I quit and was older and more honest with who I really am. But I had to go through all these things. I worked on my sobriety. I did steps and had a sponsor.
And I stripped myself down and was very honest with what I really am. Because also, if I tell myself, would I be a better parent if I didn't smoke weed? Well, then I won't be able to smoke any weed. So I'm not going to tell myself that.
Welcome to the show, everybody. Today is a different kind of show. I have talked about my sobriety several times, not too much detail. I know people that follow the show know that obviously I was a big weed guy, smoking weed, every day in my entire life, pretty much.
I see that since I was probably 12. I've been given that a good go. Alcoholic, cocaine, heroin, even meth. That was a fun run.
XSE at one point. Given it all a pretty good run, acid, shrooms, all that stuff. I didn't really fall. I wouldn't say I was addicted to acid or mushrooms.
I think I just did them whenever there was no other drug. I definitely addicted to heroin, definitely addicted to cocaine, definitely addicted to meth. I mean, XSE, I mean, there's not any reason I didn't do it because nobody had it, but it was a head of the things to do. But when I got sober from alcohol, because I had a heart condition where I had my heart would go into AFib, and sometimes there's like doctors will say this where Christmas and New Year's a lot of people go to hospital for this particular thing.
You don't even have to have a heart condition. If you drink a lot and you don't drink all the time, your heart can beat or regularly, it's a thing. I actually have a disease of sorts where my heart will go into AFib quite easily if I am to drink excessively. And after having an ablation, that's a procedure where they fuse a certain thing in your heart.
It went into AFib again and my doctor said, have you been drinking? And I said, yeah. And he's like, you're not supposed to do that anymore. And I was like, oh, and I have battled with alcoholism my whole life and the threat of, because when you go into AFib, one part of your heart beats really fast and people that don't know when you go to the ER, they say that you're having a heart attack.
So I've been on the bed with the heart monitors and they are saying, Jason, Mr. Ellis, you're having a heart attack right now. And we're going to knock you out and then we're going to take you to another room where we're going to do the fucking clear and fucking boom. And that's really scary.
Like I was really scared. I remember looking at the roof and going, I don't even believe in God. But if there's anybody out there in the atmosphere that could hook me up with not letting me go to the spirit world right now, that would be much appreciated. It was one of my first experiences with life is too short.
If I am going through something, if I am this person, I'm going to admit it. If I have any quarrels with old friends, I'm going to immediately call them and apologize and rectify and patch that up because it was all small and it didn't mean anything. It was a real eye opener being on that table. I really thought I was going to die.
And when you really think you're going to die, I've had compound fractures, I've had a lot of pain in my life. That was one of the worst things that's ever happened to me, if not the worst thing that's ever happened to me. So by the third time that happened where they were going to electrocute me and knock me out of the doctor was like, have you been drinking? And I realized that if I drink again, maybe I don't die.
But there's a good chance I go to the end, they electrocute my chest with those paddles. And I don't want to do that ever again. So I stopped drinking. Then I was somebody brought up, Jason, have you tried Cratum?
And Michael and I have had Cratum on the show. We talked about it. We had a producer that talked about the scary parts of how dangerous Cratum was and telling myself, make fun of him for years, at least a year. I don't even remember exactly how we started talking about it.
I think more than anything. Somebody a weightlifter guy came in and said he was doing it. And I know that was after because I think we speak to a wide variety of people from a wide variety of walks of life and life experiences on the show and people are calling us. It was a word we never heard before.
And then slowly but surely collars were calling the show and saying you guys heard this Cratum stuff. And I think just the word is so jarring. It just sticks out something kind of funny about it. And so we started joking about getting ourselves barrels of Cratum, which led to somebody saying, you know, a credible documentarian has actually made a guy who made this well received, well regarded documentary about it.
I think weightlifting has now, his next focus is Cratum. You guys talk to the Cratum guys. You guys are always joking about Cratum. Addicted to heroin before that, correct?
That I don't recall. Is that the case? That's what I thought I was. The documentary I recall is called A Leaf of Faith.
Yeah. So he came by and he brought samples. Yeah. Because I don't think he knows I don't know if he owned the company or not, but he was pro Cratum and he had a relationship.
And I remember you. We did it. I don't know how much of it. I didn't really feel I think because I was high all the time.
Doing a handful of the little pills was I didn't really feel it. I was like, yeah, maybe it's good. Maybe it's not it wasn't anything that I really enjoyed or hated. I don't remember thinking anything of it.
And then I remember Will saying how dangerous it was. And you and I making fun of Will because I'd already done a handful of these pills and I didn't feel anything. And I was like, dude, it's an herbal bullshit. It's nothing.
I'm happy if it helps you skim through your junkie life, but it doesn't do shit to me. It gets gas station stuff. That's what I thought. So then when I did this shot, these shots, I believe I from the start I was offered a sponsorship deal.
So it was like money. And then if I did a promo code, I would receive some money on every individual bottle that was sold with using my promo code, which didn't add up too much. But it wasn't about that. It was because it was just that it was at the wrong time, right time, depending on how it was the wrong time.
I didn't drink anymore. So I was looking for something to do to take the edge off because I was just I wasn't going to meetings. I was just I'm not going to drink anymore. I don't drink anymore.
That's it. No AA. No nothing. I remember my wife at the time would ask me like, is it okay if I have a glass of wine?
