Chris and Mark Bell discuss their carnivore diet breakthroughs, with Chris lifting heavy despite artificial hips after a failed surgery and both revealing DEXA scans showing high bone density—likely from steroids or meat-based nutrition. Joe Rogan critiques veganism’s ideological rigidity, citing Sam Harris’ blood sugar struggles and processed carbs/sugars as real health threats, while Bell’s upcoming May 29th documentary, The War on Carbs, challenges misrepresented dietary science like What the Health? Their resilience—Chris overcoming opioid addiction post-30 Percocet binge, Mark thriving on Kratom and carnivore—contrasts with wrestling’s toll (Kurt Angle’s broken neck, Pat Miletich’s fused vertebrae) and MMA’s underrated risks, like Mark Kerr’s brutal submissions. Rogan’s skepticism of Olympic doping policies (Icarus) and Atkins’ diet legacy underscores how personal experimentation often outpaces flawed institutional advice, proving adaptability beats dogma in health and performance. [Automatically generated summary]
And it got taken away from me, and I was really sad and disappointed, became a drug addict and an alcoholic because of it, and now I can lift again, so I feel good.
Before I got it done, I mean, I couldn't even get up out of a chair.
I'd be stuck, you know, I would stick places.
And before I got it done, I couldn't really move at all.
And then after I got it done, they had botched one side.
So one side went perfect.
The other side for two years was all screwed up and the doctors didn't know What was screwed up about it?
The cup.
There's a cup, and then there's the ball that goes into the cup.
The cup came loose, and it would shift around.
Now, they think the cup comes loose because when you do both hips at the same time, they hammer one hip into one side, and then you're completely like a dead body almost, and they flip you over.
I would recommend getting one done because then when I got the one that was messed up redone and I had one good leg and one leg to recover on, it was so much easier.
I didn't have to have the special toilet and all the other stupid things.
I had Pat Miletic in here a couple weeks ago, you know, former UFC champion Pat.
He's got one arm that's smaller than the other one.
Boss Rutten will be here tomorrow.
He's got the same issues.
It's necks, neck issues.
I had a bulging disc in my neck, and I was getting weird numbness in my hands and then nerve pain in my elbow.
Ulnar nerve goes on there and when you ignore that shit and then keep training it, keep getting your fucking neck yanked on, then the disc starts to decay and then the pressing against the nerves and the spinal column, it gets worse and then it starts atrophying and cutting off the nerves to your arms and you get to the point where your shit just shrinks and it doesn't come back.
I think when you go and you make the decision to only eat meat, then some rational thought should come into your head.
Maybe when I switch all the way to just meat all the time, maybe there's a possibility I'm going to eat too much meat.
And so maybe that would make sense to bring in some fruit and bring in some vegetables just so you're not eating too much meat for the simple reason.
Vegetables have been shown, and you can get a study to show you anything, but there's a study that's been done on 200,000 people that went on for 14 years.
And they studied vegetables.
They studied every type of vegetable.
And they found that they were more neutral than they were harmful or good for you.
They found that fruit was a little bit better for you.
And again, you can have any study saying anything.
I don't know what their standard was for what they were looking for exactly, but the main thing they were looking for was it being protective in terms of your heart.
That was the main thing they were looking at.
So they found out that saturated fat is protective of your heart.
They found out that cholesterol is actually protective of your heart.
They found out that salt is...
Now it's all like, you know, without...
You can't take in tons and tons of salt because then something's going to...
This is a work in progress, but the reason I did it was really simple.
It's a dietary intervention.
I went through sobriety, as you know.
I was a drug addict and an alcoholic for about six years.
And when I went through sobriety, that's an intervention.
There's something wrong.
There's a problem.
We need to fix it.
So my problem now was arthritis.
And I needed something that was like an intervention that would get me from being arthritic and in pain and not being able to lift.
So some of this might be a placebo effect of me going like, well, I'm on this diet and I feel great and whatever.
And so I'm now lifting more.
Some of it may be a placebo effect, and that's okay with me if it is.
But I feel excellent on this diet, and I think the reason is I'm getting a lot more protein in.
I wasn't getting enough protein on keto because I was listening to everybody say, well, it'll knock you out of ketosis if you eat too much protein, and that's what I constantly was being told, but I wasn't muscular.
The things that would knock me out of ketosis were just like mainly anything with carbohydrates.
I wasn't really having too much of a problem with protein because I wasn't eating a lot of protein.
But there were things that if I cheated on my diet, for example, of course that would usually kick me out of ketosis.
But then I also got to a point where you become so fat adapted that you become what we like to call metabolically flexible.
Metabolic flexibility just means you can switch from being a fat burner, you know, mostly a fat burner for the most part because I'm eating high fat, but then if I do eat something with sugar in it, it doesn't really affect me that much.
Because I'm 90% going with the fat.
So I can kind of move back and forth between those two things.
But what I realized on the carnivore diet, when I switched over to carnivore, the whole time I was thinking, man, if I could just have an apple, I would feel so much better.
Because just eating this steak, it's killing me and it's driving me crazy.
Well, you automatically use intermittent fasting almost because you don't always have a hamburger in your pocket or you don't always run through In-N-Out Burger or whatever it might be.
But yeah, you end up utilizing some intermittent fasting and you're like, fuck, man, the only food I have to eat is a hamburger or steak.
And he sent me that study that I sent to you about the fruit.
And I don't know if you watched that or not, but basically they did a large scale study with fruit and they found out that the fruit actually would drive blood glucose down instead of bringing it up when taken with protein like red meat.
And so I'm like looking at this going like, well, it's not going to drive my glucose up.
I mean, that'd be the one thing I'm concerned with.
Why not have some fruit?
And talking with Stan about it, he was saying, like, I think fruit is totally fine, and I think you can have as much as you want.
I'm not a doctor, I'm a filmmaker, so I basically ask a lot of questions to a lot of people and start figuring things out, and then it's trial and error.
Right now I'm in the trial and error part, and it seems like it's been working pretty good.
That's particularly important with dietary cholesterol.
With cholesterol in the blood, the way it registers, if you have a big fat-filled meal and then go and get a blood test versus you fasting, it's like, how is your body absorbing this is what's really important.
How's your body absorbing these essential nutrients, not what happens right after you eat?
Because your body knows what to do with that stuff.
I mean, they want it to be under 200. But I thought what was really interesting was my HDL went way up from about like 60 points going from keto to carnivore.
Before, when I was doing a ketogenic diet, the fat is kind of free-flowing because you make your bulletproof coffees and you're just dumping fat and everything.
You're putting butter on everything.
But when you have a steak, what's really nice about having a steak is you're right about 65 to 75% fat already.
Talking to Bulletproof, and the guy was telling me, like, you have to, to Dave Asprey, he was telling me, you have to pay money to get recognized as being organic.
