Dorian Yates, the "Shadow" bodybuilding legend, traces his extreme 1990s physique to Arthur Jones’ intensity principles and steroid use (up to 1,000mg testosterone weekly), dismissing modern shortcuts like insulin as less disciplined. He compares psychedelics—like ayahuasca’s decade-long therapy effects—to cannabis, which he defends as a superior antioxidant despite stigma, citing UCLA studies debunking cancer risks. Now focused on sustainable fitness and skepticism of political systems, Yates praises Super League’s functional approach over traditional bodybuilding, urging Rogan to attend the Vegas event amid UFC scheduling conflicts. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, the WIDA offices are out there and, you know...
Weed was a big name in bodybuilding, the magazines and everything, so they flew me out here, did my first photo shoot at Gold's Gym, 1990, so yeah, 27 years ago.
You were the first guy, well, you know what I'm the first guy, but you were one of the first guys that I ever saw in a magazine that I was like, gee, how the fuck is that a person?
Well, you represented to me as an outsider looking in this insane determination.
I felt like all the best guys, whether it was Arnold or you or Lee Haney, all the top guys, they always represented not just the biggest and the most profoundly ridiculously muscular bodybuilders, but also this extreme dedication that was required to reach that level.
I kind of left home when I was 16, so I was out on my own on the street.
You're either going to get smart and look after yourself or you're going to fall down.
There's nobody there to catch me.
That was there from an early age, I think.
I was just very determined to do this thing that I felt I could be good at in order to change my life and change the projection of my life and the people around me.
I grew up on a housing estate in the UK. I had no education.
I was in a jail when I was 18. So I had all that.
The people around me, I didn't want part of that future.
I wanted to do something else and I got this thing that I was good at.
It's crazy how many people have similar stories like that, where they were in just a terrible environment and they realized that they had to toughen up, they had to smarten up, and they had to get out of there.
And if not for those terrible situations, who knows if they would have ever reached the levels of greatness that they did.
You see, the process for muscle growth is you go in the gym and you put stress on the muscle.
If you put stress that it's not used to, Then it's going to react.
You're going to get growth.
But you need to recover from that first.
You don't go to the gym and grow and then recover later.
That's not the way it works.
If you give your body some stress it's not used to, you'll get a reaction.
But before you get the reaction, you have to recover.
So if you're not allowing enough time to recover, you just...
I use this analogy at seminars I do.
It's very simplistic, but it gets the point across.
If you get a bit of sandpaper and you rub it across the palm of your hand and it's kind of bloody, if you leave it and let it heal up, what's going to happen?
The skin's going to develop back a little bit stronger, a little bit thicker than before because it wants to protect against that stress.
So...
That's the process.
But if you go and you make your hand bloody, and before it's healed up again, you go and rub it again, What's happening?
If it means training 30 minutes once a week or it means training 10 hours a day every day, whatever it takes, I was willing to do it and I would have done it.
Training 10 hours a day is not going to build your muscle.
It's just going to burn out.
I was doing average 45-50 minute workouts probably four times a week.
Come and do it and tell me if you want to do more when we're finished.
Nobody has ever said, oh, please, can we do some more?
They're like, no, that's it.
That's enough.
Because every set, by the warm-up sets, you've got to warm up to be safe and everything.
But the set, the real sets, I call them, we're going to go to absolute failure and even beyond with force reps, with assistance reps, maybe extra negative reps, which is something that most people neglect when they lift weights.
They think, you know, I've lifted it.
All right, boom, let it go down.
I've lifted it.
But they're neglecting the lowering part of the weight, the negative.
So I get people to really slow that down so you're taxing that part as well.
And even at the end of the set, on some exercises with machines where it's practical, so you can't curl anymore physically on the positive, on the contraction.
But your strength on the lowering is greater.
So if you did curls and you failed, I could lift the weight to the top for you and you could lower it down for probably another three reps.
So, if you had just gone to failure here, you wouldn't have exhausted the negative part of the rep.
So, my thing is to exhaust everything.
It's totally fucked.
You can't lift, you can't lower it, you can't lift it.
It's total failure.
If you do that once on an exercise, then time to move on.
Trial and error and, you know, I didn't invent this system of training.
As I said, people there before me, Arthur Jones, Mike Mensah, I just took what they did and refined it a little bit more for a competitive bodybuilder because...
Arthur Jones was a competitive bodybuilder.
The people he trained weren't.
So his routines were even briefer than mine.
But for a bodybuilder, you know, you've got to work the side.
You've got to work different aspects.
So I probably did a little bit more than they did.
Now, when you were at your height and when you're 265 pounds shredded and dehydrated and then 310 pounds in the offseason, you must be used to looking at yourself like that.
Was it hard to adapt to being...
I mean, you're still obviously a very fit guy, but you're a normal...
If I saw you, I'd be like, there's a normal fit guy.
Because bodybuilding, you're isolating the muscles, right?
So you're isolating the bicep, you're isolating the tricep, you're isolating the deltoids, and putting stress on those muscles to maximize the muscle size of those individual muscles.
Well, I lived in the UK, and I started visiting Spain because it's in Marbella in Spain, the south coast of Spain.
It's got a very big British community there.
And the weather is amazing.
It's like LA. Marbella is like, for me, it reminds me a lot of LA, but a mini LA. Without all the bullshit and the traffic and the crime and all that kind of stuff, you know?
There's a new surgery now because what happened, I tore my supraspinatus a couple of times and...
Because the end was badly frayed, they had to chop off the end.
So now it doesn't really bridge the gap to the humerus.
So it needs a bridge.
And apparently there's a new surgery that they can make a bridge now.
But I went to see a surgeon and he's like, okay, what's three issues here?
Pain?
Do you have pain?
I'm like, no.
Not really.
Have range of motion.
Actually, I got more range than the other shoulder.
It's a bit loose.
So the only issue with mine is strength and stability.
And he wasn't able to give me 100% on whether the surgery would do that for me.
And I've had about six surgeries.
I had a tendon reattachment here, about three on the shoulder.
I had some on the hips.
And I'm like, you know what?
