Jan. 27, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:43:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. | ||
| What's up, my man? | ||
| What's up, buddy? | ||
| You got a whole book of stuff to talk about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're prepared. | ||
| I'm prepared a little bit. | ||
| You're like a professional. | ||
| There's something special. | ||
| There's something special and we're gonna kick this off with a bang. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something I don't know about? | ||
| Something you don't know about. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| But we'll get into it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Special. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| You gonna do it now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Awesome. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| Well, you and your team, you picked Fight for the Forgotten, my nonprofit, as Charity of Choice with Buffalo Trace. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we're going to do something really special for all your fans. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But first, I wanted to do something. | ||
| I talked with Bo Beckman, his great-grandfather's great-grandfather. | ||
| I think his name's like T.H., I don't know, Eckert or something like that. | ||
| He started basically the modern-day bourbon in America. | ||
| So anyways, I asked him, I was talking to Bo, and said, can we do something special for Joe? | ||
| And he was like, yeah, what are you thinking? | ||
| And so I talked with my buddy Ryan, who's the vice president of our board, and we thought about it and we were like, what if we could get a barrel from Buffalo Trace and we could give it to Joe? | ||
| And so we thought we'd do a sample tasting for you, and you get to pick a single barrel select. | ||
| Basically, I guess, I'm not a whiskey connoisseur, but basically you're about to be able to do a wine, or not wine, but whiskey tasting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| And you're going to be able to pick out your own Buffalo Trace barrel. | ||
| That doesn't taste like any of the rest. | ||
| What I didn't know about barrels of whiskey is that, what is it? | ||
| They come from like 70 to 90 year old trees. | ||
| And then each one of them starts off as kind of like this moonshine looking. | ||
| It's clear when they put it in the barrels. | ||
| But then the taste of whiskey comes from like 67% of the taste comes from the barrel itself. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But the trees are all different trees, right? | ||
| So those things, I think they call them staves or something. | ||
| It's like 28 to 35 of those things that make the barrel, but they come from all these different trees. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The wood slats. | |
| Yeah, the wood slats. | ||
| And so they all taste different, every barrel, whenever it's a single select barrel. | ||
| So I guess like what they do at Buffalo Trace is they take a bunch of those barrels and they put them all in there together so it has one consistent taste. | ||
| But whenever you just take one barrel, it's always a unique flavor. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So we got a few of them for you to try. | ||
| Goddamn whiskey nerds. | ||
| I'm not a whiskey nerd, but here we go. | ||
| Here's going to be sample one. | ||
| I need you to put that maybe to the left or right. | ||
| So I have to test these? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here's the idea. | ||
| Looks like I'm going to get hammered again. | ||
| Need glasses? | ||
| We got them right here. | ||
| I got them right here. | ||
| I talked to Bo. | ||
| Bo helped us out. | ||
| So, do you like yours with water in it? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| What am I, girl? | ||
| Well, this is the idea. | ||
| Or this is how we wanted to say thank you. | ||
| You need to pick your own thing. | ||
| Yep, here's the glass. | ||
| Oh, this is hilarious. | ||
| But this is why we're doing it. | ||
| It's nerdy, sure. | ||
| I like some nerdy things. | ||
| Don't worry, it's not a negative. | ||
| Yeah, here's why we're doing it. | ||
| We wanted to say thank you from Fight for the Forgotten and Buffalo Trace, because we're about to do this big raffle for Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| But you'll get 220 bottles yourself from whatever whiskey you choose. | ||
| 220 bottles of whiskey? | ||
| Yeah, but what we're going to do... | ||
| Jesus Christ, are you trying to kill me? | ||
| No. | ||
| We're trying to give you a gift that you can give your guest. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If you'd like. | ||
| It'll have the Joe Rogan Experience logo on it. | ||
| I'll have a thank you from Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| So this is sample number one. | ||
| That's sample number one. | ||
| Go on the left with sample number one. | ||
| Sample number one. | ||
| I'll give it a little right there. | ||
| And then... | ||
| It's going to be a real problem this episode. | ||
| I might start crying. | ||
| This is sample number two. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I can tell you about them, actually. | ||
| Can you really? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Specifically? | ||
| I like how they come in these little, like, whiskey flask-type deals. | ||
| Yeah, so they took this straight from the barrel. | ||
| And each one of these should have a very distinct or different taste. | ||
| And so basically... | ||
| You can choose it. | ||
| I mean, you can figure out... | ||
| I don't know if you want to take notes. | ||
| That's real nerdy, but they gave me one of these. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Bo's a great guy. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Notes like hints and tastes. | ||
| You can do barrel one, two, three, four. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you going to remember? | |
| We'll do this right here. | ||
| By the time I get to barrel three, it's just guesswork. | ||
| I did a pot tasting thing once. | ||
| It was... | ||
| Pot tasting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cannabis? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was a cannabis cop. | ||
| I was one of the judges. | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| I was obliterated. | ||
| By the time I got to the third or fourth choice, I had no idea where I was. | ||
| I couldn't feel my legs. | ||
| Let's try number one. | ||
| Sample number one is seven years and nine months old. | ||
| Came from Warehouse L on the fourth floor. | ||
| Tastes good. | ||
| Tastes good? | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Buffalo Trace. | ||
| They make a damn good whiskey. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| They've been so good to us. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Now I'll try number two. | ||
| I feel like such a dork. | ||
| I'm smelling it and shit. | ||
| You know when I do that at wine? | ||
| Like if I buy a glass of wine at a restaurant and they pour it for you and they let you smell it? | ||
| I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. | ||
| I pretend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You would know. | |
| I've asked that too because I used to serve it. | ||
| I'd be like, why are people doing this? | ||
| This seems so dumb. | ||
| No one's ever given one back. | ||
| On a rare occasion, you have to send one back because something's fucked up. | ||
| Oh, one time I did have to send a glass back, buy the glass, because I think they had it open too long. | ||
| I never do this, but I go, this tastes like vinegar. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
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It can rarely happen. | |
| But I think that was at a place where the bottle was just sitting around for a couple weeks or something and nobody had ordered it. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Number two. | ||
| Number two. | ||
| This one is eight years, three months old. | ||
| It's very good, too. | ||
| Which one do you like between the two? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| They're both really good. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They do make good fucking whiskey. | ||
| Like, you can taste the difference. | ||
| Like, some people are like, how do you tell? | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| So this is how Bo said it. | ||
| All you gotta do is, like, if you have four pancakes in front of you, keep it simple. | ||
| Which pancake do you like the best? | ||
| Fucking pancakes. | ||
| It was three. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Three's got a nice taste. | ||
| That's a little unusual. | ||
| Where's it rank? | ||
| Three is eight years, two months old. | ||
| So is three the oldest? | ||
| Actually, two is the oldest so far. | ||
| Eight years, three months. | ||
| Two and three are my favorites. | ||
| Two and three. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like one. | |
| It's guessing. | ||
| If you gave me one and said it was three, I'd be like, amazing. | ||
| I have good taste. | ||
| So you could see if one has more character, like a bolder flavor, one that you think your friends would enjoy more that don't know much about whiskey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| They're all the same. | ||
| They're all the same? | ||
| I'm lying. | ||
| I'm lying to these people. | ||
| I can't tell the difference. | ||
| They're all great. | ||
| I think three was slightly different. | ||
| Three was slightly different. | ||
| But they all taste like really good whiskey. | ||
| You liked three and two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we go. | |
| We're going to do two and three. | ||
| I narrowed it down to two and three. | ||
| But that's just like, if you gave me a bottle of one and told me it was three, I'd be like, perfect. | ||
| I really wouldn't know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm just lying. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Here's three. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's real good. | |
| All right, here's two. | ||
| I mean, maybe there's a slight difference between two and three. | ||
| Let's just go with three. | ||
| It's a good number. | ||
| Three is the magic number, according to De La Soul. | ||
| Three is the magic number, and that one was born October 25th, 2012. Alright, perfect. | ||
| So they say that's when it was born. | ||
| Yay. | ||
| So, basically what we're going to do is we're going to be able to do that and make you a bottle, 220 bottles, and it'll have the Joe Rogan Experience logo on it. | ||
| And then you can give it to your guest as a thank you for being on the show. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Do you drink? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not at all? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| This is actually freedom for me. | ||
| I don't even... | ||
| But I can be around it. | ||
| And I can enjoy it because this is what Buffalo Trace has done for us. | ||
| Jamie, I don't know if it's okay. | ||
| You don't drink at all? | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| When did you stop? | ||
| When I was 23. So I'm 33. Did we talk about this? | ||
| We have talked about this. | ||
| We've talked about it. | ||
| I'm going to talk about it a little more. | ||
| But on fightfortheforgotten.org, there's something really special that Buffalo Trace did because you told them to donate to us. | ||
| It's the first thing on our website. | ||
| It's a raffle that we're doing. | ||
| Around December, 15,000 people tried to get a hold of one of these barrels. | ||
| And so if you hit order or enter today, basically on there, there's a Buffalo Trace whiskey raffle. | ||
| And on that, you get like a Disney World experience for whiskey lovers. | ||
| You get to go out to the Buffalo Trace distillery. | ||
| And you get to, you and seven guests would be able to do it. | ||
| You can enter for $10, $25, $50, or $100. | ||
| And you get a VIP tour. | ||
| Bo's going to do it himself. | ||
| You know, his great, great grandfather is the one that basically modernized bourbon drinking today. | ||
| And then you get to stay at the lodge that they have there. | ||
| And then I'm going to go up there and visit them. | ||
| And we're going to go around all the different warehouses. | ||
| And they can taste literally straight from the barrel. | ||
| And then at the end, they could either buy a barrel for themselves and have 220 bottles or we're trying to find a donor. | ||
| Maybe my friend Ryan Llewellyn, who's a whiskey connoisseur, he might go ahead and buy it on their behalf and they'll get 220 bottles themselves. | ||
| That's so much to give someone. | ||
| Yeah, but they get to pick it. | ||
| You just ask me for trouble. | ||
| Well, actually, they said that they could resell it to any local store. | ||
| Any store's probably going to buy it. | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| And so they'll make a profit off of it. | ||
| Do you know this company's older than the United States? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Buffalo Trace is from 1773. Wow. | ||
| Yeah, they're three years older than the United States. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| That's a long-standing company. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So our goal on that is to raise $100,000. | ||
| Bo really thinks we can do it. | ||
| We even thought, man, if 15,000 people tried to do, you know, 15,000 people tried to get it around Christmas time on these barrels, you know, let's just mention it on the show, it might be able to get 40,000 people. | ||
| If they did $25 raffle tickets, 40,000 people. | ||
| That's the first time Fight for the Forgotten would ever raise a million dollars from any one specific donor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And so it's going to be incredible for us because we're really trying to expand in the Congo, or sorry, actually Uganda with the Pygmies. | ||
| How many wells have been dug so far? | ||
| 73. Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And when I came on the first time, zero. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And we've been able to provide water, clean water, to over 60,000 people. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And right now, Dustin, whenever we fought Khabib, he helped us raise, I don't want to slaughter, but it was either $155,000 or $185,000. | ||
| It was him, Dana, and Khabib. | ||
| Whenever they did their shirt exchange, Dustin said he was going to try to raise $25,000 for us. | ||
| He blew through that before even the fight started. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's amazing. | ||
| And then they exchanged shirts. | ||
| And then we were able to take that money. | ||
| We were able to buy 48 acres of land for the pygmies in Uganda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And so when they got kicked out of the Simuliki National Forest in Uganda. | ||
| Why did they get kicked out of it? | ||
| The Ugandan Wildlife Authority would say to protect the forest and to protect the animals, although the pygmies are the protectors of the forest. | ||
| And they deserve part of the forest because they're the people of the forest. | ||
| And so I would say it was politics. | ||
| Was there an issue with overhunting or nothing? | ||
| No, they only take what they need. | ||
| And they don't go after elephants. | ||
| They don't go after the things they're not supposed to. | ||
| They just go after the wild hogs. | ||
| I mean, they eat what they get. | ||
| But there was no poaching and they put them on one acre of land behind the slums. | ||
| One acre. | ||
| Said this is where, for Chief Zito, they said this is where your 300 people can live. | ||
| 300 people can live on one acre of land. | ||
| It's on the slums. | ||
| They throw out the sewage and literally the sewage just starts going through it. | ||
| I've seen them pick up their firewood because the fire would go out from the raw sewage from the slums. | ||
| And so they'd have to shift where they're cooking. | ||
| I was walking over these mounds. | ||
| That's why we really needed to get them new land and shift them from living right behind the slums. | ||
| And it was honestly, it was heart-wrenching because I was walking on these mounds and I asked Chief Zito, I go, what are these mounds? | ||
| He goes, they won't give us anywhere to bury our dead. | ||
| We live on top of our cemetery. | ||
| And there was over 150 people that were buried there. | ||
| So literally over 300 people on one acre. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| They buried on top of each other, right side by side. | ||
| That is insane. | ||
| It was like 1 to 1.25 acres, but it was less than 2 acres. | ||
| And so Dustin made it possible through the Good Fight Foundation donating to Fight for the Forgotten, and Khabib donating his shirt, and Dana matching it for us to go get 48 acres of new land. | ||
| We also drilled a water tower, not just a well, but a water tower for an orphanage and a school that the Pygmy kids started going to. | ||
| And now we've started farms on that 48 acres of new land. | ||
| I actually talked to Manny Pacquiao's team. | ||
| One of their missions is to build homes. | ||
| And Manny Pacquiao, yesterday, his executive director gave us confirmation that they're going to donate $50,000 to us to help complete 32 homes for these 32 surviving families. | ||
| And so they're actually being taught how to drill wells and be part of that process, how to farm with agriculturalists, growing corn, cassava, potatoes, and peanuts. | ||
| But also we're about to start teaching them how to make bricks, how to build homes. | ||
| And they're going to go from never having a real home, you know, living in the forest to then now being in these shacks to now that each family is going to have a two-bedroom home at least. | ||
| And then they're going to have a patio. | ||
| They're going to have a kitchen inside, a dining room. | ||
| It's just going to absolutely change their way of life. | ||
| So this 48 acres, is that enough for them to hunt on? | ||
| It's not enough for them to hunt on, so that's why we're having to teach them how to farm. | ||
| Now, if they can still go into the forest, that's going to be some talking with the... | ||
| They're allowed to go hunt for basically wild mushrooms or, I guess, gather. | ||
| They're allowed to go gather firewood. | ||
| They're allowed to go gather... | ||
| Like fruits and vegetables and roots. | ||
| Like wild plants. | ||
| But they can't hunt. | ||
| They can't hunt. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| In the Congo, it's much different because there's so much virgin for us. | ||
| It's been untouched and they can still go in there and they can hunt and gather. | ||
| They can get wild hog. | ||
| I mean, I've had... | ||
| I've had a diker, this little antelope. | ||
| I've had a hog. | ||
| I've had a parrot. | ||
| I've had a monkey there. | ||
| That's what we talked about. | ||
| There's an amazing documentary from the BBC on the Congo. | ||
| And one of the things that it covers is the diker. | ||
| And that the diker actually swims underwater. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, they swim underwater and eat fish. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, this is what's crazy. | ||
| What the documentary was discussing was how rapid it was that these grasslands turned into rainforests. | ||
| Apparently it was a very drastic climate shift, and a lot of these plains animals got stuck in the Congo. | ||
| It's pretty wild, because you can see these herds, I guess they would be herds, of antelope. | ||
| Running through the swamp. | ||
| They're like trampling through this, like all these animals you would normally see like in these little grassy plains. | ||
| They're running through the water and this little diker, that little antelope thing, swims underwater. | ||
| They can swim underwater as long as 100 yards. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Have you ever seen an okapi or an okapi? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cool looking. | ||
| That's like a zebra. | ||
| That's like a zebra butt and a giraffe head and then the body of an antelope or a big elk. | ||
| What is that related to though? | ||
| Is it related to a zebra? | ||
| It's actually the only other animal in the Giraffidae family. | ||
| So it's actually, if you look at their little horns and then also their long, long tongues, that's where they, they're part of the Giraffidae family. | ||
| I guess most all the, or all the other ones have been extinct. | ||
| But I've actually had a poacher, yeah, I had a poacher try to sell me its meat when it was fresh and then he came back and tried to sell me its pelt. | ||
| And those things are endangered. | ||
| There's only like a couple hundred of them or something like that, maybe 2,000 max in the world. | ||
| And they're only right there in Mombasa rainforest, in the Eturi rainforest. | ||
| They should bring them over here to Texas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Put them on a high fence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, what's crazy is they had a rebel group that went through the Okapi National Reserve. | ||
| This was probably in... | ||
| I think it was right before I was there or the year I was there. | ||
| This was like 2013 or 14, maybe 2012. But I believe it was the Mai Mai that went through there and they just started slaughtering these Okapi at the Okapi National Reserve. | ||
| So they got pushed out of where they were doing their illegal gold mining. | ||
| They had taken over this gold mine. | ||
| They slaughtered them for food? | ||
| No, they just slaughtered them by meanness when they were fleeing. | ||
| When they were fleeing, they went through there and they just murdered them. | ||
| Just for fun? | ||
| Just for fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just out of meanness. | ||
| So I actually saw that rebel leader, his name was Morgan. | ||
| I don't know if he went by like a code named Morgan, but anyways, they were dragging him behind the truck. | ||
| Whenever they had killed him, he like peacefully turned himself in, but I don't know, he had his rebel groups that were like looking in, so they killed him right there, and they took him out of there. | ||
| So you got to watch that. | ||
| Yeah, well, I got to watch his body be drugged. | ||
| You must have saw some wild shit over there. | ||
| Yeah, I saw a guy get killed. | ||
| He was accused of being a thief, but it was just outside this bar. | ||
| And normally at night, they boarded up. | ||
| Basically, if you think about an old Wild Wild West thing, they board it all up, shut it down whenever sunset comes. | ||
| That's the same thing there in the rainforest. | ||
| Because if a rebel group comes through, you want to already be prepared. | ||
| You don't want to be out after dark. | ||
| But there was this bar that was kind of staying open and... | ||
