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Welcome guys to episode 261 of Behind the Shield Podcast.
As always, my name's James Gearing
and I'm very excited to bring to you this week, James Wilkes.
Now I sat down with James in California.
He is a lifelong martial artist.
He won the Ultimate Fighter television show for Team UK.
He trained some of the most elite law enforcement
and military personnel in combatives
and he's also the man behind the movie, The Game Changers.
So great conversation.
We really explore so many of the benefits
that I have seen personally from a plant-based diet.
This doesn't mean a purely vegan diet,
but either removing meat temporarily
or increasing the amount of plant-based food
in your diet versus processed
and all the chemicals and hormones and things that we see.
So a great conversation.
I really enjoyed picking his brain.
So before we get to the interview, please take a moment,
go to the podcast app that you're listening to this on,
subscribe to the show, leave feedback
and then leave a rating.
The five-star ratings do make us more and more visible
to other people looking for a project like this.
And then use your social media, email, word of mouth,
whatever it is and help share these incredible episodes.
There's so much information
in each one of these people's stories
that I know will change lives around the planet.
So with that being said, I introduce to you, James Wilkes.
Enjoy.
James, I wanna start by saying thank you so much
for inviting me here to your office.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.
It's exciting to be talking with you.
Brilliant. So for everyone listening,
where are we right now geographically?
So we're in Laguna Hills, California.
And so that's about an hour south of LA,
about an hour north of San Diego
on the West coast of the United States
and moved here, what, 19 years ago now.
Brilliant. Let's start with that.
I mean, I'm gonna go chronologically,
but what brought you here specifically?
Originally came out here in 2000
after I finished my degree.
Thought I'd take six months to train in martial arts,
some more martial arts.
You know, I had, I've been training for years
in martial arts, but came out to train with Paul Vunak,
who developed the unarmed combat program
for the Navy SEALs, called the Rapid Assault Tactics.
So I thought, well, I finished my degree,
I'll come out to the States and train for six months.
Then I'll come back and get a job in London or whatever.
And loved the weather, loved the martial arts training,
and I'm still here 19 years later.
Was it California you came to initially?
Yeah, Paul Vunak lived in Orange County,
so that's sort of why I'm still here.
Brilliant. All right, well, I wanna talk about the military.
So let's start at the very beginning,
even before you were born.
I know your granddad was a bit of a badass,
so let's start with him and then we'll work forward.
Yeah, so allegedly he basically faked his birth certificate
so that he could fight in World War II.
So he was around 14 or 15 and really wanted to join the war.
So faked his birth certificate
and then was parachuted in, fought in Arnhem.
Most of the people that he was fighting alongside were killed
and somehow he seemed to like dive into a river
and swim down and got away and survived.
And so after he got out of the, after World War II finished,
he sort of still had that fighting spirit.
So he used to go to the pubs and get in fights
and that sort of thing.
And then it's sort of from there, he had two sons.
One is my dad, Gary, who's been a big inspiration for me.
And the other one is my uncle, Mark.
And Mark went on to become a very high sort of ranked
Kikishinkai karate fighter.
I ended up in 1986, he got the fastest knockdown.
It was like four point something seconds
with a spinning hook kick to the temple,
knocked the guy out and won some big fight there.
But then my dad was into Kung Fu.
And so they sort of got me into,
I think it was in the blood basically.
And then they got me into martial arts from there.
Yeah, so firstly, 14 years old volunteering to do that.
That's insane in itself.
But it's interesting you say he came back and he was fighting
because that's what I think our generation was kind of told
about our forefathers and why I think there was so much
violence around football and all that was that we are kind of
a warring nation and once World War II was done,
remember we had the Falklands conflict, but that was it.
But there was no one to fight.
So I know when I grew up, I mean, you know,
some of the violence in the soccer stands was just insane.
But it's interesting observation that we kind of were
a very feisty group of the nation.
Absolutely.
There's a lot of around soccer,
there's a lot of sort of tribal mentality too.
And it sort of reinforces sort of us versus them mentality.
But yeah, it's quite warlike.
Yeah, now I always ask the people that have got World War II
generation in the family, because it's fascinating.
Did your granad ever talk about the war?
I don't really have many memories of it.
Because he died when I was quite young
of a heart attack, unfortunately.
He was a big smoker and that probably played
a big role in that as well.
But yeah, I didn't really talk about it.
My other grandfather talked about it a little bit.
And I think, you know, anytime I talked about guns
or fighting, he really didn't.
My other grandfather, my mom's dad really didn't like that.
You know, because they've been through real, you know,
because I think when I was younger, I thought it was cool,
like military stuff, you know, shooting people.
You know, when you actually think about it,
like is that really what you want to be doing
is, you know, killing people.
Those people don't even want to be there in the first place.
I'm not saying there's not ever a case for war,
but a lot of those wars are sort of, you know,
funded by ulterior motives.
And, you know, I think the individuals, soldiers,
get put in these positions where they sort of led to believe
they need to fight for this cause and very patriotic.
But in many cases, if they really thought about it,
would they want to be there fighting?
Yeah, there's definitely that double-edged sword
that a lot of the people had on the show where,
I mean, obviously they're aware of some of the ulterior motives
of some of these conflicts, but then what kind of makes them
justify is when they go to some of these places
and they see there are still horrible things happening,
and they lose friends and that at least gives them
that intrinsic purpose of being there now.
But yeah. Yeah, totally.
I mean, I've also, you know, because I train the military a lot
and I've had, you know, friends come back and, you know,
they've been manning a security checkpoint
and some old men, you know, come up to them with a trash bin,
you know, garbage bin, and opened it up
and there's like a couple of his dead grandchildren in there,
you know, and so, you know, the people are always scarred
by that and the PTSD, and I think that they should be offering,
you know, much better counselling for those troops
that come out when they return from war
because there's a lot of, a lot of,
I can't imagine that situation.
No, no, I mean, we do touch on that a lot with this project
because obviously military first responders, you know, the ER,
yeah, there's many, many areas where, you know,
people do not only see horrible things,
but then the environment that they're in,
we talked before we started recording, like, sleep deprivation
and, you know, the work weeks just compound that.
And yeah, we do, there's no question we have a,
not even in our community, but just generally,
we seem to have a mental health crisis going on at the moment.
Yeah, totally.
All right, so then you come into the world.
So firstly, what was your family dynamic like?
So what did your dad do and your mom,
and then how many siblings did you have?
So my dad did a lot of, he actually did truck sales,
or lorry sales, if I'm saying it in English.
Yeah, so he did a lot of that, but like as time moved on,
he moved into self-storage,
so that's what he's still doing now.
My brother is from my mom's first marriage,
so he's my only sibling, Richard,
and he was into fitness and bodybuilding,
and he was a personal trainer for quite a while,
and now works with my dad.
You know, and that's it, it was an upbringing in a town
called Melton Mowbray,
which is known as the rural capital of food in England,
and yeah, that's about it.
Brilliant, and what got you into martial arts?
So my family got me into it originally,
my dad put me into karate, kikijin kai karate,
when I was eight years old.
