Peter Berg’s Painkiller exposes Purdue Pharma’s $6B opioid scheme, where Richard Sackler and his family falsely marketed OxyContin as non-addictive while pushing lethal doses like 85mg "Oxycoffins" via sales rep incentives. The show’s raw opening scenes—parents grieving lost children—cut through fiction disclaimers to reveal systemic corruption, including FDA official Curtis Wright’s suspicious approval and later Purdue Pharma job. Berg contrasts this with militarized economies, like $30M nuclear missiles or Ukraine funding, while critiquing the revolving door between regulators and profit-driven industries. Their discussion ties opioid greed to broader ethical failures, questioning why billions fuel war while domestic crises like addiction go underfunded. [Automatically generated summary]
When they first came to me and asked me if I was interested, my buddy Eric Newman, who put the whole thing together, said, do you want to do something about the Sacklers?
Do you know who the Sacklers are?
And I did.
I knew they were the family behind OxyContin.
And he said, are you interested?
And I started thinking and I started counting the people I know who've died or whose kids have died because of Oxycontin and opioids.
And I quickly got off of both fingers.
And then I started thinking about...
Some of my heroes, my artistic heroes, Chris Cornell, Tom Petty, and one of my big heroes was Prince.
I was a huge, huge Prince fan.
I went to school in Minneapolis when he was coming up.
I was an extra in Purple Rain back in the day, you know, First Avenue in Minneapolis.
And, you know, those three guys, when Prince died, you know, Prince was, he was, had such a, he was legendary for his work ethic and his lifestyle, no alcohol, no swearing, and just incredible work ethic.
And the fact that OxyContin got him.
And that really kind of fucked with me.
So when they came to me and, you know, started talking to me about doing something about The Sacklers, I was like, yeah, I'm all in.
And the more I dug into it, the more experts and writers who have been covering this epidemic for so long, the more I learned.
I'm not necessarily the biggest conspiracy guy of all time.
If the proof's there, I'm down.
But the more I learned about the Sacklers and how they maneuvered What is essentially just heroin and like a little M&M pill, you know?
How they were so artful and so good at manipulating the system.
Well, I'm glad you were all in because people need to know this story and a lot of people aren't going to watch a documentary.
You know, they're not going to read about it.
This is a very entertaining show that shows accurately how this went down.
And, you know, there's a moment, and I don't want to give too much away, but there's this one moment where this ethical doctor confronts this sales girl.
And that's a very, very, very powerful moment.
Because the ethical doctor who knows everything about opiates is essentially explaining to this very young girl, just a beautiful sales girl, that you're selling heroin.
This is heroin.
It's indistinguishable to the body.
It's heroin.
It's just you're calling it a different thing.
And this idea that it's only 1% Of the people have problems with it.
Those numbers are all lies.
They're always lies.
They lie about how many people died.
They lie about how many people get addicted.
It's all a lie.
And if they can keep lying and not face any repercussions, they'll keep lying.
Because they almost have an obligation to their shareholders to do that.
Yeah, and in this case, they didn't even have shareholders.
It was a private company.
Richard Sackler and his uncles were making all the money.
They completely lied.
I mean, there were doctors, and they knew how powerful the opioid dosage was.
And what else is crazy is they knew that if they just kept, they would make so much more money by what they call titrating up, right?
So, you know, we put you on 10 milligrams of OxyContin because you blew out your back in the gym.
And it works for a bit.
And then when it doesn't, we're like, oh, well, we just got to kick you up.
So let's put you on 20. And then let's put you on 40. And they got up to 85 milligram Oxycontins.
They call them Oxycoffins.
That was the word on the street.
And these reps, these cute little reps, these pretty little college graduates who are just looking to make some money, were paid bonuses based on the amount of milligrams in the pill.
So I'm trying to convince you, if I'm a rep and you're a doctor, just to kick it up, doc.
Prescribe 20 or 40 or 85 milligrams and everybody will make some more money.
And that was the game that the Sacklers were playing.
And, like, you know, I've said, like, I'm down with capitalism.
No problem.
Like, make money.
Do it.
And if you just look at the Sacklers, you know, from a capitalistic perspective and you apply, you know...
Rules of capitalism and you're on their grade.
They get an A+. They were fucking good at making money.
You put like that much morality into the equation and these are some evil human beings.
So in the most bizarre coincidence I've ever experienced in my years of being in the business, the day Painkiller came out, the Supreme Court paused that decision.
Well, so, yes, there's so many horrific things they said.
One of the things we know that they did said, which was, like, one of the original strategies that Purdue Pharma had that they were advised to adopt by, you know, their lawyers and their advisors and their marketing guys, when they realized that people were dying, that kids were crushing up OxyContin and snorting it and getting addicted and overdosed, and when they realized it was being misused this way.
Their strategy was, quote, hammer the abusers.
Hammer the abusers.
So your Joe, your 19-year-old daughter has just dropped out of an OxyContin overdose.
The response of Purdue basically is, well, your daughter was a drug addict.
Your daughter was a drug addict.
I'm so sorry for your loss, but your daughter was a drug addict.
And if you see the show, we open each episode with a parent.
We were told right when I got ready to lock the show, I had to get on a Zoom with all the legal from Netflix and others because the Sacklers are really good at lawyers.
Giuliani was one of their main lawyers.
I don't know if you know who she is.
She's a very powerful attorney and others.
So there's a lot of fear about being sued.
I have my talking points here about what I'm not supposed to say.
Again, everything I'm saying is, you know, more or less my theory and things that have been backed up by books like Painkiller by the very talented Barry Meyer, who wrote, investigative reporter for The Times, who wrote it.