| These guys are drunk and they accuse the guy being a thief and everyone thought he was a thief and so mob justice happened and they literally just jumped him and they beat him to death and I tried to get in there and one of our well drillers grabbed me and said no no no if you go over there we're gonna turn on you and uh so it turns out those guys were just drunk they accused the guy being a thief they didn't like the guy they had like some feud with him they just accused him being a thief and he got killed and the next day when I came by in the morning He was in basically like a, not a gutter, but a ditch. | ||
| And he was bent up like a pretzel. | ||
| I mean, it was awful. | ||
| It was a terrible scene. | ||
| And his body was just laying there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No one did anything with it? | ||
| No one did anything. | ||
| I mean, eventually they did. | ||
| Their family would have to come get them. | ||
| But no one's going to come get them in the dark whenever rebel groups and things are somewhat in the area. | ||
| You never know when they can come through the town. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| A Blood Diamond movie, something like that, where they'll drive through with the trucks and have the guys with the machine guns in the back. | ||
| And it's pretty crazy. | ||
| You know, there's a thing that happens when people go to really crazy environments. | ||
| They leave and then they have this bizarre desire to go back, to experience the thrill of the fear and the danger again. | ||
| You know, people talk about that with war. | ||
| You know, that's the part of the show, the movie The Hurt Locker, was about... | ||
| I haven't seen that yet. | ||
| It's about a guy who kind of, he's a veteran, but he kind of gets addicted to, or they imply, I believe that's... | ||
| Jamie, that's what it was about, right? | ||
| It's like the guy was addicted to the thrill of disarming bombs. | ||
| But people say that about places that they go to, that I've heard people talk about that, that are adventurers, that go to remote mountain ranges and almost lose their life, but they can't wait to go back for some strange reason. | ||
| Did you feel that about the Congo? | ||
| I felt almost, I don't know if it's survivor's guilt or what, but when I came back, I couldn't really sleep in my bed for quite a while. | ||
| I would say over two months. | ||
| And the reason was I didn't have a bed there. | ||
| I just slept on the dirt and the fire was my blanket. | ||
| So you wanted to sleep almost on the dirt here? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I felt like they didn't have one, so maybe I didn't deserve one. | ||
| And I know that's twisted. | ||
| But I buried a couple of kids, a little boy named Mandibo, another boy named Babo. | ||
| Little Mo had died and Fina just recently died. | ||
| Well, she died in 2020. I met her when she had tuberculosis and she was seven years old and she just died at 14 years old and it was a lung thing. | ||
| They say it was, she had a dead lung in there and she needed a transplant, but it was while COVID was going on too. | ||
| And we got her out of the Congo and this was like February or March. | ||
| And we got her out of the Congo and got her to Uganda, got her to a good hospital. | ||
| And then they said we needed to take her to one other place. | ||
| To not have a lung transplant, but just to remove the dead. | ||
| I think it was the left lung inside of her. | ||
| And so in transport, whenever she was being taken there, she's 14 years old. | ||
| You know, she died. | ||
| And so we're trying to save her life, but we had to send her back in like a... | ||
| You know, a casket and that kind of stuff like messes with you and it's heartbreaking and you want to make sure it doesn't happen again for some of these kids and so I think I've been to at least five funerals of children under the age of five years old. | ||
| And so, you know, that kind of hard stuff, I mean, I've been told by Dr. Daniel Amen and some other people that I have PTSD from some of this stuff, you know, taking rape victims to the hospital right after they've been gang raped, like tied to a tree and gang raped. | ||
| And when that kind of stuff happens, it's very brutal on the women mentally, but also physically, you know, sometimes they need surgeries and To try to help them be normal again. | ||
| Not to get too graphic, but there's a guy that won a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| He actually passed away now, but he's from the Congo. | ||
| He's from Goma. | ||
| And he was revolutionary or innovative in that surgery, like repairing women's and giving them a normal life again so they can stay clean and be hygienic and things like that. | ||
| So, it's been a lot. | ||
| And honestly, man, I was hoping to come in on this podcast and be, you know, more real and more raw. | ||
| I mean, I feel like I'm normally a pretty transparent dude on here. | ||
| And that's why I'm going through life. | ||
| But... | ||
| 2020 was actually the hardest year of my life. | ||
| The first six months was the toughest six months of my life. | ||
| And then the last six months, even now, has been the best of my life, which has been an incredible turnaround. | ||
| But, man, I think this year, 2021, my goal is healing and kind of healing from the inside out. | ||
| I've been doing that physically from a lot of stuff that I've gotten there. | ||
| But I've been trying to do it like... | ||
| Emotionally or mentally and just mind and heart healing, but it's been quite a journey. | ||
| In March, I'd say that from 23 when I stopped drinking, What's cool about this moment for me is I'm not just been sober, sitting in defeat, maybe in these meetings where I don't have a hopeful life or a great life to live. | ||
| Those meetings can be great, but sometimes you see some old-timers and they're not living in victory or they're not walking free. | ||
| They're sitting in defeat. | ||
| And so, like, for me to be able to sit here with you and let you, you know, taste some of the greatest whiskey there is, and for me to be able to go up on a trip and experience that with whoever wins this raffle, it's going to be pretty incredible. | ||
| But in 2020, I was in 90 days of rehab, and I was also in 90 days of sober living. | ||
| And so I'd relapsed. | ||
| And it was mainly to Oxy, but also weed and some other things. | ||
| Did you get injured? | ||
| Well, I had a shoulder surgery. | ||
| Is that when you started taking oxys? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| And you actually helped a couple years ago. | ||
| My ex-wife had reached out and she was looking for something. | ||
| And I think you had told her about Kratom or Kratom. | ||
| It was from my phone. | ||
| And who's that? | ||
| Hamilton Morris? | ||
| Is that his name? | ||
| He had said about Kratom or Kratom here. | ||
| And that helped melt away the withdrawals. | ||
| Withdrawals from Oxy are... | ||
| Besides malaria, it's the next hardest thing I've ever gone through. | ||
| Were you on an excessive dose? | ||
| I was on it for four weeks and I had six or eight weeks worth of prescriptions. | ||
| But since I abused it so much from 17 to 23, whenever you take that stuff, you can get addicted within the first, I don't know, nine days. | ||
| Like you're hooked to it chemically. | ||
| It's one of the fastest... | ||
| It's almost like it's the pharmaceutical version of heroin, right? | ||
| So... | ||
| Whenever I had that shoulder surgery, it was such a brutal one. | ||
| I didn't want to go on Oxy at all. | ||
| But it was such a major surgery that I'd be in a cast where I couldn't move at all or sling for eight full weeks. | ||
| What did you get done? | ||
| I had my labrum. | ||
| And I had four, not pins, but anchors put in. | ||
| And there's some other stuff they did too, but that was the main part of it. | ||
| They like scraped out some There was a cyst that was sitting in there in between the labrum and in between the glenoid, the joint there. | ||
| So they just scooped that out. | ||
| Had a bunch of scar tissue. | ||
| And when they got in there, they thought it was going to take four hours. | ||
| We'll end up taking like eight hours. | ||
| And I'm grateful that that surgeon helped save my shoulder. | ||
| He actually sits on my board as the chairman of my board. | ||
| Now I fight for the forgotten. | ||
| And he's been such a gift to us and to me in my career, but also to us as an organization. | ||
| Your shoulder's all good now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My left one's better than my right one. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Really. | ||
| Labrums are a weird one, right? | ||
| Because it's a cartilage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like it doesn't get a good blood supply. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They say labrum surgery for people when they get to a certain age, it's like basically useless. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's why I'm really glad we got that treatment in our shoulders and our knees to keep it growing new tissue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But basically, after 10 years of mostly being sober, I had three major relapses where it was like 30 days, 9 days, and then 5 days. | ||
| So it was getting shorter and shorter. | ||
| But after my divorce, which was really healthy for both of us, and we're actually great friends, I want her to be awesome. | ||
| She's going to be a rockstar counselor and help a lot of people. | ||
| And she's rooting for me. | ||
| And, but still no one gets married to get a divorce. | ||
| And so, um, I think, you know, the silver lining was that we had the kindest divorce and any of our friends or family ever heard about. | ||
| It was so easy. | ||
| Um, and we even went through counseling to get divorced, um, like for six months and we were in counseling to save our marriage for two years. | ||
| And we really gave it our all. | ||
| But I also think the hardest part about it was it was such an easy divorce. | ||
| And so I don't know why I just let down my guard. | ||
| And for me, weed doesn't, I don't do weed like anyone else does. | ||
| Like if I get a pound, that will be gone in two or three weeks. | ||
| And so I just, I'll smoke an ounce a day almost or more sometimes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So you were just rolling them all day? | ||
| Every single, or I go to the vapes and the gummies and everything else too, or the concentrates where I'm doing the dabbing. | ||
| What were you thinking while it was happening? | ||
| Were you thinking, I shouldn't be doing this? | ||
| Or were you thinking, I'm just going to escape? | ||
| For a little while. | ||
| A little while. | ||
| So in wrestling, you have a thing called a reset weekend. | ||
| After a big tournament, you want to just have a reset. | ||
| So you go party and get it out of your system, and you're right back in the gym on Monday or Tuesday. | ||
| And so I used to be able to do that. | ||
| That's even kind of fabricating that. | ||
| I've never been able to do that. | ||
| I found that out at rehab, really taking a hard look at it. | ||
| I decided not to go to, I could have gone to some of these places in Scottsdale or LA or Malibu, and I could have gotten massages and had the green smoothies and stuff like that, which can help a lot of people. | ||
| But me, after having like a 15 year off and on battle, 10 years where I was pretty solid. | ||
| And I'd come out of it and I'd get right back on the horse and I'd be good for years. | ||
| I decided I needed fight camp. | ||
| I needed a training camp. | ||
| I needed the right coaching, the right strategy. | ||
| And I needed people to ride me. | ||
| Be hard on me. | ||
| This is to get sober? | ||
| Yeah, this is to get sober. | ||
| So that's what I wanted. | ||
| And so I sought out one of the toughest places in America to go to. | ||
| It's kind of like a 12-step completion program. | ||
| It's a big book boot camp, but it's also like a... | ||
| It's developed a little bit out of like militaristic style. | ||
| And I don't know, it was really hard on you. | ||
| You know, I mean, while we were there, people were being called, you know, mask-wearing clowns, you fake as fuck, motherfucker. | ||
| And you Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. | ||
| I mean, just like they would just grill people. | ||
| Is that good? | ||
| I don't know exactly, but it was what I needed at that moment. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It was what I needed at that moment because I needed to not run from it. | ||
| I needed to face it and I needed to look at the stuff. | ||
| Are the people running or people that have gotten clean this way? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they have an 87% success rate for the people that do 90 days. | ||
| Now, a lot of them only do 45. Some of them only do 60 days. | ||
| And then I would say probably more than half of the people that went there ended up leaving because of how hard it was. | ||
| So the only reason they wanted people there is if you really truly wanted to get sober, because for years you've been stuck in the cycle of addiction. | ||
| And for me, the easiest way, I mean, they explained it and I had drawn it on whiteboards a lot. | ||
| But for me, whenever you would have that first use, you would have this, what they call an allergy set off. | ||
| You have an abnormal reaction to a substance just like someone else can't have peanuts. | ||
| I can't have drugs or alcohol because when I do, an allergy goes off that says in my body I have an abnormal reaction that says... | ||
| You know, I know rationally that one is too many, but whenever I have that first use, a thousand's not enough. | ||
| I got to keep having it. | ||
| And this is explained to you by these people at this rehab or this is just your own feeling? | ||
| No, no, this was explained. | ||
| And there's this doctor that's really great. | ||
| His name's Dr. Kevin and he's got like a Irish last name, but he's he's got some stuff on I think Netflix and Amazon and he was a Navy surgeon and Basically like he ended up writing himself scripts for oxy and then he was injecting himself with other stuff and he got put in a Prison a military prison that one that got taken down and like Kansas. | ||
| I forget what it's called and But anyway, Leavenworth or something like that, he was put in that prison. | ||
| Anyways, now he's spent his time there really trying to help people in addiction. | ||
| And that cycle of addiction basically is explained as after you have that first use and that allergy set off, now you go on your spree. | ||
| Because what that doctor did, why he brought him up, was he shows scientifically through brain research that an addict's brain is different, like they don't have enough dopamine receptors. | ||
| And whenever that hits, now all of a sudden it goes back to that almost hunter-gatherer brain. | ||
| Where it says, this is a priority for survival. | ||
| Like, that's why some addicts will prioritize it above food or water or family. | ||
| And you see them do irrational things. | ||
| And then they go on this run. | ||
| And then when they, after that spree, after that run, they come out of it and they emerge remorseful. | ||
| They feel terrible. | ||
| I've had moments like that. | ||
| And then all of a sudden you make a firm resolution. | ||
| That's what you back it up with. | ||
| Is that what you felt when you did it the first 30 days? | ||
| Yeah, I came out, I emerged remorseful, and then I promised myself, I promised my wife at the time, I promised my family, friends, that this isn't who I want to be. | ||
| And what they say about an addict is you could hook them up to a lie detector And they absolutely 100% mean it. | ||
| That they never intend to use again. | ||
| But then what happens is they back with that firm resolution. | ||
| I promise. | ||
| This was the last time. | ||
| All of a sudden you get restless, irritable, and discontented. | ||
| Well, whenever an addict gets restless, irritable, discontented, I would ask the question, what's the difference between discontent and discontented? | ||
| You might be a little restless, but discontented? | ||
| Basically says, well, if discontent is I'm thirsty, discontented is there's not enough water in the whole world to quench this thirst. | ||
| And so you get in that place where you have this mental obsession. | ||
| So you have this mental obsession, you get restless, irritable, and discontented, and then you go back to that first use. | ||
| And then you get stuck in that cycle of addiction again. | ||
| And that's where I lived for five years from 17 to 23 was I was just looping back and forth. | ||
| So you'd get sober for a little bit, then go back again? | ||
| From 17 to 23, no. | ||
| I wouldn't get sober, hardly at all. | ||
| I would get sober for my fights, the eight weeks of fight camp, ten weeks of fight camp. | ||
| But then that's why Grudge Training Center had to kick me out, you know? | ||
| I mean, Brendan was on that vote. | ||
| I think Rashad, Nate Marquardt, Shane Carwin, Dwayne Bang Ludwig. | ||
| All those guys that invited me on the team after I got off the Ultimate Fighter, it was just a short while later that they were having to ask me to leave the team. | ||
| It was like a vote. | ||
| Elliott Marshall, Trevor Whitman. | ||
| I think Justin Gaethje was just starting to come up. | ||
| I don't know if he was actually training full-time then, but he was still at Northern Colorado State or Northern Colorado Wrestling there. | ||
| But they said, you know, Justin, like, you, we love you, but you got to go. | ||
| You got to go get help. | ||
| And I should have went and got helped. | ||
| But that's when I found my purpose with the Pygmies. | ||
| I've heard this quote that said, no act of kindness, no matter how small, ever goes wasted. | ||
| And so I started at the local children's hospital, became a local volunteer, went through night school for it. | ||
| Later, you remember HDNet and Inside MMA with Boss Ruten? | ||
| Those guys came out to the Denver Children's Hospital. | ||
| This was like nine months of me being sober. | ||
| All of a sudden now I have Rashad visiting the kids and Shane Carwin, Dwayne Bang, Brennan Shaw visiting the kids that I would push around in the wheelchairs and stuff. | ||
| It gave me purpose. | ||
| And that purpose helped me stay sober. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| So 2020, this was the first time you had had anything since 2000? | ||
| 10. It wasn't. | ||
| I'd had three pretty big relapses. | ||
| So 10 whole years of sobriety. | ||
| Pretty much, but I'd relapsed three times in that time. | ||
| Oh, in the 10 years? | ||
| In the 10 years. | ||
| I'd relapse for 30 days. | ||
| I'd relapse for 9 days. | ||
| And I'd relapse for 5 days. | ||
| Oh, because these are different relapses. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is not the ones you're talking about, the recent ones with your shoulder. | ||
| No, that led in, that 5 day, then led into a big one. | ||
| I'll go ahead and explain it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was confused. | |
| Because when you said 30 days, I thought you meant this year. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Not this year. | ||
| Basically, March to May 15th. | ||
| Well, I was out. | ||
| I was out there using. | ||
| And I felt so much shame and so much guilt because I've been on your show. | ||
| I've been doing good things. | ||
| I've been really trying to live the right life. | ||
| And my marriage failed, which is okay. | ||
| That happens. | ||
| And I just took on a lot of, like, shame. | ||
| I couldn't, you know, have that relationship be a success. | ||
| Then whenever I went back to weed, all of a sudden that weed, I just kept going more and more and more and more. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I found Oxy. | ||
| Then all of a sudden I found Coke. | ||
| So you started with weed? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then I went right to the Oxy. | ||
| And what I would do in my addict mind, I would think it would sound rational. | ||
| I'll just have weed so I don't go back to Oxy. | ||
| And that will help me with pain if I'm injured because I'd actually hurt my neck training with Raphael a little bit. | ||
| And he was sweeping me and I put my head out. | ||
| Whenever I put my head out, I crunched right on top of my neck or my head. | ||
| And it just sent this like crunch down into my cervical neck and it was hurting. | ||
| I was hurting more emotionally and I was stuffing it. | ||
| I wasn't looking at it. | ||
| I was stuffing it, stuffing it, stuffing it. | ||
| And then what happened was I felt so much shame. | ||
| I told my board I needed rehab. | ||
| And I said, I need help. | ||
| Like, I've relapsed. | ||
| I need help, and they've always supported me. | ||
| But I was scared that would they support me in this? | ||
| You know, if I'm the leader of the organization or the founder and the spokesperson, you know, we've got an incredible internal team. | ||
| But, like, we've had donors from thousands, thousands of donors from all 50 states and 59 countries. | ||
| You know, did I just let everybody down? | ||
| You know, is this going to be taken from me? | ||
| Is this life of purpose that I found, you know, am I going to lose it all? | ||
| And I felt so much shame. | ||
| They were going to send me to a place in Oklahoma, not to knock it at all. | ||
| But I had known people from the recovery world because I had been going and sharing my story of recovery in rehabs, in different sober living homes. | ||
| And now all of a sudden I'm back to where they are. | ||
| What is this rehab place, you said, this hard ass rehab place that has an amazing percentage of people get successful? | ||
| It's out of Dallas-Fort Worth and it's called Stone Gate. | ||
| And I don't think they advertise it as that hard, but it is that hard. | ||
| And I wanted a place, once I talked to them, I realized like... | ||
| So they yell at you and shit? | ||
| They do. | ||
| They absolutely do. | ||
| Did they yell at you? | ||
| They did yell at me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I had a 21-year-old kid yelling at me. | ||
| Over what? | ||
| Over a green towel. | ||
| Did you want to tackle him? | ||
| I was just like, bro, I kind of wanted to at first. | ||
| What they think is they got to humble you. | ||
| And I'm like, man, life has humbled me. | ||
| That's why I'm here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I've been humbled enough. | ||
| And now I came here to get help. | ||
| But their whole thing is if there's no bullshit, if they get to you to actually look at your We're good to go. | ||
| And, I mean, we had people that were Ivy League professors, professional athletes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Explain. | |
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But we had people also from, like, homeless shelters. | ||
| What do you mean, a hot box? | ||
| A hot box kills any of the, like, bed bugs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| So if someone were to bring bed bugs in and get in the mattresses and things like that, like if someone came from a homeless shelter or from the streets. | ||
| How could they afford it? | ||
| I don't know, honestly. | ||
| I think there was, like, a scholarship program because some of the people were paying $895 a day there. | ||
| I think that's what they charge insurance. | ||
| It was expensive, man. | ||
| So I just went through the divorce and I basically gave the finances we had so she could go back to school and I was going to restart. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I need rehab and that's expensive. | ||
