with fish oil. More importantly than that, started creating space for myself to actually look at my life and just create like a distance from the party atmosphere. Maybe I can take a break.

With that started to see a shift, started to get goals. Were you back in class at this point? No, I never went back to school. Never went back to school. I'm still a senior at ASU officially. I had fought a lot growing up. I talked about and I had watched the UFC from its infancy. It was a huge fan of pride. I had no intention of becoming a professional fighter, but I knew what

I was missing and what I was missing in football was camaraderie. It was being able to butt heads. It was some physical interaction with another human. And then the training. I would go instead of training with all these guys and having some of the best coaches in the world, hyping me up before I lift, I'm lifting by myself a 24-hour fitness. I'm on a fucking treadmill. Like there was no real draw to do that I felt like a rat on the wheel. Knowing that's something I missed, I wanted to start training in mixed martial arts just for the training, just for the camaraderie, just for the ability to learn something new

each day and not really know. I don't want to have to design my entire workout in the gym. Let me go here and learn something brand new and maybe make some friends in the process. And probably three months into that, there was a guy at gym owner out in Arizona who ran Rage in the cage was a local very low level show. And he said, dude, you're big, you're handsome, you played football, you're athletic, fight for me at heavy weight. You don't have to do it one time. If you don't want to do it again, you're big, you're handsome, you played football, you're athletic, fight for me at heavyweight. You don't have to do it one time.

If you don't want to do it again, you don't have to. And so I said, all right. And my first two fights I won in under 30 seconds. I'm not saying I was great or anything like that. I want to am saying is there is a difference between an athlete that comes from Division 1 and a lot of the guys fighting heavyweight at the time. And this was in MMA? Yes, mixed martial arts.

And what are the rules? What are the rules? What are the parameters? I think everybody's heard of MMA. People sometimes don't understand the difference between MMA and UFC. Like, sometimes people use these terms synonymously. But let's start with what mixed martial arts means. And analogy I like to use is mixed martial arts is to the UFC as tissues are to clinics.

A lot of people will say, can you hand me a tissue? They'll say, pass me a clinics, whether it's clinics brand or not. So the UFC being the highest level of sport that is mixed martial arts. And then mixed martial arts can have, there's a mameshoes all over the world now at varying levels. But mixed martial arts is the practice of bringing all things together, typically they use four to five ounce gloves that are fingerless so you can grab. You can't strike in the back of the head.

There used to be varying rules, you know, in pride you could stomp a guy's face, you could suck or could you guys face while he's on the ground, you could knee a guy's head while he's on all fours. No, that's allowed in the UFC or in all of North America to my understanding. Can't you not? Yeah, it's probably easier as you can't kick to the nuts, can't pull hair. A lot of this stuff when MMA started was allowed, you know, it was no holds barred. What's the, where's the genesis of MMA?

When did it really first start? I think it's different, you know, for different people, different camps would say it was Bruce Lee, different camps would say. So they would say Jut Kunde was the original. Yeah, and Kaji Kempo also was a different forms of full contact karate kickboxing Jujitsu. We just had John Hackelman on a podcast and he was a Kaji Kempo background at a Hawaii and now he created Hawaiian Kempo. So there's there's merit in both, you know, but it is that bridging of different forms. And the arc of MMA, if you haven't seen it, started off as like, this is what I'm good at versus this is what you're good at. It was like the Cuma Tay and Bloodsport. So you'd have a boxer against a Sumo wrestler.

And then, you know, as it progressed, people begin to have more than one trick pony, a couple skillsets. So I'm good at defending takedowns and I'm really good at stand-up. So I can stand at banks, brawl and brawl, were terms that were being used. More on a great wrestler and I can pound you when you're on the ground. So ground and pound became a thing. And then as it's transitioned in now, you have to know everything in any position because if you have a weakness, it's going to be exploited. And in parallel to this, you've got this Brazilian jiu-jitsu that is being, you know, you've got these incredible graces and all these other guys over there doing this

other form of traditional jiu-jitsu. And when does that start to merge with MMA? Because today it's almost impossible to distinguish. Like, it's almost impossible to imagine MMA without Brazilian jiu-jitsu, right? I think right as the UFC came along, that was the point. Oh. That was the point. Oh, without a point.

And when did the UFC come into? 93. So it was a different group of ownership. Forget the guy's name, Bob something. But he started the UFC in large part with the Gracies. And they, according to their story, wanted to bring in a guy who wasn't the best, wasn't the most fit, wasn't the strongest. And they brought in Hoist Gracie just to illustrate, like this is a technical thing.

It's not that he's a gifted athlete and he's going to do this to you. He's not our best athlete. He's not our best Gracie, and he can still do this to you. I mean, they showed what Jiu-Jitsu was all about. It was awesome to watch that, to see the difference. But now you see even the sport of Jiu-Jitsu has really progressed. There's guys that focus on that, their whole lives and careers, and you see them in Jiu-Jitsu sport competitions, and it's just a whole different level. They're orders of magnitude

greater than some of the guys in the UFC. Going back to when you start training in an MMA gym and have these couple of quick fights, at that point in time, outside of your fitness and athleticism strength, etc. Did you have any formal training in boxing, kickboxing, martial arts? It was only wrestling. I mean, I had, let me correct myself. When I was 17, I went with another wrestling teammate of mine. We didn't want to do tracker or any of that spring sport. So we went into a K, American kickboxing academy, which is in San Jose. At that time, Frank Shamrock was the coach there. This is today, regarded as one of the most prolific training institutes of MMA.

