July 26, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:02:54
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unidentified
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Push the sucker right up close. | |
| 3... | ||
| 2... | ||
| 1... | ||
| And we're live. | ||
| What's happening, man? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| I'm cool, man. | ||
| Up here in LA. It's nice to meet you in person. | ||
| I've seen you in magazines. | ||
| I've seen you since... | ||
| Man, when did you first burst onto the bodybuilding scene? | ||
| What year was that? | ||
| I was reminiscing today. | ||
| First time I came out here was 1990 to Gold's Gym. | ||
| So I came from UK to do my first professional bodybuilding contest. | ||
| It was called Night of Champions in New York. | ||
| And I got second place there and made a real big impact. | ||
| And the WIDA company that used to be based out here with the Flex magazine and Muscle and Fitness and all that stuff. | ||
| They're right down the street. | ||
| They used to be. | ||
| I don't think they are anymore. | ||
| No, it's all closed down. | ||
| There's a fence around it and everything. | ||
| But that's less than a mile away from here. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Man, I remember watching you in those magazines. | ||
| 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? | ||
| You were so big, man! | ||
| Jesus Christ, you were big! | ||
| That's funny, because I look back at some of the pictures now of me, and I say, what the fuck? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Well, you were going for it. | ||
| It's extreme. | ||
| And I came into the sport and I wanted to see what I could do. | ||
| I wanted to, like, take it as far as I could take it, you know? | ||
| Well, you represented to me as an outsider looking in this insane determination. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You've been around, man. | ||
| You're with martial arts and everything. | ||
| Any kind of sport is the same thing. | ||
| What separates the guy that's first from second from third or whatever? | ||
| You know, you all got certain physical characteristics that help you in your sport and so on. | ||
| So you're all gifted up there. | ||
| So what can separate the guy from first and second and third? | ||
| It's all up there. | ||
| That's the key. | ||
| How did you develop your mindset? | ||
| Was that something that you always had or was it something that you developed as you were training? | ||
| I think it's something I already had. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm going to take it and run with it, you know? | ||
| It's crazy how many people have similar stories like that, where they were in just a terrible environment and they realized that they had to toughen up, they had to smarten up, and they had to get out of there. | ||
| And if not for those terrible situations, who knows if they would have ever reached the levels of greatness that they did. | ||
| I can tell you from my point of view, I don't think I would have done. | ||
| Because I would be too comfortable. | ||
| If you're comfortable, you're not going to put yourself through that extreme kind of pressure and pain. | ||
| I wanted to improve my life. | ||
| I changed my life. | ||
| Through the sport, here I am, sitting, talking to you on this show. | ||
| People are listening to me. | ||
| I've been all around the world, thanks to my sport. | ||
| It's been great for me. | ||
| When you meet current bodybuilders, are they like, Hey man, what the fuck? | ||
| How could we not be a gigantic, huge Mr. Hulk anymore? | ||
| You're a regular-sized, athletic-looking dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Maybe some of the younger guys that are coming into this now. | ||
| But, you know, people know me. | ||
| I was a professional bodybuilder. | ||
| That's what I did. | ||
| And I was the best at doing that. | ||
| But that kind of training and that kind of physique is not going to serve me now. | ||
| So I do training to be more functional. | ||
| My goals are more health-related now. | ||
| Whereas before, I was a young guy and I wanted to be the best at this thing I was doing. | ||
| I put everything into that. | ||
| But, you know, that kind of physique's not practical for everyday usage, you know? | ||
| I couldn't hardly tie my shoelaces when I was 300 pounds. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure, man. | ||
| And how tall are you, like a 5'10"? | ||
| 5'11". | ||
| 5'11". | ||
| So, like, when you were that big, you were just a ball of muscle, just a mass. | ||
| Yeah, and, you know... | ||
| 300 pounds! | ||
| I was 300, 310 in the off-season. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| Competing 265, but, I mean, 265... | ||
| Lean as fuck, dehydrated, you know, shredded, so yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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God! | |
| That's all I did. | ||
| That was all I did. | ||
| I trained, I eat, I sleep, I studied. | ||
| That's just all my mental focus was, like, lasered on that thing that was doing nothing else. | ||
| I wouldn't go to the movies, I wouldn't go to dinner if I got home after 11, because I've got to be in a bed at 11. Wow. | ||
| That was, you know, that was the regime that I lived for many years, and that's why I was able to beat other people that maybe... | ||
| It could be argued they were more gifted than me, but they weren't willing to do that. | ||
| So that's what it's all about. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I had always read about you. | ||
| Like I said, that was the impression that I always got. | ||
| What you represented is the pinnacle of extreme dedication. | ||
| Yeah, and study. | ||
| We had no internet then. | ||
| Everybody's got coaches now and nutritionists. | ||
| The thing that appealed to me is this was an individual thing. | ||
| I had to learn about the training. | ||
| I had to learn about the nutrition. | ||
| I had to learn all this stuff myself. | ||
| And that was, apart from the training, that was part of it as well. | ||
| You know, the learning part of it I enjoyed. | ||
| Was it hard to get good information? | ||
| Because I'm sure there's a bunch of gym experts. | ||
| There's always these bro science guys that are hanging around giving you shitty advice. | ||
| How hard was it to get the proper information when it came to training? | ||
| I kind of sifted through it and was very influenced by a guy called Arthur Jones. | ||
| I don't know if you've heard of him, but Arthur Jones invented the Nautilus machines. | ||
| This guy was like a billionaire, self-made billionaire. | ||
| He just was fascinated with the bodybuilding, but he had no business interest in it. | ||
| So he just wanted to, you know, he studied it and he was like, what is it that causes muscle growth? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| And he found it was the intensity of exercise. | ||
| And then there was another bodybuilder, Mike Mensah, who went to compete in the Mr. Olympia, won the Mr. Universe. | ||
| He took those principles and he used them. | ||
| So I read all this stuff and it was very logical. | ||
| You know, it made sense. | ||
| And then I tried it out in the gym. | ||
| And it worked in the gym. | ||
| And if I trained more often or if I did more in the gym, my progress would slow down or it would stop. | ||
| As soon as I cut back and I made the workout shorter and more intense, my progress went... | ||
| So for me, it was pretty early on I learned how to train properly. | ||
| And that's why I was competing. | ||
| I competed in a world championship after 18 months training, which is... | ||
| Pretty much unheard of. | ||
| That is pretty much unheard of. | ||
| Now, when you say shorter, more intense workouts, how did you regulate that? | ||
| That's a huge issue with martial artists, is overtraining. | ||
| They want to do more work than everybody else. | ||
| They want to work harder than everybody else. | ||
| And they wind up breaking their body down and showing up for the fight exhausted. | ||
| Overtraining is a big thing, yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| You're not really getting anywhere. | ||
| You're just going to have a bloody hand. | ||
| You think you're being tough, but you're actually just being silly. | ||
| Why are you going to the gym? | ||
| I'm going to the gym to get results. | ||
| I'm going to do whatever it takes to get results. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| That's it? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| And everybody says, oh, that's it. | ||
| I write on a piece of paper. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| That's nothing, man. | ||
| I'm like, okay, but come and do it. | ||
| Come and do it and tell me if you want to do more when we're finished. | ||
| Nobody has ever said, oh, please, can we do some more? | ||
| They're like, no, that's it. | ||
| That's enough. | ||
| Because every set, by the warm-up sets, you'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. | ||
| Do another exercise. | ||
| How did you develop your protocol? | ||
| Just trial and error? | ||
| Trial and error and, you know, I didn't invent this system of training. | ||
| As I said, people there before me, Arthur Jones, Mike Mensah, I just took what they did and 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. | ||
| So I adapted it to myself and my needs. | ||
| Now, when you were at your height and when you're 265 pounds shredded and dehydrated and then 310 pounds in the offseason, you must be 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I want to be now. | ||
| I'm not training for bodybuilding because it's not what I want to do now. | ||
| Plus, I got a lot of injuries from all those super heavyweights I did. | ||
| I got a torn rotor cough, which is not... | ||
| I've had a couple of surgeries on there. | ||
| It doesn't repair. | ||
| I was trying to lift weights and continue to do what I do because that's what I'm used to doing, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| When you're familiar with doing something, you're reluctant to change to something else. | ||
| But I noticed my shoulders getting a bit worse, my hips were getting... | ||
| I'm like, hold on. | ||
| Is this serving me now? | ||
| Why am I doing this? | ||
| Am I doing this just to try and maintain something for other people, what they think I should look like? | ||
| And I kind of came to the conclusion, yeah, you are. | ||
| Because you're not a bodybuilder anymore. | ||
| You're not competing. | ||
| So if doing this kind of training is not really benefiting you and it's maybe making your injuries worse... | ||
| You know, when you're 60 or something, you're not going to be able to lift your arms up or something like that. | ||
| So I'm thinking more practically. | ||
| And I started doing yoga. | ||
| I really fell in love with that. | ||
| It's amazing, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| Physically, it's amazing. | ||
| I got much more range of motion, mobility, and then you got the spiritual aspect of it as well. | ||
| Actually, I was inspired to do yoga from a DMT trip. | ||
| I did a DMT trip and I came back and I was like, my body's all fucked up. | ||
| This ain't right. | ||
| I've got to fix some stuff here. | ||
| What shall I do? | ||
| I don't even... | ||
| I vaguely knew what yoga was, but I don't really know what it was. | ||
| And I got to do something. | ||
| I got to do yoga or tai chi. | ||
| I don't know what it is, but I started looking into it and then found a yoga teacher. | ||
| And I do that a couple times a week. | ||
| I find it's great. | ||
| Every time I do it, I just think I should do more. | ||
| I did one this morning, and I got up this morning, did a yoga class at 8 o'clock, called the gym. | ||
| You know? | ||
| On an empty stomach, just had some water and some tea, and I fucking feel amazing all done from that. | ||
| Well, it just, to me, it feels like it connects everything. | ||
| It connects all the tissue from the back to the legs to the arms, like the neck and the core. | ||
| It strengthens all the connecting stuff. | ||
| Yeah, and you get energy flow. | ||
| It's going around. | ||
| And there's the thing with bodybuilding. | ||
| Because bodybuilding, you're isolating the muscles, right? | ||
| So you're isolating the bicep, you're isolating the tricep, you're isolating the deltoids, and putting stress on those muscles to maximize the muscle size of those individual muscles. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is great for bodybuilding, but your body doesn't function like that. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you throw something or you throw a punch or, you know, you don't use one muscle. | ||
| You use, you know, it's a chain effect. | ||
| Your whole body works together. | ||
| And in bodybuilding, you don't really do that. | ||
| You don't learn to do that. | ||
| So that's what I've had to relearn, you know? | ||
| So when you exercise today, like, what kind of stuff do you do besides yoga? | ||
| I do yoga. | ||
| I do some cycling. | ||
| I live in Spain. | ||
| We've got some good hills there. | ||
| So I do... | ||
| Because I like to push, man. | ||
| I can't push the weights anymore. | ||
| I can't get in that zone, you know? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Because of my injuries. | ||
| So I've got to do something else. | ||
| Yoga is a challenge, you know, and it can continue to be like... | ||
| If I do that until I'm dropped down dead, 80 years old, there's always more that I can do. | ||
| You know, you can always do a bit more range or a bit more difficult pose. | ||
| So there's no ceiling there, you know? | ||
| With the bodybuilding, I've already been on the ceiling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I do cycling a couple of times a week, up and down the hills. | ||
| So that's like... | ||
| You know, it's almost like intervals because you do a hill, it's intense, and then you go flat, and it's a bit easier. | ||
| So I enjoy doing that. | ||
| What made you move to Spain? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| So that's why I moved there. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Now, have you ever looked into anything for your shoulder, like stem cells or things along those lines? | ||
| No, I had... | ||
| 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'm just going to cope with this. | ||
| And I can't bench press, but so what? | ||
| It doesn't really matter that much to me. | ||
| Can you do push-ups or just anything? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Then I would consider it. | ||
| Until then, I live with it. | ||
| They're doing some pretty amazing stuff now with stem cells. | ||
| Yeah, they can maybe grow some tendon tissue. | ||
| Yeah, they can do a lot of soft tissue regeneration. | ||
| They're also doing it now, the most recent thing is they're combining stem cells with platelet-rich plasma. | ||
| They're doing it together, and they found that by doing the stem cells and the PRP together, it helps generate new tissue growth better. | ||
| Yeah, I know my wife, she had a knee surgery, and she had the PRP, and the recovery was real quick, so... | ||
| Yeah, it's nice. | ||
| She had meniscus, is that what it was? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, if there's any surgeons out there that know how to repair Dorian's shortened supraspinators, let me know, man. | ||
| Now, is your situation very similar to what a lot of bodybuilders face after they retire? | ||
| There's just so much stress and strain on the joints and the back? | ||
| Yeah, well, Ronnie Coleman, who was Mr. Olympia after me, and... | ||
| He's had a serious back surgery, right? | ||
| Super strong, yeah. | ||
| He did a lot of really heavy squatting. | ||
| Also, when he was getting ready for a bodybuilding competition, basically doing powerlifting, which is probably not a good idea. | ||
| So Ronnie has a lot of problems with his discs in his back. | ||
| I'm not sure of all the details, but I know he's had a lot of fusions, so his mobility and so on is going to be very limited. | ||
| More than one fusion? | ||
| Yeah, several. | ||
| So he can't really turn his neck and his back too good. | ||
| He's had both of his hips replaced. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| He's a young guy, too. | ||
| How old is Ron? | ||
| He's like 36? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Ron is like almost my age. | ||
| He's probably early 50s. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why do I think he's younger than that? | ||
| Well, he's retired now. | ||
| Maybe I'm thinking... | ||
| I should have said 46 instead of 36. But, you know, he did... | ||
| We both... | ||
| We're known to be very strong, running even more so than myself because I did powerlifting before. | ||
| So we moved some heavyweights and, you know, any sport, man, you're going to have some consequences. | ||
| Yeah, no doubt. | ||
| If you run, if you fight and play football, whatever, anything has its downside. | ||
| But all things considering, I think I'm doing pretty good. | ||
| I'm healthy. | ||
| You know, I got a dicky shoulder, so big deal. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Yeah, I'm telling you, man. | ||
| Just hang in there. | ||
| They're on their way to figuring something out for that. | ||
| Yeah, that's almost what I'm thinking. | ||
| I'm thinking, like, don't do anything now because in a few years' time, there'll be something that can really do the job. | ||
| So I'll wait until then. | ||
| Yeah, the last thing you want to do is get something. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, you know, there's a doctor that we've talked about on the podcast before that recommends hanging from bars for your shoulders. | ||
| It's one of the best things ever to alleviate pain and also to increase range of motion and reduce impingements. | ||
| Well, I have to get in touch with this guy. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's a bunch of videos. | ||
| I hang from my feet from my back. | ||
| I've got the inversion table, and I do that a couple of times a week just to, you know, keep the mobility there. | ||
| I know one of my discs, L5, is a little bit worn, but I don't do squats or heavy overhead stuff, so I think it's going to be okay. | ||
| But yeah, still, you know, it's all about prevention, man. | ||
| Have you heard of the reverse hyper machine? | ||
| Have you seen that thing? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| No? | ||
| We have one in the back. | ||
| I'll show it to you. | ||
| But it's a creation of Westside Barbell. | ||
| You know Louie Simmons? | ||
| Yeah, I've heard of him. | ||
| That crazy bastard? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Louie Simmons created this machine that when you lift your legs up, it strengthens the back and on the down, when it swings down, it's active decompression. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| It's phenomenal for disc issues. | ||
| It's like active decompression plus strengthening together. | ||
| I have one back here. | ||
| I love it so much. | ||
| Sounds great. | ||
| Let's have a look at that later on. | ||
| Yeah, there it is like this. | ||
| You can see it up here. | ||
| We've talked about this so many times, people would think this guy's hired me to endorse his product, but it's an amazing product. | ||
| I want to see how that is. | ||
| Yeah, it's a reverse of the hyperextension almost. | ||
| Play it so he can explain it, Jamie, so he can hear it. | ||
|
unidentified
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He knows the range of motion at the top. | |
| Squeeze the glutes. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Squeeze, control, release. | ||
| Squeeze, control, release. | ||
| She drops her head, raise her head on the way up, drops on the way down. | ||
| Full flexion and extension of the spine. | ||
| This will absolutely help cure a bulging disc. | ||
| This is traction. | ||
| I need to get one of those for my wife. | ||
| She's got a disc, bulging discs. | ||
| Well, your wife looks very fit, so I'm sure she does a lot of lifting as well. | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| She was a world champion as well in her field, you know. | ||
| It's so common for anybody that puts any strain in their body. | ||
| Usually the L5, L4 area on the bottom of the spine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the things about bodybuilding is that in isolation, when you're 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. | ||
| Do guys now address that? | ||
| Do they do a lot of rotation exercises, a lot of rotator cuff stuff? | ||
| You know, if you did that back in the 80s, people were like, what the fuck are you doing there with that little weight? | ||
| You know, lift some weights. | ||
| But I see people doing it now and with the bands and everything. | ||
| So, yeah, people are doing more preventive stuff. | ||
| It's fascinating because there's guys like Arnold, who were kind of the original pioneers, and then guys like you who came after him. | ||
