The Peter Attia Drive - #76 - Kyle Kingsbury： Finding meaning, depression, and psychedelics

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. The drive

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00:03:58.420 My guest this week is Kyle Kingsbury. Some of you may recognize Kyle. He's a retired UFC

00:04:03.280 fighter. He's been on the Joe Rogan experience a number of times. He's currently the director of

00:04:08.060 human optimization at Onnit. I first met Kyle in person during a hunting trip in early 2019,

00:04:15.080 though we had both known sort of about each other prior to that and seen each other and

00:04:19.640 interviews and things like that. So we immediately clicked and become very close since that time.

00:04:24.660 Now in this episode, which truthfully, you know, when you're interviewing people that you know

00:04:28.840 pretty well, you don't really know where you're going to go. And honestly, this episode in this

00:04:34.020 interview went in places I did not expect it to go in and for which I'm incredibly grateful.

00:04:39.860 We could have spent a lot of this time talking about UFC and mixed martial arts and all of those

00:04:45.000 things. And that would have been interesting, but we went to places that Kyle has never talked

00:04:48.880 about publicly. In fact, a couple of things that he hadn't even shared with me privately before.

00:04:52.980 So I was incredibly moved by this experience. So, you know, we talk about his upbringing,

00:04:57.880 playing football, going to JC, then college. We talk about his experience with performance

00:05:02.640 enhancing drugs, something I don't think he's ever really spoken about before. As a little sidebar,

00:05:07.220 we talk about something called the whizinator, which is about the funniest thing I've ever heard

00:05:10.480 of. Talk about his transition away from football after realizing he wasn't going to make it to the

00:05:14.920 NFL. And it's during this piece that Kyle really opens up about this period of depression in his

00:05:20.300 life and his thoughts of suicide that have been somewhat recurrent and had started as early as

00:05:24.780 the age of seven. He talks about his close calls with suicide, his eventual transition into MMA

00:05:30.500 and UFC. And we end our talk with a conversation around his experience with ayahuasca towards the

00:05:36.480 end of his UFC career and how that really became the turning point in his own journey towards being

00:05:43.100 sort of more emotionally healthy. And frankly, what's enabled him to become a father and become the

00:05:48.680 father that he wishes he could have had? Now, before we get into this conversation, I feel it's

00:05:53.240 really important to have a couple of disclaimers. First, in this conversation, Kyle really opens up

00:05:57.120 about his past depression and his thoughts of suicide and how close he was to it on a number of

00:06:01.740 occasions. It's a very heavy conversation. And if you're currently experiencing any thoughts of

00:06:06.220 self-harm or suicide, it is imperative that you seek out medical help immediately. Second, Kyle and I

00:06:12.240 have a very open and honest conversation about psychedelics. The substances we speak about are

00:06:17.500 illegal and by no means are we advocating for anyone to use them or experiment with them.

00:06:22.220 There are physical, physiological, psychological, and legal risks around the use of these plants.

00:06:27.620 This conversation is purely informational only. Kyle speaks about his personal experiences and how it

00:06:32.800 has shaped his thinking. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with my friend,

00:06:37.900 Kyle Kingsbury.

00:06:41.600 Hi, brother. How are you?

00:06:43.420 I'm doing great, brother.

00:06:44.560 Happy Father's Day.

00:06:45.460 Happy Father's Day to you.

00:06:46.520 Thank you. I forgot it was Father's Day when I woke up and my wife left me this beautiful little

00:06:51.720 note on the counter. She had gone out running before I got up and it was like, here's your

00:06:55.360 coffee. It was like the sweetest thing. What did you do for Father's Day today? Because you're not

00:06:59.280 with your boy.

00:07:00.120 No, we head back tomorrow to the bay and we'll get like a Father's Day celebration there. My dad's

00:07:04.740 going to come up from Santa Cruz. So today is just living the dream. I mean, I'm on your podcast.

00:07:10.600 I'm staying at your house. We're going to shoot arrows after this with a couple of great guys. So

00:07:14.280 couldn't ask for much more.

00:07:16.180 So did you grow up in Santa Cruz or San Jose?

00:07:18.220 Right outside San Jose and Cupertino and Sunnyvale.

00:07:20.880 Got it. And you played a ton of sports growing up, I imagine. Was football your big one?

00:07:25.500 Yeah, I wasn't really good. I mean, I got into baseball late, 12. A lot of kids have been playing

00:07:30.480 for a long time. So I just played one year. Football I got into at 10 and I just loved it

00:07:35.600 immediately. Like I was playing. At that point, you had weight classes and age classes. So for my

00:07:42.020 weight and age, it was, I think, I don't know, right around 105 to 110 pounds when I was 10.

00:07:49.220 So I was skinny like a beanpole. I mean, then...

00:07:51.780 That strikes me as big for a 10-year-old, but maybe I'm just comparing you to my daughter.

00:07:55.080 I don't know.

00:07:55.540 Which is not a good comparison.

00:07:56.560 Maybe it was less, but at 12, we were on the Sunnyvale Microrockets. That was 118. Because

00:08:02.460 I remember that was the last year I could play. We had a running back that weighed the same weight.

00:08:07.100 We both had to cut weight and he was a great deal shorter than me. So he was just stacked.

00:08:12.680 I didn't fill out till much later, like sophomore year of high school.

00:08:16.140 That's interesting. Kids at 12 cutting weight.

00:08:19.140 Yeah, I'm not sure that's great. We'd get the seeds or something like that that are salted and

00:08:23.260 just suck and spit for hours, you know, on the drive out to games, that kind of stuff.

00:08:28.720 So in high school, you played football?

00:08:30.720 Football and wrestling in junior high and high school.

00:08:33.580 Got it. So how'd you decide where you wanted to go for college?

00:08:36.720 You know, I had for a long time wanted to play in the Pac-10. It used to be the Pac-10.

00:08:41.420 I think every kid wants to get out of state when they go. A lot of them want to get out of state

00:08:45.160 when they go to university, as you call it. And you don't want to go too far, obviously.

00:08:52.000 Your parents will throw a fit. My parents would have. But a lot of my good friends that I grew

00:08:56.580 up with, I knew since I was 12 years old, they were like, dude, we're going to ASU. It's amazing.

00:09:00.760 And I had to go to junior college because I was garbage, garbage academically. I didn't resonate

00:09:04.840 a lot with the teachers I had. And, you know, we talked about this on my podcast yesterday.

00:09:09.980 Literally, I can count on one hand, everyone that stuck out and took me under their wing and

00:09:13.480 saw something in me that more than I saw myself. So going to junior college, I went for one year

00:09:20.060 and then I realized I can, if I transfer to a different junior college, that's right by ASU,

00:09:24.900 my likelihood of getting in is much higher. So that's what I did.

00:09:28.060 So why do you think that is, by the way, that high school didn't resonate?

00:09:31.340 We had a pretty high academic school for a public school. The Wall Street Journal published us as

00:09:36.860 one of the top 10 public schools in the world. And we had a lot of people from China and Asia and

00:09:42.420 India coming over. It's even higher now. It's about, I want to say 70 to 80% Asian, including Indian.

00:09:48.720 And the population is what roughly of the high school?

00:09:52.120 It was huge. I mean, I think we had 2,500 people in our graduating class senior year.

00:09:57.000 25? So you mean there were 10,000 kids in the entire high school?

00:10:00.860 I don't think so. Maybe that's the wrong number. 2,500 total probably.

00:10:04.100 Okay.

00:10:04.940 Yeah. Couldn't have been 10,000.

00:10:06.520 Wow.

00:10:07.560 Regardless, that's still unbelievable.

00:10:08.920 They couldn't build whatever the portables, they couldn't get enough portables one year. So we had

00:10:13.580 breached the number that was allowed in the school district and the superintendent gave it an okay

00:10:17.360 because his son went to school with us.

00:10:19.460 And a high school that big, you don't actually know everybody in your class?

00:10:22.080 No. There's, I mean, many, many kids that I didn't know from that. But we kind of, I mean,

00:10:26.440 like any high school, you stick to your core group, that kind of thing. And I was fortunate

00:10:29.460 enough to have those guys all the way through college and after. I'm still close with a lot of

00:10:34.220 them.

00:10:35.060 I mean, obviously knowing you today, you're intellectually curious and, you know,

00:10:38.700 thoughtful and stuff. But I always find it interesting when you see people who have kind of

00:10:43.120 gone through a transformation of not resonating with any of that stuff until doing so. But I often

00:10:47.620 wonder, like, was there a precipitating event? Was there a bad experience you had with a teacher

00:10:51.060 or something like that?

00:10:52.560 You know, I wasn't nice in high school or prior to that. I got in trouble from kindergarten on.

00:10:57.760 I'd get sent to the principal's office at least three days a week. Got in a lot of fights growing

00:11:02.520 up. I mean, more than the fighting, just mess with the teachers. You know, I was a class clown and

00:11:08.220 pretty disruptive. And I enjoyed that. It gave me some sense of control in my environment.

00:11:14.620 I always enjoyed entertaining people and making people laugh. So, like,

00:11:17.520 that checks off every box. If I can start riffing and clowning on people and everyone's laughing and

00:11:23.180 looking at me, then I can get a little attention and maybe be, you know, a little bit of a jerk to

00:11:28.220 the teacher. But it was worth it to me. So, it was actually at ASU. I was taking some psychology

00:11:33.700 courses and sociology and communication where I was like, oh, this shit matters.

00:11:37.200 Like, I will. It doesn't matter if I get a philosophy degree or a communications degree.

00:11:42.420 Like, these are things that I will use the rest of my life. And that was the first time where it

00:11:47.040 really felt that way. A lot of kids complain, like, what am I going to use algebra for? What

00:11:50.840 am I going to use this for? You know? And I think that having that in college really made me think,

00:11:55.860 like, oh, there's a lot to learn. And there's really cool stuff to learn that resonates with me.

00:12:00.380 And in all those classes, I did really well. It was all A's and B's as well for me.

00:12:04.440 So, it's interesting because if it weren't for football, I mean, you jumped through a lot of

00:12:08.900 hoops to get to ASU. You're going to JC's before you get there, right? And a walk-on at ASU.

00:12:14.420 Okay. So, it begs the question, right? If you weren't athletic, if you were the exact same guy,

00:12:19.040 but you didn't happen to have an ability to play, you know, Division I football,

00:12:23.580 what would you have done after high school? Something blue collar, for sure. My dad, he had a

00:12:28.080 Silicon Valley Shelving was a company he created in the Bay right as the tech boom started. And all

00:12:32.920 these tech companies needed static control shelving. So, he was making a lot of money and

00:12:37.240 he would pay me and my sister to build a lot of this stuff. And it was fun for me. It was like

00:12:41.320 giant erector sets. You know, like we'd play with... It's like life-size Lego.

00:12:45.460 Yeah. Huge stuff. Even, you know, like we'd get into a warehouse and he and I would be drilling

00:12:50.640 into concrete and pounding, you know, giant hammers down to get this stuff anchored. And that was

00:12:56.520 always cool and it paid really well, but I enjoyed it. So, I liked working with my hands there. And

00:13:00.380 he came from a different era, you know, as every dad is. But he always worked on cars and

00:13:06.920 he knew a lot about things. And then he would kind of shun me from living the same life as him. He was

00:13:11.660 like, no, you're going to go into sales. You're going to make a ton of money. You'll just pay a

00:13:14.400 guy to work on your car. You just pay a guy to fix your house. Cause he did all that. He did

00:13:18.200 construction since he was 20. And I was just laughed at it. It was like, these are like really usable

00:13:22.940 skills. It's nice to know how to change the oil in your car. You know, like, why aren't you teaching me

00:13:27.440 this stuff? So thankfully now he's kind of, that had a little bit of success. He's, he's happy to

00:13:32.700 show me those things. Why do you think he felt that way? Where did you grow up? Did you grow up

00:13:36.200 in the same area? He grew up in all my families from Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. And then

00:13:40.640 they moved to California. My parents met in Alaska and then moved to California. I think in large part

00:13:45.780 to be by the sun and to get away from their families. And so, you know, I grew up there and I just

00:13:52.600 think all parents want better for their kids, you know, in that regard. And he saw that as better,

00:13:58.860 you know, financial success, stability, those kinds of things as better.

00:14:02.260 And were they upset then in high school when you weren't doing well academically?

00:14:06.060 Kind of. I mean, they paid attention and I'd get in trouble a lot at home. I think for them,

00:14:11.660 it was really hard to kind of wrap their brain around how you can wrangle someone in at that point

00:14:16.860 because, you know, they fought a lot growing up. I talked about this before, but one of the books

00:14:23.460 that I really have a lot of love for is nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg who recently

00:14:30.860 passed away. And whatever that is, my childhood was not. So they really didn't know how to communicate

00:14:38.040 with one another. And it was like two rams butting heads all the time. And then they got divorced when I

00:14:42.300 was 13. And from there, that was like the deepest sense of peace I'd ever had because it was less

00:14:47.180 stress on both of them. They didn't know how to communicate with each other. And did you and

00:14:50.800 your sister spend time with both of them? Pretty much. My mom got full custody, but we'd see my dad

00:14:56.300 every week, you know, twice a week, something like that. He was still a big part of our lives and he

00:15:00.180 lived right down the street. So, and I wanted to see him more because he was a gentler, kinder dad at

00:15:06.160 that point. Was one of your parents more strict than the other when it came to trying to keep you in line

00:15:09.960 in school? I'd say I went back and forth, you know, on who took the cake there. You know, they had

00:15:14.680 different, different ways of discipline, but yeah, it was, I don't know. I think they were at a loss

00:15:20.080 really, but they still, they never said, you're not going to go to college. Like the entire time it

00:15:24.920 was, you're still going to college. I don't give a shit. If you have to go to junior college for three

00:15:29.120 years, you're going to go to college. So they were pretty pumped when I got an ASU, which is funny.

