Ryan Root details his evolution from a bullied teenager to the kingpin of "Operation Cyber Juice," an illegal steroid empire generating over $1 million annually through sophisticated money laundering and a compartmentalized supply chain. He argues that prohibition fuels black markets, comparing steroid regulation to marijuana's history, while explaining how unregulated dopamine drives manic states akin to bipolar disorder. After serving six-and-a-half years in prison, Root now operates a legitimate TRT clinic, leveraging his empirical data from 20,000 users to challenge medical stigma and advocate for education over prohibition as the path to public health. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Operation Cyber Juice Origins00:09:57
Your story is super fascinating.
The title of the DEA sting they had on you was Operation Cyber Juice.
What a great fucking name.
It has a nice ring to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, for me and for the people listening, give me just a brief background on how you got into this whole world of testosterone and growth hormone and all this stuff.
It started when I was younger, probably about 13.
I was underdeveloped, I was skinny, small.
I used to get, and I started to get picked on for being so skinny and small.
So at that point, I hit the gym and I never looked back.
But I was still behind all my peers.
Like I would, no matter how much work I did, it seemed like I had to put in twice the amount of work to get, you know, to where my peers were.
And if my peers, you know, did any kind of work, they would vet surpass me.
So at 23, I did my first testosterone cycle.
I actually did.
Some one milliliter of sustenance a week for anybody who knows what that is, it's like a testosterone blend, and 10 milligrams of D ball a day, which is a very moderate blend.
Now, you know, at the time it was all I could take or afford, but it's a very moderate blend.
And I hyper responded, which means it just absolutely dramatically changed the quality of my life.
I put on 30 pounds of muscle, I put 100 pounds on my bench in five weeks.
I just absolutely transformed into a different person.
Wow.
So, and this led to a lot of other changes.
The way people treated me, the way people saw me, all of a sudden I was getting respect.
Suddenly, you know, I was this big, very impressive looking person who everybody wanted to befriend.
And so, for instance, like I would, you know, now I would walk into a bar and everybody's head would turn and they would part in front, like the crowd would part in front of me and let me just, you know, to let me pass.
I had a while I was in college, I was a plumber and I hated this job.
I was terrible at it.
But as soon as I started taking steroids, my boss, just because of my impressive stature, would um, he gave me a raise for no reason, absolutely no reason.
Like, um, the world around me just changed.
Everybody treated me, I was suddenly respected.
Uh, um, and the world after testosterone and its derivatives was vastly better than the world before.
So that's what led to the passion.
I've always thought my My personal experience of it was that when you were too young, it kind of like stunts you for the rest of your life, or it kind of fucks up the biochemistry of your body and the development of your body and the natural testosterone that your body produces.
You know, that's interesting.
And the popular thing is to say that and regurgitate those facts that you've read.
Now, if people start it too young, like, you know, before maturity, like, you know, in their teens, like, you know, 13 or something, you know, that's a different.
That's different than using it after maturity, such as in your early 20s.
For me, for many people, especially, it's getting more and more understood that there's a lot of people who have lower hormones even in their 20s.
And that has the same effect that it did for me, just absolutely dramatically improving your quality of life.
So, to answer your question, when you take exogenous testosterone, or that's testosterone from the outside, it does shut off your natural production.
But that natural production can be brought back to baseline if, and there's plenty of anecdotal and empirical evidence that shows that, you know, after about a year,
if you take it for, you know, about a year, and this is all just approximate, just because there's a lot of different, You know, a lot of evidence and a lot of different conjectures, but you know, around a year, you can go out, then go on a protocol that will jumpstart your HPTA, which is your hypothyroid, pituitary, testicular access, and bring your levels back to baseline, back to whatever they were.
Oh, really?
Before you started.
So, the whole idea is of, and a lot of people just preach this, but it's really just regurgitation of antiquated notions and dogma.
And I'll say that a lot because there's a lot of antiquated notions and dogma from the Endocrine Society, which has been widely debunked.
And we're still debunking to this day.
But only long term abusive use, long term use or abusive use has been proven to permanently affect your natural testosterone production.
The other reason that I never really liked, another one of those kind of like negative effects that I've always been aware of is like the gut that people get.
Like the steroid gut, like one of the people that is most widely known for it is Joe Rogan.
I mean, he talks wide, you know, openly about taking TRT and growth hormones since he was, you know, for years, since he was probably in his 30s.
And he has that like crazy, like bold gut.
A lot of people talk about that.
Yeah.
How real is that?
And is that what his gut is from, the testosterone and the testosterone replacement therapy?
Yeah.
So that's an interesting question.
And when you do research on that, nobody knows exactly.
The real reason that happens is there's a lot of different conjectures.
All the bodybuilders, too.
Like, if they'll see them out there, they'll have a big bubble gut.
Yeah, and you do notice it.
But if you notice when the bodybuilders go on stage, it's gone, right?
So, when it's time for a show, so is it a function of the calorie intake that they have to have in order to put on all the muscle mass?
And then, you know, by showtime, they can reduce that.
Is it a function of a lot of people say, oh, yeah, stuff makes your organs grow.
Wow, that's not necessarily accurate.
Yeah, doesn't it make your heart grow?
Like, enlarged heart?
I have a friend who does it who's been doing it for years too, and he says he has to always go get his heart x rayed to make sure his heart's not super enlarged.
Abusive levels can cause ventricle hypertrophy, which means an enlarged heart.
It can, abusive levels.
But if you keep it to moderate levels that is within the realm of what your body would naturally produce, then it doesn't cause these issues.
So there's a complete, and that's where among the naysayers of testosterone are the people who try to.
I don't know, say that it's more dangerous than it actually is.
There's not a distinction between abusive use of testosterone or its derivatives and safe, moderate use.
Anything taken in high doses is bad for you.
You can die from water.
If you drink too much water, you will die.
That's a fact.
And that distinction isn't made through a lot of people who speak out against the use of testosterone, especially younger people.
I'm talking about people in their 20s.
Why?
Why would people speak out against it?
Like, I don't understand why people would.
I mean, I understand, like, people like myself, I'm kind of like scared to try it.
I don't know what's going to fuck my body up, but like, people, why would people be so, so anti?
And it comes down to a very, it took a very similar path to marijuana, right?
So if we look at the history of marijuana, there was in the 50s, there was something called reefer madness.
Now, you and I don't remember this.
I learned about it, but older people will actually remember reefer madness, where that led to all the laws against marijuana that led to its classification as a narcotic, narcotic.
But Reefer Madness came out and actually taught people that if you smoke marijuana, you would go crazy.
You would end up in an insane asylum.
And it was almost certain death.
Right.
It took how long?
Let's see, just now, like maybe 40 years since the 50s, four decades, over four decades to finally debunk those myths, which are just now coming into light that this actually isn't very dangerous.
It's actually very helpful in a lot of instances.
And it has medical use and therapeutic use.
Right.
It's the same thing with testosterone.
So it was especially when the war on drugs was going on.
So testosterone became classified as a controlled substance, a schedule three controlled substance in 1993, the Steroid Control Act.
And it happened at a time when the platform that every president was running on was say no to drugs, war on drugs.
Right?
This was just the platform they used to get elected.
Right.
Yeah.
It's a political thing.
It's a political thing.
And And it just got lumped into these drugs that are dangerous.
All drugs are dangerous, make them illegal.
And so just a stigma started.
And part of the reason why the medical community and the endocrinology, the endocrine society, which has notoriously poor protocols and an understanding of these hormones, you know, that's when it was just kind of, for optics reasons, they just stayed away from it, shied away from it, tried to, you know, everything.
You know, poor information came out about it that led to a negative light, and it just was stigmatized.
So now we have dogma and antiquated notions that stigmatize something, and it's testosterone is being realized for the beneficial drug that it is, but it's taking a long time, just like it did with marijuana.
It's following the same exact path.
The Dopamine of Helping Others00:04:17
So, how did you transition from using it personally, seeing how it changed your life and the way you're changing your relationships and everything else?
How did you eventually get into it?
Selling this stuff and like having your own online business.
That's so you want, and then you pitched it to Shark Tank too.
Is that right?
Shark Tank, I, yeah, there is, there was an article that came out about myself, Shark Tank, and steroids, which was, which was just incorrect.
It was, had incorrect information.
I did almost get on Shark Tank, but it was for my supplement company.
Okay.
I had a supplement company too, you know, which was called My Custom Protein.
And it, it, I customized protein blends for each person depending on what they needed to yield the best results for them.
And that almost made it to Shark Tank.
It was very close.
But okay, so back to how I got into this.
So at the time, when I was 23, when I was taking this, I was in college for biochemistry.
And this passion, this new passion that I developed for this, led me to tailor my degree.
I started taking all the courses to learn specifically about hormones.
And then I did my own research, just voraciously, just studied and researched every day.
It was just fascinating to me.
So, when I eventually learned a lot and I was learning in school as well, other people saw my transition and they wanted to know how I did it, you know, logically.
And so, when I started showing people exactly like, okay, this is how we do it, you know, this is where we can get it.
And, you know, this is what you should do, here's the science behind it.
And I started transforming other people's lives the same way I did mine.
And when people, what also drives passion is this, is, um, When you have the sense that you're a part of something bigger than yourself, right?
And I'm going to refer to this a lot in this interview, so I might as well start this explanation now.
Is I also studied, while I was in prison, I studied neurobiology quite a bit.
So it just led to a complete understanding of human behavior, and it's much more pervasive than people think.
So it led to an understanding of human behavior and why people do the things they do and what drives things like passion and motivation and people to do things.
So it's called the dose response.
Dopamine.
Oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, the dose response.
So, when you connect with people and help people, and you're a part of something bigger than yourself, that elicits a dose response, mostly dopamine, which is another word for what we call passion or ambition or motivation.
That's just a release of dopamine.
So, when I was able to start helping people transition their bodies and they showed me respect and admiration and appreciation, it elicited a dopamine response in me, which drove me to keep going, to keep doing that.
Right, you're getting rewarded for the hard work that you're doing precisely, yeah, precisely.
Yes, so and you're going to school for biochemistry, yeah, okay.
So, so now, um, what when I start developing a passion now for helping other people do this, not only myself, because I'm being rewarded through these dopamine responses, and people are really, I start becoming like a name in my local city for if you want to look good and you know, beat your own personal records and really change your life, then you come to this guy.
So then I started, you know, well, I got to monetize this.
So I started, you know, developing sources to be able to get it myself and then just sell it to people.
It was just a local thing at first.
And it was still the, you know, more people came, more people came.
And then pretty soon I was like, so I also became very adept.
I'm a social chameleon.
I became very adept at finding, sourcing all these products and, you know, befriending the people who, You know, we were able to get what I needed.
And then I was always able to just figure out their supply chain, come up with something better, find a way to bring it to more people.
From Prison to Local Dealer00:09:26
So I found a Chinese source that had unheard of low prices.
And I was able to, you know, wrangle that and develop that into, you know, one of the best sources.
And it turned out to be, as we'll find out, one of the best sources in the world for most quality products and cheapest prices.
Really?
Even quality in China?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so one of the, you know, one another one of the myths.
About China, it's still a business structure, even though they're a communist country.
There's still a capitalist quality to the concept that whoever has the best quality products at the best prices will prevail, especially when they deal with Americans.
So the Chinese come to Americans.
I'll get into this later too, but when I finally started to become big, all the Chinese powder sources were coming to me and trying to outcompete.
The others.
But it leads, you know, it led to now I have this, I can pick from the sea of different suppliers and find the best ones.
And, and, and, you know, find the best ones with the best quality, really test.
I did a lot of testing and, and, uh, eventually I can have some of the best quality of any, anyone in the world, you know, among the top quality in the world.
Other than yourself at the time, where would the average Joe get their hands on this kind of stuff?
Was it, I mean, could they get, could you get it from your doctor at the time or?
Yeah, no.
And that's, You know, that's part of the problem which pushes people into the black market is that the medical community is, you know, does not treat low testosterone conditions, right?
So, most primary care physicians, just most of them, almost 95% of them, will not prescribe testosterone to somebody unless they meet certain very specific, very low testosterone.
You know, if you have medically low testosterone, which could present a problem, your testosterone is so low, then sometimes they will.
Prescribe it, but it's the protocols are terrible and it doesn't, it usually doesn't work, so that's why you know people now go to TRT clinics, these are testosterone replacement therapy clinics that specialize in these hormones and you know have a better understanding.
When did TRT clinics first come on the scene?
Probably that I don't exactly know.
They weren't around when you were doing it, they probably existed, but I didn't know that.
And they certainly at the time wouldn't have served anybody that was my age because.
The understanding is getting better today, but at the time it was, oh, you have to be over 40.
You have to have a certain low testosterone level.
And it was a very specific criteria to get, which pushed everybody online into these black market platforms.
It pushes people into the black market.
That's right.
To do this unhealthily.
So, I mean, little does the steroid control act, the political figures at the time realize they're creating this underground market.
They're.
They're creating a market, Silk Road, that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, to push people into because there's no healthy way to do it, there's no other way to do it.
And when you stigmatize and create laws against something, and the people want it, a market's going to develop for it.
And the fact that it's illegal just makes it more lucrative, right?
Yeah, and it just incites more crime and puts more people in prison, too.
That's precisely correct.
What, when if you destigmatize it, legalize it, warn people of the problems, then there would be no need for a black market, it would be safer.
It generates tons of tax money, just like marijuana is today.
The tax revenue, it's the same thing happened with alcohol during prohibition.
Right.
It's the same story over and over again.
Like little, you know, what people don't understand is that this has been played out before a few times.
And we're seeing that, you know, that just legalizing these things, but keeping, educating, education is key, not, you know, make something illegal.
You educate about it.
You know, now alcohol drives tons of tax revenue, billions and billions of dollars of tax revenue.
People don't go to prison like they did in the 20s during prohibition.
And the same thing with marijuana, driving tons of tax revenue.
The prisons are, you know, nobody's going to prison for it anymore.
So it's just, it's such a better, I mean, nothing's going to be perfect.
Like, you know, abuse of these things, abuse of anything is bad.
But the answer is education, not making it illegal.
Right.
Right.
So, Obviously, you were getting tons of education, studying yourself.
You were getting a pursuing a degree in biochemistry, and people started just coming to you to find out what the best stuff was, even though you weren't actually making it yourself.
You were just finding sources for it in China.
Yes.
And you were just being like a middleman, just selling it to people.
Is that how it was working?
Yeah.
So there's a major market just for A, doing the work to find the source yourself and then just having it on hand.
You know, your local gym goers just.
They want to be able to go give you money for something and get it right away.
And so that's what I provided, along with the education that I have the knowledge of, well, if you're looking to do this, this is what you want to do.
This is how you want to do it.
This is what you want to take.
And yeah, so that, I mean, that developed into a business.
Now, I live in a small city, so I wasn't making a lot of money.
I still wasn't making enough to support myself on it, but it was enough to, I don't know, just provide a little bit of extra revenue.
You had another job at the time?
Well, when I was in college, I just had jobs in the summer, and then I was just a bouncer when I was in college.
And then, so then I actually went to prison for this before this last time.
So I.
Oh, you went to prison twice for it?
I did.
So I had already been to prison once for this, but the first time was very minor.
It was just like a.
You know, I was just a local dealer.
I didn't have a lot.
So it wasn't a huge bust, and I didn't go, I only went for a total of like six months.
And it was just a local state bid.
So then when I got out, I mean, there was the problem with I had a felony on my record now, a major felony had been in prison and I couldn't find a job.
You know, everything was pretty tough.
So I eventually just slowly got back into what I knew the only thing I knew, the way I knew how to do it.
And then this time I did it on a much bigger, grander scale.
How did you do it on a bigger scale?
Well, the second time is when I developed the online portion.
Okay.
When I came back, when I came out of prison the first time.
So you were doing this, you created your own website where there are specific online bodybuilding forms you were plugged into.
How did people know about you?
How did you build sort of like an online presence that people could trust?
Yeah.
So I guess, yeah, I can start here, but this is how it started.
When I went to prison the first time, I had this Chinese source that was fantastic, right?
And you met him how?
That's a good question.
I was just, it was serendipitous.
I was just one of my friends who, you know, I was getting stuff from various sources, local sources, and, you know, finally kind of working through the supply chains.
And I had a friend who came and just said, hey, you know, he actually went to Cornell and he said that, you know, my friend Cornell gave me this.
And this, you know, I've ordered from here before, and the stuff comes, it's incredibly cheap and it's really good.
So he just gave me this guy's email address and said, just email this guy and talk to him.
So I did and ordered a few things, and sure enough, it you know, everything came and it was fantastic.
Uh, and this started that the relationship with that source, and that was that was pretty early, like in 2003 or something, 2002.
This is when, um, when it was hard to get, but okay, it's not hard to get anymore, right?
And part of what, well, but we'll go into exactly what led to me becoming so big in the creation of that empire.
Yeah.
So that all happened after you got out of prison the first time, right?
Yeah.
So you got out and you immediately went right back into doing that?
Well, not exactly.
Like I had, you know, I didn't want to at first.
I didn't want to go back down that road.
So you were still taking it, right, for yourself?
Yeah.
When I got out, yeah, I was, you know, I started to, I felt terrible, you know.
It's just my life is so much better when I'm on it, just to improve quality of life.
Is it like a big come down when you have to stop?
Because obviously, when you go into prison, you can't take it anymore.
Metabolism and Ketosis Benefits00:04:45
So, what are the negative effects?
What happens when you have to stop like that and completely be cut off from it?
So, you suffer what's called the symptoms of hypogonadism, which is low testosterone, another word for low testosterone.
So, lack of motivation, fatigue, lethargy, libido just goes.
You know, it just goes way down.
Fuck, that sounds terrible.
Well, not fuck.
Yeah.
Depression.
Your body just doesn't form, right?
So, the hormone testosterone is responsible for anabolism.
So, and also it's a large part of metabolism, too.
So, your metabolism just changes.
When your body isn't in an anabolic mode, it goes through a state called catabolism, which means that you burn your own muscle mass before you burn fat.
So now you're just for energy.
So now you're just burning muscle mass.
You're maintaining fat.
So you just get fat.
Your stomach gets fat.
And your muscles underdevelop and you just look terrible.
You look like an old person.
That's what happens when people age.
It's one of the reasons that old people, I mean, there's many reasons, but one of them, the reason they start to form the way they do is because of their testosterone traps.
Really?
I had no idea that the body starts burning muscle and leaving the fat on you.
It's called gluconeogenesis when you're about to use your muscle instead of fat.
Instead of your fat stores or the glucose in your blood.
So, usually people operate under the glucose in your blood.
When that runs out, depending on your anabolic state, your body will go right to muscle mass for your next source of energy.
Are there certain things you can do with diet to sort of mimic the benefits of testosterone replacement or any of these types of treatments?
What's like the closest type of diet you can use to replicate it, or is there anything that'll even come close?