But we were told by legal that we had to put disclaimers in front of each episode.
You know, what you're about to see is based on fact, but some of the facts have been changed.
And, you know, it's not all true.
We've changed some of the facts.
And that didn't really sit right with me because, yes, we have interpreted things and changed some things, but the reality is the Sacklers did what they did.
And I thought just putting a standard disclaimer would be kind of letting them off a bit.
And I was thinking about it.
I'm like, well, what if we had a 50-year-old woman sitting, we opened the show, a 50-year-old woman staring at the camera, and she reads the disclaimer exactly as legal says.
You know, what you see is based on fact, but some of it has been fictionalized.
And then she stops and she says, but what hasn't been fictionalized is that my 22-year-old son, Tommy, and she holds up a picture, died of an Oxycontin overdose.
And that was, you know, the kind of thing that was, I think, very important to me and to all the makers of the show that if we were going to veer from the truth and we were going to potentially occur the wrath of the Purdue legal, we did it in a way that never let them off the hook.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine about his mom.
His mom's 90. And, you know, she's had health issues.
But could you imagine when we were kids if you told me that your friend's mom was on heroin?
And that we had to get her more heroin and the doctor's not there's something wrong with her prescription So what had happened was the pharmacists the doctor had screwed up and prescribed more pills Verbally then he wrote it down on paper like he told her you have to take two a day You know and this is supposed to be good for you know, whatever it is 30 60 days, but he wrote the wrong number and Instead of like 180, he wrote 90 or something.
And, you know, one of the things that, I think, like, episode three or four, the patriarch of the Sackler family, Arthur Sackler, who started, got the whole ball rolling.
And he, you know, back in the day, they actually did prescribe heroin.
We found all these great old ads for heroin and cough syrup.
And this is what doctors like Arthur Sackler, who was Richard Sackler's uncle and is arguably the godfather of Oxycontin and opioids, they were sending this stuff out.
Your child's having trouble sleeping?
Put a little liquid morphine on a blanket and let him suck on it.
So the catchphrase for OxyContin that Richard Sackler came up with was, OxyContin, the one to start with, the one to stay with.
And those were the ads.
And that's what the cute little 23-year-old graduates from Ohio State or Duke or wherever they were from, these cute girls would come into your office.
You're a doctor in some Midwestern town.
And in comes this beautiful girl with a...
Brochure that says OxyContin, the one to start with, the one to stay with, and you've never heard of it, so you just start, you know, and here's the thing about OxyContin.
We've talked to people who've done heroin and they describe the feeling, the actual moment of the high.
Yes, it's a powerful experience.
If you've got horrific pain and you take an Oxycontin or a Fentanyl, it's probably going to make that pain go away and you're going to feel really good for a little while, right?
For a little while and then you're not going to feel so good.
And I took it and recognized, okay, yeah, there's a lot of power in this little pill.
No thank you.
And I'm fortunate.
I don't have an addictive gene.
But I could easily see how...
And look, the Sacklers knew this.
They all knew how powerful that product was.
And they knew that if I put it in you...
You're gonna feel, as they say, as Richard Sackler says, life is about running away from pain towards pleasure.
If you feel pain, that's, right, the human condition is we wanna stay away from pain.
Anything to feel no pain and to feel good.
And so he knew he had this miracle because any pain, whether it's physical, emotional, you know, psychic pain that you're feeling, this little pill's gonna turn that off.
And you're going to feel like you've been dropped into a vat of warm honey for a little while.
And then that honey starts to turn into battery acid and it starts to burn.
And then, you know, something else we talk about in the show is, yes, the deaths are very high, but the amount of families that have been wrecked and destroyed and children who've lost parents and had to grow up with that kind of trauma.
You know, I have friends whose children have gotten hooked and tangled up in opioids.
And, you know, as a father, one of...
One of my biggest, biggest fears was, God forbid, my child should ever experience addiction because I've seen what that does to a parent.
To have to ride that chaotic roller coaster of childhood drug addiction and try everything you can to keep your kids safe and find that this pill has taken a hold of their soul, like you said, like a demon.
It's true, though, that the chaos of dealing with someone, and it's not just OxyContin, any addiction, right?
I have many friends who've struggled with alcoholism and Other addictions, just trying to love somebody who's going through that kind of beast ride is just horrific.
And to think that people like the Sacklers were in the business of monetizing such hurt and pain, that's dark.
And kind of ironically, because of the war on drugs, because so many drugs are illegal, now people are dying from fentanyl from things that are not supposed to have opioids in them.
One person survived, but the whole thing is fucking insane.
Right.
It's so insane that it's so...
It's so common.
It's so common to hear about someone overdosing from fentanyl.
You read about it in the news.
It's in the news all the time.
Athletes, singers, you know, someone fucks up and takes the wrong dose and they're dead.
And I believe what happened with Tom Petty was he got off stage and I think he had some sort of an injury and he got a pill from one of the guys that was like a sound guy.
I mean, if you Google their value, it's between $10 and $20 billion reported.
Nobody knows exactly how much.
They're a really secretive family.
One of the most internet-scrubbed families, and Richard Sackler in particular, people I've ever encountered.
You just can get very little information on them.
And the other, I think, big part of the story that surprised me was the FDA, right?
And the FDA's role in opioid approvals.
And in the case of OxyContin, We think about the FDA as this big, giant, bureaucratic organization.
We were talking about stem cells a little bit earlier.
If you want to get an approval for a drug, you've got to send it to the FDA. It's going to be reviewed by this massive board of scientists and experts, and they're going to make a determination after careful analysis.
That's not how it works.
In the case of OxyContin, The whole approval process came down to this one guy, this guy named Curtis Wright.
