In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the host talks about the new Netflix documentary "OxyContin" and how the Sackler family got their hands on OxyContin and turned it into a multi-billion dollar business. Joe also talks about Prince's death from an opioid overdose, and how it was a direct result of the family's decision to sell OxyContin to millions of people across the U.S. and around the world. Joe also discusses how the family made millions of dollars from the sale of OxyContin, and why they should be accountable for the deaths of so many people who died from the painkillers they were peddling. Joe is a comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. His work has been featured on Comedy Central, HBO, and the New York Times, and he is a regular contributor to NPR and NPR Worldwide. He is also the host of the podcast "The Joe Rogans Experience" and hosts the show "The Rogans' Experience" on Netflix's "The Other Way" and "The Late Show with John Rocha". He is a frequent guest on the Tonight Show and host of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and has his own show on HBO's "Late Night with Seth Meyers" and is a host on "The Nightly Show" on CBS Radio's "Good Morning America." and "Saturday Night Live" with his own podcast, "The Morning Show with Rachel Maddow." he also hosts a podcast called "The Morning Show," which is hosted by Rachel Maddie and Rachel Goodman. and hosts a show on the morning show with Rachel Goodman on the Morning Show, which is all about her life and her new podcast, Rachel talks about her new book, Rachel's new book "Rachel Maddow's new novel, "Rachel's Day Off." . , Rachel talks all about the painkiller epidemic and how she got into painkillers and how they got hooked on the business of her life, "O OxyContin. , and how to get the job she loves it, and much more! Thank you, Rachel, for being a friend of mine, Rachel is an absolute rockstar, and I hope you enjoy this episode and hope you do too! - it's a good one, Rachel and I can't wait to do more of that. - Thank you so much Rachel's podcast, thank you for listening to this, Rachel! "
00:00:50.000When 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?
00:01:35.000I went to school in Minneapolis when he was coming up.
00:01:38.000I was an extra in Purple Rain back in the day, you know, First Avenue in Minneapolis.
00:01:44.000And, 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.
00:02:31.000But 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?
00:02:41.000How they were so artful and so good at manipulating the system.
00:02:47.000I was shocked and I was all in on painkiller.
00:02:51.000Well, 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.
00:02:58.000You know, they're not going to read about it.
00:03:00.000This is a very entertaining show that shows accurately how this went down.
00:03:05.000And, 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.
00:03:13.000And that's a very, very, very powerful moment.
00:03:17.000Because 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.
00:04:54.000And 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.
00:05:09.000So I'm trying to convince you, if I'm a rep and you're a doctor, just to kick it up, doc.
00:05:16.000Prescribe 20 or 40 or 85 milligrams and everybody will make some more money.
00:05:22.000And that was the game that the Sacklers were playing.
00:05:26.000And, like, you know, I've said, like, I'm down with capitalism.
00:06:19.000So 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.
00:08:25.000Well, so, yes, there's so many horrific things they said.
00:08:29.000One 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,
00:08:45.000that kids were crushing up OxyContin and snorting it and getting addicted and overdosed, and when they realized it was being misused this way.
00:08:54.000Their strategy was, quote, hammer the abusers.
00:09:54.000And if you see the show, we open each episode with a parent.
00:09:59.000We 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.
00:10:12.000Giuliani was one of their main lawyers.
00:10:19.000She's a very powerful attorney and others.
00:10:22.000So there's a lot of fear about being sued.
00:10:27.000I have my talking points here about what I'm not supposed to say.
00:10:33.000Again, 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.
00:10:46.000But we were told by legal that we had to put disclaimers in front of each episode.
00:10:53.000You know, what you're about to see is based on fact, but some of the facts have been changed.
00:11:02.000And 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.
00:11:12.000And I thought just putting a standard disclaimer would be kind of letting them off a bit.
00:11:19.000I'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.
00:11:30.000You know, what you see is based on fact, but some of it has been fictionalized.
00:11:35.000And 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.