| But you were still, again, pre-internet, figuring things out on your own, learning from the guys that came before you, but taking it to another level. | ||
| That was the beauty of it for me. | ||
| I never really liked team sports because I just feel like this asshole is letting me down here. | ||
| And I felt like that through my life as well. | ||
| Like my parents didn't really, you know, like everyone's fucking letting me down. | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| I'll do this myself. | ||
| And so I got to learn about the nutrition. | ||
| I got to learn about the training. | ||
| I got to do it. | ||
| I got to pull it all into action. | ||
| And of course, I had people like supporting me. | ||
| But when I got on that stage, it was win or lose. | ||
| I'm taking full responsibility for this. | ||
| And we don't really have that now. | ||
| And the guys don't learn anything because they got coaches. | ||
| So what should I do, boss? | ||
| Do this, do that, and eat this and eat that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And, you know, the beauty of it's gone. | ||
| You're not learning anything anymore. | ||
| And what if you fall out with your coach? | ||
| Like, what are you going to do next contest? | ||
| You know? | ||
| So is that like a big thing now? | ||
| Like there's like a series of coaches? | ||
| Is it like MMA camps? | ||
| It's a huge thing. | ||
| And it's like, I don't know. | ||
| I think the guys are suckers because who's making the money here? | ||
| The coaches. | ||
| The coaches are making the money, not the competitors. | ||
| The coaches are smart. | ||
| And I look at the coaches and I say, who the fuck are you and what have you done? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Which contest have you actually won? | ||
| Most of them haven't done anything. | ||
| It's just all theory. | ||
| So what are they, exercise physiologists? | ||
| No, they're just guys from the industry that, you know... | ||
| They've trained a few people and they've got a few results. | ||
| For me, it's more about the insecurity of the guys competing. | ||
| Why don't you learn yourself and listen to your body? | ||
| I used to make notes. | ||
| Every week I'd write down my diet. | ||
| Every single workout that I ever did from 1984 to 1997 I have in a training log. | ||
| You should sell that. | ||
| Print it. | ||
| Maybe, yeah. | ||
|
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Print it. | |
| It's in a book. | ||
| It's in all these little exercise books, you know, and like you can see the first one when I'm like 21 years old is a bit childish with the comments. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I can go back in time and remember that workout. | ||
| Just from those notes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every workout, as soon as I got home and I finished, I was like, hey, bench press, I did this. | ||
| And every month, I would make notes, and I'd say, okay, this is what I'm doing now. | ||
| These are my goals for the next four weeks. | ||
| You know, whatever. | ||
| Like, little goals. | ||
| Like, I'm gonna put five pounds on my bench press. | ||
| But if you do that every month, then at the end of the month, in the year, you got 60 pounds, right? | ||
| So, I did all these things like, you know, mental rehearsal, visualization, all this stuff. | ||
| I did it. | ||
| I just, I kind of learned it. | ||
| Nobody taught me. | ||
| So, that was one of the things, goal setting. | ||
| And writing it down on a piece of paper, And you can do this with anything. | ||
| Your business, whatever. | ||
| You're writing it down on a piece of paper. | ||
| You're making a commitment. | ||
| It's fucking there on a piece of paper. | ||
| Every day you can look at that. | ||
| And that just gives you a stronger mental vision. | ||
| And instead of saying, right, I'm going to win this contest in 18 months' time. | ||
| Yeah, that's cool. | ||
| You're going to win that contest. | ||
| But how are you going to get there? | ||
| It's like saying, I'm going to sail to Australia. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good idea. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| But how are you going to get there? | ||
| Have you got a plan? | ||
| Have you got a map? | ||
| Like, fuck, you're going to go with no map? | ||
| You're just going to get lost, you know? | ||
| So... | ||
| I found that very helpful, and that's what I try to teach people as well, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I think writing down goals is huge, and it's something that most people don't do. | ||
| Yeah, I still do it now, like a daily thing. | ||
| This is what I've got to do today. | ||
| Sometimes I won't get through it all, but, you know, at least it's there. | ||
| I might put a couple of things off for tomorrow, but I find it very, very helpful, yeah. | ||
| And when you've read it down, like, you know, like, let's say, I don't know, you want to stop drinking or something. | ||
| Write it down. | ||
| I'm going to stop drinking alcohol. | ||
| Sign it. | ||
| You fucking put it there on your table. | ||
| You've said that, man. | ||
| You've said it. | ||
| You've said it. | ||
| You've made the commitment. | ||
| You've put it on a paper. | ||
| So you're going to let yourself down. | ||
| You're going to be a pussy. | ||
| You're going to be weak. | ||
| You're going to break that. | ||
| You made that commitment, man. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's there on a piece of paper. | ||
| That's strong. | ||
| Especially for the type of person like you, a dedicated, focused guy. | ||
| Something like that is just extra motivation. | ||
| It's a scaffolding of your ideas. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| It's solid. | ||
| Just say it casually. | ||
| I fucking committed to this. | ||
| I wrote it down. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a firm believer. | ||
| I think you should, at least for a week, you know, at least for your week, set it out. | ||
| And have a little checkbox next to it. | ||
| Make sure you can look at that. | ||
| Like, I did this. | ||
| I got my workouts in. | ||
| I got my whatever you need to get done. | ||
| Whatever you're trying to slack off. | ||
| There's five things to do there. | ||
| I did four of them. | ||
| I didn't do the fifth one because I smoked a joint. | ||
| Four out of five. | ||
| Yeah, it's not bad. | ||
| Four out of five. | ||
| I reward myself. | ||
| If you do write things down, though, you'll just get more done. | ||
| Even if you don't fulfill the entire list, you'll get more done. | ||
| You're going to get more done than if you didn't do it. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's having a plan, man. | ||
| Everything needs a plan. | ||
| If you want to get somewhere, I'll use that analogy. | ||
| If you want to get somewhere, if you're a captain on a ship, you don't just get on a ship and say, hey, let's go sailing and we're going to get there. | ||
| No, you're probably not. | ||
| You need a route to get there. | ||
| And you need to know What it takes to get there. | ||
| Oh, I'm gonna do this. | ||
| I'm gonna do this fight and competition. | ||
| Yeah, cool. | ||
| But do you know what it takes to get there? | ||
| Right? | ||
| First of all, this is what it takes. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Are you prepared to do this? | ||
| Are you gonna do this? | ||
| Yes or no? | ||
| And if it's yes, go for it. | ||
| You know, if it's too much, be honest. | ||
| Just don't fucking do it, you know? | ||
| There was a time when you were at the top of the heap where there was debate As to like what a bodybuilder should look like. | ||
| There was like the Frank Zane look, which was like a strong, obviously fit guy, but much smaller and just symmetrical. | ||
| And then there was you that just came out like the fucking Hulk. | ||
| And then it was almost like overwhelming for a lot of people. | ||
| And then there was this debate to try to figure out. | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| Because when I look at a bunch of bodybuilders on a stage and they're trying to pick out who's number one, who's number two, I'm like... | ||
| I mean, I always assume that it's like a lot of other things, like the deeper you are into it, the more you can see the intricacies of it. | ||
| Whereas for me, a person is not a bodybuilder. | ||
| I'm like, they're all fucking huge! | ||
| How can you tell who's the best? | ||
| Well, it's a matter of, you know, it's bodybuilding, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's muscle size is a big factor. | ||
| It's not the only factor, but it is a big factor. | ||
| If you look at the Mr. 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? | ||
| It was Arnold. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Arnold was Mr. Olympia. | ||
| You could argue that Frank Zane's body is more aesthetic and nicer and prettier than Arnold's, but Arnold beats him. | ||
| Why? | ||
| He just was bigger. | ||
| More freakishly impressive. | ||
| Yeah, he's bigger. | ||
| And Lee Haney was eight times Mr. Olympia. | ||
| You could argue maybe Lee Lebrard or somebody like that was better proportioned and put together, but he was much smaller. | ||
| Frank Zane looks like a guy you would see in a gym today, like a regular dude. | ||
| There's a lot of regular dudes like that. | ||
| Yeah, there's a category now. | ||
| So you've got bodybuilding. | ||
| But you've got other categories now that you didn't have. | ||
| So you've got men's physique, which is more of this type of physique they're looking for. | ||
| Very aesthetic, tight waist, everything like that. | ||
| And you've even got classic bodybuilding now, which is height over weight ratio. | ||
| So, you know, the guys are not that big. | ||
| So you've got different categories as a reaction to people not really liking the direction that bodybuilding went in. | ||
| And, yeah, I'll take responsibility for it going the size route. | ||
| And I had a nice physique when I started. | ||
| You know, I had a nice physique. | ||
| I had nice abs and everything. | ||
| But I'm like, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this to the max. | ||
| I'm going to see how far... | ||
| You know, how big can I get? | ||
| How ripped can I get? | ||
| How strong can I get? | ||
| I want to go to the max. | ||
| And I don't want people to say, oh, that's... | ||
| Wow, that's a nice, pretty physique. | ||
| I want people to say, what the fuck is that? | ||
| That's what I wanted to do. | ||
| Well, you succeeded in that. | ||
| You definitely succeeded in that. | ||
| 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? | ||
| His legs were so big. | ||
| His legs were so freakishly big. | ||
| Like, that guy had legs. | ||
| Nobody has really surpassed Tom Platz's leg development, I don't think. | ||
| To this day, it's fair to say. | ||
| Now, is that just... | ||
| It's weird because it's very rare that someone's known very specifically for a body part the way Platz is known for his legs. | ||
| But Platz made a whole career on the legs and not only the legs, 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. | ||
| That's not really there anymore. | ||
| What's missing? | ||
| What's the element that's missing? | ||
| Why isn't that there? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Maybe it's just a reflection of society in general. | ||
| People just want stuff easy now. | ||
| Everyone wants to be famous. | ||
| Put the picture on Instagram. | ||
| You don't need to do shit. | ||
| Just be famous. | ||
| Go on Big Brother. | ||
| Be famous for nothing. | ||
| You've done nothing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think that's a reflection of the way things are, perhaps, in everything. | ||
| But what's the difference in the way the bodybuilders approach it today? | ||
| I mean, they're obviously doing something because they're still huge, and there's still, you know, these giant guys that are lifting weights. | ||
| So what element... | ||
| But if you look at the giant guys that are lifting weights now, they don't look quite like myself and the guys from the 90s. | ||
| Now the guys are just big everywhere. | ||
| The waists are huge. | ||
| Everything's huge. | ||
| And it's 20 years since I competed in a contest, so I don't exactly know. | ||
| But the guys are using a lot more different drugs than we used to. | ||
| A lot more insulin and IGF, things like that. | ||
| So I think what you're seeing in the big guys is somewhat systemic growth. | ||
| It's like they just got a bit bigger everywhere. | ||
| And that doesn't look... | ||
| So appealing, I think. | ||
| Right, when like their guts extend. | ||
| Yeah, so maybe they're relying more on the chemicals and they don't really... | ||
| You know, I haven't really heard anything from any of the bodybuilding champions in the last 10 or 15 years. | ||
| Anything interesting or new or revolutionary in their training methods. | ||
| It just, you know, they don't really even talk about it that much now. | ||
| Everyone just does the same stuff, you know. | ||
| Well, it was at one point in time 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. | ||
| It was somewhat of an inner circle. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know, guys just want to look good on the beach. | ||
| It's everywhere now. | ||
| It's mainstream. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| There's Nelly. | ||
| Damn, Nelly's jacked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We saw a picture of Hugh Jackman when he was preparing for Wolverine. | ||
| He was doing deadlifts. | ||
| And he was in his 40s, and someone was asking me, do you think he's doing it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes! | |
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| Yes, he is! | ||
| How much did he get paid for the movie as well? | ||
|
unidentified
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Fuck yeah! | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, in a couple of months? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not even a good picture of him, man. | ||
| There's real good pictures of him jacked. | ||
| But, I mean, there's pictures of him from the movie, too. | ||
| He's enormous. | ||
| Like, he just became an enormous guy. | ||
| What I'm saying is, like, how much did he get paid for the movie? | ||
| My point is... | ||
| You know, he got paid for that. | ||
| So maybe he took a little health risk or whatever. | ||
| You can debate that, but he's getting paid for it. | ||
| But is it worth it if you're just doing it, just fucking look good on the beach or look good for the girls or something? | ||
| Depends on how much pussy you get. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Depends. | ||
| But here's the thing, man. | ||
| Once you get on that merry-go-round... | ||
| You don't want to get off. | ||
| That's the problem, right? | ||
| You don't want to get off because you took some stuff, you 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. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| But that's my question. | ||
| How did you just accept the fact that you were no longer a superhuman-looking freak show of a man? | ||
| Now you became a regular man. | ||
| Was there a weird transition? | ||
| My whole thing was, with bodybuilding competition, I never showed my physique. | ||
| Even in the gym with the guys that I train with, I was covered up all the time. | ||
| If I want to look at my physique and practice my posing and stuff, I did it at home. | ||
| So on the street, I always wore long sleeves. | ||
| I don't give a shit about anybody else. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because I did it purely for competition. | ||
| But why did you cover it? | ||
| Why didn't you just dress like normal? | ||
| Because it was too freakish? | ||
| Unwanted attention all the fucking time. | ||
| I'm not interested in it. | ||
| I'm a quiet guy and I just wanted to go about my business and reveal this... | ||
| I've been working on. | ||
| I didn't see it as being, it's almost removed. | ||
| It's like a statue I'm working on, you know? | ||
| So I wasn't tied up in, like, I was tied up in being Mr. Olympia because that's who I was and that, you know, somewhat a role you're playing. | ||
| But the whole huge body, I didn't need that for everyday use. | ||
| Well, that sort of fits with this whole Spartan image that people had of you. | ||
| The image of you was like this guy that was just doing work that other people weren't willing to do in some sort of quiet isolation somewhere. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| A dusty basement. | ||
| A basement in Birmingham, in the middle of England, where, you know... | ||
| It's not exactly a hotbed of bodybuilding activity. | ||
| No beaches or nothing. | ||
| It's an industrial city. | ||
| So I just locked myself away there and worked on this project. | ||
| And I loved doing it. | ||
| I loved just being in that tunnel and seeing what I could do. | ||
| And obviously, the further you get along, the more difficult it is to make any kind of improvements. | ||
| But I was trying. | ||
| That's fascinating to look at it that way. | ||
| It's almost like an art project. | ||
| It was a statue. | ||
| I was removed. | ||
| I wasn't like building this body so I could get, you know, admiring from the girls or the guys going to respect. | ||
| I was already like a fit, strong guy before I started, so I didn't come from that place of like, I need to do this to make myself feel better. | ||
| I need to do this because I have some talent for it and I can change my life with this, maybe. | ||
| I didn't know it was going to be Mr. Olympia, but I just knew that if I put my energy into this, something positive was going to come from it. | ||
| And after a few years, I won the British Championship. | ||
| And because of that, you know, I was British champion. | ||
| I didn't have a car. | ||
| I went home to one bedroom apartment with no furniture. | ||
| I didn't even have a proper bed. | ||
| I had a mattress on the floor. | ||
| I don't have a shirt, but I won the British Championship, and because of that, somebody put up the money for me to open a gym. | ||
| Then I had a gym, then I was making an income from my sport. | ||
| So even if it went that far, it would have been worth it, you know? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, I think that attitude is probably what's made you very healthy, like mentally, afterwards. | ||
| The fact that you're separate from your body, and that it was a project. | ||
| There was a period afterwards that was very tough, because... | ||
| I was this guy, I was Mr. Olympia, and this is all I've been doing since I was 21 years old. | ||
| And then I got an injury. | ||
| So my exit from the sport was not calculated. | ||
| What injury was that? | ||
| I tore my tricep tendon on the left elbow, and this... | ||
| I had already one injury, a bicep tear, but I kind of handled that and it didn't affect my training too much. | ||
| But this was almost a complete detachment that I have to have repaired. | ||
| And after that, I just knew I couldn't lift properly. | ||
| You know, you can't compete with the rest of the world if you can't lift properly. | ||
| So I had to retire and then I was like in limbo. | ||
| I was like, who the fuck am I and what am I going to do with my life? | ||
| So it took me a few years to kind of... | ||
| Slowly get back. | ||
| But it wasn't about, oh, I've lost my muscles. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| It was more about, you know, I don't know what my role is in life. | ||
| I don't know who I am. | ||
| It took me a long time to find that. | ||
| And I think a lot of athletes that retire from sport, they have the same issues. | ||
| It's a giant issue with fighters. | ||
| You know, you've got this fucking tunnel that you're in, right? | ||
| It's almost like being at war. | ||
| It's stressful, but, you know, you've got this role and there's this thing that you're just aiming for all the time. | ||
| And now... | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| Like, what the fuck are you going to do? | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| What it's all about, you know? | ||
| So it took me years to kind of, you know, come to peace with that. | ||
| But it wasn't about losing the muscles. | ||
| It was about losing my goal and my focus and my role in life, I think. | ||
| Yeah, for a lot of athletes, it's the intensity of life is all of a sudden reduced down to a mundane home. | ||
| Yeah, and you're going to become a normal guy now? | ||
| There's no highs and lows. | ||
| It's just mediums all the time. | ||
| But I turned it around because when I was doing bodybuilding, my life was very restrictive, like a fucking monk. | ||
| I just had this regime, and I didn't want to socialize. | ||
| I didn't want to do anything outside of that. | ||
| So... | ||
| After some time, I came like, hey man, so you can't do that anymore. | ||
| How about the thousand and one things you didn't do when you were doing that because you couldn't? | ||
| Now you can do all those things. | ||
| You can go where you want, not eat all day if you don't want to eat six meals a day. | ||