There's nothing that will come close, but.
There are certain things like certainly eating healthier, getting enough protein.
And there's a concept of getting enough glucose right after a workout, which will spike your insulin, which will lead to anabolism.
So essentially, when you're done working out, your body is still under a Using its own fat stores.
There's a certain time when you're working out when your body is using your fat stores, depending on your metabolic state and your hormone levels and everything.
So, when your body is, and you switch from using the glucose in your blood, probably because you ran out of it.
Right.
And you start burning fat.
Burning fat.
Your body goes through it's ketosis.
Ketosis, right.
Ketosis.
You start using fat.
And when you're using ketosis, your body won't push.
Store glucose as fat at that point when you're going through ketosis, right?
So there's a point right after your workout when if you actually slam some sugar, you still don't want to take too much, but you slam some sugar, it releases insulin.
And insulin will, because it can't push those glucose molecules as fat, which it would normally do, because you're using fat.
When you're in the state of burning your own fat, your body won't store fat.
So it just pushes it right into your muscles, which is why insulin can be very anabolic.
Okay.
So after a workout, it's good to have the insulin.
Right.
The insulin production can make all that glucose store into your muscles.
Oh, I know.
But there's a window, right?
There's a window of opportunity.
And that's just one of the tricks of using your own insulin production as an anabolic force.
Yeah.
I've had one guy on here who all he dedicated his life to studying ketosis and the benefits of ketosis, like on the brain and studying things like neurotoxicity.
Toxicity seizures, and um, he is a beast.
Like, he said he would fast for seven days straight and then deadlift like an ungodly amount of weight.
He maintained this incredible physique, and he is a hundred percent keto, which is seems like it's crazy.
It's very rare, it seems, for people to be keto and maintain that kind of physique.
You're absolutely correct.
And and uh, you know, the keto diets, I it works for some people, um, I think it doesn't work for more, um.
But there's people who are passionate about it.
Crypto Payments on the Dark Net00:08:41
Why?
Because it works for them.
It's the same thing that drives all passion, right?
It works for them.
They have helped other people in that manner.
It helps me think more clearly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There are benefits to fasting.
There certainly are.
And I think those benefits are only relegated to specific people and specific conditions.
It depends on what you're trying to do, whether or not fasting would be.
Ideal for you.
Have you ever messed around with like keto or different types of diets and see how they affect you?
Or does the testosterone and the steroid stuff basically completely blow that shit out of the water?
It does.
I have messed around with different diets and nothing works like actually just having the correct amount of hormones in your body.
Nothing works like that.
Interesting.
Interesting.
So when did this business start blowing up for you like big time?
Yeah.
So sorry, we keep getting sidetracked.
That's okay.
So, okay.
So, When I went to prison the first time, I had this source.
I knew there was something here.
I also knew that I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.
I didn't want to put myself in a position to go in prison again.
So, what I did is I handed this source off to a friend, to one of my clients at the time.
And I said, Here, take this source, keep it, keep the relationship with this guy going.
When I get out, I don't know what I'm going to do.
But if I come back to you and you build something, I want to be a part of it because I gave you the source.
It was just kind of, I don't know, just like an insurance thing for the future.
So I went and I just did a short bed.
And I got out and it was, I mean, it was tough.
So now I got this felony.
I just got out of prison.
I have an employment gap.
There's nothing I could do.
So at this time, I moved in with my grandmother.
I couldn't get a job.
I applied several different places.
I couldn't get a job.
So I just had this time of depression and lack of lethargy, fatigue.
I ended up going back on testosterone myself because that really improved a lot of things.
And at this time, I actually had nothing else to do except work out because I couldn't get a job.
So I actually got into really good shape and I was working out.
I was doing two sessions a day.
And again, it kind of did the same thing.
So now people start coming back to me like, hey, Help me out.
Look at you.
Help me out.
So eventually, I couldn't afford anything.
I couldn't do anything.
I had no money, had no anything.
So I just kind of rationalized in my own head that I would just kind of start very small just to be able to support myself doing some things again here and there.
And so then one day, it just kind of got bigger and bigger.
It kept driving passion.
So now I'm just like, I don't know, I'm kind of into it as much as I was before.
And Now, one of my customers told me about this online forum that it was a source forum.
And he said that, you know, essentially they have all these sources that from, you know, these internet sources from all the United States.
And you go on here and you can look through all the sources.
You look at all these reviews that people have written on them.
It's kind of like a Silk Road type of deal, except, but it's just for steroids.
And it wasn't in the.
I'm having a brain fart.
What's the Silk Road called?
Silk Road.
We mean, what was it?
Just like a black hat marketplace, right?
Yeah, it was.
I mean, the dark net.
Dark net.
Yeah, that's a good one.
So it wasn't on the dark net.
So people weren't buying it with like crypto.
Or was this before crypto?
This was before crypto.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, crypto existed, but it wasn't anything that anybody really knew about.
So, you know, I just kind of offhandedly was like, okay, I'll go check it out or whatever.
I didn't think much of it, but so I went on this thing, and all of a sudden I see that he's right.
Like, holy cow, look at all these sources!
And you can see all these people commenting, and I'm, you know, my business mind just kind of starts going, like, holy cow.
So I did some research, and I see that, oh my God, like I can compete with these prices that these guys are putting out here, and I can still generate, I can still have a decent profit margin because my source was really good.
Um, so I start, you know, I'm just starting looking in this, like, this is doable, like, I can do this, I can compete with all these guys on here with their prices, and um.
And, you know, it just looked very doable.
So I started, you know, really, really started researching it and looking into it.
Now I had a plan like, okay, I'm going to try this.
I'm just going to try it.
That is about when the friend that I left my source with came back into my life.
It was kind of coincidental that right when I was already about to do this, he comes back into my life.
So one day he just calls up and he's like, hey, How's everything going?
I'm like, oh, I haven't seen you since before I went to prison.
Like, you know, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
I'm almost near your house.
Can I stop by?
I'm just like, okay, yeah, sure.
I was, you know, it was a little strange, but sure, it was going to be good to see him.
So he pulls up in this brand new Hummer, this freaking really decked out Hummer, and he gets out and he's just got this big smile on his face.
And I'm so, what the heck?
You know, this guy wasn't a wealthy guy.
Like, he wasn't college educated.
No, there was nothing.
And I'm just like, and he, Comes out and he grabs this bag out of the back and he goes, He gives me a hug and he's like, How's it going?
Okay, so we go into my house and he's got, so he's like, opens this bag and it's full of steroids and money.
And he must have $30,000.
He's just got like wrapped hundreds.
And I'm just like, Jesus, what the hell is going on?
Why are you carrying around 30 grand in a bag full of steroids?
He's like, I turned that source into a freaking gold mine.
Oh my God.
Here's your cut.
Well, So he did.
It's not like he just gave me any money.
I didn't even ask for it.
But what this did was make me realize that this is possible, right?
That this can drive a lot of money.
So, you know, he goes on to explain how he made $900,000 last year, that he's just got this massive operation.
At the time, he was selling all different kinds of drugs, but the steroid one was really driving most of his revenue.
And what other kinds of drugs was he selling?
Out of anything, just like Coke and like legitimate anything you wanted.
Yeah, wow, he had a huge black market operation.
And I don't, and I didn't ask him exactly what he was doing, but he gave me enough hints to set the seed for how I could do it, right?
And um, I intentionally didn't want to bring other drugs into this just because uh, you know, I don't know, I was more passionate about the steroids at the time, right?
And what those could about helping people, actually, like, um.
You know, passionate about helping.
Yeah, how it can make your life better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, but, but he set the seed that A, that this was possible.
And he gave me enough information to understand a structure to put in place to be able to do this on a massive scale.
And, and he was there for me.
Like, so when I started, I didn't even tell him what I was doing.
He didn't tell me exactly what he was doing, but he, but every time I would call him to ask him how he took care of this problem, he would tell me, he was like, well, oh, I ran into this.
This is how I solved that problem.
And he just gave me enough hints to where I could set up a bigger, bigger structure and just start expanding and scaling this operation.
So, did you guys partner up or?
No.
He just showed you how to do it on your own.
Building Trust in Fake Forums00:12:35
Yeah.
With your source.
Yeah, with my own source.
He took it.
So, let me go back again now.
So, I met him and he set the seed, as I said.
So, now I'm like, okay, now I'm definitely going to do this.
Like, I see it can work.
And I, and, So I get all ready and I do everything.
I set up and I bought an extra from the source.
I bought like an extra, you know, an extra order, a larger order than normal just to get ready for in case, you know, in case like a bunch of people bought.
And I had just my laptop.
So I had a duffel bag full of steroids and a laptop and I was going to start this online venture.
And so the first thing I did is I went online and I just, I just, I just posted.
I just created this list of all these products I had and everything, and I just posted on this online forum.
That's what everybody else was doing at the time or just before this.
You just go on and you just post a list, and people can order.
Like a menu?
Yeah, kind of like a menu.
And people could order if they want, but anyways, let me start with this first, and I'll go back to that.
So when I posted this list, Well, yeah, it's time to explain.
So the zeitgeist at the time, right?
The ethos of the black market steroid world was steeped in distrust.
There was a lot of fake stuff that was going around in the 90s and in the early 2000s.
And this was because testosterone and its derivatives, steroids, were very hard to get and they were very expensive.
And therefore, a fake, fraudulent market also established where people would just sell fake stuff.
And Oh, so people were terrified of getting fakes or getting frauds, right?
So if you weren't branded, if you didn't sell brand name stuff, and at the time there was only like five or six brands that were ever accepted throughout the entire bodybuilding community or the black market steroid community.
And if you didn't have one of those brands, or if you were even a person that had no name, like at the time I didn't, then people would absolutely not only laugh at you, but come at you with antipathy and, and, um, Hatred and anger.
It almost made him angry that somebody would dare try to, somebody with no name would dare try to sell steroids.
So when I posted this list, I was laughed at and berated.
And the mods took my post down.
It was only up for like an hour on this forum.
So, anyways, but this forum, as it turned out, was the largest antibiotic steroid source forum in the world.
It had like a million unique hits a month, but it was worldwide.
What was it called?
Could I say the name of it?
Why not?
It's like promoting a source.
Oh, okay.
You don't have to.
Well, I mean, it just might be against the rules of YouTube.
No, it's not against the rules of YouTube.
I don't think so.
We'll be fine.
Okay.
But if you don't want to mention them, you don't have to say.
I guess I don't really care, but it was Eroids.
It was called Eroids then.
Okay.
You probably just made a lot of people happy.
Yeah, the largest, and it still is, as far as I know.
Is it?
Source forum in the world, but it's worldwide, right?
So, right.
Um, so there's, I mean, there's just like I said, a million unique hits a month.
There's just tons of traffic on this, it's unbelievable.
So, but they took your post down because you weren't like a reputable person.
Well, and it wasn't only that because that's what people were doing when I was researching.
And, and literally in the last few weeks before I posted, they came up with new rules for sources.
And one of those, and it was very simple at the time, and I still got lucky because it was still pretty simple to be a source, much more difficult.
Nowadays, probably.
But I just had to have a website, right?
So, and to them at the time, because one of the reasons was people were posting, because it was so simple.
You just make a post, a menu, and there was some fraudulent, you know, people were just taking people's money and running.
Yeah, it makes sense.
If you're running a board like that or you're running any kind of website like that, you got to regulate the scam and the bullshit.
So, it makes sense.
If it's your first time, they got to bet you and, you know.
But they weren't before that.
That's what I'm saying.
In the last two weeks since I posted, it was when they established the first rule.
And this was just the first level.
And they're saying, no, you have to have a website because we feel if you go through the pain, because at the time, websites weren't as easy to make as they were, or at least not for me.
I had no idea about it.
What year was this?
2011.
Okay.
So, I mean, people could make websites at the time, but it wasn't as prevalent as it is now.
And at least I didn't know anything about it.
So, to me, that was almost like prohibitive like, oh, I can't do this now.
I don't know how to make a website.
I don't know how to do that.
So, but they were just saying you just need a website.
And that shows us that you're serious enough.
If you go through the difficulty of the process of creating a website, that shows us you're serious enough to at least there's a good chance that you're for real, that you're legitimate.
So I didn't know how to do that.
And so, like, this is the first employee that I had, as I, one of my friends did.
I actually just kind of thought that was it.
I was like, okay, well, I can't do this.
That's it.
Then, like, I got thinking, I'm like, you know, I had this friend of mine.
He was, And he was one of my customers.
So he knows about how to make websites.
He's really good with this.
So I just broached it with him.
He's like, Yeah, I can make a website.
So let me go on that later, but let me tell you what happened with the post that I made.
So this is where it started.
The post that got taken down?
The post that got taken down, it was only up for an hour.
Well, I got three emails from that of three guys who were said, Hey, I saw your post for that hour.
I'm interested, but.
You know, we can't risk the fraud, the potential fraud.
And two of these guys were.
So, this forum has.
They like.
Let's see.
They give people a point scale, right?
And if you amass these points or aggregate, accrue these points, it means that you're more respected in the society.
You know, for giving good information.
Yeah.
Trustworthy.
You get points.
Right.
You're more trustworthy.
So, a couple of these guys were very respected members of this.
Online community and people just listen to them and they just, you know, they spend a lot of time on there.
They have a lot of trust.
And two of these guys had a lot of that.
So they were like, We can't do this.
Why don't you just send us something and, you know, and then we'll post about it, you know, if everything's real and everything goes well, you know, we'll post about it.
And at the time, in retrospect, I shouldn't have been so reticent to do this because it's what ended up working.
But I was just like, really, I don't want to give something away for free.
And that's the mentality that people in business shouldn't do.
If you have a good product, you should just get it out there.
Be worried about getting it out there.
It's not about profit in the beginning.
Long term goals should be profit, but that's only after you've established a brand and established.
And that's what I needed to do.
And I was reticent to do that.
So I just asked all these guys to, okay, when you receive it, once you see everything's good, then will you pay me?
And they were like, yeah, yeah, sure, we'll do that.
So, I sent these three ambassadors, I call them, the original ambassadors, the orders that they wanted.
Do these guys post pictures of themselves to make the people just respect them, not only because they've been on the forum for a long time, but because they see pictures of them?
It's like, oh, I want to look like that guy.
That's part of it.
That is a part of it.
But it's more about they just create value on the community, in the forum, information.
Information.
And they've led people to good sources before.
So, everybody knows if you go to this guy, you're going to get.
The latest, greatest information on all the best sources because they do things like they did with me.
They go check out all the sources and then kind of update everybody on who's doing the best job right now.
So I remember, yeah, so these ambassadors went at the time.
I was able to get a job finally in an emergency room.
So I did work at the hospital.
I had just gotten a job at the hospital.
I remember now, you know, at first I would check these emails, this business email from the hospital.
I worked a lot.
So I would just kind of check from the hospital.
And I remember all of a sudden one day I was in the hospital and I checked out, and these guys I saw, I went to this forum where I was a member, and all of a sudden I had a bunch of private messages.
And that never happened.
I didn't know what was going on.
So all of a sudden I went and I checked the messages, and hey, this guy's name was, he called himself Sicko on there.
It was like C Y C O.
That was his handle.
And he said, Sicko sent me, said, You have some good stuff.
Hey, give me your list.
I want to order.
And I had like five, six, and then it just kept going messages.
Like, holy cow.
So, and then I went, What is this coming from?
Like, what happened?
I saw that he did.
He posted it.
He posted a picture of my gear, said that he started taking it, said that he started feeling it.
And so did the other guy.
So now all of a sudden, there's people just coming to my PM.
These guys sent them.
And this is when it started.
And this was just from an hour post.
A one hour post that was set up days ago.
And I'm still working on the website to actually become a legitimate source.
I'm not even a legitimate source, but this should have been an omen to come of what was to come because with a one hour post, now I'm getting, I have five, 10 clients already.
What was the bet?
What was so good about you?
Was it the quality of your product?
Was it the price?
Was it both?
What made your product so much better than everything else that was out there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so I'm definitely going to get into that.
And that's, um, Yeah, so that's what comes up next.
I started the business off just on these ambassadors, right?
And I'm just sending the product.
So they're going online, they're talking about it, saying the same thing.
Yeah, so now all the new guys I'm sending are also going online and saying the same things, like posting pics.
Hey, I got this.
So now it's a good time to go into what established me?
What was the distinction between me and the rest of the guys on the site?
And the answer to that is in the beginning, At this time, steroid dealers were not known as masters of business administration, right?
They didn't have good business practices.
They didn't understand things like, you know, customer service, you know, just putting in pretty simple good business practices.
So when I came in and I started establishing some good business practices, simple things that none of them were doing at the time, such as priority shipping.
So, you get your order in two to three days.
For everybody else, even domestic suppliers, it was taking two weeks at that time, two weeks to get their products.
It's just because it was just not foresight.
They were just not spending the extra money for fast shipping and just sending a snail mail, and it would take two weeks to get there.
Quality products was one thing that we did have.
And then just price, right?
So, I just undercut everybody else by a little bit.
And I could do that, I had the source.
And it was also customer service.
So, talking to all my customers, being very friendly.
Breaking the Depression Cycle00:14:18
You know, so another thing, so back into more neurochemistry.
So, what happens with suppliers is when you have a good product and you start amassing a bunch of a big client base, people are starting to respect and admire you and show you appreciation.
This initiates a large dose response, right?
Or dopamine.
And this can make It makes most sources manic.
You go into a state of what's called mania, where you have too high a level of this dose, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.
And when you're manic, you start to think, you start to become a megalomaniac.
You start to think you're almost godlike.
That's when all these things hit it, all these chemicals hit it at once.
Yeah.
And it sends you too high.
You go into a state of mania.
So if you're familiar with a manic depressive or a bipolar disorder, that's when your body doesn't control your endorphin or your dose response into this even level and you become manic, which means you're too high and you start getting too wired, too, you know, Almost over motivated, over ambitious, and your brain just kind of starts going crazy.
And then also, you drop down into depression mode.
So, bipolar people, which is also called manic depressive order, their endorphin or dose response is too high or too low, and their body isn't regulating it.
They're having problems regulating it.
So, they go up and down dramatically.
Yes, that's exactly correct.
So, that's the same thing as bipolar disorder.
Bipolar disorder is also called manic depressive.
Same thing.
Interesting.
Okay.
So, that's what happens with that disorder.
And the key is to get people into that regulated area.
So, you're not too high on your body.
You want to be even keel.
You want to be riding, have a smooth ride, not a roller coaster.
That's right.
And there's things you can do within society to raise your own.
And this is what makes you feel good.
That's how pervasive these chemicals are.
They control human behavior.
And that's not known enough.
So, why it's such a benefit to study neurobiology to understand these things, because you can control, you can do things to control your own dose response.
Natural things?
Yeah, and it's not even natural.
It's just, yeah, I would love, I wanted to do whole sections on this too.