In the world. Yeah, still to this day. But you just got lucky. It just happened in your backyard. Very fortunate that it literally was in my backyard. And we, you know, the first three months I went there, that was about it. I went there for three months and started training for football again.

It was awesome. I loved it. I was just thinking, I'm gonna learn this stuff so I can kick more ass on the street. That was really it. It'll keep me in shape and maybe help me be a better wrestler, those kind of things. It took some time.

Once I got back into fighting, well, once I started fighting professionally and really trying to learn this stuff, in large part I had forgotten a lot from wrestling and most of the things that I learned at AKA when I was young. So, but also having learned how to be coachable was really just there to absorb as much as I could. And out in Arizona, we had some good guys. It's not at the level that it is now.

You know, you have some pretty great gyms out in Arizona these days, but it was still still kind of young in terms of who you'd train with. I didn't know that I'd fight in the UFC or anything like that. It was just fun for me. And again, you could think for the listener, the UFC's like the NFL, and you have an infinite number of other arena football leagues and all these other sorts of things and you could be playing in those leagues and maybe one day Think you make it to the UFC or the NFL as it were yeah, and that was the goal I mean or or pride they were equal, but I it wasn't my dream to play or fight in Japan for that matter I would have happily done it, but I Just keep going you know, and I fought often. I wasn't training

Nearly by the standard I needed to be at. So as I was building this... Kind of injuries were used sustaining at this. Zero. I had no injuries at all early on in my career. It was only when I got to, when I circled back. So I was six and a no. I was now fighting in King of the Cage, which you could look at as kind of a bridge between the two. Still a massive jump from King of the Cage to the UFC, but a lot of guys that fought. Still a massive jump from King of the Cage to the UFC, but a lot of guys that fought in the UFC

had fought in King of the Cage at some point. How much are you getting paid per fight? $1,000 a fight. And how frequently do they let you fight? It was four times a year with the contract. Prior to that, it was $100 a fight in rage in the cage. It's just to give you perspective, $100 to go in and fight. Oh, God.

That's even worse than boxing. Yeah, I mean, that's still in the, I don't know what it is today. You know, this is still when things were starting, or relatively. I mean, it's not like I was fighting in 93. That's when it was starting. Got to 6-0, how to loss. My first loss in my career in King of the Cage. What happened in that fight?

I really hadn't trained much for it because I was walking through people who was almost like Tyson and Buster Douglas, and my coach was trying to get me in there more. And I was like, yeah, whatever, you know, and you think a humbling experience is like, I just had my head in the clouds. It's thought I was a shit,

thought I was gonna just walk through people until I got to the UFC then, I'd really have to start training. So I went into a fight, I think it was Laughlin Nevada, and it just got the shit beat out of me. I mean, it was the first time I got stung with a punch, need me in the head, it was Erb Dean who ref the fight. He actually stopped the fight with me on my feet.

I was getting beat so bad. I had a really good coach, actually. I wanted that fight to take. It happened in the first round. It was a bad beating. My striking coach trained under Dan and Asanto, who was one of Bruce Lee's main students. So he was a JKD guy. And I learned JKD from one of Dan's six students. That's amazing. Yeah. This guy Vince Perez, Mizzola, incredible human. He basically pulled

me aside and he said, look, I can teach you all of this stuff. Things that people aren't doing in the UFC, but you need more than me. You need a team, you need training partners, and all my training partners fought at 185, you know, a weight class underneath me, or two weight classes underneath me. And he was like, you should go home and train an A.K.A. again. They have a team, they're great. There's many great guys that fight in the UFC,

and that's where you ultimately wanna go now. So you should move home. And at the same time, my strength coach from ASU hit me up, Joe Ken. And he said, Kingsbury, I heard you're fighting right now. You got to go back to AK with the fuck are you doing? And I was like, I don't know coach. I kind of like it here in Arizona.

He's like, no, fuck all that. Kane's there. So Kane was the heavyweight wrestler at ASU. He took fifth, I think, in NCAA as senior year in nationals. And he's one of the greatest heavyweights of all time. But he was only two and a half at the time. So I moved back in with my dad and started training at the A.K.A. largely just getting my ass beat every day until I could finally get my skills and endurance

and everything up to par to be able to hang, just to hang with cane for one round. We were rotating fresh bodies on them. I mean, it was a really hard entry point into what being a real pro looked like. And how did you guys spar? Like, obviously, very familiar with boxing where you can spar. You're using slightly larger gloves.

You've got headgear, though. I don't think headge gear does much except prevent cuts. And it's just a little easier to dial back the intensity, but when it comes to elbows, knees, things like that, like how are you sparring basically out 100% all the time? So we weren't using elbows at the time. If you had knee pads, you could knee. Generally, we wouldn't need it ahead. It was full go.