| You can do what you want. | ||
| I started looking into some other things I was interested in. | ||
| I've always been interested in wildlife, so I started going on a few safaris and things like that. | ||
| Slowly I realized, like, hey, there's a million and one things you can do in life. | ||
| I get over this. | ||
| So it's just a transitionary period. | ||
| Transitional period, yeah. | ||
| But I can absolutely see why many athletes struggle. | ||
| Frank Bruno, who was a world boxing champion from the UK. I know he had a really hard time. | ||
| Almost like he was a world champion when I was a Mr. Olympian. | ||
| We retired at the same time. | ||
| We both got divorced. | ||
| Everything falls apart, man. | ||
| And then you hopefully rebuild back to something else. | ||
| Yeah, it seems that very few athletes have a smooth process into retirement. | ||
| And fighters in particular, they always come back when they shouldn't. | ||
| Yeah, well, I know why they do that. | ||
| When I was a kid, I 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. | ||
| Now, when you did decide, did you have a plan? | ||
| Did you write out a plan like how to step down? | ||
| Because you wrote out a plan for the rest of your life. | ||
| No, because it was like... | ||
| New territory. | ||
| It was like that, you know? | ||
| It was like I didn't have a plan. | ||
| Right after the injury. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Vaguely, I had an idea in my mind that I would like to open more gyms when I finish bodybuilding. | ||
| Actually, that didn't happen, but I started my own nutrition company, which I'm still doing sports nutrition during sports nutrition. | ||
| So I put a lot of energy into that and different things and being able to experience things in life that I shut myself off with. | ||
| So that's how I dealt with it. | ||
| And now I feel great about it. | ||
| And I can look back and I can sit back and say, you know what? | ||
| I couldn't have given any more to that thing. | ||
| I couldn't have given any more. | ||
| So there's no regrets. | ||
| Like a lot of athletes... | ||
| You know, when you're young and you're there, maybe you don't really appreciate it so much. | ||
| And then when it's gone, you're like, shit, man, what if I'd have done this? | ||
| What if, what if, what if, what if? | ||
| You know, I don't have those what ifs, man. | ||
| I did 100% even too much to the point where I got injured. | ||
| So, you know, I'm happy with that. | ||
| I can put that to rest. | ||
| That's a great lesson. | ||
| That's a great lesson for young people coming up. | ||
| If you just do all the work. | ||
| When it's over, it's over. | ||
| Do what you can do, man. | ||
| Win or lose, you do what you can do, and then you have the self-satisfaction, the pride to look back and say, you know what? | ||
| I fucking give it everything I had. | ||
| And no regrets. | ||
| And that's the way I feel about it. | ||
| And I know there's a lot of my contemporaries that compete against me that don't really feel like that. | ||
| That's why a few of them are still, they're in their 50s and they're making comebacks. | ||
| That's one of the most horrible things to see someone who's lived a life of regret. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or even, I don't like to see athletes coming back. | ||
| When they're not, as you remember them, at their best, and they're coming back and they're not so good, which I'm sorry, but inevitably at 50 years old is going to be the case. | ||
| Is there any bodybuilders doing that now at 50? | ||
| Yeah, Kevin Leverone, who came second to me, and Mr. Olympia, he made a comeback last year. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| How did he look? | ||
| Well, it depends how I answer that question. | ||
| How did it look compared to previously? | ||
| Not good at all. | ||
| How did it look for a guy that's making a comeback at 50 years old? | ||
| Yeah, great. | ||
| But it's not a 50-year-old guy looking good contest. | ||
| It's Mr. Olympia. | ||
| It's the best in the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if you just tried to make a comeback within a year, doesn't it take many, many years to get to that kind of shape? | ||
| There's a thing with bodybuilding. | ||
| You've got a thing called muscle memory. | ||
| So maybe it took me 10 years to get to be 260 pounds ripped. | ||
| But now that information is in my DNA. It's there. | ||
| So I could theoretically not train for 10 years, lose all that muscle, I'll probably get that back in 6 to 12 months. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Well, I've heard of muscle memory and I know that it's a thing, but has it been physically isolated? | ||
| What causes that or how it is in your DNA? I'm not really sure if they have or if they're interested enough to do the studies that's necessary, but those of us, 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So the director made him sort of emaciate himself? | ||
| Well, he still looked pretty big, I guess, for the average person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, man, that's nothing compared to how he looks. | ||
| Still looks big next to Jeff Bridges. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he looks like a really big, fit guy that you'd see at the gym. | ||
| Look at Jeff Bridges. | ||
| The dude abides. | ||
| I like Jeff Bridges, man. | ||
| He's cool. | ||
|
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Me too. | |
| I love that guy. | ||
| Still around, man. | ||
| Still banging out great movies. | ||
| Let me talk about how many great movies that guy's been in. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What's the one where he's a country singer? | ||
| That was great. | ||
| Yeah, that was recent. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| That was a good movie. | ||
| He's a good actor. | ||
| He's good at choosing roles. | ||
| So when a guy does get down to something like that, is it a matter of taking less steroids, working out less, like your body just naturally starts to shrink? | ||
| Well, if you're taking steroids and you stop, then you're going to lose a lot of weight pretty quick. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just don't lift weights. | ||
| Play tennis, do swimming, do something else, and your muscle mass is going to go down. | ||
| So I'm guessing that's what it is. | ||
| Now, when you first started bodybuilding, how long did it take before you did take something? | ||
| After about 18 months, I decided I want to do a contest. | ||
| And I knew the guys in the contest were taking stuff, so I just want to be on a level playing field with them. | ||
| So, like two months before my first contest, I did that. | ||
| Which take? | ||
| A little bit of D-ball. | ||
| 20 milligrams of D-ball a day. | ||
| That was the first thing I ever had. | ||
| And then, nearer to the contest, I switched to some anivar and primobolin. | ||
| But, I mean, 20 milligrams a day is like fitness chicks take that now. | ||
| Do they really? | ||
| They do. | ||
| Fitness chicks do take steroids, right? | ||
| I mean, it's pretty common. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Even bikini chicks. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Because they want to look harder. | ||
| They want to look leaner. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's common in athletics across the board. | ||
| We see it in MMA. We see it in women in MMA as well. | ||
| Look, man, if you're a competitive sport, a competitive athlete, you're going to do whatever you can do to win. | ||
| There was a study once done by a guy called Dr. Goldman, and it's called Goldman's Dilemma. | ||
| And he asked a bunch of athletes, including, I think, Olympic-level athletes, So, if I could give you a pill that would guarantee you would win the gold medal or whatever the equivalent is in your sport, but you would die at like 40, 45, would you take it? | ||
| The vast majority of people said yes, they would take it. | ||
| That's the mentality you're dealing with. | ||
| Especially when you're young, man. | ||
| You feel indestructible, like nothing's gonna, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It doesn't seem real, too, right? | ||
| It's like global warming will one day make the seas rise. | ||
| Yeah, but not right now, so fire up the fucking Buick. | ||
| Yeah, right now I won a fucking gold medal. | ||
| That's all I'm interested in. | ||
| I'm not even... | ||
| That doesn't even exist. | ||
| I'm here now, I won the fucking gold medal. | ||
| And this is the mentality of the, you know, the successful athlete. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Maybe it applies to everything. | ||
| Maybe it's a fucking businessman. | ||
| If you said, you take this pill and you'll fucking make billions, would you do it? | ||
| A driven businessman would probably say, fuck yeah, I'll do it. | ||
| If it's a solution, then it'll allow you to win. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's what I did. | ||
| I consider that I did a calculated risk as far as taking steroids with the possible negative health effects. | ||
| Which I tried to monitor. | ||
| I had doctors, you know, blood tests and everything like that. | ||
| So if something really was going wrong, at least I'd have to, you know... | ||
| Did you ever find anything wrong? | ||
| No. | ||
| Some things were a little bit out of the normal range when I was heavy. | ||
| My blood pressure went up. | ||
| Like, not sky high, but it was, you know, 140 over 90, 150 over 90. So it was edging up there, but I was 300 pounds. | ||
| So, you know, and... | ||
| A couple of the other readings were a little bit, but nothing of great concern, you know? | ||
| But that doesn't mean to say that they're harmless because it's over a period of time, right? | ||
| And I equate it to smoking, you know? | ||
| If you smoke for 10 years and then you stop, apparently after 15 or 20 years you're back to like, you know, a guy that didn't smoke. | ||
| If you smoke for 20 years, 25 years, then maybe it's a different story. | ||
| Have you ever seen Chris Bell's documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster? | ||
| I haven't, no. | ||
| I think I'm due to speak with the brothers, right? | ||
| Yes, Chris and Mark. | ||
| I think I'll be going on their podcast at one point, but I actually haven't watched it, no. | ||
| Great guys. | ||
| Really great guys. | ||
| They've both been on here a couple times and very knowledgeable. | ||
| Chris just did a great documentary called Prescription Thugs, too, about the prescription drug industry and getting people hooked on these pain pills. | ||
| But in Bigger, Stronger, Faster, one of the things that was fascinating about it was... | ||
| He was going over, like, we were told that this is going to kill you. | ||
| We're told that all these negative health effects... | ||
| He's like, but where's the bodies? | ||
| Where are the bodies? | ||
| Like, when you think about all the things that kill people, obesity crushes human beings. | ||
| I mean, it is one of the number one causes of death in America, but yet it's looked at... | ||
| Obesity, smoking, alcohol, prescription drugs. | ||
| Oh, all those things. | ||
| All these things. | ||
| There have been some deaths in bodybuilding. | ||
| That may be attributed to steroids, and there's been a couple that are definitely attributed to diuretics, which is, you know, diuretics, you lose a lot of water, you can lose electrolytes, you 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, that's an interesting thing to point out because the diuretic aspect is critical. | ||
| When you see someone on stage and you see them shredded, those guys are basically like almost dead, right? | ||
| Well, you know, like probably the least healthiest fucking point you've been at all year is when you're looking like that on stage. | ||
| And you look amazing! | ||
| Yeah, you look amazing, but I can tell you, you know, you feel weak as a kitten. | ||
| You don't feel real good at that point, but... | ||
| You know, you do whatever you'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. | ||
| They're just not doing them anymore. | ||
| Well, if you do real random testing year-round, then you have a better chance of eliminating something. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Would it be more of the bigger guys or it's across the board? | ||
| It's bigger, guys, but it's also EPO. A lot of guys have been popped for EPO. They've been popped for, what does that other say? | ||
| Melodonin? | ||
| There's another one. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| I'm trying to remember it. | ||
| But it's a similar thing to EPO. EPO, increase your red blood cell count, so you get more oxygen, which would give you more endurance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's giant in the sport. | ||
| I mean, physical size is not really that much of a consideration. | ||
| There's very few guys that are big and muscular. | ||
| Well, here's the thing with steroids. | ||
| I mean, they can give you muscle size, but it depends on your training, the kind of training you're doing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it can also help with your endurance. | ||
| So just because a guy is not big and muscular doesn't mean there's not benefit from steroids. | ||
| You get runners and cyclists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The whole thing with Lance Armstrong is like, you know, he was on a pedestal and then he's demonized and he's down here. | ||
| Was he the only guy using a bit of testosterone or, you know? | ||
| No, he was a... | ||
| You know, Bill Burr, who's a good friend of mine, a stand-up comedian, had a hilarious bit about it. | ||
| And he's like, our psychopath was better than your psychopath. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got a dirty sport. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, we just had one psycho that was more psycho than your psychos. | ||
| And he had testicular cancer, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| I'm assuming then you're not producing any testosterone. | ||
| So you're going to have to put it in from outside. | ||
| How much? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Well, they had it in... | ||
| They used to allow testosterone replacement therapy for fighters. | ||
| They don't allow that anymore because guys are abusing it. | ||
| And also there was questions of why they were losing testosterone in the first place. | ||
| And one of the thoughts was damage to pituitary gland because that's apparently a big factor with fighters. | ||
| Once they develop damage to the pituitary gland from head trauma... | ||
| They start decreasing the amount of testosterone their body produces. | ||
| And so the thought was put it back in. | ||
| But other doctors are saying, well, maybe you shouldn't be competing anymore. | ||
| Maybe put it back in for general health and wellness. | ||
| But you probably shouldn't be competing anymore if this is the way your body's responding to head trauma. | ||
| Yeah, and you shouldn't really need replacement testosterone until you're like... | ||
| 40 or thereabouts, you know, because you should be producing still. | ||
| And there's ways to up it, right? | ||
| Yeah, there's natural supplements to up it. | ||
| Diaspartic acid is one. | ||
| What is diaspartic acid? | ||
| Diaspartic acid is a compound. | ||
| I think it's from amino acids. | ||
| But anyway, they've done studies on it that shows that it can raise your own natural testosterone. | ||
| Some herbs, tribulus terrestris, also has some... | ||
| You know, some studies to back that up. | ||
| Also exercise, right? | ||
| Like high-intensity exercise, sprints, certain kinds of squats and deadlifts. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| How much is going to make a difference, I don't really know. | ||
| But yeah, heavy exercise would raise your testosterone over a normal baseline. | ||
| But once you get to a certain age, it starts declining in any case, you know. | ||
| Now, when you started taking stuff and you started off with D-ball, what, like, at the height, what was the craziest amount of shit you were taking? | ||
| The most stuff I took was in the off-season when I was training real heavy, trying to build size, because I had a regime that I used to get ready for contests, and I was always known for 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. | ||
| Some decadarabalin, maybe 500 milligrams. | ||
| And D-ball, maybe 40, 50 milligrams is average. | ||
| And growth hormone in the off-season. | ||
| That's a lot of shit. | ||
| It's probably about 30% of what guys are taking now. | ||
| God, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 30%? | ||
| I think so, based on what people are telling me. | ||
| I mean, I have people come to train with me that... | ||
| Haven't even done a competition, let alone a Mr. Olympia, and their stack is more than that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Because they found it on the internet. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck? | ||
| You know, why? | ||
| I just saw it on the internet somewhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Somewhere? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you go on the internet and have a look for Dorian Yates' stack. | ||
| I mean, I've been on there, and I'm like, first of all, 50% of this stuff, I don't even know what it is, right? | ||
| So I don't even know what it is. | ||
| And the rest of the stuff that I do recognize, like if you take this, you're going to get real health problems. | ||
| Like insulin's an issue, right? | ||
| I mean, insulin, you take too much insulin, you fucking keel over in a coma. | ||
| I tried insulin the last couple of years I was competing. | ||
| Because a few guys started using it and so on. | ||
| And I don't feel that I benefited from it. | ||
| I got a bit bigger. | ||
| I got more bloated. | ||
| The conditioning was harder to get. | ||
| So for me, I didn't feel I got any benefit from it. | ||
| You can get bigger, but it's not the quality. | ||
| I was known for super hard, grainy quality, and I felt I was losing a little bit of that using insulin. | ||
| So that's my opinion. | ||
| I wouldn't recommend it. | ||
| I don't recommend it to people that I train with because it doesn't have any real benefits and it has risks. | ||
| So why? | ||
| That's fascinating, the quality. | ||
| What constitutes the quality of muscle that you're looking for? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How did you figure out how to make that number, like six to eight? | ||
| Like, why not three to five? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| How did you arrive? | ||
| Just over many decades. | ||
| First of all, people in the gym, And also studies as well. | ||
| Most studies would say for muscle growth, you need to keep the muscle under tension from probably 40 to 60 seconds, which in most cases would be 8 to 12 reps. | ||
| So I went a bit lower, like 6 to 8. 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? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I need endurance. | ||
| Yeah, you do. | ||
| But you're already doing that. | ||
| You're already doing that, right? | ||
| So if you want to get more power behind the punch... | ||
| But you don't want to build muscle because if you build muscle, you put on weight and then you go up a weight category. | ||
| So whatever more power you've got is going to be negated by the fact that you're fighting heavier guys. | ||
| So if you could stay the same weight but be more powerful and stronger without building muscle size, that would be the key. | ||
| And that's basically like powerlifting, low reps. | ||
| Like three reps and then have a really long rest. | ||
| Totally... | ||
| Foreign to MMA training. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're gonna do it, boom, boom, boom, put it back and wait for three or four minutes. | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| And do it again. | ||
| So you get that, bam, that power behind the punch, but without... | ||
| But a big rest. | ||
| But without increasing your muscle size. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that would, you know, if you get more power behind your punch, but you're going up a weight class, like, so what? | ||
| You know, you want to stay in the same weight, but be stronger. | ||
| That would be ideal for a fighter, so... | ||
| That seems counterintuitive for a lot of people, because they assume that bigger muscles mean more power. | ||
| Not necessarily. | ||
| I mean, bodybuilders have got bigger muscles than powerlifters, but powerlifters can lift more weight, at least for one or two reps, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're training for that power, boom. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Same thing with weightlifting. | ||
| It's a couple of reps, but very explosive and powerful. | ||
| That's hard for people to understand. | ||
| Kettlebells as well, like, throw it up, you know? | ||
| Power. | ||
| Well, that's the thing about kettlebell competitors. | ||