Like, what can you do?
Like, even if you are, even if you're not manic depressive, if you experience, people can understand what you're saying and experience what you're talking about, like highs and lows, how can people regulate this kind of thing?
And how can people control it themselves?
So, you have to understand what elicits these dose responses, right?
And there's very simple things that, Behaviors we evolved to elicit this response to control our behavior or to make us want to do things, right?
To for our survival or the survival of our species.
Those are the two things.
Anything you do to help your survival or the survival of your species will elicit a dose response.
And that's as a reward chemical to keep doing those things.
We evolve this to allow the human species to survive.
Right.
These are things like eating, right?
That helps you survive.
So that's why people with eating disorders just eat and eat and eat because it makes them feel good.
Right.
This is sex.
When you have sex, you're prolonging the human species.
So you produce a massive dose response.
There are forms of exercise that can do that.
Yeah.
And money.
So money is a.
I'll go into money later when we talk about.
When we talk about money, I'm going to go into the whole dose response over money, but it's a little different because it's representative of our value to society.
So now I have to go over another thing.
Probably the major and best way to increase your own dose response is human connection through helping people.
So we evolved to be social creatures because when we help each other survive, our species as a whole survives better.
That was an evolutionary process.
So now when we help people, it emits a massive dose response.
So Creating value for yourself, just being helpful, will massively increase your dose response.
So, understanding this, there's times when I felt myself going into a depression.
This is mainly when I was in prison because I read about this.
I used prison time to read voraciously.
And I read so many helpful books that really put into place exactly how the economy, biology, the society, like how all this stuff works.
And everything became very clear.
I had a moment of clarity after I read all this.
But so there's times when I felt myself going into depression.
And the answer was to, okay, how can I just help everybody around me?
Well, what can I do?
And when I was in prison, it was everybody needed legal help.
So, I just studied the law voraciously.
I became a legal expert and I was able to help hundreds and hundreds of people around me file habeas corpus petitions or motions to the court or defend them if they got some sort of discipline within prison.
Yeah, that's not only a way to help people, but having that kind of specialty or expertise or knowledge also helps your survival rate in prison.
I've heard that from many people.
Yeah.
But creating value for yourself.
So now everybody knew, like, if you have a problem, you go to Ryan and Ryan will take care of you and he'll help you.
And it got me massive respect from everybody, even people I wasn't helping because they've seen, they watch me help other people.
Right.
So now I'm what's called a jailhouse lawyer and, and, you know, I'm doing a good job.
So, but that helping people forms a connection with that person and, and then they show me respect and admiration and it elicits a massive dose response in me.
So my depression could go away like that when I would.
Figure out how I can help people around me.
It's interesting.
It's like being in prison.
You can almost test all these things in a vacuum.
So that's another thing.
So you're absolutely correct.
It's a great social experiment.
Right.
And there's so many people around you to run all these little experiments.
And this is precisely what I did.
And it was very interesting.
It's fascinating.
It was fascinating.
So to answer your question, so if you go online and you look, okay, how can I increase my serotonin?
How can I increase my whatever?
Like all the information gives you, okay, eat these foods.
And I mean, eating is one of the ways to get to elicit a dose response, but that's not the real answer.
The real answer is forming connections elicits a dose response and, um, and, and help it.
And the best way to form connections is by helping people because it's a reinforcing circle.
You help somebody, which, which, um, increases your relationship with that person, which another dose response, which reinforces, uh, Which also reinforces the potential that they'll want to help you in the future, which forms another connection.
So, the more people you help, the more opportunity you have for other people to want to help you back.
So, you're putting yourself in a position to succeed just by doing this.
Yes.
And the more people you help, the more of a position you're putting yourself in the position.
So, the answer was to just help everybody around me.
So, were there actual scientific studies done that proved that making these kinds of human connections and the somehow increased like oxytocin levels, serotonin levels in the brain.
Absolutely.
There's studies out there.
I don't have any to give you verbatim right now, but that is evident in all the research.
But what hasn't been put together logically and coherently enough is just like what I just did here explain that to people and say, if you're feeling depressed, if something's just not quite right, to raise this dose response, here's some things you can do.
Just help people.
And that reinforces the entire circle.
Of events of all dose eliciting experiences.
Reinforces, like I said before, reinforces relationships.
Because now people, people, you gain these dose responses off of reactions to people.
And your body can pick up on when somebody respects you, when somebody admires you, when somebody's showing you appreciation.
And that elicits a dose response within yourself.
So when you're helping people, and even when other people hear that you help somebody else, the same type of their visual cues that they respect and admire you will also raise your dose, give you a dose response.
Wow, that's fascinating.
It is fascinating.
And it's weird.
Another thing is like, I know I don't.
I've never dealt with depression on my own, but I've heard a lot of people explain it.
And it seems like the way, you know, people that are depressed, it seems like it's more of an egocentric type of problem where it's not like what you're saying is be selfless and help people and that will get you out of a depression.
But from what I understand about depression, it seems like it's more of an egocentric black hole you're in.
And it's hard to understand or get yourself.
Out of that because you don't, you can't see the forest through the trees.
You're stuck in a black hole.
Yes.
And you're correct.
And it's usually, I think you use the correct terminology too.
It's more of a self centric type of concept where I'm just depressed.
It's all me.
What can, you know, why don't other people help me not be depressed?
You know, what, when it's the actions that you have to take to elicit the neurochemistry to bring you out of this depression.
Right.
And, And I don't think it's the people's fault.
This just isn't understood well enough.
Like the pervasive nature of this dose response is just not understood well enough.
And it's not communicated effectively.
And I wanted to do lessons on this.
And in prison, I did lessons on this.
So once I learned this, like we have these little forums where you can do these little lessons and you can kind of be a teacher.
And I did lessons on these, on the endorphins and dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin and taught people this.
And it went over incredibly well.
And, you know, people think that.
Type of atmosphere you're in in prison, like nobody's going to understand that.
In fact, when I started doing these lessons, I was told that by a lot of my peers in prison that this is going to go over terribly.
Nobody's going to understand this stuff.
And I just put it very simply and explained it, and it went over phenomenally.
And everybody was fascinated, and everybody wanted to learn more.
And people really enjoyed all these classes that I did on it.
It really is fascinating.
It's something I've never really thought about too, but it also, you can see the ties to people now, like in culture now, people.
Like work from home, people working from home, people living by themselves in an apartment building in a big city, not being surrounded by people.
It's just them and maybe one other roommate or significant other or their cat or whatever.
Yeah, you're absolutely correct.
And I'm not trying to dismiss real clinical depression.
Like there's some people who just have a genetic predisposition for not producing enough serotonin or maybe their dopamine transporters are not, you know, they just don't have, or they have too many dopamine transporters.
Transport dopamine out of your brain.
And there's a bunch of things that could go wrong.
But if you look at the lives of a lot of these mild depression or people who are depressed, if you look at their lives, you'll notice that they don't contribute to society.
And again, it's not their fault.
I'm not saying that these people are dumb.
They should do more to help people.
They don't know that.
This education isn't out there.
But if you look at their lives, they're isolated people who have a boring job that doesn't.
Translate into them understanding that they're actually creating value for somebody or helping.
Or doesn't necessarily align with their values.
Whatever they're doing might not necessarily align with their own personal values.
Right.
Yeah.
I had a guy, it's so funny.
I can see that I had a guy in here yesterday who was in the Marine Corps and he was in Iraq for a couple of years.
And he explained the sort of visceral sort of feeling of being in a life and death situation 24 7, being in firefights, literally hunting humans every day, and what that does to your physiology, what it does to your body.
You're always on pins and needles, you're always on high alert.
And he explains, You know, so I think there's something like 22 veterans kill themselves every single day because of PTSD or whatever it is.
But we label it as like PTSD.
But I can see where, when you come back to the United States to living this comfortable, normal life after spending years in this high intensity, super, super fucking high intensity life or death situation, you,
I can see how those chemicals would just drop off and people lose their, these veterans, they lose their, their, They lose their sort of purpose and become depressed.
And that's why there's so much suicide.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the release of those hormones is called corticosteroids, right?
They're stress hormones, right?
So, and when you release a lot of those, essentially you put your body into a state of fight or flight.
Right, right.
From the amygdala.
So all your neural connections divert to your amygdala, which is the fight or flight mechanism.
And you're living in a constant state of fight or flight.
Right.
And that can become permanent if you.
If you've seen too much, right?
Or if these memories of these traumatic events stick in your head.
Yeah, he said when he came back, he was like hyper vigilant all the time.
And he was always in fight or flight.
And it's corticosteroids and it just screws up your entire brain and your biochemistry and everything.
Stress Hormones and Fight or Flight00:11:50
And it's terrible.
And I feel awfully for these people because this isn't anything they can help.
And it's bad.
And oddly enough, testosterone, because it's dopamine-ergic, it helps release the dopamine, which can kind of overpower the.
PTSD, corticosteroids.
It helps.
So, a lot of people with PSD can go on testosterone and it does help the symptoms.
And I have a lot of clients, I had a lot of clients in the past that are helped by that.
That's fascinating, man.
That's fascinating.
Yeah, he said that he was just going through life when he came back trying to, and he thought he wanted to fix the world one asshole at a time.
You know what I mean?
Just like flipping out on people, thinking that they didn't have the right discipline, they, you know, whatever.
Thinking that he could just fucking scream people and that's like, like back in the Marines, back, you know, being overseas.
I could see that's what a crazy fucking thing to put your brain through.
Oh, absolutely.
And I feel terrible for people with PSDTD.
I couldn't imagine.
I've read about it.
I understand the biochemistry behind it and it's just terrible.
It's awful.
It's nothing that they could help.
Yeah.
This guy, this guy found a way through it by he went to Africa and started this organization where he puts, Um, veterans in Africa and they fight poachers, so now they live in Africa.
It's like it's funny, it's like I the only way the best way for me to get through this is going to Africa, being surrounded by animals that want to eat me and hunting poachers, you know, protecting animals.
And now he's like found a purpose, which is right.
Yeah, so it has to do with finding a purpose, doing something bigger than yourself, right?
And that also drives the dose response.
So, some of the answer to PSTD and again, PSTD, PTSD, sorry.
Um And again, I'm not an expert in this.
I have read a lot about it, but I'm not an expert.
But some of it seems to be over and over again, it can be relieved to an extent by overpowering it with the dose response, right?
And finding a purpose by going and fighting in Africa against poachers, you think you're doing, or you are doing something for wildlife.
Right.
Instills a purpose that's bigger than yourself.
And that elicits a dose response, too.
So community as well.
Yes.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Forming a community with people.
We're all in this together.
The connections, right?
The human connections.
We're all doing this for a purpose, for a bigger, grander purpose.
And that leads to passion, which is another word for dopamine and ambition and motivation.
All words for dopamine response.
Right.
Dopamine response.
It's fascinating.
So, how did you parlay this education that you took from prison, learning about this type of stuff, into everything else you were doing?
Okay.
One more thing I want to say about PTSD.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
I think it's sort of relevant.
So, MDMA is showing to be very, very beneficial to people with severe PTSD.
Right.
But because of the stigma, that same thing back in the war on drugs and the.
You know, at the time when they were just making all the drugs illegal, all drugs are bad, right?
So they made MDMA a contraband, made it a controlled substance, and put it up to such a high level, schedule one, that now it can't be used in any medical reference or it can't even be studied, right?
So now they actually just moved it and allowed it and are allowing it to be used in a medical context.
And it is turning out to help tons of people.
Like a lot of people are really being helped, especially with PTSD symptoms.
So that goes again to show you that the politicians just to run on a platform on anything that will get them elected, right?
What's the problem right now?
It's almost like you create a problem and then offer a solution to it, right?
So you create, okay, drugs, cocaine is killing people, right?
So, you know what?
We're going to take all these drugs, run on a platform like we're going to fix this.
We're going to fix this big problem.
And oh my gosh, this is a problem.
They're saying it's a problem and they're offering a solution.
Let me vote for them.
And it's a, you know, It turns into a political tactic rather than something that's actually rational, makes sense, and is effective.
Right.
So, now how many years did we lose out on using MDMA medically just because of this?
And the same thing happened to marijuana, steroids, alcohol, everything.
We've seen this over and over again.
And it kills, it ends up killing more people because pushing it to the black market makes it more unsafe.
It makes more, you know, absolutely correct.
Right.
That's why, you know, we have cocaine that's accidentally laced with fentanyl killing people.
And if you made cocaine legal, people could do it and not fucking buy it.
You could buy it from a store.
Right.
Where it's regulated and you can educate people like they're doing with tobacco.
I mean, I think what they're doing with tobacco is much better, right?
It's education, telling people how bad it is for you, but you don't want to make it illegal because then you just create a nicotine black market.
Right.
And you're creating cartels.
Yeah, putting people in prison, creating cartels, creating violence.
I mean, during Prohibition, there was so much violence.
One of the reasons they made it legal again, one of them, there was a lot of them, but was that it created so much violence and that so many people died and there was so much violence in the name of controlling alcohol in the black market.
That when they legalized it, now you can just get it anywhere.
And all that violence stopped that was caused from the legalization of fermenting.
I mean, it's just over.
The thing with MDMA, though, I always wonder I know MDMA elicits a super high serotonin and dopamine, too, right?
Yeah.
But isn't there like a crash after that?
Oh, yeah.
When you have super high levels of dopamine, serotonin, and then super low levels of depressive states, doesn't that happen right after the MDMA?
Yes.
So you're making yourself more colder.
Right.
So, how do you mitigate that?
Obviously, so veterans have the super low levels of serotonin.
Oh, yeah, right.
And they're getting MDMA, and it's increasing it.
But doesn't it just go right back down afterwards?
Yeah.
So, but if you do it at therapeutic doses, so the dosing in this part, I'm not super educated on.
So, I don't know the exact how.
I just know that it is working.
And there's plenty of studies going on.
And I even saw it on like 60 Minutes.
And they did a study that showed this is working.
And there's people who are evangelizing the use of it.
And I'd imagine it just has to do with, again, a moderate use can bring you up and bring you into a space where, Where it's therapeutic and you can start really talking about things.
And, you know, so it's kind of used for therapy sessions to really get you to open up and understand why you feel the way you do.
And that's really important in healing from these diseases, too, is understanding exactly why you feel the way you do.
And MDMA can get people talking.
Maybe they can do it in a way that, like, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but maybe they can do it in a way where it helps people get their head above the clouds just for a little bit of time to see the light and then do that in.
Specific doses over time, micro dosing.
Yeah, or something like that, too.
And then maybe eventually wean them off of it to where they don't even need it anymore.
Their bodies learned how to produce it or learned how to live that new way.
It is fascinating.
But what makes me angry is how many years did we set back on this new therapy just because the government decided that they wanted to get elected?
They wanted to just make everything illegal.
Like that.
I mean, that kind of is like the lack of foresight.
From a government to unilaterally abolish something that could be so helpful.
We've seen it over and over again.
And there are many countries that have a lot of these drugs that are legalized and regulated.
And it's not like there's tons of people going crazy in these countries and doing.
No, they're incentivized to keep their people healthy.
A lot of those countries also have socialized health care to where they're paying for health care and they're not incentivized to feed people drugs or sell people drugs.
They just want to keep them healthy.
Yeah.
Mm hmm.
So, going back to going back, what we got way off topic.
That's okay, man.
That's what we're supposed to do.
I forgot where we were.
No, yeah, you were talking about you were in prison and you were learning about these neurochemistry of the brain and how it affects certain responses.
And you were talking about, you know, like manic states, depressive states.
Okay.
Yeah, I remember.
And how does that all tie into what you did after that?
Yes.
Okay.
It was like an hour ago.
So, yeah, so I was explaining what made me distinct from all the rest of the suppliers, which kind of rose me above everybody else and allowed me to really start creating a brand and an empire.
And I mentioned the simple business, good business practices that I put into place free shipping.
Free shipping was one, but everybody else was charging for shipping and fast shipping.
I just used Priority, which got people their products in two or three days, and nobody else was doing that.
So, these are, it's kind of simple, but If nobody else was doing it, um, good quality products and uh, um, oh yeah, so so this is how this is what launched into the dopamine discussion.
So, everybody else, when you have oh yeah, so back to the back to the dose response, right?
When you have when you're manic, when you're too high, it leads to mentations of uh, megalomania, right?
You think that you're almost godlike, right?
These people, everybody should listen to you and nobody dare.
This is what happens with really drunk people, too.
So, you see, with like, like Trump for example, yes, he's exists in a constant state of mania, right?
Or drunk people, like really drunk people, what do they do?
They get very belligerent.
No, you listen to me.
And that's a state of mania.
Their endorphins, their whole dose response is too high.
And they think they're amazing.
They think they know everything, and everybody else should be listening to them.
And that's what crazy is.
That's why there are so many people that fight when they get dressed.
Yeah, exactly.
That's exactly correct.
They're in a state of mania.
So celebrities feel this too, right?
But they have a team of people, what do you call it?
Public relations people, right?
Who tell them how to act.
Don't do this, don't do this, say this, say this.
Or don't keep them in check.
They're just telling them yes to everything.
Like, you're doing great.
You look great.
Well, the public relations tell them how to act on camera, right?
To make them seem humble, to make them, you know, because people who are shown respect and admiration to such a vast and wide degree become manic.
Like you start to think they're godlike.
But actors have public relations teams that are keeping them in line and showing them how to act, how to present themselves to the public, right?
But people like steroid dealers don't have that.
So they become rude and think they're above everybody else to their customers, to their own customers.
And they start treating if any customer has a little complaint about something, they end up, you know, calling them names and telling them that, you know, just you don't, you shouldn't question me, this and that.
And, you know, so there's an element of they become too manic.
There's an element of they're not, it's not, it's terrible customer service.
You're ostracizing your own client base, you know, by just because to protect your own pride, right?
So, and that's what all the steroid dealers were doing at this time.
They were like, They were fine until you start asking them questions or questioning something that happened with what they're doing, such as an order.
If something went wrong with an order or something, then they would just degrade their own client base.
Mania in the Drug Business00:09:28
And I saw that.
I saw all these other things.
I'm like, why would you treat your own customer like that?
Just help them, just figure out what's wrong and fix the problem.
And I made a mental note to myself not to do that.
So now I've always been very good socially, anyway.
So now when people come to me, I'm actually taking ownership of.
Of any problems that occur and fixing the problem.
And I would usually give people something free for the mistake that I made because, you know, within an operation, there's, you can't, you can't hire, I can't, you know, take resumes and put my, get my employees from Indeed or anything.
I have to pick from a very small pool of people around me and the employees aren't always, you know, the best.
So a lot of mistakes are made, but it's not about making the mistakes, it's about how you handle those mistakes.
So, So, I started to develop this crowd.
And as we said, this is just from that one hour post.
And I got the ambassadors, and then the ambassadors sent me people.