I'd be like, yeah, of course, because I didn't want to be a party pooper. But was I pissed and jealous and envious? Absolutely. Every time she had a glass of wine, I was like, you should go out with somebody else.
Because I'm I'm lame forever now, you know, like I'm no longer fun. And then when I did the shot, it kind of loosened me up a little bit. It made drunk people and people that drink around me more tolerable. And then that's right.
When I got into comedy, so late nights, I would do another shot before I go on stage. And it was almost like it kind of loosened me up. I started to figure out that I had these little tobacco pouches and I'm not a cigarette smoker. So I would do two of these feel threes and that would kick in pretty quick.
And then I do the little zen things and that would kind of give me a little bit of a buzz and there would be this feeling of like, not all the time, but sometimes I go, oh, I'm it's working. Like I'm it's like a painkiller. Like I'm I'm high. I'm high.
And I'm not as far as I know, doing anything bad. Dr. I told him about it. And he was like, that's what is that?
And I was like, it's an herbal thing. And he was like, yeah, good for you. He did not know what it was. And he just said, yeah, that's not going to trigger your heart.
So I got into them. I did them. My wife and I did them all the time. And then it got to the point where they weren't sending us boxes of it in time.
So we were going to the liquor store and buying them not by the bottle, by the box. Always by the case. Yeah. Yeah.
You say money, right? Yeah. We would buy the case. And this is from our local liquor store where he didn't give me a discount.
But I went so many times, it was like clockwork. At one point I went and I started to figure out that there were some off ones where they would explode when you'd open it and they smelt and tasted 10 times as disgusting as they already do. Very tasty in the beginning. And I should have called it, but I didn't where I'd be like, oh, no, we got a bad batch.
And you got to slam them fast, not throw them away. Slam them fast. I went to Columbia to get stem cells and we brought two cases to survive Columbia. I don't even know if that's legal that nobody said anything.
It's not like they have any drugs there. Those ones. But they were fizzing everywhere and I would drink them and I would be immediately nauseous because they were off ones. Did you notice that the carbonated ones did not work the same either?
Yeah. Wow. That's what they were. They had kind of turned to booze in a way.
Right. It's a natural fermentation. It's probably a good time to introduce our guest. Hello Noah, Joseph, Noah, Joseph Urbina.
That is exactly it. Well done, Michael. What prompts a man to decide? I'm going to use that middle name.
It's one of those things that as a kid like having a name Noah, Joseph was kind of embarrassing and then as you grow up you're like, that's my name. Did your parents always call you by both names? Of course I'm never mad. It's the classic.
No, just by just Noah. Just by Joseph, his name is my middle name. My baby mama says to the my daughter she gets their first and middle name when she was in trouble. I totally remember that.
That's pretty funny. We are we know each other accidentally through. What is she to you? She's my first cousin.
She's my first cousin. We just find out until 10, 12 years ago. That's crazy. Late in life, new cousin edition.
She's my friend. Hopefully had been dating at that point. We did not know each other or about each other. See that the court.
They make it take some DNA tests. Low and be old. But we did find out that there's her and two others. These are first cousins that we never knew about until I was 28, 29 or so and Catherine's the only one that I've met.
Oh, wow. We're finding out that my dad's side of the family is from a very, very small town in Ireland and we're finding out that one of the most common other last names is my mom's maiden name. She was out there. Don't do any more reason.
Yeah. It might be a tightly coiled family trip. Anyway, go on. Well, anyway, Catherine showed me a video of him talking about Cratum and I go, yeah, because when I first got off these feel frees, I tried and it was really hard and it's just like addiction.
Like I got off and it was a couple of days of hell and I slowly got back on it again secretly to the people that I already confessed that I was addicted to and they helped me get off it and then I secretly started doing them again like a junkie and this is like, I already know that this is bad for me. I think that my narcissistic, my face was puffy and I hated my face. You have some dead eyes. Dead eyes is one of the most common side effects of it.
Bags. Or what do you mean? Not even, like lifeless. Like they almost get kind of sunken squinty and red but then I look like a picture of myself and I was deep in it and I just look off.
You have a picture of yourself and your face. Yes. Oh, I have lots of them. I documented my withdrawal process and for me it was 12 days of acute withdrawal.
It was probably six months until I felt human again but 12 days of your in a bed, you're not moving, there's no walking, there's no eating, there's no sleeping. Maybe you fall asleep for 10 minutes at a time but it was 12 days of severe acute withdrawal is comparable to any drug, any amount of alcohol, just absolutely fucking devastated and leveled for two weeks straight. That was my, and I documented it, took pictures, took video, talked about what I was going through, if only to look back and remind myself how severe this got so as to never end up in that same position again. It wasn't forethought like, oh, I'm going to use this in the future to show people how bad it could get.
It was just that I had never felt so awful in my entire life and much like Jason, drugs were every bit of my life from 18 to 30 and beyond. Like, I have an innocent appearance about me that leads people to believe that I've been in a room eating saltines and listening to church hymns my whole life but no, just all drugs all the time. As soon as I turned 18, I was all I did and never have I experienced anything like what Kratum specifically feel free did to me, never ever. Yeah, I've never had a detox where where I thought I might need to get a hospital.
Yeah. I've been a rehab and I guess I give you stuff at rehab to help you detox. Yeah. So it's like going to give you some volume of sedatives.