Unless you're going to tell me 100% that going through the inconvenience and pain of a surgery is going to give me what I need, then I'm not going to do it.
I can do some push-ups, but probably like 10, where before I'd do like 100 or something.
So, it's very weak and unstable.
So, yeah, sure, if I had a surgeon that says to me, listen, man, we're going to do this, and I guarantee you your shoulder's going to be stronger and more stable after it, because, you know, you've got to sit with your...
In a sling for like six to eight weeks.
You can't shower properly.
You can't dress and pain and all this stuff.
So for me to go through that again, I would have to have like, yeah, this is definitely going to help.
Yeah, the last thing you want to do is get something.
Like, I always tell that to my friends that are thinking about getting discs fused.
I'm like, you know, they're so close.
They're now shooting...
They're shooting stem cells into the discs directly and regenerating disc tissue the same way they've been regenerating meniscus tissue and tendon tissue and things along those lines.
I met a guy that trained out here many years ago in LA and he told me they were, and I've seen before and after x-rays of joints, That the joint's destroyed, he's got no cartilage, so you're looking at a replacement, and these guys have actually regenerated the tissue back.
But it's quite a lengthy process of traction, like hanging upside down, hours of ultrasound, just to push a ton of blood into the area, blood supply, and then you can heal it up.
You can actually regrow cartilage tissue, but it's not...
It's not quick.
It's not on the protocol of the medical association, so they basically push these guys out of business with lawsuits.
Louie Simmons created this machine that when you lift your legs up, it strengthens the back and on the down, when it swings down, it's active decompression.
One of the things about bodybuilding is that in isolation, when you're constantly isolating these things, Does that run the risk of, like, weakening certain areas?
Like, you have to be, I would imagine, very cognizant about balancing everything out.
I think, like, with bodybuilders, a shoulder injury is the most common because you've got the rotor cuff, which is small muscles and tendons, which gives you the mobility.
That's why you can move it around rather than being a hinge.
So what happens is, you know, your pecs are getting stronger, your delts, your lats, all these external muscles are getting bigger and stronger, but these guys inside are not.
So eventually they get overloaded and you get some kind of issue there, some kind of tear.
So when I'm training people now, I give them rotation exercises just to strengthen those areas so they can avoid that.
But, hey man, I started training in the 80s.
Like, we didn't know anything.
And when I got an injury...
And I live in England as well.
There's no sports medicine doctors dealing with, you know, strength athletes or so on.
So I just go to your doctor and he's like, how do you do that?
Lifting weights?
Stop doing that shit.
Why are you lifting weights?
Take these pills and, you know, that's it.
So now we have much more information, much more, you know, sports therapists and so on.
So there's a lot more things available now and a lot more knowledge and information that we didn't really have back then.
Yeah, that's the main thing.
You neglect some of the smaller supporting muscles, I think, when you're doing major bodybuilding exercises.
It's in all these little exercise books, you know, and like you can see the first one when I'm like 21 years old is a bit childish with the comments.
It's like, you know, I felt shit today.
This was a shitty workout.
Never fucking let this happen again.
You know, all this stuff.
I'm talking to myself.
So I got all this and I go back and look at it sometimes and it's weird because I can go back to 1988 and I can look in my book and I look at that workout and I was like...
I was in this gym, and I was training with this guy, and I can't even remember what I was wearing.
If you look at the Mr. Olympus, for instance, in the era of Frank Zane, And Frank Zane is a body that probably most people would look at and say, fucking hell, that's it, that's great, you know?
They'd probably look at me and say, it's too extreme.
But in the era of Frank Zane, who was Mr. Olympia?
Yeah, the guy that inspired me before that was Tom Platz.
I don't know if you know Tom Platz with the fucking freaky legs.
You know, he was...
The guy, when I started, he wasn't Mr. Olympia, but he was very inspirational.
And when he talked, he was just full of energy and enthusiasm for the training and pushing the body to his absolute...
Maximum.
And I remember Tom Platt saying, you know, when I walk out on stage at a bodybuilding competition, I want to see those judges there with the pencil and the paper.
And I just wanted to fucking drop that pencil and just say, what the fuck is that?
But Platz made a whole career on the legs and not only the legs, the...
This passion he had for pushing himself into the gym to the absolute maximum.
And that inspired me to do that and try and take it even further.
And that now is missing.
That's not here anymore.
Now, for me, the bodybuilding and the fitness industry, people are just really more concerned with the cosmetic, the look, and taking their pictures and putting them on Instagram and all this kind of stuff.
They're not really into...
It's almost a spiritual side of it, where you want to push yourself to that maximum and see how far your mind can go into the pain and all that kind of stuff.
Well, it was at one point in time when no one talked about it at all, right?
Like it was, you would get the magazines and they would tell you to take creatine and you could look like me, but everybody kind of knew, everybody who knew people, who knew people.
You know, I remember I started in the 80s and I read the magazines and I saw a few things by Arnold and Mike Mansa where they kind of admitted they used something, but they very downplayed it.
Oh, it's only for the last six weeks before a competition just to give us that last polish and stuff like that.
And I asked a few guys in the gym, and when I first started, they were a bit cagey, like, no, no, no, no, I don't do that.
You know, later on I found out they're all doing it, right?
Yeah.
And it was very much an inner circle, in the gym, bodybuilders.
Now everybody knows about steroids, and now it's mainstream.
And guys take steroids now just for cosmetic reasons, because they want to look bigger and harder and quicker.
I just equate it to women having Botox or having some implants.
The guys want to look bigger.
They don't want to work so hard.
They just want it quick, right?
So you get guys coming to the gym and they just take steroids pretty much straight away.
And they don't necessarily learn how to train really properly.
And it's not just competitive bodybuilders now.
I mean, it's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
It's mainstream.
You look at Hollywood.
You look at hip-hop artists.
I mean, come on.
They're all doing a bit of juice, man.
Look at Nelly 10 years ago and look at him now, man.
I haven't really been paying attention to Nelly.
There's a lot of them.
Nelly, Cool J. They're all Jack, man.
There's no fault in me.
I can see what's going on.
Guys from Hollywood, they want to get in shape quickly for a movie.