And then all these guys started going back and posting about this.
This guy is great to deal with.
His stuff started working.
It was great.
I got my order in two or three days.
That was a huge one because everybody else was taking two weeks.
Yeah.
It's been basic business practices that people don't use that, honestly, that Jim, that roided out bros don't know how to do.
They're just tough guys.
That's exactly correct.
So, when I come in and did this, it just changed the game.
And by the way, pretty quickly everybody else started following suit with what I was doing.
So now I like completely changed the way the business model that all this there were deals operate.
Nowadays you can go and everybody's shipping two or three days and everybody's doing these things.
But I was the first one at the time.
So now all this stuff on, and I started gaining a good audience before I was even a legitimate source on E-Roids, right?
So then as this has happened, I'm starting to, oh, This is amazing.
Like, I remember, like, even going, and at the time, like, it all had to be anonymous.
And I remember my very first order.
I had like three orders.
I was in the hospital.
I was in the emergency room.
And the orders came in for my email.
I took them while I was working in the emergency room, which in retrospect was pretty stupid because the IT can see everything that's happening on those computers.
So somebody called me.
Oh, shit.
You're actually using.
I forgot.
That was probably before phones had email, right?
Yeah.
So you're using the actual computers in the hospital?
Computers in the hospital.
Yeah.
That was funny.
So, uh, So I took the orders right in the emergency room, and I was just like, I was overcome with this sense of like, I think the orders came to a total of like $1,150 or something, right?
And my profit margins at the time were something like, I don't know, I think it was 250%.
Holy shit.
Yeah, the profit margins were big, but I'll go into detail when I started my own UGL, it got much better.
I'll go over all the business stuff as soon as we get there.
So, on that order alone, right, I probably made like, I don't know, 550 bucks or something after I profit, yeah, profit, which was the most I'd ever made in one day in my entire life.
So, right there, the first day the orders come in, I just and what that does is that money puts this warm feeling in your chest, and that's a massive dopamine response, right?
So, now all of a sudden, I'm just glowing and I'm like, This I like that you become passionate about this, right?
And you're like, I gotta do this more, this is fantastic.
So, it just kind of drove more passion.
And I just remember that warm feeling in my chest when I went and picked it up too.
When I went and picked up that money and I had like $1,100 in my hand, like I had never really helped make that money.
How did you get that money?
Oh, Western Union.
So, Western Union is the only anonymous way you could do it at first.
But again, as you'll see, that this became a problem because Western Union shuts down after you collect so much money, they shut down your ability to collect more money from one person.
So, I can only collect $20,000 a year.
And once you collect that, they shut your name down and you can't collect anymore.
So, now you got to go find other names.
And this became a whole problem.
Yeah.
Because when you're collecting millions of dollars, you need a lot.
That becomes a hardest part of your business.
Yeah.
And it did.
And I will get to that.
It became a major problem to collect money.
So now I'm at this.
I've got, I don't even remember how many, but it was a decent amount of clients, especially for me.
I had never seen this much money coming in.
It's probably like, I don't even know how much it is, like maybe a thousand dollars a week.
It's funny how it's like a snowball effect, too.
You know, like you're saying, like you had that burning feeling in your stomach, and you feel like, oh, I make this much money.
Yeah.
I can make so much more.
Like now this is my new baseline.
Yes.
You know what I mean?
It's funny how it works.
Yep.
Yeah, you're correct.
And it's like, it's the same thing goes the opposite way.
If you like have no money, it's like a slippery slope.
You know what I mean?
It's hard to get your head above that.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Above the clouds.
Yeah.
And I had spirit of that whole gambit of, you know, Emotions and from going, you know, doing okay to going back down to now coming back up again.
You're right.
And it's you feel good.
You feel good.
You start feeling good finally.
You're more optimistic.
You see more opportunities.
So, you know, at this point, I want to go into this too, but I think maybe I'll do it a little later where people just kind of label drug dealers as greedy.
You're greedy, right?
Oh, you're greedy.
You just did it for the money.
And it's absolutely not an accurate depiction of why you do it, right?
It's not.
The money is great, but it's not about money.
Um, at first, it's about money, though, right?
Maybe after.
Not even.
No.
It was so for me, for this, and when I was in prison, I was around a lot of drug dealers.
We were in a nonviolent camp, and half of them were drug dealers.
So I got to get inside a lot of heads of some other pretty big drug dealers, you know, cocaine dealers and everything.
And it's not just about money.
Even with these guys, it's not inaccurate.
It's facile, right?
It's easy to just put a simple label on something and then just say, ah, it's that.
It's greed.
Right.
Story over.
It's not, it's much more complicated than that.
There's a whole dose response.
When you help somebody with cocaine, the person treats you with respect and admiration.
When you bring them a brick of cocaine and you have the best price, thank you.
Now I can go take this.
My customers love it.
Right.
It's the same type of dose response that you get from anything else.
But evolution can't tell the difference between helping people with a drug or helping people survive.
Right.
It's just the, because it's the response you elicit when you, when you feel a person respects or appreciates you.
Right.
So, so this.
Like a lot of these drug dealers were working on, they were working on these dose responses too.
I talked to a crystal meth dealer when I was in prison, and I was relaying this information to an entire class of people.
And one of the crystal meth dealers raised his hand and he goes, There were times when I sold my crystal meth at cost because I got it so expensive that time.
I bought like a kilo of it so expensive.
And I didn't want to disappoint my clients by raising the price.
So I just sold an entire kilo at cost and made nothing.
But I still wanted to do that just so I could be the man.
And in the drug business, a lot of people will front you product and then say, you pay me later.
Like, here you go, take this and you can pay me when you get the money.
Right.
And it's still so, you know, in that case, it wasn't about money because you didn't make any money.
Or in that case, you know, like you could lose that money.
You're giving them a loan, you're trusting them.
It's more about, yeah, the connection you make with somebody is very intensely, elicits an intense dose response.
Right.
And a lot of, A lot of continuing to build these, even these cocaine or crystal meth empires, is built on that.
The money isn't, I mean, don't get me wrong, the money's nice, the money's great.
It elicits its own dose response, which I'll go into later about exactly how money does that.
Well, I mean, if you look at it geographically, the poorest countries, the poorest communities are the ones that are corrupted by drugs and cartels.
The people that are generally the most desperate are the ones that.
Get into this stuff because it's the easiest route to money.
That's right.
And it's the same thing, even with like if you look at porn stars, like think about who fucking, you know, when they're 10 years old, say, I want to be a porn star when I grow up.
It's not that.
It's people who are poor, people who have been abused by relatives who have nowhere to go.
Like, how the fuck am I going to get out of this house where my uncle's abusing me every fucking day?
I need to get out tomorrow.
Okay, I could go fucking do porn and make 10 grand a week.
Yeah.
Whatever.
And it's not only about the money to get out of that situation, too.
It's what can I finally do?
To gain some respect and admiration within the community.
And if you're a good porn star, a lot of people admire you and respect you.
You have fans, right?
Once they get into it.
But I'm saying, like, the catalyst, the thing that they jump off initially might be money.
Like, in a desperate situation, they need to get away from.
Hosting Steroids Abroad00:02:44
And then after that, they could maybe, I think, the other part comes.
The other part comes and you grow with that, right?
So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that not that money is a zero factor in everything, but it's not the only factor.
Right.
And a lot of people just want to fast, silly.
Simply just label it greed and throw the key away, and then that's it.
And it's not that simple, it's very complicated what drives motivation and people to do things.
And that's just all I wanted to instill.
So, for me, and I'll explain, I'm going to explain pretty soon, like what drove me to continue and build this empire was not, you know, it certainly wasn't all money.
The more, it was more factored into helping people and the thought of not helping people.
So, let me get into that.
So, because I'm almost there.
So, the point when, the point when, The website, right?
So now I'm actually, I got some clients, and all of a sudden my friend comes to me, hey, website's ready.
We had to do all this stuff because you can't just build a website on GoDaddy or Wix and open a website, it can be traced, all this stuff.
It's got to be untraceable, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we couldn't do that.
So the way that we had to get around it was you have to host it in a different country, in a country where steroids are legal.
And you have to host a website out of a different country, and which isn't easy because uh, what countries are steroids legal in?
Oh, geez, I used to have a whole list of them.
Um, I think we used the Isle of Man because the Isle of Man steroids are illegal.
That was our because my website was bdsupplements.im, the im stood for Isle of Man.
Um, where's that?
I don't even know, I just picked it because the domain was cheap, it sounds good.
And this country was it was legal, yeah, sounds like a cool island, yeah, yeah.
Um, their their uh flag is really crazy too.
If you ever look up the Alaman flag, it's crazy.
Anyways, yeah, so you have to host it out of the country.
So this way, if the United States, you know, if the FBI was to get into your case, then they would go and trace it.
It would go out of the country.
And in that country, they have no jurisdiction outside the country.
So they can't search and go in and you host your emails from out there, too.
So they can't go and get all this information that can obviously put you away.
So that's the idea.
So we finally did that.
And it took a little bit to set that up.
But now we have a website.
So I just go.
And I go back.
So, and the moderators told me, they said, listen, if you want to do this, you have to do it the right way.
Here's the rules set up a website, blah, blah, blah, get back to us.
Scaling to a Whole Operation00:15:50
So, we did that.
And then I remember it was another just spur of the moment thing.
I put that information in and nothing happened.
Like, I didn't notice anything for like days.
And I'm like, this didn't even do anything.
Like, nobody cared.
And then one day, I think I woke up in the morning and all of a sudden I had like two or three times the amount of emails that I usually have.
And I'm like, what the heck happened?
And then I had all these people saying, hey, saw you on E-Roids here.
I'm like, what the hell is going on?
Where did all this business come from?
So I go, and sure enough, now I have the source tag under my name and I'm up officially.
As they labeled you a source.
Yeah, you get a special label.
I'm up officially on the.
Now everything I have is posted, my list in the official source section.
So people know that they can go there.
And so now here I am.
Boom.
I'm officially a source on the largest anabolic serotonin source forum in the world.
And then it just, from there, I just kind of kept instilling the same business practices and it absolutely blew up.
Like before, more than I ever could have dreamed possible.
So let me, I have to say it this way.
So when I started, before I started, I lived in my grandmother's house.
I made no money.
I couldn't.
There were times when I had to go.
I had $5 to eat for the day, and I used to get those back when McDonald's used to sell double cheeseburgers for a dollar.
I would buy like four of those, and that would be my food for the day, for the entire day.
And people would ask, hey, do you want to go to Applebee's or something tonight?
I'm like, I can't.
I don't have any money for that.
So I went from that.
And then I got a job at the hospital, right?
So I worked my ass off, and I made $9 an hour.
After taxes, I bought home $275 a week.
I could not survive on that kind of income.
And it was just kind of a mess.
So I did all this stuff, right?
So, and I finally start this thing, and it freaking.
And so, when I started this, right, I was like, when I started the whole thing, I said to myself, if I can make two or three hundred extra dollars a week, that would be perfect.
I'll be right in, you know, I'll be making like six or seven hundred dollars a week.
I'll be comfortable.
Yeah.
Everything will be great.
That would be perfect.
That would be my ideal situation.
Two or three hundred extra dollars a week.
And I thought that that was too much.
I was like, I don't think, you know, that's overzealous.
I don't think that's going to happen.
When I got put on that source forum, like, and I started instilling these same business practices that I talk about, being nice to my customers and all this stuff, I mean, it freaking blew apart.
Within six months, I was bringing in $21,000 a week.
I just, like, everything just blew apart and it got overwhelming the amount of business, the amount of work.
I was doing everything by myself at first.
And I never dreamed that I could make this much money or I never dreamed that.
That anything like this would happen.
How does your mind frame change when it's all of a sudden the fucking faucet is full blast?
It was crazy.
Like, are you a lot of people talk about, you know, the pursuit of wealth, like the pursuit of wealth, always trying to figure out a way to reach that next level.
And then people who have reached it, and then some, it just becomes now I'm just worried about losing it.
I want to make sure I can maintain this, I want to make sure I don't lose everything.
There is an element about that.
Let me tell you where my mind went, and that will come into play later.
Well, actually, right about here, it comes into play.
Yeah, it does.
It comes into play right here.
So, when I started bringing in this kind of money, and so one morning I wake up again, right?
This is probably, I don't know, six months into it, if that, maybe we went four months.
And I had done a shift at the emergency room the night before.
I get off at 11, I work till 5 a.m.
I work during the shift, right?
Answering emails.
When I get home, I got to pack all the orders.
Now it's to the point where there's 20 of them.
And I got to pack all the orders.
I got to go collect all the money from Western Union, which is just tedious.
So I got to go myself and collect all this money.
So you have like multiple different accounts with Western Union.
So you can, because there's only 20 grand a year you said you can take out, right?
Right, right.
So what I started doing pretty early is getting other people's IDs.
And I used to pay people for their ID.
Give me your ID.
And it doesn't matter if it looks just remotely like you, it's fine.
I would just, so I would tell the people to send the money in this name.
Okay, I have three different IDs.
So you're paying them for their IDs.
Yeah, I just pay people for their IDs.
And then they go get another one for $10 from the thing, from the DMV.
Yeah.
So I got to go pick up.
So now I wake up one morning.
I have freaking 200 emails right in the morning.
And I've never had that many before.
And I got to go to work.
I got to go click, collect all the money from last night that I picked up from all the emails I did last night.
I got to pack.
20 more orders.
Who knows how many more are in these 200 emails?
There's probably another 20 or 30 or 40 orders in there.
You're still doing all by yourself?
I got to go collect all this money.
I got to go do a nine hour shift at the emergency room.
And it just freaking slammed into me.
And after all this, I have, after I pick up all this money, I have $100,000 in my cash at my house.
And I have never, ever dreamed that I would ever be able to hold that kind of money.
And now I'm just like, this is too big.
Like, I fucked up in the way that this is too successful.
I'm going to get caught.
There's, I cannot keep doing this.
This is out of control.
I have to stop.
And I just like, I'm not a person who's prone to panic attacks, but if I ever had a panic attack, it was right here.
I remember sitting down in my head, burying my head in my hands and just saying, I can't do this.
I got to quit.
This is too big.
I'm going to get caught.
So I said, Why did you keep the job at the emergency?
I don't for very much longer.
Okay.
I was going to say, maybe to keep yourself off the feds' radar.
There was an element of legitimacy that I wanted to keep.
But there became a point pretty quickly where I just couldn't keep it.
But So I got my head buried in my hands.
I'm just like, I can't do this.
Okay, this is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to fill all these orders for the people who've paid money.
I'm going to tell everybody else I'm done.
I can't do this anymore.
I'm just going to stop because this is absolutely out of control.
And so I'm just sitting there.
Okay, that's what I'm going to do.
I'm starting to feel a little better.
I got a plan in place.
All right.
And then what hit me almost immediately is the thought of because I used to get emails every day from my clients, every single day.
Throughout the whole operation, people thanking me for what I did.
Thank you.
You have given me the ability to be a better husband to my wife, a better father to my children.
I enjoy life now.
I'm confident I can finally have sex with my wife.
I have energy to play with my kids.
My whole life is better because of what you do and how available and cheap and easy to obtain you make this testosterone or these products.
Right.
You have made my life better, and I want to thank you for that.
And I got that every single day.
Wow.
And that drives a massive, intense dose response, right?
So the first thing I thought of was I got to go tell these like thousand guys or so that I'm not going to help them anymore.
That they're going to have to go back to being poor husbands, poor fathers to their children, having a worse life because.
I'm a little overwhelmed and anxiety ridden right now.
And I had this, the overwhelming feeling that I was a part of something bigger than myself, which I was.
This was bigger than me.
It's not about me anymore.
So that right there, like, kicked me into gear to say, fuck that.
Fuck this.
I can do this.
And I just, after thinking about that, I put my head down and I said, fuck it.
I can do this.
I'm going to make this happen.
And then right after that, I like, you know, it's funny as I started, like, and Facebook, when you go through Facebook, right?
What do you see?
All these memes of all these things to convince people to try, try.
Like, you succeed when you don't be afraid of change.
Don't be afraid of trying new things, right?
You know, you only fail if you quit, like, you know, all these memes.
Yeah, typical self help type shit.
Yeah.
And all these things just started hitting me in the head.
And then every time I'd read one on Facebook, I would, Relate it to this.
Like, you're just going to quit.
And that's not how success is made.
Success isn't made by making excuses and quitting.
Fuck that.
Make it happen.
And that was my mantra.
My mantra became make it happen.
Was there any, I'm sure you thought of it, but was there any feasible path, no matter how hard it be, to make it legit?
Yeah.
So I tried at the end.
That was what my supplement company started.
Okay.
And I started like a little, like a real estate.
I bought four houses that I rented out.
And it was going to start like I was going to build this legitimate empire.
And eventually the idea was.
Stop doing the illegal one and continue with this.
I started a supplement company, which is the one that was on Shark Tank or almost made it to Shark Tank.
So there was that idea.
I just got indicted before any of that could happen.
So at this point, it was fuck this, I can make it happen.
I put my head down and I had to scale.
So I had to start thinking about okay, I can't do this to myself.
I have to delegate responsibility.
I have to, and from just from, you know, a lot of these things just made sense.
And I had some clues from what Gene told me.
Like, I started asking Gene, like, his, I'm sorry, I said his name, but that was the guy who I met, who I left with the source, the other guy who was kind of helping me, who had started his own empire.
So I asked him, how do you handle these things?
And he started, like I said, he didn't give me a clear indication, but he kind of set the, The tone for how to do this.
So I started, I just had to scale.
I had to compartmentalize every aspect of the business.
So I hired shippers.
I just started hiring people.
I hired a shipper.
I hired somebody who could just handle shipping.
I hired money collectors.
So I had money collectors and eventually I hired chemists too.
I don't know if we're getting into the part where I started making my own brand, but I started making my own brand.
So then I had chemists.
I had all this compartmentalized in the different jobs.
You do your job, you do this.
And I just, So, I started dealing with the customers because I was best at that, but I just pulled the puppet strings to make everything happen.
And then there became a point quickly where I never touched a product.
Right.
You just started delegating all the tests.
Yeah, I just delegated all the tests to everybody.
And this freed up my time to be able to really focus on business development and the customers.
So, you were like the head chemist.
So, you developed and started manufacturing all this stuff by yourself?
Obviously, you hired chemists.
I am a biochemist, but I actually did not.
Did you teach them how to do it?
The two chemists?
Maybe later, but I wasn't the first chemist.
Okay.
There was a guy.
So, yeah, I guess we can get into that.
I'm trying to think if there's anything else that's pertinent before that.
I kind of want to keep this story chronological so there's an understanding of, you know, a clear, concise understanding of how it went.
I'm trying to think if it actually is time to get to that.
Yeah, I suppose it is.
So, the idea was, right?
My idea was to compartmentalize each job.