And to be honest, I didn't really like it at that time,
I was sort of being pushed into doing it,
and did it for a couple of years on and off,
and then sort of took a break,
but started getting into the martial arts films,
especially Bruce Lee and to the dragon,
you know, that type of thing,
and that's when I sort of really started getting into it.
And then so when I was 15, I started studying taekwondo,
but also started really looking into,
no actually probably 14 maybe, 14 around there.
And then when I was 15, sorry later on,
like maybe close to 16, I got attacked on the street,
basically got beaten up,
started realizing that all of those
choreographed karate routines really weren't that effective,
perhaps counterproductive actually,
and started really digging into different martial arts
and trying to figure out what went wrong,
what could I have done better,
and studying different styles.
Basically what Bruce Lee was doing
is the search for truth in combat,
and so that's what I started doing.
Bruce Lee would say, research your own experience,
absorb what is useful, reject what is useless,
add what is specifically your own.
So I sort of took that approach
and started realizing that Bruce Lee
wasn't just a martial arts movie star
that he'd already really thought about what really works,
and started looking at the immutable principles of combat,
so the risk to reward ratio, economy of motion,
things like that, and started applying that,
looking through that lens at various martial arts,
and trying to put that together,
not just eclectically here and there,
but synergistically trying to weave
those martial arts together.
Yeah, I was talking to Clint Emerson,
the Navy Seal the other day,
and he was a big Bruce Lee fan at the same time.
And it was amazing looking back now,
because I was the same.
I did karate, then I did taekwondo,
I actually won some national championships,
and then went to a boxing gym, got my ass kicked,
and took it to a boxing gym, got my ass kicked.
More recently, Jiu Jitsu got my ass kicked.
And so you realize on this journey that,
okay, there's elements of this that are good,
and taekwondo ended up being great,
as I was a stunt man for a while.
It looks awesome on film,
spinning kicks, jumping kicks.
But yeah, that constant humbling,
but you look back now where we've got MMA,
and we've got CrossFit, the Tao Jikun Do,
that's pretty much what he was thinking about
in the 60s and 70s.
No, it was ahead of his time, for sure.
And the same sort of thing happened to me,
and I was doing well in taekwondo,
I was winning most of the tournaments that I was in.
Probably first or second place in all the tournaments I did.
And then, yeah, and when I was 16,
I went to train with a guy called Jeff Thompson
in Coventry.
Was he the bouncer?
Yeah, he was the bouncer on a bunch of books.
And he was like, what's the problem?
Yeah.
Smack him in the face.
Create a fence, yeah, ask a question, engage the brain,
knock him out, three second fight,
that basically was one of his books, I think.
So I went and trained there,
and that was a huge wake up call for me,
like you said, going to a boxing gym,
you realize things don't work.
Because I wanted to find the best.
So in England at the time, he was sort of, again,
ahead of his time,
combining lots of different martial arts.
And I remember going in my taekwondo gi,
I think I was like 16 or 17,
I had a red belt in taekwondo at the time.
Was that T-A-G-B?
It was ITF.
ITF, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the same one I did.
Yeah, okay.
And then I went WTF after that.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, so basically I went to Jeff Thompson's place,
and it was like this scenario setup
where you basically had to act as the bouncer.
So you stand up and face the wall, right?
With your eyes closed, covering your ears.
And then there's like about 25 guys maybe,
all sort of discuss what their plan is they're gonna do.
And then you basically engage with the,
there's 25 people all walking around,
you pretend you're a club or something, right?
And so some people were just milling around,
everyone's got boxing gloves on,
or some sort of hybrid glove where you can punch in
and grapple.
First red flag.
Yeah, yeah, everyone's going,
hey, what's going on here?
So anyway, I'm wearing my taekwondo gi,
but of course those lads were just training
in like shorts and t-shirts and like, yeah, I didn't care.
And someone starts asking me a question,
I start engaging, got a lot of adrenaline
and they'd use, they'd be swearing at you
and start shouting, shoving you,
and you say, just training that I hadn't really experienced
before.
And then I remember someone asking a question
and someone else smacking me from the side in the jaw,
knocked me down to the ground.
And then it was like, they said, pick three guys
that were just gonna jump on me and start attacking me.
I remember within like five or 10 seconds,
my taekwondo gi, you know, cause they were thin
compared to like jujitsu gi's, it was ripped off
and just hadn't experienced anything like that.
And then another part of session that day,
I remember grabbing someone's throat, you know,
I grabbed his trachea when we were starting
to grapple on the ground,
I had very little grappling experience.
And I remember him grabbing my nuts
and just like yanking them.
And so I went down to defend that
and then he locked his fingers.
And I remember like being able to join his fingers
around the back of my trachea and that's when I tapped out.
And that was just a whole different world
and a really big wake up.
Cause I'd read a lot of the books and it was theoretical
and I was like, okay, I need to start doing some of this
stuff when you actually get in there and do it.
So it's a huge wake up.
Yeah.
Yeah, I just had an experience recently,
I did Sheepdog Response, Tim Kennedy's class.
Great.
I mean, I love the fact that they're going around
to law enforcement specifically.
I mean, it's great for civilians too,
but you know, men and women in blue need options.
Absolutely.
But God, rolling with some of those guys,
so I actually roll with Tim and some of the other cadre,
you know, and you're doing your jujitsu stuff
and I'm a striker as well.
So at least I have an understanding of,
oh, I could actually pop you here.
But yeah, Tim sticking his fingers in your eyes,
smothering you, covering your mouth and nose.
And you're like, you just forget if you stay in one art,
especially if you start entering like a sport realm
of that art, yeah, you can get such a false sense of security.
And you know, if you're not in that crucible
that you were put in, yeah, you realize that you're not
as prepared as you thought you were.
Yeah, no, totally.
I think even just regular people,
they go on a mat just on jujitsu
and they don't realize like how, you know,
it really sort of puts people's egos in check.
But then when you start combining all these different arts,
yeah, it becomes exponential.
So yeah, that's how I started to sort of start my journey
to even dig into it more and really search
for the truth in combat.
Right, so then where did that take you?
What was your, rephrase it,
what was your career aspirations
when you were high school level
and then where did you end up going?
I wanna do something in leisure and sort of fitness
and that type of stuff.
And I applied for sort of a leisure degree
or something, fitness type degree in Bournemouth University.
And you know, my grades weren't that great
and at A levels, they're called in England, as you know.
And so I ended up like shifting onto another course
that was basically called Land-Based Enterprise.
It was a Bachelor of Science degree
and it looked at land use actually
from a sort of soil perspective and gradient perspective.
And it basically looked at the diversification of land use
from the primary sectors like agriculture and mining
because the agriculture was becoming more efficient.
We were getting more imports, you know,
mining was decreasing.
And it basically looked at the diversification
of that land use into tertiary sectors
like leisure and tourism.
But it was a science degree because it looked like
what is this land usable for and what can we do with it
and what are the demographics nearby?
To be honest, it wasn't something I was that interested in.
Just sort of, you know, I'd already sort of planned
on going to Bournemouth.
My girlfriend was going at the time, you know,
and so just ended up doing that.
But what ended up happening was I just spent a lot more time
studying martial arts in university than I did for my degree.
So I still graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree
with honors, but you know, probably barely just
because I really didn't spend much time doing that.
In fact, I never read one of the entire books.