Well, not only that, for a guy that's not really that kind of an athlete to all of a sudden look like that, you've got to make some radical physiological changes.
You don't want to get off because you took some stuff, you got bigger, you're getting more attention from the girls now, guys got more respect for you, your self-confidence is up.
You don't want to lose all that, man.
I'm not speaking personally, because I took it for a competitive sport, and when I stopped, I stopped.
When I was a kid, I was always like, why is Ali coming back, man?
Like, just, you know, he's the greatest and now he's going to get beat by some guy because he's coming back.
But you miss the fucking adrenaline or whatever it is of that, you know, of that all your focus, all your soul, everything is going into that one point and like...
It's tough to replace, but you've got to know when it's time to step down, I think.
Or even, I don't like to see athletes coming back.
When they're not, as you remember them, at their best, and they're coming back and they're not so good, which I'm sorry, but inevitably at 50 years old is going to be the case.
What causes that or how it is in your DNA? I'm not really sure if they have or if they're interested enough to do the studies that's necessary, but those of us, you know, that are in the sport, we know it happens.
I mean, Arnold did it like 1974. I think Arnold was going to retire.
But then he got this Pumpin' Iron movie that everyone's familiar with.
So the 1975 Mr. Olympia, which the Pumpin' Iron runs around, he basically made a comeback for that just for the movie.
And previous to that, he did a movie called Stay Hungry with Sally Field and Jeff Bridges.
And I think he had to get down to like 200, 210 pounds because the director didn't want him to be too big for that.
So he came off the back of that, and then he just put all the sides back on for the Mr. Olympia for pumping iron.
So when a guy does get down to something like that, is it a matter of taking less steroids, working out less, like your body just naturally starts to shrink?
You know, I get girls that are fucking strippers and all kind of chicks asking me, Oh, I want to take this Winstroll stuff.
You know anything about that?
I'm like, I do.
Do you?
Oh, the guy just told me it's going to make me leaner and everything.
I said, alright, let me explain what this is.
This is an anabolic steroid.
An anabolic steroid is a derivative of testosterone, which is a male hormone.
So what they try to do is minimize the androgenic part of the testosterone, the male-like, and so you're left with more of the anabolic, the building part.
But they can't completely minimize the androgenic part.
So even though stuff like Winstroll and Anavar is less androgenic than testosterone, it's still derived from a male hormone.
And if you take enough, you're still going to get the male side effects, which is pretty common in women's bodybuilding and fitness and so on.
Look, man, if you're a competitive sport, a competitive athlete, you're going to do whatever you can do to win.
There was a study once done by a guy called Dr. Goldman, and it's called Goldman's Dilemma.
And he asked a bunch of athletes, including, I think, Olympic-level athletes, So, if I could give you a pill that would guarantee you would win the gold medal or whatever the equivalent is in your sport, but you would die at like 40, 45, would you take it?
The vast majority of people said yes, they would take it.
That's the mentality you're dealing with.
Especially when you're young, man.
You feel indestructible, like nothing's gonna, you know?
That may be attributed to steroids, and there's been a couple that are definitely attributed to diuretics, which is, you know, diuretics, you lose a lot of water, you can lose electrolytes, you can lose potassium and sodium, which regulate your heartbeat.
So then you're playing Russian roulette a little bit, and a couple of people played that game and lost, so...
Yeah, you look amazing, but I can tell you, you know, you feel weak as a kitten.
You don't feel real good at that point, but...
You know, you do whatever you've got to do that's required.
1996, when I was competing, they had actually testing for diuretics because there was a couple of deaths and the people in charge started getting concerned, you know, this doesn't look good and that affects your revenue and all that stuff.
They attempted steroid testing in 1990, but it affected the guy's look so much.
like this or once you've seen a guy fight like this or once you've seen a guy run this fast nobody fucking wants to see anything slower than that or less than that right right the audience is not interested so they realize that real quick like fuck this we just forget about the steroid testing and anyway steroid testing is like it probably just makes it more unfair because the guy that's got more information and like the clearance times and all that stuff they're gonna stop people from taking it They're just going to take it and try to avoid, get around the test.
And it's the same in all sports.
And I don't care if it's fucking running, riding, Tour de France, whatever it is, it's going on to some degree.
Well, what the UFC has done, and they've self-imposed this, is they've hired Jeff Nowitzki, the guy who went after Lance Armstrong, and he's the head of USADA. They just do random tests on people, and the punishments are terrible, like two-year suspension.
If you get popped first time for steroids, I think it's a two-year suspension now for the UFC. Again, this is self-imposed.
This is not even the Nevada State Athletic Commission or any other athletic commissions in positions.
And they've radically cut back on the amount of people that are, first of all, caught, and second of all, doing steroids.
This is athletes off because you're waking these fighters up at six o'clock in the morning and they need their rest, but they take the blood, they take the urine, see you go back to sleep.
And you know, that way nobody can be safe.
And you've seen a radical change in performances in some athletes that people were suspecting of doing steroids.
They changed the way they look.
There's so many pre- and post-USADA pictures of people that post them on Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that.
In these groups where they talk about fights.
Which athletes have been hurt most by USADA? It's interesting.
The most stuff I took was in the off-season when I was training real heavy, trying to build size, because I had a regime that I used to get ready for contests, and I was always known for really coming in shape.
So I didn't use so much stuff getting ready for a contest.
I used more in the off-season.
Like a thousand milligrams of testosterone a week.
Well, I think in my case, I was known for muscle density.
So you could have a 20-inch arm that's like...
Got good volume, or you could have a 20-inch arm that looks like a fucking block of steel.
So how do you get that look?
What's the difference?
I think the difference is in the training, that I train very heavy and primarily quite low reps compared to bodybuilders.
I was working in 6 to 8, mostly 6 to 8, a little bit higher on the legs, 10 to 12. But everything I did was like 6 to 8 reps, where most of the guys are doing 10 to 12, and they're relying more on pumping, just getting a lot of blood volume into the muscle rather than overloading it.
So I had a density and a powerful look to my physique that the other guys, when they stood next to me, they didn't have that.
And that was just from really heavy training, I think.