| They're not the biggest guys. | ||
| No, but they've got the internal musculature, the core that does a lot of the lifting, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| If you're throwing a punch, I mean... | ||
| Who cares if you've got huge biceps? | ||
| It's like the internal, right? | ||
| It's from the toe all the way up through the core that's going to give you that power. | ||
| So you've got the guys like Fedor Emelianco. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of him. | ||
| I like his fighting style. | ||
| Me as well. | ||
| I mean, the guy looks like... | ||
| He's got arms like sticks. | ||
| He looks like he's got a pot belly. | ||
| He looks out of shape, but he fucking hits like a baseball bat, man. | ||
| Well, early in his career, he was bigger. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's already there in the brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| But the guys that hit the hardest, they're not necessarily the most muscular, though. | ||
| That's... | ||
| Some of them are. | ||
| Like Tyron Woodley, who's the UFC welterweight champion, he's one rare guy that kind of violates the normal build of professional MMA athletes, because he's fucking jacked. | ||
| But he's also 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... | ||
| And he says it's actually natural. | ||
| You know, it's genetic. | ||
| My son is doing bodybuilding, and he doesn't have a particularly good diet. | ||
| He eats fried chicken and burgers and stuff, and he's shredded all the time. | ||
| Well, Tyron's son is jacked, and he's a little kid, and he's fucking... | ||
| Genetics are real. | ||
| There's no denying it. | ||
| It's like me when I started. | ||
| I had already a physique. | ||
| I had the abs. | ||
| I was lean. | ||
| I had the shape. | ||
| Everything was there. | ||
| Just had to get bigger. | ||
| So, yeah, genes are a big thing as far as your body type goes. | ||
| Is it insurmountable? | ||
| Like if a guy has shit genes, can he become like a jack? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| It can get better. | ||
| Everyone can get better. | ||
| You can't be Lee Haney. | ||
| It's a rare individual that can get up on the Mr. Olympus stage. | ||
| There's probably hundreds of thousands of maybe millions of guys around the world that are in the gym training and maybe would like to compete. | ||
| But you know, can everybody be a UFC champion? | ||
| Can everybody be a basketball player? | ||
| No. | ||
| You need certain tools to start with, and then you've got to work on that and build that. | ||
| But at least for athletes and fighters in particular, you see guys who don't have impressive physiques that have incredible records and wind up doing really well with their skill and their tactics and their mindset and their understanding of when to engage and when not to engage. | ||
| With bodybuilding, though, it's very specific. | ||
| If you were born with sloped shoulders and small hands, you're fucked, right? | ||
| First of all, you need the frame. | ||
| The frame is the bone structure. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No. | ||
| Have you ever had a guy come to you and said, Dorian, I want to be a champion, and you're like, kid, you're fucked? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Damn. | ||
| I mean, why, you know? | ||
| Dorian Yates tells you you're fucked? | ||
| I don't say. | ||
| I try to be a little bit more subtle than that, you know? | ||
| But I'm like, you know... | ||
| I'm not here to bullshit anybody. | ||
| So if somebody asks me, I'm just going to tell them, 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. | ||
| That's hard for people to hear, though. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| But it's better than me blowing smoke up their ass and saying, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| You know, yeah, pay me. | ||
| And, yeah, you can have whatever you want, man. | ||
| Because somebody else is going to tell them that. | ||
| Have you ever seen a guy that you thought, man, I don't think so, and then he became a great bodybuilder? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I can pretty much... | ||
| I mean, I've been around like... | ||
| You know, 35 years I've been in this game, so I can see people, and I've seen people probably with more potential than me. | ||
| Well, they don't get anywhere because they don't apply themselves. | ||
| You've got to have the physical stuff, but the glue, the thing that holds it all together is this. | ||
| I've seen freaks in the gym. | ||
| First of all, they're not that smart. | ||
| They don't really understand everything that's going on. | ||
| Usually, when somebody gets something real easy, They're not really that hungry. | ||
| So it's not necessarily always the guy with the most potential. | ||
| You can beat somebody with more potential by being smarter and working hard, but it's only two degrees, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I've always said. | ||
| You can get a guy who's the most dedicated, the most hungry, wants it the most, but when you're competing in basketball against Michael Jordan, you're kind of fucked because he wants it bad, too, and his genetics are just so superior. | ||
| There's just no way around it. | ||
| So you can't equalize that. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| I saw this thing in England recently. | ||
| A guy came over from the States. | ||
| I don't know what his name was, but he was a good martial arts. | ||
| He was a kickboxer. | ||
| He was dedicated. | ||
| He was lean. | ||
| He was fit. | ||
| And he came over to fight this gypsy fighter over in England. | ||
| And this guy is, like, fat, out of shape. | ||
| He turned up, like, 45 minutes late for the fight because he'd been drunk the night before. | ||
| And he came in and he's just fat and he looked like shit. | ||
| And for, like, half an hour he was getting his ass kicked. | ||
| Well, then I think he... | ||
| Oh, he woke up, you know? | ||
| And he kicked the other guy's ass. | ||
| So this guy's been training, he's been dedicated, he's doing all this stuff. | ||
| And this guy, the night before, is getting drunk, but he's still coming and kicked the guy's ass. | ||
| So, you know, he probably just had more potential or he had a hard head or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's a lot of factors involved in fighting. | ||
| I mean, his experience, his ability to take punishment, that some of it is just inherent. | ||
| Some people just have a wider face, stronger neck, they can take a shot better. | ||
| Yeah, these are all genetic characteristics, right? | ||
| The ability to absorb punches, it seems to be, or at least the variables seem to be a lot of it based on genetics. | ||
| Maybe you've got thicker bones or a shorter neck so your brain doesn't rattle as much or something. | ||
| Mark Hunt's a perfect example of that. | ||
| He's one of the best kickboxers of all time. | ||
| From New Zealand, right? | ||
| Tank of a man, you know, 5'10", 265 pounds, just built like a brick shithouse. | ||
| He had a bazooka to take him out. | ||
| Oh, dude, Crow Cop head kicked him, and he went down and got right back up. | ||
| It's like, nobody does it. | ||
| Crow Cop head kicks you. | ||
| That's a rat, you know? | ||
| And he's one of the few guys that survived it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't feel it anymore. | ||
| Well, he's been knocked out a few times recently, but, you know, he's in his 40s now. | ||
| But isn't it the case with fighters? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I noticed anyway. | ||
| You get a guy that, like, seems to be invincible, then he gets knocked out, and then after that he loses it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Unquestionable. | |
| Like Chuck Liddell, for instance. | ||
| Perfect example. | ||
| Yeah, unquestionable. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Well, your brain does not want to take that kind of punishment anymore. | ||
| And what Chuck explained to me was that what it gets to is a point where your brain realizes that you're too tough and you're just going to absorb this punishment. | ||
| And it just shuts itself off. | ||
| It shuts down to protect itself. | ||
| And that's how he described it. | ||
| Now, obviously, that's not like a neuroscientist describing it. | ||
| There's also the connective tissue that keeps the brain connected and stable inside that. | ||
| It gets looser and more torn. | ||
| Have you ever seen connective tissue? | ||
| It's almost like a strong version of cotton candy, is what it looks like. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| It's not the toughest stuff in the world. | ||
| It's not supposed to take that many beatings. | ||
| In the wild, if you had that many beatings over a certain point, you'd be dead already. | ||
| Somebody would have already eaten you. | ||
| But MMA seems to be safer than boxing because you don't get hit as many times. | ||
| I mean, sort of. | ||
| Yeah, I would say probably overall safer. | ||
| But that's like saying motorcycle racing is safer than going downhill on a skateboard 60 miles an hour. | ||
| You're kind of fucked. | ||
| It's all relative, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's all... | ||
| The study that they did that just came out this week on football players would show they did... | ||
| Did a test on 111 football players, 110 had traumatic brain injuries. | ||
| I saw the movie, I can't remember what it's called now, with Will Smith. | ||
| The brain damage was causing the guys to be violent and all kind of stuff. | ||
| But they were saying that 87% of football players at all levels, high school, college, all levels have traumatic brain injury. | ||
| 87%. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Stop football? | ||
| Stop MMA? That's the question. | ||
| Stop rock climbing? | ||
| Everything's got its risks, right? | ||
| Every sport. | ||
| Unless you do it moderately. | ||
| If you do things in moderation, they're good. | ||
| You'll never be Dorian Yates in moderation. | ||
| Competitive sports are not... | ||
| You know, they're not the healthiest thing in the world, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, you're dealing... | ||
| Well, I mean, I guess there's injuries involved in basketball, right? | ||
| But, you know, you're not going to lose your ability to think. | ||
| But even like endurance sports, marathon running, stuff like that, these guys die younger than... | ||
| than a sedentary person because of the massive amount of free radicals they're producing, which is aging the cells. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, a massive free radical from all this oxygen. | ||
| So you're aging yourselves. | ||
| You're wearing yourself out doing all these endurance sports. | ||
| I think what's going to come out in the future, and I've been doing this myself and getting great results, is very short interval training. | ||
| They've done studies with five-minute cardio workout, and it's getting the same results as an hour. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I do ten minutes. | ||
| What? | ||
| 90 seconds, like, you know, moderate. | ||
| Then I do a 30-second all-out sprint, whether it's on a cross trainer or a rower or kettlebells or whatever. | ||
| Get the heart rate right up, like 160 or something, and then go back down. | ||
| Do that a few times, like 10 or 12 minutes, and my resting heart rate... | ||
| It was pretty good for a bodybuilder. | ||
| I guess it was like 54, 55 in the morning. | ||
| I had it down to like low 40s, 45 in the morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's just from doing a couple of times a week a 10-minute workout. | ||
| And once a week I do a hard bike ride, but yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Because you want to get the benefits from the cardio exercise, which is a more efficient cardiovascular system, but you don't want the negatives of all that free radical. | ||
| So if you can get what you're looking for in a 10-minute workout, Why are you going to do an hour or two hours? | ||
| I don't know if it would, 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. | ||
| I'm just talking about for general health. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| I've never even heard of such a thing. | ||
| Yeah, interval training. | ||
| But ten minutes? | ||
| Ten minutes. | ||
| They've done studies on four and five minute workouts. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| So I think that's the future. | ||
| Where, you know, you want to get the benefit, but without the negatives. | ||
| Do you think you could run a marathon right now? | ||
| Could I run a marathon? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Running is not for me. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, definitely not for you when you were in your prime. | ||
| Yeah, fast walking is good. | ||
| When you were in your prime, how much endurance did you have? | ||
| Like, if you had to do something, if you had to go up a flight of stairs, were you like, oh, fuck? | ||
| It wasn't too bad because I always did some cardio. | ||
| I did some cardio and stretching, so it was a bit unusual. | ||
| For bodybuilders, because that doesn't give you bigger muscles, but I saw the other benefits of it. | ||
| Because if I got more efficient cardio, like I'm training legs and back, stuff like that, that's a huge amount of oxygen. | ||
| You go to failure on squats or leg presses. | ||
| That's a huge amount of oxygen. | ||
| So for me to recover from that, I needed a bit of cardio. | ||
| So I was doing three or four times a week in off-season every day, getting ready for a contest. | ||
| But it wasn't very intense. | ||
| It was more like moderate. | ||
| I did fast walking for an hour or do stationary bike for 45 minutes, sometimes twice a day. | ||
| So I was doing quite a lot of cardio work. | ||
| Getting ready for a contest rather than starving myself. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| You know, I was bringing the calories down a little bit and bringing the activity up a little bit. | ||
| So it was a bit of both, a bit of calorie restriction, a bit of more activity, more calorie burning. | ||
| Now, when you're doing calorie restriction, but you also have to keep all that mass, how did you... | ||
| Contradictory goals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, training we can debate because I train with some MMA guys in England. | ||
| A bit of jujitsu, but mainly conditioning stuff. | ||
| And it's fucking hard, man. | ||
| It's hard training, right? | ||
| It's a super hard cardio and then someone's trying to punch you in the face at the same time. | ||
| That's hard. | ||
| So we can debate about the training, which sport is harder, yeah? | ||
| Because I've done a little bit of both. | ||
| But what's harder in bodybuilding is when you leave the gym, it's still with you. | ||
| And when you're getting ready for a contest, you're going to do more training and you're going to eat less. | ||
| So most sports, you can go train hard and then you can go home and eat. | ||
| With bodybuilding, you know, two months before a contest, you're hungry all the time. | ||
| Because you're trying to lose... | ||
| You're trying to lose slowly, lose the body fat or maintain the muscle. | ||
| If you're trying to lose weight too quickly, your body will preferentially burn the muscle because it's like... | ||
| Body fat is an emergency store, right? | ||
| Your body doesn't want to give it up, so you've got to coax it out slowly, you know? | ||
| But yeah, you're going to be hungry and you're going to be tired for a couple of months going for a contest. | ||
| That doesn't sound like fun. | ||
| It's not fun, man. | ||
| It's a constant mental battle as well. | ||
| Because your body's telling you to eat. | ||
| You've got to eat. | ||
| You've got to eat. | ||
| And at night you can't sleep properly because... | ||
| You go to sleep a little bit, and then your body's internal alarm clock will wake you up. | ||
| Hey, you're fucking starving. | ||
| Go eat. | ||
| And you're like, no, I ain't doing that. | ||
| But how do you keep your body from absorbing all that muscle? | ||
| Because you're carrying so much muscle. | ||
| Is there a drug that you can take that keeps the mass? | ||
| Well, you're taking steroids, which are anabolic and anti-catabolic. | ||
| So that's going to stop you from losing muscle. | ||
| However... | ||
| You know, if you restrict your calories too much or, you know, too much exercise and none of it, you're still going to burn muscle. | ||
| It's just going to lower the chances of it. | ||
| So, you know, you've got to stack everything in your favor. | ||
| You're taking steroids, just, you know, try to keep the muscle mass and stop losing it. | ||
| But if you restrict too much, you're still going to lose it. | ||
| So you need to, like, one or two pounds a week, very slowly. | ||
| Keep your body from going into shock. | ||
| Yeah, that's where a lot of fighters... | ||
| Go wrong because they starve themselves for a couple of weeks. | ||
| They lose muscle, they lose strength, they lose glycogen from the muscle, and they're weaker. | ||
| Yeah, they fight very weak. | ||
| That's a huge issue. | ||
| And a lot of fighters are choosing to go up a weight class and they're having big success. | ||
| Donald Cerrone is a great example of that. | ||
| There's been quite a few fighters. | ||
| Or you lose that weight very slowly so it's not depleting you down. | ||
| What kind of diet were you on when you were competing? | ||
| High protein, pretty high protein. | ||
| Off season, there's still a lot of carbs, medium fat, and then getting ready for a contest, the carbs slowly come down. | ||
| But I was a big guy, 270, 280. I was still eating probably 3,500 calories a day, which is probably more than I eat now. | ||
| But when you're that big, you're starving. | ||
| What do you weigh now? | ||
| I weigh now 230, something like that. | ||
| So, yeah, all that extra mass needed to be fueled. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That was one of the things about you. | ||
| I would try to, yeah, and then maybe there's certain areas where you want to, like, work on. | ||
| At some point, that's a bit behind, so you put more focus on that and a bit less on something else to try and keep the balance. | ||
| It might sound strange now, but when I first competed, my first contest, I lost to a guy called Mohammed 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. | ||
| I was inspired by other people to do that. | ||
| I worked on the back for a couple of years. | ||
| What is the difference between the way you approach nutrition when you were competing versus the way people do it today? | ||
| Because so much changes in nutrition. | ||
| I mean, it seems like every five or six years, like, you know, oh, no, low fat's out, now you go high fat. | ||
| You know, high carbs are out, now you go low carbs. | ||
| And it could change back and forth again. | ||
| I think the 70s, like Arnold area, Frank Zane, they go more low carbs, getting ready for a contest. | ||
| But then you lose size more quickly. | ||
| Why do you lose size more quickly that way? | ||
| Because you get catabolic, you haven't got the energy, so your body can use the amino acid from muscle for energy, so there's a balance there. | ||
| And also you lose the glycogen storage. | ||
| Your muscle is 70% water, and the water holds carbohydrates in the muscle, glycogen, so you lose that as well, so you lose that. | ||
| A bit of volume. | ||
| When you lose the glycogen, you lose the water, so you shrink down a little bit. | ||
| So my approach was higher carbohydrates. | ||
| Especially in the off-season, getting ready for a contest to cut them down, but not zero. | ||
| And fairly low fat. | ||
| I think people now realize that fat's more important and there's probably more fat in the diet than there was back then, which I think is healthy. | ||
| Fats have just got a bad rap and it's bullshit, you know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's haunted people to this day. | ||
| They think that fats are bad for you. | ||
| I think it was essential. | ||
| I may be wrong with the organization, but I think it was World Health Organization. | ||
| They basically submitted a study that showed how bad sugar was. | ||
| And some department of the US government, which is getting a lot of money from the sugar lobby, basically said, I think you want to reconsider this. | ||
| So that's where the whole fats are bad, low fat came from. | ||
| They knew back then how bad sugar is. | ||
| So I found it amusing when I first came to the States in 1990. Got all these low fat products. | ||
| I call my friends at home. | ||
| I'll be how fucked up this is, man. | ||
| They got low-fat muffins. | ||
| Of course they're fucking low-fat. | ||
| They're full of sugar, though. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird, right? | ||
| Low-fat, low-fat yogurt, low-fat muffins. | ||
| It's fucking full of sugar. | ||
| It's the worst thing you could have. | ||
| So people thought they were being healthy, but they were being misled. | ||