And Curtis Wright, when Purdue Pharma needed the FDA to approve, they'd spent 30 million bucks developing this drug.
The whole business of drug developing is fascinating.
But they were all in, and they needed this drug to keep the company alive.
They needed the FDA to approve it.
And this guy was like, I can't approve this.
This is heroin and a pill.
No.
And they kept trying to get him to approve it.
And they started trying to pump his ego up.
They started writing articles with him.
They started trying to schmooze him and charm him.
He wouldn't approve it.
Finally, and no one knows the facts, they took him to a hotel on the East Coast.
Purdue Pharma took Curtis Wright of the FDA, spent a couple of days in this hotel room.
They came out of the hotel room with an approval, with the language, OxyContin, quote, is believed to be non-addictive.
Is believed.
If you think about that language, it had never been used in an approval process before, ever.
Made no sense.
Is believed.
Not is not, but is believed to not be addictive.
A year later, he leaves the FDA. He's making probably 50 grand a year.
Where does he go work?
Purdue Pharma.
For 400 plus thousand dollars a year.
They bought the approval.
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But the two days in the hotel, what the fuck did they do?
When I was in fifth grade, we had a social studies teacher who was absolutely, like, before Oliver Stone in the film, this teacher was obsessed with the super bullet theory, right?
The magic bullet theory that, you know, went through Connelly's shoulder, through his knee...
He spent a year still working for the FDA before he came and worked for Purdue.
It's pretty intense.
I just saw a video that, I don't know whether it was TMZ or somebody found the guy, Curtis Wright, up in, I think he's in New Hampshire, just like two days ago, and they kind of went after him.
And then they just interviewed the local police chief for this town in New Hampshire who said, well, we had no idea that this guy's living in our town.
I want to take him on a tour of our morgue and our cemeteries and show him...
I think you'll find Curtis Wright if you look him up.
He said, many saw his invention, what Alfred thought would end all wars, just like Oppenheimer, as a highly lethal product.
When Alfred's brother Ludwig died in 1888, a French newspaper accidentally published an obituary for Alfred that referred to him as the merchant of death.
Like, I always have trouble, like, understanding how different people process morality and, like, what it would mean for...
Because you've got to assume a guy like that, after, you know, 25 years, has figured out a way of justifying to himself what he's done, right?
Like, we all do that, like...
We justify our behaviors.
We don't engage in behavior like that, but whatever we do, we justify it.
And I wonder how much it hurts.
We tried to contact Richard Sackler several times during the early—he used to live here in Austin, and we couldn't find him.
He has a house here in Austin still.
But how it feels.
You know, there's never been a moment where there's been any kind of accountability where, you know, Richard Sackler comes out and says, okay, okay, look, I am really fucking sorry.
Let's just start with that.
I am so sorry that this has happened.
I am so sorry for the pain.
And I can't undo it.
But I want to first acknowledge that I'm sorry.
I made some really bad decisions.
I thought I was helping people.
I wasn't.
There has never been...
And I think that's where the anger comes from, so much of it.
The idea of a serial killer is such an extreme, real but extreme version of that.
But how many times do you kind of come across someone who's maybe not killing people or engaged in a lethal career, but you're like, whoa, that dude doesn't seem reachable.
I don't know what's going on there.
I'm trying to have some sort of human connection, but this dude is just like...
I've met many people generally who organize their lives strictly around making money.
Like, I think it was Bush who said, you know, he had just come back from meeting Putin years ago, and he said, you know, I looked into his eyes and I didn't see his soul.
And I remember, like, I was younger when he said that, but it chilled me.
Like, and Bush looked, this was Bush too, and he's like, I looked into his eyes and I didn't see his soul.
I mean, something that I've been looking at for a while now is trying to get into the weapons contracting business, meaning like the big ones, the McDonnell Douglas, the Raytheons, the Boeing, the companies that Are making so much money.
I was in Pearl Harbor working on a film and they had the nuclear submarines coming in and out of the harbor.
Have you ever seen one, these Trident submarines?
No.
They're amazing.
Like, you know, it never ceases to amaze me that, like, many of our greatest creative accomplishments are these weapon systems, right?
Like, have you been on an aircraft carrier before?
Or, you know, witnessed the awe and spectacle of those planes, right?
They're incredible.
And we were filming on a carrier in Pearl Harbor, and the subs kept coming in and out, and they're these massive, sleek, they look like, you know, sharks, and they're cruising slow, and they dock in.
And we had handlers from Pearl Harbor there, and I'm like, you know, could I tour one?
And they went to the Admiral of the base, and the word came back, yes, you can tour one.
So they took me to a nuclear submarine that was tied up at Pearl Harbor, and they took me on it.
And I go in, I've got these, you know, public affairs people, and the captain of the sub, and they're showing me around the sub, and they're just awesome, and they're massive, and they're full of people, and And it's just all, like, the most, like, technical, high-tech shit you've ever seen in your life.
And they're like, this is the navigation room.
This is where we control the sub.
And they're showing me the equipment.
I'm like, how much does this equipment cost?
And they're like, well, we can't really tell you, but it's, you know.
50, 100...
Between 50 and 100 million dollars for this area of the sub.
And then they take me past the nuclear reactors where there's armed guys guarding the nuclear reactors because they're propelled by nukes.
And I'm like, well, how much does it...
We can't tell you.
Right?
And then they get you into the torpedo rooms where there's these massive torpedoes.
Dozens of them.
And you're like...
How much do these things cost?
We can't tell you.
We can't tell you.
Then they take you to the fucking missile room where there's 10 missiles.
Okay?
Missiles that have nuclear warheads that can go on them, right?