And this also, not only did it mean that everybody has their specific job, but in order to run a criminal empire, you have to put in safeguards so that if something gets busted, it doesn't necessarily bring down the whole operation.
So the idea was I got to hire these people and they can't know about each other.
Nobody can know the names of the other people in the business.
So I had to kind of like start.
And then I started hiring people from out of state.
And that was actually one of the smarter things I did.
I spread the operation throughout the entire United States.
I had people all over the country working.
And nobody knew each other's name.
And that was the idea.
So, as we'll see as we get in, if a part of the operation gets busted, it just stays right there.
Nobody can tell on each other because they don't even know each other.
That way, the whole operation doesn't have to go down.
So, I was kind of doing that, I was setting that up and setting it up so this could run and I could just pull the strings and have everybody do the job.
My Chinese source, which is everything was going fine, as I said, As I stated before, the zeitgeist at the time was that you have to have a brand name.
Oh, yeah.
So, my source had British Dragon gear, which was one of the five acceptable brands in the world at the time.
In fact, it was one of the more popular brands.
What does gear mean?
Oh, sorry.
I know.
I hear it used all the time.
I just don't know what it means.
I forget that.
I forget.
Gear is just another word for steroids.
It's just the gear that you use.
And it's just a.
Does it stand for anything?
G E A R?
No.
Okay.
It's just the term that they use for.
Okay.
Any antibiotics there.
It's what Juice Heads call their gear.
Okay.
So I had British Dragon products, right?
And so British Dragons was one of those products.
The ironic thing is that British Dragon actually went down a few years before I started selling it.
But my Chinese source just started sticking British Dragon labels on his stuff, and everybody knew it.
So you have this situation where nobody wants to do anything that's not a name brand.
This guy just starts, and because of that, this guy just starts sticking British Dragon labels on this company that just got busted and went under.
And so everyone knew it was counterfeit, but it was still real and it was still good.
So everybody just accepted this is like one of the close enough.
Yeah, it's like okay, well, but it's not the original British Dragon, but the new British Dragon stuff is okay too.
So it didn't matter.
Okay.
So I had this, but it was my source that started this.
So I had the repurposed British Dragon stuff, and everybody was fine with it.
But this guy could get flaky.
Like, I mean, this guy was probably one of the biggest steroidulias ever in the world because he was sending this worldwide.
And this guy was like, maybe he must have been pumping out massive amounts.
The Matrix of Repurposed Drugs00:11:03
But I was one of his biggest clients at the time.
And so was Gene, or the guy was helping.
Because I mentioned Gene.
I said, hey, Gene's one of my partners, you know, just to kind of seal me in with this guy.
And this guy knew Gene by his name.
He knew stuff about him personally.
Oh, shit.
This Chinese guy from, And so Gene was big in his.
And I started, eventually, I was getting as much, if not more than Gene.
So, so, and yeah.
And so Gene also taught me how to actually reduce my prices from this guy because I was just kind of taking, I had no other options.
I was just taking what he gave me.
And he taught me that the prices could go lower.
So I actually started to go, as soon as I started buying a little higher quantity, they started saying, no, I want to pay this for it.
And that guy just never said anything.
I just actually just started paying him less for it.
I said, this is what I'm going to give you for this.
But he taught me that's how he did it.
Right, right.
And it worked.
Right.
So now my profit margins were even higher, and I could, I could, you know, I could start giving my clients even better deals, you know, here and there.
So it just worked out really well.
But this guy started getting flaky, right?
So he would just disappear every once in a while for a month and then come back.
And so, you know, what I learned is that I was fragile.
I was too fragile, right?
I had all my eggs in one basket.
If something happens to this guy, I'm done.
I needed to do something to create a more robust system.
Right.
And I use this terminology because in prison, so what's ironic is not ironic, coincidental.
It's actually coincidental is some of these things that I was thinking of were actually advanced business concepts.
And I didn't realize it until when I got to prison.
I was able to read, I read voraciously about books about business, MBA textbooks.
And I read from some of the biographies of some of the greater entrepreneurs of our time.
I just read everything.
And I started to learn from Nassim Taleb.
He had this.
Book called Anti Fragile, which talks about setting up systems, building robust systems with optionality, and to make sure that all your eggs aren't in one basket.
But you do that with everything you do.
Every system you build, you build contingencies, you build any business you have, you build contingencies, you build optionality so that you're not focused on one thing to drive your success.
Yes.
Right?
Yep.
And I knew that then, but I didn't have names to put to it.
And when I read it later, I said, oh my God, I did this.
And I didn't even know that this is actually an advanced business concept.
It was kind of neat.
But so I knew that I was fragile and I had to build a robust system.
So I'm looking at other brands to start buying, but they're all too expensive.
My profit margins would go down.
I would have to sell it at a higher price.
And my thing was having the cheapest stuff in the black market and with the best quality.
So I couldn't do that.
So then I thought about this guy I knew.
Now, mind you, we were building a big empire and I started.
Bringing a lot of money into the area.
You know, at this time we're making 20, probably about 21,000 per week, but more and more was coming in.
I mean, the business ended up getting five times, five to 10 times bigger than that.
And so, but we were, for my small city, like the amount of money that was coming in, it was, I knew that we had to hide that.
That was what was going to get us caught, is having the local cops come in and try to, about this, you know, this guy, because if people went and talked, word gets out.
It's a small city.
Word gets out, some cops are going to find out and they're going to come question us.
So I made sure everybody kept their mouth shut.
It was very important.
I explained to them, to everybody who was in our operation, why.
So nobody knew what we were doing.
I mean, they did just, they kind of started to see that everybody in our operation was suddenly doing well.
But nobody told what we were doing.
And I tried not to even sell locally because the local game was going to get me in trouble.
But this anonymous nationwide game, Wasn't as dangerous as a local game where the local cops can come busting.
So I even tried to keep down the local sales.
So nobody knew what we were doing.
So I knew this guy, all the juice heads in my local area, we all knew each other and all the dealers knew each other.
We were all friends, all the other steroid dealers in the area.
And so I knew one of them and I knew that he made his own stuff and he knew how to do it.
And he had educated himself really well.
He's one of the few people that knew as much about steroids as I did.
And I had never tried to make it myself.
I knew he was, and I knew a lot of people said his stuff that he made was good.
And he was able to charge lower prices because it's so much cheaper to make it yourself.
Right.
So I decided right then and there that I had to form a partnership with this guy so I could have another way to offer something else besides just this British Dragon stuff from this Chinese store.
So one night I just went to him.
I had this whole thing planned out.
I intentionally got a lot of my Western Union money and I brought it with me and I went out.
you know, to go drinking that night and we were going to meet him.
And I said, Hey, I got something to talk to you about.
And he was just like, Okay, let's go talk now.
And so I just brought him in my car and I unloaded everything we're doing and I showed him all this money that we're making.
I had like, I don't know, $15,000 that I picked up that day or something, or not that day, that week.
And I remember like his mouth just dropped open.
He was just absolutely dumbfounded by everything I had just told him.
And I said, I said, Well, let's partner.
Let's, yeah.
I'll start manufacturing.
Yeah, you like, I'll give you all the money to do to get all these powders.
You can just make this, but you got to just make it on a much bigger scale.
I need, you know, I need like a thousand bottles a week or whatever, and just start making it.
You know, what do you say again?
And he's just like, he didn't say anything the whole time.
His mouth is just open.
He can't believe what he's just heard.
But also, the opportunity is in front of him because the amount of money he was going to be able to make was pretty serious.
And he was just like, okay, let's do it.
And from there, I named my My brand name was Matrix.
We created a label.
I had another one of my guys create a label.
He made, you know, he got all the powders because he already knew where to get powders from.
He had a good powder source.
So he ended up getting the powders, making these vials.
I slapped my Matrix label on it and then I put it up on the list of my products.
And you know, there we were going, and so you can still look up to this day, Matrix Lab steroids, and you'll see all the reviews a bunch of really quality reviews.
We intentionally made it strong so that it would be good, and little did I know that would just drive a ton more business in.
Um, just the quality, the strength of these products, so it started getting legitimized, people started trusting it, people started using it, and then uh, eventually, was that all that you were selling was the Matrix stuff, yeah?
So, this is the interesting part.
So, I Again, the zeitgeist at the time was we don't trust anything that's not name brand, right?
Nobody wanted to do that.
So I thought that when I entered my Matrix brand, so at this time, now the whole black market is run by UGL, right?
Underground Lab.
UGL stands for Underground Lab, which is just people making their own stuff and selling it.
Now the whole, there is no name brand anymore.
It's all Underground Lab stuff.
But at this time, it was the opposite.
The UGL or Underground Labs just started and there was only a couple in existence.
And I was one of the, I wasn't the first, I was in the beginning.
Of the whole UGL movement.
That's also what helped spark this empire.
So I thought it was going to take a long time for people to warm up to this new stuff.
Now, this new stuff I had, I was making my profit margin.
I bought 25 milliliter vials for $50 and sold them for $125.
My profit margin was about 250%, right?
Yeah, 250%, right?
So When I the stuff I made, I could make for significantly cheaper, and then I just charged a hundred.
I made 20 milliliter vials for a hundred dollars, so my profit margin came up.
It was a 400% profit margin.
Wow!
So not only was it cheaper to make, but my profit margin, you know, shot up.
And so, I mean, the economics just worked out wonderfully.
So, again, I thought that.
It would take a while to warm up to this new brand that nobody knew this brand.
But it turns out that I was the brand.
That people, I had set enough of a trust in people that they trusted me.
They trusted everything that I did and anything I put up there that they would go ahead and accept.
Anabolic steroid users are some of the, they have a lot of animus towards people they don't know.
They'll berate you.
They're some of the hardest trusting people on the planet.
But once they do, they're also some of the most loyal.
So once I got these guys' loyalty, once I had all these patriots that was my client base, they would trust anything I put up there.
And I'm telling you, if it wasn't almost instant, everybody just switched right from the BD stuff to this Matrix stuff.
And then the Matrix stuff, people started posting about it.
And so this stuff is absolutely fire because we made it strong on purpose.
Right.
And that drove in tons more people because now they're like, I got to try this Matrix stuff because everybody's talking about it.
And that was all over the internet, all the forums.
This was nationwide.
This was no longer just local.
Yes, that's correct.
And in fact, you tried to keep it from being low.
You didn't want it to be local at all.
That's correct.
But these people knew your name on the Online, my business name is your business, not you personally.
Yeah, nobody knew, so they knew Matrix.
Matrix, and the name of our business was BD Supplements.
I named it that because it was British Dragon Supplements, that's what I was originally selling.
Oh, okay, so my business name was BD Supplements, that's what you saw on Eroid.
They didn't know your face though, no, nobody knew my name right, but uh, but then the Matrix was the brand name of what I sold, so everybody knew kind of both of them, but okay, more people started knowing the brand because it was so potent.
How long did this last before you realized that you were on the DEA's radar?
Selling Informants to the DEA00:02:15
I didn't.
I didn't totally.
I didn't totally know I was on the DA's radar.
Oh, you never knew?
Until they kicked in the door.
It makes sense now.
Yeah, it makes sense now, but I didn't think I was.
Now I can.
After I got indicted and saw the information I have, I can piece it all the way back.
It's pretty evident.
In hindsight, you can see it.
Yeah, it's obvious what happened now.
But, you know, at the time, I didn't.
Yeah, I didn't.
I didn't know.
Did you sell to an informant or something?
Yeah, but I did because that was what was in the paperwork, but it didn't, it doesn't matter.
It was all anonymous.
So all they can say is, I ordered from this site and I got steroids that tested legitimately, but they can't put a name or a face or anything to that.
So that, I mean, that almost didn't matter.
It was, you know, there was a lot of elements that ended up getting us caught, which I could go into.
I probably could go into at the time when it's time in the story when it's more relevant, if you want.
Yeah.
Where are we in the story now?
You started producing your own stuff.
You're selling your profit margins up to 400%.
Yeah.
And you're just making, you're raking in tons of money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and what sort of problems are you encountering because of all this fucking money?
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So, the first problem that became there was a whole bunch of just expansion problems, scale problems.
Yeah.
So, and one of them was that we were making too much, too much money.
It's a stupid fucking problem to have, but it was a problem.
So I couldn't collect all this.
So I had to start finding other anonymous ways to collect money.
And I started using this.
You ever heard of those green dot cards where you can essentially have this reloadable credit card and they sell these little reload packs with a number on it, right?
And if you get that number, somebody pays the cashier, you know, whatever that costs $2, $3, $500.
And then you send that number, I can load that onto this card.
And it's completely anonymous.
And I have this card.
It's like a reloadable credit card with a code that you can buy.
Money Laundering Signals00:15:03
Okay.
And so, if somebody from across the country can just buy one of these in their local CVS or whatever, and then send me that code, and I can load that money onto my card.
Okay.
But you can only load so much money onto these cards, right?
So, I had to get freaking 30 of them.
And I just, again, I started paying people, get me one of these cards and give it to me, and I'll give you 100 bucks or something.
And then I had, so I had like 30 of these, and I had like, I had an army of people collecting money in Western Union and this way.
And it was still just getting bogged down because like only 20,000 per person for Western Union.
These things can only hold so much money.
Just too much money was coming in.
Like, you know, at this point, at this point, probably we were probably doing like 1.2 million a year.
And it just kept getting bigger from that.
And I just couldn't collect all this money.
So I remember like I used to, whenever I had to think through a problem, I would go to the gym.
The gym, Releases its own endorphins, and you use a lot of the sometimes your brain gets foggy when you have that brain fog.
A lot of it is you're thinking so much that there's too many neurotransmitters that are kind of clogging up signals, and that's kind of what brain fog is.
So, when you work out, your brain actually you're using these neurotransmitters and it actually clears your brain out, and you produce a different type of endorphin.
So, it really helps people think.
And I would always go to the gym and I could figure out a problem.
So, you know, whenever that happens, like when I had a problem, I would think through it so much that.
I would that would start happening.
I can't think straight.
So you go to the gym, and then at the gym, like all the motor actions that are happening and the signals going to your muscles actually use those neurotransmitters to transmit the signals.
So you kind of use them up and you produce different endorphins too, which it's just like the opposite of what you're talking about would be like flow, where people talk about like being in a flow state where you're not thinking at all, or like a meditative state where your mind is completely clear and things just happen with effortlessly.
Yeah, I guess it would be like a way to create that.
I mean, exercise is a way to create something like that.
I guess it's kind of like my meditation, or like, you know, a lot of people can use it for their form of meditation to clear their brain.
Yeah.
But when you say I cleared my brain, like scientifically, that's what's happening.
You're releasing the influx of neurotransmitters in your brain to allow better synaptic firings.
Yeah, makes sense.
So, I had this money problem.
I went to the gym and I'm like, I got to figure it out.
And just going in, like you said, like when you're at the gym, like stuff starts coming into focus and you can have these moments of clarity where just boom, it hits you.
And that happened to me often.
So, when I had a problem, I'd go to the gym, I'd figure it out almost every time.
And so that's what happened with this.
So, I started thinking about the whole money flow.
It all comes to me and then I dole it all out to wherever it needs to go, right?
Because like a lot of it has to go from my clients to I have to pay the source, I have to pay my employees.
You know, but it all comes to me and then it goes out.
So, why would I do it that way when I could just have the money go right from where it's coming from to where it needed to go?
I could just bypass me as the middleman.
So, I started.
I went to my Chinese source at the time, and my powder sources were also from China at the time.
And I said, I need, can I send you?
Because they had all these Western Union names, they collected through Western Union.
And I noticed every time I did it, I would send like five grand at a time.
Because that's as much as you're allowed to send Western Union.
So I would just send these $5,000.
But I noticed the names would always change and they had no shortage of names.
So I said, and I knew other people are ordering with these names, and a lot of people just order $200 worth of stuff, you know?
So I'm like, can I have my clients send you money directly?
And this will like take me out as the middleman, and I don't have to worry about collecting that money.
It just goes right to where I need it to be.
And the Chinese suppliers, like the guy with the BD, British Dragon stuff, and my powder suppliers were both like, yeah, that's fine.
We'll just give you a bunch of names.
So So, I was able to stop myself from being the middleman.
And I was able to send money directly from my clients right to the powder source and my employees.
So, now I said, through all my employees, they had those green dot cards.
There were other companies, it was more than just green dot.
They all had to get one of those.
This is how I was going to pay them.
And then it came directly from my clients.
So, now what I did is I diverted all that money from flowing to me, from me having to figure out ways to pick it all up to.
And it was just all diverted to the end source where it needed to be.
And then the money I collected was just mine.
Right.
And that was a major overhaul of a major efficiency to be able to now further operate and collect more money in the future.
Right.
So I can't understand how big that was.
The other thing that really aided in business development was now the powder sources we had, as I stated.
So once we started to become big and we had a name and we were doing UGL, was.
All these Chinese suppliers, powder suppliers came to me and wanted to sell me powders.
So I would just take samples from all of them.
Sure, I'll take samples.
I'll take samples.
And at this time, there was no labs that could just test your gear, test your testosterone and its derivatives.
You couldn't just send it to a lab.
You actually can these days.
You can just send it to a lab, have them test it for quality, and then you just send them a little sample of it.
You couldn't do that back then.
Nobody was taking steroid samples and testing it for you.
So I decided that quality was of utmost importance.
And then to do this, I was going to use crowdsourcing.
I was going to use my own clients to help me test.
And so I'd give guys these discounts and I'd say, listen, I need you to clean your receptors out.
I'm going to give you, we'd make a lot of these powders that come in.
We tested on ourselves first to make sure, like the whole crew, we tested on ourselves and make sure it was fine.
Everything was good.
And then I'd send it to these, you know, I'd send these to clients and tell them to clean out their receptors, take some of it, and then get a blood test that I'll pay for and then send me the results.
And I knew what this amount of test, take this much, I knew what it should show on a blood level, right?
And so we had like 50 different powder sources, and I just had an army of people testing this stuff for me and getting me back with information.
So now we were able to pick the top three sources that had the most consistent quality and the best.
You know, the best stuff that really raised people's testosterone levels.
And we were able to weed out all the bad ones and have the top quality.
So now we're talking about Matrix was made, nobody else was doing anything like this.
So Matrix was now made of tested powders from countless other powder sources.
And we had the best stuff probably in the country for sure, possibly the world, just because we had done that much work to make sure that we had the utmost best quality products.
And we just, you know, kept that up.
So now, and that, so now all the forums, all the word was just make your stuff as fire.
And it just started pouring more people in.
And so, pretty quickly, I couldn't do it with just the guys that I had.
The guy making couldn't keep up with the demand.
Wow.
The shipper couldn't keep up with the demand.
So, I just keep expanding.
So, I started getting more shippers.
I got them in other states.
I had a chemist from another state.
These guys were making together and still couldn't keep up with demand.
So, I got more chemists, more shippers, and different.