I'd have to say that I completely agree with you, but there isn't science to really support that eating a cow that was fed with soy or corn is necessarily way worse.
And so I might just be stupid for waiting for that to come out.
These aren't the main things that we're really trying to fight.
My brother and I, we just took on to do another film, and he and I are doing this one together on nutrition.
And we're trying to find out some truths.
I mean, we're trying to find out about grass-fed and organic and all these different things.
But mainly we're just trying to figure out how the fuck do we help fight obesity?
How do we help fight diabetes?
How do we help people gain control of their diet?
And I think that's really truly what we're talking about is control.
And you look at something like a ketogenic diet, in my opinion, it's one of the few diets that can really help people with control of their diet because it can help...
Well, the cravings of refined carbohydrates and sugars, those are giant.
It's the saturated fat in conjunction with the refined carbohydrates and sugars.
And one of the things that they're finding, too, is one of the big arguments that vegans in particular have used for high-carbohydrate diets in relation to obesity is look at Asian cultures.
In Asian cultures, you have low levels of obesity but high levels of high-carbohydrates.
We'd go to the gym and do a full-on squat workout, work up to 500 pounds and go home and eat half a gallon of ice cream just because we didn't know any better.
There is a big shift, though, in what's going on in nutrition and what people think about that post-workout carb window and all that kind of thing.
I think a lot of people have been shifting away from that kind of stuff.
A lot of people have been shifting away from six meals a day.
A lot of people have been shifting away from...
Fasted cardio, and a lot of these dietary sort of myths that we thought that we needed to do, we're looking into it and going like, wait, if you don't eat after you work out, you don't lose muscle, these things don't happen, so do you need to do that?
It could be beneficial or it could not be, but we're starting to realize that maybe some of these things that we were doing aren't necessary.
I think there's science behind it, too, because there's money to be made.
So I don't think it really matters exactly when you take in your carbs.
I think if you were just to have carbs throughout the day, I think you would end up with a similar pump and you'd end up with similar recovery levels.
I know there's a lot of studies showing that, but there's probably not a study showing if you took in 300 grams of carbs just normally versus dumping some more in after a workout.
But one of the things that Rob Wolf has done is pretty interesting is he and his wife will eat the exact same thing and then an hour later they test their blood and they have very different results.
And this is something that's really important to emphasize.
Well, that's what we're trying to define by doing a documentary.
What are the couple things that we can point to and say everybody needs to do this, this, and this, and then these other things are like, I just wonder if your average American only ate 100 carbs every day if people wouldn't be fat.
You can only store 2,000 calories of, you know, carbohydrate in your body at one time, but the normal average person has about 40,000 calories of fat just hanging out on their body and they don't even know it.
So we have a lot more energy available to us as fat if we Learn how to utilize it.
Well, intermittent fasting is absolutely beneficial.
And I think one of the things that we're talking about, one of the benefits of the keto diet that you also get from intermittent fasting is when your body goes into fat-burning mode, your hunger goes away.
But yeah, not being hungry has allowed me to have a little bit of...
I feel free now.
I feel like I'm not...
You know, attached to food.
I don't need food all the time.
I used to think about food all the time because I was constantly, you know, eating things with sugar in it.
I used to go to the movies and because I'm a filmmaker, I love to go to the movies and I used to go all the time.
And I had this rule where during the movie was my only time I could cheat on my diet and I could eat whatever I wanted.
And it turned into a clusterfuck because I'd have, you know, I'd have like the little pretzel bites with the cheese that you dip in.
And I'd have Sour Patch Kids and Twizzlers and I'd buy...
I'd eat three bags of candy and pretzels and I'd eat the whole thing during the movie because the movies usually suck and I need something to do to keep my mind off of the shitty movie.
So I would eat the whole time, you know, and obviously that didn't work, you know, and I was dieting besides that.
But, you know, it wasn't doing anything because I was just killing all the, you know, all the progress I was making.
But by doing this ketogenic diet and not being hungry...
It's allowed me to just sit back and look at food and go, I want that and I want that because it's good for me.
Rather than say, I need this now because I'm hungry.
I think a lot of people, when they hear all meat, they're just thinking, I'm downing these giant plates of food, but I'm not that hungry.
So I do have to try to hit my protein goal each day, though, which is about, you know, I need a certain amount of protein, so I need like 168 grams of protein or something like that.
One thing that we've tried to do is we've tried to not celebrate I think that can be an issue.
You do want to celebrate here and there.
You want to have some fun here and there.
But have control over that celebration.
You're celebrating your buddy's birthday party that you never even talked to.
And you're getting drunk and eating fucking cheesecake and stuff.
Celebrate when you really want to.
Celebrate when you really kind of quote-unquote need to.
Maybe you celebrate after you lost 20 pounds, but if you celebrate by cheating on your diet, it's actually more harmful to you than it is a real celebration.
You're hurting yourself rather than helping improve yourself.
Now, we do need times where we do have fun and we kick back and have a couple drinks.
But drinking or overeating, a lot of those things, even when you're trying to stay on your diet, they will almost always lead to you cheating.
I noticed that if I overeat, that's when I get hit with cravings sometimes.
So somebody might think, I'm just going to stuff myself with a bunch of burgers.
I'd say even like on a carnivore diet, there's some things that I eat that are, I'd consider them like slight cheats, like going to In-N-Out Burger, you know, getting like a Flying Dutchman.
I take it, I'll slice a piece of steak, dunk it in, I'll put a fucking glob of mayonnaise on my plate, I'll dunk the steak in the mayo.
But it's a chipotle lime mayo and it's made with avocado oil.
So you're getting all these healthy fats, it gives you some nice taste and again, because I'm eating moose and elk and deer, it's a very, very lean meats.
If I'm not eating like a cow, if I'm not eating beef, my meat is mostly like a cow.
Yeah, 200 grams of fat, and I was dropping fat like crazy.
But then it came to a point where it stopped.
I think that's what everybody needs to know.
On any of these diets, they eventually plateau or stop, and then you have to sort of figure out how to get around that roadblock and continue to lose more weight or do whatever you're trying to do.
I mean, I think, like, if you have a couple grams over, you're not going to be in trouble.
But if you're eating 500 grams of protein or something crazy or even, like, 300 grams of protein, you know, after a while, you're going to get to too much and you're going to have that problem.
But I feel like for most people, that's not going to be the main issue, you know?
The big difference is when I eat a lot of carbs, if I go off the rails and I'll cheat and have pasta or bread or something like that, I experience more inflammation.
I experience more soreness in my joints.
You get more fatigue.
You get tired.
You get that insulin crash.
You get all those big factors that I just don't get when I eat clean.