| Insurance helped, but then I had to match that. | ||
| Do you find yourself, this is a weird question, but I think it's valid. | ||
| Do you find yourself always in like a new problem? | ||
| Do you create problems, do you think? | ||
| I think I try to help find a solution to problems. | ||
| But I think for me... | ||
| You asked me a question after we got the treatment on our shoulders and our knees. | ||
| You asked, what are you manifesting to have this sickness? | ||
| All these sicknesses inside of you. | ||
| I think now... | ||
| That's not exactly how I said it. | ||
| That's not exactly how I said it. | ||
| I said, do you wonder if you're doing that? | ||
| Yes, you're right. | ||
| Because sometimes people do... | ||
| Do you wonder if you're bringing this into your life? | ||
| Sometimes people do create problems. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| They find themselves in this eternal state of conflict. | ||
| Like, some people, they figure their way through life with very little conflict. | ||
| They're magical people. | ||
| I know a few of them. | ||
| It's rare. | ||
| Some people are constantly engaged in some... | ||
| Insurmountable problem. | ||
| And then they also go and, like in your case, you find insurmountable problems like what you're doing with the Congo and the Pygmies and Uganda and helping these people. | ||
| It gives you purpose and it helps define your life in a positive way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then when you're not there, problems come up again. | ||
| Like all kinds of major problems. | ||
| There's always something, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We've had some health problems for sure. | ||
| And then these relapses that had happened were really tough. | ||
| The biggest one was this one in March. | ||
| And let me tell you what happened because I didn't want to go to this rehab in Oklahoma that I had known people that were there that talked. | ||
| It had a reputation for people using while they're even there because they could have their phones at 5 p.m., They could have visitors. | ||
| They could go to Walmart two or three days a week. | ||
| And then you can call your connection and they could leave it to you at Walmart. | ||
| They could throw it over the gate and it's on 110 acres and they can send you a picture of where it's at. | ||
| And you can just go dig it up or find it and use. | ||
| And I wanted a place where I wasn't going there for that. | ||
| I knew I was going to get sober, but I didn't want to be around other people. | ||
| So they take your phone away? | ||
| Yeah, you don't have your phone. | ||
| Paper underwear. | ||
| Paper underwear. | ||
| How comfortable are paper underwear? | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| But you get it back the next day or that night. | ||
| After it gets out of the hotbox. | ||
| After it gets out of the hotbox, you get your clothes. | ||
| So it's one day of paper underwear. | ||
| So that's how I get my towels back. | ||
| I brought nice towels, and they gave me my towels back. | ||
| Well, this guy's doing room checks. | ||
| Room checks are every day, at least once a day. | ||
| And anyways, he found my green towels. | ||
| It's my first like 24 hours being there. | ||
| You didn't know that you didn't? | ||
| I didn't know you couldn't have green towels. | ||
| They'd given them back to me. | ||
| So also I was using that and he gave me an infraction. | ||
| And if you get three infractions, you lose your phone call that week. | ||
| You don't even get one phone call until you've been in there three full weeks. | ||
| Because normally when guys go to rehab and then they start calling their families, they start feeling like, I got to get out of here. | ||
| I got to get home. | ||
| You start telling yourself this. | ||
| My family's more important to take care of than me right now. | ||
| When really you're in crisis mode and you've got to take care of yourself before you can take care of anyone else. | ||
| And so I'd gotten two infractions for the two green towels I had. | ||
| And I was about to lose my phone call at the three-week mark. | ||
| And if you get three infractions in those first three weeks, you lose your phone call. | ||
| I got two for things I didn't even know I couldn't have. | ||
| What was the other one? | ||
| No, that was the green towel. | ||
| He took one green towel and started walking off with it. | ||
| He looked back and saw in my cubby that there was another green towel there. | ||
| So you had two infractions for the same thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What a dick. | ||
| But I would say that the counselors that were there and the recovery advocates, they're really hard on you because some of the guys that have left there, if they let them leave their overconfident, that they've got their problem nicked, then they can go right back out and relapse. | ||
| So how do they keep you from doing it again? | ||
| For me, well, they can't. | ||
| You have to keep yourself from doing it. | ||
| No one can keep me sober. | ||
| No therapist, no sponsor. | ||
| It's got to be me. | ||
| But what do they do to give you the tools to let you do it yourself? | ||
| I think you really start to unwind the tangled web of why you use. | ||
| And for me, it's always been like self-worth. | ||
| It's been like that bullying moment when I was a kid. | ||
| My record can go right back to the three things the kids told me. | ||
| And so I dressed up for a costume party. | ||
| I went to my middle school crush's birthday party. | ||
| I got crushed there because I was dressed up like a Dr. Pepper Transformer, 24-pack on my head, 12-packs on my arms. | ||
| I went all out. | ||
| Everyone was excited because she loved Transformers, Optimus Prime. | ||
| I went as Dr. Optimus Pepper. | ||
| Anyways, I get there, go to the backyard, and when the door opens, I get hit with a couple flashes of light. | ||
| And it's them taking pictures. | ||
| I hear the sound of laughter. | ||
| I see that no one else is dressed up. | ||
| And my middle school crush said, I can't believe you thought you were good enough to come to my party. | ||
| Right next to her, a boy said, you're worthless. | ||
| And then my notorious bully from like third to eighth grade said, you should just kill yourself. | ||
| And so that leads to basically, whenever I would relapse, I would say to myself, you're not good enough. | ||
| You're worthless. | ||
| Maybe you should just kill yourself. | ||
| You know, I was suicidal at 13. I didn't kill myself because of my mom. | ||
| I thought, what would this do to her? | ||
| Do you still go back to that one day? | ||
| Like that one day when you were a child hurt you so badly. | ||
| That's still in your mind almost as like a benchmark for who you are. | ||
| I did and that's why I think I've really come to a place of like self-love seeing myself that like... | ||
| When? | ||
| I'm needed. | ||
| Well, the last six months. | ||
| But this is after your UFC career, after your Bellator career, all the amazing things you've done with Fight for the Forgotten, all the times you've been to the Congo. | ||
| I would know it, but when I would relapse, I would feel like such a piece of garbage. | ||
| I would feel like I was a disappointment to myself, but also to everybody else. | ||
| And that... | ||
| Let me tell you what happened in Mexico. | ||
| So I end up going, I asked to go to a different place, and they just wanted to get me into rehab as soon as possible, which I really admire and respect. | ||
| But I knew it was a place that didn't have a good success rate. | ||
| Why in Mexico? | ||
| I got on a plane, and I thought it was pretty symbolic. | ||
| It was COVID, so everything shut down. | ||
| And then, man, there's a statistic that was on CNN, and it said that in Japan last month. | ||
| And I don't know if this was last month in December or November, but in one month they had more suicides than all of COVID deaths in Japan. | ||
| In one month. | ||
| And it's because all these people are isolated. | ||
| And I know that when I'm in active addiction, what I do is I isolate, I sedate, I suppress, and I numb out. | ||
| And there's so many people that are going through This right now what I went through and I think kovat was a big part of that, you know Going straight from a divorce to then all of a sudden you're in isolation. | ||
| Yeah And then I just decided to use and then that's all I had to do and then kept going What was the feeling when you when you decide when you say okay, I'm gonna use like you make a conscious decision How do you get the weed like what what sets you off? | ||
| I was just hanging out with two people and they brought it out and I was like, you know what? | ||
| I can do this once and show myself. | ||
| So this is what that mental obsession is. | ||
| It'll be different this time. | ||
| I can use it this time and put it down. | ||
| See, I know people that are drunks that have figured out that they can smoke weed. | ||
| They can't drink, but they can smoke weed. | ||
| Well, I think maybe some people are that way, but for me... | ||
| So for you, it was anything that changes your consciousness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anything that has me drop out where I can... | ||
| Other people, whenever they smoke weed, maybe they get more creative. | ||
| Maybe they get more in love with themselves and nature and other people or they laugh, they have fun. | ||
| I wasn't. | ||
| When I smoke weed, I go dark. | ||
| I go dark, not to anybody else, but internally I go dark and I get depressed. | ||
| I get depressed and I can't stop, so I go for a couple weeks or a month. | ||
| You can't stop. | ||
| I can't stop. | ||
| But it's depressing you. | ||
| At rehab, they say, without a complete psychic change, without something happening to come in whenever you're in that restless, irritable, discontented, or that emerging remorseful and that firm resolution. | ||
| If you don't break that right there, you have like a pattern interrupt, which for me was rehab and sober living. | ||
| But you knew it was depressing you. | ||
| I knew it was, but I thought I could use it once. | ||
| But my mind would trick me saying... | ||
| So there's this analogy that this doctor used and... | ||
| And it just made sense to me. | ||
| The addict brain is almost like a kid whenever he goes to the vending machine and he puts in change and he thinks he's going to get one bag of Funyuns. | ||
| All of a sudden he's getting, instead of one bag of Funyuns, it keeps, it's on and a second one comes or a third one comes or it's just on and it keeps coming. | ||
| And now all of a sudden it's way better than you expected. | ||
| So whenever all of a sudden I have that one hit, all of a sudden it's way better than I expected because in my brain, like literally biologically or whatever, it's, it's giving me more dopamine because I have limited numbers of dopamine receptors and And so now all of a sudden it gives me that and so I think I'm happy. | ||
| But if I really look back from a rational state of mind... | ||
| I might be happy for a moment, but then all of a sudden that fades and I keep going and it's with every inhale or what happens with Oxy. | ||
| So I get on this plane, I end up going down to Mexico and I thought I'd just use and come back whenever we found... | ||
| A better place. | ||
| Honestly, I thought I was going to go to Tulum and I was going to get in some healing waters and I was going to get away from my connection there. | ||
| And I was going to find a rehab place and then I was going to go, uh, come back and go straight to rehab. | ||
| And then I just got darker and darker and darker. | ||
| And I feel like, I don't know how to explain suicide to people, except for I some reason I go to this this place of seeing the Twin Towers get hit by those planes and it's the people that are stuck above They're stuck above the plane and it's smoldering and smokes going in their fires going in there and they're looking for a way out They try to find they can't go to the elevator. | ||
| They try to go to the staircase They look down. | ||
| It's it's smoldering black smoke. | ||
| They can't see awesome They come to an open window and no one wants to jump out of the window But some of those people in 9-11 did. | ||
| And it's almost like I have... | ||
| Either choice sucks. | ||
| But I can stay in the burning building. | ||
| Whenever I got snagged by this addiction this last time, I felt like it got to a point to where I'm not going to escape this time. | ||
| This time it's got me in a stranglehold that I can't get out of. | ||
| I can't fight it off. | ||
| I can't tuck my chin. | ||
| I can't pull the hands down. | ||
| I can't fight the hands. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| I'm toast. | ||
| I'm in such a weakened state of mind or body or mentally, spiritually, physically. | ||
| I'm not going to escape. | ||
| And so when I actually got on that plane at 5 a.m., it was four flight attendants, two pilots, and me. | ||
| I have no idea why American Airlines still took that plane unless it was something with COVID funding that if they still operate, they get funding for it. | ||
| But they would have lost money on that, just taking one person down to Mexico. | ||
| They took me to Cancun, and I took a one-way ticket. | ||
| And the reason I took a one-way ticket was because I thought, I'm not coming back this time. | ||
| I'm not coming back from it. | ||
| And I ended up going and staying at this Airbnb there. | ||
| And I met a military veteran who was there, who was stoked that he bought this condo that was next to mine, my Airbnb. | ||
| And then he got a call that, like, the love of his life wasn't coming to the condo that he bought for them. | ||
| Basically, she said, if you went down there during COVID, you expect me to come down during COVID? Like, you know, I'm not coming. | ||
| And so he had his heart broken. | ||
| I was down there in a very negative space. | ||
| He had oxy on him. | ||
| He had PTSD. He had seen a lot of war. | ||
| He served a lot of time. | ||
| I guess he went on three different tours. | ||
| And I just started using those oxys with him. | ||
| And then we found his connection, which you can just buy him at the pharmacy there in Mexico. | ||
| But we ended up finding this guy that had weed, that Coke. | ||
| We got Oxy. | ||
| And then we asked him for Molly once. | ||
| And, you know, the guy had loose lips and he told him that I'm a fighter and this stuff. | ||
| Anyways, he ends up telling some of the cartel guys that are there. | ||
| We get invited up to this like penthouse apartment that's got like an infinity edge pool on it. | ||
| It's like this drug dealer. | ||
| I mean it looks like a guy out of he's got the silk shirt and the chains on and it looks like the jungle on top of this in Playa del Carmen kind of Cancun area. | ||
| And he's got all the drugs there for us to just use. | ||
| And for coke it was the best coke ever. | ||
| It made everything numb both sides of my nostrils. | ||
| And then I see people are reaching out. | ||
| They're trying to get a hold of me. | ||
| They love me. | ||
| They know that I've relapsed. | ||
| And I just feel like I can't come back. | ||
| I was hanging my head in shame. | ||
| And honestly, going, I thought it was so symbolic. | ||
| I didn't want to take a lot of people on this journey with me. | ||
| And I thought, I'm going here. | ||
| I'm not coming back. | ||
| I'm either going to die from the drugs or I'm going to purposely kill myself. | ||
| And so I was just in this negative, negative place, like felt defeated in that loop of that. | ||
| You're not good enough. | ||
| You're worthless. | ||
| You should just kill yourself. | ||
| Was just on repeat. | ||
| I was stuck in this thought loop. | ||
| That's really all back to when you were bullied when you were a kid. | ||
| That's what I feel like I discovered at, with Dr. Daniel Amen and at rehab and at these places like uprooting that, you know, these roots went so deep. | ||
| Do you meditate? | ||
| I do now. | ||
| When did you start? | ||
| I mean, off and on 10 years, but when I stopped practicing that, that's when I would relapse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then now, the greatest thing I discovered at rehab and at Sober Living was 180 days of daily meditation, prayer, and just like really going inward and like setting my day up to where I'm not in that negative of a place. | ||
| I haven't had an addiction problem on my tour. | ||
| I've ever found something that I couldn't stop doing. | ||
| But I feel like I get myself, I understand myself more when I take time in silence every day and I just reset my brain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I'm surrounded by a tribe now that does that. | ||
| Um, what I mean by that was getting out of rehab, having those connections of people that are now beating it and staying sober, but also I needed something a little different. | ||
| Like I don't want to be, I wanted something more tailored towards me and my needs and like just to share like Aubrey's been so great to me. | ||
| Aubrey Marcus, I shared with him what had happened and I saw that he started this fit for service and basically it's a mastermind group. | ||
| Of people that want to make their business or whatever their livelihood is make a difference in the world. | ||
| Basically the premise is to be of service, you must be fit for service, not just a rock star in business or there's actors and athletes and musicians and podcasters and authors and things like that. | ||
| You have to be fit relationally. | ||
| You have to have a tribe. | ||
| That's what I found in Congo and in Uganda that I didn't have here, really. | ||
| I didn't have these deep relationships of people I could completely be raw and vulnerable with, where I could share my wins with, but I could also share my biggest failures with. | ||
| Do you feel at peace? | ||
| Are you at peace? | ||
| Now I am, for sure. | ||
| You have this thing where you're always like, it seems like there's always a thing coming out of you. | ||
| Like there's always an, and then there's this, and then there's that, and then there's this, and there's that. | ||
| And they're like, there's no end to it. | ||
| Like when you talk about things, you talk about one thing into the next thing, into the next thing, almost like you're troubled. | ||
| Like you're immersing yourself into all these things. | ||
| Because you kind of can't help yourself. | ||
| Like you're just caught up in the wave of life. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| Whenever this last seven months has been the most at peace I've ever been. | ||
| And what? | ||
| I'm eight months sober. | ||
| And then I am really... | ||
| Let me share two experiences with you that brought me the most peace. | ||
| Because you were asking about that. | ||
| I don't know if I ever told you what took me to the Congo. | ||
| It was a sober vision, and I know that sounds out there, but experimenting with psychedelics and stuff, I've seen stuff, but this was me at 23, and I basically, in a time of meditation, and I wasn't a praying dude at all, but prayer meditation, all I did was basically said, and I was volunteering at the children's hospital, I was volunteering at the rescue mission for the homeless, all this stuff, and But I basically just said, God, what do you want me to do with my life? | ||
| God, source, creator, whatever you want to put on it. | ||
| But I just said, God, what do you want me to do with my life? | ||
| And I had a movie in my mind. | ||
| And it was like visualization whenever you—at the Olympic training center, we had sports psychologists take us through visualization. | ||
| And you'd see yourself in whatever color singlet you're wearing. | ||
| You'd see yourself shake hands. | ||
| You'd hear the whistle blow. | ||
| You would see you setting up whatever takedown you're going for. | ||
| And sometimes you'd see yourself have the perfect match. | ||
| Sometimes you'd see yourself battle back from worst case scenario. | ||
| You get down. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Are you going to sink or swim? | ||
| Are you going to fight back, battle back? | ||
| Well, those were all like guided visualizations, right? | ||
| And I'd also do that by myself, like some music and headphones. | ||
| And this, though, was unlike anything like that because it was unprompted. | ||
| It wasn't like I was trying to conjure something up. | ||
| I just really felt like I needed direction. | ||
| I had stepped away from fighting for a little bit because win or lose, I had an excuse to use. | ||
| It was like if I won, I wanted to celebrate. | ||
| If I lost, I wanted to erase all that. | ||
| And this was 11 months sober at 23. And how'd you do that? | ||
| Honestly, I just kind of white-knuckled it and will-powered that. | ||
| And then I had a great group of people around me. | ||
| I would say I had this complete psychic change from almost a spiritual experience that I'm about to share with you where I say that prayer, God, what can we do with my life? | ||
| I think we talked about this before. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I'm walking down the forest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I literally, like, I hear drumming, then I hear singing, and I come into a clearing. | ||
| I don't know if you've told me this on the podcast, but you've definitely told me this. | ||
| But go ahead, tell me again. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm walking down this footpath, and I don't know where I am, and there's vines and thickets that are all around me, and I'm clearing out the vines, and the footpath is barely wider than my foot. | ||
| And I don't know where I'm going, but I hear drumming. | ||
| And then I hear singing. | ||
| I come into a clearing and I see these leaf huts. | ||
| And then the first guy I meet has like his ribs kind of poking out or how would I say? | ||
| He looked like a skeleton with skin on. | ||
| I knew that he was hungry, thirsty, poor, sick, oppressed, and enslaved. | ||
| I just had that knowledge. | ||
| And this was the most vivid thing I've ever seen that didn't actually happen. | ||
| It was 10 times, 20 to 100 times more vivid than the visualization drills that I did at the Olympic Training Center with my coaches for fights. | ||
| Like, it was so real. | ||
| And... | ||
| I come out of vision, feel like they were forgotten. | ||
| And I just knew all this stuff, like they're suffering. | ||
| And I cried a little puddle of tears. | ||
| I had no idea who they are, not a puddle, but like a little silver dollar size of like tears. | ||
| And I wept and I never wept like that for anyone in my life. | ||
| I know who they were, where they were, anything like that. | ||
| And three days later, I meet this guy named Caleb and Caleb had done humanitarian mission trips all over the world. | ||
| And he had lived with the Vanuatu people. | ||
| And I thought I was crazy, bro. | ||
| I literally thought I was crazy. | ||
| Is this some psychic break? | ||
| Is this some sort of mental breakdown that I saw something that I didn't try to conjure up? | ||
| I just had this experience. | ||
| I thought I would never tell anyone about it. | ||
| And then when I tell Caleb, who had been buddies with Bear Grylls, had done survival training with him, had went and visited the Maasai tribe, the hunting lions, I thought, if there's one guy I could tell this to, it's this guy. | ||