00:11:47.000And 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,
00:12:04.000we did it in a way that never let them off the hook.
00:12:17.000It's so weird how many people are on it.
00:12:19.000I had a conversation with a friend of mine about his mom.
00:12:22.000His mom's 90. And, you know, she's had health issues.
00:12:29.000But could you imagine when we were kids if you told me that your friend's mom was on heroin?
00:12:36.000And 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,
00:12:55.000whatever it is 30 60 days, but he wrote the wrong number and Instead of like 180, he wrote 90 or something.
00:13:03.000I don't remember what the mistake was.
00:14:01.000And, 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.
00:14:13.000And he, you know, back in the day, they actually did prescribe heroin.
00:14:17.000We found all these great old ads for heroin and cough syrup.
00:15:05.000And 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.
00:16:10.000And 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.
00:16:19.000You're a doctor in some Midwestern town.
00:16:23.000And in comes this beautiful girl with a...
00:16:27.000Brochure 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.
00:17:28.000If 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?
00:17:40.000For a little while and then you're not going to feel so good.
00:17:44.000And then you're going to want it again.
00:17:45.000And you're going to want it again and again.
00:17:47.000And then your body becomes addicted to it.
00:18:10.000They all knew how powerful that product was.
00:18:14.000And they knew that if I put it in you...
00:18:17.000You're gonna feel, as they say, as Richard Sackler says, life is about running away from pain towards pleasure.
00:18:24.000If you feel pain, that's, right, the human condition is we wanna stay away from pain.
00:18:30.000Anything to feel no pain and to feel good.
00:18:33.000And 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.
00:18:46.000And you're going to feel like you've been dropped into a vat of warm honey for a little while.
00:18:52.000And then that honey starts to turn into battery acid and it starts to burn.
00:18:58.000I think it's funny that people make fun of people who believe in demons.
00:19:09.000If you were a demonic entity and you wanted to steal lives and souls...
00:19:15.000Would you just go around just pulling people out of their house with a pitchfork and being, like, obvious about it?
00:19:21.000Or would you do it through a really evil sociopathic person who decides that they're just gonna manipulate this system and ruin countless lives?
00:19:34.000I mean, how many people have been affected by this?
00:20:50.000And 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.
00:21:06.000You know, I have friends whose children have gotten hooked and tangled up in opioids.
00:21:16.000One of my biggest, biggest fears was, God forbid, my child should ever experience addiction because I've seen what that does to a parent.
00:21:26.000To 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.
00:21:55.000It's true, though, that the chaos of dealing with someone, and it's not just OxyContin, any addiction, right?
00:22:05.000I 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.
00:22:22.000And to think that people like the Sacklers were in the business of monetizing such hurt and pain, that's dark.
00:22:33.000And 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.
00:23:37.000Athletes, singers, you know, someone fucks up and takes the wrong dose and they're dead.
00:23:42.000And 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.
00:24:19.000One of the most internet-scrubbed families, and Richard Sackler in particular, people I've ever encountered.
00:24:26.000You just can get very little information on them.
00:24:31.000And the other, I think, big part of the story that surprised me was the FDA, right?
00:24:38.000And the FDA's role in opioid approvals.
00:24:42.000And in the case of OxyContin, We think about the FDA as this big, giant, bureaucratic organization.
00:24:50.000We were talking about stem cells a little bit earlier.
00:24:53.000If 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.
00:28:13.000I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved, too.
00:28:15.000That's part of the problem with people's argument about this.
00:28:18.000They're like, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
00:28:21.000There's no evidence that he acted alone.
00:28:23.000There's a lot of evidence that he was involved.
00:28:25.000When 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?
00:28:40.000The magic bullet theory that, you know, went through Connelly's shoulder, through his knee...
00:28:46.000Bounced out of his knee, then hit Kennedy.
00:31:26.000I 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.
00:31:45.000And he got in his car and wouldn't talk.
00:31:48.000And 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.
00:31:58.000I want to take him on a tour of our morgue and our cemeteries and show him...