So you get the density of the muscle rather than just pumping it volume-wise.
First of all, people in the gym, And also studies as well.
Most studies would say for muscle growth, you need to keep the muscle under tension from probably 40 to 60 seconds, which in most cases would be 8 to 12 reps.
So I went a bit lower, like 6 to 8. That worked really well for me, but not on legs.
I went higher, 10 to 12 on the legs.
So just a bit of trial and error.
We know...
The lower reps will give you more strength and more power without the hypertrophy or the growth of the muscle.
So that's ideal for fighters.
I work with a few fighters in the UK and I try to explain this to them.
And it's hard for them to grasp because they think, I'm in the ring, I'm doing a lot of, you know?
And he stopped training weights and started training only sports specific, which is...
It's a very controversial subject because if you talk to modern strength and conditioning coaches, they say it's absolutely the wrong approach.
And if Fedor continued to do strength and conditioning along with his martial arts training, he probably would have been able to prolong his career.
But who the fuck knows if that's true.
That seems like a very...
It's very hard to say what would have happened, but the modern approach seems to be you have to consider strength and conditioning as a huge part of any regiment.
In terms of, like, some of the elite athletes focus primarily on strength and conditioning in camp and not really on skill work because they feel like they already know how to fight.
Well, the conditioning, it's all about, I mean, as far as the conditioning of their motions and their ability to react is already there.
It's just a matter of building the ultimate gas tank and having the body that can perform and react as quickly and as fast and recover as fast as possible.
Like Tyron Woodley, who's the UFC welterweight champion, he's one rare guy that kind of violates the normal build of professional MMA athletes, because he's fucking jacked.
But he's also very smart in his approach, whereas the consequences of engaging with him are extreme, because he has tremendous power.
So he can pace himself more.
Then like maybe some guys can because if you get in a firefight with him like one shot from him puts the lights out on you so he's got this ability to and he's developed a very Very interesting way of fighting where he just paces his bursts, but his bursts are so terrifying like when he comes at you When he does sprint your way, he's so much faster than the average fighter and so much stronger that I guess in his mind, having all that muscle...
But at least for athletes and fighters in particular, you see guys who don't have impressive physiques that have incredible records and wind up doing really well with their skill and their tactics and their mindset and their understanding of when to engage and when not to engage.
With bodybuilding, though, it's very specific.
If you were born with sloped shoulders and small hands, you're fucked, right?
You can't do anything about that with your training, right?
You need a relatively wide shoulders.
To smaller hips.
You need the limbs to be proportional for bodybuilding.
Most of the successful guys, they tend to have a little bit longer legs compared to the torso because it just looks more aesthetic and makes the upper body look more like that.
So that's a bone structure.
You can't do anything about that.
You need to be born with a bone structure.
And then you've got muscle bellies.
So you've got the length of the muscle belly, which is genetic.
So if you've got a short bicep, you know, it used to tell you, I'll go to the gym and do preacher curls and that'll work, you know, you get long.
No.
Your muscle attachments are genetic.
So the longer your muscle bellies are, the more potential they have for volume.
So somebody that's got uniformly long muscle bellies, With a good frame and a good metabolism that tends to have naturally low body fat, then you're looking at somebody with potential to be a good competitive bodybuilder.
If they don't have all those things, Everyone can improve, but are you going to go win contests?
I try to be a little bit more subtle than that, you know?
But I'm like, you know...
I'm not here to bullshit anybody.
So if somebody asks me, I'm just going to tell them, yeah, you can improve, man, but you're just going to waste your time if you dream about being Mr. Olympia because, I don't want to be rude, but you just don't have what it takes.
Enjoy your training.
Be healthy.
Have fun in the gym.
But, yeah, forget about that, because it's not going to happen.
You can get a guy who's the most dedicated, the most hungry, wants it the most, but when you're competing in basketball against Michael Jordan, you're kind of fucked because he wants it bad, too, and his genetics are just so superior.
Well, I got my friend, a business partner from New Zealand.
I don't know if it's true, but he told me about Mark Hunt.
He's got a brother.
And the dad used to get him in the backyard there and just, like, knock the shit out of each other, you know, until they're, like, immune to getting hit.
Well, your brain does not want to take that kind of punishment anymore.
And what Chuck explained to me was that what it gets to is a point where your brain realizes that you're too tough and you're just going to absorb this punishment.
And that's just from doing a couple of times a week a 10-minute workout.
And once a week I do a hard bike ride, but yeah, absolutely.
Because you want to get the benefits from the cardio exercise, which is a more efficient cardiovascular system, but you don't want the negatives of all that free radical.
So if you can get what you're looking for in a 10-minute workout, Why are you going to do an hour or two hours?
I don't know if it would, you know, be useful for a fighter because you're going to be in a ring for all that long, so you've got to condition yourself for that.
Now, when you were in, say, like, out of contest, now, what your goals were to put on muscle that you would eventually, like, you would get bigger and bigger every year.
I would try to, yeah, and then maybe there's certain areas where you want to, like, work on.
At some point, that's a bit behind, so you put more focus on that and a bit less on something else to try and keep the balance.
It might sound strange now, but when I first competed, my first contest, I lost to a guy called Mohammed Ben Aziza, and his back was just like freaky thick.
It was like 3D coming out, and that just stuck in my mind.
I'm like, fuck that, I gotta...
I put a picture of him on my fridge at home.
I put a picture in the gym.
Funny enough, later on in my career I became known for the guy with the best back.
Well, we've talked about that several times in the podcast, but there was a New York Times article recently about how the sugar industry paid off scientists to fake results.
And that was done in the, I guess, the 50s or the 60s.
Now, when you give these seminars and you talk to these young bodybuilders that are coming up, how do you...
I mean, you kind of have sort of a holistic approach to life now.
You're about health and wellness.
But when you're coaching these kids or talking to these kids about how to be successful in competitive bodybuilding as a multiple-time Mr. Olympia, one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest...
I mean, you can't have a holistic approach, can you?
You know, it's like, this wide going down, what is this?
There's a wardrobe?
What is it?
You know?
So, yeah, I look on the other side of it.