I mean, it was, it was a fight three days a week. Monday was a Friday, you're in a fight period. Thankfully, we've seen the sport evolve and that's not really the case, there's still some smaller gyms and backwoods areas that still spar like that. It was a huge issue in the UFC for a long time. Fighters would get to camp, they'd train like animals, they'd spar as hard as the fight was, and then a week before the fight they get hurt or the week of the fight, they would get hurt. It was a real issue and I think it still happens now but thankfully people are being more mindful of the approach and also knowing once you have that level of experience and you've kind of weeded out who's not going to make it you can scale back and work

technically. You look at things like Moitai which is a form of kickboxing from Thailand, they fight on a weekly basis. So their sparring is just touching, go, it's highly technical, and they're never trying to hurt one another. So I think we're going to start to see that more and more in the sport of mixed martial arts. I did move tie for two years when I was in college, and some of the most painful injuries I had were, you know, blank, shindish, and contact.

I mean, my God. That's the only thing that hurt me in actually inside the octagon in a fight in the UFC was shindish in contact. I could get drilled and actually touch canvas, snap out of it and get back up and I wouldn't have felt the punch. Like a hard rib shot. If I get the win knocked out of me, that hurts, but the shindish in, that's the one where you're like, wow, I might not be able to walk tonight.

Well, I trained, I was trained by a guy from Thailand who God, I still remember his name too. I had loved to know what he's up to now, but his name was Eric and his shins were so badly conditioned, meaning so well-conditioned for the concept of the sport that you could hit them with, not all out, but you could take a baseball bat and somewhat, like just gently, not gently, but like with medium force whack his shins and he was unfazed at a level where even if you roll a baseball bat across a normal person's shin

at the wrong angle, it's very sensitive. And yeah, I was kinda like, look, I mean, I'm done with trying to be a professional fighter here. I go to college now. I don't think I'm going to do the work that's necessary to make my shins look like Eric's over there. It's just not, I mean, it's just, it's dry.

Even though I didn't know much at the time, I sort of knew like, that's just the bridge too far right now. But gives you an appreciation about sport. I mean, it's love, I mean, love Thai boxing. But we would spar mostly with really heavy equipment that would enable us to do this. And we would focus on sort of different types of things. Like there were some days when it was just all gonna be

low leg sweeps and you were gonna be in shin guards and you were really heavily guarded. Cause I always felt the worst thing you could do is train at half speed. Because then it conditions you to be doing something at half speed. You wanna be able to be doing something at half speed. You want to be able to be explosive, so you just have to have more, more barrier there when you're doing it.

But having never done mixed martial arts, it's just nothing but awe I have for how you have to be so prolific at so many things. You can be a great striker and I can sort of relate to that because at least I know what those things, I know it would be like to be great at that, I was never great, but I understand those sports well enough, but then you think you could spend your whole life doing that, and if you're a horrible grappler, you get destroyed. Yeah. And vice versa. That's where it's at now, for sure. Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at guys like Dan Okormi and John Jones, anybody who's great in the sport these days, they came in with something

already in their back pocket, you know, a lifelong wrestling pedigree or a lifelong in traditional martial arts pedigree and then they could just focus on these other things. He's the only have so much bandwidth. There's only so much time in the day to really learn and acquire new skills, to polish them, to feel comfortable enough to use that in a fight at full speed with all the pressure of people watching you

and pay per view and that kind of stuff going on. It's a lot. And I started kind of late when you consider things. Thankfully, I wasn't missing the athletic background, but from the technical standpoint, I entered the UFC as a white belt in Jiu-Jitsu. I mean, there was gaping holes in my game that remained there until I finished. While this whole new thing is going on, how are you processing or what's the state of your mind with respect to this near death experience you've had?

And the culmination of really kind of what's been going on since you were a kid like has this has this now backburner and sort of been supplanted by a new addiction, so to speak. Yeah, for sure. I think having something to look forward to and train for and and really some level of meaning of what I want to do. I didn't obviously know I wasn't going to fight for the rest of my life. I'd already experienced that in football, but this kind of gave me a second go at it, as a professional athlete, in that as I was working towards being the best that I possibly could, those are the things really, they weren't coming up for me because I also had an outlet. If I was feeling weird inside and I go and fucking punch someone's lights out,

like that's a good feeling, right? Like it's letting the let out. It was a great outlet. In tandem, there was a couple catalyst, big catalyst that changed my life forever. One, I started working with a sports psychologist who introduced me to breathwork and some level of mindfulness. And the idea was, because I mean, early on in my fight career, there was no issues. I had ultimate confidence.

I was going to walk through people. But now I'm at the UFC. All these people are as good, you know, as me, if not better. And that negative monkey mind chatter that comes up, it was non-stop. So how do I control that? And the breath was really my first entry point into quieting my mind and finding some level of stillness at least right before the fight. And this was holotropic? No, we would do various forms of slow breathing, trying to get down

into parasympathetic. So at least two to one exhale to inhale, four seconds in, seven seconds, hold eight seconds out, things like that, or 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10 in, 10 out, or 10 in, 10, whole, 10 out. And those were, I mean, fairly basic forms of breath work, but I could feel the difference. And practicing that right when I woke up and right before I went to bed helped me sleep at night because there was, I mean, it's one thing to say, I'll fight again on this certain date, but you sound a contract every day up until that date happens. It's very hard to sleep. Cannabis helped me with that too, specifically THC. He not just CBD, but there was a lot that helped me there to actually fall asleep.