00:15:34.520 There was a Simpsons episode where there's the great flood and Ned Flanders is like, thank you,

00:15:41.180 Lord. You've spared the righteous and damned the wicked. And he sees Homer floating in a raft and

00:15:45.800 he's like, looks like heaven's easier to get into than Arizona state. We played that clip all through

00:15:51.580 college. Like it was, it was great. It was a feather in our cap, but yeah, it is, it is an easy

00:15:56.020 school to get into. Yeah. But I mean, it's a, it's a school that also has a great reputation as well.

00:16:00.120 You get in there and, and what ASU has got to be huge. It was massive. It was still, I mean,

00:16:05.020 still to this day. And even at that point, when I was there, one of the high, most highly populated

00:16:09.420 schools in the country, huge campus, gorgeous campus, hot year round for the most part.

00:16:16.560 And you know, the draw for a young male is that a lot of the ladies there, they can't wear much.

00:16:22.420 They can't hide it, you know, because of the heat. And, um, that was, that was definitely,

00:16:26.580 there was some good times there for sure. So you walked on and what position do you play?

00:16:32.000 I was defensive end and defensive tackle. I was probably not probably, I was for sure

00:16:36.800 undersized to play D tackle, but too slow to play D end. So it's kind of an in-betweener.

00:16:41.820 And thankfully you were talking about these great teachers that you've had. One of them was my

00:16:45.560 strength and conditioning coach. Actually both strength and conditioning coaches I had at Arizona

00:16:49.140 state went on to become strength and conditioning coaches in the NFL and the head of the strength and

00:16:54.100 conditioning department. It's a guy named Joe Ken big house power is a kind of his moniker now was

00:17:00.620 then to a big house. He's the only guy in division one football history and the NFL to win strength

00:17:07.200 coach of the year in both division one football and the NFL. And he's the coach. He's the strength

00:17:11.840 coach for the Carolina Panthers, Mark Uyama. He was, he went on to become the head strength coach for

00:17:17.180 the 49ers. He's, I think he's now with the Vikings and both those guys really pushed me past

00:17:21.800 whatever limit I thought I had, you know, like if there's a ceiling, they would push me so far past

00:17:28.040 that. I just began to realize like there is no ceiling. And you were how old when you showed up

00:17:32.120 you're two years older than the other. I think I was 20. Yeah, it was definitely a, an impressionable

00:17:37.700 time. And I was still working through a lot, not really knowing how, you know, drinking a lot,

00:17:43.120 doing the party thing. We were number one party school in the nation. If that's any claim to fame.

00:17:47.220 I know one of my friends at med school went to ASU and the stories he told were,

00:17:52.480 I mean, I couldn't, I couldn't fathom what he was talking about. I mean, I was sort of like,

00:17:56.620 he was speaking another language. I was like, what did you guys actually do? Well, I mean,

00:18:01.320 I can give one example. They filmed a porno at one of the fraternities that my friends all went to

00:18:06.780 Theda Chi and they actually shut down all fraternities. Like they don't exist there anymore

00:18:11.780 because of that. So there was, there was no extreme. You couldn't think of that. That didn't

00:18:17.620 happen there. I mean, it was really, it was wild and fun and I've lost some friends to drug overdoses

00:18:23.280 and many, you know, it was polarized for sure. You know, and there were still people that went there

00:18:29.140 that were, you know, on the grind and they had all their ducks in a row. But I think there was a lot

00:18:32.620 more people just exploring what it felt like to be an adult for the first time.

00:18:36.160 Did you sort of think about this at the time? Like I'm escaping from something I'm running from

00:18:41.820 something. Or did you feel like you were running to something? I didn't feel, you know, it's funny

00:18:45.980 because in those moments of play and pushing the envelope, it just felt like we're going to tear

00:18:53.200 it up tonight. You know, and it was more of a celebration. Like I never was an angry drunk. I

00:18:57.180 never, never saw myself as leaning heavily on a crutch. I mean, for a whole year in junior college,

00:19:02.800 I would wake up and smoke pot every day. I'd have to wake up my roommate to light the four foot bong

00:19:07.420 for me because I couldn't reach it with my hand. And that's how I'd start the day. And I had all my

00:19:11.560 classes on Tuesday, Thursday schedule. So five days off a week. And even in that whole year, I never

00:19:17.480 thought like I'm overdoing it. It was just the thing to do. And now obviously that's, it's a lot

00:19:22.860 much different, but we'll get into plant medicines. But I think that was really where it lifted the veil

00:19:27.740 and showed me how much I was destroying myself without realizing it.

00:19:31.220 When you decide, I want to go to ASU to play football. Was that a means to an end? Where did

00:19:36.700 you think that was, was there some thought you had in the back of your mind? I might make it to the

00:19:39.540 NFL. Yeah. I always wanted to play in the NFL. That was the light at the end of the tunnel. And I think

00:19:44.320 there was a lot of things driving me for that one, my love of the game. Like it was, it was my

00:19:48.300 greatest joy. It was my first legal outlet to let off the steam. And because of the positions I played,

00:19:54.300 I really got to, you know, I was button heads every single play of every moment I was on the field.

00:19:59.940 Once I got to ASU, I didn't play much. I really was a bench warmer. And at ASU, I had to embrace my

00:20:06.720 role as a secondary guy for the first time in my life. Everyone who makes it to college was an

00:20:10.740 all-star in high school, you know, and the jump is even higher to the NFL. And I remember seeing a

00:20:15.480 guy who graduated a year before me who had played, he started every game, all four years in defensive

00:20:20.680 line, which if you're a wide receiver, that's fine. But defensive line, that's pretty tough to do

00:20:25.500 that to, to start every game, your entire, and he didn't make it to the NFL. And that was like,

00:20:30.380 oh shit. All right. Maybe I should think about something else. Cause even if I get playing time

00:20:35.240 my senior year, it's pretty unlikely that that's going to happen. And there was a lot of guys going

00:20:39.500 into arena league and Canada football and things like that. And it was like, I don't know. There was

00:20:44.500 a piece of me that, that wanted to be the best or at least play with the best. And if I wasn't going to

00:20:51.200 do that, there was no point. And I think that there was a decision because I could have gotten

00:20:55.360 a scholarship to play at like a D2 school or D1 AA. And I said, no, I'd rather walk on and play with

00:21:00.180 the big boys. So kind of having that mindset going in, I knew I wasn't going to play some subpar level

00:21:06.880 of football, even though I probably could have extended my career there. It's amazing. I think

00:21:11.120 for a lot of people that maybe aren't as familiar with that, what those jumps look like between high

00:21:15.180 school division one and the NFL, I think I was having this with my daughter a while ago.

00:21:19.580 So it must've been during the college football season. And I don't remember how it came up,

00:21:24.560 but the point I wanted to make to her was if you take the very, very, very best team in college

00:21:29.740 football, the team that's going to win the national championship, and you put them against the very,

00:21:33.940 very worst team in the NFL, it would be the biggest blowout in the history of football. I mean,

00:21:38.680 in as many possessions as you could have, that's how many times the NFL team would score.

00:21:43.500 And she just like, couldn't understand like how that could happen. And I didn't have a great

00:21:47.400 explanation for her. I said, I think one, it's just a much tighter selection process. And at

00:21:52.180 the end of the day, once you reach the NFL, you're a professional and nothing else matters.

00:21:57.660 Like this is your job, but it is interesting. And it must be sobering too, to get there and sort of

00:22:02.260 realize, Oh my God, like even if you're exceptional in college, it doesn't guarantee you get to this next

00:22:08.580 level. Yeah. It doesn't guarantee that your practice squad. And that's where I was like,

00:22:13.580 damn. And I had a lot of guys from our team did go pro. Some of them played for a few years on

00:22:19.420 practice squad. Other guys actually had like decent careers playing starting in the NFL and a couple

00:22:24.000 started for the dolphins, different teams. And it was cool to watch that, but it was like,

00:22:27.200 it didn't seem like there was rhyme or reason to me. Cause a lot of these guys in college,

00:22:31.280 you know, they were good and they made progressions, but they just kept getting better. That was the

00:22:36.040 difference. Like they were late bloomers, whatever you want to call it, but they kept improving,

00:22:40.680 kept getting faster, kept learning the routes better or whatever the position was.

00:22:44.540 And I think a big part of it is they also are the guys that don't get injured as much.

00:22:47.680 I think injury avoidance is such an underappreciated piece of professional sports.

00:22:53.540 I don't know the exact numbers, but you know, the median duration of an NFL player

00:22:57.340 is staggeringly short. It's like three to five years. And so we can sort of celebrate these people

00:23:03.200 that spend 10, 15 years in the NFL, but there's such outliers, you know, the name of the game

00:23:08.460 first and foremost, once you're there is just figure out a way to not get hurt.

00:23:11.580 And you talk to Joe Ken or anybody that's a strength coach, that's all they're focused on.

00:23:16.100 And it's, it's really, even in the off season, they might have periods of time where they're

00:23:19.760 working on guys getting a little faster or guys getting a little stronger, a little more weight,

00:23:23.620 that kind of thing. But come season, it's just preservation. That's it.

00:23:27.680 Had you done any performance enhancing drugs in high school?

00:23:30.660 No. I mean, I played actually my senior year started with testosterone. I had a guy

00:23:35.620 with susten on two 50 and I realized I wanted to play college football. So that was the,

00:23:40.760 that was the place like, all right, I got to put on some size. I've weighed about two 20

00:23:45.040 prior to, or after prior to, and then two 30.

00:23:48.040 And you're what? Six, four, six, yeah. Six, three and a half. So like, that was the time where

00:23:52.540 I think for me, it was about if I'm going to do this, let's do this. And being thin, you know,

00:23:59.160 it was like, all right, I got to put on some size unless I'm going to change positions entirely,

00:24:02.140 but I enjoyed the positions I played. So let's, let's pack on the pounds. And I was

00:24:06.140 pretty disappointed only gaining 10 pounds, but there was, that was a catalyst to what sleep

00:24:11.800 does. You know, and I had my dad telling me like, you got to sleep better. You got to get to bed on

00:24:15.960 time. You can't stay out all night, those kinds of things. And, and you got to eat well, you got to

00:24:19.840 eat more. And at that point it was just a numbers game. You know, it didn't mean eating the food that

00:24:24.920 I eat now. It was just me eating more, you know, getting more protein and more calories in general.

00:24:28.960 So, so I think once I started to pay attention to that stuff, that's where I was starting to gain

00:24:34.220 the size. And then throughout junior college was testosterone still kind of the staple of

00:24:40.180 supplementation. Yeah, no doubt. And I gained fairly consistently still kind of undersized. So

00:24:47.300 I think by the end of my junior college, I was about two 50, you know, and to put that in perspective,

00:24:52.600 I mean, that's big for a lot of people, but there's linebackers that are 250 pounds,

00:24:55.640 plenty of middle linebackers that are that size. So for the position still small.

00:25:00.820 Yeah. And then what's it like when you get to a place like ASU and not, and again,

00:25:05.260 I'm not singling out ASU. I think this is probably true. It has to be true of every division one

00:25:09.080 school, right? Yeah. And I don't want to come across as Floyd Landis, so I'm not going to paint

00:25:13.180 a picture of what other people are doing. No, no. Yeah. Just, just for, just for yourself.

00:25:16.720 Like what, what was that step up? It was good because I, you know, I was introduced

00:25:20.520 to a doctor, a naturopath and he'd for better and for worse. And we'll talk about what that

00:25:26.260 worse looks like. He would give me anything that I wanted. Thankfully, we were doing routine

00:25:29.980 blood work to look at something. My father, who I included on this, we were pretty adamant about.

00:25:35.360 So that's when I first experimented with growth hormone, IGF-1, different things. I think when I,

00:25:40.580 when I realized I wasn't going to go pro, that was the, when I started taking a decadurbalone

00:25:44.940 with testosterone. And that was great for inflammation and just feeling better. At that

00:25:50.140 point, it really was like, how big can I get? And I still had a ceiling, you know, my senior year,

00:25:53.820 I was 268. I couldn't gain a pound more. And I was having just. And just give me a sense of dose,

00:25:59.140 how much you were, you were mixing decadron and discipionate 50, 50, or like what? One-to-one

00:26:04.240 ratio of those? No, it was probably 600 milligrams of tespionate and 400 milligrams of decadurbalone

00:26:10.100 a week. And you would take a week. It's about a gram total. Yeah. Which is just amazing. I want to

00:26:14.660 kind of put this in perspective for listeners. I have a subset of patients who are getting

00:26:18.880 testosterone replacement therapy for, you know, hypogonadism, right? So middle-aged guy who's,

00:26:24.660 you know, you can't get his testosterone back into a normal range with all the usual stuff,

00:26:29.400 beginning by the way, with sleep is sort of rule number one. You don't run a place testosterone

00:26:33.000 until a person's sleeping reasonably well. But to put this in perspective, I would say a normal

00:26:39.100 starting dose of testosterone cipionate is somewhere in the vicinity of 80 to a hundred milligrams a

00:26:46.060 week. And we like to divide that twice a week because the half-life of cipionate is about three

00:26:50.660 days. So you'll get a smoother dose. A couple of patients will even do it daily. You know,

00:26:56.020 they'll put in sort of. With cipionate. With cipionate. Wow. Yeah. Sub-Q injection and they'll do

00:27:01.020 10 to 13, 10 to 14 milligrams a day would be sort of a daily dose. And then that's, you know,

00:27:07.820 and you know, it's really interesting by the way, with that, you see no FSH LH suppression.