So, throughout the entire country, you know, at one time we had five shippers, five chemists, all making thousands of thousands of vials a week.
And there was rarely a time when I could keep up with all the business.
It just got absolutely insane.
So, you were completely overwhelmed by this massive.
But I kept expanding enough to where, although it was overwhelming, like I worked 12 hours a day, but in my job was just dealing with the clients, and then I'd send the.
So, you know, how my business worked is.
Client would come in, ask, you know, oh, hey, I want this.
Okay, boom, boom, here's a payment.
Pay me this way.
And I would tell him how to pay.
He would come back with the money one way, whether it was a Western Union or, well, I would ask them what way they wanted to pay.
And then I would direct it to where it needed to go, the payment.
And then I would put that order in into like an email that I had every day.
I would just list all these things into a different email.
And then I would send it to the shipper every night.
The shipper had till the next.
The clothes of the post office next day to get this out.
And they would just sit there and pack the orders and then print off the shipping label.
UPS, they had shipping stuff all in their houses.
And they would just pack each of these orders and take them to the post office.
And so every day this would happen.
And then the chemists would make more, but the chemists would have to ship it to a shipper, which is usually in a different state.
So they'd vacuum seal them, really wrap them up, and ship like 100 vials at a time.
It so and so that's how it would work.
The products would go to the shippers, the shippers would ship all the orders that I sent out, and I would deal with the clients all day and then disperse the money wherever it needed to go.
So now the only money that's coming to you is the profit, right?
Because you're not having to pay everybody, so you're making so much money.
Are you laundering this money any sort of way?
Are you how are you legitimizing all this money?
What are you doing with all?
Are you keeping it cash?
What are you doing with it?
Yeah, so I didn't really do anything to legitimize it.
I didn't really, I didn't launder it.
I got a laundering charge, but I shouldn't have gotten a laundering charge because I wasn't laundering money, what they said.
But so all the money was on, I had like 30 of these credit cards, right?
And you can spend money on a credit card, on a reloadable credit card, and it doesn't, like anything, you know, under certain amounts, under like this $10,000, this magical $10,000, like doesn't raise any red flag to the IRS, right?
So, So, you just have an unlimited amount of these $10,000 prepaid credit cards.
Yeah, I have like 30 of them, and they're full all the time.
And you just use those to do everything.
Everything.
Get gas, go to dinner, restaurants, pay your.
What about your living expenses?
You bought houses with this shit?
I bought houses with cash.
So, I still had a lot of cash too.
So, I was still picking up cash from Western unions, but it wasn't that much.
And what I also had is so, I had guys with these cards, right?
I had an army of people who had their own, and I used to pay them 6%.
Just, I'd fill up their cards, tell me every week, bring me back, you know, a couple thousand dollars, you know, and then, and then I'd pay them 6%, like that, you know, that's what they did.
So, and I had a bunch of people doing that.
So, I was still getting cash.
So, what would happen is they'd get it in their name.
So, they order one of these credit cards in their name because it has to have a name to somebody.
Okay, I understand.
And then I would load their credit card slowly.
And I'd say, bring me back this cash.
You know, when I first got a new person, I'd only put $1,000 in and say, bring me back this cash.
I'll give you 6%.
But then it started, if they had five or six cards, it only takes them a couple minutes at the ATM to pull out.
You can only pull out like 300 at a time twice a week, or they shut the cards down.
The hard way.
Holy shit.
It got very complicated, but we learned exactly how to do it.
So they wouldn't shut the cars down because it looks fraudulent if you're just pulling out cash and we had a whole system.
Right.
It was actually very difficult, but it took us a long time and a lot of lost money to figure it out.
But so I had these guys, you know, and they were bringing me two, three, four, five grand a week.
They get 6% of it and it really only took them maybe an hour of their time total.
Right.
And they're making like, and they're making, you know, good money.
I don't know.
Wow.
Four or 500 bucks a week for an hour's worth of work.
That's fucking insane, man.
And how is your, How is your life changing?
Like, how is your lifestyle changing?
How is obviously this 100% of your life every day?
This is what your main thing that you're focusing on.
Like, are you being extra careful not to look like you have a lot of money?
Or are you just like saying, fuck it, I'm going to buy this Lamborghini and this mansion?
And so, at first, that was the idea.
And when I lived in the small city that I grew up in, it was important to do that because.
It would draw attention.
Everybody knew me and they knew that I was not wealthy.
If I suddenly exhibited all this opulence, then it would attract attention.
And that's not what I wanted.
So I ended up, I was okay about that.
And I didn't.
One of the things I did wrong is I started going on vacations every six weeks and I would post about it on Facebook.
And that was one of my mistakes because people could see that.
And so I got robbed a few times because.
People would know when I was on vacation because I just posted about it and then they come to my house and probably lost $100,000 and people around Jesus.
Yeah.
So eventually, what happened?
You get on the feds' radar, right?
Eventually, you get busted.
Yeah.
So, and how did you get what was that like?
Like, did it, was it just like out of nowhere they raided your house or what?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'll definitely go into that.
I think there's a lot of, there's build up to explain how it got there.
Okay.
So, so let me start there.
Um, To go about the money thing, when I moved to New York for a girl, actually.
And when I moved to New York, I wasn't drawing attention by having money because there's a lot of people with money.
So it wasn't as big of a deal there.
So I could start doing things.
I bought a brand new Jaguar F-type.
I didn't buy it, I leased it, but I paid for it in cash.
When Money Changes People00:08:44
I had to put a huge sum down.
So, this is the strange part.
Like, I didn't have anything on the books.
I had quit my ER job.
Right.
I didn't have any money on the books.
And so, I just went and I found this guy who did leases.
And I'm like, hey, look, I want to lease one of these cars.
I don't have any proof of my income, but I have a lot of income.
And he figured it out for me.
And I was able to get a brand new Tabalon Jaguar.
It was freaking awesome.
Jaguar F type.
And then, the same way, like, In a very strange event, like I didn't have any income for my apartment either.
So I had this.
I moved at first, I moved into this like this really nice place that nowadays would probably go for like $6,000 a month.
And then I upgraded and I eventually had this penthouse overlooking Manhattan on the Hudson River.
And at the time, I paid $9,000 a month for it.
But that was, it would go for a lot more now.
The real estate market was different back then.
So you were renting places.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I was able to get around to it.
They had these clauses that allowed.
I didn't have to prove income.
It was kind of strange, but it worked out.
Right.
I'm sure you wouldn't have to prove income if you paid like X amount of dollars up front.
Like, I'll pay up front for this whole fucking place or half 50% up front.
Essentially, yeah.
It's amazing what you can do when you have a lot of cash.
So, yeah.
So, that's one of the lessons I learned too.
So, there's a whole thing, like, especially in my book, I go over what money does, what it does to people.
Yeah.
Not what it does to people.
I don't even want to say it in the negative sense because I think like having money that, Is seen as a negative thing and it can change people negatively.
And I don't, that's not necessarily true.
It certainly can.
So people say that money changes you.
And it does.
Money is a representation of our value to society, right?
What is it?
It's just this paper or it's numbers in a bank account, right?
It's arbitrary.
This is just man created.
It's not real.
So, but what it does represent is our value to society, right?
Because when we create value, We create value for people.
If we create value for a myriad of people in a very meaningful way, we are valuable to society.
And that is translated into wealth or monetary.
Right.
So the money is seen as when people see that you have money, it's a representation of your value to society.
And then it's respected.
You have respect for somebody who can help a lot of people.
Right.
And the more money you have, Money is also like a panacea, right?
It's an easy way to help everything.
It's a panacea, it's something that can, I don't know, almost like something that can take care of any problems, right?
And that's kind of what money is.
You can throw money at anything, almost anything, and take care of problems.
And it's an easy way to help other people, right?
So when people see that you have money, it's a representation of your value to society and you can easily help people.
It's very easy.
You need your rent paid.
Oh, you want to go out to a nice dinner?
Blah, blah, blah.
You want this?
So it's respected.
So when you just having money gives, makes people respect and admire you, which also raises a dose response, right?
So, so now when you get money, not only do you, are you raising the dose response and it can slowly go into something that's a little manic, right?
Just because everybody's respecting you, everybody's showing you admiration, appreciation, you know.
So, so if you're not cognizant of that, it can get a little out of control.
And I'm no exception.
There was a, But I was able to rein it in pretty quickly.
But there was a period when I got a little manic over the amount of money that I had.
How did you realize or become self aware that you were becoming like that?
You know, interestingly enough, I want to say it was probably at a blow up I had at a friend's house.
This friend I hadn't seen in a long time, and I went to his place, and I just got back from a vacation.
And all I wanted to talk about was me and the money I had and the.
The amount I could spend on everything.
And I bought everybody's dinner, and I thought that everybody should kind of kiss my ass for that.
Yeah.
And so some of these people started having a problem with it.
And then, and I, you know, I was drunk at the time too, which actually raises the mania.
So, yeah.
So it's drugs and alcohol and mania don't mix well.
And so, like, I flipped out.
And, you know, this is a guy that I knew my whole life, and he's a good friend of mine.
And I kind of ruined that friendship.
And I think that's when I say, you know, I screwed that up.
That was me.
I can't be like that.
And, And I was able to rein it in after that and understand that the only reason I have this money is because of the value I create to people, the value I create to society.
And I have to be humble.
And you have to understand that my good feelings and the dose response that I get is because of everybody around me and because of my ability to help people.
So I just have to focus on that.
And it's not about making people recognize how awesome you are.
That happens to a lot of sports figures.
Like, you see a lot of mania happen, like with these young athletes who suddenly become millionaires.
You see them just talking, you know, about how awesome they are, how this and that.
And you can see the manic, the manic levels just in a lot of these, a lot of young sports stars.
And they have public relations people too.
So these really wealthy guys like LeBron James, like, you know, a lot of the, they're, when they're on camera, they're very, they say the right thing all the time.
They're very, you know, Kobe Bryant was also excellent.
On camera, and they have public relations people telling them about all this stuff and how to act and how you need to be.
But before you get that education and understanding, there's definitely something.
So that's what people mean when money changes people.
However, money can also fuck you up too.
One of the things, interesting things to me about, I just talked about this yesterday, was there's a certain path or a certain way humans are supposed to develop.
There's a certain amount of experiences growing up through childhood into becoming an adult.
That you need to go through to become a well rounded human being, to understand pitfalls, to understand success, to understand failure, and to understand your relationships and everything.
I think the brain doesn't stop developing until you're in your mid 30s or something like that, they say now.
But there's something that happens when you give someone who's in their teens or in their early 20s an ungodly amount of money.
That throws everything off.
It throws everything off your relationships to your friends, your parents, everybody in your life.
Everyone starts treating you differently, and that dramatically fucks up and changes your development from a child to an adult.
So, when you, I mean, and a lot of the kids, like NBA players and NFL players, the most obvious example of this, they get ungodly amounts of money and attention at a super young age.
They don't know certain things about the world, about life necessarily.
It's not their fault they made this money, but I mean, you have to understand.
Human development and human nature.
And when you give it to somebody who's not developed yet, it's going to severely fuck them up.
Yes.
It's very perspicacious.
Yes.
It's all correct.
And a lot of these cliches about money changes people, money can't buy happiness, which is just totally not true.
All these are not thought of with a clear understanding of all the things that occur when somebody makes money.
It's not simple.
Just like everything, it's not as simple to slap a label on it and And call it a day.
It's very complicated.
So, on the lines of what you were saying, what I want to iterate is there is a change in the person.
The change in the changes in person goes along with what I said.
There's a slight mania that goes on, but there's also different changes.
And there's a change in the relationship with the current people you have.
All right.
So let me go into something else first.
So, when I was talking about there's a difference between.
You know how Antonio Brown is?
Yeah.
Responsibility and New Dynamics00:12:55
He's a great example of this.
Yes.
Yeah.
You're correct.
And he might have personality disorder as well.
But yes.
And CTE.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yes.
And you're absolutely correct.
Like, look at that guy.
Sorry to interrupt you, but look at the guy.
Like, he's a fucking perfect specimen of a human being, super athlete.
And he can't.
Incredibly fucking gifted and talented.
Keep his ego in check.
Right.
And he has tons of fucking money.
Yeah.
And that's a recipe for disaster.
You're absolutely correct.
Yeah.
And that's why I think like people like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant was excellent at handling that too.
Like they're, they're phenomenal at handling that kind of fame.
Right.
They, I mean, they're just, when they're on camera, it's flawless, almost flawless what they, you know, how they present themselves.
Yeah.
I mean, they've been doing it since early teens, but it also is coached into them.
Right.
A lot of people don't understand these people have massive PR.
Right.
Firms.
They have firms for like entire groups of people working around the clock to make sure that they don't look stupid.
Right.
And teaching them how to act.
Right.
And that's what's not understood.
So when you have like a drug dealer who, you know, doesn't have like things can get out of control, like you just don't realize what's going on.
That's why I like Michael Jordan so much is because he had all those flaws that he didn't try to hide, like the gambling and all that crazy shit that he was into.
And that's what makes him so much more fascinating to me than like LeBron.
He's like, No stains on anything.
You know what I mean?
Too perfect.
But he's been, like you said, he's been being groomed for that since he was in high school.
Right.
Since he was a freshman in high school, probably.
You know, because everybody knew what he was going to be.
Right.
Yeah.
He's been being groomed like that.
Right.
That's true.
That's very true.
Michael Jordan didn't even make his freshman.
Yeah.
That's what it was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're right.
Michael Jordan is fascinating.
I love that.
The last dance.
I enjoyed it.
The last dance was fascinating.
Wasn't it amazing, dude?
I need to watch that again.
I want to watch.
Like when he breaks down, because he's talking about like people being upset with him or having a problem with the way that he demanded perfection.
The way he's like, no, this is how we're going to, this is how you make it to the end.
This is how you get there.
And you do this or you get the fuck out.
Right.
And when people were taking exception to that, some of his teammates, like on that, remember that scene when he broke down?
He actually started crying and he was just like, He's like, you know, maybe you shouldn't be on this journey with me.
This is how this is what it takes to get there.
I know I've been there, and this is how you have to do it.
And if and if you don't want to, and if you don't like that, then maybe you shouldn't take this journey with me.
But that's where I'm going.
And it was just so poignant and so cathartic.
Like, yeah, when he's being interviewed and he's kind of reflecting on everything and reflecting on how much of a he was, yeah, but he had to be right.
That's who he was.
If he wasn't, then they wouldn't have got there.
If he didn't, if he didn't demand the best, so let me let me use that.
If he didn't demand the best from everybody around him.
Then he wouldn't have made it to the finals.
He wouldn't have been as successful as he was.
But he showed people how to get there.
This is how you do it.
And people around him didn't like that, right?
So there's an element of that in what happens to somebody who starts making money as well.
So when they say that people change who make money, what I want to really clearly iterate is that the people around you change as well with the changing social dynamic.
So So now there's a new dynamic.
You're the guy who has the money.
You have this money, which is a kind of a panacea, and you can help.
It's easy for you to help somebody.
You become more respected, your relationship with everybody around you changes.
You have a lot more responsibility.
Especially people who made the money, who created the value to make the money themselves, you have a lot more responsibility.
I have a team of people that I have to pay that are looking to me for support.
I have tons of responsibilities.
I have thousands and thousands of clients that I have to make sure I take care of.
And it's not that.
So, your friendships change.
I have a lot of responsibility now.
I have to take care of people.
It's bigger than just me.
I have a huge empire to run.
You have a lot of money.
People are respecting and admiring you.
So, you raise up here, and your friends are still, you know, all the people that are around you are still down here.
And people have problems with that.
They were your friend because you had something in common.
You both had similar circumstances, and you could help each other through those circumstances.
All relationships form because there's some sort of give and take.
Right.
And When you come up here, people get jealous.
People get, they don't like the new dynamic because that's not why they were friends with you in the first place.
That's not, you didn't, you didn't, you're not creating the same value you did when you were both just like poor people who made each other laugh.
And then you see new people come in and think you start getting suspicious of their motives.
That's exactly correct.
You're exactly so, or, or they just, they wreck the relationship because they're not happy with it anymore.
When you see somebody else rise, there's a, An inherent jealousy about that.
And jealousy runs rampant.
So I want to iterate that the people around you change, the entire social dynamic changes, the people around you change as well.
And that is a big, but it comes out as people say, oh, money made that guy change.
Well, there's some things that he had to change because he's got a lot more responsibility now.
Like there's a lot different things going on.
You know, you're changing as well.
Like I can't say it enough.
Jealousy runs rampant.
So I started having people rob me, my friends that had been my best friend, who would start robbing more than one.
You just lose friends and new friends come in, but new friends that are now comfortable with the new dynamic of that you're the boss, you're the guy who's the responsible, who can get everything done.
And you start, you know, so like you lose a lot of your old friends.
Some of the old friends come for the ride with you.
I guess that would be your entourage, right?
But it's those people who are comfortable with the change and okay with the change, right?
But a lot of people are not comfortable with the change in the social dynamic.
So I just want to iterate that that's a major factor in people saying that, oh, money changes people.
Well, it changes you too, it changes everybody.
Some people say that money is more of a magnifying glass, it just makes you more of who you already were or who you were before.
Yeah, I suppose.
I would have to think about that more.
I guess it.
Like that was already there, that the money just really magnified.
Yeah, I can understand.
Whether they be good or bad.
Yeah, I could understand that.
Because it allows you to give in to all your voices and all your, it allows you to be you more.
Yeah.
Like, there's nothing holding you back from what you want.
Yeah.
And I think it will be evident about some of the things I like to be because of some of the things that I chose to do, just as far as a lot of my money.
But so one more thing I want to say, though, is that about money is so, so there is a difference between, and when you said, and you were, you're on the, you're on the, obviously, You understand when you just heap a bunch of money onto somebody, right?
So if you have somebody who makes their money because they have a business or they created value for people, right?
Instead, they started a business and they're valuable and they're creating money and they're making money the right way by themselves.
They create a business or something.
Those people are happy with money because they also have the rest of the dose responses of being able to create value for people.
And the money is just a representation of that.
So, anybody who makes their own money, makes their own wealth.
Like I said, did that by creating value, and they have the appropriate dose responses from actually being valuable and the respect and admiration from a lot of people.
Right.
So, those people are happy.
Money is not, when you say money doesn't buy happiness, well, you know, money certainly can.
I've never seen, what did Daniel Tosh say?
Never seen anybody frown on a Wave Runner.
That's funny.
So, I mean, I don't like that saying money can buy happiness.
It freaking buys a Lamborghini.
For sure.
That makes me pretty happy.
For sure.
So, but what that means, what they're actually trying to say is that people that say that are broke.
Yeah.
If you're valueless in society and you don't do anything, suddenly you win the lottery and you get millions of dollars, right?
That doesn't make you a valuable person.
You have this temporary ability to help people.
You have this panacea that is money.