When I eat just meat and Salad and vegetables and high fat diet and low carb, my body is just way more efficient.
Since like 1993, I think it was, around the time we kind of started.
We've been doing them on and off for a long time, and more recently I used it to drop 70 pounds.
But I think...
One of the things with keto that I noticed was it almost doesn't really matter that I'm in ketosis all the time.
I think the effort to be in ketosis, I think, is important by getting rid of a lot of the carbohydrates that you have, the effort to kind of eat a little bit more fat.
But what I've noticed is I don't think I need to really go out of my way to eat tons and tons of fat.
I don't need to be dumping tons of MCT oil on stuff.
I don't need to...
There's enough fat usually in the steaks that I'm eating.
A lot of times I get ribeye.
Sometimes I eat bacon, eggs, things like that.
I put up on my Instagram the other day about seven or eight foods that I thought if you just stuck to these seven or eight foods for a handful of days, you would lose a lot of weight.
And the response was amazing.
People were writing back and they're like, holy shit, man, I'd lost 10 pounds.
They don't raise your blood level, blood sugar level.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't want to eat regular waffles on a regular basis, but if I'm going to cheat and I eat what they have, you know, and they also have a very low sugar syrup, too, that tastes very good with some butter.
It's just, it's the best option if you're going to do something like that.
I had Jordan Peterson on, and he had some pretty serious autoimmune disorders, and his body was really in trouble.
And his daughter had similar problems, and his daughter went to essentially a diet of just meat and greens.
And now I think she's on a carnivore diet, and she's got an Instagram page too documenting it.
But he went to meat and greens, lost a shit ton of weight, was losing, I think he said he was losing, what did he say, like seven pounds a month for something like, something along those lines.
Lost a ton of weight and looks great.
He said he's thinner than he's been in 25 years.
Feels great.
All his autoimmune issues were done.
I think a lot of what people are dealing with is inflammation that's caused by too much processed carbohydrates, too much simple refined carbohydrates and sugars.
And the inflammation leads to So if you look at what they call the five scourges of health, they are obesity, cancer, cognitive decline, heart disease, and diabetes.
Those are all metabolic.
Those are all things that we get through food.
And over half the people that are in the hospital today, right now in the United States, are in there for metabolic issues.
And you see a direct correlation between the amount of refined sugars and carbohydrates human beings have adjusted and started eating to the rise in diabetes and heart disease and all these other issues.
And one of the things we were talking about before the podcast is...
Sorry, I went running today.
For some reason, I can't stop coughing.
People are dealing with...
A lot of various health issues, and they're always trying to pin one cause of these health issues.
And one of the real problems is when people develop these ideological answers, like veganism is one of them.
They do not want to think that there's anything healthy about meat and that what they do is the only way.
I'm watching this, there's a thread right now going on on Twitter between some cockamamie vegan doctor who's full of shit and all these people that are citing science and he is getting pissed off and he's showing his degree and photos of his degree.
They're like, look, motherfucker, there's real science to the fact that dietary cholesterol is necessary.
It's the building blocks for cells.
I mean, it literally is.
It's the reason why your body is converting it to all the sex hormones, cholesterol, saturated fat.
Your body processes that.
It's healthy for your brain.
It's healthy for your heart.
All these things are a fact.
He's not recognizing the fact that the issue is not saturated fat.
It's saturated fat in conjunction with all these other things.
And that's a problem with these studies.
One of the studies they did recently where they showed that people who ate meat more than five times a week were much more likely to have heart disease.
But that's not a good study because they didn't say, what are they eating the meat with?
A good study would be have someone, you know, get a large group of people, put them on a carnivore diet, have a large group of people, put them on a keto diet, have a large group of people, put them on a standard American diet, let them eat burgers and fries and chocolate shakes and sodas, and let's find out what the fuck it is.
Put people on a vegan diet.
I have had tons of friends, including Sam Harris, who was on a vegan diet, and his fucking blood sugar was off the charts.
He was trying to figure out how to stay healthy.
Like, he tried.
He tried it for a long time, but he felt like shit, and then he went and switched to fish, and he felt like shit just doing that too.
We veer off so far, and we're like, oh man, we got Doritos, and we got cookies, and we got all this stuff being thrown at us every single day, and it's convenient.
And then someone will say, okay, you know, no more carbs.
And you just go the complete opposite route.
And you end up with something like a carnivore diet.
But I think just, if you just sit there and think about stuff logically, it would make sense to me that you can overdo it on meat.
Like, I think you can overdo it on just about anything.
Yeah, I think your balance is probably ideal, but the balance of the average American is not great because I think they think they can just grab and reach for anything.
And it all started with them going to bed too late because they stayed around and fucked around on their phone or watched TV. They went to bed too late.
They woke up later than they wanted.
They're tired because they didn't get the sleep they were supposed to get.
We're basically just going around interviewing people that are sort of in the know, that are writing these books, like Mark Sisson, Rob Wolf.
Those are some of the people that we interviewed.
And just asking them basic questions about diet and nutrition and sort of seeing where they stand.
And then we shot about 15 interviews right now.
And then it's my job to sort of figure out like, well, how does this all correlate together?
So we don't really have, I'd say it'd be disingenuous for me to come on and say, this is exactly what we're going to do, because I have no idea what it's going to be.
And I think that's the beauty of it.
When we shot bigger, stronger, faster, I had no clue how that was going to turn out.
And I think a lot of documentary filmmakers, they go in with like, here's the point I'm going to prove.
Let me find all the people and string them along and then figure out how they fit into the puzzle.
If they don't conveniently fit into my puzzle, they're out.
I don't know.
I developed a different way of doing it.
I just like to try to get as much information as I can and then think about it a lot and then put it in a way that makes sense to me.
I think if you do it right and you have, you know, some sort of B12 supplements, whether it is, you know, from, like, greens, like, what do they use at, what's that?
But the thing is, Plants are far more complex in their ability to communicate and their ability to even express predation, pain, and protect themselves through various chemical means to protect themselves from predation.
They change the way they taste to keep from getting eaten.
And there's been studies also that if you just play the sound of a caterpillar eating leaves next to plants, they recognize that sound and they change their taste profile.
And those are chemicals like lectins, things like lectins and stuff that can be very damaging to people.
A lot of people don't know, but if you eat cucumbers and tomatoes and stuff like that, you're getting a lot of these lectins that a lot of people have adverse reactions to.
So a lot of people be eating a variety of vegetables in their diet and not understand why they still don't feel good.
When we started this film, we were going to call it the War on Carbs.
That's what we were talking about, and that's what we've been talking about for quite a long time.
But as we started to go through the movie, we were like, oh, I don't know, War on Carbs, like maybe that's going to isolate and that's going to pigeonhole the movie into one style.
But as we started interviewing more and more people, we realized that the problem is carbs.