00:27:12.560 The natural range is about 11 milligrams a day, give or take for men. So that's like where you're,

00:27:18.420 you're kind of mimicking that. Yeah. That's the part that blows my mind is we just discovered

00:27:22.360 this by accident when a patient just on his own decided to start date. Like he felt started out

00:27:27.720 doing it, injecting once a week and then twice a week. And you're cutting the dose down, of course,

00:27:32.500 each time. And then he decided, well, daily must give you the most perfectly smooth way to do it.

00:27:37.460 And I said, well, yeah, if you don't mind giving yourself a little shot every day,

00:27:40.580 but it's actually a pretty, the sub-Q with the tiny needle is not a big deal.

00:27:44.440 So when we looked at his blood, it was really amazing. He was like, it's the only patient I'd

00:27:48.020 ever seen on testosterone cipionate who had normal FSH and LH. He'd looked like he was not taking

00:27:52.620 exogenous testosterone. And then we tried this with a couple other patients and sure enough,

00:27:56.300 that's the case. I think the highest amount of testosterone I've ever prescribed to a patient is

00:28:00.980 probably in the neighborhood of 140 to 160 milligrams in a week. And if you're talking,

00:28:08.280 did you say 600 of cipionate, 400 of deca or vice versa, but they're one-to-one equivalent.

00:28:12.260 So it's a thousand a week, right? Which is, I've seen that a lot in athletes and bodybuilders and

00:28:16.720 stuff like that. What kind of side effects do you have from a dose that high?

00:28:19.960 Well, that's where I capped it, you know, and there's bodybuilders that'll go in the three to

00:28:23.200 five gram a week range. And from what I know loosely, they likely have more receptor sites and

00:28:29.580 they're going to deal with the side effects no matter what's coming up for them. I'd get acne

00:28:33.360 in season, but I think it was from the shoulder pads. I never washed those kinds of things. So

00:28:36.800 yeah, I'd get acne and stuff like that on the back. I don't know how much that affected my mind

00:28:41.340 because it felt good. And with the amount of training that I was doing, it was a positive.

00:28:45.860 Did you understand what testosterone at the time, I know today you have a much better understanding,

00:28:49.780 of course, but at the time, did you understand what this molecule is doing to transcription factors in

00:28:56.020 your, you know, cells and how it's helping you recover better? Like, or was it, were you not,

00:29:00.980 I mean, that's maybe a dumb question. What, what kid in college is thinking of that? But

00:29:04.640 did you just think like taking this makes me bigger and stronger? Did you have a sense of why?

00:29:09.820 Well, I understood an increased protein synthesis, things like that. I think there was a book called

00:29:13.820 anabolics 2000 by Dr. William Llewellyn, which is where I started to take a deep dive in it.

00:29:18.140 You know, that's the funny. So Llewellyn's principles of pharmacology is one of my favorite books

00:29:22.400 on the entire study of anabolics. I have like, it's like, you know, the volume, it's like a

00:29:27.220 Bible and it's, it's long and wide. It's not just thick. Like it's, it's a really, it's a great

00:29:33.220 place if anybody's looking to do this. No, I can't recommend it highly enough because one of the

00:29:37.840 things I love about Llewellyn is totally unemotional. There's no editorializing, right?

00:29:42.960 It's not like these things are horrible. These things are wonderful. It's like, okay,

00:29:46.940 let's go through every single one of these molecules painfully deep. And we'll just talk

00:29:53.980 about the relative differences, similarities between them, what they do, what they don't do.

00:29:57.660 And, uh, yeah, I'm a, I'm a big, I'd love to meet Llewellyn. I don't know if he must be still

00:30:01.260 alive. He's got to be young. He's got to be, he was doing, I think the last one I read was,

00:30:06.320 I think he had 2007 was the last one that I had. I have a more, I have a more recent one than that.

00:30:12.520 And I've seen pictures of him and he looks like he's young.

00:30:14.620 A buddy of mine had like 2011. So like, he's for sure still around if he's writing books,

00:30:18.660 he's not on his deathbed. You know, how hard it is to write a book. So you're reading Llewellyn,

00:30:24.960 which is actually kind of interesting. I'm guessing not everybody who's taken testosterone

00:30:28.860 is reading Llewellyn's principles of pharmacology to understand what's going on. One thing I just

00:30:34.420 curious about, you mentioned you were never the nasty drunk, right? You were. So one of the things

00:30:39.300 that people talk about is, well, if you take that much anabolic steroid, you, it must change your mood.

00:30:44.080 Did you experience that?

00:30:45.660 I didn't feel it. And that's what I was alluding to with that positive wellbeing. I couldn't wrap

00:30:49.580 my head around roid rage for the life of me. I think, and then to that note, I began to see like

00:30:54.680 whether the guy was on like five friends that had that particular outcome from anabolics,

00:31:00.140 they were that way without it. They hadn't unpacked their shit to begin with. And that's why

00:31:05.600 whatever amplifiers in them is going to draw that out. Same thing goes with alcohol or anything else.

00:31:10.040 You know, you, you give somebody a little fuel to the fire. And I think it was Wayne Dyer who said,

00:31:15.780 if you squeeze an orange, what do you get? Orange juice. If somebody squeezes you, what do you get?

00:31:20.740 Well, it's whatever's going to come out of you. Right. And that's, that's the difference. Not that I was

00:31:24.560 all rainbows and fucking clouds in the inside. I still had a lot of work to do, which wouldn't come

00:31:30.120 for years later.

00:31:31.120 That's interesting to see at that dose. Cause I, I mean, I don't have experience clinically with those

00:31:35.360 doses. I've, I've seen it anecdotally, like in cases like yours, but I've, I've never had the

00:31:41.260 ability to clinically observe what happens at what we call super physiologic doses, but at physiologic

00:31:47.320 doses, which I have lots of experience with patients, I've never once seen any of these horror

00:31:54.200 show side effects that people talk about. And I've come to the same conclusion, which is steroids are a

00:31:59.760 lot like money. You know, people talk about, well, that guy's a rich asshole. And it's like,

00:32:04.100 I don't think those are necessarily the same thing. He's an asshole who then got a lot of money and

00:32:09.000 that just allowed him to amplify his asshole as assholedness. And similarly, like, I think if you

00:32:16.180 take a really aggressive, angry person and you give them more anabolic steroids, you can probably

00:32:22.320 amplify that phenotype, but you don't create that phenotype. That's why I've seen some of the most

00:32:28.100 beautiful people in the world I've seen are some of the wealthiest people as well, because they

00:32:31.840 just happen to be good people. You give them a bunch of money. Now they can amplify their good

00:32:35.980 through that. So yeah, I think, I think of those the same. And it, but, but what's interesting is

00:32:40.200 that at such high doses, my observation, at least anecdotally in you is still the same, which is

00:32:45.100 didn't, didn't it actually seem to be quite positive. This is a topic I'm super interested in because

00:32:51.400 I think that the science on this whole topic is so misunderstood. I think that the fear

00:32:58.640 undermongering around these drugs. And by the way, to be really clear, I have no idea if the doses you

00:33:04.000 were taking are safe. My intuition is it's probably not a good idea to be clear. So anybody listening

00:33:09.080 to this who thinks that me having this discussion is somehow endorsing taking a thousand milligrams a

00:33:14.320 week of testosterone, testosterone equivalent is a good idea. I don't think it is, but that's mainly

00:33:19.120 because I don't have data. I don't have long-term data. I've seen short-term data, right? I've seen

00:33:23.540 studies of eight, 12, 16 weeks, where you put athletes on those kinds of doses, which is

00:33:28.540 effectively 10 times the normal amount of testosterone. These studies don't find bad

00:33:34.640 outcomes. Of course, you were probably taking it for longer than 16 weeks. And that's my whole point,

00:33:39.380 which is, I don't know how to extrapolate outside of the normal window. But when you start to talk about

00:33:43.260 normal physiologic doses and all the fear mongering that comes with that stuff,

00:33:47.940 I don't know what it is about our society. We really love to misunderstand things.

00:33:53.160 There was a very famous story that was talked about in that documentary that Mark Bell made,

00:33:58.220 or sorry, that Chris Bell made, you know, the story about that kid.

00:34:00.360 Bigger, stronger, faster.

00:34:01.000 Yeah. I forget the boy's name.

00:34:02.340 He got really depressed when he jumped off because he didn't have post-cycle therapy.

00:34:06.460 Yeah. I would even put a different spin on that, which is, and again, this is, I don't mean to

00:34:13.240 sound unempathetic at all because I know that in the documentary, they feature very prominently

00:34:17.580 his father, who's adamant that steroids killed his son. And if I were in his shoes,

00:34:22.140 I think I'd probably say the same thing, but this gets to the point of, I would argue that

00:34:27.840 people who are going to take steroids for non-medical use are probably searching for

00:34:34.060 something anyway. There's a void that's probably trying to be filled there. And in the case of

00:34:37.620 this boy who, I forget his name, begins with a T. I think it was like Tyler or Taylor or something

00:34:41.560 like that. You know, high school kid, I think he was a baseball player. If I recall, you take 10 kids

00:34:46.560 who play high school baseball. There's a subset of them that are going to gravitate towards

00:34:50.300 wanting this. Maybe it's because they want to be better. Maybe they want to be better

00:34:53.980 because they're sort of filling some other void. It's probably that, that at least increases

00:34:58.420 their susceptibility to depression and not that, not that the testosterone is causing

00:35:02.520 the depression. That's sort of my view on that. And I think that's a bit too nuanced

00:35:06.300 to explain, but it feeds into this discussion of which one's driving the other. And that's

00:35:12.080 why when you look at studies of this stuff, where you get the luxury of not having to rely

00:35:18.180 on a person self-selecting into it. And instead you can use the process of randomization.

00:35:22.720 I just think these findings just, they never show up in the medical literature of testosterone

00:35:27.900 use. So now you mentioned growth hormone as well. Why growth hormone? What did it offer

00:35:32.540 above testosterone? I think from a recovery standpoint, and I don't know how much of that

00:35:36.860 was placebo effect. And I was taking probably four IUs a day. Which is not that much actually

00:35:42.640 in the big picture, is it? No, but I could feel the side effects, you know, like a little

00:35:46.160 tingly fingers in the middle of the night, some level of carpal tunnel. And that's also

00:35:50.880 for sure had to do with the water weight I was carrying and, you know, just being a swole

00:35:54.560 for, for lack of a better word. Did you ever take growth hormone without testosterone?

00:35:59.460 No. So we don't know what growth hormone alone would have felt like.

00:36:02.360 Yeah. But I do remember, I mean, playing defensive line, you get bumps and bruises every day.

00:36:06.400 And I rolled my ankle really hard. And the next day it was like nothing had ever happened.

00:36:10.280 And I was astonished. I thought I was going to wake up and have blue and purple around my foot

00:36:14.960 for a month. It was a bad, bad sprain. And literally the next day, like there was no

00:36:20.400 swelling. It felt great. I went right back to practice and I could do everything again.

00:36:24.080 So I was like, okay, this is worth a thousand dollars a month. Like it just made perfect sense

00:36:28.240 to me at that point. How did you come up with the money for all this? Was the growth hormone

00:36:31.920 alone a thousand dollars a month? It certainly was. So without, uh, let's just say that part was

00:36:37.780 sponsored. Uh, we'll just leave it at that. And the testosterone, while nowhere near as

00:36:44.140 expensive at the doses you're taking, can't be, it's still got to be a couple hundred bucks a

00:36:48.300 month, right? Yeah. Especially because it's through a doctor and obviously insurance isn't covering any

00:36:52.080 of that. Now, did you guys get drug tested in college? We did. And I don't know if you remember

00:36:56.320 this, but there was a thing where I think it was, I don't want to get the guy's name wrong. Maybe we

00:37:00.840 can look it up. Ryan, can you look up if it was Ontario Smith, they got caught with the

00:37:05.420 wizenator. So the wizenator 5,000, the wizenator, the old wizenator, you know, it was so great. I

00:37:14.940 remember going into the weed shop back then. Um, of course they didn't have cannabis there. They just

00:37:19.580 had bogs and whatever. And I saw this thing and they had like seven different colors of a penis.

00:37:24.260 Like, what the hell is this doing here? And they're like, Oh man, that's for your piss test.

00:37:27.820 And I was like, are you serious? Okay. All right. We got confirmation. It was Ontario Smith.

00:37:31.000 He fucked it up for everyone. But, uh, you know, I've seen all the different colors and I'm like,

00:37:36.560 huh? So how does it work? You get somebody's clean urine. He's like, no, you don't even have

00:37:40.720 to do that. It comes with synthetic urine. And then there's a Japanese heat pad that sticks to

00:37:46.480 the outside. And then you have the other, the, the other part of it pressed against your pubic hair

00:37:51.140 or whatever. And then when you're asked to pull it out, you just pull out that one. And it's kind of

00:37:55.260 like, do you remember the toy water weenie back in the eighties? It's got a little click in.

00:37:59.580 It's like surgical tubing. You'd fill with water and then squirt people. So anyways,

00:38:03.420 you unclick this thing and, uh, just free flows and you can push on it a little bit to get it out,

00:38:08.640 but it's always at like one and a half X, whatever the a hundred milliliter standard is.

00:38:14.040 Does the drug test or not actually look at you voiding?

00:38:16.460 I mean, I had a guy look at my penis when he saw the wizard nader, but I had my pants on. He

00:38:20.880 didn't make me drop trial, you know, whereas what does he do when he sees a purple penis?