Yeah.
You have this temporary ability to help people, but the fact that you have no inherent value or you don't inherently create value for people to reinforce those dose responses hasn't changed.
So, you don't have a foundation.
Right.
As soon as that money's gone, your value's gone, right?
And those people aren't happy because, or people, misers, right?
Who, you know, just have a get an inheritance or something and then they don't spend their money on any people because that's the only value they have, right?
They're not valuable other than that.
They don't create any value in society.
And people like that, they haven't fixed the root thing that makes you happy is by getting these dose responses, these eliciting these dose responses, which comes through being valuable or helping people or cementing relationships, right?
So those people aren't happy.
If you just heap, Millions of dollars on somebody who's inherently not valuable and somebody who's just an asshole.
The foundation, like you said, hasn't changed, and that person will not be happy with money.
Right.
But anybody who makes it on their own is happy because they do have a foundation.
They are valuable to society.
So it's just like, I don't think that cliche isn't clearly understood.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the same thing when you see people sometimes, even athletes, get a lot of money and they just fucking, they find a way to spiral out of control and fuck up everything.
I didn't even read the laugh because it's sad.
It is.
Yeah.
If you don't have the foundation, you know, if you don't build it up the right way, bottom up, then it's just going to be chaos.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Have you ever heard that there's this thing, there's this idea in this show that I just finished watching called Westworld, where this guy talks about, I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but he talks about the human intellect just being an extravagant mating call.
He's like, look at Picasso, look at the Empire State Building, look at Mozart.
All of it is just peacock feathers.
Yeah.
All it is is just an extravagant mating call.
That's really funny, but it's also very poignant and interesting.
But we'll put a story behind it.
I even like to think about it in relationship to Elon Musk.
I want to make a human race interplanetary and make the human race survive.
But is that true or is that just a story you're telling?
Because you want pussy.
So, evolutionary speaking, though, that's like people say, Oh, what is the meaning of life?
Well, it's actually pretty simple.
Like, the meaning of life is just to procreate and continue the human species.
That's what we evolved to do.
So, anything we can do, like throw up our elaborate peacock feathers, that's what we evolved to do.
So, there's absolutely truth in that.
And some of it is, yeah, like the most elaborate person gets the most pussy.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
It's very interesting when you put it that way.
Okay, so you're rich now.
Yeah, yeah.
And you, yeah, we were talking about you, you sort of like, you realized you were kind of like spiraling out of control with your ego and your relationships.
Yeah.
I was able to pull in check very quickly, but a lot of people, shit, I still have friends who still haven't been rich for decades and still haven't put it together, you know, rained themselves in.
But I was able to rein it in pretty quickly.
Yeah, but there were a few things, yeah, that led to, you know, that kind of got out of control.
And I realized it pretty quickly and was able to rein it in.
But there is a dynamic.
There's certainly a dynamic shift.
And it's not as simple as, you know, as money changes people are.
Money can't buy happiness.
It's not that simple.
There's a lot that goes on.
Let's get to the part where the downfall of your empire.
Okay.
Let's transition to there.
Okay.
Federal Raids in Georgia00:06:36
I have to tell that.
I have to tell about the middle where, so we have, I moved to New York.
I'm in New York.
I get into my apartment in New York for the first day.
I sleep there one night.
I wake up in the morning and I get this phone call.
It's one of my shippers.
They said the post office just called her.
She has a shipment coming in from Georgia that's full of steroids.
In my mind, it wasn't too much.
It was like probably 300 vials, probably $30,000 worth.
In my mind, it was just a small order that was coming to her.
And so she says that the post office called the shipment, some vials broke in the shipment, it was leaking.
They have to open it and make sure it's not hazardous.
Oh, shit.
So I'm like, off.
And I'm in New York and she's in upstate New York.
So it's just not feasible for me to get there to help.
So I call some people, go help them.
And this is one of the mistakes I made, which I changed after this to have a shipper ship directly to a shipping house where there's a lot of illicit product was a bad idea because if something happens like that, then they can just, the DEA can just go to the house where it was being shipped, like they did.
And And they can find everything.
So after this, I developed a shit.
I need clean receiving houses.
So now the shipper ships to a clean receiving house and then the shipment is delivered to the shipper.
But this would eliminate the.
So now if something happens to the package that the post office finds it and sends the DEA to the house, it would just go to a clean house.
There's nothing they can do.
Nobody possessed anything, right?
Because the post office still has it and it's just nothing can be done.
So that's what I started doing.
But this is how I learned.
That this was a mistake.
So it was sent right to a shipper who had a bunch of other, you know, product at the house.
The DEA went there.
I sent somebody to go help clean it out and they got it almost all out when the DEA showed up.
So they had just a few things and it wasn't even that big of a deal.
They got, so they arrested them.
They got the most minor felony that you can get.
Neither of them had a previous record.
So it would have been what's called the conditional discharge.
Nobody was going to do any jail time.
And six months of clean behavior, it would have been thrown out.
That's it.
But You know how they get the interrogation?
They scared the crap out of this shipper, and the shipper blew everything in.
And this shipper used to be, was a female.
She used to be my personal assistant.
But she wanted more because she saw, she started to, like, I never told her, but she, some of my stuff had to deal with drop this guy off some money, collect money from this guy, this guy.
That was some of the stuff she did.
And she just started to pick up too much information over the time.
And then when she said, well, listen, I want to do this because it makes more money, let me do something in the business.
I was reticent, but finally I was like, okay, all right, I'll give you a chance.
And she was doing a good job, but they just scared the shit out of her.
So she just blew in everything, you know, it was blew in almost the entire operation.
So I immediately, the other guy didn't say anything.
He could see through everything.
So he was just like, nah, I'm not saying anything.
And I got him a lawyer and I got myself a lawyer because she mentioned my name.
But I was in New York, I was in New Jersey at the time.
I lived in the greater New York City area, but on the Jersey side of the Hudson.
So I was overlooking Manhattan, but right on the Hudson, just on the Jersey.
So I was in a different state.
And so they couldn't even, they had no jurisdiction over me.
But I still got a lawyer and my lawyer talked to them and everything.
And I was going to come in and talk to them if I had to.
And at this point, I thought it was the whole jig was up, right?
I mean, it's all, it's damn it, it's all done.
The DEA, like they knew everything.
Again, they just, they arrested those two.
It was only because they could only charge them with the low level felony.
And then that was it.
So, Like a month went by, another month went by.
I still have his lawyer.
We're asking him what's going on with this case.
And they're saying, well, it's done.
Like, you know, they just charged you two with the felonies and they don't have any jurisdiction to go get Ryan in Jersey.
And there's just nothing else that they can do because the package came from a guy in Georgia.
They don't have any jurisdiction to go down there and do anything.
That's it.
It's just you guys got your two low level felonies and that's it.
So pretty soon all the guys are like, Okay, let's just stay out of New York and keep going.
That's it.
That's done.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I started.
Yeah.
All right.
Everybody wants to get going again.
Not one person didn't want to.
So let's get going again.
So we just stayed out of New York and I got shippers in Georgia and I had one from Tampa.
I forgot.
I had a shipper and a chemist from Tampa.
I didn't even, I forgot about that.
I had one from Tampa.
I had one from all over the place.
So we all got going again.
And, um, And then, you know, it just kept getting bigger and better.
And this was it.
That was it.
It was done.
Just kept getting bigger and better.
Well, so it's going to turn out that there was this thing being developed or this branch being developed called Operation Cyberjuice that was picking up exactly this type of thing.
They were picking up this fucking name.
Yeah.
That was picking up this exact type of case.
So, So they didn't pick it up for a long time.
And it was almost dead in the wind.
And the lawyer was like, and I find out later that it almost died, but that one post office guy who's just a federal post office security guy, but he has federal jurisdiction, was able to call.
And he was there when I was busted, too.
He was the first guy.
He wanted me so bad.
I don't know why.
It was his thing.
For some reason, he found that and goddammit, he was going to get to the bottom of this.
And he sparked the entire thing.
So he got the.
He got the feds to eventually pick it up, but it took a long time.
And we didn't think it was going to happen.
The information we were getting from the lawyer talking right to the guys was that this is it, it's done.
Betrayal During a Vegas Crisis00:13:47
So they picked it up, and it still took them two more years to get us.
Wow.
But we went stronger.
We picked back up and just went stronger.
Can you walk me through the day that they raided you?
Yeah.
So I had just gotten back from a.
Extravagant vacation in Vegas.
I took a bunch of friends there.
I had been doing that.
A lot of these vacations were pretty epic.
I would go and just get a.
I had.
So I used to go to Miami or Vegas, my two favorite places to go.
And I would call these VIP planners and just tell them that I would just give them like 50 or 60 grand and told them to book a pool party during the day in the top club at the top table at night.
And like people would be like, Oh, you dropped 60 grand at Vegas.
How much did you lose?
You go gambling?
I didn't gamble at all.
It's all in booze.
You didn't gamble at all?
I didn't gamble at all.
Wow.
It was all, I mean, I did gamble sometimes, but I didn't lose a lot of money.
I didn't, I don't, I don't spend a lot of money gambling.
I just have fun a little bit.
Yeah.
And I didn't, some of the times I wouldn't gamble at all.
It was, it was all on this, on these freaking elaborate VIP tables.
And, you know, I get the best table every time.
Some, some of the tables were 16, $20,000 for, uh, For one table at one night, for a good DJ, you know, you spend a lot, it's fun.
Yeah, I bet.
It's a lot of fun.
And I brought a whole bunch of people with me.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, bring a little entourage of people and it's fun.
We had a blast.
We did that a lot.
Anyways, so I get.
I can sense the Dan Bilzerian themes.
Yeah.
What you probably did.
Yeah.
That's fun.
I think everyone should be able to experience that for at least one weekend of their lives.
Yeah, I agree.
And part of it, part of why I wanted to go so extravagant was because I wanted to show other people something that they may never be able to explore.
Blow their fucking minds.
And that was part of it.
So I took an entire bachelor party to Vegas one time.
And that was probably the most expensive one I did.
That was probably like pushing 60 or 70 grand.
But I just booked the top tables everywhere and then like the strip clubs.
Uh, I had these like roped off sections, and we had our own personal dances.
It was freaking cool.
Strip club hops into your limo when you're done, yeah.
It's freaking crazy.
It was so much fun though.
Uh, and it was, yeah, it was just like, but but that's what it was about.
It's like, let me pull these guys, man, let's show them something that they know me and they're still never gonna understand what I can do for them, right?
It was fun.
These guys were just their minds were blown, it was crazy, and we had a freaking blast.
And that's what a lot of it was about.
It was about helping out other people.
So there was a lot of good that came from all this money, too.
It wasn't just all, it was more about showing people doing things that they could never do.
I took a lot of people out to expensive restaurants when I would go.
I would always pay, let's go so we can see what some of these top restaurants in New York are about.
Or anybody who was short on their rent that time, I was just like, here, get yourself.
Get yourself back up and going.
I gave a lot of people money and it was good.
It feels good.
I'm big on helping people.
A lot of that happened too.
I remember, like, I went to Santa Cruz this one time.
We met this homeless guy.
And I don't know, he just had problems.
So I just bought him a whole bunch of stuff, like, you know, probably spent $1,000 on him and his dog because he had a dog.
And that was a whole different story.
But yeah, just helping people wherever we went.
I mean, that was kind of important.
So let me tell you, I want to get into one more thing before we get to the downfall.
But this was a part of it, too.
But this was a big event.
This was a big crisis in the middle.
So, right in the middle of, Of everything we went to, I went to Cancun.
I was 32, I think, at the time, and uh, I wanted to go to spring break.
I'd never gone, been able to go to spring break, I couldn't afford it.
So now that I could finally afford it, I wanted to do spring break real.
So we went to Cancun.
We intentionally booked this place with uh, with all these college kids, one of the bigger spring break college kid thing, um, themes, and we just went there.
It was it was crazy, like you know, went out every night, met a bunch of people, like partying with freaking college kids again, and uh.
It was fun.
We had a great time.
But so one of the things we did while we were there is we got, we're all drunk and we booked flight.
We said, why end this vacation?
And because it was an eight day trip to Cancun, why would I end this vacation then?
Let's stop over in South Beach on the way back home.
And so we were drunk and we rerouted our tickets and got, you know, and bought new tickets essentially for Miami.
And then we'd go home and we all forgot about it because we're so drunk.
So we woke up in the morning, all hungover.
We all had alerts on our phones, like, what the hell?
Who booked tickets to Miami?
And so, like, we had this Bacchanal in Cancun.
And then all of a sudden, now we got to go do a whole other eight days in South Beach just because we got drunk and booked it.
And we're like, all right, let's just go.
Fuck you.
So we go to Miami now.
So now I have to tell another little story.
In my expansion, I had to hire a bunch of people.
Again, I couldn't take resumes.
I had to hire the people that were available to me that I knew.
And one of the shippers was really bad.
So I had to get rid of him.
I had to get a new one.
So I got another shipper, somebody who would do it.
And he did a better job.
But this guy also came from a criminal background and was very.
He really thought that.
I don't know how to explain it.
He thought that he started to think that he should own half of the business just because he felt that he came in and did a better job at shipping.
And so he was responsible for the business doing better.
When he came in late, like I had already developed this whole thing, I set up this whole model.
Everything was going fine.
He came in and did do a better job and it did help to get some more customers in, but by no means did he deserve half the business like he thought he did.
So, He still, like, it just created, and this is a part of what the money did, right?
Because he knew me before I made money.
And this is part of what happened.
So the dynamic, when it shifted to me being the boss, like him and I were just equals and buds.
And if anything, he has a strong personality.
So he kind of probably felt that he was a little over me as far as the social structure went.
But now that I have all this and everything, the social dynamic changes and he's taking offense to that.
And he starts bugging me with all these things that he thinks we should be doing and running the business the way he thinks that we should be running it.
And I was just, you don't know what you're getting into.
Stop bugging me.
I built this freaking little empire, which became a big empire.
Don't tell me how to do this.
I know how to do it.
And I had to start getting strict with him.
And he was like, Oh, why are we doing this and that?
You know, eventually I had to almost like yell at him and say, Stay out of this.
I built this.
I know what to do.
And you're actually going to ruin it.
And he wanted to do things that didn't make sense.
It just didn't make sense.
It didn't make business sense.
He didn't have a great business mind.
He was very selfish.
Anyways.
So, in order to go on these vacations, I need somebody to take over my spot because I would get way too drunk to be able to take care of the business.
So, I taught him how to do all the emails, collect the money, and do everything.
And, you know, I had this in the future so I could go on vacation for, you know, a week at a time here and there and still the business would be okay.
When I came home, I had to put out some fires, but it would still run and everything would be fine.
So, when I went to Miami or Cancun, and then Went to Miami and I had to call and be like, hey, we're going to be gone another week.
We're out here having fun.
Like his, the animus and the anger and the rage in him just must have been festering about all this.
So he, so little did I know that I was in Miami after that.
And all of a sudden I get this text from him and he tells me that the cops are watching him.
Somebody was taking pictures of him.
I'm out of here.
I left all your stuff and I'm taking off.
And this is like right.
And I remember I was in Miami and I was actually going to go get meet this multimillionaire on a.
We were going to, he was starting to invest in this new company and he wanted to know if I wanted to invest.
And I was very interested.
It was an interesting company.
And so I was like looking at going and putting $100,000 into this thing.
And I was just going to go meet this guy when this text came in and it just screwed up my whole world because my shipper's gone and my guy, now the business is just, nobody's helming it.
It's done.
So I'm like, holy shit, I got to get home.
I had to cancel this meeting.
I think I left the next day.
I got a flight like a couple days early and left the next day and went home trying to figure out.
He just doesn't answer me or he took off.
So, what I found out is he had actually been planning this and he never even answered another email and he just collected all the money that was coming in.
So, he took off with like, I don't know, $50,000 or $60,000 and he just left and he just took off.
So, I got home and I had this crisis.
Like, all these people were starting to be like, hey, it's been two weeks, I haven't got my money.
Or, on my order, like what's going on, blah, blah, blah.
So, I had to get back to everybody.
Like, I got everybody what they ordered, and I sent everybody some free stuff too.
But, but I had to, like, almost, I had to, you know, I had to get the old shipper back who was terrible.
But I had to, and we had to work back, and all these people were angry, and it was started to adversely affect the business.
And I had to put that back together.
But that was a crisis.
So, but at the, at first, we think that the cops are actually watching him.
When in reality, we find out pretty quickly that he made that all up just as a way to escape without.
Without thinking that he was just straight up robbing me.
So he just made all that up.
Nobody was watching him.
And the other thing is, one of my chemists went with him.
Well, he didn't go with him, but he scared one of my chemists into thinking that there was cops watching.
And the chemist actually took off out of the area too, and he was gone.
So I'm down a shipper and a chemist.
And the business was going great before that.
So it just was a massive crisis and a lesson against.
I don't know.
I realized a lot of mistakes I made with being too candid with this shipper and hiring somebody that you knew before.
And when that dynamic changes, it just causes problems.
It's almost better to hire new people and start on this new Schultz structure, the new.
Yeah.
I know what you mean.
But that, I mean, that was big.
That was the first massive crisis.
And there was a part of me that thought it was over right there.
There was actually a big part of me.
I thought we were done because at first I thought the cops had been taking pictures of me.
And then we didn't send anything because.
So, we didn't send anything to anybody for like a month because it took me a couple of weeks to figure out he was lying.
And then we opened the business back up.
So, everybody was pissed.
And I was like, listen, we're going to get everybody back.
I gained everybody's trust back.
I got everybody's stuff.
I sent them free stuff.
So, everybody was taken care of.
And I had to overload my other chemists and get new chemists.
But yeah, that was one of the major crises.
So, then, okay, so now we'll go back to the end.
So, I get back from Vegas.
I'm hungover.
I'm sitting there, and this is when I had my penthouse in Overlooking Manhattan.
And at five o'clock in the morning, there's this pounding on the door.
And I wake up, and my girlfriend wakes up, and I'm like, Is somebody really knocking on the door?
She's like, I don't know.
So she gets up and she starts walking out there, and I get up, and I'm just kind of groggy, and I'm still hungover.
And I'm like, I put some clothes on.
And she already went out there, and I go out there.
Then, sure enough, I hear pounding on the door again.
And now I'm getting angry because, like, who's pounding on my door at five in the morning?
Like, I'm not, uh, yeah, I don't like, I'm gonna go talk to this person and make sure they know don't come pounding on my door at five and five a.m. in the morning.
So I'm getting mad.
So now I go out there, and she's she was at the door and she walks back without opening it and says, I can't see, they're blocking the people.
The Penthouse Raid at Dawn00:15:15
And I'm like, what?
I'm like, so now I just I race for the door, like, I'm gonna go find figure this out real quick.
Boom.
I opened the door, and there's like 15 people with bulletproof vests on and guns pointed at my head.