| And it makes you fat. | ||
| Yeah, nothing wrong with fats as long as they're natural. | ||
| If you get the fats in baked goods and all this shit, that's not good. | ||
| But natural fats in animal products and coconuts and all that stuff, it's great. | ||
| Now, what would you use for carbohydrates? | ||
| Did you have a preferred method or did you vary it? | ||
| Complex stuff like oatmeal was a big thing. | ||
| I use oatmeal, brown rice, sweet potatoes and some fruit and fibrous vegetables. | ||
| Those are the main things that I use. | ||
| Nothing fancy, you know? | ||
| Did you mix your portions up in like little Tupperware boxes or something like that so that you could know exactly what to eat? | ||
| I used to weigh my food like pretty much all the time. | ||
| I didn't eat in restaurants very rarely and yeah, I used to pack them up in boxes because You know, you've got to have it all the time, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So that was one of the things I didn't miss, man. | ||
| I'm so relieved. | ||
| I don't carry any fucking plastic boxes around with food in it. | ||
| I just go to a restaurant and eat whatever I want, you know? | ||
| And have an ice cream if you want to. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That must have been nice when you realized you could just eat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, off-season wasn't too bad because I was eating good food, but a lot of it. | ||
| But yeah, getting ready for a contest, I mean, that was the real mental test, you know? | ||
| Because your whole... | ||
| My body's telling you you've got to eat, man. | ||
| Even at night, as I said, you wake up, you've got to eat. | ||
| No, no, I'm not going to eat. | ||
| I'm going to watch MTV for half an hour. | ||
| I'll maybe fall back to sleep a little bit, hopefully. | ||
| So yeah, the diet thing, I don't miss that at all. | ||
| It was a tough mental challenge and I did it. | ||
| Whenever you get through a challenge, I think it makes you stronger. | ||
| No, I don't want to ever do that again. | ||
| Yeah, I can only imagine. | ||
| 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 kind of have to be a savage. | ||
| No, they're coming to me for bodybuilding advice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't have the body now, necessarily, but I got all the information here that I can put across to people for the training, for the nutrition. | ||
| But it's goal-specific, you know? | ||
| You want to be a competitive bodybuilder? | ||
| This is what you've got to do. | ||
| I'm not a competitive bodybuilder now. | ||
| My diet and my training is geared toward what my goals are, which is functionality, health and well-being. | ||
| That's what I'm into now. | ||
| That's where I'm at. | ||
| I'm not a bodybuilder anymore. | ||
| I'm a body reducer, if anything. | ||
| I feel good, man. | ||
| I fucking got a suit from Hugo Boss. | ||
| A couple of months ago, off the rack, and this was like, so happy I could just buy a suit off the rack, you know? | ||
| Before, I had to have it made, and if I go for a fitting, go for another fitting, all that shit, man. | ||
| I'm sure if they looked at the measurements on paper, they were like, what the fuck? | ||
| What are you making a suit for? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look at your fucking forearms. | ||
| Well, there's a thing, forearms. | ||
| I never did any training for forearms. | ||
| All that was just from gripping the bar when I was doing back training, mainly, and some bicep training and stuff. | ||
| So I had 19-inch forearms and I didn't do a single fucking exercise for them apart from gripping onto stuff. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| It's so ridiculous. | ||
| Well, that's a good picture, but it's not me. | ||
| Who is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How dare you, Jamie, pull up a non-Dorian. | ||
| Somebody put it on Google images. | ||
| Put up that one. | ||
| Keep going to your right. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Down where you were? | ||
| Yeah, go to your right. | ||
| One more. | ||
| That one. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| Side tricep. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That's from an onstage picture from Mr. Olympia. | ||
| So what you can see, if you look on the legs, You can see the thinness of the skin and the density of the muscle underneath. | ||
| There's no fat, there's no water between the skin layer and the muscle layer. | ||
| What percent of body fat did you get down to? | ||
| Well, I don't really know because I had skin fall calipers. | ||
| I used to do the skin fall calipers. | ||
| And they're not accurate. | ||
| They used to get down to like 3.5, probably like a month out. | ||
| But I know I got leaner after that, but they didn't really register because they're not that accurate after that point. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| Maybe 3%. | ||
| But nobody measures your body fat. | ||
| It's what you look like. | ||
| It's a visual thing. | ||
| So it's really what you look like in a mirror. | ||
| How did you know how much water to drink and when to back off? | ||
| Experience. | ||
| I didn't really... | ||
| Look at your fucking legs, dude. | ||
| I didn't restrict water intake until like maybe 24 hours before the contest. | ||
| Look at your right leg there. | ||
| That's preposterous. | ||
| Yeah, that's a huge medialis right over the knee there. | ||
| Yeah, that's a lot of sick work, man. | ||
| That's like... | ||
| I used to train legs pretty much once a week. | ||
| And for four or five days of every week, I had trouble sitting on the toilet. | ||
| I had trouble moving around. | ||
| I mean, if I didn't, I wouldn't be happy, man. | ||
| I had to feel that fucking pain. | ||
| Pain in the ass, pain in the leg, just to sit down. | ||
| But, hey, it's satisfying because you know you've fucking done some damage, right, if it's like that. | ||
| And the damage repairs itself. | ||
| To get slightly bigger and stronger. | ||
| Bodybuilding is just an adaptation to stress. | ||
| You know, you put a certain stress, your body's gonna adapt to it. | ||
| Fuck, I need to get bigger and stronger so I can handle this stress next time. | ||
| That's basically what it is. | ||
| So continually trying to stress yourself. | ||
| Like anything, like you wanna get better cardio, you gotta stress your cardio system so it adapts. | ||
| Yeah, there's no other way, right, to get that big? | ||
| I mean, there's no shortcuts. | ||
| There's nothing you can do. | ||
| There's no easy route. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| It looks like guys are looking for the easy route now because I don't see them training. | ||
| That hard, but then you don't see the quality of the physiques. | ||
| The guys are big now, but you look at the quality, it's not the same. | ||
| It's not the same. | ||
| It's generally accepted in bodybuilding that the 90s was the peak of competitive physiques. | ||
| As far as the standard and the depth of the standard, there were like six to eight guys on that stage that were like really, like if you were off, you know, 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. | ||
| Now, what is it, though? | ||
| I mean, doesn't it open the door for a current modern-day Dorian Yates, like some super dedicated person? | ||
| I mean, physiologically, people can still do the same things that you did. | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| Things have changed since the 90s. | ||
| There's a lot more avenues that people could choose to go down as like doing a sport. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was, like, hugely popular. | ||
| Yeah, what's interesting now, what is this, Jamie? | ||
| What are you pulling up here? | ||
| This is a Mr. Olympia from 1996. It's myself, Sean Ray in the middle, and that's Ronnie Coleman on the end who became an eight-time Mr. Olympia. | ||
| You guys are all jacked. | ||
| Also. | ||
| It's so hard to tell. | ||
| See, I'm like, I'm looking at this, I'm like, how the fuck do you pick? | ||
| I'll work it out for you. | ||
| The guy on that end is the best. | ||
| That one right there? | ||
| Well, it's also got to be hard for that tiny dude that's next to you, you know, because you're just so much bigger than him. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, if he was the same size as Arnold... | ||
| Maybe he would have beat him, but he wasn't the same size as Arnold, and the same goes for the gentleman up there, Mr. Sean Ray. | ||
| He had a great physique, but, you know, I was twice as big, so a big guy always beats a good little guy, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a crazy sport, man. | ||
| Now, what about the top guys today? | ||
| Like you said, Sean Heath is the number one guy today? | ||
| Phil Heath. | ||
| Phil Heath, I'm sorry. | ||
| Now, there's so many different avenues now, and a lot of people are going towards, like, the internet route. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Because you can make a lot of money as, like, an internet... | ||
| Like, famous person for being a bodybuilder. | ||
| Then you're selling things and selling... | ||
| There he is, Phil Heath. | ||
| Pretty jacked. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He's pretty jacked. | ||
| Phil Heath is, you know... | ||
| Giant. | ||
| He's not very wide in the shoulders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
| That's his weak point, but he's got huge, long muscle bellies on most of his body. | ||
| His pecs are not great, but the rest, you know... | ||
| The rest is, he doesn't really have any weak points, so that's why he's ahead of everybody else. | ||
| And you just think there's just less people doing it now? | ||
| There's less people going into competitive bodybuilding because there's a lot more avenues, and I think it's less popular now because it's almost like peaked out with myself and 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. | ||
| They don't have the same quality. | ||
| That's got to be super dangerous, isn't it? | ||
| When you see those guys with those enormous bloated bellies. | ||
| Yeah, there's a huge debate, and, like, what is that, you know? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is it internal organs that are growing? | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| Initially, that's what people thought, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| The short answer is I don't really know. | ||
| Who's that guy on the far left? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| That's like a turtle shell. | ||
| Doesn't that look like a turtle shell? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So that could be insulin. | ||
| That could be a variety of different things. | ||
| I think we've only seen this kind of thing happening since the guys are using insulin and IGF, which is insulin-like growth factor. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So yeah, it's not a good look. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| The turtle shell look is so weird. | ||
| It literally looks like someone... | ||
| It's like the guys have got big, but everywhere, systemic growth. | ||
| When you're training with weights, your major muscles are going to grow, but around the waist can thicken a little bit, but not that much. | ||
| Now, when you got off of everything, when you retired, what was the crash like? | ||
| Well, it wasn't something I was ready for. | ||
| I had a lot of things going on in my life. | ||
| I had a divorce. | ||
| I had somebody close to me pass away. | ||
| And I'm, you know, retiring. | ||
| So, you know, they say a death in the family or a divorce or retirement is like a major stressful event. | ||
| How about having all fucking three at the same time while you're coming down from steroids? | ||
| So, yeah, I definitely suffer from depression, anxiety. | ||
| I don't know what's going on. | ||
| Like, why do I feel like this? | ||
| I didn't even, like, now I know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you fucking stop cold turkey. | ||
| Because I'm extreme. | ||
| I'm, like, I'm using them. | ||
| Because I'm doing this. | ||
| I'm stopped. | ||
| Now I'm stopped. | ||
| And I had no real help. | ||
| There was no real, like... | ||
| 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... | ||
| Was it a gradual effect where your body's freaking out or was it like almost instantaneous? | ||
| It was probably after a few months I started like noticing I wasn't feeling too good. | ||
| Funnily enough, like... | ||
| Sex drive didn't totally disappear, and actually my daughter was conceived while I was not on anything. | ||
| I mean, they did trials with testosterone as a male contraceptive, and it was moderately effective, but not enough that they would market it. | ||
| So, yeah, probably like six to nine months I was really not feeling good at all. | ||
| And, you know, there's a lot of factors there. | ||
| If I was still taking steroids, but those things happened in my life, would I have felt as bad? | ||
| I don't know, probably not, but there's definitely a lot of traumatic stuff going on all at the same time. | ||
| Now, was there any conventional wisdom in the bodybuilding community of how to slowly cycle off or what the factors would be and how you could mitigate them? | ||
| Not at that time. | ||
| Now, 20 years on, I mean, you can go on the internet and find a ton of information, but not really then. | ||
| The only things guys were using was HTG, which helps to reduce your own testosterone. | ||
| Clomid. | ||
| Clomid and some natural stuff like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I remember going to an endocrinologist and asking him, like, you know, what should I do? | ||
| Should I do HTG and this and that? | ||
| And he's like, look at me. | ||
| And I said, you know what, Dorian? | ||
| You probably know more than me about this. | ||
| Thanks for that, man. | ||
| You know, he's talking about this situation with somebody coming off sterile. | ||
| He didn't have a clue, man. | ||
| Right, it's a different thing. | ||
| But now, yeah, you've got guys out there that have a whole... | ||
| I did a seminar up in... | ||
| In Canada, and Ben Johnson was there actually, the guy that... | ||
| Oh, the Olympic gold medalist? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, for a while he was. | ||
| He was there with his doctor and 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| That's the story they told me. | ||
| I believe that, man. | ||
| There's definitely some real good evidence that they're all doing something. | ||
| The guy was just a scapegoat. | ||
| I feel bad for him. | ||
| He was like fucking demonized. | ||
| I remember all the newspapers. | ||
| I remember my son went to school, and they did a whole thing at school about, you know... | ||
| And he came home. | ||
| He must have fucking known his dad was jacked up like that. | ||
| Like the guy was cheating and he shouldn't do that and all this stuff they told him at school, you know? | ||
| Like, all right, son, I'll explain to you when you're a bit older. | ||
| And he also had no recourse. | ||
| Like Lance Armstrong today has a podcast. | ||
| He's done a bunch of interviews. | ||
| He can tell his story. | ||
| And now, you know, I mean, I think there was a period of time where Lance was demonized. | ||
| But over time, that has greatly subsided and people now recognize, no, he literally was in a sport where everyone was cheating. | ||
| Everyone. | ||
| But is it cheating? | ||
| Well – If everyone's doing it, is it cheating? | ||
| The real issue, I think, was deception and lawsuits and saying that he didn't do it and suing people who said he did. | ||
| And there's a lot of stuff that wasn't exactly the smartest thing to do. | ||
| But you're dealing with a cornered person who's a super competitive alpha male trying to figure his way out of this mess that he's found himself in and this mess that exists systematically or systemically in this entire industry. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That was 1965. So when did they start being used? | ||
| I don't know, but for sure in the early 60s. | ||
| 1965, they had steroids. | ||
| When did they invent steroids? | ||
| I believe... | ||
| Well, you had testosterone. | ||
| I mean, testosterone was used in the Second World War. | ||
| The Germans were using that with the SS soldiers. | ||
| So injectable testosterone was available then. | ||
| Steroids, which are a more refined version of testosterone, I think late 50s. | ||
| How is it more refined? | ||
| In what way? | ||
| So you've got testosterone as a male hormone. | ||
| So it's basically 50% androgenic, that's male-like characteristics, 50% anabolic, repair, build. | ||
| So they wanted to take this, 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. | ||
| 1958? | ||
| I think it was 58, yeah. | ||
| But before that, you had testosterone, so who knows when people started using it. | ||
| But for sure, from the early 60s, it's been a part of bodybuilding. | ||
| Other sports. | ||
| And there used to be a disclaimer inside the steroid thing saying anabolic steroids do not increase athletic performance. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So they stated this. | ||
| And they also told guys, if you take this, your fucking balls are going to drop off. | ||
| You're going to fucking die. | ||
| You're going to get liver cancer. | ||
| So guys started using them. | ||
| And seeing that'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. | ||
| That's the problem with propaganda and deception, right? | ||
| Yeah, just tell people the fucking truth, man, and let them deal with it. | ||
| And that's what I do. | ||
| Because I saw all this stuff on the internet about what I'm supposedly doing, and I thought, young guys are going to read this, and maybe they're going to do it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, tough shit, man. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I know a lot of guys that take more stuff than me that couldn't even compete in a contest. | ||
| They're not even good enough. | ||
| Is there a certain amount where it doesn't help you? | ||
| I think it gets to, like... | ||
| The cup is full. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's just a matter of hard work. | ||
| The cup is full and more than that is not going to help you anymore. | ||
| It's just going to increase your chances of negative effects. | ||
| So when I was an amateur, my policy was always to take as little as possible to get the maximum effect. | ||
| And when that's not working, then you can go up a little bit more, you know? | ||
| But if you go day one and just... | ||
| Throwing everything in there, like, your body's gonna get used to that, where you're gonna go. | ||
| Where would you get steroids? | ||
| Where did I used to get them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, that's, I think, how it should be. | ||
| You know, as long as there's education, as long as they're not lying. | ||
| But the problem is, when you lie to people about the effects of things, then they think you're lying to them about pain pills, you're lying about all sorts of other stuff that is actually deadly. | ||
| I think all fucking drugs should be legal. | ||
| And she put money into education and treatment and that's what they did in Portugal. | ||
| Massive results. | ||
| Right down. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And the money, they're using it to re-educate people and get them out of that cycle and try and get them back into society, trying to get them a job and all that stuff. | ||
| You're just going to punish people for doing it. | ||
| How the fuck are they ever going to get better? | ||
| Well, there's also a problem with telling people not to do something and they want to do it. | ||
| Yeah, it seems more appealing, especially when you're young. | ||
| Oh, this is illegal. | ||
| Oh, yeah, let me do it, you know? | ||
| Like, here it is. | ||
| You can fucking have it if you want, but this is all the negative consequences, and what do you want to do? | ||
| People are choosing not to do it. | ||
| The bodybuilders that died, did any of them die from steroids, or did they die from complications involving a host of different issues? | ||
| Well, that's hard to say, because there's been quite a few bodybuilders, and Mainly male and mainly the bigger guys. | ||
| Well, there's been a couple of women that have died from heart attacks. | ||
| So, did steroids contribute to that, possibly? | ||
| What else were they doing? | ||
| They're individual cases. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Were they taking pain pills, anti-inflammatories? | ||
| Were they doing recreational drugs? | ||
| There's a lot of factors there. | ||
| But I think it would be probably fair to say that using steroids over a long term will probably increase your risk of heart disease, perhaps. | ||
| I think it causes some inflammation in the line in the arteries. | ||
| It can raise your blood pressure a little bit and so on. | ||
| So, yeah, I compare it to smoking, you know? | ||
| Probably not as bad, though. | ||
| Yeah, probably not as bad. | ||