00:38:25.120 Well, I have a funny story about that. So my penis, the, my fake penis didn't, didn't look far

00:38:32.660 off. This discussion is taken out of context is out of control. We'll have him clipped as we're

00:38:38.860 social. My fake penis looked very similar to my actual penis in terms of color. Loaning that out to

00:38:45.800 one of my teammates who was half black didn't go so well for him. Thankfully he said, as long as the

00:38:51.580 test is clean, when he got caught, I won't get you in trouble. And of course he got off cause he had

00:38:55.560 clean piss. The issue, what we saw with the wizard nader in pro sports is that the synthetic urine

00:39:01.400 contain no levels of hormone. So you'd show zero on to zero sex hormones across the board. So then

00:39:09.640 they know something was up that would qualify as a positive test. I was kind of rolling the dice

00:39:16.040 with NCAA. I figured at that point I wasn't going to get, you know, what are they going to do? Bust the

00:39:20.860 guy who was fucking third string barely made travel squad. So yeah, I was rolling the dice

00:39:25.900 there. They make you go to your ankles with your pants or whatever you're wearing. The team guys,

00:39:29.900 they'd just glance down, see what you got. As long as it's a penis and you're not pulling something

00:39:33.260 out of a cup, you're okay. In other words, there was sort of the, was this the NCAA that was basically

00:39:38.120 turning a blind eye to this then? The team guys. And then the NCAA, they would have you pull your

00:39:42.760 pants down, but they're, you know, I don't, from what I understand, not super weird about it

00:39:46.880 because it wasn't invasive. Like I hear horror stories from, from the guys that are fighting

00:39:52.300 now and have you saw that knocking on their door at 3 a.m. Yeah. The Wizenator is not going

00:39:56.280 to work when you saw that or WADA comes right now, not even close. Never would have. I'm amazed. I

00:40:01.400 mean, I've never really thought about this problem specifically, but I'm amazed people haven't come

00:40:05.580 up with artificial bladders and things that are more nuanced. Well, I think it was a, what was that

00:40:10.300 movie with the old football movie? I think it was in the nineties with Latimer. Oh, Latimer. Yes,

00:40:16.320 yes, yes. Jack to the gills. Yeah. He did the oil change where he would pull urine out of his

00:40:21.260 bladder and then have someone else's injected in with a TCC syringe. Yes, yes, yes. How can I be

00:40:24.880 blanking on what that was? It wasn't any given Sunday, was it? No. Uh, the program. Yeah. Yeah. James

00:40:29.840 Kahn. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how often that was going down. I don't think people were going to

00:40:34.500 those kinds of extremes in college, maybe at higher levels of sport, but. Is growth hormone

00:40:39.800 detectable on any of their tests? It certainly wasn't even something they were testing for in

00:40:44.280 college. I know a couple of people who have had that come up for them in fighting now with USADA

00:40:49.900 to what degree that's accurate. I'm not sure. So, you know, a lot of these guys have lawyered up and

00:40:56.180 are fighting it. Whether or not they're successful or not, I have no idea. So college comes to an end.

00:41:02.600 You sort of realize you're not going to make it to the NFL. What do you think about as the next chapter?

00:41:06.740 Sure. I was just in the moment. You can model the whizinator. That's always got to be on the

00:41:10.240 table as an option, a work opportunity. That's all right. That was my next venture. Um, you know,

00:41:16.400 I quit going after my senior year of football and I was really starting to battle my own personal

00:41:20.860 demons at that point, that same doctor. So I talked about the better and worse of having a doctor that

00:41:26.180 would give me anything. He was prescribing me two milligrams Xanax, call them Xanny bars because they

00:41:31.720 had the four squares, 60 at a time, 10 milligram volume, 60 at a time with five refills on both

00:41:37.620 10 milligram. I didn't know that was even legal. Meaning I didn't know. It's not legal. He went

00:41:42.060 to jail later. Oh, okay. He gone. One of my friends died. So that, that guy, uh, I'm sure he's out now,

00:41:49.440 but needless to say, also 10 milligrams of Vicodin 60 at a time, five refills. Now, thankfully for me

00:41:56.600 personally, and I've lost a lot of friends to opiates, it was very hard for me to take a high

00:42:01.080 dose and feel good. I would get nauseated and puke violently. So there was always like this,

00:42:05.240 you had a built-in governor, yeah. Built-in governor when it came to opiates, but having

00:42:09.860 had a lot of stuff that I hadn't worked on internally and we can dive into that, but it

00:42:14.380 just, these anti-anxiety medications were fucking perfect. Like I would feel great. There's a euphoria.

00:42:19.540 I'd sleep very well if I was using cocaine or ecstasy. And these are pressed shitty pills,

00:42:26.580 not the type of MDMA we talk about with Rick Doblin, just a whole different ball game. I'd be

00:42:31.740 up till 5 AM. Then I'd take my Xanax, something like that, you know, and that's, you know, you're

00:42:35.440 playing that roller coaster. So you're already done with football, but you're still like finishing

00:42:39.900 college at this point. And that's when I quit going to school. So I didn't see, I'd finished

00:42:45.080 95% of my communications classes and sociology. And at that point, in order to stay eligible,

00:42:52.840 I'd switched my degree so many times. There was this bullshit degree called a bachelor in

00:42:56.980 interdisciplinary studies, which is fine. It's like two minors to equal a major.

00:43:01.820 And I enjoyed the coursework. But once I got to my senior year, a lot of the classes became actual

00:43:06.540 BIS classes where you would go in and have to write these long ass papers that you'd present to a

00:43:11.780 potential employer on why it was actually better that you had a basket weaving degree and not an

00:43:16.360 actual degree. And I couldn't stand it. Like it was just so fake to me and really like not enjoying

00:43:22.320 school at that point, not having a reason to be there, not having a reason to stay eligible.

00:43:25.500 Are you taking loans out to be in school at this point?

00:43:27.660 Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah.

00:43:29.080 So you're paying to do this thing that you think is not helpful.

00:43:32.420 Correct. You know, I said I'd take a semester off. My parents didn't really fuss over it

00:43:36.680 and really got into pills with alcohol and cocaine and ecstasy. And that was something that I'd been

00:43:44.000 doing. But because of football keeping me, there was a point in time where I knew I had to straighten

00:43:48.080 up each and every year and really being a fan of the gym and who I was training with that also would

00:43:53.940 kind of regulate me. So even in the off season, I was still kind of, I was mindful of the debauchery.

00:44:00.880 And then without that, it was mindless debauchery really. And I was very depressed. I didn't know

00:44:06.360 what I wanted to do from that point on and probably came to one of the most depressing

00:44:13.700 points in my life. And to give some background from, and I talked about this on a solo podcast

00:44:19.560 I did a long time ago, which for sure, I don't think anyone here has heard it, but from about

00:44:23.840 seven years old on, I had thoughts of suicide and like pretty vivid, like thinking of my dad's

00:44:31.000 handguns or his rifles or how I would use a bow and arrow, put it plainly. I remember having a

00:44:36.600 conversation with my dad on the deck of our condo and I asked him what would happen if I fell off of

00:44:42.040 this and landed face first in the concrete. And he said, you probably wouldn't die. You'd just be

00:44:46.740 really messed up from that point on. And, but that was me. He didn't realize at the time that was me

00:44:51.180 checking to see like, can I kill myself by jumping off this fucking balcony? And how old were you?

00:44:54.620 Seven? Seven. Yeah. Six, seven. And that would circle back at, I mean, many times throughout the

00:45:02.720 year that would circle back. What do you think was at the root of that? It was really hard.

00:45:12.080 It was really hard to see my family fight so often, you know?

00:45:21.180 It was constant. And my little sister is just a year younger than me and I could feel her

00:45:27.780 shift. I could feel her clothes inside and wall off. And, uh, you know, being the oldest,

00:45:37.140 my dad was the oldest. He was a little bit harder on me than her. And that stuck out. Um,

00:45:41.740 it was just really, I mean, without too many details, it was very, very difficult. And it

00:45:51.100 really felt, I think at the root of a lot of depression is this concept that it will never

00:45:55.460 get better. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. There's no way out of this. And that's,

00:46:00.340 that's how I felt most of my childhood was just like, this is not going to get better.

00:46:05.000 I remember when I was 10, my mom said, I'm thinking about divorcing your father. And I

00:46:09.880 said, yes, do it. And my sister was in panic. She didn't want her family to get broken apart,

00:46:14.520 but a part of me knew once that happened, like they would be better people for it because they

00:46:19.860 weren't meant to be together. And it took three more years for that to actually happen. But yeah,

00:46:25.020 it was, it was, it was incredibly difficult. And I think, uh, coming to this place now

00:46:30.600 where once again, I felt like I didn't have any viable option of doing something that was

00:46:37.840 meaningful with my life. And not to mention from a neurochemistry standpoint, just playing

00:46:45.520 with all the buttons, you know, up, down, up, down, lack of sleep. You had Matthew Walker on

00:46:51.780 three episodes. Like I now see that very clearly when I read his book, why we sleep, I was like, well,

00:46:56.180 yeah, no shit, no shit. I was, I was messed up in the head. I saw, I watched the sun come up many,

00:47:02.600 many nights in the beautiful double-edged sword of an anti-anxiety pill is that you feel fucking

00:47:08.180 great while you're on it. And the second you stop taking it, all that unworked through stuff is still

00:47:12.340 there. It's just waiting to come up once the chemicals out of your body. And so I had a fight

00:47:19.240 with my girlfriend at the time. And there really was this thought in my head that I'll never be

00:47:26.560 loved. I will never find love. And with that, I took every remaining pill that I had. And I drove up

00:47:32.820 to, uh, the top of parking lot seven at Arizona state. Thankfully, a security guard saw me pulling

00:47:39.940 up at like 2 AM, got out of the car, stripped down naked and walked, climbed, uh, one more flight of

00:47:45.800 stairs and, and was standing on the edge about ready to jump. And I heard, Hey, what are you doing

00:47:52.540 up there? And I looked back, actually, let me rewind that. I had been to church growing up,

00:47:56.680 but I didn't consider myself a religious person. Most of that stuff didn't resonate with me at all,

00:48:00.680 particularly with regarding gay people going to hell. Like I was from the Bay area. That shit

00:48:06.260 really didn't resonate with me. And there was a lot of other things that stood out to me as

00:48:10.000 hypocritical. It didn't make sense. Yeah. Hypocritical, that kind of stuff. And,

00:48:13.900 but as I was standing there before the security guard said anything,

00:48:17.000 that was my first real spiritual experience. Like this, I don't know if it was the chemicals

00:48:22.820 kicking in, but this wash of warmth came throughout my body from head to toe. And it was the most peace

00:48:30.300 that I had felt ever in my entire life. You think it's because you sensed it might be over?

00:48:36.260 Yeah. It was the time to go for me. Like there was no, no reason to stay. And, uh,

00:48:43.180 this voice, and it might've been a voice in my head. It might've been outside of me. I don't

00:48:46.780 think that's the point. The voice just said, not yet. It's okay.

00:48:52.260 I, I,

00:48:52.660 so this guy gets you off the ledge, literally gets me off the ledge. And I wake up in a hospital

00:49:02.880 with all my family there. They flew out from California, obviously to Arizona.

00:49:08.220 I don't really have a recollection of what happened after that. Other than I remember asking my mom,

00:49:13.120 like, why are, why is this male nurse such a dick? And she was like, you, you weren't very nice to him.

00:49:19.480 You weren't very nice to anyone here. And, uh, knowing myself, I just kind of laughed and said,

00:49:24.540 yeah, that's, that's for sure what happened. So I spent about a week in a detox center.

00:49:30.160 They had everything from group therapy to, uh, activities. They wanted to wean me off the anxiety

00:49:36.140 medication, knowing how long I'd been on that. And, um, didn't, like I had mentioned where there was

00:49:40.880 no real problem with the opiates. So they didn't wean that, but put me on Klonopin for the week.

00:49:47.060 And the first dose I took, uh, I remember walking up to the nurse, like I'm, I'm fucking high right

00:49:53.060 now. I don't want to be high. I want that. I want to, I want to go cold Turkey. And they're like,

00:49:57.120 no, it's, it's really important that we wean you because you can have potential side effects here.

00:50:00.840 And I was like, I don't care. I'm not going to take it. I'm telling you right now, I'm not going

00:50:04.080 to take it. So thankfully they, they cut my dose to nothing. That was an interesting time because

00:50:10.600 there was a lot of people there that had, I mean, not to make comparisons, but people that

00:50:14.980 didn't have all the same opportunities that I had and didn't look the way that I looked and weren't

00:50:19.500 as young as me or as fit as me or any of the things that I had going on. A lot of them didn't

00:50:24.060 have family there supporting them. My family would come in every day. They were staying in a hotel.

00:50:28.840 They had nothing else to do, but, but check on after me. I think at that stage, you know,

00:50:34.680 when you have other people saying like, what are you doing here? You have so much going on. It's

00:50:38.180 like, you don't fucking know. And that's to my point, when someone's depressed, they see through

00:50:44.060 their lens. They don't see through anyone else's lens. It's just like, this is water. Right. And

00:50:48.220 so you could have everyone on earth fucking Obama could show up and say like, look what you have

00:50:52.400 going on for you. And you'd say, you don't know what's going on for me. And that's really how I

00:50:57.340 felt when I got out. I had a psychologist and a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist. I was pretty

00:51:04.000 adamant that I didn't want to go down the SSRI rabbit hole. I had family members that had done

00:51:08.900 that. And I saw it was just a merry-go-round of different things. And finally, when they found

00:51:13.600 something that would work, they didn't inevitably have to increase the dosage. So I said no to that.