00:32:03.000I think you'll find Curtis Wright if you look him up.
00:32:10.000That is the definition of living in hell.
00:37:56.000He said, many saw his invention, what Alfred thought would end all wars, just like Oppenheimer, as a highly lethal product.
00:38:02.000When 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.
00:40:29.000I never know, like, someone's morality.
00:40:34.000Like, I always have trouble, like, understanding how different people process morality and, like, what it would mean for...
00:40:42.000Because 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?
00:41:20.000You 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.
00:42:02.000I don't think you could admit that you're sorry in a situation as horrendous as this because I think it opens up the floodgates for further scrutiny.
00:45:13.000The idea of a serial killer is such an extreme, real but extreme version of that.
00:45:19.000But 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.
00:46:31.000Like, 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.
00:46:42.000And I remember, like, I was younger when he said that, but it chilled me.
00:46:45.000Like, and Bush looked, this was Bush too, and he's like, I looked into his eyes and I didn't see his soul.
00:46:52.000Pull that quote up, because that's crazy.
00:49:23.000I mean, but it's like the political aspect of it.
00:49:27.000It's so terrifying, man, that we're like this close to a nuclear war.
00:49:32.000God damn it scares the fuck out of me.
00:49:34.000And I always wonder if the same sort of decision-making apparatus that exists in pushing through OxyContin also exists in pushing through wars.
00:49:45.000Also exists in pushing through just things that like morally we would all say these are terrible, terrible things.
00:49:57.000And to be able to convince large groups of people to engage in them because you're the leader.
00:50:02.000I 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,
00:50:17.000the Raytheons, the Boeing, the companies that Are making so much money.
00:50:25.000I was in Pearl Harbor working on a film and they had the nuclear submarines coming in and out of the harbor.
00:50:34.000Have you ever seen one, these Trident submarines?
00:50:54.000And 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.
00:51:10.000And we had handlers from Pearl Harbor there, and I'm like, you know, could I tour one?
00:51:16.000And they went to the Admiral of the base, and the word came back, yes, you can tour one.
00:51:21.000So they took me to a nuclear submarine that was tied up at Pearl Harbor, and they took me on it.
00:51:29.000And 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.
00:51:44.000And they're like, this is the navigation room.
00:52:38.000Then you start looking up the prices, right?
00:52:41.000And 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.
00:53:04.000Oh, 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.
00:53:13.000And then there was a talk of how much that missed cost.
00:54:51.000And 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.
00:55:05.000But 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?
00:55:33.000I've done multiple films about Our troops, and I understand, I've been to Iraq with the SEAL platoon.
00:55:42.000I've had a front row seat to the reality of what these men and women are going through.
00:55:48.000This kind of spending, it seems to me to be a bit reckless.
00:55:56.000Well, at the very least, they're incentivized.
00:56:00.000They're incentivized to be in conflict.
00:56:04.000If 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.
00:56:16.000Like, there's decisions that get made specifically because of money.
00:56:21.000That's really scary for us because we want to think that if we have a leader, we trust someone to be a leader.
00:56:27.000We have this thought in our head that this is our chief, right?
00:56:31.000This is the wisest person that's lived the longest and the best to govern us.
00:56:35.000We 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.
00:56:54.000And it's like the same thing with with some of these drugs is the same thing with some of the big weapon systems.
00:57:01.000You 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.
00:58:24.000We'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,
00:58:41.000and 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.
00:58:55.000You know, and I can't help but think, like, who's making money?
00:59:01.000Okay, 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.
01:01:14.000Other than communication, like cell phones and the like, and wireless internet, this is crazy that they develop a nuclear-powered underwater weapon That is...
01:03:12.000I mean, the more time I've spent with the military...
01:03:20.000When I was writing Lone Survivor, I got to go to Iraq with the SEAL team and see them operating and see the skill with which they operated.
01:03:36.000SEALs don't really need this kind of stuff.