Sir, how much do these cost?
Well, we can't tell you that.
Then you start looking up the prices, right?
And you figure for a nuclear missile with the warhead and the guidance system and all the propulsion, you've got to be looking at least $30 million.
That's my guess.
What do you think a nuclear missile armed and loaded costs?
Oh, there was a question about this recently because the missiles that they shot at the Chinese air balloon, that balloon, the spy balloon, they missed one of them.
And then there was a talk of how much that missed cost.
I'm talking about a nuclear missile fired from a submarine, right?
So now I'm on this thing.
I'm counting these missiles, 10 missiles, right, that I can see.
So I'm trying to do the math.
I'd say it's $500 million worth of missiles on one sub, right?
I'm looking, I can see eight subs docked in Pearl Harbor, right?
So now I'm like, there's 10 times 8, right?
There's 80 missiles in my visual at 500 a missile.
And these are just the subs I can see, right?
So I'm thinking, well, wait a minute.
If one of these subs fires one missile, right, we're fucked.
We're done.
The world is probably over, right?
One missile goes.
We've got at least 80 of them that I can see.
How many people are making money off of this game, right?
Where's the money going?
That we have to keep putting, loading these submarines with nuclear missiles, one of which is going to get it done.
That's not then including all the missiles that are in the silos, right?
All the missiles that are flying 24-7 in planes and bombs.
Like, we are loaded up.
Good.
Right?
We got enough.
Yet we keep making more.
And this is, you know, like Purdue Pharma, these companies, and now it's all turning into, like, AI-controlled drones, right, that are going to be, like, the new forefront of the weapon systems, where all the money is going to go.
But I was thinking, like, what would happen if you took two of these subs and took them offline and built, I don't know, schools?
What would happen?
Would our national security be threatened?
I don't know.
Would our country be better off?
I don't know.
All the money, all the money is going into the military.
I support the military.
I've done multiple films about Our troops, and I understand, I've been to Iraq with the SEAL platoon.
I've had a front row seat to the reality of what these men and women are going through.
This kind of spending, it seems to me to be a bit reckless.
If there's that much money to be made, the same way Purdue Pharma was incentivized to pretend that it wasn't addictive, even though they knew it was, it's the same kind of thing.
Like, there's decisions that get made specifically because of money.
That's really scary for us because we want to think that if we have a leader, we trust someone to be a leader.
We have this thought in our head that this is our chief, right?
This is the best warrior.
This is the wisest person that's lived the longest and the best to govern us.
We would never want to believe that someone that he appoints and that's in that chain involved in running all these people is making decisions that will absolutely cost lives and souls.
People will be destroyed.
But they're making these decisions because of money.
And it's like the same thing with with some of these drugs is the same thing with some of the big weapon systems.
You know, some of like if you're if you're the if you're the president, right, if you're the next president of the US and you decide that you want to reduce spending in the military.
So say there's a jet program.
F-35 or some massive jet program that's costing a shitload of money and you want to try and slow it down.
Well, what they do is they build different parts of the aircraft in different states.
So there might be 30 states that are all contributing to making one weapon system.
So if you try and dismantle it, you've got the government, the representatives from 30 different states saying, you can't do it.
We've got a factory that's making the guidance system.
We've got a factory that's arming the ordnance on the missiles.
We're doing the landing gear.
And the weapons are now part of the economy, and they can't be divorced from it, and the spending just goes on.
And that's what's going on with China right now, right?
That we're in an arms race with China.
A lot of AI technology involved.
We're now starting to discuss letting AI... Fly and arm and release weapons on targets that are AI-assessed and AI-authorized kills because China's doing the same thing, and we don't want to be out-teched by China, and so we're in a never-ending arms race to have the best technology.
I get it.
Okay, fine.
Let's do it.
It's just a lot of money.
You know, and I can't help but think, like, who's making money?
Okay, it says CBO estimates that plans for US nuclear forces as described in the fiscal year 2023 budget and supporting documents would cost $756 billion over the 2023-2032 period.
Okay, nine years.
$122 billion more than CBO's 2021 estimate for the 2021-2030 period.
Other than communication, like cell phones and the like, and wireless internet, this is crazy that they develop a nuclear-powered underwater weapon That is...
Because it's this road, Area 51, it's this highway, and the base is over a mountain, but the road goes on forever, and you're driving, and we're high as fuck on mushrooms, and we're not getting any closer to the mountain, and we're driving, and we're driving, and we're driving, and suddenly there's a white van behind us, right?
With the light on, and we're like, oh, fuck.
Okay, good.
Like, this is kind of what we thought might happen, and sure enough, guys get out, military dudes with guns, and they're looking at us, they're like...
Buddies are like, let's take some shrooms and get on Area 51. And these guys, they weren't nasty or tough, but they're like, yeah, yeah, you're going to turn around, drink some water, turn around, and go to the Little Alien Hotel.
Because people were filming things, John Lear in particular, a lot of people were filming things that set up like very strong telescopes and high-speed optics and they were filming these tests of these things.
Whether or not these things were UFOs or whether it's top secret shit they're working on, obviously the stealth bomber came from that program.
They made a lot of wild shit that is absolutely from us.
But the alleged claims, and the most fascinating one is this guy Bob Lazar, who claims to have worked at S4, which is a Site 4 of Area 51, and he was on a program designed to back-engineer this recovered disc.
It's a fascinating story.
Because if he's full of shit, oh my god, what a great story.
This guy's pulled the wool over people's eyes for 30 years.
Because he told the story in like 1989 was the first time he told it.
So it's more than 30 years.
But he's also, he has like real knowledge of the area.