So maybe that did make it easier because when I did it, I taught to a friend who was a brain scientist of sorts and he's like, he's like, it's not going to be easy but you can white knuckle it. And I'm like, yeah, he's like, yeah, you can make it. He's like, you can do it. Not going to be easy.
I'm telling you it's not going to be easy but I know you can do it. And I was like, all right, I believe you. You know, it was the four days of like, I couldn't talk dude, like I couldn't communicate with the outside world. I couldn't text people.
Like I don't, I don't have a thought. I just have pain, just pain and shaking, freezing cold and sweating. I was in, I got, I rented an Airbnb because I was in the middle of a, this is meant the hell that I went through. I was in the middle of a divorce.
We were getting a divorce but we still live in the same house. And I was like, I'm getting off this shit. Also when we got divorced, there was a time there where she was like, that's it. I want a divorce and I went, okay.
And I'm absolutely positive that there was no fighting me because of the cradle. I was like, it sounds like a good idea to me. Because if I say yes to this, you'll leave me alone because I just want it to be, I don't have no fight in anything. I have no desire to really do anything.
Oh, hey, Jason L's, Jason L's show talking about miracle made, miracle made sheets. They're connected with NASA. Like they're not like in space or anything, but same people that got something to do with it. All I know is I sleep on them and I am a guy that washes his own sheets.
I make my own bed. I'm a big boy. There's a gentleman and when I make my big boy bed, I know the difference between what I got miracle made on or my regular stock ones. I'm a guy that never could tell the difference.
I'm like, I don't care how many counts or whatever it is or silky or. I like pink ones. I'll tell you that. But when it comes to sleeping comfortably, I could get them out of the washer and dry.
I put them on and now I know because they're a little bit cooler of a color, but they are more comfortable and they are also temperature regulated. So I'm a hot, I'm either hot or I'm freezing with miracle made. It seems to sort of subside and I'm a lot more comfortable. These are just like, I bought them, you know?
Like I did a read a long time ago and then I was like, wait, these are really good. So then I bought them and now I'm sponsored. I'm doing a read again, which means I think I can use my discount code, but I'm not that sharp. I got three sets and I just rotate them and I want to use other ones because they're that good.
I love them. So if you want to be a part of this and get a discount, so you're because you probably be smarter than me, you could use this discount and then you could get them for cheaper. I don't think I seriously feel stupid right now. I think I just bought them.
I'm starting to feel really bad. Go to TriMiracle.com slash Alice. That's TriMiracle.com slash Alice. TriMiracle made sheets today.
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Thank you Miracle made for sponsoring this episode. Hey everybody, this show is sponsored by BetterHelp, online therapy. I am a guy that grew up in the old school world where you're not supposed to get therapy because that makes you weak and a lot of those people that gave me that advice really, really need therapy. Hopefully they got it.
I reached out and got therapy several times in my life and I can honestly say if I had not have got that therapy, I would not be here today. I'm very grateful because it is the time, it's the season to be grateful. I'm grateful for Tony Hawk and grateful for my family, my beautiful girlfriend and my lovely children. I'm grateful for myself because I'm so awesome.
If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, suited to your schedule. Easy.
Just fill out a brief questionnaire and get matched with a licensed therapist and if you want to switch therapists at any time for no additional charge, let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Alice today to get 10% off your first month. That is BetterHelp.com slash Alice. I mean, I'm still like, I have to make apologies to that person for being so cold because I can't blame that drug.
I have to be like, you should have done better but I didn't care. So yeah. Personal responsibility is as important as any part of this process but it doesn't mean that you weren't significantly affected by that shit because I had the same thing. Everything in my like fellow part of my business, my relationship, friend group, family, all of that.
Just you push them all the way, feel miserable and it's just you and your little blue bottle. Yeah, the only thing I want to talk about is like dark stuff because it's just everything sad. Yeah, that's where your head's at. Yeah.
Yeah, it's like really like a like heroin like I was really like I'd own date or something and there was times where I used to throw up from doing too much and not until way after I quit it where somebody knew of that and told me and then hearing them tell me like I just go to the bathroom real quick and come back and they go, did you just throw up and they'd be like, yeah, so I'm ready to go anyway. And they go, wait, what do you mean like you used to act like it was no big deal? And I'm like, well, when it happens like 15 times a week, it isn't a big deal. That's so funny.
Like I did it in the car. I stopped it a lot over the door. I was like, man, moving on. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And then I got on video as we were walking after the right and you know how we went surfing and I didn't surf. Yeah.
You know why I didn't go surfing? I didn't think you wanted to embarrass me in Kevin. No, because I didn't want to do anything. Yeah.
If I get my heart rate up, I'm definitely going to vomit. That's the other thing you do too much. Yeah. If you run or you paddle or anything like that, you just stop vomiting.
Like I started vomiting because I took too much in the car. Yeah. Not I hadn't worked out at all. No, I remember that.
You were doing two and a rose back to backs of a field free. Yeah. I never got to that point for me was every three hours eight to 10 a day. And that went on for about a year.
I was at 10 a day. Sometimes more. Yeah. Oh, wait.
No, why don't you just tell us your story? Oh, my God. How much do you weigh? Oh, I got down to 130.
So I lost 50 pounds. 10 a day. Dude. All right.