You know, I'd always read like the introduction,
the first paragraph of each chapter in the conclusion,
you know, of any of the books I was studying
and managed to sort of get by doing that.
But I was studying so much martial arts.
I was doing, at the time there was Wing Chun there.
There was boxing from, there was actually an older guy
that had been in the Olympics, you know, years back.
Yeah, but it was pretty old school.
But he'd bring some new boxes in.
So I was doing some boxing, kickboxing.
I was doing Japanese Jiu-Jitsu,
which had a lot of the same throws as Judo,
but it was sort of a little bit more self-defense oriented.
Although to be honest, I wish I'd done more Judo.
But yeah, so I just studied, you know,
a number of martial arts while in college,
just as much as I could basically.
Yeah, that's funny because I did sports science
in University of North London
and I fought for the college's WTF.
And then there was a boxing gym.
So I did that.
I actually did hockey first,
but I got so pissed off with the kind of,
oh, you know, you missed that shot.
So you got to drink the whole top shelf of the, you know,
at the pub or wear a dress.
I'm like, or I could just not play with you anymore
and go do something that doesn't involve.
Yeah, public humiliation and intoxication.
Yeah, I also, I almost played,
I've been playing rugby for 10 years in school.
And so I also really enjoyed rugby,
but it sort of came to this point where, you know,
there's always an opportunity cost with your time, right?
And so it was sort of a choice at that point
between should I keep playing a lot of rugby
and like minimize my martial arts training,
but I just really enjoyed the combat sort of sports,
but also the self-defense aspect.
And so really focused on martial arts.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I never thought this before.
I know our generation as Brits,
we, and wrestling wasn't really that big.
And obviously, you know, the MMA world,
you come to the American and Russian fighters,
you know, that wrestling is their thing.
Did you find that at least the rugby training,
that impact that, you know, the tackle side
that helped you with the wrestling portion of it?
Yeah, I think that's a huge help.
I mean, just taking the knocks, right?
And just getting sort of toughening you up a little bit
and tackling people.
I definitely think that helped a lot.
Funnily enough, another sport that I used to play was,
and I've got back into it more recently, actually,
it was table tennis,
which seems totally on the other side, right?
It seems like it.
But that was also really good for reaction speed,
hand-eye coordination.
I also used to play the drums in a band.
I think that was good for coordination.
So I think all these things, you know,
these different modalities of sports
give you different insights
and you benefit in certain ways.
And then in college, I did all these sports
and then sort of towards the last year or so,
I learned about this guy called Phil Norman,
who was actually originally on that,
he won that, what was the show called?
Gladiators?
Yes.
Or whatever.
So he won that show.
But he was also a student in Jeet Kune Do.
He used to come out every year and train with Dan Inosanto,
who was Bruce Lee's training partner.
And then he was also trained with a guy called Eric Paulson,
who went on to become my coach in the States
in combat submission wrestling,
who's also a Jeet Kune Do instructor.
And so I started training with those guys
and that's sort of how I started getting into the,
learning about, you know,
I obviously knew about Jeet Kune Do from Bruce Lee,
his system, but that's when I started learning
about the various instructors
that we're currently teaching today,
which sort of led me out to new training out here.
Right, yeah.
Cause I know when I was looking at,
cause Dan was more the Filipino martial arts, wasn't he?
Yeah.
And then Paulson was more of a grappler.
Yeah.
Primarily.
Yeah, exactly.
And I went, there was a, was it Bob Breen?
Yeah, he came with Bob, yeah.
I never went, but I remember, you know,
his academy was the closest one.
I kept meaning to go and I never did,
cause I had all the other stuff going on.
Yeah, so Phil Norman was friends with Bob
and so we used to go up there as a group, you know,
and train.
Right, brilliant.
So then take us through to moving to America.
So yeah, so it was 2000 and, you know,
I just thought we'll take these six months off.
And I originally thought, okay,
I'm going to train at the Dan Inosanto Academy, right?
So, you know, Dan was Bruce Lee's main training partner
and not just partner, but he would teach him stuff.
And Bruce would obviously teach him, you know,
a lot of techniques and then training methods as well,
but they were trained together.
And so, you know, there's this big split
in the Jeet Kune Do community.
I don't know if you're aware of it,
but there's like, there's basically the Jeet Kune Do concepts
and then there's what they call original Jeet Kune Do.
So there's sort of these arguments of like,
which is the authentic Jeet Kune Do.
And then within the original Jeet Kune Do,
there is sort of subsections.
So there's like the era that he was in Los Angeles
or the era that he was in San Francisco.
So they actually teach different curriculums
based on what he was teaching at the time.
Yeah, because people who train in San Francisco,
that's really mostly what they did.
So they teach what they learned from him in San Francisco.
But of course, Jeet Kune Do wasn't really about that.
It was about adapting over time.
And it was more about the concepts.
And so I sort of fall,
I definitely think there's some great instructors
and great training in the original Jeet Kune Do
and it's interesting to learn and so forth.
But I fell more on the sort of concepts side,
which is what I think Bruce would have carried on to do,
is to continue devolving.
Like if he was alive today,
what would he be doing in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
and other things incorporating that?
Absolutely.
He was already getting into grappling,
as you'll see in his book.
He was training with Gene LaBelle.
And so I fell more on the concept side, basically.
And so I originally was coming out to train
with Dan Inosanto for six months.
Who I've been trying to get on the show.
I went and did a seminar with him recently,
but I'm working on it.
Oh yeah, he's amazing.
I mean, I would love to sit down.
Even just talking about the Philippines,
he's so passionate.
Yeah, and he's so, like if you go,
it's like a history lecture when you learn the techniques.
He talks about with boxing, for example,
the position that we have now,
sort of the head chin down
and sort of forwards with the hands up, elbows in,
how that came about.
And it's actually when the Americans went to the Philippines
and the Philippines of course would also fight with knives.
And so they'd have a reverse grip.
And because if you,
yeah, you didn't wanna fight with your palms up
because they'd do the reverse grip
and the knives could cut your own wrists.
And then also if your head's already far back,
the old school wrestling style.
And originally one hand was out,
one hand was on the hip, the rear hand.
So if your right leg's back,
your right hand was on your right hip.
And then it went to the American boxing,
went to both hands sort of forward with the head back,
with the palms facing up.
You've seen the old school boxing.
But when the Americans went over to the Philippines,
so the Philippines, if you had your head back already,
when a knife swung at you,
you really couldn't go further back.
So they would sort of very guarded,
right with their arms up high with the knives
and they could slash out.
And if someone slashed at you,
you could evade it
because your head was forward to start with.
So the Americans went and just boxed the Filipinos
and the Filipinos beat all the Americans.
And that's when the style of fighting
to what we see today in boxing actually began in the States.
Anyway, so every time he teaches you a technique,
he goes to this five, 10 minute lecture
about the history of this technique.
And it's just fascinating.
And so, and Dan Inosanto is amazing.
Probably the most, if not one of the most
overall knowledgeable martial artists in the world.
But as I was talking to them,
Paul was saying, well, in the 70s and 80s,
when we trained at the Inosanto Academy,
it was, the floors were painted red
because there was always blood on the floor.
So they didn't want all these blood stains.