00:51:18.760 I was prescribed lithium and I took it for about a week. And I remember thinking like, I am a fucking

00:51:25.280 mute my whole life. I've been an extrovert. I've enjoyed talking to people. I've walked through

00:51:30.980 public speaking classes in college. Now I'm a mute. There was no high. There was no low.

00:51:35.780 The diagnosis was bipolar. What dose of lithium did they put? They must've put you on a very heavy

00:51:40.100 dose. Probably. I know some, you know, I think we know some people that benefit very greatly from a

00:51:45.300 low dose of that. But at the time it was like, I can't do this either. And I remember talking to

00:51:50.240 the psychiatrist who actually resonated more with me than the psychologist. I've had great therapists,

00:51:56.180 but that guy wasn't it. Psychiatrist was like, all right, if you don't want to take anything,

00:52:00.980 read these. And he handed me six studies on fish oil and the brain. And that was my first like,

00:52:06.880 okay, from like a holistic standpoint of what supplementation can look like rather than just

00:52:10.700 creatine and testosterone, maybe there's something to this. And started something with fish oil.

00:52:16.080 More importantly than that, started creating space for myself to actually look at my life and just

00:52:23.280 create like a distance from the party atmosphere. Like maybe I can take a break. And with that started

00:52:29.780 to see a shift, started to get goals. Were you back in class at this point?

00:52:33.800 No, I never went back to school. Never went back to school. So I'm still a senior at ASU officially.

00:52:39.060 You know, I had fought a lot growing up. Like I talked about, and I had watched the UFC from its

00:52:42.960 infancy. It was a huge fan of pride. I had no intention of becoming a professional fighter, but

00:52:48.400 I knew what I was missing. And what I was missing in football was camaraderie. It was being able to

00:52:54.180 butt heads. It was some physical interaction with another human. And then the training, I would go

00:52:59.940 instead of training with all these guys and having some of the best coaches in the world hyping me up

00:53:04.780 before a lift, I'm lifting by myself a 24 hour fitness. I'm on a fucking treadmill. Like there

00:53:09.680 was no real draw to do that. I felt like a rat on the wheel. Knowing that's something I missed. I

00:53:14.960 wanted to start training in mixed martial arts just for the training, just for the camaraderie,

00:53:18.920 just for the ability to learn something new each day and not really know. Like I don't want to have

00:53:23.840 to design my entire workout in the gym. Like, let me go here and learn something brand new and maybe

00:53:29.220 make some friends in the process. And probably three months into that, there was a guy, a gym owner out

00:53:35.860 in Arizona who ran Rage in the Cage. It was a local, very low level show. And he said, dude, you're big,

00:53:41.060 you're handsome. You played football, you're athletic. Fight for me at heavyweight. You only have to do it

00:53:45.820 one time. If you don't want to do it again, you don't have to. And so I said, all right.

00:53:50.720 In my first two fights, I won in under 30 seconds. I'm not saying I was great or anything like that.

00:53:56.620 What I am saying is there is a difference between an athlete that comes from division one and a lot

00:54:01.340 of the guys fighting heavyweight at the time. And this was in MMA? Yes. Mixed martial arts.

00:54:06.760 So what are the, just quickly, what are the rules? What are the parameters? I think everybody's

00:54:10.340 heard of MMA. People sometimes don't understand the difference between MMA and UFC. Like they're

00:54:15.220 sometimes people use these terms synonymously, but let's start with what mixed martial arts means.

00:54:19.420 An analogy I like to use is, is mixed martial arts is to the UFC as tissues are to Kleenex.

00:54:25.460 And a lot of people won't say, can you hand me a tissue? They'll say, pass me a Kleenex,

00:54:28.740 whether it's Kleenex brand or not. So the UFC being the highest level of sport that is mixed martial

00:54:34.360 arts. And then, you know, mixed martial arts can have, there's, there's, there's MMA shows all over

00:54:39.920 the world now at varying levels. But, um, mixed martial arts is the practice of bringing all things

00:54:46.440 together. Typically they use four to five ounce gloves that are fingerless. So you can grab,

00:54:51.780 you can't strike in the back of the head. There used to be varying rules, you know, in pride,

00:54:56.000 you could stomp a guy's face. You could soccer kick a guy's face while he's on the ground. You

00:54:59.340 can knee a guy's head while he's on all fours. None of that's allowed in the UFC or in all of North

00:55:03.880 America, to my understanding. What else can you not? Yeah. It's probably easier to say what you

00:55:08.500 can't do. You can't kick to the nuts, can't pull hair. And a lot of this stuff when, when MMA started

00:55:13.280 was allowed, you know, it was no holds barred. What's the, where's the genesis of MMA? When did

00:55:18.020 it really first start? I think it's different, you know, for different people, different camps would

00:55:22.900 say it was Bruce Lee, different camps would say. So they would say Jeet Kune Do was the original.

00:55:27.600 Yeah. And Kaji Kenpo also was, um, different forms of full contact karate, kickboxing, jujitsu.

00:55:33.880 We just had John Hackleman on my podcast and he was a Kaji Kenpo background out of Hawaii. And now

00:55:39.260 he created Hawaiian Kenpo. So there, there's, there's merit in both, you know, but it is that

00:55:44.420 bridging of different forms and the arc of MMA. If you haven't seen it started off as like, this is

00:55:51.100 what I'm good at versus this is what you're good at. It was like the Kumite and blood sport. So you'd

00:55:54.920 have a boxer against a sumo wrestler. And then, you know, as it progressed, people began to have more

00:56:00.280 than one trick pony, a couple of skillsets. So I'm good at, um, defending takedowns and I'm really

00:56:05.640 good at standup. So I can stand at banks, brawl and brawl were terms that were being used or I'm a

00:56:10.600 great wrestler and I can pound you when you're on the ground. So ground and pound became a thing.

00:56:14.500 And then as it's transitioned and now you have to know everything in any position, because if you

00:56:19.720 have a weakness, it's going to be exploited. And in parallel to this, you've got this Brazilian

00:56:24.340 jiu-jitsu that is being, you know, you've got these incredible Gracie's and all these other guys

00:56:29.620 over there doing this other form of traditional jiu-jitsu. And when does that start to merge with

00:56:36.520 MMA? Because today it's almost impossible to distinguish. Like it's almost impossible to

00:56:40.820 imagine MMA without Brazilian jiu-jitsu, right? I think right as the UFC came along, that was the

00:56:45.240 point. And when did the UFC come into 93? So it was a different group of ownership. I forget the

00:56:52.280 guy's name, Bob something, but he started the UFC with, in large part with the Gracie's and they,

00:56:59.100 according to their story, wanted to bring in a guy who wasn't the best, wasn't the most fit,

00:57:03.380 wasn't the strongest. And they brought in Hoist Gracie just to illustrate, like, this is a technical

00:57:08.960 thing. It's not that he's a gifted athlete and he's going to do this to you. He's not our best

00:57:13.440 athlete. He's not our best Gracie and he can still do this to you. I mean, they showed what jiu-jitsu

00:57:17.940 was all about. It was awesome to watch that, to see the difference. But now you see even the

00:57:22.000 sport of jiu-jitsu has really progressed. There's guys that focus on that their whole lives and

00:57:27.400 careers and you see them in jiu-jitsu sport competitions and it's just a whole different

00:57:31.440 level. They're orders of magnitude greater than some of the guys in the UFC. Going back to when

00:57:37.240 you start training in an MMA gym and have these couple of quick fights, at that point in time,

00:57:42.220 outside of your fitness and athleticism, strength, et cetera, did you have any formal training in boxing,

00:57:47.680 kickboxing, martial arts? It was only wrestling. You wrestled in high school, right? Let me correct

00:57:52.580 myself. When I was 17, I went with another wrestling teammate of mine. We didn't want to

00:57:57.540 do tracker or any of that spring sport. So we went into AKA American Kickboxing Academy, which is in San

00:58:03.500 Jose. At that time, Frank Shamrock was the coach there. This is today regarded as one of the most

00:58:08.760 prolific training institutes of MMA. In the world. Yeah. Still to this day. But you just got lucky.

00:58:15.660 It just happened to be in your backyard. Very fortunate that it literally was in my backyard.

00:58:19.380 And we, you know, the first three months I went there, that was, that was about it. I went there

00:58:23.300 for three months and started training for football again. It was awesome. I loved it. And I was just

00:58:28.880 thinking like, I'm going to learn this stuff so I can kick more ass on the street. You know, that was

00:58:33.080 really it. And it'll keep me in shape and maybe help me be a better wrestler, those kinds of things.

00:58:37.660 But it took some time. I mean, once I got back into fighting, well, once I started fighting

00:58:43.400 professionally and really trying to learn this stuff, in large part, I had forgotten a lot

00:58:47.880 from wrestling and most of the things that I learned at AKA when I was young. So, but also

00:58:54.440 having learned how to be coachable was really just there to absorb as much as I could. And

00:58:59.180 out in Arizona, we had some good guys. It's not at the level that it is now. You know, you have some

00:59:03.540 pretty great gyms out in Arizona these days, but it was still, still kind of young in terms of who

00:59:09.740 you'd train with. I didn't know that I'd fight in the UFC or anything like that. It was just fun for

00:59:14.240 me. And again, you could think for the listener, the UFC is like the NFL and you have an infinite

00:59:20.320 number of other arena football leagues and all these other sorts of things. And you could be

00:59:24.380 playing in those leagues and maybe one day think you make it to the UFC or the NFL as it were.

00:59:29.980 Yeah. And that was the goal. I mean, or, or pride, they were equal, but I, it wasn't my dream to

00:59:33.980 play or fight in Japan for that matter. I would have happily done it, but, um, I just kept going,

00:59:39.800 you know, and I, I fought often. I wasn't training nearly by the standard I needed to be at. So as I

00:59:45.560 was building this record, were you sustaining at this? Zero. I mean, I had no injuries at all

00:59:51.700 early on in my career. It was only when I got to, when I circled back. So I was six and O was now

00:59:58.200 fighting in King of the cage, which you could look at as kind of a bridge between the two,

01:00:01.800 still a massive jump from King of the cage to the UFC. But a lot of guys that fought in the UFC

01:00:07.920 had fought in King of the cage. How much are you getting paid per fight? A thousand dollars a

01:00:11.420 fight. And how frequently do they let you fight? It was four times a year was the contract prior to

01:00:16.580 that. It was $100 a fight in rage in the cage. It's just to give you perspective, a hundred dollars

01:00:22.220 to go in and fight. Oh God. That's even worse than boxing. Yeah, it was. I mean, that's still in the,

01:00:29.740 I don't know what it is today. You know, this is still when things were starting

01:00:32.740 or relatively, I mean, it's not like I was fighting in 93. That's when it was starting.

01:00:37.480 Got to six and O had a loss, my first loss of my career in King of the cage.

01:00:42.180 What happened in that fight? I really hadn't, hadn't trained much for it because it was walking

01:00:46.560 through people. It was almost like Tyson and Buster Douglas, you know, and my coach was trying to get

01:00:51.220 me in there more. And it was like, yeah, whatever, you know, and you think of humbling experiences.

01:00:55.060 Like I was just had my head in the clouds, thought I was the shit, thought I was going to just walk

01:00:59.380 through people until I got to the UFC. Then I'd really have to start training. So I went into a

01:01:03.320 fight. I think it was Laughlin, Nevada and just got the shit beat out of me. I mean, it was the first

01:01:07.540 time I got stung with a punch, kneed me in the head. It was Herb Dean who reffed the fight. He

01:01:11.860 actually stopped the fight with me on my feet. I was getting beat so bad. I had a really good coach

01:01:16.440 who actually had that fight take. It happened in the first round. It was a bad beating. My striking coach

01:01:22.100 trained under Dan Inosanto, who was one of Bruce Lee's main students. So he was a JKD guy.

01:01:26.840 And I learned JKD from one of Dan's six students.

01:01:29.700 That's amazing. Yeah. This guy, Vince Perez Mazzola, incredible human. He, he basically pulled

01:01:35.480 me aside and he said, look, I can teach you all of this stuff, things that people aren't doing in the

01:01:41.200 UFC, but you need more than me. You need a team. You need training partners. And all my training

01:01:45.800 partners fought at 185, you know, a weight class underneath me or two weight classes underneath me.

01:01:51.120 And he was like, you should go home and train at AKA again. They have a team. They're great.

01:01:57.460 There's many great guys that fight in the UFC and that's where you ultimately want to go now.

01:02:01.480 So you should move home. And at the same time, my strength coach from ASU hit me up, Joe Ken.

01:02:07.560 And he said, Kingsbury, I heard you're fighting right now. You got to go back to AKA. What the fuck

01:02:11.580 are you doing? And I was like, I don't know, coach. I kind of like it here in Arizona. He's like,

01:02:16.400 no, fuck all that. Kane's there. So Kane was the heavyweight wrestler at ASU. He took fifth,

01:02:21.580 I think in NCAA his senior year in nationals. And, um, he's one of the greatest heavyweights

01:02:28.260 of all time, but he, he was only two and O at AKA at the time. So I moved back in with my dad and

01:02:34.260 started training at AKA, largely just getting my ass beat every day until I could finally get my skills

01:02:39.780 and endurance and everything up to par to be able to hang, just to hang with Kane for one round.