They call the diseases Western diseases because they didn't used to have these diseases in other countries.
And then when we started exporting molasses and we started exporting rice and everything else we were exporting to these other countries that didn't have it, they all got sick.
They all started getting sick.
Their obesity rates went up, their diabetes rates went up.
And that's...
That's just proof right there that if you eat that stuff, you know, it will have those consequences.
I mean, just stuff like that, I'd say, that you still have in your diet and not know about.
I used to have, I was doing a low-carb diet, so I'd figure, okay, I'll make a big salad and I'll dump this dressing all over it and the dressing's full of soybean oil.
I think this falls in the category of addiction, too, because the place that he came from where he was addicted to drugs and alcohol and he was able to overcome a lot of that, I think the ketogenic diet, I think without it, I think it would have been a lot harder.
And so when I went to rehab, you know, I was about 245 pounds, and I came out at like 215 from doing a keto diet, and I started training again a little bit.
But I was still very sick, and I was very, like, I was messed up at that time.
Like, I wasn't right mentally or physically.
I was just broken, you know, and I was ready for a change.
And so, you know, it was very humbling.
You know, it still is, actually, to even talk about it.
So...
Getting knocked down a little bit helped me.
It also helped me to start back over and start back over with a better head on my shoulders, you know?
Because I used to think I knew everything, and now I think I know nothing.
And I think that that's important because I have this white belt mentality now that I use on everything.
And I actually got that from talking to Fabricio Verdum because he was always learning, always thinking he was learning, right?
And so I asked him one time, I was talking about something, and he said, yeah, I have a white belt mentality towards everything.
And I think I've heard you talk about that as well.
Yeah, veganism started with the Seventh Adventist Church, I believe.
So there was a group of people that had a church, and the guy that led the church as part of the church was like, you know, they were following the Jewish kosher laws or whatever at first, and it was like no pigs or whatever else, shellfish, I think.
No pigs or shellfish.
And then the guy just said, like...
It just sort of took it to a next level and said, like, no meat, no animal products at all.
And so these people that were in this church were like the first real group of vegans.
The Church of Seventh Adventist, I think, is what it's called.
It's where it came from, like, 1863 is when that, like, movement, I guess, started.
I'm sure people were doing it earlier than that, obviously, but I think that that's where the roots came in.
And I just find that really interesting because it does seem like a religion.
It seems like...
It seems like a lot of times you get – I get called out a lot on Instagram and stuff like that from people that are vegan saying, like, I can't believe you do this and blah, blah.
But I would never go on their page and say anything to them at all.
I mean, that's a big part of this whole community is there's a moral high ground.
They stand on it.
And then a lot of these people, especially people with vegan in their name and their screen name, they always go after people.
And they try to shame people.
In many ways is a very good thing.
They're not participating in factoring farming, right?
They're not participating in the horrors that we see in these fucking PETA videos where you see Cows and pigs and chickens are just being tortured all that fuck that is disgusting and that should be eliminated and shouldn't be a part of modern culture But in terms of like the humane raising and killing of animals Look, they're not going to live forever.
And I don't care what you say.
I'm not into animal suffering.
I don't think they should suffer.
But if you try to say that people are not herbivores, or that people are herbivores, rather, and that we're not omnivores, you're crazy.
Yeah, we look real similar in our teeth to fucking chimps.
Chimps are omnivores.
And...
The human diet is a very complex thing.
When you attach that human diet to ideology, then it gets really screwy because you're not dealing with people that are being honest about dietary requirements, how your body functions, what the studies show.
If you look at it objectively, the objective, the first thing anybody should say, first thing across the board, get rid of all the fucking sugar.
That's number one.
Get rid of all the refined carbohydrates.
Eat more vegetables.
I think.
You guys don't.
Eat more vegetables.
Eat healthy fats.
Get some form of omega fatty acids.
Recognize that the omega fatty acids you get from flaxseed oil are not as bioavailable.
It's a fact from studies.
Not as bioavailable as the omega fatty acids you get from fish and meat.
But it's not as good as the protein that you get from meat.
It's just not.
Can it sustain you?
Yes, it can.
Can you be a healthy person and live a fucking balanced life on a completely vegetarian diet?
100%.
But I would always recommend eat free-range eggs.
You're not hurting a chicken.
Nothing gets hurt.
It is free food.
I have chickens.
They roam around.
They eat vegetables.
Nobody eats them.
The chickens live a fucking healthy life.
They lay eggs.
We eat the eggs.
The eggs are healthy as fuck.
Eat those.
Find a place that has free-range chickens.
Eat the eggs.
I mean, it's not vegan, but it is vegetarian.
If you want to get rid of dairy and you don't want...
I get it, man.
I've seen dairy farms.
It's fucked up.
You see what they're doing to cows and the way they treat them and the way they raise them and just the whole idea behind it, like making them lactate.
The only time cows lactate is when they have a baby, right?
So they keep them in this state and it's just unnatural.
And that is a reality of dairy production.
And if you don't want to be a part of that, that's 100% noble.
But we have to be honest about nutrition requirements, not about the ideology of veganism.
And this is the problem with these people.
And so many of them, especially the ones with vegan attached to their identity, because they use the name, like, I'm Vegan Warrior, this is Vegan Prince, I'm the Vegan Defender.
They're fucking morons who joined a gang.
And what they do is they start eating plants, they start talking shit, and they go looking to just go after anybody who's not on the same page as them.
And the real problem is people that watch a movie like What the Health or something, and then think, well that, this is, oh my god, I'm killing myself by not being a vegan.
No, you need to...
Google what the health debunked and find out the actual science.
Because what they're talking about is bullshit.
They're not being honest.
What they've done is make a vegan proselytizing movie.
They're trying to get people to join in because that's what they do.
And a lot of these people...
They give up.
A lot of these people, they get to a point where their health can't take it anymore and they fucking give up.
Well, no, I would just say my ketogenic diet, before I went on the carnivore diet, We're good to go.
That's sort of what the switch was, and it's just an intervention for now.
I feel that I used to think that the best, healthiest diet for a human being would be a vegan diet with like three or four ounces of meat thrown in at every meal, you know, just to add.
The animal fat and animal protein.
I thought like that would be really smart.
Now I'm starting to think the opposite.
I think front-loading your body with the nutrients that it needs because our body's always in search for nutrients.
That's why we're hungry.
We're always searching for the nutrients that we need, the vitamins and minerals that we need and all the macronutrients we need.
If we front-load it first and give us a chunk of nice steak, your body's not hungry afterwards.
And I think that's what's happened to me where Now I'm sort of giving my body what it needs, and it's never asking for what it doesn't need.
I saw a comment the other day on one of those animal videos, one of those horrible factory farming videos, said, because of this video, I'm 60% vegan now with my diet.