Let me just run with this. All right. So I want to give a little bit of backstory leading up to what turned into this freedom addiction because for years I took it without any issues whatsoever. Not only that advocated for its legality when it came under scrutiny from the FDA because of a leaf of faith, the Chris Bell documentary that he was purporting it to be some sort of a miracle sort of a thing.
And at the time I was consuming just a tablespoon here and there. I never exceeded that dose. And it was just like a nice little mood booster. If you just take a spoonful of the ground up leaf powder, I never had any issues with it.
I would share it with friends. I did come under, like I said, FDA scrutiny. I advocated for it to be legal, but to look back on it. I had heard my son died from this, just general internet things to 2016, 2017.
Internet was different than it even is now. Yeah. I think his story at the time as he put it in the documentary, correct me if I'm wrong, is that what there were two different opiate plants in like southern Asia and heroin is one and Cratum is the other. And at a certain point, the government had said the problem with Cratum is that it wasn't sufficiently habit forming and the money was in actually selling the world, exporting the world heroin.
So they destroyed Cratum and the world lost this essentially healthy alternative to heroin. Yeah. And it's a lesser of two evils maybe compared to heroin. But so from 2016 to 2020, yeah, I would buy a kilogram off the internet and it would last me for six months, eight months, easy peasy.
Come 2020. We all know what happened in 2020, everything just got very weird. And between COVID in the sense that there was now this weird just energy in the culture, we were separate from people, we weren't allowed to do shit. And there was just a lot of frustration and resentment in the culture from me being a lifelong addict.
But imagine that I was through all that. I went down, I was living in Sonoma, California up north and I went down to my produce stand where I would just get fruits and vegetables and they had this little bottle called Feel for You 2020 is when it came out. And I'm like, Oh, look, there's a little thing that I could get and I have to mix it myself. It's just ready to go.
And much like the first time I did a lot of drugs for me, it was the very first time I drank it. I'm just like, I do that. I do that. I do that.
So alcohol was never my thing. The first time I smoked weed, I realized that I could just feel this way forever. And so it was that all the time. It was, I mean, opiates, Adderall, amphetamines.
Yeah, certainly Matt's like anything I could get my hands on at any given time given that between 18 and 30, I wasn't making much money. So whatever I could get my hands on, I would just to not feel so like to look back on it. It was just like, if I could not feel what it's like to raw dog life, I didn't put that much forethought into it at the time. It was just like, if I could just not feel this, all that just how it feels to be a person all the time, then that's what I'm going to do.
And I get that all the time. Yeah. So a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, for sure. And that's what's hard about creative and generally is that for it to be categorized by the CEO of it as, yeah, a sugar and caffeine can also be addictive.
And so, yeah, it has the potential for addiction, but so do sugar and caffeine. It's a little disingenuous to me because at no point are people having to go through extreme acute withdrawals from caffeine and sugar and have to go to rehab and all of that. No, no, no. Real quick.
Just because I think it is valuable, my personal experience is, Chris came by and he brought us a bunch of samples and Jason did it on the show. I did not. I actually was, because there was a couple of drugs that were making the rounds at the time, they're like, oh, they're brain drugs. They'll be really focused.
I don't like the way that this feels. But I'll try this one because this guy made a whole documentary about it. He's a credible guy. He, I know he, because especially coming from the weightlifting side of things, he was coming from like a healthier living point of view.
And I remember I actually cleared a morning. I was going to work on some creative projects and I took it for the first time and 20 minutes later, I was like, oh, Vicoden, yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. But not, this is not the path to me becoming a highly productive functional member of society. Wow, legal, legal Vicoden.
So for anybody, anybody, I mean, everybody's different. I react differently to marijuana than you do. But I think the average person, whether they're selling it or they're just talking to a friend to say, well, caffeine's illegal too is, I don't know what you're taking. Because my experience when I took it is this is a drug, a low level drug, but this isn't like tripping balls, but this is a drug.
And I don't see how anybody with a straight face could claim that they believe otherwise. Yeah, I mean, it's categorized as a wellness tonic, safe alternative to alcohol, a social lubricant and all of those things that lead people to believe that it is safe. But also, I mean, multiple groups now with people that are trying to come off it and all that and half of the people in there are addicts. And it was just like this next thing to find.
The other half of people never drank, never did drugs, never wanted any of that. But do like to go out with their friends. And they ended up as addicted to any junkie, anybody, anywhere, any time, no history of drug abuse, anything like that. They just wanted to go out and have a nice time with their friends.
And especially in its early stages, it does work as a social lubricant. And it does work to tolerate your drunken friends a little bit more. And you get out there and you become a chatterbox. And for me, initially, I could work 18 hour days as long as I kept a steady stream of that shit in me, but just like any drug first you use it to get high, then you fall and then you use it to get well.
And then you use it to just not feel awful all of the time. And this is exactly that. So from 2020 to 2021, I was steadily taking it. And within about six months, I started losing weight, not being social anymore, got super pale, just gnarly, looked awful.
In another six months and taking at eight to 10 a day, sometimes more had to have one on my nightstand because I would wake up in the middle of the night in complete withdrawals, had to drink one in the middle of the night just to go back to sleep, had to drink one the moment that I got up in the morning to not feel like you're going to die if I didn't have one in the morning. I would go down to the produce stand and I would get there 15 minutes early in hopes that they would open early because I was just tweaking out in withdrawals. And what sucks about all of this is that I'm no fool when it comes to drugs. Like I know about them, I've done them, I do my research, I know about things.