He has real knowledge of Los Alamos Labs where they tried to say that he never worked there, but then they found him on the employee roster from the time.
He went in there.
People knew him.
It seems like the guy really was a propulsion specialist, and they really did try to get some off-the-fucking-beaten-path scientists.
Because they have to get fresh eyes on these things, allegedly, every few years.
But everyone's sworn to secrecy, and it's very compartmentalized.
So the metallurgy guys are not allowed to talk to the propulsion guys.
No one gets together and goes, what the fuck is this?
They can't have a group of scientists.
So they exist in a team form, and it just doesn't work that way.
They need more people.
And he said no one was able to figure out anything about it, other than there's some sort of a reactor that worked on some new element.
It was theoretical back then, but now they know it's a real element.
What I was getting at though is that like when you see an insane system like these helicopters and the goggles and then you see these insane nuclear-powered submarines and these insane aircraft carriers, like what we have built is so fucking mind-blowing.
Why wouldn't we think that we've hit some next-level propulsion system and that the reason why the Pentagon is talking about out of this world crafts, they're obscuring reality.
The reason why people are coming forward and telling you about their experience in this program, maybe that's obscuring reality.
It might be bullshit.
It might be that the government and the military and the contractors don't want any of our enemies to know that they have some fucking bonkers shit that can go literally like the speed of light.
So I was just working up in New Mexico and we were filming around Los Alamos.
Have you ever been to Los Alamos?
No.
It's amazing that people just haven't seen the laboratory, the current Los Alamos Research Laboratory.
Which is, you know, across the street from where Oppenheimer lived when he was doing the Manhattan Project, which was this boys school that they kicked everyone out and all the scientists moved in, which was not in the film, which is quite interesting.
Like Los Alamos, if you can ever go there and see the museums and, you know, it's just a fascinating place to see where they built that bomb.
But across the street, or actually across this river from where Oppenheimer lived, is now the current Los Alamos Research Laboratory.
Pull up a picture of that one if you want to see something mind-blowing.
It's bigger than UCLA campus.
It's this massive research facility.
In Los Alamos, which, and you can't see half of it.
It's supposedly a giant chunk of it is underground.
It's completely armed.
We would drive, there's a road, that road at the top there is this access road that we would drive every day to go up.
There's a ski mountain above it.
So for some reason they let you drive fairly close, but it's all Homeland Security protecting it.
We first got up there and we're like, what are they doing here?
And everyone's like, well, it's digital warfare.
It's nuclear maintenance.
It's...
Alien dissection.
Forget Area 51. This place was like...
So if we're inventing shit, this is the kind of place we're inventing it.
And we went out a couple of days to these...
There's some restaurants and bars in the town of Los Alamos.
And I'm like...
If I'm China, I'm just hiring hot girls, getting them to turn, and putting them as bartenders or cocktail waitresses because all the scientists from Los Alamos just go there after work and get drunk.
Yeah, it was such a crazy story, like how these scientists just moved into this school, kicked all the kids out under national security order, and the scientists moved in.
And to your point, no one knew what anyone else was doing when they were building the bomb.
So you're working on one part, I'm working on another.
Our wives have no idea what's going on.
We're going out and building the bomb all day and coming home and just like drinking.
They all drank and like I think there was like a lot of wife swapping and weird shit going on too.
They were just partying and building fucking nuclear bombs.
And now you go out there and see what this and it's just like I just want to know what are we doing?
How much does it cost?
And who's in charge?
And Los Alamos now, so if there is those systems, in my mind, if there was an alien ship found the government wanted, they're going to take it to Los Alamos.
That's where they're going to take it.
That's where they're going to dissect it.
And whatever's going on out there is some deep and real shit.
If you go from Orville, Wilbur and Orville Wright's invention of the aircraft, how long is the time period before someone drops a nuclear bomb out of one?
Like, if they have programs If they have programs to do something like Area S4, if they can develop these insane machines in silence, What else do they...
There was just a great article in the New York Times yesterday about it.
All these companies that are now scrambling to take over the buildings, which is a threat to the established weapons manufacturers, jet builders, because the future are fighting China in a large...
Like, full-scale battle is going to be AI-controlled drone-dependent.
So rather than sending human beings in $60 million jets, they're going to send swarms of $2 or $3 million AI-controlled fighter drones.
And those are going to be self-driven, right?
Self-flown.
The way Elon's trying to get self-driving vehicles.
I mean, I think this is what—I'm not defending Ted Kaczynski—but this is what Ted Kaczynski's manifesto was about, was the construction of technology was going to replace the human race.
I went to MIT. We filmed something at MIT and they took me into the robotics department like down in the basement and they showed me like these 10 kids did a presentation.
We're the first film, Patriot's Day, because one of the MIT cops was killed by the marathon bombers.
They killed him after the bombing.
And so they wanted to honor him, and they let us film there.
And they took us down to the robotics wing and showed us a robot cheetah that they had invented that was sprinting up and down the halls and jumping over little obstacles.
And if you look at OxyContin and what the Sacklers were able to do and how they were able to basically take something much more lethal and certainly more profitable than fucking crack and get away with it.
Like, that's something that we talk about quite a bit.
It's pretty insane that this is the reality of our current generation, that money allowed this to happen, and that influence allowed this to happen, and most people just trusted their healthcare professional, and as it said in the film, or in your show, that guy's trusting the FDA. He's trusting that they know what they're doing.
And when he prescribed it to me, I'm like, but it doesn't hurt.
I'm like, it doesn't hurt.
Like, right now it doesn't hurt.
You did the operation.
It's done, right?
Like, it's not hurting.