| So, you know, the way I look at it is I smoked for 10 years and then I stopped. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, now I smoke good stuff, you know? | |
| Now, speaking of smoking good stuff, how did you find out about DMT? And how did you get involved? | ||
| Because I read something about you having these positive DMT experiences. | ||
| I'm like, wow, how strange is it reading about this massive bodybuilder now getting into psychedelic drugs? | ||
| And speaking openly about it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Leaving the planet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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... | ||
| I know everything. | ||
| Oh, yes! | ||
| 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? | ||
| I've had many people tell me the same thing. | ||
| They had such a profound breakthrough experience that they're like, okay, I get it. | ||
| I had a crazy one in around 2008 or 2009 or something like that, and I took a long time off. | ||
| I didn't do it again until like five years later, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty intense, man. | ||
| I mean, the iOS goes nice because it comes in nice and subtle. | ||
| You go through hours of this thing, but DMT is like... | ||
| Last time I did DMT. You feel very anxious when you're like... | ||
| It's almost like you're leaving your body and... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't want to... | |
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you get that bit of anxiety. | ||
| But once you go, you feel okay. | ||
| Once you go, it's cool, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's cool, but... | ||
| Have you done it more than one time in a day? | ||
| Like multiple times in a night? | ||
| No, I just... | ||
| You know, just blasted it as far as it could go, and that was it. | ||
| I've done it several times over the course of a few hours. | ||
| And, you know, you're more comfortable letting go that way in some sort of a strange way, but it never gets less alien. | ||
| Well, we had a... | ||
| I'm not going to mention his name. | ||
| I don't know his name, but... | ||
| We had an experience, me and my friend a few months ago, 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? | ||
| What was that? | ||
| Because he said, yeah, it was from his birth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| He was from his birth. | ||
| When he was born, he had the cord around his neck. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| And he went back and he relived this. | ||
| So that had been in the back of his mind all his life, subconscious. | ||
| Subconscious has a huge effect on us, but we don't know. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| So now he opened that box and let it out, and it's gone now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So it can be therapeutic. | ||
| I thought, this guy's like, wow. | ||
| But when he came back, he was like, hey. | ||
| I'm like, you're good? | ||
| He's like, yeah, I'm good. | ||
| I'm like, do you know what just happened? | ||
| He's like, no. | ||
| I said, good thing we filmed it then, man. | ||
| Go home and watch this. | ||
| I had a friend who freaked out, too. | ||
| He freaked out, he threw up, took his shirt off, was running around saying a bunch of crazy shit. | ||
| And then after he came down, we calmed him down. | ||
| It took like 10, 15 minutes. | ||
| He goes, Okay, well, obviously I'm a work in progress. | ||
| I'll never forget that. | ||
| I'll never forget that statement. | ||
| Did he know what it was that was troubling him so much? | ||
| Well, he had a bad childhood, for sure. | ||
| Well, everything is like, most of our shit is from there, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From the developing years. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, especially like real traumatic ones, abuse, being beaten by his stepdad and a bunch of fucked up shit that was just haunting him. | ||
| But it helps you to come to terms with that, especially the ayahuasca because it's longer. | ||
| I felt like the first time I did ayahuasca properly with a shaman, I felt like I was a different person the next day. | ||
| I felt like I'd done 20 years of fucking therapy or something. | ||
| Just a lot of stuff I'd worked out in my mind. | ||
| I could even see... | ||
| Other people's point of view on things that I couldn't see before. | ||
| That's huge, right? | ||
| Seeing other people's point of view. | ||
| Especially a guy like you, who's so determined and goal-oriented and just cut out all the bullshit and get it done. | ||
| Yeah, you can be a little insensitive to other people's Feelings around you because it's just like nothing keep out of my way. | ||
| That's a male thing in particular anyway, right? | ||
| And then add steroids on top of that and bodybuilding and intensity and competition and then being the best, arguably the best ever and just fucking grinding every day. | ||
| My son said to me a couple of weeks ago, he's like, Dad, you don't see yourself as other people see you. | ||
| I said, what do you mean? | ||
| He said, like, I remember when I was a kid and First of all, the size, you know? | ||
| It was fucking huge. | ||
| But it's your persona. | ||
| You might have said to me something very, like, normal, like, you know? | ||
| You know, whatever. | ||
| What are you doing with a dog? | ||
| Like, just something normal. | ||
| And he said, I'll be like, because just your presence made me feel like that, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's got to be weird when you're a little tiny kid and your dad's a gorilla. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember he did kickboxing, right? | ||
| So he got his black belt when he was about 11 or something like that. | ||
| And that was my thing. | ||
| I used to take him to kickbox him and pick him up. | ||
| And he's like, Dad, can you wait outside? | ||
| I'm like, what do you mean? | ||
| Do you want me to come in? | ||
| Can you just wait outside? | ||
| Like, you don't want me to come? | ||
| It's like, yeah, but everyone's like freaking out and looking at you. | ||
| Well, it's got to be nice to know. | ||
| No, I'm fucking coming inside, man. | ||
| Semi-anonymous in crowds now, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, unless someone's a hardcore bodybuilding fan. | ||
| Well, there's the thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It does seem to be working in that regard, right? | ||
| It is the time, man. | ||
| It's the time. | ||
| There's so many people that are more aware now. | ||
| Isn't it kind of like, I mean, there's parallels to bodybuilding, right? | ||
| When Arnold first started doing it, there was very little information. | ||
| And you guys got to see what they did and build upon that. | ||
| And more information came out. | ||
| And now, because of the internet, there's so much information. | ||
| Almost too much information. | ||
| People are aware more of what it's all about. | ||
| 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, Terence McKenna used to say that DMT is the center of the mandala. | ||
| The way I describe DMT is it's like mushrooms times a million plus aliens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then it just seems so titanically bizarre. | ||
| I've tried to describe it to people, but I always say, look, I'm going to tell... | ||
| You can't really do it, man. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to give you some bullshit words. | ||
| Yeah, you can't really do it because you can't... | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| You don't have the words to put it into words. | ||
| You know, you can attempt to... | ||
| I went to this place. | ||
| Well, it's not a place, but I don't have the word for it. | ||
| The place is everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, it's like... | ||
| And there's colors, there's numbers, there's shapes, and... | ||
| People, things. | ||
| There's things, and there's like, everything is all one fucking thing. | ||
| And what I noticed is like, my breath was connected to it. | ||
| I don't know how it happened, but I was in the trip, and I went, like that. | ||
| And the whole thing moved. | ||
| I was like, really? | ||
| Let me try this then. | ||
| And then the whole thing moved, and then there was music playing, and music was part of the thing as well. | ||
| Like the thing. | ||
| I don't even know what to call it. | ||
| The thing, the place. | ||
| I don't have a word, you know? | ||
| We played a bunch of these shaman Icaros. | ||
| And the shaman Icaros... | ||
| This is the last time I did it. | ||
| And the shaman Icaros, like, literally made the DMT images dance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, they had figured out a way with these sounds and songs to integrate these beats into DMT trips. | ||
| And as you would take these trips, these shamans had figured out the right sounds and songs and how to... | ||
| Make the trip more intense and sort of guided in a strange way. | ||
| Well, that's what I had with 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. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Started dancing around with this... | ||
| Becoming part of this rhythm. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I had experience once, one of the first times I ever did DMT, where I saw the difference between negative and positive thinking. | ||
| Like, I started thinking negative, and there was all this, like, black and dark green and, like, these 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. | ||
| It's not just some sort of an abstract idea. | ||
| You affect everything. | ||
| You affect the program. | ||
| You're in a program. | ||
| And your thoughts, the program's coming towards you, and your thoughts are going, and it's interacting with the program. | ||
| And that's why conflict, like interpersonal conflict between people, can be so negative. | ||
| It's not just as simple as you and some person getting into an argument. | ||
| It's those dark images and those negative forces. | ||
| It becomes a part of your system. | ||
| I had exactly the same thing. | ||
| But it was almost like a tunnel. | ||
| I was in this tunnel. | ||
| And it was the same thing. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| All these images around and scary and everything. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Instinctively, I knew to be very relaxed. | ||
| And I started laughing like, fuck you. | ||
| You're not even real. | ||
| You're not even real. | ||
| And when I said that, it went away, and I just got this thing that came into my head. | ||
| You've just been in the valley... | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| The valley of the shadow of death. | ||
| It's in the Lord's Prayer, I think. | ||
| Yeah, either we walk through the valley of the shadow of the death, you should fear no evil, because God's by the side. | ||
| I vaguely remember it from school or something. | ||
| But I got this thing, like, you were there, and you're in the valley of the shadow of death, and because you, like... | ||
| Fuck you, it's not even real. | ||
| It just disappeared and then it went to somewhere really nice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, I just wonder how much is real. | ||
| It's such a hippie thing to say. | ||
| How much is real? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've been having these thoughts a lot lately. | ||
| How much of life do you manifest? | ||
| How much of life is real? | ||
| Because it's such a bullshit thing to think. | ||
| It's such a hippie thing to think. | ||
| And so many people that say that are so annoying. | ||
| Yeah, but scientists are saying the same thing now. | ||
| Quantum physicists are saying... | ||
| I think his name is Professor Gates. | ||
| I don't know if you're familiar with him. | ||
| Professor Gates, and he said that they've broken down reality into the smallest level, and it's a computer code. | ||
| Yes, I've seen that guy. | ||
| Not only is it a computer code, it's a specific computer code of zeros and ones, and it was invented in the 1940s by somebody. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that guy being interviewed. | ||
| We actually talked about it with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I tried to get him to sort of break it down and explain. | ||
| But what it is is essentially that... | ||
| When you break reality down to the smallest level, it mimics a self-correcting computer code. | ||
| Not just a computer code, but a computer code that's self-correcting, which is... | ||
| Right there, I just said a bunch of noises that I don't even understand. | ||
| It's gone beyond my... | ||
| But now you're getting spirituality and science. | ||
| It's coming together, because the scientists are saying what spiritual masters... | ||
| Well, they're already telling us that we live in an illusion and everything is inside, not outside. | ||
| They were saying that thousands of years ago. | ||
| But some of it is real. | ||
| Like you have to work hard or you don't get results, right? | ||
| Like your hard, fast, pragmatic reality of being the best bodybuilder in the world revolves around actual work, real results. | ||
| In this reality, in this program. | ||
| You need to do physical stuff, yeah. | ||
| Probably there was a lot of mental shit going on there, too. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The work was being done, but also there was probably a lot of... | ||
| Thoughts all day. | ||
| I mean, that's all I thought about. | ||
| Literally, all fucking day. | ||
| So... | ||
| You know? | ||
| I had to have the physical goods to make it happen. | ||
| I could dream about being a basketball player all day. | ||
| Probably wouldn't help me because I'm not built to be a basketball player. | ||
| But those thoughts were just going out all the time. | ||
| And I was a kid in Birmingham, industrial city in England. | ||
| And I was thinking, I'm going to go to America and I'm going to be a bodybuilder. | ||
| And everyone around me was like, the fuck you talking about? | ||
| So yeah, there was those thoughts all the time. | ||
| So I think it's like a holographic program we're in, but we influenced it. | ||
| We interact with it, with our thoughts. | ||
| That's kind of where I'm getting at now. | ||
| Yes, in some way. | ||
| And the guys... | ||
| That were spiritual masters like Buddha and the guy they called Jesus and all that apparently did things that were called miracles because they were outside the box, outside the physical reality we live in. | ||
| How can you walk on water? | ||
| That's not possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But if you were so advanced that you really knew it was a program, then you can like hack the program. | ||
| And that's how they're able to do it. | ||
| They kind of remove themselves out of the program. | ||
| Yeah, how can guys levitate or walk on water? | ||
| I don't know if they can. | ||
| Yeah, well, I don't know. | ||
| I wasn't there. | ||
| See, that's the thing. | ||
| There's no evidence whatsoever that anybody actually can levitate. | ||
| Well, people have witnessed people doing it, but I haven't. | ||
| Yeah, people have witnessed Bigfoot. | ||
| There's a lot of people who said some weird shit. | ||
| The problem with people saying things is they might have literally seen that, but it doesn't mean it wasn't a hallucination. | ||
| And then again, it doesn't mean that a hallucination is an alternative reality that you're experiencing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, what's a hallucination? | |
| What is it? | ||
| You know, people say you hallucinate when you take LSD or DMT. You're just hallucinating. | ||
| But are you? | ||
| Or are you just seeing more stuff that you can't normally see because now you've shifted your... | ||
| Your vibration, you know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's still the same experience. | ||
| The exact same experience. | ||
| And why is everybody's experience kind of similar? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, we're going to have a totally different fucking illusion. | ||
| No one seems to think it's no big deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No one that I know who's ever done DMT is like, eh, it's no big deal. | ||
| You're not going to be the same afterwards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Your perspective is going to be different. | ||
| Your point of view is going to be different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know anybody that's done DMT and they've said that was not a positive experience. | ||
| I didn't get anything from that. | ||
| Every fucking body I know has said that. | ||
| What? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The fuck? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Where am I? Who is this? | ||
| What are noises that come from my mouth? | ||
| Nobody's like... | ||
| Nobody's ever said to me that... | ||
| Even the guy that I saw... | ||
| That looked like he was getting raped by the devil. | ||
| You saw a guy getting raped by the devil? | ||
| I didn't see that, but I saw his eyes. | ||
| And that's how I imagined somebody's eyes would look like if that was happening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He looked like... | |
| In absolute terror is all I can say. | ||
| Absolute terror I saw in this guy's eyes for like 20 minutes. | ||
| But when he came back, he was like... | ||
| Oh, this is the guy that was reliving his childhood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He didn't even know. | |
| I'm like, you okay, dude? | ||
| Yeah, man, that was fucking great. | ||
| I'm like, do you know what happened? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's like, yeah, it was great. | |
| I'm like, okay, you need to watch this video when you go home because we filmed you, man. | ||
| I had a friend, my friend Doug Stanhope, and he's talked about this many times on stage. | ||
| I got him high on DMT at my house. | ||
| And he's the only guy that I've ever got high on DMT that I worried about. | ||
| Because he fell over on the couch and started moaning and like foam was coming out of his mouth. | ||
| But he's so unhealthy. | ||
| He smokes cigarettes. | ||
| He drinks constantly. | ||
| And I was like, oh my god, did I break my friend? | ||
| I was really worried. | ||
| I was like, maybe I should have considered the fact this fucking guy doesn't really take care of himself. | ||
| I think when your system's kind of toxic, You don't get the best results. | ||
| Oh, he came out of it. | ||
| He got great results. | ||
| He came out of it. | ||
| It was a fantastic experience for him. | ||
| He came out of it with all these revelations. | ||
| We had a great conversation about it. | ||
| But in the moment he was like And I was like, oh no, I've killed him I Oh, this guy was spasming him and kicking. | ||
| I mean, my friend had to hold him on the floor to stop him from smashing the furniture or hurting himself. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So he was thinking he was being choked. | ||
| It was like 10 minutes, 15, 20. Oh, God. | ||
| I was starting to get concerned. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Half an hour later, he came out of it. | ||
| But he's glad he did it now. | ||
| I'm glad he couldn't see himself at the time. | ||
| Do you ever float? | ||
| A flotation tank? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I did it once. | ||
| And you know, funny enough, like when I was a kid, I read Frank Zane. | ||
| Frank Zane was doing flotation tanks back in the 70s. | ||
| Yeah, those Samadhi tanks. | ||
| So I always wanted to do it. | ||
| And I saw this place when I was over in England. | ||
| They're everywhere now. | ||
| So I went in there and I said to the guy, like talking about it, I said, listen, man, let me ask you a question. | ||
| I said, is it good to smoke weed before you go in there? | ||
| And he's like, I'll tell you the truth. | ||
| He said, a lot of people come here, they smoke weed outside before they come in. | ||
| He said, but the first time, I think you should just go with nothing and see how it goes. | ||
| And I'll be honest, I was in there for like, it was an hour thing. | ||
| After 40 minutes, I just got really fucking bored. | ||
| I thought to myself, I meditate every day, yeah? | ||
| So I was like, this is like, I don't feel this is any better than me doing my meditation. | ||
| I'm just getting kind of the same thing. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I wasn't blown away by it like I expected to be, to be honest. | ||
| But then, you know, I've done DMT and Ayahuasca and acid and everything, so maybe my expectations were too high. | ||
| I always give the same advice. | ||
| I say don't smoke weed the first time. | ||
| Just go and experience it. | ||
| But my thoughts are that Isolation tanks and the isolation tank experience is something that it takes time to really fully relax and settle in. | ||
| And there's layers to the onion and you got to go deeper and deeper and peel those layers away. | ||