And something about that gradual process, it wasn't obvious to me what was happening at the time. And I would show up at 545 to get it. And I was in a little town and it was only available there or about a half hour away and guess who would be there at that time in the morning? A couple other junkies.
Like we're meeting in a back alley to get a fucking bunk heroin deal. And like if nobody was there, I would buy all that they had. If someone else was there, like we would get together. Like do you want to just split that case?
Wow. Then we have one and we would talk about it because and maybe that other person didn't realize how severely addicted they were to that thing. But it was to look back a little bit funny to see some other skinny tweaked out kind of dude, which I mean at the time, like I was a pillar of my community at the time. So the fucking shame involved in that kind of behavior was atrocious.
Yeah, my ex-wife, her and I at the time, like we were being a room buy. We never told each other we were secretly addicted to anything. We were just, hey, we're almost out of feel free. And then we would get more.
And it was never, I never looked at her like, wow, are you sure you want to do another one? And she never did the same to me. It was like a, I think of anything. She'd be like, yeah, Jason has a higher tolerance.
I usually do half a one and he smashes two. And I'm like, yeah, I've always had a higher tolerance, like no big deal. And then when everyone ever pointed out to us that it was like anything bad. It's really the, I'm not going to do it anymore.
Something's up. I don't feel right. And then when I really like the second day of not doing it was when I was like, okay, you've got to be joking me. This is like really bad.
I am freaking the fuck out. But you know, the third day I had my manager was watching me and I was in a head to toe like sweatpants with a blanket with the house on it with the heater on freezing cold and sweating. And I was like, I feel like I'm seizing up. And I was rocking back and forth.
And I was like, I've got turned the jacuzzi on. If I go, I, my arms are coming in and I'm locking up. And if I go into the jacuzzi, it'll like defrost me. I had like some theory, you know, and I was like, I've just got to get to the jacuzzi and I could bear, I couldn't get up.
And I was like, get up. You know, I mean, like do it. And I started to get up and start to walk and my legs don't want to move. I go outside.
I get to the jacuzzi and I can't move anymore and I can't put my hands out. So when I went to crouch down, I just fell over and I couldn't even put my hands out. I just landed on my side and I was like six feet away from the jacuzzi and it was like an ingrown one and I was next on the, on the red bricks and I was just rocking back and forth. And I managed to be like, are you okay?
And I was like, yeah, okay. So you don't look okay. I'm like, I'm okay. I'm okay.
I'm okay. I'm I'm in a trance because it's been three days. I don't want to eat. I just, I just want, I think if I just do one, it'll help me, but I know that I do one then this feeling is going to be one more day.
And I just keep thinking like one more day and I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be okay. And it got to the point where I started to feel like I was going to have like a seizure and I couldn't then I couldn't stop shaking. I was like really stop shaking and I couldn't stop it. So I hit my own head.
I'll never forget. I hit my own head on the concrete to stun myself intentionally. Yeah, because I thought that if I stunned myself, it would kind of stop the seizure from happening and I was right. I hit my head and I kind of like fives myself out and that's when my man was like Jason, like I'm, you know, like what are you doing?
And I was like, I don't know if I even said anything. I was just like, I'm helping myself. And it rocked me enough to be like a little bit dazed and I crawled into the jacuzzi with my sweatpants on and my hoodie and got in and was like holding onto the ledge and it was like 104 and I was freezing with a hoodie on in it and then it started to throw me out enough to roll a joint. Then I rolled a joint, smoked a joint, took the edge off enough to like just rock back and forth.
That was the worst part of it all. And then two days later, I couldn't wait because I was like, what I just did, weed is nothing. And then I was right. I love weed.
Detasting for weed is hell to me. But me wanting weed, like six days of no cradum, I didn't care about weed. Like the weed was obsolete. I was just like, and then I went to meetings and I was telling you before the show started.
I was like 36 days because the 35th day I was in a meeting and I was doing this and then I was like, wait, why am I doing this? It's been 36 days. I feel sick. I feel like my theory was maybe I have a staff infection, like a blood infection because I feel sick inside.
And as I was telling you, I was like, maybe I have an STD but I'd recently decided not to sleep with anybody as well because I'm trying to be sober and trying to do things. And I was like, well, how could you have got an STD if you haven't had sex for a fucking, I don't know how long enough to, there's no way that's it. But I couldn't figure it out. I was like, you know what?
It's worth it. My peace of mind. I went and got blood work and then they came back and said, yeah, you don't have nothing. And that's when I was like, okay, it really is 35 days of IM detoxing from this herbal fucking drink.
And it was so embarrassing because I was, because I'm older. I've got kids like smoking weed is less embarrassing to me. I'm like, man, like you did it your whole life. Like, you know, and you worked and you did stuff.
You can do it. Right. But you don't do heroin. Like you don't do, you're not addicted to, I'm not trying to shit on anybody.
But I mean, I can't, I can't do hard drugs with children. Like I quit when my daughter was born. I don't, but I was back in worse than ever. Let me ask you both two questions because it seems like you have similar experiences and these two regards.
I accept that both of you were doing it over and over on a daily basis and days on end and all of the warning signs were there for both of you. And yet somehow you were for a time blind to what an issue you had. I'd like to ask both of you from somebody who's not been in that situation. How do you think you could have remained blind?