Exactly.
What the fuck does that mean?
But that's the type of morons we're dealing with here.
People that are not looking at themselves or anything, honestly.
They're trying to stand on the moral high ground.
And if they know they eat meat, they can't.
So they say, well, I'm almost all vegan.
Well, okay, well, those poor little fucking cows you murder, they're 40% almost.
It's a ridiculous thing to say, but the problem is people, they're not just eating things, they're posturing, they're publicly posturing on their position on morals and ethics.
But I think there's also a difference between, you know, survival and there's a difference between performance.
And I think, you know, we're asking our bodies, all three of us at the table, we're asking our bodies to do some demanding things.
So I think in that case, like maybe we do need a little bit more meat, especially if meat is going to be kind of our main driver of our calories, then it kind of makes sense that we would need a little bit more of that than maybe your average person.
So what you said about the three ounces of meat every couple meals probably makes sense and probably be great for survival.
The other thing that's really interesting, though, is that even for those of us who have been trying to seek the truth and for those of us who have been trying to eat good and trying to train, it's not like you're like, oh, there's Joe Rogan, 150 years old.
Look at that fucking guy.
You're not insuring anything, right?
But you're trying to just live the life that you want to live the best way possible that you can live it.
I mean, I've always been supplementing with vitamins, and I've been getting my blood work done for a couple decades now, but the real shift was switching to ketogenic.
Well, I spend a lot of time in hotels, so what I would do is I would show up at a place on Thursday, and I'd be there until Sunday, especially when I was doing comedy clubs on the road.
So I'd go to Whole Foods.
I'd stock up on kombucha.
I would get a bunch of healthy snacks, a bunch of raw almonds and things along those lines.
So that way I had something in my hotel room all the time.
So if I'm writing or getting done working out or something like that, I'm not eating candy bars.
I'm not raiding the hotel mini bar and eating bullshit.
I like whole foods, and I like things in the whole food environment.
And the more I do research on things and look into it, the more I realize the whole foods are really where it's at.
So I don't know.
I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of studies on it and things like that, but I just feel like the way that they make fish oil and the way that it sits around forever and stuff like that, I don't know, so I don't use it, you know?
You know, one of the things I do use because I can't I can't stand eating it.
So I can stand to eat the fish.
I like the fish.
I like salmon.
I do not like liver, but beef liver is the highest in nutrients.
You want to talk about a superfood.
It is like these true superfoods, but way more than quinoa.
I mean, there's so many nutrients in beef liver, but I don't like it.
So I take beef liver tablets or capsules or whatever.
Organ meat is the best meat for you and liver in particular.
That's why wolves, when the alpha is established in the pack, the alpha will always eat the wolf or eat the liver first.
There was this crazy thing that this guy was doing where he was living with wolves.
And he had established himself as the alpha in the pack.
And one of the ways he would do that, they would have a kill, and he would plant a liver inside the kill.
And then he would eat the liver and growl at all the other wolves.
He would let them go because he's got the liver.
But then he had to leave in order to help someone else.
This guy had a farm that was being attacked by wolves, and so he set up some speakers and had some other wolves howl and essentially tried to convince these wolves that were killing these guys' animals that a new pack had been in town.
And with these big speakers, these other wolves were like, holy shit, there's a lot of fucking wolves here.
Let's get out of here.
And it literally worked, but he was gone for a while, I think for a couple months.
And when he came back, the other wolves were like, fuck you, motherfucker.
We're the alpha now.
And he almost got killed by these wolves.
It's terrifying to watch him whimpering in front of these wolves while these wolves are like inches away from him with their teeth.
Well, he was doing studies on wolves, and they were all contained in this large, fenced-in area, which is also highly criticized, because there's some videos on YouTube that you can see of these wolves attacking this one beta wolf.
And one of the reasons why that behavior is so accentuated is the fact that they are contained in a very small area.
I mean, it's big in that it's a few acres, but it's small in terms of what a wolf's natural roaming would be.
So if you look at salmon, there'd be a bunch of salmon in a river and there'd be a big chunk taken out of them, but the rest of the body would be there.
And the reason was a bear would just basically rip out its liver.
And the idea that people would fit in between that 20-pound optimal, either this way or that way, is crazy.
Because those 205 guys, a lot of them could be heavyweight.
It's like Jon Jones.
Jon Jones could be the heavyweight champion of the world.
100%.
No doubt about it.
He's a savage.
No fucking doubt about it.
Yet, he still weighs 205 when he fights, and he doesn't have a hard time making that weight.
Now, if you're a guy like...
Say, Hector Lombard, who's fought at 170 and just really packs a lot of meat on, and he fights at 185. You know, when he fights at 185, he's also fought at 205 before, I believe.
If he decided to fight at 205 and John Jones decides to fight at 205, I mean, Hector's my height, and John Jones towers over me.
So you're looking at just a totally different body size.
Totally different frame.
That 20 pounds is too much, man.
And then from 205 to heavyweight, you could get some Brock Lesnar motherfucker or Francis Ngannou who has to cut weight to make 265. Francis is even more impressive, right?
Because he's natural.
I mean, he's not even barely lifting weights.
I mean, that guy's just a fucking gigantic super athlete.
There's videos of him on his Instagram from yesterday of him back in the same sand mine, and he's wearing his fucking Reebok jersey with his name on the back of it, digging sand with all the guys he used to work with.
It's fucking crazy, but that is hard labor.
And there he is.
Do that all day?
Dig fucking sand all day?
You know how fucking strong you would be?
Just carrying 20 pound hunks of sand and shoving them onto the top of that Truck?
The only issue with Francis is his wrestling and his endurance.
And this is just based on his fight with Stipe Miocic, who, in my opinion, is the best heavyweight ever.
He's great.
If you look at what Stipe has managed to do in his career, he's defended the title more than anybody.
He knocked out Fabrizio Verdun, who was one of the best ever.
He knocked out Alistair Overeem.
He beat Francis Ngannou, who everybody was fucking terrified of.
And Francis has been blowing everybody out of the water, including Alistair Overeem.
I just think, and knocked out Junior Dos Santos, also a former heavyweight champion, I think Stipe's the best of all time.
So when, you know, Stipe's able to beat you, and beat you by using his wrestling, and using his smarts, and using his octagon intelligence, and just his overall fight IQ, he just knows how to fight better.
He's just got more tools in the toolbox.
Francis can learn, and he's an incredible athlete, and what he has over everybody is power.
He has more power in his punch.
We have a machine out there called the Power Cube, and that machine, Francis registered the highest ever power punch by like 10,000 units, whatever the fuck that means.
So Tyrone Spong, who's a super powerful heavyweight boxer, he scored like 119, I think it was, or 114, and then Francis scored 129, 129,000.