You know, young guys coming up, maybe they think, that's strange, like, and ask me, don't you do look at the pictures back and think, wow, I look like that?
I'm like, no, I don't look at, I just look at that and I think, wow, that was fucking extreme and what I did and that's crazy and that's incredible, but...
Does it weird you out to look at pictures of yourself?
A little bit sometimes.
When I look at those black and white pictures...
If you've got any of those black and white pictures, man, that's just insane.
There it is.
Look at that.
That's insane, man.
You couldn't really fit any more muscle onto that frame, really.
You're not so...
I know I went to places and I did things to other people, you know, in the gym.
It's generally accepted in bodybuilding that the 90s was the peak of competitive physiques.
As far as the standard and the depth of the standard, there were like six to eight guys on that stage that were like really, like if you were off, you know, those places could change.
Now you've got one guy, Phil Heath, who's Mr. Olympia, and It's pretty, like, distance between him and the next few guys.
There's a lot more avenues that people could choose to go down as like doing a sport.
For instance, UFC didn't exist in the early 90s.
I remember watching the first show on...
I was in New York.
I watched it on TV. The very first one, you know, with...
Royce Gracie.
So you got MMA, you got CrossFit, and you got all these other competitions now in the bodybuilding arena that's not bodybuilding.
It's men's physique where they wear the board shorts and they're going to have the nice physique and abdominals, the kind of physique that most people aspire to have, I guess.
You've got classic bodybuilding.
So you've got a lot of different avenues.
And I think the interest in pure bodybuilding is a lot less.
I mean, in the 90s, everyone wanted to be a bodybuilder.
The tiny dude has always been unhappy because he got beaten by me, but the thing is, he had a great physique, just like Frank Zane had a great physique.
There's less people going into competitive bodybuilding because there's a lot more avenues, and I think it's less popular now because it's almost like peaked out with myself and running and gone down a little bit.
It's like, how do you surpass, it got to a peak, and guys are trying to do that.
So, you know, they're trying to get big, and they're getting big, but they're getting big with a big waist and everything as well, so it's not the same look.
And my waist started to get a little bloated around 96, 97, maybe 97, when I was using insulin, right?
It got a little bloated, a little distended.
But when I retired, it went down.
And I actually, in England, because I was always like, I'm taking steroids for this sport because I'm a professional.
When I'm not competing, I'm not going to take them, so...
Stopped taking them.
And also I took growth hormone and that was the thing.
A lot of people think growth hormone is going to increase the size of your internal organs and that's why guys are getting blow to waistline.
So I went and had a real, I mean a battery of tests where they actually measure all your internal organs.
And mine were all totally normal.
Apart from my heart was a bit bigger and stronger but that's just normal athletic heart.
So that wasn't the case.
So I... Perhaps it's fat that's building up around internal organs, or maybe it's just a lot of water in the intestines and it just bloats the waste out.
There's guys now, especially in the States, that, you know, they specialize in patients that are using steroids and all, you know, possible side effects and coming off and all that stuff.
I don't really have any of that.
So I just went cold turkey.
And after about two years, my normal testosterone was still not...
Coming into the normal so then I went on the replacement therapy which is like twice a month Testosterone placement and yeah, then I felt normal again So the the come down like you you're taking this What were you taking like right before you stopped like what was the do you remember?
Probably about a thousand milligrams a week total of testosterone a total of everything all kinds of stuff D ball everything a bit of testosterone a bit of Decker or something like that and then Then stop and then, you know...
Now, was there any conventional wisdom in the bodybuilding community of how to slowly cycle off or what the factors would be and how you could mitigate them?
He was there with his doctor and a couple of other doctors there, and one of the doctors told me that absolutely every guy that was in that 100 meters race tested positive.
Every guy.
But I think it was CBS was covering the contest, and they're like, we can't fucking, you know?
We can't have every guy.
We've got to choose one and make sure he's not American.
The real issue, I think, was deception and lawsuits and saying that he didn't do it and suing people who said he did.
And there's a lot of stuff that wasn't exactly the smartest thing to do.
But you're dealing with a cornered person who's a super competitive alpha male trying to figure his way out of this mess that he's found himself in and this mess that exists systematically or systemically in this entire industry.
There was a car that got stopped in the border a few years ago in the Tour de France, going, you know, from France to somewhere, across the border anyway.
And it was a team car, right?
And they stopped the team car and it was just full of EPO and steroids and all this stuff, you know?
So it's...
You know, when was the first Tour de France?
I don't know, but I know one of the very early ones...
I think the guy that was winning, he died because he was using amphetamines.
Back in whatever, I don't know, 1910, 1920 or something like that.
So it's there.
It's part of the sport.
When I came into bodybuilding, it's not like I invented steroids.
They were already there.
My first Mr. Olympia was in 1965. Larry Scott was the Mr. Olympia in 1965. And he said he was using steroids then.
So they wanted to take this, and they wanted this part, the anabolic, and minimize the androgenic, because that's what gives you side effects, prostate growth and all that stuff.
So, they refined it so that those effects were minimized and more of the anabolic effect.
That was the idea.
And there's a guy called John Siegler, I think, because they found out the Eastern Bloc, they had their own stuff called Turinabol.
Siegler invented Dynable, and I don't know, don't quote me if I could be wrong, but I think it was about 58 or something like that.
He developed that for the U.S. weightlifting team.
And they also told guys, if you take this, your fucking balls are going to drop off.
You're going to fucking die.
You're going to get liver cancer.
So guys started using them.
And seeing that's all bullshit, right?
So then, they don't want to listen to anything these medical guys have got to say, because you were lying to us then, so you're going to be lying to us all the time.
Not necessarily so, yeah, because you do have chances of side effects, but...
You could say it's been greatly exaggerated in certain areas.
Yeah, just tell people the fucking truth, man, and let them deal with it.
And that's what I do.
Because I saw all this stuff on the internet about what I'm supposedly doing, and I thought, young guys are going to read this, and maybe they're going to do it.
I did an article in a magazine, Muscular Development, and I said, here, this is what I did.
This is what I did for a contest, and these are my opinions.
My honest opinion is I don't think it's worth it unless you're competing and so on, but ultimately it's up to you.