| And I end up telling him the vision. | ||
| He says, I know who they are. | ||
| I said, what? | ||
| He said, those are the pygmy people. | ||
| They live in the Congo basin rainforest. | ||
| It's in eight or nine African nations. | ||
| I'm like, who are they? | ||
| And he goes, they're in the Congo. | ||
| They're in all these other places. | ||
| And I'm like, where are they? | ||
| This is how I found out about the pygmies. | ||
| This is where this all began at 23 years old. | ||
| Like this guy tells me the people from your vision are the pygmy people. | ||
| Then I tell him the vision. | ||
| He goes, I'm supposed to go there in three and a half weeks. | ||
| This is crazy that we met because I had a team of three other people that were going with me, but they're all husbands, they're all fathers. | ||
| And the U.S. State Department just said no Americans go there for any reason. | ||
| That there's rebel groups that are actually decapitating people and different crazy things. | ||
| He said, look, come tell my wife this vision. | ||
| Her name's Jess. | ||
| And he said, if you come tell Jess, she asked me to cancel the trip, but you tell her this vision. | ||
| And so I told her the vision and literally he said, he looks at me and goes, Justin, if you go, I'll go. | ||
| And Jess said, if you go, he'll go. | ||
| And it was like the craziest thing to me that like he can go, he's married, he's got a kid and like he, but he was already planning on going in three and a half weeks. | ||
| And so we brought a buddy, Colin, along with us who took the, the, the photo that was just a candid photo. | ||
| That's the cover of my book. | ||
| It was my first hour in the Congo. | ||
| And so the sober vision literally took me there. | ||
| And then all of a sudden we land on this grass runway. | ||
| Monkeys are jumping off the runway. | ||
| We get out. | ||
| We drive six to eight hours. | ||
| We get on a dugout canoe. | ||
| We go across the river. | ||
| We start walking. | ||
| And then all of a sudden we hear drumming. | ||
| And then we hear singing. | ||
| And then we come into a clearing. | ||
| And the first guy we meet has tuberculosis. | ||
| And he's coughing. | ||
| And like they start telling us how they're hungry, they're thirsty, they're poor, they're sick, they're oppressed. | ||
| But before that happened, like before they start telling us their stuff, I just had to drop down into like a full squat. | ||
| I put my elbows on my knees. | ||
| I literally took a knee because I felt weak in the knees because I never experienced. | ||
| I didn't know stuff like this actually happens. | ||
| And I felt like it's who's going to believe this. | ||
| Like you found your purpose. | ||
| Yeah, I found my purpose. | ||
| But it was so wild to me that I was like, why did this happen? | ||
| That it came to you in a vision? | ||
| Yes, it came to me in a vision. | ||
| How did this happen? | ||
| I couldn't make logical sense of it. | ||
| Did you tell people about the vision other than this one friend? | ||
| I told Caleb, I told Colin, and I told his wife Jess. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And I had a piece of paper that I wrote down, forgotten at the top, then hungry, thirsty, poor, sick, oppressed, enslaved. | ||
| And they knew it. | ||
| And it's been really cool, actually. | ||
| Jim and Susan, who helped me run Fight for the Forgotten, We had a dinner in Caleb's house in Nebraska, and Caleb and Jess were able to tell Jim and Susan their version of the story, which was awesome. | ||
| You know, he had this vision. | ||
| We went. | ||
| It happened. | ||
| Caleb was grabbing my shoulder like my trap. | ||
| He was like, this is your vision. | ||
| This is your vision. | ||
| And I didn't know what to do with it. | ||
| I felt like it was nuts. | ||
| But the chief came to us, and he gave us, after we stayed there for a couple weeks, he said, He gave me the one thing, you know, this is our 10 year anniversary, a fight for the forgotten. | ||
| We're calling it 10 years of promise because they gave me the one promise that I could keep. | ||
| And they said, I knew that they needed land, but I didn't know how to do that. | ||
| I didn't know how to drill water wells. | ||
| I was just a fighter. | ||
| I didn't know how to start farms. | ||
| And literally he said, he, he, Caleb and Colin are with me and he looks at me and says, we don't have a voice. | ||
| Can you help us have one? | ||
| He's looking right at me. | ||
| He motions to me. | ||
| Can you help us have one? | ||
| I start tearing up because Caleb and Colin know my vision and how it happened and what are you going to do with this, you know? | ||
| And I'm like, I don't know what to do with this. | ||
| I don't know what to do with this, but that that's whenever it set in because I said, yes, I said yes, but it was almost like my soul or my heart screamed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, this is my purpose. | ||
| This is what I'll do. | ||
| I'm not just going to fight against people. | ||
| I'm going to fight for people. | ||
| And so that really helped me for a long time. | ||
| Like being able to go there and help. | ||
| And then I'll, I'll, I'll tell you, since we're on these visions, like I had not, I had only had one other time that I had experienced anything like this. | ||
| It's 10 years later. | ||
| I was in Sedona, and I was with Aubrey and Fit for Service, and there's like 178 people from all over the world. | ||
| And we met up in Sedona. | ||
| And there were classes, and not classes, but like breakouts on meditation. | ||
| And I never had like formal teaching, training on it, but we did a breathwork session. | ||
| And they split us up into three different groups. | ||
| And there's 170 people, so there's like maybe 50 people, a little over 50 people in each of the three groups. | ||
| And they're going to take us through three hours of breathwork. | ||
| Now it's a 30-minute teaching on the front, a 30-minute kind of integration at the end, but you're going to do two hours of breathwork. | ||
| And I guess to actually set that up, in Mexico, I took a cocktail that, honestly, I thought was going to stop my heart. | ||
| I took five Oxy-80s, 80 milligrams. | ||
| Basically, they do 5 milligrams, they do 10 milligrams, they do 20 milligrams, they do 40 milligrams, and then they do 80. So 5-oxy-80s is equivalent of like 40, or no, what is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's 5-oxy-80s is what? | ||
| That's 80 5-milligram pills. | ||
| That's 85 milligram pills. | ||
| That's like almost three prescription bottles of 30, you know, 10 shy. | ||
| I took all that at once. | ||
| I took the biggest line of Coke I've ever taken. | ||
| I drank like half a bottle of tequila, one of those smaller bottles, but I took like half a bottle of tequila. | ||
| And then I had bought what I thought was Molly, this like crystallized Molly. | ||
| And my motor skills were slowing. | ||
| This was April 5th. | ||
| The night of April 5th was the darkest night of my life. | ||
| Actually, it wasn't the night. | ||
| It was about noon or 2 p.m. | ||
| Like, April 4th was the darkest night of my life. | ||
| And then April 5th, when I woke up, I was just like, I was tired. | ||
| I felt like the addiction had snagged me that I wasn't going to escape. | ||
| What did you think the crystal stuff was? | ||
| I thought it was molly. | ||
| And what was it? | ||
| Turned out to be red phosphorus meth. | ||
| Red phosphorus meth. | ||
| Red phosphorus meth. | ||
| What is the... | ||
| I guess that's the strongest meth in the world. | ||
| That's what the dictionologist at rehab told me. | ||
| And they said, literally, Justin, just the cocktail you took was 100% a heart-stopping cocktail if you hadn't had that crystal of that meth. | ||
| That meth is the only thing that kept your heart beating. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| When I sat down, when I sat down on the bed, Because the five Oxy-80s, the cocaine, the... | ||
| Oh, I had five Xanax, two milligrams also. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So the meth kept you alive. | ||
| The meth kept my heart beating. | ||
| And the next morning I woke up. | ||
| I remember my motor skills slowing to where if I would have tried to talk, I wouldn't have been able to. | ||
| Um, the table was maybe right where you're sitting and the bed was where I was sitting. | ||
| So it wasn't that far, but I remember I only took, I didn't take them what I thought was the Molly until after everything started getting dark or just kind of cold. | ||
| And then the last thing I did was I crushed up that, that Molly or what I thought was Molly and I crushed it up and I snorted it. | ||
| On both sides of my nostrils, and I never felt a burn like that in my life in my nostrils, because it was this, whatever, this chemical of methamphetamine. | ||
| And I sat back on the bed, and I remember I laid back with my arms out, and my feet were off to where the next morning my ankles were swollen, because I just fell back and passed out. | ||
| I woke up at maybe like 6am the next morning. | ||
| It was right before the sun rose. | ||
| And I remember I woke up and I woke up with a gas. | ||
| It was like a... | ||
| And I thought in my head, I was like, shit, I'm alive. | ||
| Fuck, I'm still here. | ||
| And I went out and I was in my clothes from the day before. | ||
| I mean, bro, I was passed out for like 18, 20 hours, something like that, from like noon until like maybe 6 a.m. | ||
| the next morning or 2 p.m. | ||
| to like 6 a.m. | ||
| the next morning. | ||
| And people that take meth, like they can't sleep. | ||
| And that was my first time or only time, but they normally can't sleep for days. | ||
| And now all of a sudden I pass out for that long because I had all that other stuff in my system. | ||
| I went out and I got in the water. | ||
| And I take my shirt off and I just get in. | ||
| And I remember I was sitting on my knees on the sand in the water. | ||
| The water's coming up kind of on my chest and over my shoulders. | ||
| And it was kind of grounding, but I just remember trying to connect to my breath and also my heart, because my heart was racing like crazy. | ||
| And I remember, like, saying thank you for the beating heart in my chest. | ||
| Like, thank you, because I wasn't planning on waking up the next day, and I did. | ||
| And then I was saying thank you for the beating heart in my chest. | ||
| And then I started saying thank you for the breath that's in my lungs. | ||
| And I had my eyes closed. | ||
| And before I started saying thank you though, I remember like these waves coming over me and it was almost like the shamefulness was coming over me with every wave. | ||
| Like just so much shame because of what I did the night before, day before. | ||
| And then whenever I started thinking myself or being thankful for the breath of my lungs, being thankful for that crazy beating heart in my chest, it's like it kind of switched to like gratefulness all of a sudden. | ||
| And maybe like the shamefulness was leaving. | ||
| You know how waves can kind of come over you and then they go back out and they kind of come over you. | ||
| It was kind of like just all of a sudden it changed like gratefulness and a little bit of the shamefulness kind of left. | ||
| And I just felt a sense like open your eyes. | ||
| Like a thought in my mind, just open your eyes. | ||
| And when I open my eyes, like literally on the horizon, in Playa del Carmen, like the sun just pops up over the sunrise. | ||
| Or the sunrise starts to appear on the horizon. | ||
| And I just sat there and I was like, I was dumbfounded. | ||
| Or I was like, blown away because I watched the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| So explain to me this. | ||
| You have this revelation. | ||
| You realize you want to live. | ||
| You feel grateful. | ||
| You feel thankful. | ||
| You feel ashamed that you almost killed yourself and that you were using. | ||
| But yet you still have to go to rehab. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| I think it was because... | ||
| Did you use again after that? | ||
| I did. | ||
| That's why I went to rehab. | ||
| When did you use again? | ||
| I came back. | ||
| And I came back and... | ||
| How long later? | ||
| I came back on, I don't know, a few days after that. | ||
| And a few days after that, what did you do? | ||
| I took a flight. | ||
| I was waiting for flights to come back. | ||
| What did you do in terms of drugs? | ||
| I was smoking weed. | ||
| I was still taking some of the pills. | ||
| Waiting for the flights to come back? | ||
| Because they were not taking flights because of COVID. They had to consolidate our flight until it was me and one other guy coming back. | ||
| And they postponed our flights for like three or four days. | ||
| And so I was using it in that time because I was going through a draw. | ||
| You can go through a draw quick. | ||
| I mean, I was using from March 1st or 2nd to then this is like April 6th that I have this revelation that I do need to come back and go to rehab, but I can't stop. | ||
| So you were in Mexico for how long? | ||
| I was only there for like, I don't know, end of March. | ||
| So I was there like two weeks, but I was using the whole time. | ||
| I was there two weeks and I was using the whole time I was there. | ||
| So after this revelation, where you're in the water and you're thankful for your heartbeat... | ||
| How do you use again? | ||
| What is the thought process? | ||
| If you realize that you want to be alive and that you are valuable and that you've just tricked yourself into falling into this trap again, how do you allow yourself to use again? | ||
| What is, like, what happens in your mind? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| I still had some there. | ||
| Don't let it go to waste. | ||
| I know that's stupid. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Don't let that poison go to waste. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then also, I think just the addict mind of, like, withdrawals suck whenever you go through oxywithdrawal. | ||
| Like, you feel like, I remember the time I was going through withdrawal after surgery, and I felt like I was going to shake the mattress off of the bed frame and I was sweating through it. | ||
| But you already knew about Kratom. | ||
| Yeah, but I didn't have any access to it there in Mexico. | ||
| You couldn't get Kratom in Mexico? | ||
| I guess I could have gone and found it, but I had this and I was looking for my flights and I was going back to rehab and I guess I thought, I'm going to get sober at rehab. | ||
| I'm going to get sober at rehab. | ||
| And for me, it's one thing to say you want to fight in the UFC, but you've got to go to training camp. | ||
| You've got to get the right skill, the right training. | ||
| And that's what you felt like rehab was going to give you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And because I had tried to do it on my own for a long time, and I'd done it well at times. | ||
| But then I would always go back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so I... But you went 10 years. | |
| You just had a few... | ||
| 10 years where I had three relapses within that time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 30 days. | ||
| So I can't say I had 10 years. | ||
| When was the last time... | ||
| How long have you been sober for? | ||
| I relapsed that five days in November of 2019. And then in March of 2020, after the divorce, that's whenever I went all in. | ||
| And before 2019, how long had it been? | ||
| Maybe a couple of years. | ||
| And the time frame was getting shorter and shorter. | ||
| And so that's what was concerning to me. | ||
| The time frame in between. | ||
| In between sober. | ||
| But the time frame of the binges were shorter as well. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| You're a glass half-empty guy. | ||
| No, I'm a glass half-full guy. | ||
| I'm very hopeful. | ||
| I'm a hope-filled guy. | ||
| So you will never use again? | ||
| I will never use oxy, alcohol, marijuana, Xanax, those kind of substances, unless it's under the care of a doctor. | ||
| I am open to, I'm talking with a place called Aluma here in Austin. | ||
| They do ketamine transfusions and what they do that for is for addicts. | ||
| They work with recovery centers and they work with PTSD, childhood trauma, and they're seeing great things. | ||
| So I've talked with those doctors. | ||
| I'm willing to look at that and see if that's the right thing, but I want to do it under care of like actual specialists that have like Have you thought about Ibogaine? | ||
| I have thought about that, and it's in Africa. | ||
| Well, no, you can get it in Mexico. | ||
| Well, you can get it there, too, but it comes from the aboga tree, which is in Africa. | ||
| In the Congo Basin rainforest, where I lived. | ||
| And the pygmies do it as a rite of passage for the end of manhood. | ||
| But it has a great reputation. | ||
| For people with heroin and oxygen. | ||
| Alcohol, cigarettes, gambling even. | ||
| It stops withdrawals. | ||
| It stops even, not the temptation, but the desire to go back to it. | ||
| Patterns of the mind are fascinating to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because, like I said, I don't have a physical addiction problem to a chemical, but I've had addictions. | ||
| Like, particularly games. | ||
| I have a real problem with video games. | ||
| I get obsessed with them. | ||
| Rehab said most everyone... | ||
| Has some form of addiction within their life. | ||
| It might be to their phone. | ||
| It might be to porn. | ||
| It might be to people, like codependency. | ||
| It might be to gaming. | ||
| It might be to TV. It might be to all these things that you can basically sedate. | ||
| How can you sedate and numb out? | ||
| How can you break free? | ||
| How can you have this release? | ||
| And sometimes people can't get it under control. | ||
| Food? | ||
| I mean, I have a friend that has a food addiction. | ||
| Just one? | ||
| Probably a lot, but one that talks about it openly. | ||
| Not the anorexic and bulimic type, but the one that says that food addiction is one of the hardest things because you have to eat. | ||
| You have to eat. | ||
| And so like me, I don't have to drink. | ||
| I don't have to use, but you do have to eat. | ||
| And so that's one of the hardest addictions that's out there is whenever you actually do have a food addiction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Yeah, people are overweight. | ||
| It's actually a chemical. | ||
| It's a giant problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's so difficult to train your body to somehow or another avoid the temptation to overeat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And not just that, but you have to kind of under-eat because you want to lose weight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you have to put your body into a deficit, and so you have to be uncomfortable all the time, which is something that most people try to avoid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would say this. | ||
| So when I was in Sedona, I had one of the most powerful moments of my life because this was 10 years of not having a vision. | ||
| And I find myself on doing this breath work. | ||
| And I'm breathing with these coaches that are doing like a yoga style breathing. | ||
| Like a holotropic breath work? | ||
| What kind of breath work? | ||
| They have music going and you have, some people had an eye mask on and you're just breathing as deep as you can and then out as far as you can. | ||
| In as far as you can and out as far as you can. | ||
| And then they would coach you in different ways. | ||
| They had people that were walking around doing different things. | ||
| You can get high as fuck like that. | ||
| Oh man, dude. | ||
| So I don't know if I had a DMT experience, but this was sober just through breath. | ||
| All of a sudden, Aubrey had gotten down and he had known my story, him and Vailana, his wife. | ||
| And I'd shared with him how scary it was that I attempted suicide through addiction and that I can't go back to it again. | ||
| I just can't. | ||
| I won't. | ||
| And I really need freedom from it. | ||
| And so I was there and Aubrey got down and I had my mask on and he puts his hand on my heart. | ||
| He's got his hand down. | ||
| He's on his knees. | ||
| He just said, you know, what is this? | ||
| He just kind of we're in meditative stuff. | ||
| We have like this priming thing that we've been doing. | ||
| And he said, what is this armor over your heart? | ||
| Why have you not allowed yourself to be fully seen? | ||
| Would you let that armor fall in your mind's eye? | ||
| And would you just be you, be real, be open, be honest? | ||
| And so I just started thinking about that as hard. | ||
| Is that what you feel? | ||
| Do you feel like you have like armor over you? | ||
| You don't let yourself be seen? | ||
| Is that what you feel? | ||
| Are these your words or your thoughts? | ||
| They were Aubrey's and then I think there was part of it. | ||
| Why didn't you have those about you? | ||
| I think that, well, I think like right now, you know, with you and knowing that this is such a big platform and me sharing my weakest moments, you know, that's me trying to let that armor fall and be fully seen and not hide it, be transparent with it. | ||
| And I think for me, I'm allowing myself to be seen more and more. | ||
| And I don't think I was ever hiding stuff. | ||
| Fight for the Forgotten has never once been an act for me. | ||
| It's been something I fully believed in. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| If someone said to me about you, not even just Fight for the Forgotten, if someone said to me about you, does he hide who he is? | ||
| It's one of the most transparent people ever. | ||
| You wear your heart on your sleeve. | ||
| Like, I don't understand that at all. | ||
| I think you do have scars from your childhood that I'm trying to figure. | ||
| Like, I was bullied when I was a kid, but not like that much. | ||
| Like, yours sound, that one moment at that party sounds like that cut deep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I ran away from that party. | ||
| My mom found me literally at Dairy Queen after it closed down. | ||
| And I was literally, I'd thrown everything off, took all the cardboard stuff and threw it in the dumpster. | ||
| And now I have the duct tape like residue on my shirt, on my jeans. | ||
| And I literally sat there, held my knees and cried until Dairy Queen closed. | ||
| How old were you? | ||
| Thirteen. | ||
| God damn, people can be mean. | ||
| Kids can be so fucking mean. | ||
| Because they know they can. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's almost like some kids can't help themselves. | ||
| They know they can get a reaction out of someone if they're just mean. | ||
| And they do it almost like to see... | ||
| It's interesting when I watch little kids be mean to each other, and you see them in the playgrounds when your kids are playing. | ||
| It's almost like they're testing out how to behave. | ||
| They're testing out reactions they can get. | ||
| And they're also testing out groupthink, where they can get each other to be mean to a kid. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| That sort of gang mentality, mob mentality is very strange because you see it in kids. | ||