They just painted the floor red.
And because it was like a hardcore gym.
But of course, when you run a martial arts gym,
you sort of have to start commercializing
and then you're in LA and you start getting business people
and celebrities and they can't get hit.
Like they don't wanna get hit in the face that hard.
People think they want to,
and then they get punched in the face and they quit.
So I think that sort of hardcore mentality from the 80s,
when Vunak was really training there a lot
in the early 90s, that sort of shifted.
And so Paul said,
why don't you come and be my apprentice?
So Paul Vunak would train to teach these two days
what he called IPTP, Intensive Personal Training Programs.
People fly in, you train five hours a day,
two and a half hours before lunch,
you have lunch with Paul, two and a half hours afterwards.
And then you do that for two days
and you can come out as often as you want
and then train with Paul.
And so it'd be like one to,
one to, I don't know, four people that we'd have in these
intensive training sessions.
And so Paul said, why don't you do that?
So I thought, well, that sounds pretty good.
And Paul's sort of known as the black sheep
of the Jeet Kune Do concept family,
because he would get into fights.
He used to go out and train the Navy SEALs in Virginia
and they would go out to the biker bars
and literally go and test the techniques
that they'd been doing in the day.
Yeah, he got arrested a bunch of times,
would get pulled out for national security reasons to go,
he'd be getting sentenced and they'd come in
and the SEALs would stop him from being sentenced.
Because they needed him there, right?
So, yeah, so some people sort of frowned upon him,
but Paul was really into like,
what is gonna really work in combat?
And he sort of took the floodlight of information
from down in the Santo and turned it into a laser beam,
basically for fighting and focused on that stuff.
But basically, so I decided, okay,
I'm gonna go and train with Paul Woonak for six months.
And it was amazing, because it was like in the morning,
we'd maybe do some Jiu Jitsu 45 minutes, just him and I.
And then we'd train people for five hours,
which I was learning a ton all the time.
And then in the evening, we might do a bit of stick training
or just him and I, just incredible.
Originally the plan was for six months and that dragged on
and I was sort of his main apprentice
and sort of protege for a long time.
So anyway, I would also still go up weekly
to the Inosanto Academy at that time and train there.
So I sort of got the best of both worlds.
And it just sort of grew from there,
originally six months and then,
that was my visa, it was a six month visa at the time.
And I just sort of went back for a couple of weeks,
came back for six months, back for a couple of weeks.
And it just sort of grew from there.
I started training people,
out of someone's garage at the time.
And it just sort of grew from there.
All right, so then what did the next few years
look like after that?
Just continued training really.
I started training a lot with Eric Paulson,
in the combat submission wrestling,
who I'd already trained with in England,
but started training out there.
I started training with a guy called Chris Brennan,
who was a really good jujitsu black belt.
He was fighting in Pride at the time, things like that.
And my whole focus was on just martial arts really.
And I was teaching, I started training
various government agencies.
So I got, started training the Marines
down at Kent Pendleton,
the US Marshals, the rest response team,
which is basically the SWAT team, DEA.
And then of course, in 2001, after 9-11,
I started also training the US Air Marshals,
Federal Air Marshals.
So I just totally engrossed in that.
And it was really about self-defense and street tactics
and military tactics has always been my main focus.
But there was sort of this,
this sort of urge to test myself.
And you can't do that morally on the street
with the techniques I was teaching.
So the closest thing, although it's not real,
I mean, sorry, it's real.
It's not like WWE or whatever it's called.
It's got boundaries.
It's boundaries, yeah.
And so I don't want people to think that the UFC
and MMA is not real, because it is,
but there's a lot of restrictions.
And so, but it's the closest thing
that you can test yourself in.
And so I just, you know, occasionally like once
or twice a year, you know, maybe I take a year off,
whatever, I'll just have some professional fights.
Not because I was trying to become a professional fighter,
but I just wanted to test my skills
against someone that was really trying to take me out.
You know, so that's what I did for a number of years.
Yeah.
So I know you ended up representing Britain
in the UFC show.
What was the actual house experience like?
Being aware that, you know, reality,
the word reality in reality TV is a loose term.
You know, I mean, I, as a, put it this way,
as a viewer, I could see that you take a house of fighters,
you remove televisions, but you put in alcohol.
Seems like shaking the snow globe a little bit.
So what was your experience from the inside?
Yeah, well, first of all, I just mentioned how I got,
you know, onto that show and why I decided to do it.
So it was 2008 and I was turning 30 years old.
And I was living with a couple of roommates,
Tom and Mark, and they were training in martial arts as well.
And, you know, we were watching one of the ultimate fighters
and I said, I could be all of those guys.
And they said, yeah, well then go on then.
If you think you can do it, show us.
And I just thought, well, I don't want to look back
and say, yeah, I did a lot of martial arts.
You know, I was good at martial arts.
I could have been in the UFC if I wanted to be,
because like anyone can say that, right?
So I just wanted, yeah.
So, yeah, maybe you could, maybe they couldn't,
but like, I didn't want to look back and say,
I could have done this, right?
Or I should have done this or I would have done this.
So I just, when I decided to start, you know,
taking the fighting seriously in 2008
and see how far I could get.
So I had a couple of fights.
I won the well-to-weight world championship
for gladiator challenge, which was like a sort of tier B
or C sort of MMA show, fought in the king of the cage.
And then basically, you know,
I'd been training with Joe Stevenson,
who had won another version of the ultimate fighter.
And the ultimate fighter people had called out to him
and said, have you got anyone you recommend?
And he said, yeah, this guy, James Wilkes.
So I actually skipped the first trials.
I didn't need to go to them.
I went to the second trials and then pretty quickly,
you know, I was selected to fight.
And of course I'd been living here,
but obviously I'm British and, you know, from the UK.
So they said, okay, well, you've got to fly back
and in three days, you've got to fight
to get on the British team.
So I had to fly back.
I was jet lagged, fought on the,
fought one of the UK guys and won the fight in 30 seconds
with a heel hook.
Cause of course at the time,
the grappling in America was quite a bit better
than it was in the UK.
In fact, when I first came out here,
there was only one black belt in Brazil
and in the whole of the United Kingdom.
Really, whereabouts is that?
I think he was based in London.
He was Roger Gracie's dad.
And his name was Mauricio Mato Gomez.
And I remember grappling against Roger Gracie
when he was like 16, maybe in a blue belt.
And I think I was a white belt.
Back then, yeah.
Tapped me out a couple of times, obviously.
Welcome to my world.
Yeah.
And, but anyway, so I, yeah.
So I tried out the ultimate fighter
and the house was, as an interesting experience,
it is reality.
I mean, there's no, they don't tell you to do anything,
but they do give you alcohol.
And when you edit a reality show,
you can ask people certain questions
to get them to say certain things.
And you edit it, right?
So you've got 100% of your footage
and maybe you show 5% of it.
And they can misrepresent what you're saying.
So for example, they ask you,
what is the worst song you've got on your iPod
or whatever it was at the time?
And I said, nah, I don't know.
Or the fun that, the song that most people would make fun of
or something like that.
And I still like it, but it was like Brian Adams,
Everything I Do.
Classic, but.
Yeah, it's good, it's good, right?