And the first guy is that post office, that federal post office workers.
And he just puts his hand on the door like that and he says, he just goes, okay.
And that okay was like both to his team behind him that, you know, because we were nonviolent, I don't have any guns or anything, nothing like that.
Everything's okay in here.
He was kind of saying it to them, but he was also saying it to me, okay.
This is done.
It's over.
We got you.
And so they just come in.
They put my girlfriend and me, handcuff us, and put us on our stools.
And one of the ladies asked me, Do you know why we're here?
I said, I have no idea why you're here.
I knew why they were there.
And, you know, I didn't even go to prison that night.
I went and I got released.
I was actually released.
And it took me like two years to actually go to prison.
Oh, wow.
The pre trial stuff had to happen, and then I never went to trial, I just pled guilty.
Um, but one of the things that was a little for some reason gave me joy at that moment is that the cops came in, and they and I more than one of them kept coming up to me, like, Hey, this is an awesome apartment.
For some reason, that made me feel good.
I was like, Yeah, maybe if you didn't do this, if you weren't just a cop, you could maybe do something a little better too.
But no, it wasn't like that.
For some reason, that did make me feel better.
Was it like a sense of all this responsibility is now lifted off my shoulders?
All this weight is off my shoulders.
I can finally, I don't know.
I don't have to look over my shoulder anymore.
Like that.
I want to say that there was a sense of that at some point.
It wasn't right then.
I mean, I enjoyed the responsibility of having all the clients and taking care of everybody and helping everybody.
And so, and I want to say that that may have came at some point, especially when I just, you know, Like after this, and when I got out, I decided I'm not going that route anymore.
I'm not doing anything illegal.
I'm going to keep all my actions legitimate and legal.
And there is certainly a sense of relief because there was a lot of anxiety.
Like, I mean, there's a lot of good times, but sometimes the anxiety was overwhelming that you're being watched or looking over your shoulder.
And you're taking all these signs.
Like, I remember I used to live in that penthouse, and the cop would pull in and just pull back out.
And I'd be like, what are they doing?
And there's a lot of instances of things like that.
And with my employees too, like I would get calls in the middle of the night, like, hey, there's a cop parked across the street.
I'm like, I don't know, cops do that.
Yeah.
Sometimes I just park on the road.
They were setting that up for a long time.
No, I don't think that was anything.
I think it was just coincidence.
But everybody sees something in the mundane or the normal things.
How long did you do in prison in total after that?
I was sentenced to six and a half years.
I did an RDAP program, which took a year off my sentence.
And I, And I had a good time.
So I did like a little over four years.
Wow.
A lot of people that I have in here say that prison helped them.
And if they could go back, they wouldn't change anything.
They're like, I would have done the same thing over again.
Like, doing that, having all that time to self reflect really helped me and like turned me into who I am and it made me a better person.
That is very interesting.
I can, but that's very interesting that people say that because I think the prison system is.
I watched one of your podcasts with, shoot, I forgot his last name, Larry.
Larry Lawton?
Yes.
Yeah, Larry Lawton.
And it was very good.
And he went into a lot of the need for prison reform, which I studied a lot too.
And I had this whole prison reform and I kind of delineated all the things that were wrong with the prison system.
And there's a lot.
And it's very bad.
And it does need reform.
So I don't want to say that prison was good.
It helped me because it didn't, and it doesn't help people, and it's not good.
No, and it's very poorly.
I mean, I think it could if a prison system is done right and focused more on education and focused more on, you know, what I learned about being in a little society comprised of a lot of prisoners is that most people that I was in camps too, so understand that because I'm nonviolent, so it's different than I think Larry Lawrence.
You weren't like a high security, yeah.
Yeah, I was.
Yeah, so I was just in a camp that didn't have offenses.
So, so it's a different kind of type of prisoner.
So, you know, I was never in a, I think Larry Lotton was in a medium.
Yeah.
And he went down to a camp.
Yeah.
And so, like, it's a little different.
Yeah, but a lot of like, a lot of like, even nonviolent drug offenders, they go to, they go to the state prisons, can be pretty fucking violent.
Right.
The one that I was at was, was pretty bad, actually.
But I only went for like six months, but that was, that was worse than these federal camps.
I mean, yeah.
But, but the point is that a lot of these guys aren't bad guys.
They're not, they don't go out there with the intent of hurting anybody, right?
It's they, they just, and most of them are drug, just drug felons, right?
So, it has to do with there's a lot of factors, and it has to do a lot with they don't know what else to do besides the only way they knew to make money was to sell drugs.
That's what their entire family was about.
That's what, that's all they saw, that's all they learned.
So, if you don't know what else to do to put a roof over your head and your family's head, then what if you, you know, so it's important to educate.
And the education system in the federal system is very poor.
And if it was focused on that, let me get you something else to do.
Let me teach you a skill so you don't have to go back to selling drugs.
Right.
That's what the antithesis of what the prison system is about.
Yes.
Yes.
So there is a lot of reform that needs to be done.
And the system is flawed, ridiculously fucked.
Yes.
But as an individual, if you have the capacity, you can grow as an individual.
Right.
And I think Larry Lawton did a good job of that.
Yeah.
Like, you know, the way I heard him talk is.
And so back to your question.
Is yes.
And it's funny that you mentioned that because I have said that the whole time.
Like, even though I don't want people to think that prison is okay and prison is good and it's good for people and we should keep it the way it is because it's very poor.
However, in my circumstance, if I could go, as sick as it may sound, if I could go back and take all this back, I wouldn't change a thing because it did make me the man I am today.
And it made me a much better person and somebody who understands the economy and society.
And how to properly maneuver and create value for myself within that.
And I learned all that while I was from this business, from the business that I did, and then reflection and reading voraciously while I was in prison.
Yeah, the judicial system, as well, is extremely flawed when you have people in there trying to just get convictions and climb the ladder, the bureaucratic ladder of the judicial system and incarcerate as many people.
As they possibly can, cops with quotas giving out as many tickets as they can.
It's flawed tremendously.
And not only that, but there are people that are sent to prison for life.
And even there's, I forget the statistic, but there's a lot of people who are on death row who are innocent that get exonerated by DNA evidence all the time.
It happens all the time.
Imagine how much that's actually happening, but we don't have DNA evidence to prove it.
So look at all these people who are on death row for murders, and now we're finding out that, oh, Whoops, they didn't do it.
Now, imagine if you have like some sort of fraud crime or even drug crime or something or different crime, yeah, where the DNA there is no DNA evidence.
But I mean, I couldn't have said it better myself exactly what you said.
You're exactly correct.
There's a brotherhood within the judicial system the defense attorney, the judge, the prosecutor, all on the same team.
They all went, they all worked for each other.
That when you get out of law school, you go clerk for a judge, right?
And then you become the District attorney, the prosecutor, or you become a defense consul.
And you all have worked together for your whole careers.
And you all, there's a huge element of not stepping on each other's toes.
So even your defense consul is kind of working with these two.
Right.
That's what happened with a guy I had in here recently who did 16 years when he was a kid.
He was 16 years old.
He got sentenced to 16 years in prison, did 16 years.
And his public defender was working with the other side.
They just wanted to get it over with.
They didn't care about finding the real killer or murderer who was actually caught later.
It happens all the time.
Yeah.
All the time.
It's absolutely insane.
So tell me about what you're doing now.
Tell me about your new company.
Yeah.
Yes.
All right.
So while I was in prison, the final 18 months, I wrote a business plan.
I finally decided that I had all this knowledge because, you know, this whole time I was answering probably like 500 emails a day.
And a lot of that was guiding people, giving them advice and guiding people through the use of these hormones, all these hormones.
So from prison?
No, no.
This was during the commission of my crime.
Okay.
All right.
So.
So, I would like to look at blood work.
People would be like, I want to do this, or I'm feeling a little bit of this.
I would look at their blood work real quick, look at pictures of them, and say, Okay, I think you should try this.
I just became an expert at fine tuning these things, diagnosing the perfect cocktail for them.
That's exactly correct.
And I aggregated a lot of empirical evidence as well.
Like, you know, I've seen all this stuff, seeing all this information, watching it develop.
You know, there's a ton of empirical evidence, and more than.
So much so that we're talking about hundreds of people every day for, I think the whole empire lasted for like five years, a little over five years.
We were talking 20,000 people or more, right?
So that's more empirical data, more experience than any endocrinologist or urologist in the country.
These are the people who are supposed to be dealing with hormones, right?
And especially with the medical community, the medical community is, you know, there's a stigma about.
About hormones, testosterone.
So they don't deal with it a lot.
They don't prescribe it a lot because they don't, you know, it's just stigmatized.
And I dealt with it a lot.
So I dealt with it more.
I have more experience than almost anybody in the entire country.
There's no way that you could have treated the amount of people that I did or at least guided the people and seen all the evidence that I have.
So I turned this into a business plan.
The also, the ironic thing is that the bodybuilding, the black market community is light years.
Light years ahead of the medical community when it comes to understanding all the derivatives and how they can be utilized with testosterone to really fine tune and fine tune the way people look and feel and really, really mitigate any potential side effects.
And, you know, as I said, like really get people to look how they want to look and feel how they want to feel.
So, and nobody, the medical community doesn't understand them.
I understand these.
I've used, you know, compounds such as nandrolone or oxandrolone.
A lot with people to really fine tune and really, and these are less anabolic, less energetic than testosterone alone.
So they have less side effects.
They're, you know, in some, they lead to, you know, potentially less potential problems.
And none of the medical community will use them just because they don't understand, not because they aren't effective.
So I bring all this expertise in.
So now I've decided to start a TRT clinic.
We're called hormonesforme.com.
Where I guide, you know, I personally guide through it's starting to explode right now.
And like I personally guide people, you know, and now, you know, I was in the anabolic world and I know that for some people, most people realize how much experience that gave me and they're happy to come to me to help them.
I am concerned, you know, I've matured a lot.
I'm concerned with safety.
So it's all about health and safety, making sure that your health markers are all in place.
You know, at the same time, we can.
You know, help you, you know, dramatically improve your quality of life, make you aesthetically look exactly how you want to look and feel exactly how you want to feel.
And I'm an expert, an absolute expert at fine tuning these things to do that for people.
And but again, the focus is on safety and health and maintaining health markers.
Can you make me look like Jason Momoa?
Um, I, I could, I could certainly help you out.
No, I don't want to be that.
Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of natural, innate genetics that goes into the way that you react to these compounds.
So I don't want to look like one of those fucking dudes who just look like bulldogs that are walking around like this everywhere.
They're fucking, most people do not want to look like that.
And so, Just because I came from the bodybuilding world or the anabolic world, like, because I also coached, I guided thousands of professionals.
Like, my stuff was running throughout the pro circuit.
Have you seen that documentary called, what's it called?
I think it's called Screwball by Billy Corbin.
Oh, you know, I've heard of it, but I have heard of it.
It's really good.
I think it's on Netflix.
It's basically all about the doctors in Miami who were selling the baseball players all of their fucking testosterone, all their steroids.
It's a fucking fascinating documentary.
I got to watch it.
It's good.
And as you said, like most people don't want to look like bodybuilders.
Just because I came from that world doesn't mean I don't know how to do, how to just really fine tune these things.
I know how to fine tune them because most people don't want to look like bodybuilders.
My biggest concern personally is that, like, from my understanding of it, is like once you jump on the wheel, you can't jump off.
And I don't want to be, I'm afraid of being stuck there, be like, I got to fucking keep doing this or now I'm fucked.
That's a common thought process, right?
So, and so I think I was saying this earlier that.
Anti-Aging Through Testosterone00:03:50
There's plenty of anecdotal and empirical evidence that people can get on, and if you get off within a year or so, you can do a protocol that will restart your HBTA and come back to baseline.
So it's not like if you do it, you're permanently disabled.
I mean, you know, you permanently have your natural testosterone reduced.
That's not accurate.
However, most people who do it feel such a benefit that they don't, you honestly don't want to get off.
So A lot of times it becomes, and there's so many people out there who say, no, once you start this, it's a lifelong treatment.
And it usually is only because for the reasons I just said that people don't want to get off once they do it because it really does dramatically improve people's quality of life.
Now, there's also something to be said for somebody who has a healthy testosterone level, who is healthy.
You know, it doesn't always make sense just to.
Just jump on testosterone, just to jump on testosterone.
And there is an element of, well, you know, there's probably some natural things that we could do to get you feeling better.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be testosterone if your levels are already very adequate.
Right.
You know, so it just depends on it.
It's so individualized.
And that's what I've learned.
Like we can't put just these broad categories and say, well, Testosterone, you know, wouldn't be good for you because you're scared about having to do it for the rest of your life.
Yeah.
It's really individualized.
I would have to look at your blood work and decide if it would help you.
And maybe, maybe it wouldn't.
Maybe it doesn't make sense to do it at this point.
At some point, it will, right?
Because your testosterone is going to lower.
At a certain age, what can you talk about as far as like anti aging?
I know it has a dramatic effect on like different things as far as like your DNA and slowing aging, right?
Well, I mean, yeah.
So, the aging effect has to do with the degradation of all these hormones and the degradation of cells, right?
Okay.
And so it puts all these things back in the order.
Things like human growth hormone or the secretagogs are known to be just as good as HGH secretagogs, which spur your body to naturally produce more HGH.
Human growth hormone is also wonderful and it really helps replenish or it's good for all your organs.
It really regenerates all organs.
That's the word I was looking for.
It regenerates your organs and your cells, makes your skin actually look younger.
You produce more elastin.
The younger looking skin is more.
Comprised more of elastin than collagen.
And it, so it does all these things to kind of give a youthful effect.
So this is kind of the anti aging process, right?
We're fixing, like I said, the old people, the reason they shape the way they do is, and the reason that their bones are all brittle and their joints all hurt is because of systemic inflammation.
It causes, is one of the major problems with aging.
And testosterone is an anti inflammatory.
And moreover, nandrolone is.
Systemically more anti inflammatory than testosterone.
So when we take these things, we start taking away aches and pains.
We start looking, you know, our skin starts looking better.
We start forming in the way that we did when we were 23, because the hormone levels are at that level again.
And it just makes you look, feel younger, look and feel like you're 23 again.
It's incredible shit, man.
What is the liver king on steroids?
Looking Twenty-Three Again00:05:17
There's just no way he can look like that.
Like, I have done this for a long time, and there is absolutely no way that he could look like that without being on a significant amount of steroids.
Yeah.
Some people even say he's got fucking ab implants, too.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It looks like a freak.
It's possible.
I don't know.
Like, I don't know, and I don't like speaking on things that I can't.
I'm a science guy.
Yeah.
Everything should be based on facts, and I don't have any.
The only.
The only thing I will say is my experience tells me that there's no way that guy's not on steroids.
And I think he flat out says he's not, doesn't he?
Yeah, straight up.
He's like, there's no way I'm not.
He responds with like these paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs of like saying, I'm all natural.
You know, the, what does he say?
He goes, the ancestors, the tools of the ancestors only.
Whatever his bullshit sales gimmick is.
I've seen some crazy things, like, you know, since I've been in this business.
You see, and so one of the things that sets the most extreme bodybuilders apart.
And I've been in those circles before with some of the biggest names, biggest name bodybuilders in the world.
Yeah.
And one of the things that sets them apart is that they are genetic freaks.
They start out their genetic freaks.
The Rock.
Yeah.
Well, interestingly enough, if you look at The Rock, and I think you said more plates, more dates, he does a pretty good nattier, what is it, nattier?
I don't know.
I forget what he says.
Yeah.
And he does a pretty good one on The Rock, but it shows him in different movies.
And you can tell when he's not on steroids and when he is.
It's very obvious.
Really?
Yeah.
And if you pick out the movies, like Walking Tall, right?
He was actually pretty small.
And he wasn't very defined and very big.
So you think he would take time off of it?
Yes.
And then go back?
But a movie before that, he was just monsters.
And then he'd go down.
Right.
And then and now it's been a long time.
He's like pain and gain.
Like, I mean, he was just a freaking monster.
He's still a fucking monster right now.
He's still a beast.
Yeah.
So you can.
Like you can almost, you can almost think.
I mean, this is just, you know, just off the top of my head.
Um, but you can almost feel like he was a wrestler, right?
So, so he had to, he had to do some, you know, some steroids to play that role.
When he got in the movies, he wanted to try to be the good guy and get off all this stuff and do it.
But he just, then he couldn't play the roles that he wanted to play because he really shrank a lot.
Yeah.
He's not big in Walking Tall.
I don't think it was that much.
There's one more.
There's one more where he wasn't big.
I think it was only those two movies.
Then you could tell he said, fuck this.
It's funny too.
If you gotta be this guy.
So then now he's huge and everything.
Yeah.
And you can tell the difference too between people like him or people like Hulk Hogan and Macho Man back in the 90s.
They just look like, Like their chests and their biceps, they just look like big, smooth, puffy figures, like Michelin men.
Yeah.
It was like they were doing something wrong.
Yeah.
They looked kind of like fucked up.
Yeah.
There's a lot more education than there was at that time.
So, like, everybody was shooting in the dark in the 80s and stuff.
Everybody was kind of shooting in the dark.
Yeah.
But now there's a ton of education.
There's a ton of empirical evidence and there's a ton of studies that have been done.
So it's a different time.
Well, Ryan, thank you so much for doing this, bro.
What a fascinating conversation this was.
I really appreciate it, dude.
That was fun.
Could I do one more thing about?
So, I do have a book out.
Yes, tell everyone about it, everyone listening and watching.
So, I have, yeah, along with my business, hormonesforme.com, which is doing really well and will take care of you better than anybody else in the industry.
I have like a book that you can see.
It's just on Amazon or a platform called Fiction 8.0.
It's not Kindle, though, but it is Amazon.
It's called.
Amazon Kindle Vela.
So, what it is, is these chapterized, these serialized chapters.
So, you can just read it chapter by chapter.
So, it's not like a finished book yet, but I just keep going on where I go into detail about the story.
But so, if you go on and you Google Memoirs of a Steroid Kingpin, Memoirs of a Steroid Kingpin, it will come right up.
Okay.
Kindle Vela.
And also, yeah, and the business.
And I want to give a shout out to Brady Lanter, one of our guys who's helping us with the business, and Amrit Singh.
Ashwini Patil, some of my employees that are really helping bring this thing to big levels.
We're doing big things with our new hormonesforme.com business.
That's amazing, man.
It's fascinating.
I definitely want to learn more about it.
I think it's cool as shit that this happened through Reddit.
Told you about coming on here?
People on Reddit?
Yeah, I just went and posted the beginnings of my story on Reddit, just trying to see what happened.
I embraced the story.
And immediately, a lot of people just said, You should go on concrete.
So, what's that?
So, I went and checked it out and I started watching episodes.
I really love what you do.
That's a fantastic job of really aggregating some of the most interesting people in the entire world.