Let me give you the information.
What you do is up to you.
And I don't know, 70% of the people are like, this is bullshit.
He must have talked much more than this, because I'm taking this.
Actually, I'm taking more than this, and I don't look like him.
I mean, when I got them in the UK, it was just from the gym.
When I first started, I mean, people were bringing them in with trucks loads full from Europe, and there was not, you know, the authorities were not even aware of it or concerned about it or anything.
Now, the policy, at least in the UK and It depends on every country in Europe, but in the UK, it's perfectly legal to have steroids for your own use.
So you're going to be driving your car with a bunch of steroids on the fucking passenger seat and the police call you and they're like, what's this?
These are my steroids.
Okay.
For your own personal use, but selling, making money, and not paying your taxes, that's all they care about.
You know, as long as there's education, as long as they're not lying.
But the problem is, when you lie to people about the effects of things, then they think you're lying to them about pain pills, you're lying about all sorts of other stuff that is actually deadly.
Glenn Greenwald actually posted something today about that showing how it's changed over time and gotten actually better since they've made, especially in particular, marijuana.
Since they've made marijuana legal and started legalizing drugs in Portugal, they've had far less incidences of people having real issues.
And the money, they're using it to re-educate people and get them out of that cycle and try and get them back into society, trying to get them a job and all that stuff.
Yeah, first time I did ayahuasca, I was in Brazil.
I met my wife who was outside.
She lived in Brazil, so we went out to the Amazon.
Well, this was like...
Ten years ago, you know?
So people weren't really, not like now, people know what ayahuasca is, because there's so much information out there, yourself talking about it, I'm talking about it, it's a ton of stuff on the internet.
It wasn't so much then, but I heard about it, and I heard about it, it's a life-changing experience and all that stuff.
So we were out in Brazil, and we got this guide, and I asked him for ayahuasca, and he was like, Bring me these two bottles of brown stuff.
I don't even know to this day if it was really ayahuasca.
But I just got really sick and didn't see any great revelations apart from I got this thing in my head to stop poisoning yourself.
But the night before I'd been out drinking, getting drunk and everything.
So, you know, that was my experience with that.
Then a friend of mine out here in California, actually, I knew about DMT. I used to live in Amsterdam and like I read the DMT spirit molecule and all that stuff.
So I knew about it, but I had no idea To get this stuff, where you can get it from and everything.
So a friend of mine got it, and that was my first experience of leaving the room, so to speak.
And then since then I had some very positive ayahuasca experiences but with a shaman and doing properly and preparing like five days of restricted diet and no sex and all these kind of things you do to prepare and also afterwards.
So DMT is like blow the fucking doors off your perception and realize that this world we're in is like, you know, it's nothing.
It's just a little illusion, right?
There's so much more outside of it.
So there was that.
But with the DMT, I think it's like you've got a computer with like so much storage space and you've got...
It's like a thousand times more than you can retain.
So you see all this stuff and while you're there, you're like...
But when you come back, how much of it can you hold on to, you know?
So you've seen it, and that makes you look at everything differently.
But the ayahuasca is over hours, so I feel like from the ayahuasca, I actually benefited more.
It was like going through therapy or something, because it was much slower, and I could digest it, you know?
Right.
But doing it with the shaman, I did it with a guy called Guillermo Averello.
And he's one of the top guys in the world from Peru.
He comes to Spain a couple of times a year.
So I did it with him.
And yeah, it's probably, I don't know, it's probably two or three years since I did DMT because I sat down one day and I said, right, actually I fasted for two days before.
So I'll be like just in the zone.
And I said, right, I'm going to sit down.
I've got my DMT here.
I've got my vaporizer here.
I'm going to fucking smoke as much DMT as I possibly can to like, like, You know?
Until I've gone and passed out.
So I had that experience and since then I just...
I don't feel any need to do it.
I don't think there's anything more I can take from it, you know?
We had an experience, me and my friend a few months ago, that I've never seen before, because usually people take DMT, they're very calm and sit in the chair and you go off and you might start laughing, but you know, you don't move much, right?
And this guy, he just like freaked out, like...
It wasn't for 10 minutes, but for half an hour.
My friend was a former MMA fighter.
He used to fight with shamrocks.
He knew wrestling techniques, so he had to hold this guy on the floor to stop him from hurting himself because he was probably freaking out.
So I could see the guy was going through something traumatic from the past.
So today I messaged him.
I said, hey, did you ever find out what the guy was?
And then add steroids on top of that and bodybuilding and intensity and competition and then being the best, arguably the best ever and just fucking grinding every day.
Not necessarily slow because of the interviews I did on London Real.
Yeah.
And I talked about Ayahuasca and DMT and spirituality and reality and all this stuff.
I get so many people coming up to me.
They're not from the gym.
I get housewives, young kids.
It's almost like, you're the guy from London Real.
You're the guy that...
So I get a whole bunch of other people that appreciate what I'm saying.
About spirituality, about reality, and life, and they're like, fuck, man, what you said that really helped me.
I got so many letters and emails and stuff, people, you know, like, they just took something away from what I was saying.
So, I mean, that's really why I do these interviews, just trying to help The whole general vibe and, you know, put it out there and there's a whole consciousness awakening revolution going on now and I just want to push some dominoes, you know, and like create that effect.
And then, you know, if you touch one person, They touch somebody else and it's like the butterfly wings flap here and the other side of the world is a tsunami or something.
Well, with psychedelics, I mean, 20, 30 years ago, there was so much ignorance and so little understanding, and also so little understanding, especially when it comes to something as extreme as DMT. There's still a giant percentage of our population that doesn't even know what it is.
Yeah, I mean, they should all take it, especially the fucking politicians.
I like to get those politicians, man, and fucking get them in a room and force them to take DMT and then see how they're going to behave afterwards, how they're going to look at the world and treat people after they've had that experience.
I don't think you can be so self-centered and unfeeling as most of them are after you've had that experience.
I think that any breakthrough psychedelic experience, whether it's psilocybin or LSD or DMT, they're all pretty much, you know, different roads to the same place.
Well, that's what I had with the shaman, with the ayahuasca.