It seems very odd. Like to me, I was watching you at the time getting ready to do a show and you'd be taking one and I'm just like, okay, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that. Like this is work time. This is not take anything.
It's not take any time, not that I thought you were going to know, you know, having seizures or anything like that. But how do you not see that you're developing a dependency when you're pretty clearly developing a dependency? And then well, my second question is just why did, but what do you think both of you opted to white knuckle called Turkey as opposed to tape? Did you do, why knuckle?
Yeah. With no idea how bad it was going to get. Yeah. Okay.
That's if I had an owner was going to get that bad, I would have got to rehab. Yeah. Well, because I remember hearing like anecdotally, there's an actor Brewster and people, you may or may not remember who he is. He, when he was like in his 70s or something, he's very, very old, said he developed an addiction to pain pills.
And so I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like taking 50 a day. And he's like, and then one day I took 49 and a half from the next day I took 40, you know, I just want to have a pill down until the last day I took a half. And that's the last time I took one. Obviously if it was that simple, we wouldn't need rehab and we wouldn't have junkies, but I wonder why you didn't choose the question.
All right. So to start at all, all common drugs of abuse at this point in our culture, everybody knows what's to expect. If you start taking too many pills, too many opiates, too much heroin, too much cocaine, too much alcohol, there's a common known cultural understanding of if you do this, we all know the end result of this. This is so new.
Cratum is so new that it not only is it not understood, but as Jason experienced that like talking about it on the internet, I mean, people will just rip you to shreds and I see if it's two reasons. Hey, they don't know. Be there hooked and they don't want somebody talking about the thing that might get some sort of regulation, which means they won't be able to get their drug. And so given that it came in under the banner of being less of a concern, an herbal supplement for the drink, a wellness tonic, even if you can drink it and notice that something more severe is happening, whether it's the junkie mindset or not, there's a part of you that doesn't have to think that what's happening is that bad.
And then it's a frog and boiling water situation where you go from having one a day or one in the morning, one in the afternoon and you're good. Yeah, like a coffee. Yeah, but just the body adapts to anything. So you go from two to three.
It doesn't seem like that big a deal. You go from three to four, it doesn't seem like that big a deal. And there are things that your body does on a subconscious level that some of this is these are not conscious decisions. But a lot of the time that as the stuff leaves your body and the discomfort starts to set in and you know to remedy that all you have to do is spend another 10 bucks on a thing.
And it's just, you know, it's just a herbal remedy down at the store that it just happens so gradually that one day you end up in a position. And for me, it was the very first time that I took it to go to sleep. That's when you know you're in the upside down. So just take it in the morning, get to kind of zazz it up for the day, take it in the afternoon for that afternoon lull, then I get it.
And in the evening, sure. But the first time I had one at 11 o'clock at night because I knew that I wasn't going to sleep unless I got this feeling out of my body, at that point I'm like, I think I'm in a real bad place. And guess what? Just kept on going.
How long would you say it was from then until you actually probably took six or seven months to end up in the point where I had to take it to go to sleep and it went on another year after that. And then I was like, I'm going to get a little worse, worse feelings. I probably spent about $60, $70,000 on them. It was 10 a day, let's say it's 100 bucks a day, 3000.
It was more than that. They were actually closer to 12 early on at the time. So I said, yeah, $3,600 a month, 40 plus thousand. You want to get a promo code?
Yeah, I should use mine. I'm going to do a four day and talk to somebody about it. And he was like, I do six. Yeah.
And I didn't feel good about four a day. I could already tell that that was not healthy. But when he said he did six, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm just being a bitch. Yeah.
Well, that's everybody like if you're down at the local bar where everybody's like, could you get a little bit more? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we're not that bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here's the thing, I feel like some people, you know, it's like if we were here talking about how everybody should not drink, it's poison. I mean, there is facts to that. But some people like a drink on the weekend and get at a wedding or whatever it is and they work and they do their jobs and they're great people and there's no harm, no fail. Can there be a way of doing creative in a way where it could be, I don't know about beneficial, but like not ruin your life?
Yeah, of course. Yeah. I wanted us to make sure we talked about that too, to give somewhat of a reasonable acknowledgement that some people don't have problems with it. Right.
And then you have to say that because you lose credibility and you tell people, no, if you do this, it's going to kill you. And then there's people going, well, that's not my experience. Well, then everything else that you're saying loses its credibility. Right.
But it's also, you know, there's like people that are, you know, I got off painkillers and I use creative and that's helping me. So fuck you. Because that was the thing when I talked about it on social media, people came at me with that one and I was like, look, I get it. It's also people that have gone off heroin that are on methadone.
Methadone. I mean, if I do methadone right now, I would be off my tits. You know, it's a drug, dude. And I get it.
And I'm like, I don't know anymore anymore, but you are doing a drug. And my thing is like, the more I get sober, you know, there was a time where I smoke weed every day and I would skate and there would be people that would be around me that would go, dude, I don't know how you can skate. I don't know how you can fight. I don't know how you can do a podcast.
I don't know how you have the energy to go anywhere after smoking that joint. And I'm like, yeah, man, I'm just different. And then I quit and was older and more honest with who I really am, you know, like, but I had to go through all these things. I had to, you know, I worked on my sobriety.