Doesn't have the wrestling experience, doesn't have the wrestling technique, but what he has is incredible heart and desire and he's very hungry to learn.
And I'm very hopeful that he's going to learn and I really, really hope that he incorporates a real rigorous wrestling program because that was one thing that was lacking from his last training camp when he fought for Stipe.
Yeah, maybe you just like put USADA on the back burner for above 265. Like, guys, listen, you can do whatever you want.
You know, I'm hopeful that Francis still, I mean, he's a little older in terms of, like, being this new to the sport at 33. You know, I mean, really didn't even start training until he was 28, which is kind of crazy.
I mean, you want to talk about an amazing story that's like right out of a movie.
The guy was homeless, came from Africa where he worked in a fucking sand mine, and then gets to the number one contender spot in the UFC. But there's guys now, like Alexander Volkov.
And, you know, he was obviously fighting in the unlimited class, and he was fighting guys like Dan Severn at the time, who was, you know, 265. Zabit is thin, but he's got muscle on him.
He was running around the hotel lobby the day when we found out that Max Holloway could not make weight.
By the way, I shouldn't say could not make weight.
I believe Max would have made the weight.
The New York State Athletic Commission, they made some big errors.
I can go into detail with a couple of them.
One of them is they wouldn't let Paul Felder fight.
Paul Felder wanted to fight.
They said he's not ranked.
Paul Felder is a fucking killer.
He is a straight-up killer.
And him versus Khabib would have been a very interesting fight because Paul is a big 155. He's very big and very strong, and he is an expert, world-class striker.
Paul Felder is a dangerous, dangerous man for anybody at 155 pounds.
And he's a ground-and-pound expert.
He's also got very good defense in everything.
Very good defense standing up.
Very good defense on the ground.
I mean, Felder's fucking well-rounded.
I would have been very intrigued in that fight.
And they offered it to Felder.
Felder said, fuck yeah.
And then the New York State Athletic Commission said no.
He's on a four or five fight win streak, and he's beaten some very good guys like Jorge Masvidal, Ross Pearson.
He's beaten some legit guys.
Look, Iaquinta can bang, and he's tough as shit, and he's got a wrestling background, which I think played a big factor in that fight.
Obviously, he was greatly outclassed by a guy who I think is one of the greatest lightweights of all time.
And now that he's the champion, I'm very interested in seeing.
I think what we saw in that fight that was very intriguing was the fact that Iaquinta was able to get back up and that Iaquinta was one of the few guys that Nurmagomedov has ever fought that has stuffed a bunch of takedowns and then into the late rounds.
And this is a guy in Al that didn't even prepare for a five-round fight.
He was getting ready for a three-round fight with Paul Felder.
Well, I've goofed around about pro wrestling before, but my honest feelings, all bullshit aside, is this is one of the toughest professions in all of entertainment.
Well, one of the things about it is the range of motion that it gives you.
And for grapplers, I think it is mandatory.
I think it's a mandatory thing.
I fucked my neck up for a bunch of reasons.
One, from being an idiot and not tapping.
Two, from getting injured and still training.
But three, because one of my biggest moves is the arm triangle.
So in the arm triangle, when you get a head and arm choke, when I got the guy's arm trapped here, I'm using my neck.
So I'm constantly pinning things down with my neck.
And you're rolling...
For a fucking hour, a night, or whatever it is, it's a lot of pressure you're putting on your neck, and then defending things with your neck, and everything gets inflamed, and everything's injured, and you get these little micro-injuries that never really heal because you're back training again.
I think we both looked at it kind of skeptical when we first saw it, and then the guy did a demo for us, and we both used it and thought it was really cool.
And he was heavily addicted to, like, opioids for a long time.
And he actually went to the point where, I believe...
It was a situation where it was either the drugs or he gets fired, and he basically got fired from WWE or released or whatever happened, but sort of went down a really bad road, and it's just good to see him back and back being as healthy as he can be at this point because he went through a really rough time, you know?
I loved your documentary, Prescription Thugs, and I've shown it and recommended it to so many people.
I just think we live in a crazy time.
You're hearing all the time someone's cousin, my brother, this guy, my mom.
People get injured, they get on pills, and then they wind up dying, or they go down that road and they become addicts.
It is a fucking, not so silent, but epidemic in this country.
And a lot of people feel completely helpless because they're getting prescribed these things by their doctor, so they think they should take them.
And then, you know, you watch your friend drift away.
I mean, it happened to one of my family members.
I watched my family member go from being a normal guy to being a total fucking loser.
It's just because he hurt his back and he got hooked on pills and the next thing you can't keep a job and he's always on the pills and he never did shit when I knew him.
I grew up with this kid.
He was totally normal and now he's all fucked up and it's just...
Cro Cop smashed his nose with an elbow, and he had to get his nose reconstructed.
And when he got his nose reconstructed, they put him on pills.
Next thing you know, he's taking those pills all day long.
And it's four months later, and his buddies grabbed him, and they went to his house, and they opened up his medicine cabinet, they threw everything away, and they go, this is it.
It's over.
You're not doing this anymore, man.
And he's like, you're right, you're right.
And he went cold turkey.
Luckily, Brendan is a strong guy, mentally.
And he got off of it, and that was it.
And he likes to talk about it, because it's an important thing.
Because he goes, I would have never thought that I would get addicted to drugs.
And then Dr. Rhonda Patrick did a podcast with me where she was talking about the dangers of ibuprofen and all the different real severe side effects that people have.
And then the companies that are doing it, That screws them because now they've got to try to make their product cheaper to keep up with other people, but they're paying for the testing each time.
I can't really tell people that stuff because that's like illegal according to FDA. Now I can because I'm a filmmaker, right?
So I would say take two.
But for the most part, like a company can't tell you that.
Like, you know, you as the owner of Onnit can't say, take this many pills and this will like take this much alpha brain and it'll do this for your brain.
Because you say the wrong thing and the FDA is all over your ass, right?
So that's an issue.
Like the way that...
The way that Kratom needs to be marketed is like basically, the way that supplements are supposed to be marketed is you know that you're taking it for a specific response, but the FDA doesn't let you tell people that, which is just really screwed up too, because I think that that's a problem.
It's like an issue.
You should be able to say what it does.
The problem is people make way too many health claims.
So with Kratom, they make the health claim that it will cure opioid addiction.
And that's a huge claim to make.
And it's a ridiculous claim to make.
It can help somebody get over an opioid addiction.
But to say it cures an opioid addiction or to say that it even will cure your pain or help your pain, those are bigger claims than supplements are allowed to make.
And that's the issue with people coming down on it.
Man, it's like when you know someone that has that, it is such a helpless feeling because it's not a goddamn thing you can do about it.
I first experienced it when I was in high school.