He comes around and he sings these acaros and it's like, changes tone and then it goes deeper bass in his chest and it's like, it becomes part of it, you know?
And I was even moving involuntarily.
My arms was going up, my body was moving and it's like, I'm not doing this.
I don't even know how it's happening.
It's like somebody's picking my arms up and moving.
I had experience once, one of the first times I ever did DMT, where I saw the difference between negative and positive thinking.
Like, I started thinking negative, and there was all this, like, black and dark green and, like, these threatening shapes and colors.
And then something...
I recognized what was going on in my brain that these shapes and images were connected to negative thinking and I relaxed and the shapes kind of like settled down and then I started thinking positive like I heard all these like Expressions of love, but like you're hearing it, but you're not really hearing it.
It's like the thoughts are getting into your head like someone's trying to say it without using words.
And then I started thinking positive and from those dark images blossomed these like beautiful like geometric flowers and colors and impossibly Spectacularly beautiful images.
And I was like, oh.
And I recognized in my mind there is an actual thing that happens when you think negatively.
That were spiritual masters like Buddha and the guy they called Jesus and all that apparently did things that were called miracles because they were outside the box, outside the physical reality we live in.
Yeah, well, one of the things that I tried to explain to someone about DMT that I've kind of used over and over again since then is that I felt like I met with the divine force of the universe, or a divine force.
Maybe my puny little brain could only comprehend this level of divinity and that maybe perhaps there was something even more profoundly more powerful and knowledgeable and wise past that but I wasn't ready to perceive it that maybe there's levels to that that it's fractal just like everything else and someone said like well you know how do you know that wasn't a hallucination I go well it could have been but here's the deal whether or not it was or wasn't the experience is the same like if you really go into some other dimension and meet
God Or you take a drug in which you experience going to another dimension and meeting God.
But my thoughts are that Isolation tanks and the isolation tank experience is something that it takes time to really fully relax and settle in.
And there's layers to the onion and you got to go deeper and deeper and peel those layers away.
And I've done it so many times.
I have one in my basement.
So I've done it so many times now that when I go in, I can slide right in almost immediately.
But I'll tell you this, I rarely go in sober.
I almost always go in high as a kite.
And edibles, preferably, are the best way to really...
I can have full-blown psychedelic experiences in the tank on edibles.
Full-blown visuals, going into the jungle, experiencing the center of the universe, intense, intense stuff.
Because the relaxation, the fact that the only information you're taking in Is like there's a mild feeling of the water on your body very mild that you have to think about to be aware of and Occasionally you'll touch the sides of the tank and you have to kind of write yourself There's no some water gets in the air or something but other than that don't rub your eyes get salt your eyes is a bad one but other than that you're experiencing no sound no No visual input.
And in the absence of that visual input, I think all those other thoughts become more powerful.
So whatever the effect of marijuana is on a regular body when you're just hanging out, sitting around, that effect is intensified in a big way when you're in the isolation tank.
I'll do it at night and I get home from a comedy show and I'll say, I need to process my thoughts and go over my material and I'll climb in that tank and just take off to the center of the universe.
Figure things out.
It also makes me reconsider how my thoughts are being...
One of the things about comedy is you have an idea and you've got to try to figure out a way to get that idea into people's minds and sometimes it's the wrong way.
Sometimes it's too abrupt or too corrosive or it's too...
It's just not...
It's not smoothly getting into people's minds.
So you have to really consider it.
So that idea of...
Seeing other people's perspectives, like that we were talking about earlier, that's huge with stand-up comedy.
And one of the best ways to kind of get out of your own way, for me, is to explore things in the tank.
Because in the absence of any physical input, you kind of stop thinking of your body and your brain and you as an individual, as like the captain of the ship.
And all the other things start to become more and more...
You and I are having this conversation, but one of the reasons why I like to do it in this room with no one else here but us is because there's no distractions, right?
But if there was a guy in the other room with a jackhammer, it would fuck us up.
That's a huge problem is being a reactionary person and constantly dealing with input coming in and, like, instinctively batting it away or instinctively arguing.
In that sense, one of the things about Trump being so bold and so egotistical, I think that's probably a positive, is that he's resisting the deep state.
He's resisting all of these other outside influences, and he's so wealthy.
That he has the financial power to insulate himself from these other people that are like him.
Well, I got friends in the States and that was the feedback that I got.
The guys that liked Trump, they liked him because they felt that he wasn't going to be controlled by the big money, the guys that own the Federal Reserve and pulling the strings on the military and all that stuff.
Well, it just seems that change, especially change over our culture, you know, over civilization, happens in these slow ticks to the right or ticks to the left, moving in a good direction or a bad direction.
It's so slow to change.
And so when something like this comes around that is perceived to be a negative thing and is perceived to be a negative thing moving in a terrible direction and quite rapidly, it scares the shit out of people.
Then other times I think it's probably just too complicated for anybody to really orchestrate.
And we're just reacting to these wants and needs and human instincts and a variety of factors that have been set in motion, like the momentum of these things.
Things that have been set in motion forever and people trying to profit people trying to figure out how to control various factions of it But the idea of like one person or one group pulling the strings as I find it less and less plausible.
Did you ever see them make that video where they have him hit the hammer against the fender?
It's like the first Model T. They had met fenders.
They had made them out of hemp.
And he's whacking it with a fucking hammer.
And hemp, people don't understand, if you've never experienced it, the hemp stalk, the actual stalk of the tree itself, it'll get very big and thick, and it's extremely hard, but extremely light.
It has to do with a lot of things, but a big part of it was William Randolph Hearst, because they had a cover of Popular Science magazine that was like, Hemp, the new billion dollar crop.
And they made that because there was a device that was invented called the decorticator.
And what a decorticator was, it was a machine that allowed you to effectively process the hemp fiber without the use of slavery.
See, for years and years, they had used slavery to process hemp.
And hemp was what they used for cannabis.
That's why the name cannabis comes from the word cannabis.
Well, when they had come out with this article in Popular Science magazine, Hemp the New Billion Dollar Crop, they were essentially saying that hemp, because of the decorticator, now hemp would replace wood for paper, for all these other things.