I did like steps and had a sponsor and was very like, I stripped myself down and was very honest with what I really am. Like, how, you know, because also if I tell myself, like, would I be a better parent if I didn't smoke weed, well, then I want to be able to smoke any weed. So I'm not going to tell myself that. And I was, I could argue, I was pretty good at it, where I could convince you, I'm actually more playful.
You know what I mean? I'm funny when I'm high. And I was like, yeah, I've got myself convinced of that. And occasionally it's probably true.
Yeah. But overall, it's not. Look, man, if you, that's the other thing, like once again, man, why not doesn't matter which one it is. If you smoke marijuana every now and then and you're a funny, fun, loving guy and you go to bed and you wake up and it's no harm, no fail.
You don't need to roll one when you wake up. I'm envious of that. But I and also a lot of other Americans can eat it, but people humans, when they start doing stuff, they can't turn it off. And the fact is, if I'm high all the time, I am not as good of husband.
I'm not as good of anything to anybody, to myself, to my pets, everybody, everything. That's, I know that. No one can ever argue otherwise. Creative is 10 times nalier than weed, 10 times.
And I'm, and I got knocked out skating a bunch of times because I had to do a sharp skate. And I'm in my 50s. And I'm doing, I'm like, I'll just do one feel free before I skate because I don't want to get too woozy. And now I'll look back and I'm like, Oh my God, dude.
Like, and then sometimes I got hurt. I was like, I wonder if that's, I'm like, Nah, like when I did that 540, I only did one that morning. And I remember because I only did one, it was a bit tough all day. I did one and smoked a joint and then broke a sweat and then I did that trick.
I did a trick that I was, there's no way I should have done it. But I did it. And there's my argument from the junkie Jason. I go, well dude, if you're the oldest person to ever do a backside 540, how bad can create a new week?
Because show me another guy who's in his 50s that can do that. And I'm like, well, let's strip that down. Let's cut it out. Let's get completely detailed.
Get sober, Jason. Go back at the time machine to that day. I guarantee I would have made it an hour before I made it. And also I got hurt like I slammed three times before I made it.
I bet you I wouldn't have slammed. I mean, maybe not. But also I just feel like now that I skate sober when I, this is the easiest, this was the biggest one for me because skateboarding is a way of reading life. When I skate, I don't look where I'm going.
I look at everything. And when I'm high, this is my peripherals. And when I showed up at the ramp completely sober, I saw that. And I also could feel that my back foot was slowly slipping off the grip tape.
And I remember going, did you just register that your foot was slowly slipping off the back of the board? Because old high, Jason, it's like, I'm pretty sure I'm making it. And sometimes I would make it and sometimes I wouldn't. And I was like, okay, so you can see more.
You can feel more. You are better at skateboarding when you're not high. So how does that not apply to every other thing that you do in your life? That's just the facts.
Well, there's something about being a talented human that no matter what you do to get yourself fucked up, you still read as a talented human, but you don't realize what you're missing by being fucked up all the time. But I can do things better than other people. And I can relate with that significantly. Because for my entire addiction through my whole life, never was I not functional.
Never did I not hold a full time job. I have my own business for a decade. I work with dogs. We can talk about that if it needs to be.
But people wouldn't have assumed that to look back on it. I find it insane that they didn't realize how gross I had become and what I looked like and how pale and skinny I had gotten. But any good junkie is also good at lying and pretending that something else is going on. And yeah, it is I was always able to function and get my shit done.
But to the degree that I could have, probably not. So once you came out of the withdrawal, let's talk about where your life has gone from the tunnel. Yeah, well, I would like to do that. But I want to talk about what withdrawals were like.
Because it's something that I've been talking about for a long time. And I think it's really important that people know about it. And so leading up to going through white knuckling withdrawals with no nothing to help, which I went on a two week long vacation. My ex and I had decided let's go on a two week vacation.
She knew what was going on. And we went down to Utah for two weeks. And she knew what was going on. I didn't know how severe it was going to be.
And I told her I'm going to listen. Probably going to be a few rough days. Probably the first few days. We're not going to be doing much hiking.
It was in Knav, Utah, just a beautiful, beautiful place. I had weaned and tapered leading up to then, looking like that meme of Charlie from Sunny and Philadelphia down in the mailroom with the fucking red strings going. I had been scrolling my tapering schedule on my mirror every day just to try to weaned down to make going cool, turkey tolerable. And so the first day we were there, I tried to go on a hike.
I intentionally left all remaining. I was using feel-free. And then MIT 45, which is also an extreme, great concentrate. I could use it in a plastic syringe just to be fully aware how much I'm taking in to a dropper, not a needle, just to know what I was doing or how much I was taking in my body.
But I left in the car, walked three hours away from the car and three hours was about how long it took for me to enter withdrawals. And now I'm three hours away from the car, absolutely fucked. Going into withdrawals can't fucking walk, can't speak, can't do anything. And now I have to walk miles back to the car.
And that took, I honestly didn't think I was even going to survive that. And so made it back to the car, went to where we were going and rather than three days, like I imagine it would be, it was every single day of that two week long vacation where no sleep whatsoever. And maybe there were like 10, 15 minutes here and there where I would fall asleep a little bit. But there is a symptom when I'd be interested in your take on this called Acathysia, which is common with benzodiazepine withdrawal, which is like having restless leg syndrome where your foot being asleep through your entire body.