It's a good song.
But still, it was like,
which is the worst song or the song
that people make fun of?
So then on television, they said,
here are the favorite songs of the people
in The Ultimate Fighter.
And then they cut to me saying,
Brian Adams, Everything I Do.
So they can tweak stuff, but basically it was real.
They can just edit it in a certain way.
And then the worst part was as it got towards the end,
because as people were lost and out of the competition,
early on in The Ultimate Fighters,
they would leave the house.
But not anymore, right?
And when I was on, not anymore.
So basically you've got people
that are now not training as hard.
No, they've got nothing to win.
They're sort of sitting around maybe
in case someone gets injured and step up.
But basically they've got no incentive to train properly,
to get up early.
So they're drinking like crazy, partying in the house.
And like the night of the finale,
people were up like 3 a.m. the night before,
screaming, throwing each other in the pool,
getting in some fights, throwing flour
on people's faces, just goofing around.
And you're trying to, as a serious professional,
you're trying to sleep and get ready
for the fight the next day.
So that definitely wasn't easy.
And not being away from who's now my wife
and from all your friends, no television, no phone,
no newspapers, no magazines, no internet, nothing.
It's an interesting experience.
Yeah, and like I said, just from a viewer's perspective,
if you were gonna move the chess pieces around
to maximize the possibility of drama,
then I think they had that down with the removal
of any healthy stimuli and then introduction of alcohol.
Because I mean, we all know,
there's very few people that drink.
They're like, oh, I think I'm gonna write some poetry today.
We normally get a bit rowdy.
Totally, and talking about healthy stimuli,
so I actually created a chess board
out of a piece of cardboard box.
They wouldn't let you buy any pack of cards, nothing.
So I created a chess board out of a cardboard box
that the food came in.
And what else did we do?
Oh, we did bottle caps.
So I blank mark a pen to create the squares.
And we used different bottle caps
and different things to make the chess pieces.
And then in fact, I ended up getting that signed
by everyone on the British team, UK team,
Dana White, Lorenzo Fittito, and all those guys.
So I still got that at home.
That provided some mental stimulation.
Brilliant, I remember one of the seasons,
his name was Jonathan, wasn't Davy a sudden thing,
but he was the kind of white guy, had the dreadlocks.
But when all the tomfoolery was going on,
he was always out in the garden,
meditating, doing yoga or something.
And I was amazed at the discipline that he had
to separate himself, even though, I mean, I don't know,
what, they had 12 in the house or something,
to be the only person out there.
And I think he ended up winning as well.
But I don't know what happened to him though.
He was a hell of a jiu-jitsu guy, I know that.
But, so then you won the Ultimate Fighter.
So then what was that after?
I mean, what was your journey like?
Yeah, it was an interesting experience really,
because I'd sort of really set my mind
on winning the Ultimate Fighter,
but hadn't really thought about
what if I won? the consequences of that.
Yeah. You know, I thought I felt pretty confident
that I could win, but I only had this sort of one goal.
And, you know, to be honest, like I enjoyed fighting
after that and sparingly training for it.
And there's elements that I, you know,
I was really sort of early on, I was very nervous going at,
you know, walking in front of 20,000 people to fight
to start with, but I feel like you've always got
to put yourself in those situations
where you're uncomfortable, it makes you grow as a person.
But to be honest, I just didn't have the drive to fight
in the sport, because first of all,
it wasn't my main sort of area of expertise
or desire or interest, because my interest was always
sort of street self-defense, which would include
like multiple attackers, you know, verbalization,
posturing, fight evasion, mental awareness,
knife defense, using a knife, using improvised weapons,
gun defense, you know, all sorts
of different elements basically.
So it wasn't my main interest.
And I just didn't really have the passion for it
as I did, you know, going towards the ultimate fighter,
I really set a goal.
And after that, I didn't really have a goal
that was driving to me.
And I felt now, I felt like I was just fighting
for a paycheck, you know, it just wasn't as interesting
to me, and I thought like, felt like I had to fight now
because I signed a contract and now it's, you know,
I'm making $50,000 a fight or whatever with the sponsorship
and then with the pay from UFC.
And just felt like I was fighting because I had to,
you know, it wasn't as interesting for me as it was,
like leading up to the ultimate fighter.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that burning desire,
that internal why is so important.
You see that even with people who have done very well,
like Georges St. Pierre, like you could see again,
as a fan watching that there was a certain point
where you're like, why would you want to keep fighting?
Right.
You know what I mean?
You kind of peaked, you've out wrestled wrestlers,
you've out boxed, you know what I mean?
It's such an incredible athlete,
a certain point, I know the same with the fire and police,
a certain point where like,
where's that balance between loving this job,
but then this job starting to be detrimental
to your family, your health, you know,
and if I think the smart ones know when to also
say enough is enough.
And it could be, you know, what you did,
just winning the ultimate fighter
and then going, all right, I'm good.
But there's other ones that, you know,
keep fighting and fighting and fighting,
and that might be great for them,
but you also see the detriments of that, you know,
the fighters that are in their 40s, you know, 50s,
even that, you know, getting Parkinson's
and all these things too.
Sure.
Yeah, and I think, I know, you know,
guys that are still fighting in the UFC,
and some of them are definitely doing it
because they're super passionate about it,
but I think quite a few of them are doing it because,
I mean, it's hard to turn down that paycheck,
and for a lot of them, you know,
what else would they do that was paying that kind of money?
So I think that's sort of sad though,
when you're doing it just for the money.
Yeah, exactly.
Because, I mean, there are so many other ways,
but I think a lot of these fighters,
when you hear the backstories,
and a lot of them have come from pretty rough upbringings,
which I think is definitely a good ingredient for a fighter,
but, you know, are they also being shown
that there are other ways?
Just because you're a great fighter,
doesn't mean that you couldn't be the next,
couldn't write the next amazing book
or be a great teacher for kids, you know, whatever it is.
Right, so then I know you hurt your knee,
and that'd be a great segue into the movie and everything,
but up to that point, as an athlete,
who, you know, did very well,
what was your nutrition like at that point?
So I was mainly eating what people would sort of consider
as a healthy sort of athletic diet.
So I was doing extra lean turkey, chicken breast,
brown rice, broccoli, a lot of brown rice and broccoli
with the chicken breast.
Yeah, so the bodybuilder diet.
I mean, I still do oatmeal, you know,
which is what I still eat today.
So, and I'd have, you know, I'd have steak occasionally,
not all that often.
Sometimes I'd go to In-N-Out.
So I would definitely eat some sort of, some process,
you know, sometimes some crisps or chips,
whatever you want to call them,
depending on which country you're in.
But I was mainly eating pretty healthy,
what people would consider pretty healthy.
Towards the end, before I switched to going plant-based,
I would eat, I started looking at sort of more of a paleo-type
diet, so I was eating grass-fed beef and like air-chilled
chicken and those sorts of foods.
But for most of it, it was, you know,
as I said, it's like extra lean stuff.
I thought that like, you know,
chicken and turkey was the way to go with, you know,
with plant foods and other veg, you know,
some other vegetables, but it was pretty boring, honestly.
Yeah. Well, I think that's it.