Nevada declares marijuana state of emergency to avoid $100 million tax shortfall because they wanted the money from the marijuana because they were making so much money in taxes.
So many people out there have cured cancer as well by using the concentrated oil and stuff.
I got a couple of friends that have cured their own cancer from changing the diet, going to a plant-based alkaline diet and taking the cannabis oil and the doctors are like baffled.
So there's that.
And that's a powerful thing.
If somebody cures their cancer, they're going to tell everybody.
They're going to tell everybody they know, all their family, and it's just a matter of time.
They just had something on a mainstream, which I was surprised, a mainstream news show in England where they had this case of this kid who was in hospital who was dying from, I can't remember what it was, but anyway, the point is his mother was sneaking in the cannabis oil.
And he got cured for that.
And then they did this whole thing on breakfast TV about how the, you know, the kid was, got rid of his cancer now.
But I noticed they still, you know, they're obviously told to say this.
You know, they're told this whole story about the kid is like, you know, his cancer's gone now because his mom was sneaking in the cannabis oil and, wow, we need to look into this.
But we must state, everybody, people, we must tell you, we must, you know, it's not a cure, right?
Right, so if you have tomatoes in your backyard, everyone knows tomatoes have lots of vitamins, they're healthy for you, and no one would say, oh, you can't do that.
The shoulders, you know, not only the supraspinatus is gone, you know, when I go for a scan, they're like, oh, you know, your shoulder is, the arthritis is really bad.
You must be in a ton of pain.
I'm like, nothing.
I don't have any pain.
I don't know if that's down to my cannabis use, but it's definitely a factor in there, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important, guys like you that are going against the grain, explaining your position, and also you as a respected professional athlete where people will listen to you and they go, oh, well, this guy is such a straight shooter about steroids and about training and about injuries and all these other things.
It's like, hey man, I need to smoke weed to stop me from doing too much fucking stuff, you know?
Just to slow me down to like a normal level.
And listen, yeah...
It can fucking slow you down and you can sit and smoke fucking weed all day and sit on the couch and watch TV and eat pizzas if you want.
But if you're smart, you use it when it's the time to use it.
Sometimes I like to smoke a little bit before I do cardio because it opens my broncos and I get a better fucking workout.
Or it's generally in the evening when I'm relaxing or if I want to do something creative like I'm writing or something, it helps me think a little bit.
But there will be times when it's appropriate and times when it's not appropriate and that's it.
I just think that it's a lot like what we were talking about earlier with fats and sugar, that there's this misinformation that continues forever.
It's like once you get an idea in your head, oh, low fat is good, high fat is bad, and then somewhere along the line you realize that that's bullshit.
You might realize it.
You might do the research.
You might go into the article and then look at the studies and go, wow, this is insane, and how did this happen?
And go into the New York Times article about the sugar industry bribing the But once you get to a certain point in time, you realize, like, most people are not going to do all this.
They're not going to look into this.
They're not going to look...
So, most people are going to hear what they heard when they were little.
Marijuana is for losers.
Marijuana makes you lazy.
You're going to be a lazy stoner.
I don't want to be that.
Marijuana's bad.
Like Jeff Sessions.
The fucking...
The guy's on record saying, good people do not smoke marijuana.
Yeah, I think it's supposed to be a different type of smoke, though.
Like, the smoke that you get, it's probably harsh.
It's still smoke, though.
Yeah, but the properties of it don't have the same...
The issue apparently with tobacco in particular, just regular tobacco, if you're smoking a regular rolled cigarette of hand-rolled tobacco, just pure tobacco, no other bullshit ingredients, is not as bad for you as a cigarette, but still bad for you.
Yeah, that's what he guessed, because you're taking it.
But not only that...
Because the cannabis is dilating the bronchus all the time, if you keep dilating it, keep dilating it, keep dilating it, it's going to get more, you know, it's going to get more functional.
A lot of people in America, they take a cigar, they take out the tobacco, they put the weed in, and they make a blunt out of it, but you're taking in tobacco and the pot too, and it gives you this weird high.
I mean, I'm the only one that talks about it because all those guys are, like, scared, like, it's going to be viewed negatively or their sponsors are going to, like, you know, drop them or something like that.
Yeah, that's a problem, right?
Well, I can tell you, like, half the guys on the Olympus stage, they're all stoners.
Because, you know, it helps you relax after training.
You can't drink, right?
You know, because of calories and if you drink the next day, you're not going to perform so well.
I mean, you can get totally fucking high tonight and you can go in the gym tomorrow morning.
Well, maybe the cannabis would actually help them with the brain injuries because a lot of studies, you know, with Alzheimer's and stuff like that, it's very protective on the brain.
Yeah, I mean, we're living in an age where information is leaking out there and people understand things more today than they ever did before, but there's still a massive amount of ignorance that you have to combat.
And coming back with, like, handmade stuff, there's a bunch of things like different industries and different, you know, small businesses are starting to emerge in Detroit that are kind of very promising.
Fish oils, resveratrol, like all the antioxidants.
It's a daily thing, man.
I go sometimes with not smoking for a week or two just because I want to have the discipline to say I don't need to do this every day, but I fucking like to do it every day.
So why not?
I hear you, man.
I don't get up in the morning and smoke when I got shit to do because it might not help me do that stuff.
But if I'm working out or if I'm going to lie on a beach or I'm going up the mountains, yeah, I'll take a joint with me.
Why not?
It just enhances everything.
It enhances your experience, enhances food, enhances sex, enhances music.
We've got a competition called Super League, and this is for bodybuilders slash strength athletes, and it's somewhat functional because, you know, You get a bodybuilder on stage and the general public look at that and they say, what the fuck is this?
This is like strange and maybe a product of just taking drugs and they don't appreciate the work that goes into that and how strong and athletic some of these guys can be.
So this competition has two rounds.
The first round is lifting.
So you get judged on eight different exercises.
You score a maximum of a 12-rep set.
So there's that, and then there's a physique round, but it's done by a computer.
So it scans various areas of your body and gives you a score on that.
It sounds a bit complex, but if you want to go on Super League Live, it's got to explain everything.