01:03:39.000That's just more like, give me a Jeep, give me some night vision goggles, give me some good intel on where the guy is, and I'll deal with it.
01:06:47.000Because 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,
01:07:09.000Like, 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...
01:07:17.000Okay, you guys are on mushrooms, right?
01:07:49.000Buddies 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.
01:08:00.000You're allowed to get a certain distance, and then it's illegal.
01:08:03.000And I believe they had to expand that distance.
01:08:07.000I want to say it was during the Obama administration.
01:08:30.000Because 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.
01:08:44.000Whether 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.
01:08:50.000The Harrier jump jet, which would like vertically lift and then take off.
01:08:54.000They made a lot of wild shit that is absolutely from us.
01:08:58.000But 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.
01:09:27.000But he's also, he has like real knowledge of the area.
01:09:33.000He 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.
01:10:25.000Like, I have no reason to not believe it, and to certainly not...
01:10:30.000What 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.
01:10:46.000Why 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.
01:10:58.000The reason why people are coming forward and telling you about their experience in this program, maybe that's obscuring reality.
01:11:06.000It 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.
01:11:33.000It's amazing that people just haven't seen the laboratory, the current Los Alamos Research Laboratory.
01:11:40.000Which 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.
01:11:54.000Like 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.
01:12:03.000But across the street, or actually across this river from where Oppenheimer lived, is now the current Los Alamos Research Laboratory.
01:12:11.000Pull up a picture of that one if you want to see something mind-blowing.
01:13:35.000If 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.
01:14:39.000Yeah, 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.
01:14:53.000And to your point, no one knew what anyone else was doing when they were building the bomb.
01:14:57.000So you're working on one part, I'm working on another.
01:15:00.000Our wives have no idea what's going on.
01:15:03.000We're going out and building the bomb all day and coming home and just like drinking.
01:15:08.000They all drank and like I think there was like a lot of wife swapping and weird shit going on too.
01:15:13.000They were just partying and building fucking nuclear bombs.
01:15:17.000And now you go out there and see what this and it's just like I just want to know what are we doing?
01:15:28.000And 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.
01:15:38.000That's where they're going to take it.
01:15:39.000That's where they're going to dissect it.
01:15:41.000And whatever's going on out there is some deep and real shit.
01:15:50.000If 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?
01:17:34.000Like, 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...
01:17:49.000AI-controlled aircraft that's going to fly.
01:17:52.000There was just a great article in the New York Times yesterday about it.
01:17:55.000All 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...
01:18:10.000Like, full-scale battle is going to be AI-controlled drone-dependent.
01:18:17.000So rather than sending human beings in $60 million jets, they're going to send swarms of $2 or $3 million AI-controlled fighter drones.
01:18:28.000And those are going to be self-driven, right?
01:19:03.000I 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.
01:20:35.000I 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.
01:21:03.000And so they wanted to honor him, and they let us film there.
01:21:05.000And 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.
01:24:30.000They put a battering ram on a tank And rolled in.
01:24:36.000You know, that's another, you know, interesting element of painkiller that we touch upon was the parallels between Oxycontin and crack cocaine.
01:25:10.000And 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.
01:25:24.000Like, that's something that we talk about quite a bit.
01:25:29.000It'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,
01:25:46.000or in your show, that guy's trusting the FDA. He's trusting that they know what they're doing.
01:25:53.000What do you think you would do if, you know, you hurt yourself, you were training and, you know, had a really painful injury.
01:26:02.000Say, you know, you really fucked up your shoulder and, you know, in between, the immediate pain was, you know, very high.
01:26:12.000And a doctor was like, okay, here's the deal.
01:26:15.000Like, this is going to really fucking hurt.
01:28:04.000I 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.
01:30:22.000And when I was getting ready to do the film...
01:30:27.000I 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.
01:30:49.000So I flew out there and went to his house.
01:30:52.000I 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.
01:32:03.000And we're just so fucking soft when it comes to pain.