Is again, one of the things of the podcast is,
is trying to reverse engineer some of the bullshit
that we've been taught.
And we kind of are from the same generation.
Like if you want to work out and you go work your way
through the YMCA bodybuilding machines, you know,
and you want to eat well, just have a giant bowl of pasta,
you know, and now we're realizing, well, you know, yeah,
if you want to be a bodybuilder, absolutely.
Those are great machines for bodybuilding.
But if you want to be a tactical athlete,
you may find some incredibly weak links in that chain,
if you're only using machines, for example.
Yeah. Well, I think one of the biggest things,
the difference between say bodybuilding
or what most people do at the gym,
and then sort of technical athlete training,
is that we work a lot of linear stuff, right?
As at the gym.
So you're pushing and pulling on that plane.
It's just like straight.
But if you look at all sports and like most tactical stuff,
like realistic functional things
that you're going to be doing out in the field,
there's a lot of rotational stuff.
And I think that's lacking in most people's training, right?
It's that rotation with the core
and the stability and that type of thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
And what I found, because I teach at a gym
and it's predominantly a CrossFit gym.
And I think that modality is great.
I think our coaching staff,
we've got a very young coach who does the programming.
Excellent now, you know, floor work and accessory work
and all that stuff built into the warmups
and really, really good.
But I noticed for a tactical athlete point of view,
that kind of like you're saying,
our feet don't move very much.
We're standing in place.
Whereas most tactical athletes
are moving some sort of weight over distance,
a fire hose, a ladder, chasing a perp, whatever it is.
And that was the element that was missing.
So the class that I teach is a lot of sandbag sleds,
those kinds of things.
Yeah, I love that stuff.
Unilateral carries.
Brilliant.
So then talk me through the injury
and then the epiphany that you had after that.
Yeah, and so, and it's also the stuff
that's not covered in the documentary
that of why I actually retired
so that we can go into that stuff as well.
Yeah, because I mean,
the goal is to bring some unique things to the conversation.
Yeah, so it's tricky because you make a documentary,
but you can't cover every aspect and go into every detail.
I mean, even when we interviewed a lot of people
for the documentary, which we'll talk about in a minute,
some of the interviews were two hours long,
four hours long, and these experts,
and it's tough to like get it down into 90 minutes.
But anyway, so no, so what happened was
I was sparring with Fabricio Vadum,
who later became the heavyweight champion
at one point of the UFC.
He had like 70, 80, 90 pounds maybe on me
because I fought at 170.
And I was two weeks out from a fight
that I'd been given on short notice.
And basically sparring and I was tagging him
and he was getting pretty angry with me
and he was sort of trying to hit me.
And of course I've got a lot less power than he does,
but because I'm lighter, I was faster than he was.
And he was getting annoyed.
And then we were supposed to just be kickboxing,
but he's basically stormed at me,
sort of blasting me in the face.
And then a flying knee took me off the ground,
hit me in the sternum, took me off the ground.
And when I landed, there was sweat on the floor
and my feet slipped out from under me, you know, sideways.
And then the sweat stopped.
And then even though it was supposed to be kickboxing,
he sort of sprawled on top of me.
So I had his weight on top of me,
like maybe 260 or whatever he is.
And then my weight, I was like probably 185
leading up to the fight and basically stopped.
And then all of his weight and my weight
went through my knees.
And I tore my MCL on one leg and the LCL on the other leg,
about 50% on one and like 30% on the other.
It was extremely painful at the time.
But then the next day I realized,
I got to pull out this fire, unfortunately.
And so I started really just thinking,
what can I do that's productive with my time?
And so I knew I'd have like six months
where I really couldn't train.
And so I thought, well, I'll just start spending my time
digging into the peer-reviewed research on nutrition
for optimal recovery and then athletic performance.
And that's when I came across a study
about the Roman gladiators.
So they unearthed 68 gladiator skeletons,
5,000 bones in Ephesus, Turkey,
which at the time was the only known for sure burial site
of gladiators in the world.
And scientists analyzed the bones and they can tell
there's a strontium calcium analysis,
there's a radioisotope analysis.
Again, we didn't cover everything in the film
because you can't.
But they basically indicated that they were eating
the vast majority of the calories from plants.
And that's when I thought, well, that can't be true
because you've got to eat animal protein,
especially meat to be strong and healthy,
especially as an athlete and even more so as a man.
And so that's when I just started really digging in
more and more to the research and then realized
that we've really been fooled by the meat industry
into believing that we need those foods
to be strong and healthy.
And so that led into the game changer's documentary,
which I made.
Because the documentary doesn't touch on everything.
So basically I continued after I'd healed up
and it actually took a little bit over a year
until I was really training properly again.
Because I had some things like I had PRP,
platelet rich plasma therapy in the knees,
which again now there's been studies
showing that it's questionable on its efficacy
and it may be placebo, it might be because you're told
to rest for a month after the injection, but whatever.
I didn't end up needing surgery on my knees.
So they healed.
I still get like, if it's cold outside,
still get a little bit of pain in there,
but generally they've healed really well.
But so I did end up actually training for a fight.
I remember shooting a double leg on someone
and they moved out the way and I hit my head on the wall.
There was a padded wall and it sent pains down my spine.
And I'd actually fractured, broken my neck,
you know, when I was younger.
And I was really worried.
I thought I'd broken my neck.
So I went and got an MRI and they said,
yeah, you've got, you know, severe stenosis.
Stenosis is the narrowing of a canal.
So basically around on the inside of my vertebra
where your spinal cord goes,
the bones have grown in from the front and the back.
Usually you've got space.
So when you get hit in the head, you know,
your head moves and your spinal cord's got some room
inside of the vertebra.
But the bones are grown from the front and the back
and they're actually touching my spinal cord.
So basically I went to four different,
got four opinions from experts and they said, yeah,
you've got, all of them said significantly
higher risk of paralysis.
And so I trained for a fight and I was feeling really good
after I'd started switching my diet
because the researcher came across.
But again, in a documentary, you don't have time to explain
all of the, you know, every single detail.
You know, like I say, I got injured after, you know,
while I was in the UFC, but I didn't explain like a couple
of fights in between after I won the ultimate fight.
You just, you just can't,
making a documentary is really tricky trying to figure out
what you can fit in.
You feel like before you make it, you know,
there's like 50 people that we filmed
that never made it into the documentary.
You just feel like you can fit loads in.
But in reality, you've got 90 minutes to not only put
the science in there, but tell some interesting stories
and go into detail about stuff.
So yeah, that didn't make it into the documentary
about why I medically retired from the UFC.
But so I basically just, you know,
woke up at two in the morning after I was starting
to read all this research and thought,
I've got to tell everybody about this
because I hate being lied to.
And I felt like we've been lied to here, you know,
let's make a documentary.
And so started off with a used camera off of Craigslist
called the Everett Motta, who was the director
of photography from the ultimate fighter and said,
hey, what camera do I buy?
You know, and I went on YouTube,
learned to do the three point lighting for interview setup,
bought a little wireless mic.
Knowing that that footage might not get used
in a proper documentary, I'd either edit it myself
and put it online on YouTube or something,
or I'd use that footage to get other people interested
and sort of grow from there, which is what happened.
Yeah, that's a brilliant way of doing it.