I mean, it's uncomfortable because I've got these fucking sponge things shoved up my nostrils with little tubes in them to expand my nostrils and allow it all to heal in the right form.
Sounds horrible.
It sucked, but it's a really good move.
You have a deviated septum.
My nose, I broke my nose for the first time when I was like five, and I think I broke it who knows how many times after that.
Maybe a dozen.
It was destroyed.
The inside of my nose was all fucked up.
It was completely closed off.
So they fixed it.
The doctor was fantastic.
He fixed it, but he tried to give me two different opiates.
He's like, you're gonna need these.
And I was like, but it doesn't hurt.
Like, I don't understand what you're saying.
I'm telling you right now, I'm not in pain.
Am I going to be in more pain?
Like, how am I going to be in more pain later?
I think like right after the operation, it's the most pain.
I had heard about Morgan but I never met him and he had fallen out of a helicopter doing training and broken his back and was in Recouping in Virginia and I knew he'd been hurt and so I wanted to meet him because they're very close and I knew if I was going to make a film about Marcus I had to at least meet Morgan because Morgan's a powerful figure in Marcus's life.
So I flew out there and went to his house.
I got there late at night and there were a bunch of seals in the house and Morgan was sitting in a chair and they were watching TV and he was just sitting there and every once in a while he would tremble and he decided he wasn't going to take anything.
It would have broke him back.
I'm like, dude, you're not taking anything?
And he's like, fuck no.
I'm not taking anything.
I'm going to experience this pain.
I'm going to process this pain.
I'm going to use this pain.
And he wrote out his broken back without any pain medication.
And it did make me...
I think, and I still think, you know, how pain-adverse we all are, right?
Like, oh, it hurts.
Make it go away.
Make it go away.
Give me the quickest path to being pain-free.
Drink this.
Smoke this.
Buy this.
Fuck this.
Whatever, right?
And that we're so bad at tolerating pain, and the expectation is, oh, okay, Joe, we just worked on your nose.
Strength in your neck comes from obviously the structure, the bones, but it also comes from working your neck out.
There's a bunch of exercises that guys do to strengthen their neck, and sometimes when guys don't do that, then they run into problems like bulging discs.
But you're going to run into those anyway in combat sports.
It's inevitable.
But I know of many, many, many, many people now that have sought help, particularly overseas.
Whether it is in Peru, or Panama rather, Columbia, or Tijuana, the CPI Institute in Tijuana.
I know there's BioAccelerator in Columbia that's very good.
They've taken care of a lot of UFC athletes.
A lot of guys get stuff fixed.
Why can't this stuff be approved in the US? My suspicion is the same suspicion when you see the influence that these pharmaceutical drug companies have over the FDA. Wow.
My suspicion is that there has probably been an analysis done Of what would happen if stem cell use was ubiquitous?
What would happen if it was everywhere?
What would happen if you allowed people to use stem cells the way we allow people?
Well, maybe, but certainly more people would get healed.
More people would get fixed.
Look, I don't know of anyone who has had, and this is just my own anecdotal experience, I don't know of anyone who's had bad experiences with stem cells.
I've had people that I know that did it and it didn't help them, but upon further examination, either Their problem was too big, and it required surgery.
Or, in the most part, we're dealing with, like, fighters, and a lot of these guys just don't wait long enough before they go hard.
They go back and they train hard.
They have, like, a knee issue or a shoulder issue, and they go back and they train.
They're too savage.
They get right back into it as soon as they start feeling good.
And you really need a lot of time for it to take root in many, many months for it to really heal.
But like I've said many times on this show, and I told you earlier, I had a full-length rotator cuff tear.
I don't remember exactly what mesenchymal stem cells, and they used exosomes.
I don't exactly remember what it all was.
But I remember that it's all processed from umbilical cords.
So say if a young lady, I think you have to be 25 years or younger, has a baby through a C-section, then they harvest their umbilical cord, I don't know if they sell it or whatever, and then they convert that into stem cells and that is unique.
Particularly unique in its ability to help heal any kind of tissue.
But the difference between what you're allowed to do in America now is different from what it was back then.
But also the stuff they're doing in these other places overseas is much more dramatic.
Because they can use much larger doses and they keep you there for three days.
And they also combine it with hyperbaric therapy and a bunch of other different things that also accelerate your healing.
NAD, IV drips, a bunch of different things that help along the process of your healing.
And I know many people that have avoided surgery because of that, and now we're back to 100%.
But it doesn't mean you don't need surgery.
Like, there's certain disc issues that are ruptured beyond the point of repair, and you probably need something done.
And it's nice that there is all these different options.
You just, you have to be careful, you know, whenever you're getting something that's an operation.
Like, especially if you're getting a replacement, like a knee replacement or something.
I think if it's possible that a human being, a lone human being, could be taken into a hotel room for a couple of days and then comes out and he has a $400,000 a year job after he retires.
And this revolving door does exist.
We know that.
We know that exists.
Why wouldn't you protect your interests by stopping some sort of a novel, new sort of treatment that may lead to way less people on pain medication, way less people that need anti-inflammatories, way less people that need a lot of the stuff you sell?
And Dr. Reardon, he was like the first guy that I ever talked to about this stuff and he's written many published papers and books on it and very, very, very knowledgeable guy when it comes to this and they're absolutely convinced that it's beneficial and we should be using it everywhere.
One of the things that I don't think anyone really understands that hasn't done it is like, okay, you're going to go get stem cell therapy in wherever, in Panama.
What does that mean?
Like you fly to Panama, you drive to some established-looking clinic, or is it like in the back of a strip mall?
You're probably very hesitant to throw that same kick again because you just had your leg snap in half and your leg was fucked up for a good solid year and a half after that and you had to have surgery and there's plates in there and rods and shit, screws.