01:32:08.000Well, it's also I think we've been programmed to think that when you're in pain, you need to take medication, regardless of the dangers of that stuff.
01:32:14.000I remember this sad story from COVID, where this woman overdosed on Tylenol.
01:32:20.000She died from acetaminophen poison, which is apparently Fairly common.
01:32:24.000If you take a lot of Tylenol, your liver can't process it.
01:34:45.000It might be that his neck is the same.
01:34:47.000Strength in your neck comes from obviously the structure, the bones, but it also comes from working your neck out.
01:34:54.000There'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.
01:35:01.000But you're going to run into those anyway in combat sports.
01:35:25.000Why 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.
01:35:35.000My suspicion is that there has probably been an analysis done Of what would happen if stem cell use was ubiquitous?
01:35:44.000What would happen if it was everywhere?
01:35:47.000What would happen if you allowed people to use stem cells the way we allow people?
01:35:58.000Look, 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.
01:36:06.000I'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.
01:36:16.000Or, 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.
01:36:29.000They get right back into it as soon as they start feeling good.
01:36:32.000And you really need a lot of time for it to take root in many, many months for it to really heal.
01:36:38.000But like I've said many times on this show, and I told you earlier, I had a full-length rotator cuff tear.
01:36:43.000My doctor assured me I was going to need surgery.
01:36:45.000But why were you able to do it in the US? It was different.
01:36:48.000There was different regulations when I did it.
01:36:51.000I don't remember exactly what mesenchymal stem cells, and they used exosomes.
01:36:55.000I don't exactly remember what it all was.
01:36:58.000But I remember that it's all processed from umbilical cords.
01:37:02.000So 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.
01:37:18.000Particularly unique in its ability to help heal any kind of tissue.
01:37:22.000But the difference between what you're allowed to do in America now is different from what it was back then.
01:37:27.000But also the stuff they're doing in these other places overseas is much more dramatic.
01:37:32.000Because they can use much larger doses and they keep you there for three days.
01:37:36.000And they also combine it with hyperbaric therapy and a bunch of other different things that also accelerate your healing.
01:37:42.000NAD, IV drips, a bunch of different things that help along the process of your healing.
01:37:46.000And I know many people that have avoided surgery because of that, and now we're back to 100%.
01:37:52.000But it doesn't mean you don't need surgery.
01:37:54.000Like, there's certain disc issues that are ruptured beyond the point of repair, and you probably need something done.
01:38:00.000And it's nice that there is all these different options.
01:38:03.000You just, you have to be careful, you know, whenever you're getting something that's an operation.
01:38:08.000Like, especially if you're getting a replacement, like a knee replacement or something.
01:38:24.000I 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.
01:38:44.000Why 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?
01:40:25.000And 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.
01:40:40.000One 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.
01:43:42.000You'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.
01:45:49.000And after the leg break, look, he won one fight.
01:45:52.000After 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.
01:46:07.000The 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.
01:46:17.000The Anderson Silva that beat Dan Henderson, he was never that guy again.
01:46:20.000And I think that it's a very, very, very, very difficult injury to come back from and be 100%.
01:46:27.000What 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,
01:46:47.000started a heads-up tackling program with kids, trying to get them to stop leading with their heads for brain injury and for paralysis.
01:46:57.000I've seen both and worked in that space a bit.
01:47:00.000And, 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?
01:47:12.000I 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.
01:47:22.000What do you think the long-term ramifications for fighters and their brains are when they get out?
01:47:30.000It is absolutely never good to get hit in the head.
01:47:51.000But it's this part of the sport, a big part of the sport, is getting hit in the head.
01:47:57.000And some of these guys are getting kicked in the head.
01:48:00.000And if you've ever seen someone get kicked in the head, and I've seen a lot, it is a terrifying moment.
01:48:07.000You 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.
01:48:16.000What a ferocious weapon a shin to your neck is.
01:48:21.000I mean, it's crazy when you watch people get hit by those things.
01:49:59.000And 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.
01:52:12.000And all the toilet, the pipes had blown, the toilet pipes.