01:02:45.960 We were rotating fresh bodies on him. I mean, it was a really hard entry point into what being a

01:02:52.400 real pro looked like. And how did you guys spar? Like, uh, obviously very familiar with boxing where

01:02:57.940 you can spar, you, you're using slightly larger gloves. You've got headgear though. I don't think

01:03:02.800 headgear does much except prevent cuts. And it's just a little easier to dial back the intensity,

01:03:08.260 but when it comes to elbows, knees, things like that, like how are you sparring basically at a

01:03:12.340 hundred percent all the time? So we weren't using elbows at the time. If you had knee pads,

01:03:16.900 you could knee. Generally we wouldn't need to the head. It was full go. I mean, it was,

01:03:22.140 it was a fight three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you're in a fight period.

01:03:26.560 Thankfully that we've seen the sport evolve and that's not really the case. There's still some

01:03:30.360 smaller gyms and backwoods areas that still spar like that. It was a huge issue in the UFC for a long

01:03:35.520 time. Fighters would get to camp. They'd train like animals. They'd spar as hard as the fight

01:03:40.820 was. And then a week before the fight, they'd get hurt or the week of the fight, they would get hurt.

01:03:45.580 It was a real issue. And I think it still happens now, but thankfully people are being more mindful

01:03:49.420 of the approach and also knowing once you have that level of experience and you've, you've kind

01:03:55.560 of weeded out, who's not going to make it, you can scale back and work technically. You look at

01:04:01.260 things like Muay Thai, which is a form of kickboxing from Thailand. They fight on a weekly basis. So

01:04:07.180 their sparring is just touch and go. It's highly technical and they're never trying to hurt one

01:04:10.840 another. So I think we're, we're going to start to see that more and more in the sport of mixed martial

01:04:14.840 arts. I did Muay Thai for two years when I was in college. And, uh, some of the most painful

01:04:20.220 injuries I had were, you know, blank shin to shin contact. I mean, my God, that's the only thing that

01:04:28.320 hurt me in, in actually inside the octagon in, in a fight in the UFC was shin to shin contact.

01:04:33.580 I could get drilled and actually touch canvas, snap out of it and get back up. And I wouldn't

01:04:38.220 have felt the punch like a hard rib shot. If I get the wind knocked out of me, that hurts.

01:04:42.720 But the shin to shin, that's the one where you're like, wow, I might not be able to walk tonight.

01:04:47.040 Well, I trained, I was trained by a guy from Thailand who, God, I still remember his name too. I'd love to,

01:04:53.920 I'd love to know what he's up to now, but his name was Eric and his shins were so badly conditioned,

01:05:00.000 meaning so well conditioned for the concept of the sport that you could hit them with not all out,

01:05:06.120 but you could take a baseball bat and somewhat like just gently, not gently, but like with medium

01:05:11.540 force, whack his shins. And he was unfazed at a level where even if you roll a baseball bat across a

01:05:16.980 normal person's shin at the wrong angle, it's very sensitive. And yeah, I was kind of like, look,

01:05:23.920 I mean, I'm done with trying to be a professional fighter here. I go to college now. I don't think

01:05:28.120 I'm going to do the work that's necessary to make my shins look like Eric's over there.

01:05:33.320 It's just not, I mean, it's just, it's true. Even though I didn't know much at the time,

01:05:36.920 I sort of knew like, that's just the bridge too far right now, but gives you an appreciation

01:05:41.940 for that sport. I mean, I used to love, I mean, I love Thai boxing, but we would spar mostly with

01:05:46.640 really heavy equipment that would enable us to do this. And we would focus on sort of different types of

01:05:51.380 things. Like there were some days when it was just all going to be low leg sweeps and you were

01:05:55.400 going to be in shin guards and you were really heavily guarded. Cause I always felt the worst

01:05:59.180 thing you could do is train at half speed because then it conditions you to be doing something at

01:06:04.480 half speed. You want to be able to be explosive. So you just have to have more, more barrier there

01:06:08.600 when you're doing it. But having never done mixed martial arts, it's just nothing but awe I have for

01:06:14.140 how you have to be so prolific at so many things. You can be a great striker and I can sort of relate to

01:06:19.840 that. Cause at least I know what those things, I know what it would be like to be great at that.

01:06:22.840 I was never great, but I understand those sports well enough. But then you think you could spend

01:06:27.440 your whole life doing that. And if you're a horrible grappler, you'd get destroyed and vice

01:06:31.540 versa. That's where it's at now for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think when you look at guys like Daniel

01:06:35.980 Cormier and John Jones, anybody who's great in the sport these days, they came in with something

01:06:40.280 already in their back pocket, you know, a lifelong wrestling pedigree or a lifelong in traditional

01:06:45.260 martial arts pedigree. And then they could just focus on these other things because you only have

01:06:49.080 so much bandwidth. There's only so much time in the day to really learn and acquire new skills,

01:06:53.820 to polish them, to feel comfortable enough to use that in a fight at full speed with all the pressure

01:06:59.380 of people watching you and pay-per-view and that kind of stuff going on. It's a lot. And I started

01:07:04.320 kind of late when you consider things, thankfully I wasn't missing the athletic background, but from

01:07:09.320 the technical standpoint, I entered the UFC as a white belt in jujitsu. I mean, there was,

01:07:13.280 there was gaping holes in my game that remained there until I finished.

01:07:17.760 While this whole new thing is going on, how are you processing or what's the state of your mind

01:07:22.740 with respect to this near death experience you've had and the culmination of really kind of what's

01:07:28.940 been going on since you were a kid? Like, has this, has this now backburnered and sort of been

01:07:33.600 supplanted by a new addiction, so to speak? Yeah, for sure. I think having something to look forward

01:07:39.660 to and train for and, and, and really some level of meaning of what I want to do, I didn't obviously

01:07:45.900 knew I wasn't going to fight for the rest of my life. I'd already experienced that in football,

01:07:48.860 but this kind of gave me a second go at it as a professional athlete in that, as I was working

01:07:55.540 towards being the best that I possibly could, those are the things really, they, they weren't coming up

01:08:01.480 for me because I also had an outlet. If I was feeling weird inside and I go and fucking punch

01:08:06.780 someone's lights out, like that's a good feeling, right? Like it's letting the lead out. It was a

01:08:10.260 great outlet in tandem. There was a couple of catalysts, big catalysts that changed my life

01:08:16.680 forever. One, I started working with a sports psychologist who introduced me to breath work

01:08:21.720 and some level of mindfulness. And the idea was, cause I mean, early on in my fight career, there was,

01:08:27.680 there was no issues. I had ultimate confidence. I was going to walk through people, but now I'm at

01:08:31.640 the UFC, all these people are, are as good, you know, as me, if not better. And that negative monkey

01:08:38.980 mind chatter that comes up, it was nonstop. So how do I control that? And the breath was really my

01:08:44.840 first entry point into quieting my mind and finding some level of stillness, at least right before the

01:08:49.820 fight. And this was holotropic. No, we would do various forms of slow breathing, trying to get down

01:08:55.560 into parasympathetic. So at least two to one exhale to inhale four seconds in seven seconds,

01:09:00.880 hold eight seconds out, things like that, or 10, 10, 10, 10 in 10 out or 10 in 10, hold 10 out.

01:09:07.320 And those were, I mean, fairly basic forms of breath work, but I could feel the difference

01:09:11.060 and practicing that right when I woke up and right before I went to bed, helped me sleep at night

01:09:15.700 because there was, I mean, it's one thing to say, I'll fight a guy on a certain date, but you sign a

01:09:21.380 contract every day up until that date happens. It's very hard to sleep. Cannabis helped me with that

01:09:27.180 too. Specifically THC, not just CBD, but there was a lot that helped me there to actually fall

01:09:32.480 asleep. Breath work being a big component of that. The second piece that really was a game changer

01:09:37.040 was a boxing coach that I had who was native American and Mexican. And he would take me to

01:09:42.560 the reservation to do traditional sweat lodges. So we do the Tim has call before every fight camp

01:09:48.260 started to kind of zero in on what we wanted. And after every fight for healing and reflection,

01:09:53.500 and it wasn't long before I just kind of looked at him and I said, coach, when are we going to use

01:09:59.060 La Medicina? And he just started laughing and he said, I've been waiting for you to ask.

01:10:03.180 And we started working with psilocybin. Had you ever done it before? I had done it before

01:10:07.540 highly inappropriately, you know, at a house party. Like recreationally. Yeah. At a house party on

01:10:12.220 alcohol and cannabis with a bunch of people I didn't know. And ultimate horror stories,

01:10:18.360 ultimate horror stories. But this was my first real introduction to use intention,

01:10:22.560 to have respect and reverence for the plants being used and in a completely safe and perfect

01:10:28.440 environment. You know, there's no running water, no lights. You're just out in nature, you know,

01:10:34.360 and it's just my coach there watching me and maybe a couple other fighters. And really that's where I

01:10:39.880 started to begin to uncover some things and really sort, not too much from the childhood,

01:10:45.840 but really getting direction and a true sense of peace inside that was lasting.

01:10:51.580 And at a certain point I had a friend go down to Peru. He was going to hike Machu Picchu. And I was

01:10:56.180 like, that's awesome, man. Tell me how it goes when you get back. So he actually calls me early and

01:11:00.700 I'm like, aren't you in Peru? And he's like, yeah, yeah, I just got here. But here's the thing.

01:11:06.120 I can either hike Machu Picchu or I can go do this thing called ayahuasca. It's going to take

01:11:10.820 five days to do either. And I was like, hike Machu Picchu. Why are you even calling me? That's

01:11:14.800 why you went there. And he's like, no, you got to look it up. So I went to arrowid.org. I'm not sure

01:11:19.180 if you're familiar with the site. It's got every drug from caffeine to meth in there, including all

01:11:24.560 plant medicines. They give the pharmacology of it. They give the chemistry of it. They give the

01:11:28.320 legality of it. And there's trip reports. So I remember pulling up a trip report from,

01:11:32.540 from ayahuasca. And the first thing that it was titled, it said the apex of teacher plans.

01:11:37.740 And I thought, Hmm, maybe there is something to this. And so I asked my coach if he would come

01:11:43.820 with me to Peru because I didn't speak Spanish well. And I wanted him there and he's guided me in

01:11:48.420 every meaningful experience I've had thus far. And he said, I'll bring Peru to us. And we found people

01:11:52.860 that would work with ayahuasca with us locally. And that was an absolute game changer. That's where I,

01:11:59.380 I mean, that shifted more things in me on how I perceive the world than anything else in terms

01:12:06.820 of a catalyst for that. And again, you know, like, as we talked about before, it's not to glorify

01:12:10.740 these substances. There's a right way and a wrong way to do anything, but under that guidance in that

01:12:17.040 setting with that medicine, no doubt, some of the most powerful changes in the way I view consciousness,

01:12:23.160 my spirituality. Um, were you still fighting while you were experimenting with these?

01:12:29.060 I was, I was introduced, I was fighting when I was using psilocybin, when I got introduced to

01:12:33.840 ayahuasca and to be clear, I was using psilocybin from then on still to this day, not often, but yeah,

01:12:39.480 still using psilocybin when I was introduced to ayahuasca, I had just torn my labrum. So it was

01:12:44.120 after a brutal fight in Nottingham, England, where I had my orbital, my left orbital blown out for a

01:12:48.980 second time. And my left eyebrow was fractured from a head kick in that fight. And it was my

01:12:53.880 third loss in a row. I had always said, if I get to be a 500 fighter at any level, then I'll quit

01:12:59.340 because it's, it's not fucking baseball, you know, and I am taking damage. It's clearly, if somebody

01:13:04.520 can punch me hard enough in the face to break bones, it's taking its toll on my brain. At that

01:13:09.520 point, I had some time off. I mean, I tore my labrum. It took me, it was a year to fully recover from

01:13:15.080 that. How are you supporting yourself at this point? Are you making enough in the UFC?

01:13:19.200 I was not making enough in the UFC even when I was fighting. So I lived in my mom's detached garage

01:13:23.820 for probably the last four and a half years I was there. And I worked at a, a pseudo strip club.

01:13:29.220 It was a bikini bar out in Sunnyvale as a bouncer, manager, and bartender. And I'd go in twice a week.