| It's a natural thing, a horrible but natural thing. | ||
| Well, one of the kids I'm really stoked about, I think I might have shared with you where Raiden was being bullied. | ||
| This was last night. | ||
| Yeah, well, I remember you took this on. | ||
| Yeah, well, last night he had his first night of jiu-jitsu ever. | ||
| I saw it on your Instagram page. | ||
| Oh, awesome. | ||
| Well, people don't know who this kid is. | ||
| There was a video online of a bunch of kids bullying him and hitting him and videotaping it and laughing at it. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| And he's obviously challenged. | ||
| There's some issues. | ||
| He was born with autism and deaf in his right ear. | ||
| And so he was given a concussion. | ||
| Either at the urinal where the kids jumped him and then filmed it or at the bus stop the very next day. | ||
| Actually, it might be reversed where he was at the bus stop and it happened off school grounds so the school wasn't able to look into it as much as they could or should. | ||
| And then the next day was at the urinal, and since it was circulating from inside the school, they were able to help. | ||
| Those kids that did it to them, man, watching that, it's so horrific. | ||
| Hitting them in the back of the head, kicking them in the stomach. | ||
| But it's like, how are kids so mean? | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like, what causes kids to be able to do that? | ||
| How come none of those kids... | ||
| Jump in and go, hey, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| What is it about bullying and kids? | ||
| Because it's a weird instinct that some have. | ||
| And when they get together with one target like Raiden, it's horrible. | ||
| It's horrible to watch. | ||
| It makes you lose faith in humans. | ||
| It's like, what is it about humans that makes that even an option? | ||
| I think... | ||
| Hurt people hurt people. | ||
| And when you've been hurt at home, when you've been hurt at school, and whenever someone else will laugh or joke, or when people don't do anything, you can feel powerful or you can feel strong. | ||
| Whenever people sit by as an innocent bystander. | ||
| Wrongfully thinking they're an innocent bystander when actually they're a silent supporter. | ||
| A lot of times, you know, if you see it or hear it, kids just don't know that it's now they're presented with a choice. | ||
| Am I going to do something or do nothing? | ||
| And kids don't know that nine times out of ten almost, it's like 87% of the time a kid stands up and says one thing such as like, hey, that's not kind. | ||
| It actually stops it. | ||
| Someone will stop whenever they're confronted, whenever it's addressed, whether it's reported or even more so than the authorities that are in place, which kids should go tell teachers and faculty and stuff like that, but they have more power than they know. | ||
| They can stop it. | ||
| And so it was cool. | ||
| Like when I was doing that breath work though, I was praying and this brought me so much peace because it was something that I actually needed for me. | ||
| I think I used that vision to then just give me a mission to like love people in such a deep and meaningful way for myself. | ||
| But I don't think I ever allowed myself to love myself. | ||
| Because I don't know that I... I knew it logically, but I didn't let it actually sink in, that you have to love yourself before you love others, truly and sustainably, right? | ||
| How could you not love you? | ||
| You're such a nice guy. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I mean, I know what I'm saying is not... | ||
| What I'm saying is... | ||
| I know what I'm saying sounds ridiculous, but I don't... | ||
| I don't get how after all the amazing things you've done it hasn't changed your opinion of yourself That was cut into you by some 13 year old kids Yeah, well, I really feel like I have a lot of freedom from that now But then I didn't it was I'll tell you this vision was what I think needed to happen I'm breathing. | ||
| Aubrey says that and I just visualize in my head like a human heart and the arm are falling off and hitting the dirt. | ||
| I don't know why, but that's what I did in that moment. | ||
| We start breathing and about 30 minutes goes by probably. | ||
| And all of a sudden, I'm doing the most meditation I've ever done in my life, the most intense breathing I've ever done in my life. | ||
| And all of a sudden, I start seeing in my mind, like, almost as visual as that time I saw myself in the forest. | ||
| And I start seeing these storm clouds forming and it's over the ocean. | ||
| It's this deep, dark ocean. | ||
| And I see inside of it, it's almost like perfect storm kind of weather. | ||
| But the waters were actually kind of smooth. | ||
| It was just really dark. | ||
| And then also I see this darkened human heart, like an atomical heart, like sitting in the water. | ||
| And I see it starting to sink. | ||
| And then kind of the visions underneath the water, it's starting to sink and it's headed down towards the bottom of the ocean floor. | ||
| And as that is getting deeper... | ||
| I feel like my chest actually kind of like a little bit of compression. | ||
| I don't know why, but it felt like almost like whenever you're diving underwater. | ||
| But anyways, it's going deeper, darker. | ||
| And I just have this knowing that like that was me on April 4th and 5th. | ||
| Like my heart was going down. | ||
| It was dark and dangerous, diseased. | ||
| It was like it was desperate. | ||
| It was drowning. | ||
| It was dying. | ||
| And someone walked by and my head was kind of in the sun a little bit. | ||
| And they sprinkle this water on me. | ||
| They kind of spritz this water on me. | ||
| And right when that happened, right before the heart hit the bottom of the ocean floor, all of a sudden I see at the top of the water this... | ||
| And it's this golden swirl of this water that swims down and it's almost like it's on a mission. | ||
| It's trying to get to my heart and it was right before it hit the ocean floor. | ||
| This golden gorgeous like water swirled around my heart and started resurfacing it. | ||
| I knew that was my heart and it takes it back up. | ||
| So you're saying you see a vision. | ||
| Are you seeing this? | ||
| I'm seeing it with my eyes closed. | ||
| Are you seeing this like you're on drugs? | ||
| Are you seeing this like it's a psychedelic trip? | ||
| Are you seeing this like you're just imagining it? | ||
| It's different than a psychedelic trip because I have no other sensation. | ||
| There's just a movie in my mind. | ||
| It's just like the visualization drills, but it was unprompted. | ||
| It wasn't like I'm trying to see an ocean. | ||
| It's not like I'm trying to see a heart. | ||
| So this symbolized in your mind what you needed to do. | ||
| You needed to figure out how to get yourself healthy and to get your heart healthy and to change your perceptions and the way you're behaving in life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It comes up to the top of the ocean and it's this golden, gorgeous water that's swirling around it. | ||
| All of a sudden it turns into like this flame and it's like a fire around this human heart. | ||
| And then all of a sudden it turns into this like white orb. | ||
| And then all of a sudden it turns into this golden, molten, kind of like jeweler's gold. | ||
| And it turns into this golden heart. | ||
| And when that happened, I don't know why, but I put my arms up, and I put my arms up, and one of the facilitators are helping people breathe and stretch and different things like that. | ||
| They grab my wrist, and they pull my wrist above my head. | ||
| And I'm on my back, right? | ||
| I know it sounds nuts, but I feel like they put a medicine ball in my hand, but there wasn't. | ||
| It felt like they put something there. | ||
| There was actual weight there. | ||
| And then I bring it back above my head and I'm seeing this golden heart and I feel like there's something inside of my hands, like this energy inside of it. | ||
| I don't know why, but it was heavy and it was there. | ||
| And then someone else comes by and they grab my hands and they put my hands over my hands and they sink it right down onto my chest. | ||
| And whenever they did that, I don't know how to explain it except for it felt like there was this golden honey that was like sinking down into my own heart or into my own chest and my own soul. | ||
| And it was just like love. | ||
| And I know it sounds cliche or goofy, but like loves the answer. | ||
| Like, I can't just love everyone else. | ||
| I have to love myself too. | ||
| And like, this is a season of healing through self love, through self love and meditation, taking time for myself and silence. | ||
| Um, and taking, I think, I think the word healing for me is like helping being open, To others helping me heal, taking time for myself to heal, and then helping others heal. | ||
| Whether it's Raiden, mentoring him, loving on him, other people, the pygmies. | ||
| As I heal myself, I can help others heal. | ||
| And just hurt people hurt people. | ||
| I guess healed people heal people. | ||
| And you can actually, you know, you have to heal yourself, but you can also help others heal at the same time. | ||
| And as you watch them heal, that helps you heal. | ||
| And so that's been the journey that I've been on, and that's what I've been grateful for with. | ||
| The Fit for Service tribe. | ||
| They're all people that are using their business as platforms to help people make the world better. | ||
| But they want to make their own life better. | ||
| And as they make their own life better, they can help other people make their lives better. | ||
| Are you continuing to do this kind of breathwork? | ||
| Do you do it all the time? | ||
| I've been doing a lot of breathwork. | ||
| I've been going to here in Austin. | ||
| There's Black Swan Yoga. | ||
| I've been going there. | ||
| I've been having Amy that you met at the after party of Dave Chappelle and you. | ||
| She helps me. | ||
| She does a lot of meditations and she'll do guided meditations for me. | ||
| She records them, does them herself, and then I do them. | ||
| And that's really been helping a lot because I've been trying to do that every day. | ||
| I go out in nature at Cummins Ford Ranch Park that's out there and there's like these three hidden waterfalls. | ||
| I've been loving Austin. | ||
| It's the most amazing city. | ||
| And then it's got nature all through it. | ||
| We're telling too many people. | ||
| People are yelling at me now. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's been dope for me because there's the Colorado River, Lake Austin, and then going there and just hiking on 250 acres or the Greenbelt or all these other parks, Zilker Park, and going out there with people that are stretching, doing yoga, that are just kind of like really open-minded, accepting, loving, supportive. | ||
| It's been wild, man. | ||
| I've been at Brigham's guest house. | ||
| I've been staying there a lot, and there's been people that have literally walked into our yard saying, I heard you moved to town. | ||
| I want to donate. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| This is wild. | ||
| And for me, part of the healing in my journey is that I felt like if I let anyone know, if I really let anyone know, like this dark side or this addiction that I fell back to or this relapse that I had and how dark of a spot I got, if they knew, like no one would want to support me, no one would want to support the organization, right? | ||
| And then when I went to rehab and I went to sober living and the board really helped me, the board said, Justin, we've been standing behind you for 10 years now, close to 10 years. | ||
| Now it's time for us to stand beside you and out in front of you with a shield and protect you. | ||
| Allow yourself to heal. | ||
| Allow yourself to do self-development work and get therapy and things like that. | ||
| A season, a break, a sabbatical for you. | ||
| Like take the season to really look inward. | ||
| And what do you really want to do? | ||
| I've had this revamping inside of me that's like, no, this is my purpose. | ||
| Even our last board meeting was the best board meeting we've ever had, and it was here in Austin. | ||
| So you get through the first six months. | ||
| Sorry to interrupt you, but I want to just clarify. | ||
| So you have this horrible time, and this is what starts off the good time? | ||
| The Sedona vision, after getting out of... | ||
| Rehab wasn't all bad. | ||
| I mean, they rode me real hard. | ||
| They were having me wake up. | ||
| There was different rotations, but they really liked me having to get up before everybody else. | ||
| And that's at 5 a.m. | ||
| And then you're cooking breakfast for 32 other guys. | ||
| You're cooking 60 eggs, 100-something pieces of bacon, toast, and putting out everything for them. | ||
| And then you're cleaning all their dishes. | ||
| And that was hard. | ||
| Sober living was really hard. | ||
| And then whenever I found the tribe with Fit for Service, like that was just, they spoke my language. | ||
| They're my kind of people. | ||
| They're people I can really look up to, that I can trust. | ||
| And I I think upgrading, not that I didn't have good friends, but I think upgrading a friend group in a way of like, these people are hungry. | ||
| They're hungry to live an incredible life for themselves, but they're also wanting to better other people's lives. | ||
| Like, these are my people. | ||
| And so being with them has really helped a lot. | ||
| Moving to Austin, there's been so many cool people here. | ||
| I shouldn't say that too loud, but yeah. | ||
| And it's really helped a lot to where, even at the last board meeting, The chairman on my board moved here. | ||
| There's so many like synchronicities that happened, serendipitous moments that I can't deny that like I'm supposed to be here. | ||
| And like, this is a good move for me. | ||
| And, you know, I just had to thank them because, you know, they told me how proud they were of me going through the work, doing the work, the hard stuff. | ||
| And I just had to look back at everyone and say, like, y'all don't understand. | ||
| Like, I thought I was going to lose everything. | ||
| I thought I was gonna lose every one do you think that you this this draw I keep trying to figure out what led you down this dark path other than obviously the divorce but you the the things that you've done you've been so praised for you've gotten so much love you've been so powerful as a fighter and you this weird combination of someone who's incredibly strong but also vulnerable it's a very It's | ||
| a very unusual combination like who you are like incredibly kind and giving but also like very competitive like as a fighter you know yeah you I would most people when they do something that like they've gotten over the bullying through accomplishing things and through redefining who they are as a person but for you it doesn't seem like that did enough Even with all the charitable work you've done, | ||
| the amazing work you've done, even all the accomplishments you've had as a fighter, you're obviously not that person. | ||
| We even talked about you having contact with some of the bullies, some of the people that you, and they were kind of blown away by who you are now. | ||
| But that didn't even redefine it for you, redefine who you are for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's hard to explain, but I think... | ||
| I think for me... | ||
| You know, I... How would I say it? | ||
| I think... | ||
| Until you love, until you really actually allow yourself, not just to accept love from other people, but to allow yourself to love yourself. | ||
| Like, I mean, it would look like I ran from one thing to another to another. | ||
| I was a nobody in school. | ||
| No one liked me, sat at the lunch table. | ||
| Then all of a sudden I start wrestling. | ||
| Then I'm a state champion, an All-American. | ||
| Then I'm a national champion. | ||
| Then I'm living at the Olympic Training Center. | ||
| Then I'm fighting in the Ultimate Fighter. | ||
| And then I'd wrestled in Moscow. | ||
| I kickboxed in Amsterdam or helped Alistair Overeem train for Brock Lesnar. | ||
| I had helped Randy even, Shane Carwin, Frank Mir twice train for Brock Lesnar. | ||
| Someone was fighting Brock. | ||
| They were normally calling me. | ||
| To come help him train. | ||
| And then I get out of that. | ||
| I go live in Congo. | ||
| Then I come back. | ||
| I do an interview with Sports Illustrated. | ||
| All of a sudden, it's a book deal. | ||
| And it goes from a book deal to then all of a sudden, it's a TED Talk. | ||
| And at the time, like, it was some reason, it was almost like whenever in fighting, I would get my hand raised. | ||
| And I would think, is this it? | ||
| Is this all? | ||
| I think Dustin has done something incredible. | ||
| Dustin Poirier. | ||
| I got to be with his family for that fight. | ||
| His brother Jimmy, his nieces and nephews, he's attaching that fight for a purpose bigger than himself. | ||
| And so I was doing that for a long time, but whenever the addiction would rise back up, it was like none of that other stuff mattered. | ||
| I'm just the depressed drunk drunk addict. | ||
| Yeah, but the addiction would rise back up because of a bad feeling you have for yourself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what caused the bad feeling when all those positive things were happening? | ||
| Do you allow it into your mind? | ||
| Do you think that you could have stopped that if you were meditating back then? | ||
| Do you think you could have stopped that if you knew that if you didn't stop that you could become vulnerable and start using again? | ||
| What is it that sets it off? | ||
| Did you ever think about it like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they say with an addict, you can't stop it the moment it's in front of you. | ||
| You've got to cut it off way before. | ||
| Days before, weeks before, months before. | ||
| Instead of this restless, irritable, discontented feeling inside of you and being vulnerable. | ||
| So, I mean, a lot of times I would relapse. | ||
| I haven't relapsed a lot, but the times that I would relapse, it would be like I stopped daily disciplines. | ||
| I stopped doing my five-minute journal in the morning where I have three things I'm grateful for and write down an affirmation. | ||
| Why'd you stop? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm a disciplined guy. | ||
| But when you stop, that's when you relapsed. | ||
| Yeah, and honestly, the real self-loathing or self-hatred or feeling of not good enough, being worthless, that would always come after the first use. | ||
| Because my first time to use, to drink, it was after I won my first national championship in wrestling. | ||
| Well, when I won the high school national championship. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And, um, I never allow myself to drink, but that night I thought I took 30 shots of vodka. | ||
| Um, I really only took 15 and it was out of my national championship cup, which was a national championship trophy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we're all drinking from it, passing it around. | ||
| And then after 15 shots of vodka, it was, it was all water shots after that. | ||
| And they thought it was funny. | ||
| And I thought it was hilarious the day after, but I see that from the moment I ever tried a substance, um, It was always that way. | ||
| Is that in your family? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's addicts in my family for sure. | ||
| Addicts and alcoholics. | ||
| I think those are the same thing. | ||
| And it's not everyone. | ||
| And it's really hard to explain to people that don't understand it or people that don't have that inclination. | ||
| One of the things that actually got me to choose Stonegate and this rehab center Was because on it, I always thought, like, I think part of me, because I'm disciplined, because I've been a national champion of wrestling, I've fought in the UFC, all that stuff, and I've been disciplined, I just thought that there was something weak-willed about me to use, or that I was morally corrupted, and I just didn't have... | ||
| I like, why? | ||
| It didn't make sense to me. | ||
| I know it doesn't make sense to other people. | ||
| And so whenever they said, no, this isn't a morality problem. | ||
| It isn't, you actually, addicts do after usage, after they do, and that mental obsession and everything, they lose the power of choice. | ||
| Of putting it back down. | ||
| They do until they're equipped, until they're empowered, until they're educated about what's going on when they do that and how you can trick yourself. | ||
| Well, then how come sometimes people just find rock bottom and then they just decide to stop using? | ||
| Well, that's basically what I did at 23. I hit rock bottom. | ||
| I got a voicemail from my best friend at the time and he's a great guy now and we're friends, but he said, I can't believe you missed my wedding. | ||
| I can't believe my best man didn't show up. | ||
| You know, I was eight weeks on a binge and it was basically a blur for eight weeks. | ||
| And that rock bottom moment and then going back to grudge and then being kicked off the team, like that was rock bottom, man. | ||
| And then again, rock bottom comes 10 years later. | ||
| But this is what I'm saying. | ||
| To take away all agency from a person and say you can't stop. | ||
| Something has to come along and help you stop. | ||
| Some people can stop. | ||
| So why? | ||
| And then you would say that those people... | ||
| So there's supposed to be three different types of addicts and alcoholics. | ||
| Where there's three types of users. | ||
| There's the moderate, let's just say drinker. | ||
| There's the moderate drinker who can just have it from time to time. | ||
| There's the hard drinker that drinks often. | ||
| They're a hard drinker and they drink hard. | ||
| And then there's the real deal addict and alcoholic. | ||
| I think you might be saying some people can just stop. | ||
| Well, that's normally the hard drinker because the moderate drinker can stop drinking. | ||
| Just with a good, like, with a reason. | ||
| I've got an event coming up. | ||
| Or, you know, my kid doesn't like it. | ||
| And that can make them stop. | ||
| A hard drinker, maybe what makes them stop is there's a threat of a divorce. | ||
| You're going to lose your job. | ||
| Or there's something like that. | ||
| There's a consequence attached to it. | ||
| Or there's a big enough reason for them to just put it down. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But the real deal addict and alcoholic, they're the one that actually needs help. | ||
| They're the one that actually needs a support system. | ||
| I mean, we all need support system. | ||
| We all need community. | ||
| We need tribe. | ||
| We need encouragement, empowerment. | ||
| We need to share our stories. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But you stopped your first time. | ||
| I did stop the first time. | ||
| And maybe I was more of just a hard user then. | ||
| But then after these other times, I was the real deal. | ||
| And I can point back to that first time and say I've always been the real deal. | ||