01:52:16.000So I had to fly back on a weekend and with my assistant mop it up.
01:52:20.000And 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!
01:52:33.000And 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.
01:52:43.000We 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.
01:52:52.000And you know, Gary Shandling was a partner of mine in the gym.
01:55:02.000And 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.
01:55:16.000And you hope, yeah, there's someone that's going to say, okay, enough.
01:55:51.000Some 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.
01:56:09.000I 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.
01:56:31.000It'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.
01:56:41.000I'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.
01:57:04.000Yeah, and if you're on a basketball team or a football team or any other sport really, at least you know, guess what?
01:59:47.000And 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?
02:00:02.000Like welterweight is 147. You don't think there's too many weight classes?
02:04:07.000It'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.
02:04:55.000I was the post-fight interviewer for the UFC from 97 to 98, and then I quit.
02:05:01.000And then I'm doing news radio, and then I wound up doing Fear Factor, and then Dana White contacted me and was getting me tickets to the fights.
02:06:51.000Yeah, and Golden Boy's lurking around.
02:06:55.000But 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,
02:07:10.000and create one international boxing league.
02:13:41.000But it's what we were talking about before.
02:13:43.000If you have endless money, like with the nuclear submarines and the battleships, if you have endless money, you can get a lot of cool shit done.
02:14:02.000Why aren't we putting an enormous amount into new schools?
02:14:07.000Why aren't we putting an enormous amount into cleaning up communities and stopping crime?
02:14:11.000Why aren't we putting an enormous amount into healthcare?
02:14:13.000Because the companies that make the weapon systems are not going to let it happen.
02:14:18.000It's just this ecosystem of money I think it was Truman.
02:14:24.000It was either Truman or Roosevelt who said, be careful because we're going to have an economy that is forever interconnected to our military.
02:14:32.000It was Eisenhower in his departing speech.
02:14:45.000I'm saying if you have enough money to send how many billion dollars to Ukraine, where was that money when we needed infrastructure in cities?
02:14:53.000Where was that money when we needed better education?
02:15:35.00020 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?
02:15:53.000According to what's going on in Ukraine because we we don't have to because they're doing both They're doing both.
02:16:00.000They're funding Ukraine, and they're building these weapons systems.
02:16:03.000I don't think it has to be an either-or, or you even have to, like, have less of them.
02:16:08.000But it's just like, where did you guys get all this money?
02:16:10.000And why didn't you use it for stuff that we need?
02:16:51.000And 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?
02:17:05.000So 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,
02:17:21.000drone technology, You know, Kevlar body suits, the weapon systems and the clothes and the value of that.
02:17:29.000And you think about we're just we're giving it.
02:17:55.000We can fly all the way over there and deliver it.
02:17:57.000I 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.
02:19:16.000The more human beings that have a better shot at having an enjoyable life, the better off we'll all be.
02:19:22.000But 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.
02:19:31.000While you've got a Ukraine flag in your fucking Twitter bio.
02:19:40.000Yeah, and I just go back to the time in Pearl Harbor when I was getting toured around that sub and I'm just trying to do the math in my head.
02:20:00.000So 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...
02:20:16.000Like, it gets pretty dark pretty fast.
02:20:24.000I 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,
02:20:42.000but I never viscerally felt it like, oh shit, this is real.
02:20:46.000This isn't some left-wing conspiracy theory that there's greedy people out there manipulating the FDA. No, this is actually fucking real.
02:21:10.000The time I've spent working in that space, 100% yes, support.
02:21:16.000However, 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.
02:21:33.000Like kicking in doors, fighting a war that nobody cared about back home anyway because it was over there.
02:21:39.000So 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?
02:21:50.000Because if we do, It's game over anyway.
02:21:55.000I see all these people making so much money.
02:21:58.000I'm like, this feels like we're in the same waters that we were swimming in when we were dealing with Purdue Pharma.
02:22:06.000So yeah, I would like to do something in this space.