After the leg break, he's got the no contest, which was kind of a boring fight anyway, but then you got lost, loss, one win, a decision win over Derrick Brunson, lost, lost, lost.
He was never the same again.
He was never the same again.
The Anderson Silva that smoked Forrest Griffin, the Anderson Silva that destroyed Vitor Belfort, the Anderson Silva that just dominated that division, he was never really that guy again.
The Anderson Silva that beat Dan Henderson, he was never that guy again.
And I think that it's a very, very, very, very difficult injury to come back from and be 100%.
What are your thoughts on, and I've talked to Dana about it, like, What, you know, you talk about, I've done work with the NFL on brain injury and worked on changing the way football players tackle,
started a heads-up tackling program with kids, trying to get them to stop leading with their heads for brain injury and for paralysis.
I've seen both and worked in that space a bit.
And, you know, What are your thoughts on what we're going to see in the UFC with some of these fighters in five, ten years?
I work with a lot of boxers, and I've seen a lot of boxers have a rough time, obviously, as they get older and they get out of it.
What do you think the long-term ramifications for fighters and their brains are when they get out?
It is absolutely never good to get hit in the head.
We all know that.
To deny that is crazy.
But this sport is You trying to hit someone in the head and them trying to hit you in the head.
It's a fucking insane sport.
It's you trying to strangle them.
You trying to get them to not hit you.
You try to take them down.
You try to submit them.
But it's this part of the sport, a big part of the sport, is getting hit in the head.
And some of these guys are getting kicked in the head.
And if you've ever seen someone get kicked in the head, and I've seen a lot, it is a terrifying moment.
You know, when a guy like Leon Edwards in the fifth round takes out Kamaru Usman, who's like one of the greatest of all time with one kick, that's when you realize, like, oh my god.
What a ferocious weapon a shin to your neck is.
I mean, it's crazy when you watch people get hit by those things.
There's no way that's good for you.
That is definitely bad for you.
The question is how bad and how much damage have you taken?
What steps have you made in camp to mitigate the amount of damage that you take?
And you have to make sure when you spar in camp...
That you are being very careful.
That you're not going to war.
There's a lot of fights where guys have gotten big concussions before they fought.
And then when they fought, the first punch that hits them, they go out.
Even punches that don't even look like a devastating punch.
But they're so damaged already going into the fight because they train too hard.
And then there's this intangible thing where sometimes guys have an iron jaw.
Literally, you can't knock them out.
And then one day, it goes.
And when it goes, it's gone forever.
When it goes, they get knocked out a bunch of times after that.
And that seems to be indicative of Something wrong.
Something seriously wrong.
What that is, I'm not a neurologist.
I'm not sure.
It's gotta be damage to your brain.
It's gotta be damage to your body.
You're not durable anymore for some reason.
And that's the tip of the iceberg.
The long-term effects are severe cognitive decline.
It's pugilistica dementia.
It's trauma-induced Parkinson's that some boxers like Freddie Roach has.
It's a reality of the sport.
And you would hope that they have friends that can have that long hard talk with them when it's over and say this is not I'm not saying this because you know For any reason other than you you literally have to be told this you got to get out now Or you're not going to be normal in ten years like I have run into old boxers and Guys that were younger than me and I ran into Terry Norris once.
I was a giant fan of Terry Norris.
He was so fucking good.
And I ran into him at a fight and he slurred his words so bad.
They did a whole news piece on him where he talked about it and his wife is helping him and he's gotten better since then.
But the struggle that you see like one of the fucking great welterweight champions ever.
And then you see how he's dealing with things now.
And all the toilet, the pipes had blown, the toilet pipes.
So I had to fly back on a weekend and with my assistant mop it up.
And my assistant, she was a director's assistant, and she's in there cleaning shit in a boxing gym with me, and at one point she's like, I didn't sign up for this!
I'm a princess, and I'm meant to be!
And she was delusional and delirious from cleaning up shit with me in the gym, and she was like muttering about how she was a princess, and I'm like, okay, stop.
We cleaned it up, and I'm there for one more day, and I'm gonna go back to New Mexico to film, And I'm in the gym and I'm like, I gotta shut this down.
And you know, Gary Shandling was a partner of mine in the gym.
And I called him and I'm like, Gary, I'm closing it down.
It's too much of a headache.
It's just nothing but a liability all the time.
And I'm in the gym by myself.
My last day there, I'm gonna go back to New Mexico.
And it's clean, and I'm kind of looking at it.
And I'd had it for like six years, and it was fun, and I love boxing.
And I'm like, yeah, I've got to shut it down.
And in the mirror, I see this little flash of red in the mirror, and I see someone's come in.
And I turn, and this guy's standing there.
He's like, are you Peter?
I'm like, yes.
He goes, Freddie Roach told me to come down.
I'm looking to train for my next camp.
My name's Saul Everaz.
I'm like, yeah, I know who you are.
Fucking Canelo in my gym, right?
Red hair.
And he's like, very polite.
He's like, could I train?
Could I do my camp?
He was fighting this kid named Lopez.
He was getting ready for his camp for Lopez.
This was before, you know, he'd really taken up, but he was emerging, right?
And I'm like, yeah, you can train here.
And I'm about to close the gym down for good.
And I show him around.
He's like, I see the gym.
I'm like, well, here's the gym.
It's not much.
It's a ring and our heavy bags, our speed bags.
Here's our sauna.
He looks around.
He goes, okay, could I train here?
I go, yeah.
He goes out.
There's two Suburbans out in the parking lot full of his camp, Eddie and Shepo's trainers, five fighters.