Breathwork being a big component of that. The second piece that really was a game changer was a boxing coach that I had who was Native American and Mexican, and he would take me to the reservation to do traditional sweat lodges. So we do the Tim has called before every fight camp started to kind of zero in on what we wanted and after every fight for healing and reflection. And it wasn't long before I just kind of, I looked in the minute I said,

coach, when are we gonna use Lamenticina? And he just started laughing and he said, I've been waiting for you to ask. And we started working with Silasibon. Have you ever done it before? I had done it before, highly inappropriately. You know, at a house party. Like, creationally.

Yeah, at a house party on alcohol and cannabis with a bunch of people I didn't know. And this is ultimate horror stories, ultimate horror stories. But this is my first real introduction to use intention to have respect and reverence for the plants being used. And in a completely safe and perfect environment,

you know, there's no running water, no lights, you're just out in nature, you know, and it's just my coach there watching me and maybe a couple other fighters. And really that's where I started to begin to uncover some things and really sort, not too much from the childhood, but really getting direction and a true sense of peace

inside that was lasting. And at a certain point, I had a friend go down to Peru, he was gonna hike Machu Picchu. And I was like, this awesome man, tell me how it goes when you get back. So he actually calls me early. And I'm like, aren't you in Peru? And he was like, yeah, yeah, I just got here,

but here's the thing. I can either hike Machu Picchu or I can go do this thing called Ayahuasca. It's going to take five days to do either. And I was like, hike Machu Picchu. Why are you even calling me? That's why you went there. And he's like, no, you got to look it up. So I went to arrowwood.org. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the site. It's got every drug from caffeine to meth in there, including all plant medicines. They give the pharmacology of it, they give the chemistry of it, they give the legality of it, and there's trip reports. So I remember pulling up a trip report from from my awasca and the first thing it was titled, it said the apex of teacher plans. And I thought, hmm, maybe there is something

to this. And so I asked my coach, if he would come with me to Peru because I didn't speak Spanish well and I wanted him there and he's guided me in every meaningful experience. I've had this far and he said, I'll bring Peru to us. And we found people that would work with Iawasco with us locally. And that was an absolute game changer. That's where I mean, that shifted more things in me on how I perceive the world than anything else in terms of a catalyst for that. And again, as we talked about before, it's not to glorify these substances.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do anything, but under that guidance in that setting with that medicine, no doubt, some of the most powerful changes in the way I view consciousness, my spirituality. Were you still fighting while you were experimenting with these? I was, I was, I was, I was fighting when I was using psilocybin when I got introduced to ayahuasca and to be clear I was using psilocybin from then on still to this day. Not often, but yeah, still using psilocybin. When I was introduced to ayahuasca,

I had just torn my labrum. So it was after a brutal fight, not in England, where I had my left orbital blown out for a second time, and my left eyebrow is fractured from a head kick in that fight. And it was my third loss in a row. I had always said, if I get to be a 500 fighter at any level, then I'll quit, because it's not fucking baseball, you know? And I am taking damage as clearly as somebody can punch me hard enough in the face to break bones. It's taking its baseball, you know? And I am taking damage, just clearly if somebody can punch me hard enough in the face to break bones,

it's taking its toll on my brain. At that point, I had some time off. I mean, I tore my labor and it took me, it was a year to fully recover from that. How are you supporting yourself at this point? Are you making enough in the UFC? I was not making enough in the UFC even when I was fighting. So I lived in my mom's detach garage for probably the last four and a half years I was there and I worked at a pseudo strip club. It was a bikini bar out in Sunnyvale, as a bouncer, manager, and bartender.

And I'd go in twice a week, thankfully I'd go on a weekends and pull off two 11 hour shifts, losing sleep of course, not in the best environment, but I still have a lot of gratitude because that put food on the table the entire time I was fighting. At that point, sponsorships were starting to be pulled, people know, or made me not, but there was a Reebok deal that UFC did and they no longer allowed us to have our own

personal sponsors. So, money was being taken out from under our feet left and right, and it was really important that I had a side job while I was fighting. So, the IOS started when you were in this year of the torn labor. Correct. So, you're three, you've lost three. What's your record in total at this point? In the UFC, I was four and four. So a winning record overall, but four and four, I think 11 and 11 and four at that point. Okay. So you're at a real crossroads, which is am I retiring from this or do I have one more hurrah left in me? Yeah. And I wasn't getting

super clear on that from Ayahuasca, I don't think it was my intention to make that decision until I had repaired my shoulder and was able to train again. But all of the important things in my life were coming up for me, the deep work. I mean, everything from childhood stuff to how I treated myself with drugs and alcohol,

you know, seeing those patterns come up, I remember I was in Colombia getting ready to do it and they told us we were gonna use a plant, they used a lot of different admixtures, but there was this plant of a thousand ants. They said, what do you call it that? And it said, well, we're gonna rub it on you in the middle of the night.

It feels like a thousand ants are biting you. And so I kind of chuckled and I said, what does it do? And they said, you're gonna think of a negative emotion that you wanna remove, could be anger, it could be sadness, could be whatever, there's something that keeps coming up for you. And I said, anger, and we got in a long conversation about that.