| And maybe I just had this spiritual awakening or this sober vision that all of a sudden took me and gave me a life beyond what I could've ever done. | ||
| I'm just worried about saying that you need help. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But no one can do it on their own. | ||
| No, and people can do it on their own. | ||
| And I think I'm doing it in a way, but there are people just like me that do need that pattern interrupt, that training camp for the biggest fight of their life. | ||
| This was the, after April 5th, And I attempted suicide. | ||
| I finally realized, there's no fight in a cage that's the biggest fight I'm ever going to have. | ||
| Like, this is my biggest fight. | ||
| Because if I don't fix this... | ||
| It doesn't end well. | ||
| It doesn't end well for me. | ||
| It doesn't end well for the people I'm trying to help. | ||
| So that's why I went and actually got help was because I wanted some sort of training camp. | ||
| And I had that six months where it's like preparation to build support and help and some boundaries and things like that to where I'm able to better know myself. | ||
| And so it was an internal look. | ||
| There was an hour long every day of meditation. | ||
| And I would go to that every day at 6.30 a.m. | ||
| Right after breakfast. | ||
| And so now since then, you've been maintaining a journal. | ||
| You've been maintaining your breathing and meditation. | ||
| Yeah, and I've been reaching out to people. | ||
| I've been better with my phone. | ||
| I mean, I know you, like, we get blown up a lot, right? | ||
| And so, you a lot more than me. | ||
| But this right here, I couldn't get back to a lot of text. | ||
| I get overwhelmed. | ||
| I get overwhelmed by inbound requests. | ||
| Can you do this? | ||
| Can you do that? | ||
| Can you do this? | ||
| I've been able to handle it a whole lot better lately where... | ||
| I get back to people. | ||
| I can set firm boundaries. | ||
| Like I can't do this. | ||
| You're in contact with too many people, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I've, I've really started to limit that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's, it's helped me a lot to where I don't feel like I don't feel bad if someone reaches out and I don't really know them, but they expect a response. | ||
| And are you fucking around with social media at all? | ||
| Do you pay attention to that? | ||
| Uh, I mean, I, I post, but I don't, my request box and stuff, I normally never read those. | ||
| Do you read the comments? | ||
| No, that's good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I read them sometimes, but I don't let that affect me. | ||
| And I've been pretty good about that in the past where I really don't care. | ||
| If they have not added value in my life and kind of earned right to speak into my life, then I don't care about a comment on social media. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Because the people that are close to me in my circle, the people that are helping me with the board of directors or this Fit for Service tribe or you, those are the people that can speak into my life and I'll take a good, hard look at it. | ||
| And what I learned that they would offend you so much purposefully at rehab that what they were trying to do is help. | ||
| They say offense or resentment is the number one offender. | ||
| And if you allow resentment to build in you or offense and be offended and things like that, a lot of times that's whenever people go back out and use. | ||
| And so for me, if it doesn't apply, let it fly. | ||
| And if you don't know me, then... | ||
| And most of the time people aren't saying real critical stuff. | ||
| And I've just been really grateful this last... | ||
| I talked with Denise a few days ago. | ||
| I did my second round at Ways 12. And this was what was really cool that she showed me because I've been telling her I've been trying to heal from the inside out. | ||
| And she goes, that's exactly what we're doing. | ||
| It's preventative, regenerative, integrative care and functional medicine, but they're able to track the My progress on... | ||
| I've gotten better insulin resistance, which the reason my insulin wasn't that great was because I had so much inflammation in my body. | ||
| And that goes back to the parasites, the bacterias, all the other stuff. | ||
| My cholesterol is high. | ||
| People don't know what we're talking about. | ||
| So let's just explain that. | ||
| You had a horrible parasite that took forever for them to figure out even what it was. | ||
| And then they think it might have actually been malaria that got into your brain as well. | ||
| Cerebral malaria. | ||
| So I did have something called schistosomiasis, which comes from a snail. | ||
| And that's from me bathing in the rivers. | ||
| So schistosomiasis. | ||
| And then I also had cerebral malaria of the brain, and they had to poison my brain to kill the parasite in my brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude. | |
| Wait, this before or after you went on the benders? | ||
| This was kind of like one of the reasons I went back to the bender because I was feeling so defeated that I didn't have really answers. | ||
| And I was constantly sick. | ||
| And I was constantly, you know, like it was, I was on 28 pills a day for 28 days. | ||
| I was doing this parasite detox and like I was depleted. | ||
| I was feeling weakened. | ||
| I'd gotten a divorce. | ||
| It was just all this stuff dumped at once to where I was like, yeah, I can have a... | ||
| I didn't have a joint once, and then all of a sudden it just turned into way more than I ever expected. | ||
| But when you say poison your brain, so it broke down, like, your mental function. | ||
| You were telling me that... | ||
| Brain fog. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't feel like me. | ||
| I literally didn't feel like myself. | ||
| My point is, this is what triggered the addiction episode. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't you make that correlation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's what it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's the moment. | ||
| So I was looking for what is it that made you fall apart? | ||
| Now it makes more sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I wasn't getting answers. | ||
| Then I did get the answers. | ||
| It's like, okay, we've got to kill the parasites in your brain. | ||
| We've got to poison your brain. | ||
| We've got to do all this stuff to your gut. | ||
| We've got to build back your gut. | ||
| Basically, they said I had almost 100% bad overgrowth of bad bacteria in my gut. | ||
| And that's your second brain. | ||
| And then, like, I had to start balancing back out that bad bacteria with good bacteria because it should be a 50-50 balance or better good than bad. | ||
| But mine was, like, all bad. | ||
| So now my first brain is messed up and we've got to poison that. | ||
| And now my second brain or whatever, you know, your gut health, is destroyed. | ||
| And I'm going to have a long... | ||
| I know people that have recovered from parasitic invasions like that. | ||
| And it takes a long time. | ||
| Yeah, mine's been... | ||
| It's basically been since 2014. I've been on and off sick. | ||
| That's six years where I was just on and off. | ||
| Also fighting at the same time, which is crazy. | ||
| And then I fought, like, my second Bellator fight was, I mean, I had malaria the second time, I think, like... | ||
| Four or five months before the fight. | ||
| You need a lot more time to recover than that. | ||
| And on top of that, we were talking about the fact that you're taking these heavy-duty antibiotics, and these heavy-duty antibiotics have shown to weaken your tendons and ligaments. | ||
| And then I tear my shoulder. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was just really tough to make the comeback that I've been wanting. | ||
| And so, what's been great about... | ||
| I mean, this was just a few days ago. | ||
| I got with Denise again, who you met. | ||
| And she was able to show me on all these places I'm making progress. | ||
| And instead of doing it every three... | ||
| Um, months like they do with more of their patients or all their patients. | ||
| Um, they're going to do blood panels on me. | ||
| They're going to be watching everything that's going on in my body to show me that I'm not just, so the other day she said, Justin, my first time going through your blood laps, I wasn't going to tell you how long of a road you still have ahead. | ||
| You've made a lot of progress, but you've got a long road ahead. | ||
| And after the second time with her, she's like, Justin, look at all these improvements. | ||
| This is to make sure you're hope-filled, you know, full of hope that you are on the right track to make this comeback. | ||
| So you can attribute a lot of this to that disease. | ||
| You can attribute a lot of what went wrong in your life to these parasites and getting sick. | ||
| I think I can. | ||
| But just think about who you are and who you, you know, like a big part of you is your mind, your mental energy, your ability to function. | ||
| All that was radically diminished. | ||
| Yeah, I was having to do the hyperbaric oxygen therapy treatments. | ||
| To try to get blood flow down into a cellular level into my mitochondria to increase all the blood flow back to my brain. | ||
| Are you still planning on going back to the Congo? | ||
| When I go, and I'm going to go back to Uganda, we're actually going to go celebrate maybe with Dustin, maybe with Manny Pacquiao. | ||
| In Uganda, it's a lot safer there. | ||
| And we've found a malaria medication I can take that doesn't make me reject it. | ||
| But it's not just malaria. | ||
| This other thing that got into your... | ||
| Yeah, that was me swimming in the creeks. | ||
| And I mean, there's not a lot of places you can shower. | ||
| So I'm going to take smarter trips where I take my own shower where I will shower with filtered water or I will... | ||
| Oh, dude, you're going to smell so bad at the end of that trip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'll shower the filter. | ||
| I won't go get in the creeks where the snails are, where the parasites are. | ||
| Do they have enough water from their wells that they can use it to bathe with? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what we're doing in Uganda, it's going to be so incredible. | ||
| Literally, they've never had a home, right? | ||
| We're building homes where they're going to have tapped water there. | ||
| They're going to have tapped water right outside their doorstep, not inside, because of the inside plumbing. | ||
| If something goes bad, we want the toilet to just walk out their front door, turn on a spigot, and they've got water for their food, for boiling, for their hands, for washing. | ||
| Isn't it crazy how we take things for granted? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| That is an amazing thing for them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We've dug latrines, and you should have seen the celebration they had whenever they had latrines, which are toilets for the first time, instead of just having to go behind a tree. | ||
| Or behind a hut. | ||
| They're able to actually have a latrine underneath their feet. | ||
| Greg Simmons has a very funny joke about how we take water for granted. | ||
| I can't because he still does it. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| It's a great bit about shitting in water. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Well, that was one of the things that I felt guilty about when I came back here, which I don't anymore. | ||
| Now I'm helping better other people's lives. | ||
| But when I was taking a shit in a toilet and it's clean water and they're walking six miles to go try to find clean water... | ||
| You carry it out on their head. | ||
| Yeah, and it's 44 pounds when 20 liters is full. | ||
| We're five gallons. | ||
| And then I'm giving my dog clean water. | ||
| I know. | ||
| We're so lucky. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| And they're so soft because of it. | ||
| But the beautiful thing is that you can provide this to these people and see this amazing joy that they can have. | ||
| And it'll make not just you, but people listening to us, at least for a brief moment, recognize how easy we do have and how lucky we are. | ||
| Yeah, and I hope that... | ||
| For me, I've started to find a lot more purpose in my voice. | ||
| Helping, for sure, through Fight for the Forgotten, that's so much of my purpose. | ||
| But I'm going to start a podcast this year, 2021, and I hope that it's going to help other people, whether it's having doctors and actors and entrepreneurs, whatever it is, people that have a story, a story of hope, like how they've overcome something. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I was going to say, your body is not still fully recovered. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't know if I'm going to fight again at the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022, but I've been talking to Rafael Lovato Jr., and what I'm doing is just get healed. | ||
| Heal from the inside out. | ||
| That was what I was just going to say. | ||
| I know that you were thinking about doing that again. | ||
| When we were talking, when we were getting stem cell shots and talking about it, and I was like, Jesus, dude, it seems like there's always a new thing, always a new problem. | ||
| When you've got this problem solved, a new problem comes up, you've got to deal with this problem. | ||
| That's what I'm wondering. | ||
| I'm like, you've got all these problems, and they keep happening. | ||
| There's no breaks from these problems. | ||
| But then you're always creating another one. | ||
| Like, I'm ready to fight in six months. | ||
| Stop! | ||
| Stop! | ||
| That's what I wanted to tell you. | ||
| Goddamn, dude, you gotta get fully healthy and fit. | ||
| But I'm worried about you going back again and getting more of this. | ||
| You've got malaria three times. | ||
| You got this horrible parasite that they couldn't even detect for a long time. | ||
| They didn't know what it was, right? | ||
| Yeah, and then the CDC found that I had dengue fever, and then I had blackwater fever, which if you Google that, it's either one in two or one in four people die that get it. | ||
| And that's where I had, yeah, basically 65, 70. But that was an offshoot of malaria, blackwater fever. | ||
| So how do you feel right now? | ||
| I'm feeling good. | ||
| I'm literally starting to feel good again. | ||
| And that's what I love. | ||
| So when I talked to Dr. Denise, I was like, I just want to feel normal again. | ||
| She's like, why do you just want to feel normal like you did when you were 20? | ||
| Why don't you want to feel optimal, the best you've ever felt? | ||
| And I'm like, yes, that's what I want. | ||
| That's what I need. | ||
| But it's okay to want to feel normal. | ||
| Yeah, it's okay to want to feel normal. | ||
| You haven't felt normal for seven years. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| But that was just even more mind-like. | ||
| I mean, that's even more hopeful for me is like, let's get back to normal. | ||
| That's what we're getting back to right now. | ||
| And then let's get to optimal health. | ||
| And like, let's see these metrics and measurements of like 180 or 280 blood labs where she can walk me through it every few months. | ||
| What's great is that you can actually do that and see the actual blood work. | ||
| Yeah, I'm stoked about that because... | ||
| No, it's great. | ||
| Last time I was blown away, I was like, wow, I made that much progress? | ||
| You know, my vitamins going up, my minerals going up. | ||
| I worry about you, man. | ||
| I'm pestering you about this. | ||
| I worry about you. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Because you're such a good person, and I know you want to go back there and do good again, but goddamn, dude, if you get more things happening to you, your body's been fucking poisoned for years. | ||
| Every time you go over there, you're getting poisoned. | ||
| Are you getting poisoned with malaria? | ||
| Are you getting poisoned with these parasites and fevers and all this crazy shit that keeps happening to you? | ||
| Last time I went and the last couple times I went, I didn't get malaria again. | ||
| It was like the, what was it, the third time I had it, it was where it was laying dormant. | ||
| And then my immune system got weaker because it's been weakened a lot. | ||
| I'm 33 and I've had shingles five times. | ||
| And that's like an old person's disease. | ||
| And it was because my immune system's been shot. | ||
| Young people get shingles. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard guys your age get serious. | ||
| Well, I guess it's more frequent in an older population, but it can happen. | ||
| Immune is weaker. | ||
| But it's whenever your immune system, you've been immune compromised and all that other stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so working on building that immune system back up to where I can get back into fighting. | ||
| Stipe's team just reached out and was asking if I could come help them train for Francis Ngannou. | ||
| I mean, I can go up there and be a training partner, but probably not in the hard sparring right now. | ||
| Maybe more in the wrestling, where that's my bread and butter. | ||
| And a good training partner. | ||
| I'm a great training partner. | ||
| So I could probably go up there and help him train. | ||
| But I'm not going to be like this. | ||
| Because we've had the amnio in our shoulders and in our knees. | ||
| You gotta let it heal up. | ||
| I gotta let that heal up before, you know, it's this new tissue. | ||
| I don't need it to get broken down and re-injured while it's building back up. | ||
| So it might be a yes if it's more easy, but it makes me a no. | ||
| It's not gonna be easy, man. | ||
| You're helping a guy train for the heavyweight title. | ||
| See what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, you're ready to create another problem in your life. | ||
| Well, I was doing pretty good until I went to train with Stipe and then I got a blown disc and now I gotta get a disectomy. | ||
| Like, stop! | ||
| So maybe I say no, this can't. | ||
| Yes, I know. | ||
| Listen, you're creating another problem. | ||
| And then four weeks, I get another round of those shots. | ||
| Listen, take time. | ||
| Take the time. | ||
| Well, that's what's good about being a heavyweight, right? | ||
| I got time. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because the older guys can do really, really well. | ||
| Well, you're still in your early 30s. | ||
| You have a bright future as a fighter if you choose to continue to pursue that. | ||
| But the thing that I worry about you is you've got this thing that some people do. | ||
| There's a pattern. | ||
| It's going to be hard for me to verbalize this. | ||
| But there's a pattern that some people have where they have things in their life and they really have enough on their plate. | ||
| But then they see another thing and they go, well, I'm just going to do that too. | ||
| And then they fuck themselves up. | ||
| And then there's another thing that comes on when they're in the middle of that. | ||
| I'm going to do this. | ||
| You're distracting yourself with this constant state. | ||
| And I recognize it partially because I've done it. | ||
| I've been that guy. | ||
| I've been that guy where I'm doing too many different things and I start fucking my life up. | ||
| And then I recognize I'm fucking my life up and it's like I can't stop. | ||
| I'm just doing too many things. | ||
| And then the things that I'm doing, because I'm doing too many things, I'm not doing them well. | ||
| I'm not doing any of the things to their optimal ability. | ||
| Now I protect my time. | ||
| My time is very precious to me. | ||
| And I protect it. | ||
| And so when I look at a new thing, I'm like, I don't have time for that. | ||
| And I've said no to cool shit because of that, like movie roles and things that would be interesting and projects that would probably be fun. | ||
| I'm like, I can't. | ||
| I don't have any time. | ||
| And they're like, this is a great opportunity. | ||
| I'm sure it is. | ||
| I'm great with what I'm doing. | ||
| I don't have any time. | ||
| And I don't want to burden myself with too much shit. | ||
| You look at things like, then I'm going to do this, and I'm going to be, like we were talking about the podcast, I'm going to be on the board, and I'm on a piece of that. | ||
| I'm like, stop! | ||
| You can't! | ||
| You don't have time for this! | ||
| I'm going to help produce other ones. | ||
| No, you're not going to do that! | ||
| You don't have time to produce other people's shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop! | |
| Because there's a thing that people do. | ||
| You just get these possibilities thrown at you. | ||
| And then also, you're kind of distracting yourself with activity. | ||
| Where you're always having new challenges and new problems. | ||
| But you're in the middle of other challenges and problems that aren't sorted out yet. | ||
| But you keep throwing them in there. | ||
| And more iron's in the fire. | ||
| And the next thing you know, you're in a place where you're falling apart again. | ||
| Or your life's falling apart. | ||
| Or Something gets redlined to the point where it starts breaking whether it's your physical body or it's your your immune system your health or whatever the fuck it is or it's your Emotional state or your relationships something always suffers and it comes back to in a lot of times people are afraid of stillness They're afraid of peace. | ||
| They're afraid of quiet. | ||
| They're afraid of being alone in their thoughts It's one of the reasons why I like the isolation tank so much you have to be alone with your thoughts and Yeah. | ||
| You're stuck. | ||
| I feel the same way about the sauna. | ||
| Like getting in the sauna and doing deep breathing exercises. | ||
| I fucking do it every day. | ||
| I hate it every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Every day. | ||
| I get 15 minutes in and I look at my watch and I'm like, fuck. | ||
| So much time left. | ||
| Like I just concentrate on the breathing. | ||
| But... | ||
| That piece of that time where you're forced to think is so fucking important. | ||
| If you don't have that time and you just keep doing things, you're just stuck with momentum, the momentum of all these things, and then who you are, you kind of... | ||
| You never really fully address who you are. | ||
| You don't come to grips with who you are. | ||
| You don't accept who you are. | ||
| You don't take an honest inventory of who you are and whether or not you're happy with things, whether or not you've improved things. | ||
| Whether or not there's still things you need to work on. | ||
| You don't have time for that. | ||
| You're in the middle of all these distractions that you built up for yourself. | ||
| And you keep throwing new ones out there. | ||
| Now I'm going to start to play polo. | ||
| Oh, I'm taking up chess. | ||
| I'm going to fucking play darts. | ||
| You know, I'm going to learn how to code. | ||
| People just do stuff like that. | ||
| They start tacking things onto their life. | ||