There's so many people I think trying to over plan
whatever it is they're thinking about.
And it's the same with this.
Remember listening to Tim Ferriss and one of his advices
to start a podcast he's talking about in the episode
was just do it.
Yeah, just do it.
Pull the trigger, you know.
Too many people wait so long to get things perfect.
And that hinders a lot of people
and it just never ends up getting done.
Yeah.
Like how many people do you think have said
they're gonna write a book one day?
Well, this guy, I'm about two thirds of the way
and I hit a wall, so.
But at least I started that.
You just gotta do it, you know?
Yeah, I think you just gotta do it and not worry.
I think they say like perfection is the enemy of good,
you know, and so we've always aimed with the film
to make things like an eight out of 10.
Because if, you know, people say,
oh, try and always give it your best.
And like, yeah, give it your best,
but like if you expect a 10 out of 10 for everything,
you're gonna hinder yourself.
And although the documentary took years to make
and it was ridiculous and, you know,
it took a long time to raise money
and a long time to shoot things
and a long time to learn about making a documentary
as you're making a documentary.
And right now we could do it for half the money
with half the amount of time probably now that I know more.
Yeah, but at the time, like first time filmmaker, you know?
But you just gotta get on and do it, I think,
and sort of go from there and that's what happened.
So 2013, so in 2012, I connected with Joseph Pace
who became the other producer and one of the two writers
and he was instrumental in getting this done.
He had been plant-based for 25 years.
He'd got some script writing experience.
He'd also done a lot of research in university
into the health aspects of a plant-based diet,
the environmental aspects.
He helped coordinate a 60,000 word report on health,
impacts on rural communities, the environment,
animal welfare.
So he just, you know, he really knew a lot about the space
and about script writing and so we teamed up.
2013, we raised some money.
We did some sort of preliminary filming.
Realized that it wasn't the quality that we needed
and there was some really interesting stories
and we needed like a master storyteller.
So we put it all on hold.
Almost the whole of 2014, basically,
we put together a little sizzle reel
and that's when we met Louis Tsouhoyos
who became the director.
So Louis has the most award-winning documentary
of all time, the first film he made.
Which is what?
It's called The Cove.
I've never heard of that.
Yeah, it's really good.
It's about the dolphins.
Well, it's about many things,
but it also looks at the dolphins in Taiji, Japan,
where they sort of trap them all
and then slaughter them for dolphin meat
and they save a couple of the best ones
to sell to SeaWorld.
It's about more than that,
but there's the trainer of Flipper in there,
you know, from the film who sort of ends up
going the other way and starts rescuing dolphins
instead of sort of entrapping them.
So we teamed up with him and then also in 2014,
we were fortunate enough to have a meeting
with James Cameron and he got behind the project
and it just sort of snowballed from there.
So 2015, I think it was April,
we started re-shooting again with this new crew
with a bigger budget, with, yeah,
just some really amazing people.
Mark Monroe, who's a top documentary writer,
Dan Sweetlick, who's a two-time Eddie winner,
that's the best award you can get for editors.
So just this amazing team, shooting in 4K,
better equipment.
So it took a long time, you know,
you shoot for a couple of years
and then they say for editing,
you need to allow for every 10 minutes in a film
you allow one month of editing.
So a 90-minute film, that's nine months, right?
And then you've got to produce the score,
which is the music track,
which a lot of stuff was composed for the film.
Then we came out, we sort of spent six months actually
editing Act One and there's like three acts in a film,
typically this is how you sort of format.
And we got offered to go to Sundance Film Festival,
but we only had two weeks to get it submitted
and we hadn't really done Act Three.
So we'd worked on Act Two for a few months
and then so we rushed in Act Three, got it out
and it was really well received at Sundance,
but we weren't really happy with it.
I feel like it was like a seven out of 10 or something.
And the ending was kind of flat because we'd rushed it,
the pacing was a little bit slow,
you know, that we could have improved the score quite a bit.
So in 2018, we went back into filming,
we filmed the story of the Tennessee Titans,
you know, the football players and the chef that,
Charity Morgan, this amazing chef that was cooking for them.
And we filmed a bit with Lewis Hamilton,
but we just improved the pacing and the music
and the timing and the ending.
And so we weren't really done with it until later on in 2018.
And then of course you go into distribution
and those negotiations take quite a while.
And we could have got it out sooner,
but these distributors, they wanted more control,
they didn't want us to put out resources afterwards.
And so we ended up self distributing
and it didn't come out until, what was it?
September of this year, 2019.
Right, now is that self distribution
why you see some films doing that one night showing
and then going to the online platform?
Yeah, so we did a one night, I think it was like,
it was over 1200 or maybe 1500 theaters,
I can't remember what it was, around the world on one night.
So we partnered with a company called Fathom Events,
and they specialize in this sort of one night event theater
where it wasn't just the film, it was also,
we did 22 minutes of bonus content that went afterwards,
like an after show.
And so yeah, we partnered up with them to specialize in that
because if you go with a traditional,
we wanted to get it out to the world as soon as possible.
And if you go with the traditional theater route,
with a traditional theatrical distributor,
you have to wait 90 days until you can put it
onto a transactional platform at least, for streaming.
And we didn't want those restrictions.
We had a lot of offers from Netflix
for it to be a Netflix original,
but again, it would have only been on there.
And there was restrictions around screenings
and things like that.
And so we really wanted as many people as possible
just to be able to have access to the film.
That was one of our main goals.
And so we basically negotiated with different distributors,
but we organized all the marketing and distribution.
So it's on Netflix, for example, and people say,
oh, it's a Netflix documentary.
It's not a Netflix original,
it just happens to be on Netflix as a licensed deal.
But it's also on Google Play, iTunes, Vimeo, Fandango Now.
This, just this next week,
we're coming out with DVD and Blu-ray,
which surprisingly a lot of people are asking for,
especially doctors who are asking for like 500 or 1,000
to hand out to their patients.
Oh really?
Yeah.
And so yeah, we just wanted it as wide as possible.
It's gonna be in China soon on a platform
that's got 800 million viewers,
twice the size of Netflix has worldwide.
So that's all we were doing is just trying to get it out
and so people could watch it.
Brilliant.
Well, I wanna just go back for a second.
So your own personal experience with switching
to plant-based, what did you,
James Wilkes find in your own life?
Yeah, so after I'd seen a bunch of the evidence
and met some of the athletes,
I thought I'm gonna give this a try.
I wasn't committing to do it forever,
which I don't think people should.
I mean, I think they should just try it
and see how they feel.
So I switched and I cut out red meat first
and then chicken and then dairy
and then fish and eggs were the last to go.
And I started feeling better honestly.
Like my recovery was one of the things
that just seemed faster.
And because my knees were injured at the time,
as you've seen in the documentary,
I was doing this ropes.
So the challenge was a 50 foot, two inch shipping rope.
So it's looped around, it's 25 foot in each hand.
And you're doing the battling ropes.
And the most I'd ever got was eight minutes.
And it was a gym of like,
and you had to do it at a certain pace
and you had to keep the waves going.
And it was the same style of ropes.
It wasn't mixing them all up.
Yeah, it's the up and down one, the whole straight.