But it also talked before that ceremony about alcohol addiction and cannabis addiction. And immediately I thought, oh, this is for everyone else. Like, I'm good. This is for everyone else. And then, you know, it does affect a lot of people, you know, and so I just thought of it that way. And then a great chunk of that night

was me reliving puking violently over a railing in my chonies and telling my sister to get away from me. You know, I didn't want people around to see me like that. And I had countless nights like that. And even when I was fighting in the UFC, it was really a polarized way to live. In fight camp, I was a perfect little angel. I wouldn't watch TV, I would read every night,

trying to study things that would help me in fighting from mobility to diet nutrition, you name it, eating super clean food. And then the second the fight is over, it's whoppers and alcohol and blow and whatever I can get my hands on. So that went back and forth for a while up until this ceremony and I was like, wow, okay, time to scale back outside at camp

and really treat myself better. It's so interesting when you look at this statistics, I'm borrowing a lot of this so the numbers might be a little bit off because it's been a while since I've I've read it but maybe you've heard me talk about it in the past. One of the most important books I've ever read in my life is this book called, I don't want to talk about it. We talk about this in Hawaii, we must have. I think so. Yeah, by Terence Reel.

And he talks so much about the difference between covert and overt depression. So overt depression is what most people think about when they think of depression. It's the person who can't get out of bed, who's weepy, who's unmotivated, you know, over eating, under eating, you know, your classic picture of depression, the, who's weepy, who's unmotivated, you know, overeating, under-eating, you know, your classic picture of depression, the person who's sitting there, morose, and their psychiatrist's office or whatever. And then there's covert depression, which is the same underlying pain, but it manifests itself typically with addiction, anger, aggression, workaholism, all sorts of other things that are numbing this discomfort.

One of the statistics that Terry talks about on the book that just blew my mind, because it's so obvious when he says it, like I didn't think, I guess what I realized was, I can't believe I've never thought of this before, but he talks about the stark contrast between men and women. So when you look at, for example, what's the proportion of men in prison versus women in prison? It's something about, you know, it's like 93% of incarcerated people in the United States

are men, not women. Rates of alcoholism, you know, it's about 20% in men, and again, I could be directionally, I could be a little bit off, but it's about three to one in favor of men for alcohol abuse. Obviously, nine to one in prison, drug abuse, violence. All of these things are vastly more in men than in women. But when you look at women with clinical diagnosis of depression versus men with clinical diagnosis of depression, it's the opposite. It's disproportionately men. And he goes through this exercise in his book of adding up the absolute numbers. What's the absolute number of women that are receiving therapy

for depression that have issues with alcohol, drugs, violence, et cetera, et cetera, do the same exercise for men. It turns out it's the same number. What's the difference? The difference is the form in which it exists. And this just sort of blew my mind, right? Which is all of this time, like, you know, whether it's you, me, I think this is my anger issue or this is my addiction or whatever it is. And you realize what's underpinning that is the same pain that, you know, woman might lead to depression that we will label in a certain way, and we're not seeing it this way. And so it kind of listens to your story. It's so interesting because I'm just sort of watching the arc of numbing vehicles to num pain. If it's not this drug, it's the pursuit of this sport, and if it's not that, it's this fight, if it's this thing, and

it's interesting just it sounds like the ayahuasca became along with the psilocybin, became one of the first sets of tools, these plants, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, so if I'm not right, please grind it. No, I'm nodding my head, yes, right now, as you say. But it sounds like that was the first time when you finally saw through the bullshit of, you're on a hedonic loop, a treadmill of one next fix after another. And again, it's so common in men, especially that we're sort of drawn to using our body as a shield, right? Like the bigger and stronger

and tougher you are, the more that seven year old is not going to hurt. Which again, when you say it that way, it sounds so stupid, but that's because we're now sitting here talking like it's a rational thought and not realizing that there's a wounded kid that had to come up with sort of a set of skills to adapt to a situation. And those adaptations were actually very positive. For the large part, they saved you, right? They prevented you from probably jumping off

about going when you were seven. But they start to become maladaptive. And to me, this is the stuff that's interesting, is this transition from adaptive to maladaptive, and it starts to come crashing down. Yeah, I mean, it peels back layers. They talk about the infinite onion every time you go, and that's something that really resonates with me.

You listen to people like Dennis McKenna and Gobramate People I find fascinating is that they've done hundreds of ceremonies and it's completely unique each time they go and I say ceremony Because of the respect and reverence that's used when they utilize these plants But it's the fact that if I give enough space between ceremonies and I come back and have a reason to be there that's important to me I'm gonna get a Lot that has to do with that. And maybe even more than what I came for. And that peeling back at the layer really shows such a deep reflection of what's going on inside right now.

And it also has shown me the ways that I behave due to how I was programmed. It just blows my mind. We just got back from Sotara. We did another four aywaska ceremonies there, about three weeks ago and each one just took me and took me into a different place. Again, they were completely unique from one another

and I continue to learn how to work with it. It's continuing to evolve and I listening to guys like Nenis like that will continue on. We'll pass to 100 ceremonies. If you had some really negative ones, maybe negative, I wouldn't have. I'll be at that by saying highly, highly unpleasant. Yeah, so I'll happy to jump in and ask.