| And oftentimes they don't even realize when they're doing it that they're just distracting themselves from themselves. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| I think that that, honestly, one of the most powerful moments for me at rehab was whenever it said you have to take an honest, personal, a rigorous, honest, personal inventory of yourself. | ||
| That's a good way to describe it. | ||
| Yeah, and I did that there, and I've been continuing to do that. | ||
| And one of the things that's been great that I've taken on as I've got to do this for me, but also I have support now with the people around me, is that I have to be able to say no 10 times to get one yes. | ||
| You know, defend every yes with 10 no's. | ||
| And try to cut the things out that I really am not doing. | ||
| So most of my mornings now, like until 9 or 10 o'clock, like I wake up 6.30, 7. Until 9 or 10 o'clock, I'm really not on my phone. | ||
| And I'm literally trying to either journal or read or meditate. | ||
| And then I try to set up my day, my schedule before I get on my phone and being reactive. | ||
| I'm really trying to take that time to do that. | ||
| And that's something that's new for me, but that's been really, really good for me is taking that time until nine or 10. | ||
| It might even go to 11 or 12. | ||
| Like there was, I had this meeting that I needed to get to and I'd met with them two or three times earlier in the week. | ||
| And, uh, this one wasn't as important as, uh, I was like, what's more important right now? | ||
| Is it me going out to this park and me sitting down and reading and meditating? | ||
| Because that's what I felt like I needed? | ||
| Or is it being at this meeting? | ||
| I was like, hey guys. | ||
| So I texted him. | ||
| I'm like, because I normally would say I'm indebted to these people. | ||
| And if I told them I'm going to be there, I have to be there. | ||
| And I'm normally that guy, but since I'd already been with them a lot and they didn't necessarily need me there, they just wanted me there, I texted and said, hey, I can be there late, we can go to lunch, we can do something like that, but right now I've got something I've got to do. | ||
| And really that was me almost standing up for myself, saying like, I need some more time today to work on myself. | ||
| And so I went out and I sat down. | ||
| by a waterfall. | ||
| And I literally took out my music. | ||
| I started listening to it and I started journaling some of my goals for the year, like what I really want to focus on. | ||
| And so that was on like January 2nd or 3rd. | ||
| Like one of the things I want to do is really, you know, help myself before I help others. | ||
| Yeah, I think you need to... | ||
| Because I've denied myself that. | ||
| Write that into your schedule. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, you really do. | ||
| You need to write that into your schedule. | ||
| It's like you're almost so nice of a guy that you don't think about yourself enough. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's... | ||
| I'd absolutely agree with that. | ||
| It's part of what's... | ||
| Your problem is you're too nice. | ||
| I can definitely be that. | ||
| I mean, it's just, it's not a problem. | ||
| It's just, but it's a thing that you have to kind of guard. | ||
| You know, that you will try to help as many people as possible. | ||
| And when you get requests, you will try to help those people. | ||
| And you will try to honor these requests. | ||
| And you will try to, and then the fucking pile just adds up. | ||
| And then it's overwhelming. | ||
| And you tack that on top of this severely diminished health that you experienced through the parasites. | ||
| I mean, you've gone through the ringer, man. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Well, yeah, that's what, in that reading of all my blood work, I love how they're doing it. | ||
| But just seeing the improvement in my actual minerals in my body, the vitamins that I have available, what I'm able to use, my insulin getting better, cholesterol getting better, which is showing that, like, she was saying it's not insulin from Like, you're a bad diet. | ||
| And from eating too much sugar and this stuff, it's from this inflammation that you have in your body. | ||
| And so now that inflammation's going down and you're getting healthier. | ||
| I'm just like, yes! | ||
| So I'm focusing on that now. | ||
| Are you taking CBD as well? | ||
| I am taking some CBD tinctures. | ||
| It's a company here called Reset or something in Austin. | ||
| And they're supposed to be the only FDA approved or something like that. | ||
| Here? | ||
| Yeah, it's out of Austin and they got a The only FDA approved... | ||
| Or they've been working with the FDA to get it approved and they've invested millions of dollars in it. | ||
| And it seems like it's really good stuff. | ||
| It's one of the only ones I actually notice when I take, if that makes sense. | ||
| Some of that stuff can be garbage depending on the source, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| This stuff seems like it's really good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I'm taking CBD to help the inflammation. | ||
| And I'm on a bunch of different vitamins. | ||
| And so I'm really... | ||
| I'm really excited to see what this amnio and Corian based stem cell type stuff is going to do in my joints, my knees, my shoulders. | ||
| Have you noticed anything? | ||
| No, it's too quick. | ||
| We've got to do the four rounds. | ||
| Yeah, but I think it's going to help you tremendously. | ||
| Obviously, I told you I've taken stem cells in the past, and it really did heal injuries, particularly to my shoulder. | ||
| You get banged up. | ||
| If you're doing combat sports, there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. | ||
| Everyone that I know, you've got some kind of thing going on, always. | ||
| It's a neck thing, or a knee thing, or a shoulder, or an elbow. | ||
| right. | ||
| It's just part of the prog, the program. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did I tell you that I had them in my knee though? | ||
| Um, when I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, so I'd broken my, uh, or fractured my tibia plateau and my knee training. | ||
| And you, you know, Chris Long, Howie Long son, uh, he won the Superbowl with, uh, the Patriots and then he won the Superbowl with the Eagles. | ||
| Um, so we were raising a bunch of money for water boys and also fight for the forgotten. | ||
| And so, And we were doing it through this climb of Kilimanjaro, which is 19,341 feet tall. | ||
| And so my personal goal was to raise like $2 per every foot of elevation. | ||
| And we like busted through that. | ||
| We raised like $185,000. | ||
| Then I break my knee six weeks before we're supposed to do it. | ||
| And I'm like, damn, I'm not going to be able to go. | ||
| They told me it'd be non-weight-bearing for six full weeks. | ||
| So the NFL Network made a documentary. | ||
| It's called All the Way Up. | ||
| And they followed me. | ||
| I was non-weight-bearing for two full weeks. | ||
| Then I had the amnio that we got the other day. | ||
| And then at four weeks, I was snowshoeing up Mount Elbert to climb, to just train for Kilimanjaro. | ||
| So anyways, the NFL Network followed me to do that. | ||
| You were okay to do that, even though you were supposed to be six? | ||
| At four weeks, because my healing, they were watching my healing on x-rays. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I was doing it in Dallas. | ||
| So they said it was sufficient. | ||
| They said it was sufficient to go test it out and see. | ||
| So I put in a brace and then I actually climbed it in the documentary cameras like they show me like just snow falling on me and like the wind almost blowing me over and they had to turn back and go go back. | ||
| But anyways at six weeks, six weeks I was supposed to be non-weight bearing at six weeks I was at the top of Kilimanjaro with Chris Long and Steven Jackson from the NFL and like some of our military veterans. | ||
| And that to me was like, wow, regenerative medicine is real. | ||
| Oh, it's real. | ||
| It's legit. | ||
| Yeah, it's real as fuck. | ||
| I could see it on the x-rays. | ||
| It's a real bummer that it's not approved. | ||
| And a lot of people, to get the more potent versions of it, have to go to Panama and Colombia. | ||
| And a lot of athletes are going down there to do stuff that really they should be able to do right here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And are you saying it's not approved a lot of times because insurance won't approve it too? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No. | ||
| No, it's the FDA. They're trying to stop peptides, which are also incredibly beneficial to people. | ||
| There's a lot of weirdness going on with those things, man. | ||
| With those regulations, people are like, well, they're not regulated well. | ||
| Listen, They're fucking hugely beneficial. | ||
| The amount of time and money that it takes to regulate some of these things. | ||
| And I can understand if there's no science behind it, if you don't really exactly know what's causing what and why it's healing. | ||
| No, that's not the case. | ||
| There's plenty of peer-reviewed studies on the benefits of stem cells. | ||
| They do know that these are incredibly beneficial to people. | ||
| There's a lot of resistance to these things being legalized. | ||
| I think that's why Jason with MedCorp Biologics, who is helping us, he really wants to be a front-runner. | ||
| With it, and he is in Texas, but most of his stuff all has to be through insurance and FDA approved and all the other stuff, which he's like, I think the best in Texas at doing it. | ||
| And then with Brigham, his whole vision is to literally take, take the middleman out of it. | ||
| Like the insurance companies and the providers and having to go sit and literally, you know, they only spend about eight minutes per patient whenever you go to your primary care physician. | ||
| And then they don't have the approval by the insurance company to draw all your blood work in your labs because it's expensive. | ||
| Well, they're the most overwhelmed people in the world. | ||
| Doctors. | ||
| Oh, especially now, too. | ||
| First of all, they start their jobs, they start their careers massively in debt, right? | ||
| Most doctors start their career literally hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt. | ||
| And then they begin this journey of medical care and trying to take care of people and trying to pay. | ||
| They have malpractice insurance and all this other insurance. | ||
| And then people are coming in and they're just overwhelmed. | ||
| It's a crazy gig. | ||
| It's... | ||
| Yeah, I think what... | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And then you can stop in their tracks the top 10 chronic diseases in America, like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, like this kind of stuff you can prevent with a healthy diet with optimal nutrition and good source in your body and like the right healthcare. | ||
| Not the healthcare that treats you when you get cancer, but the healthcare that... | ||
| That treats you before you get cancer and keeps you from getting cancer. | ||
| Well, let's also be honest. | ||
| We're very fortunate that we have access to these sort of treatments. | ||
| A lot of people don't. | ||
| It's just the time to pursue it as well. | ||
| We're extremely fortunate that we have access to all these different things that can... | ||
| Like when Denise is saying, let's optimize your body. | ||
| That's... | ||
| That's a fantasy for a lot of people. | ||
| That's a privilege. | ||
| Honestly, for me, that's kind of the difference between the developing world or third world, developing nations, and here in the U.S. For me, with the pygmies and the water crisis, for instance, that's completely preventable. | ||
| Completely preventable disease and death. | ||
| So that's on a whole other spectrum and level that's hard for a lot of us to hear and get because it goes in one ear and out the other. | ||
| If you see it, that can really impact you. | ||
| But if you feel it or live it or experience it with them, that forever changes you. | ||
| But then I guess on the lesser scale here in the United States, it's like... | ||
| Man, like, if you really look at it, I mean, like, we're so fortunate and we're so grateful, but still at the same time, I look at it and I'm like, I compare it to the water crisis. | ||
| We can prevent that. | ||
| We can prevent people from getting sick like that. | ||
| And now me on my own journey, my own healing journey. | ||
| It's like there is this kind of wellness revolution that's starting here that we do have access to saying, like, well, these things that are killing us, we can stop them in their tracks or we can push it back. | ||
| We can delay it. | ||
| And I'm really excited. | ||
| Like, I've gotten really close. | ||
| Well, I would say I've gotten close and I'm friends with David Sinclair now. | ||
| And he actually helped get me into rehab whenever I relapsed and I came back and I'd been to Mexico. | ||
| That dude's a saint because... | ||
| He helped me from Harvard send me the third of the three different types of tests they needed. | ||
| They did the one that barely went in the swab. | ||
| I think it's one of the ones we did here. | ||
| The other one that goes super deep in your nose. | ||
| And then they wanted the blood test one because they wanted just... | ||
| I'd been traveling internationally, so before I go to rehab, I needed all three of them. | ||
| So David overnighted it to the center, and I was able to get that taken care of. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| I love David Sinclair. | ||
| He has such a great sense of humor for a brilliant man, too. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| You know what else, though? | ||
| I got to connect him with Laird and Gabby. | ||
| And so we went up to Malibu. | ||
| I had dinner with David Sinclair in L.A. I was like, what are you doing tomorrow? | ||
| me and Rafael and Shonji, we're going up to, uh, to Laird and Gabby's and we're going to do the sauna. | ||
| We're going to do the ice and we're going to do the pool workout. | ||
| And he came up there and he's, he's in there with me with, with Laird Hamilton. | ||
| What is he a 40 year pro surfer now? | ||
| He's 55 and I think he's been doing it since he's like 15 or 16. | ||
| And then he's with, uh, Rafael Lovato jr. | ||
| You know, 12 time world medalist, six time world champion Shonji, who's got at least Yeah, they sent me the picture of all you guys in the sauna. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Man, we were all in the sauna, and we were doing those underwater workouts, which, man, Laird was kicking our ass. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| Oh, he's a, yeah, he's next level. | ||
| See his ankle? | ||
| No, I didn't see his ankle. | ||
| His ankle was broken forever, and he just kept working out on it. | ||
| What do you got there? | ||
| Is that you guys? | ||
| Oh, it was David Sinclair. | ||
| His ankle was broken, and he just kept working out on it while it was broken forever, so it fused into this gnarly stump of an ankle, like a tree stump. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| He has one ankle that's like 30% larger than the other ankle. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'll check that out. | ||
| He's like, yeah, it's just fucked up. | ||
| I just kept walking on it. | ||
| I've been there a couple times and I've done the workout and I didn't notice his ankle, but... | ||
| He'll talk to you about it. | ||
| I will. | ||
| I'll ask him all about it. | ||
| Yeah, it was broken. | ||
| He just didn't do anything about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just healed. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like a fucking animal. | ||
| Like some wild giraffe with a fucked up leg. | ||
| Yeah, he's a wild man. | ||
| David was literally doing all the workout. | ||
| This is his ankle. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at it. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| He is such a beast. | ||
| So he was doing these squat jumps. | ||
| He was doing these gorilla ones that we were all doing, and I was able to keep up with him on that. | ||
| I forget the name of the other one he does, but he's like an underwater, like, I don't know, superhero mermaid, where he's like literally doing a, he goes into a squat, he does a curl, and then he does the squat jump, and he comes out, and he arches backwards. | ||
| So that way he does this beautiful, like, backflip in the water. | ||
| And literally he said, I'll show you guys how to do it. | ||
| He did a hundred reps. | ||
| He's doing it from like 10 or 11 feet deep in the pool and he's jumping out of it. | ||
| He literally did a hundred reps because it's all about technique. | ||
| It's all about flow. | ||
| Raphael and I and Shanji, we got like six, eight, 10. I mean, it's all about the flow and the breath because you go down that deep. | ||
| And for me, like, you know, I mean, I don't know, like you start to kind of freak out whenever you can't breathe. | ||
| And so, not in jiu-jitsu for me, but underwater with weights. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I go up, all of a sudden it's like, ooh, I don't know if I can keep going on this many reps. | ||
| I'm not kidding when I say he did 100. I know that sounds like a lot, but he did 100. Then David Sinclair's getting in there and he's trying to be a champ too. | ||
| And he was doing everything we were doing a little lighter and stuff, but he was just so for it. | ||
| He was just so game. | ||
| I know he's a Harvard professor and all that other stuff, a researcher and biologist and all this incredible stuff, but now I get to talk with him and Rob, who's a friend of mine, and I think he's the PR guy for For David. | ||
| But anyways, I'm starting to look into that NAD, the Resveratol, which I don't know about all that stuff, but he was talking to Laird and Gabby about it. | ||
| And they're just such cool people. | ||
| I got to thank you, man, for opening up this world of such an incredible community or people group that have come to support me. | ||
| Laird and Gabby have donated. | ||
| Through Layered Superfoods and Reese might actually come with Gabby potentially. | ||
| Well, we're both very fortunate. | ||
| We're both very fortunate. | ||
| We're connected to a lot of cool people and I'm very fortunate I'm connected to you. | ||
| To know people like you and the selflessness that you've exhibited, it's very humbling. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| You know, you're an unusual dude. | ||
| Very unusual dude. | ||
| Definitely unusual. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's like, I don't know anybody that's, like, who got malaria three times, like, fuck it, I'm going back. | ||
| Well, I think it, I think for me, I don't think I've ever told it to you this way. | ||
| When I was there, my mom asked me to come back. | ||
| Some of the people that were supporting us asked me to come back the first time I got it. | ||
| Come back home? | ||
| Come back home. | ||
| When I was in Congo, I decided I was going to live there for a year. | ||
| I went in October, and by Thanksgiving Day, I find out that I'm dying of malaria. | ||
| And a pilot took me out of there into Uganda, and he pulled—literally, I never touched the runway in Uganda. | ||
| It's just a pilot and me on a little bitty prop plane— And they pull me out into a vehicle and take me to the hospital in Uganda. | ||
| They're saying, Justin, you come back to heal. | ||
| One, I thought, the doctors here don't know how to treat malaria. | ||
| The doctors here do. | ||
| Or the doctors in the United States don't know how to treat malaria, but the doctors in Uganda do. | ||
| They see it on a daily basis. | ||
| Logically, it makes sense for me to stay here. | ||
| But the other thing was, this was an opportunity. | ||
| And now I'm reframing that thought and everything else. | ||
| But I try to find the good and the bad. | ||
| And yes, I'm suffering from malaria. | ||
| Yes, this sucks. | ||
| But this is what the people that I love and who I'm here to help, this is what they go through on a daily basis. | ||
| Or they get this in their lifetime and they've lost people from it. | ||
| So now I get an opportunity to understand on a deeper level that I'll never forget. | ||
| Like, they go through this all the time, and it is a deadly killer all throughout the world. | ||
| It's one of the main missions of, I think, the Gates Foundation and other people trying to end malaria, like we've done mostly with polio and stuff like that. | ||
| And it's like, we gotta come up with something to, I think they have, like, new mosquitoes that are starting to target the mosquitoes that have malaria. | ||
| That scares the shit out of me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, like, how's that gonna go wrong? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hopefully they don't, yeah. | ||
| What else you got in your book, man? | ||
| Because I've got to get out of here in 20 minutes. | ||
| Yeah, let's do this. | ||
| Got anything crazy? | ||
| Got anything crazy? | ||
| You write it all down and get through all that? | ||
| Well, I did have one last gift for you, but I... Those fucking gifts, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop. | |
| Well, you're going to get that, and then you'll be able to give that to the Buffalo Trace. | ||
| Now I'm going to have to give out 120 fucking bottles of booze to people. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| For a guy who's sober, you seem to like people getting fucked up. | ||
| I like people enjoying themselves. | ||
| And for me, to be able to give that is even a gift to me, right? | ||
| It shows me that I can have that in my possession. | ||
| I'm not the addict that if it's in my possession or in my radius, I have to grab it and use it. | ||
| That's good, because here it is, baby. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It's just the thing that if I do have it, then I wouldn't be able to stop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ambiguous. | |
| Oh. | ||
| I don't have. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But this right here is a friend. | ||
| He actually helped design the tattoo on my calf, but he was the Simpsons artist. | ||
| His name's Alex Ruiz. | ||
| He's also a great friend with Aubrey. | ||
| And he's doing another piece that's art. | ||
| And I have the digital file you can share. | ||
| But he took two weeks on that. | ||
| And he just wanted to tell you thank you for the impact you've had in his life. | ||
| What did he make this with? | ||
| Man, he does it on computer. | ||
| He did this with a computer? | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| Alex Ruiz. | ||
| And so he takes it on there, and he does all the craziness. | ||
| But you will look at that ten different times, and you'll get something new out of it every time you look at it. | ||
| Tell him I said thanks. | ||
| I will. | ||
| Sweet. | ||
| So, man, I appreciate you letting me be real, raw, vulnerable, share some of my messiest times in my life. | ||