| And I've done it so many times. | ||
| I have one in my basement. | ||
| So I've done it so many times now that when I go in, I can slide right in almost immediately. | ||
| But I'll tell you this, I rarely go in sober. | ||
| I almost always go in high as a kite. | ||
| And edibles, preferably, are the best way to really... | ||
| I can have full-blown psychedelic experiences in the tank on edibles. | ||
| Full-blown visuals, 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. | ||
| Well, I'd like to go back and try that next time. | ||
| Well, when you're in town, I can hook it up if you want. | ||
| How many times are you in town for? | ||
| How long are you in town for? | ||
| We're only here until Thursday evening and then go to Vegas to do a competition there. | ||
| Well, they have them in Vegas, too, now. | ||
| They have them everywhere. | ||
| When I first started doing the tank, my first experience, I think, was in the early, early 2000s. | ||
| And I got my first tank in 2003. Because when I bought my house, one of the reasons why I bought it is it had a basement. | ||
| And I was like, I want a place to put the tank. | ||
| Because I had done the tank a couple of times at this place called Soothing Solutions in Burbank. | ||
| Yeah, if you've got it there and you can do it every day, then... | ||
| Oh, it's the best. | ||
| 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... | ||
| So you've got more room to process. | ||
| Well, that's the idea. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We'd want to get out of there, right? | ||
| Let's go over here so we can talk more quietly. | ||
| Same in the gym. | ||
| You want to get in the gym, you want to be in your bubble. | ||
| That's why a lot of guys put headphones on, right? | ||
| You just want to fucking grind and get in your own head. | ||
| Well, in And life itself, like while we're sitting here, your chair is sending signals to your ass, your hands on the table. | ||
| It's all data. | ||
| In the tank, there's nothing. | ||
| And in the absence of sensory input, I believe that your brain becomes supercharged. | ||
| And I think you can consider things in a much more clear way. | ||
| I think you have more resources. | ||
| I find the same with meditation. | ||
| It's like when I try to explain to people, I said it's almost like I feel like it's slowed down my thought process. | ||
| So now when I have thoughts, I see them coming in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like, do I want to act on this thought or not? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Whereas before, I already acted on it before it was, you know, I recognized it. | ||
| That's a huge problem is being a reactionary person and constantly dealing with input coming in and, like, instinctively batting it away or instinctively arguing. | ||
| And if you're, like, stressed and anxious, you're always going to react like that. | ||
| So you need to get rid of all that, you know? | ||
| And people know that. | ||
| And I think that's one of the reasons why people have a real problem with President Trump. | ||
| One of the real problems that people have with him. | ||
| Like, this is a guy that argues with people on Twitter. | ||
| Gets mad. | ||
| Wasn't he on the WWE? Yeah, he was. | ||
| Wasn't that perfect training, to be president? | ||
| But that's fun. | ||
| That's silly to me. | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| Yeah, but it's the same thing, man. | ||
| You're performing. | ||
| You know, for me, that's just what a... | ||
| The president, how much power does he really have? | ||
| How much influence? | ||
| Or is it just a pantomime, a distraction for people? | ||
| But that was before he was president. | ||
| What I'm reacting to is him tweeting things today, like shitting on people, insulting people. | ||
| When you're the fucking president of the United States, you're the leader of the free world. | ||
| You can't be going on Twitter and just insulting people, putting out that conflict energy that we were talking about. | ||
| For what reason? | ||
| And people recognize, whether they know it or not, inherently, they know that this is not the way to lead. | ||
| This is not the way to be above it all. | ||
| This is not the wise person that we want at the top of the hill setting the standards for all the people. | ||
| How about it? | ||
| Which was your alternative? | ||
| There's no alternative. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I don't think there should be a president. | ||
| I've said this a million times. | ||
| I just think there's too many people. | ||
| How much power does the president really have? | ||
| I mean, you had Obama, right? | ||
| He said he was going to close down Guantanamo Bay. | ||
| Yeah, great, but it didn't happen. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Did he want to do it? | ||
| But he couldn't because other people are really in control? | ||
| Or maybe they explained to him why they shouldn't do it. | ||
| There could be a bunch of factors. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I think maybe you go there with good intentions, but there's other people that pull the strings and, you know, the president's just a front guy. | ||
| In that sense, one of the things about Trump being so bold and so egotistical, I think that's probably a positive, is that he's resisting the deep state. | ||
| He's resisting all of these other outside influences, 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. | ||
| I don't think you can beat those guys. | ||
| You know? | ||
| They control the money system. | ||
| They control everything. | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| I think I like your idea. | ||
| We need to get them all fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, get them all fucked up. | ||
| Let's get Hillary stoned. | ||
| And make her a real nice cool lady, you know? | ||
|
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She would just go, I've killed so many people! | |
| I confess. | ||
| There's a picture of a deer that was on the side of the road that was dead. | ||
| You know one of those comic memes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it said, what did this deer know about Hillary Clinton? | ||
| It seems to be dangerous to know too much about Hillary and Bill Clinton. | ||
| Two people were killed just in the last couple of weeks. | ||
| They committed suicide. | ||
| A lot of people know this shit, right? | ||
| So they're like, we've got this fucking psychopath. | ||
| We've got this idiot guy, but maybe he's a better alternative than the psychopath, so let's go with the orange guy. | ||
| Let's go with the orange guy, because he's not part of this cabal, and maybe he's going to change things for the better. | ||
| That's why people went with him, I believe, because he was seen to be not controlled by the same forces, if you like. | ||
| The Clintons, the Bushes, all these people, they're all in the same club, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, that's feedback I get now of people over here. | ||
| They're concerned, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Personally, I don't think it makes that much difference who's president. | ||
| It's just a fucking sideshow to entertain people, keep them distracted. | ||
| Do you think that's on purpose? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get all emotional. | ||
| Like, oh, Trump is... | ||
| It's just bullshit. | ||
| It's a pantomime. | ||
| It's just to keep you distracted. | ||
| Keep you entertained, just like football and everything else. | ||
| Don't look over here. | ||
| Look over here. | ||
| It's a magician's trick, you know? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I like to think that way sometimes. | ||
| Then other times I think it's probably just too complicated for anybody to really orchestrate. | ||
| And we're just reacting to these wants and needs and human instincts and 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. | ||
| Yeah, this is a There's one small group that controls that the debt. | ||
| Yeah, it's not even money instead. | ||
| Yeah, I know so if you control that then you control pretty much everything, right? | ||
| But isn't everybody in debt? | ||
| Is every country in debt? | ||
| Isn't China in debt too? | ||
| To who? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's why it's so fucking confusing. | ||
| Who are they in debt to? | ||
| If everybody is in debt to everybody, like, is that really debt anymore? | ||
| No, they just fucking print money and put a number on a thing and, you know, you owe us X amount. | ||
| Let's just cancel all the debt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that's why they distract you with things like, we're going to go after medical marijuana. | ||
| Like that Jeff Sessions guy. | ||
| He's the ultimate distraction. | ||
| He's going to start cracking down on marijuana. | ||
| Marijuana, cannabis is like, that's a huge thing in the evolution of consciousness. | ||
| And it's getting more available and more accepted. | ||
| And there's so many layers to it, man. | ||
| It's like, medically, it's amazing. | ||
| Spiritually, it's amazing. | ||
| The hemp plant can fucking supply what, you know, Henry Ford built a Model T Ford out of hempcrete, right? | ||
| Not only that, it's way stronger. | ||
| It's way stronger. | ||
| You ever see when he hits it with a hammer, he hits the fenders with a hammer? | ||
| It doesn't fucking rust. | ||
| It's lighter. | ||
| You know, everything. | ||
| He fueled it with hemp ethanol as well. | ||
| 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's not like anything. | ||
| Any other wood. | ||
| It's light. | ||
| It's hard wearing. | ||
| It's easy to grow. | ||
| Hard like oak, but light like balsa wood. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| That is hemp. | ||
| So he's banging his hammer against this fucking car and it's not even making a dent. | ||
| So tell me why he didn't build the car out of hemp then. | ||
| Because of William Randolph Hearst. | ||
| That fucking cunt. | ||
| William Randolph Hearst was the guy who owned Hearst Publications. | ||
| He also owned a bunch of paper mills. | ||
| And he's the guy who demonized hemp. | ||
| He's also the guy that was the motivation for Orson Welles to make the movie Rosebud. | ||
| Or the movie Citizen Kane, rather. | ||
| Isn't it something to do with the oil and steel industries as well? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's literally La Mona Lisa. | ||
| They write the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper or something? | ||
| So the first drafts, yeah, on hemp paper. | ||
| It's a far superior paper than wood pulp paper. | ||
| Well, when they had come out with this article in Popular Science magazine, Hemp the New Billion Dollar Crop, they were essentially saying that hemp, because of the decorticator, now hemp would replace wood for paper, for all these other things. | ||
| So we don't need to destroy the forests anymore? | ||
| William Rondolph Hearst not only owned these newspapers, but he also owned these paper mills, and he owned these forests. | ||
| And he decided to combat this competing industry with propaganda. | ||
| So they started printing these stories about how these black people and Mexicans were taking this wild drug called marijuana. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then everybody was like, Jesus. | ||
| So when Congress first made marijuana, first of all, marijuana was not even the word for cannabis. | ||
| Marijuana was a word for a wild Mexican tobacco that had nothing to do with it. | ||
| But it's Mexican. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Careful! | ||
| Danger! | ||
|
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Danger! | |
| Across the border! | ||
| The brown ones! | ||
| And so people responded to this, and when they made it illegal, they didn't even understand that they were making cannabis. | ||
| They didn't understand they were making the commodity hemp illegal. | ||
| To this day, until recently, On it, we sell hemp protein. | ||
| When we first started on it several years ago, we had to buy all of our hemp from Canada. | ||
| Because even though it's not psychoactive, it was illegal still to grow in America. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| It's just so titanically stupid. | ||
| But the, you know... | ||
| There's a crack in the dam now. | ||
| You can't stop it, man. | ||
| That ball was rolling now, and people are waking up to the benefits. | ||
| How many states have you got in the U.S. now that's legal? | ||
| There's quite a few medical, and I think there's something like nine recreational. | ||
| Nevada, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Washington State. | ||
| Washington, D.C. Did I say that already? | ||
| I don't know how many other ones there are. | ||
| Maine? | ||
| Alaska. | ||
| Colorado, of course. | ||
| Yeah, so how many of them? | ||
| Legalized cannabis. | ||
| 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 7 legalized cannabis. | ||
| And then jurisdiction with medical decriminalization. | ||
| There's a lot of funky, weird shades to that. | ||
| There's more than three shades there. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| They just make it legal across the board. | ||
| But it takes time, man. | ||
| The amount of money. | ||
| What's fascinating is the amount of money that is coming in. | ||
| And that's affecting it. | ||
| Because these people are getting involved in it. | ||
| Colorado? | ||
| Colorado's massive. | ||
| They put it back into the school systems and the medical. | ||
| They're giving people tax refunds. | ||
| Sorry, we made too much money. | ||
| Well, they taxed it at 39%. | ||
| And everybody's like, okay. | ||
| Nobody gives a shit. | ||
| It's still cheap. | ||
| I read that in Nevada, in Vegas, they're literally running out. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They call it a state of emergency. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| They're out of weed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hope not, because I'm going there Saturday. | ||
| Oh, they'll get you some. | ||
| I'll hook it up. | ||
| I know people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think Nevada has 39% as well, right? | ||
| Are they at a 39% tax rate? | ||
| It's $15 for recreational, I think. | ||
| Only $15? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Really? | ||
|
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I think so. | |
| Well, they fucked up. | ||
| They should have went $39. | ||
| Nobody gives a shit. | ||
| It's still $5 for it. | ||
|
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When you're buying. | |
| I don't know if the stores are getting taxed, too, for what they sell recreational. | ||
| They might get an extra tax. | ||
| The thing is, the ball is rolling. | ||
| It's not going to stop now. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| What the fuck are you talking about? | ||
|
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It's cured. | |
| What you're talking about is not a cure, but it's obviously something they've got to state, you know? | ||
| Because it's actually illegal to claim that you can cure cancer. | ||
| Well, it's illegal to possess the marijuana, so it's illegal probably to use it as a treatment. | ||
| Even though it's effective, you have to say it's not a cure. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And there's the influence of the pharmaceutical drug companies that will come down. | ||
| I mean, there's pharmaceutical drug companies that advertise on these networks, which becomes a huge problem. | ||
| Because if they're advertising Abilify and fucking Wellbutrin and all this different shit that they're selling... | ||
| They're not going to be interested in you telling positive stories about abandoning all pharmaceutical drugs and then taking natural remedies. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| They can't patent it. | ||
| So what they're trying to do now is make, you know, slightly different versions of it that they can patent. | ||
| There's one company, I think it's GW Pharmaceuticals in the UK. But guess what? | ||
| It doesn't fucking work when you do that. | ||
| No. | ||
| So I'm laughing at them. | ||
| Waste all your fucking money. | ||
| The plant is perfect as it is. | ||
| It's a perfect balance. | ||
| It works as it is. | ||
| But they can't trademark it. | ||
| You can't trademark it, so you want to change it a little bit to create something you can trademark and make tons of profit off. | ||
| But guess what, suckers? | ||
| It ain't working. | ||
| Once you change it, it doesn't work the way it's supposed to work. | ||
| It's all people trying to control shit. | ||
| You know, it's people that are trying to control how much agriculture you could sell. | ||
| I mean, that's what it is. | ||
| It's agriculture. | ||
| Marijuana really is a psychoactive agriculture. | ||
| It's plants. | ||
| Like, the idea that you tell someone they can't grow tomatoes in their backyard is fucking bananas. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| It's a plant that grows from the ground exactly as it is. | ||
| God fucking made plant grows from the ground. | ||
| How can that be illegal? | ||
| Right, so if you have tomatoes in your backyard, everyone knows tomatoes have lots of vitamins, they're healthy for you, and no one would say, oh, you can't do that. | ||
| What are the herbs that are good for you? | ||
| Fucking Chinese have been using herbs for thousands of years. | ||
| Marijuana is just the same thing. | ||
| But it's the mother of all of them. | ||
| It's like the fucking top... | ||
| You know, sometimes people get confused about like, oh, you know, you're supposed to be healthy. | ||
| You're supposed to be an athlete. | ||
| What are you doing smoking marijuana? | ||
| I'm like, that's the fucking healthiest thing I do. | ||
| Every day, I got like 40 tablets here, yeah? | ||
| I got fish oils. | ||
| I got vitamin C. I got resveratrol. | ||
| I got herbs. | ||
| I got everything, you know? | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| More powerful than all those fucking things together, although they're beneficial, is my cannabis oil I take every day. | ||
| This is like... | ||
| I don't know if you're familiar with a guy called Bob Malamade. | ||
| Dr. Bob Malamade. | ||
| His study is a free radical. | ||
| He's a human biologist, I think. | ||
| And he states that cannabis is the most powerful antioxidant, most powerful anti-aging substance on the planet, period. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So I consider it a health supplement. | ||
| And yeah, I get high and I feel good. | ||
| It's a health supplement too. | ||
| And there's also ways you could take it that are non-psychoactive. | ||
| You know, people that take CBDs. | ||
| Or I take this stuff, Charlotte's Web Hemp Oil. | ||
| I take this everyday plus stuff. | ||
| That's a high CBD. It's fantastic. | ||
| It makes you feel good. | ||
| It alleviates aches and pains. | ||
| It's good for anxiety. | ||
| It's good for mental clarity. | ||
| It's just great for your body. | ||
| It's an essential oil for your body. | ||
| I got my left knee, the cartilage is... | ||
| Nearly gone. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I'm sure it's a factor. | ||
| Do you think also a factor is mental toughness? | ||
| Because the fact that your understanding of pain is probably way different than... | ||
| Yeah, how you perceive pain, you know, like... | ||
| You're not going to dwell on it the way you're the average person. | ||
| A little amount of pain is not a big deal. | ||
| I mean, I live with that every day from training, so... | ||
| Right, and actually look forward to it in a way. | ||
| Yeah, so probably my perception of pain is like... | ||
| than everybody else is. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You know, when I'm asleep, if you had real arthritis, I mean, it's going to wake, you're going to get pain. | ||
| I don't get anything. | ||
| So something I'm doing is healthing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I consider cannabis to be the most powerful health supplement you can take. | ||
| Better than all the other stuff, but I still take all the other stuff as well because I'm stacking all the odds in my favor, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important, guys like you that are going against the grain, explaining your position, and also you as a respected professional athlete where people will listen to you and they go, oh, well, this guy is such a straight shooter about steroids and about training and about injuries and all these other things. | ||
| He's not going to lie about this. | ||
| Well, people have just been, had this misinformation for so long, so strong in their brain. | ||
| It's like, it's hard to change. | ||
| It's hard to change that, you know? | ||
| Especially if you don't have any experience with it yourself. | ||
| Like, this fucking drug. | ||
| Like, I don't know if somebody put on Instagram, I can't believe Yates smokes weed. | ||
| I just fucking hate lazy stoners. | ||