One of the hardest nights of my life was in Colombia, and you know, Ayahuasca has a visual component where you can have quote unquote visions like in a dream like state oftentimes they're very personal what you see. There was a night where I had none of that and all of the purgative effects of I was a so I shit water violently barely made it to the bathroom the entire night didn't sleep one minute.

Pugue finally the whole night it was incredibly hard but it was in many ways cleaning me out and that's I think what I needed at that point. Now, that's physiologically unbearable. But have you had, I mean, I've had one experience on Iowaska that was emotionally unbearable. And I'm going to get right there. Yeah, those are the ones that interest me. Having had it at night like that, generally speaking, for the most part, and I've done no 26 ceremonies with ayahuasca, there would be some level of back and forth. So if I had a really challenging time physically, I could purge, and then I'd feel euphoria. If I had some challenge emotionally, maybe I'm reliving some hard memory from my past, I would see within the same time span within, I don't know, 30 minutes, that other side of that coin and see the beauty in it, and realize all the things that it gave me,

and understand it with a new perspective. My second to last night, and Costa Rica recently at Soltara, was for sure the hardest night of my life. I had my first dose early on, and didn't feel a whole lot, and it was very peaceful, and then I asked for a second dose And it was my intention for Healing and I remember asking And then you can argue one way or another what how much intention plays plays a role in this

I think it plays a huge role But I remember opening the door to any and all emotional and mental healing and if there's anything left from my childhood you guys emotional and mental healing and if there's anything left for my childhood you guys Now I'm 37. I've done a number of ceremonies with ayahuasca and even higher number with psilocybin another MDMA many things and I've worked through a great deal of stuff with my childhood So I didn't think there was a whole lot left and I just asked like if there's anything remaining for my childhood Please show me It was fucking everything. It was the entire night. I made it back to the room. Ceremony had ended and it kicked off and threw a whole second ceremony. And it was

almost unbearable at many points. I remember just begging for mercy. Like, please, I've seen enough. Let's, let's, we can run this back a different time. Like any trying to rationalize or, or beg for a way out. So I wouldn't have to keep seeing this into pain or just a small picture of this. Sometimes if I was to have a vision, it's like watching from the third person or watching a movie and I can see from a different lens. This was like reliving it for the first time. Through your lens. Through my lens. First person, like it was happening to me, the exact same feelings I was feeling as a six or seven year old or 15 year old in that moment,

all the fear of my father. My mom screaming at me and inch from my face and spit flying into my mouth. Things like just, it was incredible. And it's so real, but it just kept going and going and going and I realized, holy holy shit like all that's still there Finally as the sun came up, I just kind of surrendered to it and that's one of these Cornerstones that I've learned through working with the plants is you're not in control

I'm not in control anytime. I do these things. I can I have some level of direction, but really what I'm being shown is for me It's not happening to me. So the ability to surrender that and let go of trying to change it really helped. And then having a degree of gratitude for my parents knowing they were doing the best they could with what they could at that time. And also seeing how hard it was for them growing up. And then seeing my son, that's really where it shifted. We have a four year old son named Bear and seeing him and realizing like,'s really where it shifted. We have a four-year-old son named Bear and seeing him and realizing like that's where it ends. Like that's where it

ends. We all want to do better for our kids than than what we were given and then I applied everything from finances to education to what kind of person they become. But knowing that he will never experience what I experienced, or what my dad experienced, or my granddad experienced, that generational pain is gonna be gone with him, and seeing that I had so much gratitude for him, and just knowing like, oh, okay, this breaks here.

Like, that was really cool. And second, I thought that it all washed away, and I felt you for it, and I felt gratitude. And I just just it was For sure the hardest night of my life and one of the most beautiful in the end by far There's not much to add to that because it's funny I had made a note on my page to kind of come back to this point all I had written down was break cycle son Do you feel that part of your edge is gone as a result of this journey? Yeah, there was a fire that was in you before that part of your edge is gone as a result of this journey?

Yeah. There was a fire that was in you before that was partially destructive, partially destructive. When you were balancing those two things, there were moments when the destructive side was winning, and then there were moments when the constructive side was winning. But it's hard to look at most professional fighters and not realize how much pain unfortunately is at the root of why they're doing what they're doing. It's very difficult, I think, to put yourself in the position of getting in a ring and fighting.

I know this because I did it. You've done it professionally. I never did it professionally. There's so much pain that predisposes a person to be willing to do that. Now I'm sure there are exceptions to this. I'm sure there are people with the most wonderful childhoods who have ended up becoming fighters, but I used to study boxing at a level that would border on me getting an honor every PhD for it.

And I can't actually think of an example of a professional boxer that I had studied who wasn't fueled by some awful thing that had happened to them. It can be something little, but oftentimes it was not. Right, oftentimes it was generational and misery. Do you sort of feel a bit remote now from that sport in the way?

I mean, I'm sure you still enjoy it, but do you also... I mean, is your relationship with it complicated as a result of this new insight? Or is these new insights? I mean, I, for sure, have let go for a long time after retiring. I retired five years ago this month actually. And I knew I wasn't going to fight again, but I still love the sport. I wanted to watch every fight, never mystify trained. I didn't do striking because I knew that would lead me to fighting again, but I did a lot of jiu-jitsu, competed in it a couple of times. And I think now I would call myself a casual fan. I still have a lot of gratitude for what If I catch it great, if I don't, it's not a big deal to me. It didn't necessarily change the way I look at fighting.