They're like, come on.
And they all come running in, turn on the music, start eating.
And he came in and started doing his camps there.
And that got my gym going.
Like once he came to the gym, and we've had everyone do camps there.
And I've had a front row seat to boxing.
And man, like one of the many things that I look at is how hard it is for these guys to let go.
So you talk about Terry Norris staying a little bit too long.
Freddie Roach stayed in the ring probably a few too many fights.
Ali certainly did, right?
And watching these guys And we have a lot of UFC guys have come in and worked on their boxing in our gym and seeing the struggles that they go through.
And you hope, yeah, there's someone that's going to say, okay, enough.
Their identity is all wrapped up in them being a fighter.
It's very hard for people to let that go.
Also, it's the only thing they've ever dedicated their time to.
A lot of these guys don't have serious other side jobs or serious other side professions.
Some of them do.
Some of the really smart ones, they kind of, they break off and they start little businesses and they do stuff so that, like Eric Anders, guy's been on the podcast before, he's invested in real estate, bought a bunch of houses.
I mean, Conor started that whiskey company, did the Floyd Mayweather fight, he made $100 million and he starts this whiskey company, it's worth like a half a billion.
He doesn't have to do shit forever.
And he's only fighting if he fights again because he wants to.
But most of them, when it's over, they're confused.
They don't know what to do.
And the high of winning a fight...
It's like nothing else in all sports It's there's no other because you might lose and if you lose it's gonna be more Devastating than anything else in sports if you lose a basketball game.
I'm sure it sucks I'm sure you feel terrible, but you can go home You don't go to the fucking hospital with your face battered in and the whole world saw you get kicked in the face and there's memes of you getting flatlined and there's like animation of you get knocked into orbit and And you have to have all these trolls and haters talk shit about you on Twitter when you got knocked out in a world championship fight in front of the whole world.
And then super featherweight is 130. So featherweight must be 125. And then Bantamate must be 120. And Flyweight is like 118. Yeah, there's weird numbers, right?
Like welterweight is 147. You don't think there's too many weight classes?
Here's the deal.
The thing about weight cutting, weight cutting is so bad for you.
It's so bad.
But when there's only a few weight classes, there's massive advantages.
And one of the best ways to disincentivize weight cutting, which is As bad as anything else in sport.
Might be as bad as the strikes that you take.
With some guys.
I've seen guys that look like they're on death's door.
It's a very interesting story because at one point in time when they were following him, they were following him because they thought they were following this unstoppable force in Pride, which was the rival organization to the UFC. Yeah, that's him in his prime.
But it's actually an asset that if you look at what it's all worth, it's conceivable that one billionaire could come in and for, I don't know what the number is, a couple of billion, buy out everyone, roll it up, and create one international boxing league.
Kind of like what UFC's done.
It's hard, but if they did it, It's almost like boxing now.
It's like if there were four different NFL football leagues.
20 nuclear missiles with warheads guidance systems propulsion systems on a billion-dollar submarine 20 missiles yeah and put them on however many subs One of which being detonated means we're done anyway Why can't we take two or three of those fucking missiles and do something?
And if they just invested in people the way they invest in other shit, I thought about that, like, if you could actually see what it was like when we started, like the literal, if you get into the weeds on how we armed Ukraine, right?
So you've got a bunch of 20-year-old Ukrainian, whatever, kids, college students, electricians, plumbers, whatever they were doing, the trucks pull up and the equipment that gets presented to them, night vision goggles, drones, drone technology, You know, Kevlar body suits, the weapon systems and the clothes and the value of that.
And you think about we're just we're giving it.
OK, I understand why we're giving it.
But think about those trucks rolling up and the amount of money being handed through equipment to young Ukrainian men.
What comparable value or asset we're giving to young American men of the same age, it just doesn't happen.
But we can do it.
We can fly all the way over there and deliver it.
I mean, the amount of money we're putting into the hands of all these young soldier slash men from Ukraine compared to what that money could do in our cities, it's worth, I think, talking about.
Have places where people can teach them whatever it is.
Things outside of how to play music, martial arts.
The more people can learn, they have opportunities to do things, the better off everyone's going to be.
The more safe they feel.
The better off everyone's gonna be.
The more human beings that have a better shot at having an enjoyable life, the better off we'll all be.
But the fact that we don't think about it that way, everybody just goes about their business and thinks about themselves, but then complains about all these problems that are happening in our cities.
While you've got a Ukraine flag in your fucking Twitter bio.
So then it starts getting, like, you go down the rabbit hole of it and you look up the ten biggest arms companies, weapons manufacturers, and you start looking up the CEO pay packages and, like, you start getting a sense of how...
I mean, this whole conversation started when I'm like, well, okay, I learned this about Big Pharma because, okay, I've heard conspiracy theories on Big Pharma and be careful, but until I really went deep with Purdue, I understood it intellectually, but I never viscerally felt it like, oh shit, this is real.
This isn't some left-wing conspiracy theory that there's greedy people out there manipulating the FDA. No, this is actually fucking real.
The time I've spent working in that space, 100% yes, support.
However, when I see all the other people that are making money off of the backs of like, at the end of the day, what I observed when I went to Iraq was not big technology out there, you know, saving the day.
These were 25 year old men.
Like kicking in doors, fighting a war that nobody cared about back home anyway because it was over there.
So when I see like all this money and all this tech being thrown into systems that like, I don't know, are we ever going to really use this shit?
Because if we do, It's game over anyway.
I see all these people making so much money.
I'm like, this feels like we're in the same waters that we were swimming in when we were dealing with Purdue Pharma.
So yeah, I would like to do something in this space.