My dad was an architect, and I got a lot of gigs over the summer working on construction sites.
And so I would hang out with a lot of these guys that were carpenters and laborers, and this one guy that I worked with was a great guy, but he couldn't fucking lay off the coke.
Well, you definitely make an impact and podcasts like this always make an impact.
There's people out there that are listening right now and they might be in their car.
They might be sitting at home just trying to figure out what the fuck to do with their life.
Sometimes all people need is that little extra juice, that little extra motivation that they get from hearing somebody like yourself that's gone through it.
And came out on the other side healthy and like fuck if he was crying looking in the mirror and feeling like shit and he was addicted to drugs and And and and he came from a healthy background and he came from a background where he's making a documentary about health when it got really bad You know when you when you start drinking in the morning, it's really bad Yeah, and alcohol became the worst part of it worse than worse than even you know the pills and I just remember They start selling alcohol in L.A. at 6 a.m.
And I remember I used to live right across from Gold's Gym in Venice.
And I'd get up and I'd walk across the street at like 545 because my car was parked.
I had to park across the street right by the gym.
I'd walk across the street over by the gym and I'd see my friends going into the gym for a workout.
And they'd be like, hey, Chris, what's going on?
And I'd be waving them.
I'd be going to the liquor store.
And that's when I knew it was really bad and things needed to change.
So I really do think that, like you said, it takes somebody just like that little thing.
So if there's people out there that are listening to this, just hit me up or hit up somebody and tell them that you're hurting because people will help you.
He had an issue with pills as well and I'm pretty sure, I don't want to speak out of school, but I'm pretty sure his came also from an injury and then he had a pill problem and then was trying to figure out what the fuck to do with it and went down to Mexico Went to an Ibogaine clinic and then said, wow, this is, I mean, fixed him up totally and then opened up his own clinic.
One thing I didn't understand is I interviewed this doctor, Debra Mash, and it's probably because she's in Florida.
She's tied in with politicians, which is always a problem.
And so she's 100% for ibogaine, but she's also against kratom, which makes no sense because she thinks that kratom is...
Because ibogaine, you have to go get it medically supervised and medically done, and she just thinks giving people kratom is loosey-goosey kind of stuff.
Man, I'm 100% for clinics opening up and then giving the money to the doctors and give the money to the state.
If you can get Ibogaine into the hands of a lot of these people, it's so ruthlessly introspective.
Not from my personal experience, but Aubrey's taken it.
I know several people, Ed has taken it.
I know several people that have taken it and it's completely turned their life around where they had this...
Intense 24-hour experience where you just examine every single aspect of your life in this really alien way and then after it's over you like I'm never fucking drinking again or I'm never taking pills again and they really do change their life and it's also Not just an introspective experience, but it also rewires the way your brain handles the addiction.
I'm not qualified to speak how, because I don't really understand it.
One of the highest rates of success, another super high rate of success that we might be getting in California, it's on the ballot in 2018, is legalizing psilocybin.
If they can legalize psilocybin, that can fix a lot of fucking people, too.
And that's also something that you don't die from.
Well, Johns Hopkins University did some studies on it, and one of the things they found is soldiers with PTSD. This is one thing that MAPS is concentrating on now, especially soldiers with PTSD and anybody with PTSD, rape victims, violent assault victims.
Some people have some real hard times getting past past events.
And psilocybin has incredible effects on that.
But MDMA also does.
And right now, MAPS is involved in some pretty heavy clinical trials with MDMA. And they think 2021 is around the time where they're going to have MDMA clinics.
And then it'll be legal.
Because we have so many soldiers that are coming back from war, and they're all fucked up, and they have no solutions.
They put these people on pills and antidepressants and all these different things, anti-anxiety medication.
Psilocybin and MDMA have shown to have massive, powerful, beneficial effects.
I think that what a lot of people don't understand is when you have an addiction, there's deep-seated things in your mind, in your subconscious, that drive you to go to the pills or go to the drinks or whatever.
And it doesn't just go away when you get sober.
You sort of work a lot of it out.
But some of the subconscious stuff, you can't work out.
So I'm like, man, there's still things, habits I don't like about myself.
I'll connect you to Aubrey because he's really tight with those guys that are in the middle of those studies right now and he's actually gone through that protocol and he's helped other people.
Well, for sure with MDMA, which you get in pill form, it's actually made from the bark of a tree.
Didn't we go over this the other day?
Where the fuck's it from?
Malaysia or some shit?
Something like that.
There's a tree, and there's a real issue now in this country where this bark is, because, you know, there's fucking wars going on to try to get this tree.
And it's not a very common tree, either.
I mean, it's rare, and we could be in a situation where they chop down all the fucking trees that make ecstasy before we make it legal.
I don't know what the mechanism is behind it, but it does give me a sense of euphoria.
It does make me happier.
One thing I've always noticed about training is that when you feel good, you can lift so much better and it just makes you feel really good because You know, you're trying to lift with some force, just like you hitting these bags and stuff.
You're trying to put something into it.
And if you can't put the mustard on it that you want to because your shoulder hurts, it makes you grumpy.
This stuff really matters to us.
So for me, for lifting-wise, it's like I feel like I can go all in.
I was actually just saying the other day, when I'm sitting down...
And I go to get up, especially after some of these like squat workouts and stuff, it's kind of slow.
It takes me a minute.
But on Kratom, boom, I feel like I can get up and run out the door.
It feels like almost, I would consider it similar to getting out of a hot tub.
The way that you feel going into the hot tub, you're like, man, my shit's just kind of, I don't even know.
Everything's just stiff, right?
Can't get up and down the stairs so good.
I got to do the sideways trot down the stairs every morning.
And I get in the hot tub and I can zing up the stairs.
But I'm telling you, man, there's nothing like running up hills.
And the hills that I run, it's all rocky terrain, so I'm jumping from one rock to the next, and it's steep like that.
So I'm running up, and I have to take a couple of breaks to get to the top.
It's a half a mile up and half a mile in.
I have two different courses that I run.
Well, I have several, but the ones that I run the most, the full length of it, I could run as long as four miles, or I could break it up into one or two.
When you talk about your diet and its impact on inflammation, do you ever think that if you got on this diet when you were younger, you wouldn't have had to get hip replacements?
Every joint in my lower body, from my ankles, my knees, my hips.
And the guy basically just said, you need to go get a full-body MRI. So I get a full-body MRI, and he tells me that there's really nothing wrong with me.
And I'm like, I don't know what you're looking at, but I can't walk in the morning.
And he's like, ah, well, you don't really have cartilage in your knees.
That's going away, but you do have it in your ankles.
And he didn't really offer me any solutions.
And it was at that point where I realized...
If I'm going to do anything, a doctor's not going to be the one to help me.