I have a lot of gratitude for what fighting gave me and what fighting taught me. And I feel very fortunate that I retired at 32 years old. And retired without the catastrophic injuries that many people leave with. Yeah, yeah. And that's huge. I want to be able to read to my son

and all of our children and then chase them around and play and be the data I want to be, you know. But with that chip on my shoulder, yeah, that's for sure washed away. I mean, I remember when I first started fighting, I just wanted to... There's a line in Fight Club and forgive me if you've heard me talk about this before, but there's a line in Fight Club where Edward Norton's character beats the shit at a Jared Leto, the blonde guy. And Brad Pitt looks at Edward Norton and he says, what the fuck is wrong with you?

And he just says, I just wanted to destroy something beautiful. And that's it, like that resonate with me. I wanted to beat the shit out of people. And over time that shifted to, I just want to be the best version of myself. And then now I see that still being the case, but it's from a much different lens. Like what being the case, but it's from a much different lens. Like what being the best version of myself is applies to so many more things outside

of athleticism. And I think that's a likely transition for people who have started to age and whatever. You know, there's a lot of older people like, oh, you have an age, you're 37, but I feel different than when I was 27. Sure. I mean, 37 year old athlete's an old athlete. So you're not even halfway done life, and yet the last four or five years have probably been some of the most important.

Not that it's necessarily productive or constructive. Do you ever ask yourself the question, like, what do you think you'd be doing right now if you hadn't had this fortuitous set of events meeting the right boxing coach being introduced to the plant medicine and Being able to sort of extract from it what it gives you because I don't think the plants aren't neat They don't give you little turnkey. Just take this. It's all okay. It's really messy It's really messy work and it's as much about the work you do before and after as it is what you do In under the direct influence of the plant but but if you hadn't been as lucky as you've been to experience that, I mean, what's a 37-year-old

former UFC fighter doing who hasn't worked through the issues you had? Because there's a lot of those guys out there. And this isn't about the UFC. This is like maybe someone who's never thrown a punch in their life, but they're still suffering from the same pain. Yeah, a lot of, I mean, I think the cliche thing to say is dead or in jail. I don't think that applies to me.

I think I'd really turn the corner, but I wouldn't say it's far-fetched to think that I'd still be fighting in some low-level show getting the shit kicked out of me, losing brain cells. I for sure wouldn't be with Natasha, my wife. I mean, in many ways, we worked together for about a year before we did

Ayahuasca for the first time and like that changed the course of our relationship. It unpacked so much of the arguing that we had allowed me to see things in myself that she could but I could not and vice versa. As we grew as individuals we grew together in our relationship and there's no way that would have worked out how to just continue to fight and treat myself the way that it was. You know. So I think that's a pretty, if I look at probabilities, that's probably the highest probability is that I'd still be fighting somewhere, making peanuts and taking my heart. Yeah, getting hurt regularly. How does all this sort of shape the way you think

about raising your son? Because you alluded to the most important point of moment ago, which is if nothing else, the cycle of pain and shame and trauma and all that stuff, at least it stops with you now to bear, but what else do you think about as far as like, because now it's beyond not just having him be hurt but Showing him something. Yeah, what can I give him you know in the world?

And I think a lot of things fascinate me People talk shit about the paleo diet and that's fine and what did paleo man actually eat and all that and yeah I get it I get it from both sides but to think through the lens of how our ancestors lived that fascinates me This is a huge giant test and it's a huge test of what we're doing now with everything that's in the modern world that's being done for the very first time. What are the ways that we can reconnect to our roots

and still live in the modern world? And I think when I think about things like that, what are the most important pieces that I've learned and what are the most important pieces that I'm learning about now, I want him to have some degree of confidence and I think martial arts is really good for that. I don't necessarily want him to fight, but that's his decision. And it'll always be his decision, even if he says, fuck martial arts, I want to play piano. And that's totally cool. I have to let go of that. But still giving him the ability to to try all these things and see what he enjoys. He loves, I mean, he's athletic,

both me and my wife were both athletes. So that's not confusing to me, but he's doing Jiu-Jitsu now. It's pretty early, but it's kind of the equivalent of tumbling or gymnastics. And he absolutely loves it. And our wrestle time is probably the most fun. You know, we have a hundred square feet of MMA mats

in our living room. So we can do yoga, we can roll, we can do whatever, and rough house, and we can play soccer or Frisbee, and those are all things that he loves, but he doesn't love anything as much as wrestling me. So like, and getting him into Jiu-Jitsu now, it's pretty cool to see that. I don't know how long that's gonna last,

it really doesn't matter. Getting back to this ancestral stuff, I think it's critical that we at least try to find some right of passage, especially for our young men, to bring them into adulthood. And I think that Ben Greenfield's buddy Tim Corcoran, he's doing a lot of good stuff. He has these wilderness survival camps for father and son. When the kids are old enough, he takes them out there and out there and they're they're solo, you know, or they're in a small group And it's just him kind of watching over And they they learn how to build fires they learn how to feel safe in the environment They learn how to forge wild mushrooms and different things that they can survive on and I think that's an incredible piece