01:13:35.400 Thankfully, I go in on weekends and pull off two 11 hour shifts, losing sleep, of course,

01:13:40.220 not in the best environment, but I still have a lot of gratitude because that put food on the table

01:13:44.000 the entire time I was fighting. At that point, sponsorships were starting to be pulled. People know

01:13:48.820 or maybe not, but there was a Reebok deal that UFC did and they no longer allowed us to have our own

01:13:53.840 personal sponsors. So money was being taken out from under our feet left and right. And it was

01:13:58.960 really important that I had a side job while I was fighting. So the ayahuasca started when you were in

01:14:03.360 this year of the torn labrum? Correct. So you're three, you've lost three. What's your record in total

01:14:07.660 at this point? Hmm. In the UFC, I was four and four. So winning record overall, but four and four,

01:14:15.080 I think 11 and 11 and four at that point. Okay. Got it. So you're at a real crossroads,

01:14:19.260 which is am I retiring from this or do I have one more hurrah left in me? Yeah. And I wasn't getting

01:14:24.800 super clear on that from ayahuasca. I don't think it was my intention to make that decision until I had

01:14:29.680 repaired my shoulder and was able to train again. But all of the important things in my life were coming up

01:14:36.340 for me, the deep work. I mean, everything from childhood stuff to how I treated myself with drugs

01:14:43.460 and alcohol, you know, seeing, seeing those patterns come up. I remember I was, I was in Columbia

01:14:47.920 getting ready to do it. And they told us we were going to use a plant. They use a lot of different

01:14:51.880 admixtures, but there was this plant of a thousand ants. They said, why do you call it that? And it said,

01:14:56.260 well, we're going to rub it on you in the middle of the night. It feels like a thousand ants are biting

01:14:59.040 you. And so I kind of chuckled and I said, well, what does it do? And they said, you're going to think of a

01:15:03.180 negative emotion that you want to remove. Could be anger, could be sadness, could be whatever,

01:15:07.500 just something that keeps coming up for you. And I said, anger. And we got in a long conversation

01:15:10.840 about that, but they'd also talked before that ceremony about alcohol addiction and cannabis

01:15:16.500 addiction. And immediately I thought, oh, this is for everyone else. Like I'm good. This is for

01:15:23.300 everyone else. And then, and, you know, it does affect a lot of people, you know? And so I just

01:15:28.300 thought of it that way. And then a great chunk of that night was me reliving, puking violently over

01:15:34.020 a railing in my chonies and telling my sister to get away from me. You know, I didn't want people

01:15:38.560 around to see me like that. And I had countless nights like that. And even when I was fighting in

01:15:43.560 the UFC, it was really a polarized way to live. In fight camp, I was a perfect little angel. I

01:15:48.500 wouldn't watch TV. I would read every night trying to study things that would help me in fighting

01:15:52.420 from mobility to diet, nutrition, you name it, eating super clean food. And then the second the

01:15:58.720 fight is over, it's Whoppers and alcohol and blow and whatever I can get my hands on. So that went back

01:16:04.660 and forth for a while up until this ceremony. I was like, wow, okay, time to scale back outside of

01:16:10.360 camp and really treat myself better. It's so interesting when you look at the statistics, I'm

01:16:15.040 borrowing a lot of this. So the numbers might, I might be a little bit off because it's been a while

01:16:18.300 since I've, I've read it, but maybe you've heard me talk about it in the past. One of the

01:16:22.380 most important books I've ever read in my life is this book called, I don't want to talk about it.

01:16:26.600 Did we, did we talk about this in Hawaii? We must've. I think so. Yeah. By Terrence real. And

01:16:30.940 he talks so much about the difference between covert and overt depression. So overt depression is what

01:16:36.540 most people think about when they think of depression. It's the person who can't get out of

01:16:40.320 bed, who's weepy, who's unmotivated, you know, overeating, under eating, you know, your classic

01:16:47.420 picture of depression, the person who's sitting there morose and their psychiatrist

01:16:52.160 office or whatever. And then there's covert depression, which is the same underlying pain,

01:16:59.100 but it manifests itself typically with addiction, anger, aggression, workaholism, you know, all sorts

01:17:06.600 of other things that are numbing this sort of discomfort. And one of the statistics that Terry talks

01:17:15.780 about in the book that just blew my mind, because it's so obvious when he says it, like, I didn't

01:17:20.820 think, I guess what I realized is I can't believe I've never thought of this before, but he talks

01:17:26.020 about the stark contrast between men and women. So when you look at, for example, what's the

01:17:31.400 proportion of men in prison versus women in prison? It's something about, you know, it's

01:17:35.460 like 93% of incarcerated people in the United States are men, not women. Rates of alcoholism,

01:17:41.580 you know, it's about 20% in men. And again, I could be directionally, I could be a little

01:17:46.460 bit off, but directionally it's, you know, it's about three to one in favor of men for

01:17:50.120 alcohol abuse. Obviously, you know, nine to one in prison, drug abuse, violence, all of these things

01:17:56.760 are vastly more in men than in women. But when you look at women with clinical diagnosis of depression

01:18:02.880 versus men with a clinical diagnosis of depression, it's the opposite. It's disproportionately men.

01:18:06.540 And he goes through this exercise in his book of adding up the absolute numbers. What's the absolute

01:18:12.360 number of women that are receiving therapy for depression that have issues with alcohol, drugs,

01:18:18.040 violence, et cetera, et cetera, do the same exercise for men. It turns out it's the same number.

01:18:22.600 What's the difference? The difference is the form in which it exists. And this just sort of blew my

01:18:26.960 mind, right? Which is all of this time, like, you know, whether it's you, me, I, I think this is my

01:18:32.860 anger issue, or this is my addiction or whatever it is. And you realize what's underpinning that is the

01:18:39.740 same pain that in a woman might lead to depression that we will label in a certain way. And we're not

01:18:44.640 seeing it this way. And so, so kind of listening to your story is so interesting because I'm just

01:18:49.100 sort of watching the arc of numbing vehicles to numb pain. If it's not this drug, it's the pursuit

01:18:55.940 of this sport. And if it's not that it's this fight, if it's this thing. And it's interesting,

01:19:01.120 just, it sounds like the ayahuasca became, along with the psilocybin became one of the first sets of

01:19:07.420 tools, these plants that, and I don't want to put words in your mouth. So if I'm not right,

01:19:11.280 no, I'm nodding my head. Yes. Right now, as you say, but it sounds like that was the first time

01:19:15.380 when you finally saw through the bullshit of you're on a hedonic loop, a treadmill of one next fix after

01:19:24.520 another. And again, it's so common in men, especially that like, we're sort of drawn to

01:19:31.020 using our body as a shield, right? Like the bigger and stronger and tougher you are,

01:19:35.820 the more that seven-year-old is not going to hurt. Which again, when you say it that way,

01:19:41.140 it sounds so stupid, but that's because we're now sitting here talking like, like it's a rational

01:19:46.420 thought and not realizing that there's a wounded kid that had to come up with sort of a set of skills

01:19:52.240 to adapt to a situation. And those adaptations were actually very positive for the large part.

01:19:57.840 They saved you, right? They prevented you probably from jumping off a balcony when you were seven,

01:20:01.380 but they start to become maladaptive. And it's, to me, this is the stuff that's interesting is this

01:20:06.180 transition from adaptive to maladaptive and it starts to come crashing down.

01:20:12.660 Yeah. I mean, it peels back layers. They talk about the infinite onion every time you go. And that's

01:20:17.880 something, uh, that's something that really resonates with me. You listen to people like Dennis McKenna

01:20:23.280 and Gabra Mate people. I find fascinating is that they've done hundreds of ceremonies and it's

01:20:28.920 completely unique each time they go. And I say ceremony because of the respect and reverence

01:20:33.520 that's used when they utilize these plants. But it's the fact that if I give enough space between

01:20:39.180 ceremonies and I come back and have a reason to be there, that's important to me, I'm going to get

01:20:43.800 a lot that has to do with that. And maybe even more than what I came for.

01:20:48.280 And that peeling back at the layer really shows such a deep reflection of what's going on inside

01:20:54.700 right now. And it also has shown me the ways that I behave due to how I was programmed.

01:21:00.920 It just blows my mind. We just got back from Satara. We did another four ayahuasca ceremonies there

01:21:06.700 about three weeks ago. And each one just took me away, took me to a different place. Again,

01:21:12.700 they were completely unique from one another. And I continue to learn how to work with it.

01:21:18.280 You know, it's continuing to evolve. And I listening to guys like Nenis, like that,

01:21:22.280 that will continue on well past a hundred ceremonies.

01:21:26.420 Have you had some really negative ones? And by negative, I want to caveat that by saying

01:21:30.520 highly, highly unpleasant.

01:21:32.440 Yeah. So I'll, I'll happy to jump into this. One of the hardest nights of my life was in Columbia.

01:21:39.040 And, you know, ayahuasca has a visual component where you can have quote unquote visions like in a,

01:21:44.560 in a dreamlike state. Oftentimes they're very personal, what you see. There was a night where

01:21:50.400 I had none of that and all of the purgative effects of ayahuasca. So I shit water violently,

01:21:55.880 barely made it to the bathroom the entire night, didn't sleep one minute, puked violently the whole

01:22:00.400 night. It was incredibly hard, but it was in many ways cleaning me out. And that's, I think what I

01:22:05.380 needed at that point.

01:22:06.200 Now that's physiologically unbearable, but have you had, I mean, I've had one experience on ayahuasca

01:22:12.180 that was emotionally unbearable and I'm going to get right there. Yeah. Those are the ones that

01:22:17.840 interest me. Having had a night like that, generally speaking for the most part, and I've done now 26

01:22:24.240 ceremonies with ayahuasca, there would be some level of back and forth. So if I had a really challenging

01:22:30.580 time physically, I could purge and then I'd feel euphoria. If I had some challenge emotionally,

01:22:35.120 maybe I'm reliving some hard memory from my past, I would see within the same time span,

01:22:42.040 you know, within, I don't know, 30 minutes that that other side of that coin and see the beauty

01:22:46.860 in it and realize all the things that it gave me and understand it with a new perspective.

01:22:52.440 My second to last night in Costa Rica recently at Sultara was for sure the hardest night of my life.

01:22:59.140 I had my first dose early on and didn't feel a whole lot and it was very peaceful. And then

01:23:04.920 I asked for a second dose and it was my intention for healing. And I remember asking, then you can

01:23:11.680 argue one way or another, what, how much intention plays, plays a role in this. I think it plays a huge

01:23:16.280 role, but I remember opening the door to any and all emotional and mental healing. And if there's

01:23:22.980 anything left from my childhood, because now I'm 37, I've done a number of ceremonies with ayahuasca and

01:23:28.480 even higher number with psilocybin and other MDMA, many things. And I've worked through a great deal

01:23:33.780 of stuff with my childhood. So I didn't think there was a whole lot left. And I just asked like,

01:23:37.760 if there's anything remaining from my childhood, please show me. It was fucking everything. It was

01:23:43.120 the entire night. I made it back to the room. Ceremony had ended and it kicked off into a whole

01:23:49.160 second ceremony. And it was, um, almost unbearable at many points. I remember just begging for mercy,

01:23:57.260 like, please, I've seen enough. Let's, let's, we can run this back a different time. Like any

01:24:01.760 trying to rationalize or, or beg for a way out. So I wouldn't have to keep seeing this and to paint

01:24:07.080 just a small picture of this. Sometimes if I was to have a vision, it's like watching from the

01:24:15.180 third person or watching a movie and I can see from a different lens, this was like reliving it

01:24:19.700 for the first time. Through your lens? Through my lens. First person, like it was happening to me.

01:24:25.260 The exact same feelings I was feeling as a six or seven year old or 15 year old in that moment.

01:24:31.780 All the fear of my father, my mom screaming at me an inch from my face and spit flying into my mouth.

01:24:37.560 Things like just, it was, and it's so real, but it just kept going and going and going. And I realized

01:24:44.980 holy shit, like all that's still there. Finally, as the sun came up, I just kind of surrendered to it.

01:24:51.120 And that's one of these cornerstones that I've learned through working with the plants is

01:24:56.400 you're not in control and I'm not in control. Anytime I do these things, I can, I have some

01:25:01.600 level of direction, but really what I'm being shown is for me. It's not happening to me.

01:25:06.260 So the ability to surrender that and let go of trying to change it really helped. And then having

01:25:10.960 a degree of gratitude for my parents, knowing they were doing the best they could with what they

01:25:15.820 could at that time. And also seeing how hard it was for them growing up and then seeing my son,

01:25:20.940 that's really where it shifted. So we have a four-year-old son named Bear and seeing him and

01:25:25.660 realizing like, that's where it ends. Like, that's where it ends. We all want to do better for our

01:25:32.400 kids than, than what we were given. And then that applies to everything from finances to education,

01:25:37.280 to what kind of person they become. But knowing that he will never experience what I experienced

01:25:44.920 or what my dad experienced and my granddad experienced, that generational pain is going

01:25:49.580 to be gone with him. And seeing that I had so much gratitude for him and just knowing like,

01:25:55.820 oh, okay, this breaks here. Like that was really cool. And the second I thought that it all washed

01:26:01.240 away and I felt euphoria and I felt gratitude. And I just, it was for sure the hardest night of my

01:26:07.480 life and one of the most beautiful in the end by far. There's not much to add to that because it's

01:26:13.020 funny. I had made a note on my page to kind of come back to this point. All I had written down was

01:26:17.740 break cycle, son. Do you feel that part of your edge is gone as a result of this journey?

01:26:25.100 Yeah. There was a fire that was in you before that was partially constructive, partially destructive.

01:26:31.240 And you sort of were balancing those two things. There were moments when the destructive side was

01:26:35.760 winning. And then there were moments when the constructive side is winning, but it's hard to

01:26:40.420 look at most professional fighters and not realize how much pain, unfortunately, is at the root of why

01:26:46.260 they're doing what they're doing. It's very difficult, I think, to put yourself in the position of

01:26:51.180 getting in a ring and fighting. I know this because I did it. You've done it. You've done it

01:26:55.720 professionally. I never did it professionally. There's so much pain that predisposes a person to be

01:27:00.900 willing to do that. Now, I'm sure there are exceptions to this. I'm sure there were like

01:27:03.740 people with the most wonderful childhoods who have ended up becoming fighters. But I used to

01:27:08.480 study boxing at a level that would border on me getting an honorary PhD for it. And I can't actually

01:27:16.100 think of an example of a professional boxer that I'd studied who wasn't fueled by some awful thing that

01:27:21.940 had happened to them. You know, it can be something little, but oftentimes it was not right. Oftentimes it

01:27:26.520 was generational and misery. Do you sort of feel a bit remote now from that sport in the way? I mean,

01:27:33.360 I'm sure you still enjoy it, but do you also, I mean, is your relationship with it complicated as a

01:27:38.180 result of this new insight or these new insights? I mean, I for sure have let go for a long time

01:27:45.780 after retiring. I retired five years ago this month, actually. And I knew I wasn't going to fight

01:27:51.980 again, but I still love the sport. I wanted to watch every fight. Never missed a fight. Trained.