So I think a lot of times people are always so concerned, like, did you ask a doctor?
And I'm always like, well, doctors never really helped me.
It's myself always helping me.
It's me researching things that cause me pain that really helped me.
So that's what I had to do, was go out and look for it myself.
Yeah, I should go back to him and say, hey, you know, they screwed up my hip and they left a bad hip in me for two years and I went to the doctor and I went to my doctor and I said, doc, this is debilitating.
And so he takes a tissue box and he throws it on the ground.
And he says, pick that up.
And I pick it up.
And he said, you're using the wrong terminology.
It's not debilitating, or else you wouldn't be able to pick that up.
And I thought it was the rudest thing I've ever heard a doctor do or say.
Like, ruthless.
Like, really?
So I'm using the wrong word, but big deal.
I can't pick something up off the floor.
It hurts.
And I was trying to tell him, like, you don't understand.
This hurts.
And he's like, nah, you're not hurt.
You're fine.
He actually told me to go back to the gym and start lifting.
Well, I'm still in a lot of pain when I wake up every morning.
Are you?
Yeah, it goes away when I – the thing is that the diet has helped clear up like a lot of inflammation.
It's also helped clear up a lot of body fat, which helps you get into better, more advantageous positions when you're lifting, you know, that you can't – I couldn't even bend down to deadlift properly.
Yeah, your gut would get in the way and all that stuff like that.
So get rid of those things and that helps a lot.
Losing weight in general always is going to improve health markers and you're always going to feel lighter and better, you know, for the most part.
And then it was at this like losing weight.
And then when I started taking Kratom with a ketogenic diet, And really reduced my inflammation is when I started feeling better.
So it was sort of a combination of those two things and continuing to move.
They always say that, because there's a lot of people in my class that have some serious issues that can't move well, or there's this one lady who goes, and she's fucking courageous, man, because this lady's so overweight, and she goes to this yoga class and she does her best, and And I see her, and I want to say something to her, but I don't want to say something to her.
I don't want to be the guy and go, hey, for a giant lady, you're fucking putting it up there.
I don't want to, like, you know?
I say hi, and I smile at her, but she's courageous.
She's every bit of 450, 500 pounds.
I'm just guessing.
She's enormous.
But she does it.
She tries.
She's got her arms up.
She's bending forward.
She's doing her best.
And if you just keep showing up, it'll get better.
Like, you're not going to be able to get into those positions initially, but if you keep showing up...
In a yoga class where it's already warm, that helps a lot, but...
People need to understand that the more intense the exercise is that you're going to do, the longer your warmup needs to be.
So if you're going for a two-hour walk, how much warmup do you need?
Probably none.
There's not a lot of intensity behind that.
But if you're trying to run 40-meter sprints, Then you better warm up for half an hour and probably minimum so you don't tear a hamstring.
Same thing with trying to bench heavy or squat heavy.
Not just the exercise itself either.
That's a mistake, I think.
I think you have to warm up with other means.
And the easiest way to warm up is through your upper body.
So you go in the gym and you can do curls and shoulder stuff if your shoulder's healthy.
That's the fastest way.
SkiErg is a great way.
The fastest, easiest way to warm up your body is through the upper body.
A lot of times our knees and our What do you mean?
Well, because like your knees and your lower back, I mean, just in general, this isn't everybody, but in general, a lot of people, the knees, the lower back and some of those things are going to take time to warm up.
And you can warm them up faster just by getting the upper body to move.
When you utilize your upper body, you get your heart rate up a little bit faster.
I don't even like when they fight more than one time in a night.
And they got away with that back in the day, and I know Glory still does that for some of their kickboxing tournaments, but it's just fucking dangerous.
It's just not smart.
Guys get concussed, and then they fight again an hour later, two hours later.
I still want to do a film with Pat, a scripted film.
We've been talking about it.
We talked about it a long time ago, and now I have a little bit of clout now.
I'm starting to talk about it again.
But his life was insane.
He had two brothers that died, and one brother that ended up going to jail for like 15 years, and he was the runt of the family, and he ended up becoming the first ever UFC lightweight champion.
What's great about that book, also, it tells the whole story of how the UFC started, how it got started and all the players involved, and it tells that whole story, which is really cool.
Well, hopefully it will be on Netflix, Amazon, whatever.
I'm not sure exactly where it will be yet.
We've partnered with The Orchard, and they're the distribution company, so right now they're in the process of figuring out where it will be.
But I'll let everybody know.
It'll probably start out, to tell you the truth, on iTunes is the normal route.
And then you let it play on iTunes for a while.
There's a whole system to it because it makes money in different ways, different places.
Unfortunately, for documentary filmmakers, Netflix is sort of your graveyard at the end because you want it to be on Netflix because everybody has access to it.
But as a filmmaker, they really shaft you.
Do they?
How?
Because they buy the film from the distribution company, and then all that money just goes back to the investor, and it's like, I don't see any money out of it.
So the only way to make documentaries and make them profitable is make them really, really cheap, and a lot of times we don't do that, so we end up losing some money on it a lot of times.
Yeah, because the thing about cheating in the Olympic Games, it's always been suspected, but to get it so confirmed, where you have the guy that did it, and he's running from the Russian mob, or whatever you want to call them, and they're trying to fucking kill him, and now he's in hiding.
He's still in hiding to this day in America in protective custody, and they're looking for him.
We should tell people what Icarus is, too, if they don't know what we're talking about.
So this would be a standalone podcast.
It's a documentary that Brian Fogel made where he decided to ride his bike in a race clean, completely clean, and then do it on steroids to see what his times would be, how much benefit he would have.
And in the process of him filming this documentary, the guy who hooked him up, this guy Grigory from Russia, who was the head, Unbeknownst to him, of the Russian state-sponsored doping program.
He thought he was getting a guy who was like the Russian USADA, that it was going to tell him what the cheaters use.
But it turned out, along the way, everything got exposed, and he was like, look, I did this for 40 years, I dope everybody, everybody on drugs.
And he said every fucking single athlete that was in the Olympics was on some shit.
And then he explained how they did it, and everybody was like, what the fuck?
And then...
They were going to pull the Russians, and then the other thing that he exposed is the collusion between WADA and the IOC, and that they all work for each other, and they switch fucking roles, and they go back and forth with each other, and that they're not going to punish the Russians.
But what they're doing now is they kind of have to because of that movie.
I mean, that movie literally changed the Olympics.
See, this all came from a tweet that I read from John Joseph from the Cro-Mags, who's a pretty rampant rabid vegan and a badass triathlete and very, very athletic guy, right?
He was the one that said that, and I was like, wow, is that true?
And he said that the guy died of a heart attack and that his wife was covering it up.
So I went to look into it, and it's very difficult to say because even Snopes had it as inconclusive.