Taking it a step further And again if we're having that conversation with the DEA sitting on the couch, I don't know that I'd say this, but I think it's a very strong likelihood that I'll be taking him to the Amazon or maybe not me, maybe Uncle Aubrey will or somebody else. Because oftentimes that was the case in right of passage, the kids would have to leave their parents and go off with the elders, the aunties, the uncles, and go through their work. And I think having a close uncle like that who also has experience with these things, taking him to the Amazon for a ride-up passage with something like IWASCO would be really transformative

and powerful for him. And to most people hearing about this for the first time, they're going to be like, that's fucking nonsense. Like that. You're right. You lost me here but I know quite a few people who are some of the most beautiful humans I've ever met that did that. Perungi being one of them. He's an incredible musician, one of the most kindhearted people I've ever met and he his first

ceremony was when he was 11. So it's not to say that happens for everyone, but again, if you understand set and setting and who are really good practitioners, and that's something I say a lot of times is there's black belts and there's white belts and martial arts, there's black belts teaching, I waska and white belts teaching, and there's everything in between.

And some people spend a week in the Amazon and come back and say, I'm gonna give this to all my friends and everyone I know. And it can have really bad consequences from that. So, you know, having a place that has been vetted at least by somebody you respect and know, I think is critical when it comes to these things because, as Aubrey says, you're performing psychic surgery and not done incorrectly.

You can leave some really lasting damage, but correctly, it can be everything that I see in it, everything that dentists see in it. Yeah. And anyone listening to this who has not yet read Michael Pollins how to change your mind to have such a great story, teller and a great writer take on such an important topic, I think it's hard to come away from that without realizing that there's a lot here that we need to understand better, but the promise is enormous.

Yeah. Yeah. And we do need to understand it better. There's no doubt. Under those circumstances, I think I can give to him a lot of things. You remember being in high school thinking, maybe you didn't, because you had boxing, but I remember being in high school thinking, like, nothing is more important than this, than how I'm perceived by my peers status,

things like that popularity, who my friends are, what kind of girl I'm going to date. And like when the world ends, I'm going to grab upon graduation day, what am I going to do? And those kind of things. And there's a lot of weight and heaviness to that environment, especially now when you see kids that are glued to their iPad and you got eight year olds with cell phones and things like that. It's really hard to get them to unplug and to see the big picture. And I think I think a medicine like that could be really important to reconnect them to what matters and you get them to see with the wider lens to things that matter to them at that point in time.

I think it could be a great tool for young people. It's amazing how has your relationship come full circle with your parents? I mean, is it just this incredible place of forgiveness? Is it still difficult? It's funny, you say that because right after this ceremony, or series of ceremonies in Etzaltara and Costa Rica, my wife and I flew back to the Bay Area where our son's being watched by my family,

and then we all flew out to Porto Vierta for a family vacation. And there's a famous quote from Terence, I think it's Terence, but can I know it's Rondas, where if you think you're in light and spend a week with your family. It's like, fuck man, I went from one ceremony to the next, and Ed came with its own set of challenges, for sure. But as far as my relationship goes, I have a great deal of compassion for them. I've also learned from the medicines that everyone walks their own path. It's not up for me to decide how or when they should learn their lessons.

And just as it was the case with me and my wife, I can't always see what's going on where I'm fucking up. Everyone has a blind spot. So somebody that's close to you might be able to see what's going on in you better than you can. And it certainly was the case in my relationship. And I can see all the faults that my parents have that they don't see, but it's not up to me to decide that. They will learn their own lessons at their own pace

and they may go to the grave without having learned some lessons. That's okay, I'm for sure gonna do the same thing. But that compassion, to me that's one of the most powerful parts of the story, is to feel an experience empathy for another person who may have indirectly or directly hurt you. And to realize, wow, they didn't mean to hurt me, or even if they did mean to hurt me, which is not the case, I think, in your situation, but this is the set of circumstances for them. And that sounds crazy, right? That sounds like we should accept horrible things that people have done to us. But in reality, what's your choice?

Yeah. And something that I've gathered too is forgiveness has very little to do with the person I'm forgiving. It is everything to do with taking that fucking weighted vest off of me because I'm held down by that. Whatever anger or pain or resentment that I feel towards another person the longer I hold on to that They might not even fucking know it might not be on their radar But I'm keeping that in me and it's affecting the way that I go through the world So if I can release that what greater gift can I give to myself but alone the other person I'm forgiving?

Well, I want to thank you for being you you know, so open about such difficult topics. There were a whole bunch of other things I thought we were going to talk about that were super nerdy and science and stuff, but I get to talk about that stuff all the time. This was, I thought this was far more interesting, far more valuable, and I honestly, I think more people will find this resonance, so I really appreciate it. Awesome, brother. Thanks for having me. Happy Father's Day.

Yeah, happy Father's Day, brother. You can find all of this information in more at pterotiamd.com forward slash podcast. There you'll find the show notes, readings and links related to this episode. You can also find my blog at pterotiamd.com. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my subjectively non-lame once a week email where I'll update you on what I've been up to, the most interesting papers I've read, and all things related to longevity, science, performance, sleep, etc. On social, you can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, all with the ID Peter, ATF,

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