| It's uncomfortable for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's uncomfortable for me. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Because I want nothing but good things for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| So you're telling me all those things, and I'm trying to find solutions, and I know they don't make sense. | ||
| I know they're not there. | ||
| It's not like it's that simple. | ||
| But I'm like, don't do that. | ||
| Stop doing this. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Well, now it's on me where... | ||
| So, to end with my board, I was like... | ||
| My board of directors for Fight for the Forgotten, I just looked at them when we were here in Austin. | ||
| And a lot of them were in Zoom. | ||
| But I just said, you know, for me to not have lost everything with Fight for the Forgotten, my position, to not have lost any of the board members. | ||
| Like, we actually gained a board member. | ||
| And to not have lost these donors, but to like have had an increase in donations. | ||
| The most nonprofits in 2020 went down. | ||
| But I think the mission is so pure. | ||
| We want to defeat hate with love. | ||
| We really want to help people in a practical, tangible, sustainable way that they can take on and then champion. | ||
| You know, having your support has meant the world to us. | ||
| And we've been in existence 10 years now. | ||
| And what I've seen now is I really believe it's the tip of the iceberg. | ||
| If I start working smarter, not harder, and putting myself in these crazy positions, and I protect myself and my health, and I do the right things there, it's going to lead to even better things than we've done before. | ||
| Instead of 73 wells I'll be telling people how we've drilled 700 wells sometime in the next 10 years. | ||
| I don't doubt it. | ||
| I do not doubt it at all. | ||
| I know you can do it and I know what you've done is amazing. | ||
| So shout out to all the companies that have helped too. | ||
| Shout out to the Cash App. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They've done amazing stuff and Buffalo Trace trying to get me fucked up beyond belief. | ||
| Well, hey, on that, I'm going to go with whoever wins this raffle. | ||
| And you're going to drink. | ||
| I'm going to watch them drink, and I'll have some water. | ||
| No. | ||
| But open invite for you. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It just sprung on me where in the next six months or a year, if you want to go see how they make it, maybe we go with them. | ||
| But I would love to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe not. | |
| Maybe not. | ||
| But... | ||
| I'll go down one day, but, you know, it's like that's a giant commitment. | ||
| Yeah, I get that. | ||
| So I'm stoked to go with whoever wins the raffle. | ||
| I do want to see what it's like. | ||
| The process. | ||
| Yeah, and also the fact, I'm fascinated by the fact they've been around since 1773. Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's just bananas. | ||
| There's a continually operating distillery for hundreds of years, you know? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's crazy to think about. | ||
| You know, they operated during the Prohibition. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, they made whiskey for medicinal purposes. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, medicinal purposes because when addicts or alcoholics, when they're going through withdrawal, they have to have it. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Alcohol and Xanax are the only two things that if you stop or barbiturates. | ||
| If you stop in cold turkey, they lead to seizures and can lead to death. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So a lot of times, like rehabs and facilities, they needed alcohol so they could give the people that are coming off of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| Well, listen, brother, you're a fucking saint. | ||
| You really are. | ||
| You're an amazing person. | ||
| I hate hearing you be down on yourself. | ||
| It frustrates me because I don't know what to do. | ||
| I think I'm true from that. | ||
| I'm trying to think logically about it. | ||
| How is this happening? | ||
| So I'm glad you let me think logically about it, even though it might not make sense. | ||
| No, it does. | ||
| And I'm really grateful that I've had a big breakthrough. | ||
| I mean, literally, the first six months of 2020 were the worst six months of my life. | ||
| But the last six months, like doing the hard work, doing deep work, like trying to uproot this garbage... | ||
| You know, instead of having these deep roots that produce like bad fruits in my own life, how about deep roots that produce like good roots and then even like a shade tree for, you know, the pygmies or these kids that are getting bullied or whatever. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And in a sustainable way to where it's through self-love, it's through self-care. | ||
| Self-care is not selfish. | ||
| You just got to stay on the path. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what to do. | ||
| You just got to stay on the path and don't ever let yourself get off of it. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You know, it seems so easy to let things slip a little bit, relax a little here, relax a little there, but... | ||
| There's certain paths that you really should never get off. | ||
| And the path of, first of all, of being connected to the moment, that's so important. | ||
| And one of the things about people throwing a bunch of things in their lives and problems in their lives is it keeps you from being connected to the moment. | ||
|
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Mm-hmm. | |
| When you have all these distractions and problems and issues that keep coming up, that's why I get weirded out by people that always have problems. | ||
| And that's why I was saying, do you think that these problems, you're creating some of these problems, whether you realize it or not? | ||
| You see it with fighters. | ||
| And you really see it with fighters when they start to lose. | ||
| Sometimes they get in this fucking spiral, this head spiral, and they're never the same again. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes fighters will lose one fight. | ||
| Like Anderson Silva, right? | ||
| He's the baddest motherfucker on earth. | ||
| He loses one fight to Chris Weidman, clowning around, right? | ||
| He gets KO'd in a way where everybody's mocking him and making fun of him. | ||
| And literally doesn't win any fights after that. | ||
| Won one decision to Derrick Brunson for years and years and years. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It just happens like that. | ||
| Do you think that that could possibly be what happens to Conor or no? | ||
| I was with his brother and the celebration we had. | ||
| Dustin's brother. | ||
| Yeah, Dustin's brother. | ||
| Sorry, Dustin's brother, Jimmy. | ||
| And I was in Lafayette with the whole family and went out on the swamps during the day and went wild oyster mushroom hunting and grilled those up and ate them. | ||
| Dustin is a different person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a different person than he was when they first fought. | ||
| And Connor's a different person too, but I don't think... | ||
| I don't think he's the same animal that he was back then. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And also, their strategies are different. | ||
| Like, someone could say, like, oh, it's tough to be a savage, and you're waking up in silk sheets. | ||
| Yeah, he fought well in the beginning. | ||
| He did, in the first round. | ||
| He fought well. | ||
| He landed good shots, and Dustin admitted there was one time where he was caught, and he was in a little bit of trouble. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the strategy of those low kicks, Conor has that wide stance And he puts a lot of weight on that front leg, and he did not seem to have an answer for those low kicks. | ||
| And that is just a fucking new element of the game that seems unstoppable, because you can only take a couple. | ||
| You know, Khabib was saying that when he fought Justin Gaethje, that those low kicks were as hard as he'd ever been hit before, and even he probably recognized He couldn't take too many of those. | ||
| I told Jimmy, Dustin's brother, after the first round, he just gave it away to Dustin and to Mike Brown. | ||
| They're going to stay on that calf kick. | ||
| They already knew it was working, but he didn't sit down in between rounds. | ||
| He didn't want it to fill back up. | ||
| I noticed he didn't sit down either. | ||
| He didn't sit. | ||
| It's damaged. | ||
| He just gave it away. | ||
| Keep going after that leg. | ||
| Well, I mean, it was obvious anyway. | ||
| I mean, he kept trying to grab the leg after he got kicked. | ||
| He wasn't checking it. | ||
| And when he was checking, he wasn't turning it out. | ||
| So he was still taking it on the meat of the leg. | ||
| So even if you lift your leg up, if you're checking those low calf kicks, they're still hitting the meat. | ||
| It's a fucking terrible way to go. | ||
| Your nerves just shut down. | ||
| Oof. | ||
| Yeah, I've had a couple of those before, and they're brutal. | ||
| And I'm curious because I've been talking with some of Manny's team who's donating to us, and some of his closest guys is executive director, and they're like, man, they were really looking forward to maybe the Manny fight and the Conor McGregor fight happening. | ||
| But now they said that his stock's come down a lot in boxing after being knocked out by Dustin. | ||
| But then John Cavanaugh's saying, well, if they don't get the rematch with Dustin Poirier, then he's just going to go over and fight in boxing now. | ||
| And I was thinking, coming off of that loss, I don't think that Jon Cavanaugh is being smart there, saying he's going straight into boxing. | ||
| He's not going to get the fight. | ||
| It's not going to be valuable. | ||
| It's not like it was before. | ||
| With Conor, if Conor wanted to take that fight before he fought Dustin Poirier, it'd be worth a lot of money after he knocked out Cowboy. | ||
| It's a valuable fight. | ||
| But coming off a bad loss like that, and a loss where he got KO'd, no. | ||
| That fight's not happening. | ||
| It's also like... | ||
| He needs a redemption. | ||
| And here's the thing about him getting a redemption. | ||
| This is the first time he's been knocked out, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Actually knocked out. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| In the UFC. Right. | ||
| But he needs a redemption. | ||
| And the actual redemption versus Dustin, you can't make a real good argument for it. | ||
| You can't make a real good argument for a third fight. | ||
| Because first of all, there's great fights for Dustin, right? | ||
| There's a rematch with Justin Gaethje, which was a much closer fight. | ||
| And that was when Justin Gaethje was fighting in a different way. | ||
| Justin Gaethje was fighting much more reckless, right? | ||
| There's the fight... | ||
| I mean, there's the Chandler fight, which they're trying to push for right away, which... | ||
| It's tough to make that argument when, you know, you've got... | ||
| Charles Oliveira, who I think is maybe the most talented guy in the division. | ||
| Charles Oliveira might beat them all. | ||
| But him, Oliveira versus... | ||
| If you wanted to be a purist, Charles Oliveira versus Dustin is the fight to make. | ||
| Because you've got Oliveira who just destroyed Tony Ferguson. | ||
| And then you've got Dustin who just destroyed Conor McGregor. | ||
| That's the fight. | ||
| Let's have that fight for the interim belt. | ||
| Or for the new belt. | ||
| Because if Khabib really does decide, that's a wrap. | ||
| Maybe he is deciding that's a wrap. | ||
| Dana said that he needed to see something spectacular, but Khabib said, no, that's not what I said. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| So I think Khabib's probably done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It would be really hard for me to watch Dustin and Gaethje again just because both of them are big supporters of Fight for the Friaten. | ||
| I was so nervous the first time. | ||
| I know. | ||
| How do you do it whenever you're friends with everybody? | ||
| It's hard, man. | ||
| It used to be really hard. | ||
| When Khabib doesn't want to return, I won't push it anymore, he says. | ||
| I'm obviously going to talk to Khabib, see if he wants to defend that title, and if he doesn't, I won't push it anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he'll probably give him one more opportunity, but I have a feeling Khabib's an unusual man. | ||
| Very unusual. | ||
| It's why he's the greatest lightweight of all time, for sure, and maybe the greatest fighter of all time. | ||
| I mean, Jon Jones has a better resume in terms of the accomplishments, but Khabib We're good to go. | ||
| This is not a disrespectful thing. | ||
| John Jones stands out in any fucking division. | ||
| He would be an amazing flyweight, right? | ||
| He's just that good. | ||
| But I believe that the guys that he's beaten, if you look at the guys he's beaten and look at the overall talent depth of the lightweight division... | ||
| I think you can make an argument that the lightweights are more talented or at least more technical or, you know, overall it's a deeper division. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Jamie bringing up Dana just brought up something for me that, like, I'm really grateful for Dana in many ways, but one is that he said that he's going to help fund CTE research. | ||
| I actually just got back from a funeral in the autopsy says he died of complications due to CTE and he was one of my first sponsors and I was his training partner. | ||
| He's my training partner, but I was his coach. | ||
| He played football at Iowa State, but he got concussions in middle school. | ||
| Probably, at least they think he got concussions in middle school. | ||
| He got concussions playing football in high school. | ||
| Then he got concussions playing football in Iowa State. | ||
| 85% of them, by the time they're in high school, they already have some CT. And then he started fighting. | ||
| And then I was a coach for him. | ||
| I was in his corner and everything else. | ||
| He sponsored me with his supplement company at the time. | ||
| Remember whenever NO Explode was huge? | ||
| Anyways, he started one called Cardio Force and that was my first supplement sponsor. | ||
| There is a new study that they're doing now with the UFC with mushrooms, with psychedelic mushrooms. | ||
| And this is based on some research from John Hopkins University and now the UFC is involved in this CTE therapy with psychedelic mushrooms. | ||
| And there's something about psychedelic mushrooms. | ||
| Psilocybin regrows neurons and they think it can regrow neural tissue. | ||
| And they think it might be able to actually help heal brain damage, which was thought to be a very difficult prospect to try to heal the mind once it's been damaged by stress and impacts and concussions. | ||
| Well, that could have been something that maybe helped Brian. | ||
| I'm really proud of his family and him. | ||
| He donated his brain to a research center in Boston, the number one CTE research center in the world. | ||
| What was really hard was the last three or four months, he really just tanked physically. | ||
| I got to share the eulogy with one of the people that spoke at the funeral. | ||
| I stayed with the boys. | ||
| He's got four boys and his wife, Gina. | ||
| Anyways, yeah, he... | ||
| He ended up hanging himself and he was forgetting everything. | ||
| He had watched his mother-in-law go through Alzheimer's and her forget people and they had to take care of her for two years or more and for three months. | ||
| And it was even longer than that. | ||
| He knew he had it back in 2016 whenever he actually wrote a suicide note. | ||
| It was back in 2016. And then he waited and on Christmas Eve, he asked, you know, he asked Kevin Burns. | ||
| Do you remember Kevin Burns who fought Anthony Johnson? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Kevin Burns is a good friend of mine, good friend of Brian Sykes. | ||
| And he had asked him on Christmas Eve or the day before Christmas Eve about what if we started a charity in Iowa for people with CTE, former football players and people in MMA division. | ||
| And then something happened on December 26th. | ||
| They had a great Christmas, everything else. | ||
| But he was forgetting things for like three or four months. | ||
| He wasn't himself at all. | ||
| He had lost like 30 pounds, I think, in three or four months. | ||
| He's a big, strong guy. | ||
| They don't see it coming. | ||
| Guys that I know that have committed suicide from CTE, one of them in particular, just no one saw it coming. | ||
| He hugged his kids. | ||
| He was joking with them the very same night. | ||
| He went outside and he was working in the garage. | ||
| I can't hear it. | ||
| So I think there's going to be a lot of breakthrough, I hope, on CTE. And Brian, the thing that I even brought that up is even in his death, that was one of the things I said at the funeral, even in his death, he's still helping people. | ||
| He was one of the most loving people I'd ever met. | ||
| He would stop on the way to Ski Hills in Colorado from Iowa. | ||
| We were going skiing. | ||
| He would stop and stop by at McDonald's and get the homeless guy a meal. | ||
| Because he wouldn't give them money, but he'd stop. | ||
| And, you know, the kids or people would be saying, like, we've got to get to the ski lift and everything else. | ||
| And he'd stop by, and he would give this guy food. | ||
| And the guy would be like, oh my gosh, that's what I needed. | ||
| I was so hungry. | ||
| He was compassionate on the mats. | ||
| He was a great teacher. | ||
| He was a peewee football coach. | ||
| And then this is the thing that took him out. | ||
| And, you know, even in his death, his brain being studied is going to someday, somehow help people. | ||
| Did you read that article on Spencer Fisher? | ||
| Mm-mm. | ||
| It's a terrible article on Spencer the King, Fisher. | ||
| I know him though. | ||
| Amazing fighter from the early days of the UFC success. | ||
| And he had to retire due to lesions in the brain. | ||
| And there's an article about how poorly he's doing right now. | ||
| It was rough. | ||
| You know, I sent it out to a bunch of my friends and it's just one of those ones where you go... | ||
| Yeah, the style that he fought was so exciting. | ||
| He was such a wild dude, would fight anybody, had these wars. | ||
| But it's just, you pay a fucking price for this sport. | ||
| You really do. | ||
| And I think if people understood it more, they'd appreciate the accomplishments and the battles. | ||
| They'd appreciate the fighters more and what they're really putting out on the line. | ||
| You know, you could look at this Conor McGregor loss and you go, well, you know, the guy's rich. | ||
| That guy got damaged that night. | ||
| He got damaged. | ||
| It's not just his calf. | ||
| He got KO'd. | ||
| That's a price. | ||
| And it's a big price. | ||
| He got battered. | ||
| And he got dropped and knocked unconscious. | ||
| And that will pay. | ||
| He'll have to pay for that. | ||
| Hopefully they'll figure out some therapies where they can mitigate those problems that are going to occur from those kind of knockouts or maybe even reverse the damage, which would be amazing. | ||
| Hyperbarics help reverse the damage. | ||
| Yeah, hyperbarics. | ||
| But they believe that psilocybin therapy is very promising for this. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to have whoever's involved in that study come on here and explain it. | ||
| One of the things I really admire about you is, one, I know John Halkman pretty well, and then to watch Chuck—I don't know Chuck that well, but I know John real well—and to watch how Chuck left his career, you know, on all those brutal knockouts. | ||
| And then why I said I admire you is because of, you know, we both love Brendan. | ||
| I was training partners with him, was on The Ultimate Fighter with him, and just how you had that loving talk with him because you really care. | ||
| You really care about him. | ||
| That was so impromptu, and I probably shouldn't have done it on the air like that. | ||
| But I think look at him now. | ||
| Yeah, he's doing great. | ||
|
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Look at him now. | |
| He's doing incredible. | ||
| We actually had a conversation today about a friend of ours who's really fucked up, who's a fighter, who's got some serious CTE. And I said, thank God you fucking retired. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because I just saw it coming. | ||
| It was not... | ||
| And also, he wasn't into it anymore. | ||
| He could say he was into it, but I knew he wasn't into it. | ||
| He had a lot of other things on his plate, and he was doing well with those other things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, look at that. | ||
| He's doing great now. | ||
| It's beautiful that you helped him, because he's too smart of a guy, too loving of a guy, too great of a guy to have to deal with that for the rest of his life. | ||
| But it's just so hard for people to abandon their identity. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| It's so hard for them to hear like, hey man, you pay for this. | ||
| If you get knocked out three or four more times, you're going to be fucked for the rest of your life. | ||
| And that's really what happens. | ||
| And when the wheels start falling off and they keep getting KO'd, It's horrible at the end. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| Well, I invite a loving conversation like that with me sometime, if me going back. | ||
| But the thing that I'm excited about is I'm in such a healthier place now that I can take or leave fighting. | ||
| I want to fight, to use it as a platform, and also because that's what I love to do. | ||
| But I also fight smart. | ||
| I get underhooks. | ||
| I'm a wrestler. | ||
| I don't take a lot of damage standing. | ||
| I haven't had a concussion yet that I know of. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And so, yeah, I take people down. | ||
| And if I do stay standing, I try not to take a lot of damage. | ||
| Well, listen, brother, let's talk about the future. | ||
| But for now, get healthy. | ||
| I love you, man. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're an awesome person. | ||
| You really are. | ||
| Well, you're one of the best men I know. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And tell everybody, fightfortheforgotten.org. | ||
| That's the website. | ||
| Fightfortheforgotten.org. | ||
| If people want to donate, they can donate one time. | ||
| They can become part of our Fight Club, which is our monthly giving club. | ||
| But really, right now, if you want to scroll down a little bit, it's at Buffalo Trace, right on our homepage, fightforthefengout.org, and you can win the whiskey experience of a lifetime. | ||
| You can get hammered forever. | ||
| Yes, and pick out your own whiskey, and it's going to be absolutely awesome. | ||
| I'll be there with you. | ||
| Justin Renn, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you, everybody. | ||
|
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Goodbye. |
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