01:27:58.820 I didn't do striking because I knew that would lead me to fighting again, but I did a lot of

01:28:01.960 jujitsu, competed in a couple of times. And I think now I would call myself a casual fan. You know,

01:28:07.480 I still have all the guys that I used to train with at AKA, I'll watch them when they fight.

01:28:11.060 It's on ESPN a lot now. So I'll watch that too if it's on TV, but I don't like schedule stuff like,

01:28:16.820 oh man, the so-and-so is fighting. I got to stop everything. You know, like if I catch it,

01:28:20.600 it's not a big deal to me. It didn't necessarily change the way I look at fighting. I have a lot

01:28:26.840 of gratitude for what fighting gave me and what fighting taught me. And I feel very fortunate

01:28:30.520 that I retired at 32 years old. And retired without the catastrophic injuries that many

01:28:36.100 people leave with. Yeah. Yeah. And that's huge. You know, I want to be able to read to my son and

01:28:40.960 all of our children and chase them around and play and be, be the dad I want to be, you know,

01:28:47.320 but with, uh, with that chip on my shoulder. Yeah, that's, that's for sure washed away. I mean,

01:28:52.420 I remember when I first started fighting, I just wanted to, there's a, there's a line in fight club

01:28:56.660 and forgive me if you've heard me talk about this before, but there's a line of fight club where

01:29:00.420 Edward Norton's character beats the shit out of Jared Leto, the blonde guy. And Brad Pitt looks at

01:29:06.580 Edward Norton. He says, what the fuck is wrong with you? And he just says, I just wanted to destroy

01:29:10.480 something beautiful. And that's it. Like that resonated with me. I wanted to beat the shit out of people.

01:29:14.600 And over time that shifted to, I just want to be the best version of myself.

01:29:19.380 And then now I see that still being the case, but it's from a much different lens. Like what being

01:29:25.660 the best version of myself is applies to so many more things outside of athleticism. And I think

01:29:30.520 that's a likely transition for people who have started to age and whatever, you know, there's,

01:29:34.940 I'm sure there's a lot of older people like, Oh, you have an age, you're 37, but I feel different

01:29:39.020 than when I was 27. Sure. 37 year old athletes, an old athlete. So you're not

01:29:44.500 even halfway done life. And yet the last four or five years have probably been some of the most

01:29:50.860 important, not that it's necessarily productive or constructive. Do you ever ask yourself the

01:29:56.760 question? Like, what do you think you'd be doing right now? If you hadn't had this fortuitous

01:29:59.800 set of events, meeting the right boxing coach, being introduced to the plant medicine and being

01:30:05.820 able to sort of extract from it, what it gives you. Cause I don't think the plants aren't neat.

01:30:09.920 They don't give you little turnkey, just take this. It's all okay. It's really messy.

01:30:17.060 It's really messy work. And it's as much about the work you do before and after as it is what you do

01:30:22.340 under the direct influence of the plant. But, but if you hadn't been as lucky as you've been to

01:30:27.800 experience that, I mean, what's a 37 year old former UFC fighter doing who hasn't worked through

01:30:33.160 the issues you had? Cause there's a lot of those guys out there. I mean, this isn't about the UFC.

01:30:37.580 This is like maybe someone who's never thrown a punch in their life, but they're still suffering

01:30:42.080 from the same pain. Yeah. A lot of, I mean, I think the cliche thing to say is dead or in jail.

01:30:47.760 I don't think that applies to me. I think I really turned the corner, but I wouldn't say it's far

01:30:53.220 fetched to think that I'd still be fighting in some low level show, getting the shit kicked out of me,

01:30:57.320 losing brain cells. I for sure wouldn't be with Natasha, my wife. I mean, in many ways we were

01:31:03.380 together for about a year before we did ayahuasca for the first time. And like that changed the course

01:31:07.940 of our relationship. It unpacked so much of the arguing that we had allowed me to see things in

01:31:14.780 myself that she could, but I could not. And vice versa. As we grew as individuals, we grew together

01:31:20.780 in our relationship and there's no way that would have worked out had I just continued to fight and

01:31:28.020 treat myself the way that it was, you know? And so I think that's, that's a pretty, if I look at

01:31:34.360 probabilities, that's probably the highest probability is that I'd still be fighting

01:31:38.080 somewhere, making peanuts and taking my legs. And getting hurt. Yeah. Getting hurt regularly.

01:31:44.600 How does all this sort of shape the way you think about raising your son? Because you alluded to the

01:31:49.980 most important point a moment ago, which is if nothing else, the cycle of pain and the, and, and shame

01:31:56.140 and trauma and all that stuff, at least it stops with, with you now to bear. But what else do you

01:32:01.100 think about as far as like, cause now it's beyond not just having him be hurt, but showing him

01:32:07.460 something that maybe. Yeah. What can I give him, you know, in the world? And I think a lot of things

01:32:11.220 fascinate me. People talk shit about the paleo diet and that's fine. And what did paleo man actually

01:32:16.440 eat and all that. And yeah, I get it. I get it from both sides, but to think through the lens of how

01:32:21.640 our ancestors lived, that fascinates me. This is a heat giant test and it's a huge test of what

01:32:26.920 we're doing now with everything that's in the modern world. It's being done for the very first

01:32:30.560 time. What are the ways that we can kind of reconnect to our roots and still live in the

01:32:35.520 modern world? And I think when I think about things like that, what are the most important

01:32:40.320 pieces that I've learned? And what are the most important pieces that I'm learning about now?

01:32:44.880 I want him to have some degree of confidence. And I think martial arts is really good for that.

01:32:49.240 I don't necessarily want him to fight, but that's his decision. And it'll always be his decision.

01:32:54.840 Even if he says, fuck martial arts, I want to play piano. And that's totally cool. I have to let go of

01:32:59.460 that. But still giving him the ability to try all these things and see what he enjoys. He loves,

01:33:05.480 I mean, he's athletic. Me and my wife are both athletes. So that's not confusing to me, but you know,

01:33:12.100 he's doing jujitsu now. It's pretty early, but it's kind of the equivalent of tumbling or gymnastics.

01:33:18.020 And he absolutely loves it. And our wrestle time is probably the most fun. You know,

01:33:23.180 we have a hundred square feet of MMA mats in our living room. So we can do yoga, we can roll,

01:33:27.420 we can do whatever and, and rough house and, and we can play soccer or frisbee or, and those are all

01:33:33.900 things that he loves, but he doesn't love anything as much as wrestling me. So like, and getting him

01:33:37.900 into jujitsu now, it's, um, it's pretty cool to see that. I don't know how long that's going to last.

01:33:42.040 That really doesn't matter. Getting back to this ancestral stuff. I think it's critical

01:33:46.880 that we at least try to find some rite of passage, especially for our young men to bring them into

01:33:54.240 adulthood. And I think that Ben Greenfield's buddy, Tim Corcoran, he's doing a lot of good stuff. He

01:34:00.240 has these wilderness survival camps for father and son. When the kids are old enough, he takes them out

01:34:05.260 there and they're, they, they're solo, you know, or they're in a small group and it's just him kind

01:34:09.300 of watching over and they, they learn how to build fires. They learn how to feel safe in the

01:34:13.800 environment. They learn how to forage wild mushrooms and different things that they can survive on.

01:34:18.220 And I think that's an incredible piece taking it a step further. And again, if we're having that

01:34:24.180 conversation with the DEA sitting on the couch, I don't know that I'd say this, but I think it's,

01:34:29.660 it's a very strong likelihood that I'll be taking him to the Amazon or, or maybe not me,

01:34:33.380 maybe uncle Aubrey will, or somebody else. Cause oftentimes that was the case in rite of passage.

01:34:38.720 Your, the kids would have to leave their parents and go off with the elders, the aunties, the uncles

01:34:42.880 and go through their work. And I think, um, having a close uncle like that, who also has experience

01:34:48.680 with these things, taking him to the Amazon for a rite of passage with something like ayahuasca would

01:34:53.500 be really transformative and powerful for him. And to most people hearing about this for the first time,

01:34:58.640 they're going to be like, that's fucking nonsense. Like that you're right. You lost me here.

01:35:03.380 But I know quite a few people who are some of the most beautiful humans I've ever met that did

01:35:11.480 that Prongi being one of them. He's an incredible musician. One of the most kindhearted people I've

01:35:17.140 ever met. And he, his first ceremony was when he was 11. So it's not to say that happens for everyone,

01:35:25.120 but again, if you understand set and setting and who are really good practitioners, and that's

01:35:30.040 something I say a lot of times is there's black belts and there's white belts and martial arts,

01:35:35.160 there's black belts teaching ayahuasca and white belts teaching, and there's everything in between.

01:35:39.200 And some people spend a week in the Amazon and come back and say, I'm going to give this to all

01:35:42.360 my friends and everyone I know. And it can have really bad consequences from that. So, you know,

01:35:48.480 having a place that, that has been vetted at least by somebody you respect and know, I think is

01:35:52.440 critical when it comes to these things. Cause as Aubrey says, you're performing psychic surgery

01:35:57.180 and that done incorrectly can leave some really lasting damage, but correctly, it can be everything

01:36:03.900 that I see in it. Everything that Dennis sees in it. Yeah. And anyone listening to this, who has not

01:36:09.820 yet read Michael Pollan's, how to change your mind to have such a great storyteller and a great writer

01:36:14.400 take on such an important topic. I think it's hard to come away from that without realizing that

01:36:20.180 there's, there's a lot here that we need to understand better, but the, the promise is enormous.

01:36:24.420 Yeah. Yeah. And we do need to understand it better. There's no doubt under those circumstances. I think

01:36:31.060 I can give to him a lot of things. You remember being in high school thinking, maybe you didn't

01:36:37.060 because you had boxing, but I remember being in high school thinking like nothing is more important

01:36:41.420 than this, than how I'm perceived by my peers, status, things like that, popularity, who my friends

01:36:47.700 are, what kind of girl I'm going to date. And like when the world ends upon graduation day,

01:36:53.560 what am I going to do? And those kinds of things. And there's a lot of weight and heaviness

01:36:56.820 to that environment, especially now when you see kids that are glued to their iPad and

01:37:01.680 you got eight year olds with cell phones and things like that. It's, it's really hard to get them to

01:37:06.920 unplug and to see the big picture. And I think, um, I think a medicine like that could be really

01:37:11.760 important to reconnect them to what matters and you get them to see with a wider lens to things that

01:37:17.860 matter to them at that point in time. I think it could be a great tool for young people.

01:37:22.700 It's amazing. How has your relationship come full circle with your parents? I mean, is that,

01:37:28.020 is it just this incredible place of forgiveness? Is it still difficult?

01:37:31.660 It's funny you say that because right after this ceremony or series of ceremonies in,

01:37:35.780 at Sultara in Costa Rica, my wife and I flew back to the Bay area where our son's being watched by my

01:37:40.300 family. And then we all flew out to Puerto Vallarta for a family vacation. And there's a famous quote

01:37:45.380 from Terrence. I think it's Terrence McKenna. No, it's Ram Dass, where if you think you're

01:37:49.580 enlightened, spend a week with your family. So I was like, fuck man, I went from one ceremony to the

01:37:54.540 next. And it came with its own set of challenges for sure. But as far as my relationship goes, I have

01:38:02.160 a great deal of compassion for them. I've also learned from the medicines that everyone walks their

01:38:08.220 own path. It's not up for me to decide how or when they should learn their lessons. And just as it was

01:38:15.100 the case with me and my wife, I can't always see what's going on where I'm, where I'm fucking up.

01:38:21.220 Everyone has a blind spot. So somebody that's close to you might be able to see what's going

01:38:25.680 on in you better than you can. And it certainly was the case in my relationship. And I can see all

01:38:31.420 the faults that my parents have that they don't see, but it's not up to me to decide that they will

01:38:37.260 learn their own lessons at their own pace. And they may go to the grave without having learned some

01:38:41.540 lessons. That's okay. I'm for sure going to do the same thing. But that compassion to me, that's one

01:38:45.940 of the most powerful parts of the story is to feel and experience empathy for another person who may

01:38:51.300 have indirectly or directly hurt you. And to realize, wow, they didn't mean to hurt me. Or even if they

01:38:57.080 did mean to hurt me, which is not the case, I think in your situation, but this is the set of

01:39:01.420 circumstances for them. And that sounds crazy, right? That sounds like we should accept, you know,

01:39:06.020 horrible things that people have done to us. But in reality, what's your choice? Yeah. And something

01:39:12.140 that I've gathered to is forgiveness has very little to do with the person I'm forgiving. It has

01:39:16.780 everything to do with taking that fucking weighted vest off of me. Because I'm held down by that. Whatever

01:39:22.460 anger or pain or resentment that I feel towards another person, the longer I hold on to that, they

01:39:27.880 might not even fucking know, it might not be on their radar, but I'm keeping that in me. And it's affecting

01:39:33.020 the way that I go through the world. So if I can release that, what greater gift can I give to

01:39:38.160 myself, let alone the other person I'm forgiving? Well, I want to thank you for being, you know,

01:39:43.480 so open about such difficult topics. There were a whole bunch of other things I thought we were

01:39:46.980 going to talk about that were super nerdy and science and stuff, but I get to talk about that

01:39:50.380 stuff all the time. This was, I thought this was far more interesting, far more valuable. And I

01:39:54.100 honestly, I think more people will, will, will find this resonant. So I really appreciate it, man.

01:39:58.340 Awesome, brother. Thanks for having me. Happy Father's Day. Yeah. Happy Father's Day, brother.

01:40:03.840 You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast. There

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The Peter Attia Drive - October 21, 2019

#76 - Kyle Kingsbury： Finding meaning, depression, and psychedelics

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