And so that would only manifest if I laid horizontally. So if I stayed upright, that particular symptom would not manifest. But as soon as I laid down, try to relax, try to take some strain off the body, maybe five minutes in, your foot starts doing that. It creeps up the foot, the leg, it goes to the other one, it got to the point where I was horse kicking in my bed completely outside of my control so hard that I really thought I was going to break my back from involuntary spasming.
And that went on, that particular symptom went on for four or five days where any horizontal lane was the most miserable, like any severe junk type withdrawal. Like I felt like my insides were trying to get onto the outside, couldn't think head bobbing back and forth, couldn't eat, couldn't talk, couldn't do anything. And by day nine, which happened to be my 39th birthday, I was with somebody, somebody that cares for me that I care for and she loves to hike. And so each day she wanted to be with me to help me through this process.
But my take was like, that's kind of you, to want to do that. You got to get out of this house, it doesn't make anything better for me to be here, although I appreciate it. I think it's going to be hard on you to continuously watch someone you care about in this day. And she didn't do it to the degree that I felt she ought to have.
And on day nine, which happened to be again my 39th birthday, I found a way that I could lean into a corner with my yoga mat on the ground and I feel like I could get a little bit of rest at a 45. And at six in the morning she came out of her room and I was leaning up against the wall and the mat slipped out from under me and I fucking crumpled to the ground and for her she was like, that's it. That's it. I can't watch you do this.
I cannot keep like you have to go to hospital. You have to do something about this. This is not going to be okay. And I pulled her side and I'm like, listen, I drove down here.
If you want to leave, I can get you a flight back. I feel that this, whether self-deprecating or not, I feel I earned this experience and as mortifying and horrible as it was, there was some real fucking spiritual about it. I refer to it like coming face to face with the devil's dick and not losing. I don't know that I won.
Maybe we had a stalemate, but to be in that to be suffering that much for that long in a row, I wanted to earn my way through it. So we talked about it. I stuck around. I got a vitamin drip from somebody close by and then on day 11, I got a thousand, might have been 750 milligrams of NAD.
If you guys are familiar with it, that changed everything. And so on that 11th day, I found a gal, a hundred yards from the house who does in-home NAD therapy. And I don't know if it would have worked so well on day one. I think I needed to get some of this stuff out of the body for it to really start recovering.
But on day 11, I took NAD and how I looked before and after that two hour long IV push was different. And so that night I slept for about two hours. And next night I probably got six hours and the rotary recovery started from there. It was probably six months until I felt like a regular human again.
But on that stuff, you get styes in your eyes, liver issues, heart issues, kidney issues, your skin starts fluffing off of your body. It turns gray. And people get, I have an entire list of symptoms I would like to read at some point which are common throughout all of this. But it took me a full two weeks of not just withdrawals, but severe and acute where you can't do anything.
You're just a waste of space and all I could do was just lie there, stand there, rock back and forth, tremble. I did make a couple videos that are available to be seen whether on my Instagram or YouTube. And I encourage people. What are you two?
I mean, there's maybe like three videos up there. They're on my Instagram and that's sort of easy. You are be easy why that people, because I made some, I put the entire 10 or 12 minute videos up there, but also made some short ones that are a little bit more concise about it. And then since then, I like once you go through something like that, it almost shifts your destiny in life outside of your own choosing where if I went through that and I now know enough about it and want to know about it, it became, in my opinion, my responsibility to talk about it, talk about it as openly as possible.
And then if I can get out in the world and talk to people and whether it's helped anybody through it, remind them how severe this is, offer them some words of comfort while they're going through that experience. Like it shifted what my role in life was. Like I work with dogs, I'll probably always do that. I do sports things always, but like this now shifted into, well getting sober even though I use the term non-reliant, I feel like just the word sober has a lot of baggage with it, but that like it became now a part of my life to talk about it and see if there's anybody that I can help through this process because something you brought up, Jason, it is so fucking shameful and embarrassing addiction generally.
But this stuff in particular has a different sort of feeling that comes with it because it masquerades as a fucking wellness ton. And people are so embarrassed to say that they got addicted to gas station heroin. Right, there's a certain kind of glamour that comes from saying I was addicted to heroin. What is the huge thing with the word argue that you wanted addicted to it?
Right. Like with creative people go, no you weren't. It's fine. I'm like, why would I make it up?
Yeah. I can tell you. I have nothing to gain from it. I have nothing to prove with it.
It was really, really bad. Yeah. So where is it at now in terms of regulation and the FDA looking at it? So yes, lots of counties, so individual counties across, I think there are some states where it is illegal and counties can make those kinds of decisions too.
So even like down in San Diego, down in La Jolla area, it's not allowed to be there. But it's so unknown right now that those who know, they know, but it's going to be less than 1% of people that are even aware of what's possible that this is a thing. Every single day I see a new concentrated product. They have it in vape.
They have it in tongue strips. They have it in like mints, like it's been fucking smoke. And I tell people this all the time, it's going to get vastly worse in this culture before it gets better. Because if you make it more concentrated, it's going to get people more.
That's what changed it for me. That I was fine with occasional dosing of the leaf. These concentrates are 100, 200 times more potent, really hard to understand how severe that is because they're just kind of numbers. But like any addiction, you have a tendency to take more and more and even for the people that use it for damage control or a way to come off of other worse substances in their mind.