| That's a pretty strong reaction, man. | ||
| Like, you hate somebody because they're smoking a fucking plant. | ||
| Calling you lazy is hilarious. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, I completely agree. | ||
| I just think that it's a lot like what we were talking about earlier with fats and sugar, that there's this misinformation that continues forever. | ||
| It's like once you get an idea in your head, 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. | ||
| Dude, you're talking about millions of people. | ||
| You're saying none of them are good people? | ||
| You know how fucking crazy that is? | ||
| I think the people that smoke marijuana are generally nicer, kinder, more thoughtful people, and realize that in some way we're all connected. | ||
| We're not fucking independent. | ||
| How's that a bad thing? | ||
| Because he doesn't smoke pot. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Well, we need to fucking hold him down and make him smoke pot. | ||
| That's what we need to do. | ||
| But he'll freak out. | ||
| Apparently, Joey Diaz gave Pauly Shore some stars of death on his podcast, and now Pauly won't release the podcast. | ||
| He's like, hide it! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Burn it! | |
| Burn it with fire! | ||
| Kill it like a demon. | ||
| I mean, cannabis is so good that when you smoke it, Which is full of fucking tar and carcinogens and everything. | ||
| You smoke it into your lungs. | ||
| It doesn't even damage your lungs. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's supposed to be a different type of smoke, though. | ||
| Like, the smoke that you get, it's probably harsh. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Cigarettes got a ton of chemicals in there, that's why. | ||
| Hundreds of chemicals. | ||
| By the way, approved by our government. | ||
| They're like, yeah, pour it in there. | ||
| What's it going to do? | ||
| The government says it's good, it must be good, man. | ||
| It's going to get people addicted, throw it in there. | ||
| Governments. | ||
| Govern what? | ||
| Governments. | ||
| Ment is your mind. | ||
| But marijuana smoke has been shown to be an expectorant, actually can clear the lungs of certain issues, it dilates... | ||
| It dilates the bronch holes as opposed to the back I was closing them up all the time. | ||
| I don't know if you're familiar with a study that was done here at UCLA, I believe. | ||
| A guy called Donald Tashkin, he did it over 20 years. | ||
| It was a properly funded study. | ||
| Why was it properly funded? | ||
| Because it was funded to look for negative results. | ||
| So the purpose of this study was to prove that smoking cannabis damages your lungs, just like cigarettes, right? | ||
| So they followed three groups over 20 years. | ||
| Cigarette smokers only, or tobacco. | ||
| Marijuana together and marijuana only. | ||
| And the tobacco smokers over 20 years, of course, loss of lung function, a lot of cancers, all the stuff we already know. | ||
| The middle group was way less. | ||
| And the marijuana group, smoker, like daily smoking over 20 years, was no increased cancer. | ||
| There was no loss of lung function. | ||
| In fact, slight increase in lung function as compared to non-smokers. | ||
| Well, they're exercising, taking big toast. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it makes sense. | ||
| I mean, it's counterintuitive to a lot of people that think that it's negative, that it's bad for you. | ||
| So I just see it as a super health supplement. | ||
| I don't see anything negative. | ||
| I don't see it as a drug. | ||
| It's just a plant. | ||
| And yeah, you get high and you feel good. | ||
| And you laugh. | ||
| It's silly shit. | ||
| It's got to be good for you, right? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And I think that people are starting to understand that more now than when we were kids, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I used to smoke when I was a teenager. | ||
| And in England, we mix it with tobacco. | ||
| That's just, you know, until I came here, I didn't know, like, people smoke it pure. | ||
| I don't mix with tobacco now because I realize the weed is good and tobacco is bad. | ||
| Before, I didn't know. | ||
| Both probably bad for you. | ||
| I don't give a shit, you know? | ||
| Yeah, how did that get started in England? | ||
| Because every time I've been over to England, they do that too. | ||
| They're like, do you mix your weed with tobacco? | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know, man. | ||
| It was always done that way when I grew up. | ||
| I grew up in Birmingham. | ||
| There's a ton of Jamaicans, you know? | ||
| So the Jamaicans were the guys that We brought the weed in and stuff like that. | ||
| But even they used to mix with tobacco. | ||
| And a lot of people smoke hash. | ||
| So hash, you've got to mix it with something, right? | ||
| So people mix it with tobacco. | ||
| But I think last time I smoked tobacco was probably like eight, nine years ago when I became educated. | ||
| And I was like, wow, this... | ||
| Cannabis is really good on its own. | ||
| A lot of people in America, they take a cigar, they take out the tobacco, they put the weed in, and they make a blunt out of it, but you're taking in tobacco and the pot too, and it gives you this weird high. | ||
| Yeah, because you're getting that nicotine buzz, like head buzz. | ||
| But you're also inhaling in a way that you don't do with cigars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't usually inhale. | ||
| A cigar, you puff it out, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You get the tobacco. | ||
| It gets into your body, from your mouth. | ||
| But you don't really inhale deep into the lungs. | ||
| I like to use the hemp papers and also a vaporized extract as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like dabbing, they call it here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I do that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I find it's a bit different between smoking weed and dabbing the extract. | ||
| Smoking weed, I find it a bit more relaxing. | ||
| Dabbing the extract is like, I'll do that before I go on a bike ride or do cardio or something, and I'm like, whoa! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| Ready to roll, man. | ||
| You don't get tired. | ||
| It freaks you out, too. | ||
| Literally, you don't get tired. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| Isn't it amazing? | ||
| You can, you know, whatever you're doing, running. | ||
| First of all, it's dilating your bronchial, so you can deliver more oxygen. | ||
| But I think also it's the mental thing. | ||
| They like getting that... | ||
| Zone. | ||
| And perceived pain is less. | ||
| Discomfort is less. | ||
| So you just keep going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The guys in Brazil, they all smoke before they do jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It helps to be relaxed, right, when you're doing that. | ||
| You don't want to be all tense all the time. | ||
| Not just relaxed, but also singularly focused. | ||
| Focused, yeah. | ||
| That's America, too. | ||
| A giant percentage of people smoke pop before they do jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a big, big thing here. | ||
| Yeah, bodybuilding as well. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I mean, I'm the only one that talks about it because all those guys are, like, scared, like, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| Zero negative effect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Do you remember the Arnold? | ||
| I'm sure you do. | ||
| Arnold is numero uno. | ||
| Yeah, there he is. | ||
| Token on a little one there. | ||
| I mean, that was, people were like, what is he doing back then? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was almost like he was getting drunk or something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People didn't even think about it. | ||
| And he was the only one. | ||
| He wasn't, like, passing it around to other people. | ||
| He was the only one on camera smoking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The other guys were probably scared to smoke it when they're not on camera, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's weird. | ||
| But yeah, it's still viewed negatively, you know? | ||
| Like, an athlete saying he smokes marijuana, he's risking maybe losing his sponsorship and... | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| I don't have sponsors. | ||
| I'm independent, so I'm a bit more free to speak out. | ||
| Well, the crazy thing to me was the NFL. The NFL saying that these guys can't smoke pot and they suspend them for smoking pot. | ||
| Meanwhile, it's okay to run full speed at each other and smash into each other. | ||
| And the massive amount of damage that's doing, that's not a problem. | ||
| Well, maybe the cannabis would actually help them with the brain injuries because a lot of studies, you know, with Alzheimer's and stuff like that, it's very protective on the brain. | ||
| So maybe it could have helped them, if anything. | ||
| It definitely wouldn't harm them. | ||
| And even if it's just CBD oil, it's a neuroprotectant, you know, cannabinoids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we're living in an age where information is leaking out there and people understand things more today than they ever did before, but there's still a massive amount of ignorance that you have to combat. | ||
| But it's, you know, it's ahead of 10 years ago, right? | ||
| And I live in Europe, I live in Spain now, and in Spain it's not legal, but it's legal to grow in your house for your own use. | ||
| It's legal to smoke in your house for your own use. | ||
| So what's happened is these collectors have been created. | ||
| So, alright, so I can smoke in my own private residence and I can grow whatever, let's say three plants for myself, arguably. | ||
| So what if there's a hundred of us now in this collective, in this club? | ||
| So now we can grow 300 plants. | ||
| So that's how it is. | ||
| It's supposed to be non-profit organizations. | ||
| So when you go and you buy your weed, you're not technically buying your weed, you're contributing to the upkeep of the collective. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| So that's how it works there. | ||
| And then in Holland, it's tolerated, they call it. | ||
| Technically, it's not legal. | ||
| It's tolerated so they can sell in the coffee shops there and whatever in Amsterdam. | ||
| So those two countries are a little bit ahead, but everywhere else is still not legal. | ||
| Like in the UK, where I come from, it's not legal. | ||
| But the police have already stated they're going to arrest people for smoking weed because they're considered a waste of their time. | ||
| So any major city in England, you go walk down the street, you can smell weed. | ||
| People just walk down the street and smoke weed. | ||
| If the police are there, they might say, hey, you know, come on, put that out. | ||
| But that's as far as it goes. | ||
| So technically it's still illegal, but it's kind of like, you know, the police are not, they don't care about it unless you're selling it. | ||
| I think Canada is set to essentially legalize it nationwide. | ||
| I think that's the most recent revelation from Canada. | ||
| They're essentially ready to just... | ||
| Canada's always been a pretty good weed country, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Vancouver in particular. | ||
| There's a great documentary about the marijuana industry and its impact on Vancouver. | ||
| It's called The Union. | ||
| Fantastic documentary just showing how ridiculous it is and how inexorably tied marijuana is to their entire economy in Vancouver. | ||
| The money that comes in from marijuana is just a gigantic portion of their economy and it's all this underground... | ||
| That's why, you know, Colorado is setting such an example of making so much money. | ||
| Like, gotta be other states looking at it like, oh, I think fucking Detroit should get on that train. | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| Yeah, Detroit's a mess, right? | ||
| And coming back with, like, handmade stuff, there's a bunch of things like different industries and different, you know, small businesses are starting to emerge in Detroit that are kind of very promising. | ||
| But yeah, that would be a huge factor. | ||
| Yeah, there's a huge industry out there. | ||
| Not just growing all the other... | ||
| I come here and it's like I'm a kid in a candy shop, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You got chocolate and it's like... | ||
| Tells you how much THC is in each square. | ||
| We got breast spray, man. | ||
| You got butter, you got cakes, you got everything, man. | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Gotta be careful with those cakes, though. | ||
| Yeah, well, edibles... | ||
| I always tell people be careful with edibles because... | ||
| If you're smoking a joint and you take a couple of puffs, it's going to hit you pretty much immediately to your brain. | ||
| So you're going to feel it and you're going to decide whether you want to smoke some more or not. | ||
| Or maybe you want to just put it down, right? | ||
| And chill. | ||
| But when you eat it, it's going to take 45 minutes to an hour to hit your system and you don't know what How strong that's going to be. | ||
| And if it's too strong, which most of the time it is, if you're not experienced, then you're on that fucking ride and you can't get off for hours. | ||
| And it can be pretty unpleasant. | ||
| I mean, like too much THC for somebody that's not used to it. | ||
| You can feel very paranoid, very uncomfortable. | ||
| You can feel nauseous. | ||
| You might vomit. | ||
| You're going to get low blood sugar. | ||
| All this stuff. | ||
| It's not going to be a nice experience. | ||
| And probably then you're going to have a negative view of cannabis. | ||
| Like, fuck that shit. | ||
| I'm not going anywhere near that again. | ||
| So unless you're experienced, I would just say stay away from edibles. | ||
| Just have a small piece and wait a fucking hour. | ||
| Don't be tempted to like, oh, I don't feel anything. | ||
| I'll take another one. | ||
| Then you're going to be fucked. | ||
| That's great advice. | ||
| Go step gingerly. | ||
| Yeah, go very slowly on edibles because it takes time to digest it, time to get in the bloodstream, and time to feel it. | ||
| So most people will eat some and say... | ||
| I don't feel anything. | ||
| I'll have another one. | ||
| And then, boom. | ||
| I've said it happen so many times. | ||
| Then it's too late. | ||
| Yeah, and it's not going to be over in five minutes. | ||
| You're going to have hours of that. | ||
| And then they're just going to say, that cannabis stuff is bad. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| But you're fine. | ||
| That's the beautiful thing. | ||
| Even after a horrendous, terrifying ride. | ||
| Nothing bad can happen to you physically. | ||
| You might vomit. | ||
| It's like the worst thing that can happen. | ||
| But you've got to be careful because I read the other day, right, that there is a level at which cannabis can kill you. | ||
| So you've got to be careful that you don't smoke 628 kilos of cannabis in 15 minutes. | ||
| Because if you do that, that could be toxic. | ||
| That could be lethal. | ||
| Someone out there is going to try to prove you wrong. | ||
| Yeah, 1.5 fucking tons in 15 minutes. | ||
| If you're going to handle that, good luck to you. | ||
| I think that's actually the LD50, too, which means lethal dose for 50% of the population. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And 50% of the population are most definitely pussies. | ||
| So you'd probably survive that anyway. | ||
| I mean, I couldn't smoke a fucking... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| In 15 minutes? | ||
| How much could you smoke? | ||
| Like 5 grams or something? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| In a bong, you could do more than that. | ||
| In a vaporizer, you can get pretty deep. | ||
| But you're not going to get anywhere near 628. I don't know where they came with 628. It's theoretical. | ||
| 627 or 629. I don't know. | ||
| It's theoretical anyway because no one's ever died from it. | ||
| No one's ever died from it. | ||
| So like... | ||
| What other substance can you not die from? | ||
| Even water. | ||
| If you have too much water, you drown. | ||
| This is a pretty harmless fucking substance if there's no feasible toxic level. | ||
| Alright, 628 kilos, I'm taking the piss. | ||
| I couldn't smoke that in my lifetime. | ||
| How often do you smoke pot? | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Every day, man. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Take my vitamin C every day as well. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're preaching to the choir, man. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I know you know. | ||
| Other people are listening. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm saying I'm with you. | ||
| I'm saying I'm with you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, I couldn't agree more. | ||
| Listen, man, we just did three hours. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| That fucking went quick, right? | ||
| Like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would have said that's like an hour and a half or something. | ||
| Anything else to say to the people before we wrap this bitch up? | ||
| I hate to be the guy that goes on chat shows and promotes things, but I'm going to have to do this. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to be in Vegas on Saturday, and we've got a thing called Super League. | ||
| What's the date, actual date? | ||
| Saturday is 29th. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to be in Vegas. | ||
| We've got a competition called Super League, and this is for bodybuilders slash strength athletes, and it's somewhat functional because, you know, You get a bodybuilder on stage and the general public look at that and they say, what the fuck is this? | ||
| This is like strange and maybe a product of just taking drugs and they don't appreciate the work that goes into that and how strong and athletic some of these guys can be. | ||
| So this competition has two rounds. | ||
| The first round is lifting. | ||
| So you get judged on eight different exercises. | ||
| You score a maximum of a 12-rep set. | ||
| So there's that, and then there's a physique round, but 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. | ||
| How long have you been doing this for? | ||
| This is going to be the first one. | ||
| And we weren't sure what reaction we get with the first one, but it's been off the fucking hook. | ||
| And I think we're going to get a new breed of athletes that are maybe not purely... | ||
| physique bodybuilders as like the Mr. Olympia. | ||
| We've got guys coming from powerlifting. | ||
| We've got guys coming from bodybuilding. | ||
| There's a lot of guys out there in the gyms around the world that are fucking athletic, strong, freaky guys and girls. | ||
| We've got both categories that maybe don't want to compete in a bodybuilding competition for various reasons. | ||
| Or they do want to compete in a bodybuilding competition and they want something alternative to do. | ||
| We've got a competition between Team LA and Team Atlanta as well. | ||
| And we've got interest to roll this out internationally. | ||
| So keep your eye on that, man. | ||
| So how do people go to it? | ||
| What casinos are there? | ||
| Super League Live and the contest is in the City Athletic Club gym in Vegas, which is like the biggest gym in Vegas. | ||
| Okay, and so the website for it would be? | ||
| Super League Live or superleague.live, I'm not sure. | ||
| Super League Live. | ||
| Super League Live. | ||
| I'm going to be there Sunday and a lot of other people from the sport. | ||
| I'll invite Joe Rogan if you've got spare time. | ||
| I'm actually going to be at the UFC Saturday. | ||
| It's in Anaheim in California. | ||
| So, unfortunately, it's a good card. | ||
| I'm very excited about it. | ||
| John Jones and Daniel Cormier. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| Is that in Vegas as well? | ||
| No, that's out here in Anaheim. | ||
| Cowboy Cerrone and Robbie Lawler. | ||
| It's a great card, actually. | ||
| It's one of the best cards of the year. | ||
| I'm just joking. | ||
| So... | ||
| Do whatever you want, folks, but Super League is going to be awesome, I'm sure. | ||
| Listen, man, it was an honor and a pleasure. | ||
| I really, really appreciate you having me. | ||
| Thanks, Joe. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| It's been, yeah, like three hours has gone like nothing. | ||
| Like nothing. | ||
| I'm sure we could talk for fucking 24 hours, but it's time to smoke a joint or something. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| All right, everybody. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| See you guys tomorrow. |
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