And not sprint, if you sprint that,
it's tough to do it for like three minutes.
So it was more like a jog basically than a sprint.
But at that pace, I'd only got eight minutes before.
There was a bunch of collegiate or professional athletes
at the UFC fighters at this gym we were training at.
And the most I'd ever got was eight minutes.
If you got 10 minutes, you got your name on the wall.
And there was some people that got 20 minutes.
And so six weeks after I was like 100% plant-based,
I got an hour straight and my hands were bleeding
actually a little bit from the blisters that opened up
and still felt like I could have kept going honestly.
Yeah, and so again, that's just anecdotal.
It doesn't prove anything, but it's interesting.
And then another thing I didn't get to mention in the film
is my bench press, dumbbell bench press, right?
In each hand, I had been stuck at 105
for about five reps for over two years.
And so for some people, they say,
some people laugh and go, that's nothing.
Like, that's pretty weak.
I've got a pretty small chest.
105 dumbbells?
Yeah, some people laugh and say that's nothing.
And then some people say, oh, that's a fair bit of weight.
So it depends who you are.
To me, that's a fair bit of weight.
But if you're a power lifter or something,
then you're like, I've literally had people call me out
when I've given a speech before and they're laughing.
So whatever, I fought at 170, it was 105.
I think it's decent.
You can see my back is much bigger than my chest.
I've never had a big chest.
Yeah, well, most strikers don't.
Right.
I mean, I remember when I started lifting,
even when I was out here in the States,
I was struggling with 85s.
I was younger, like in my 20s.
So I built up to 105s.
And again, within weeks of switching,
I went up to 115s for six reps.
Again, totally anecdotal.
Doesn't prove anything.
It's interesting.
And I think it's reflective of the science
that we know about nutrition.
Now, what about your digestive system?
Because that's something that I know
didn't really discuss in the film so much.
And even in Joe and Chris's discussion,
anecdotally for me, that was one of the biggest thing I noticed.
So I'm not plant-based at the moment.
But just like you said, I did it for a while.
I did a hard reset kind of thing.
But I was amazed.
Removing dairy got rid of a lifelong stomach issue.
I was in hospital with abdominal pains and constipation
and all these awful things.
I won't go into too much detail, but it
sucks to be relieved of constipation.
And then my dad is a vet.
So the entire veterinary world, the fecal matter
is one of the diagnostic tools.
And I realized that switching to plant-based,
everything was working better.
And without being too graphic, the toilet paper usage
went down a lot, if you know what I'm saying.
So what about you for that side?
Well, first of all, I'd mention as well
that some people actually have, let's
say they don't have a problem with dairy,
or they weren't doing what they had to start with.
If people get inspired, they suddenly
jump into 100% plant-based from whatever they're eating,
that can actually cause some distress and upset as well.
So I don't want to sugarcoat things and say,
just switch.
And it's all great.
And it's easy.
It's completely easy.
Don't worry about it.
Because some people will experience
gastrointestinal distress in early stages
if they jump in 100%.
Because you've suddenly gone from not having enough fiber
to plenty of fiber.
And if your gut's not used to it,
and there's certain bacteria in your gut, in the microbiome
that's used to breaking down certain foods,
in an early stage, now I'm not trying
to discourage people from jumping in overnight.
But most people generally do better working gradually.
So I would just point out that some people,
I didn't really experience that myself, probably because I sort
of, it was only over the space of like six weeks
or two months or something that I sort of transferred over
to 100%.
So I don't remember really experiencing that.
But I would point out that people beware.
If they do switch overnight, that they
might have some issues in the first few weeks or whatever.
But personally, I don't know.
And I think, yeah, it's probably easier going to the bathroom
than it was before.
Doesn't take as long as it did before.
But I don't feel like I got huge distress from drinking dairy,
which I'd occasionally drink.
I wasn't a huge milk drinker.
So again, I don't want to oversell it.
It's not like it was a cure-all for me.
I didn't have gut issues really before
that I can really recall.
But certainly, yeah, in terms of going to the bathroom,
I mean, things are just feel just regular and better.
Yeah, definitely.
What about pain, inflammation?
Did you see any relief on that side?
Yeah, I feel like recovery from workouts felt better.
And then people say, oh, well, did your knees heal better
because of the diet?
I don't know.
Because we didn't have a controlled experiment.
Both knees weren't.
Like, if you could injure one knee exactly in the same way
and test it and then exactly the other way
and control for all variables, I don't know.
They healed well, but it did take a long time.
Like, after about five or six months,
I tried going back and training jiu-jitsu,
tweaked my knee again.
Someone pulled it another couple months in, tweaked it again.
Probably tried to go back in too early.
So I don't know.
I mean, I feel like I recover better than I did before.
And I feel like my endurance has improved.
And I feel like my strength went up.
But again, I can't prove that that's causal based on the diet
or even though I think that it's backed by what
I know about inflammation.
Because that's really the key thing, right?
Is that animal foods tend to be inflammatory.
Plant foods tend to be anti-inflammatory.
And so inflammation is geared around blood flow.
So we know that inflammation in the arteries
slows down your blood, which means you got less oxygen,
less nutrients to the muscles.
So you don't want to have that inflammation.
Now, just to explain, though, because people sort of say,
oh, inflammation bad, no inflammation good.
That's not quite true.
So you actually need acute short-term inflammation.
That's part of the recovery process.
If you didn't have inflammation, your muscles wouldn't grow.
And so you do need some of that short-term inflammation.
But you want to get through it quickly
so that you can train again more efficiently.
And then in terms of injuries, yeah,
you want to get through that quicker
because your injury will heal quicker.
And so I think my anecdotal experience is backed up also
by the science.
Yeah.
Now, because my whole perspective,
and I know as we were recording this now,
Game Changers came out.
Joe Rogan, Chris Cressa did a kind of critique.
I love Joe.
I think he's got a great show.
He's definitely someone who inspired me.
In their discussion, I know you're about to go and talk
to those guys yourself personally.
But the one area they didn't discuss
and the one area that resonated with me the most,
and I had Rip Esselstyn on the show before,
was it was specifically firefighters, which is awesome.
It was actually in the Friends of Firefighters building.
And I've had the head of that on the show as well.
But it's taking the average person.
So we're sitting here now.
I'm a pseudo-athlete, a weekend war-wrecking athlete.
You're an elite athlete.
So our experience is-
I don't know that anymore.
Regardless, you are already teaching.
And that's what the discussion was with them as well.
Like these elite athletes that you have on the show.
To me, for this platform that I have,
the real impact is how can we affect
the majority of the population,
many of whom, when we look out the window,
are obese, have high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetic.
And that was a very pertinent thing
that Rip was showing in the film.
And it's also something that I've seen over and over again.
The Game Changers has had people in my circle
switch to that and they've had effects.
So whether it's, like you said,
whether it's for a couple of months or your lifetime,
there is no question that switching to that diet
where there's an emphasis on plants now,
putting in nutrients that probably weren't there
when you're having your old brown and yellow
plate of mac and cheese and chicken fried steak,
whatever it was, is a huge benefit.
And the details obviously can be argued in the minutiae.
So tell me about that portion,
the FDNY firemen and some of the blood work changes
that they saw.
Yeah, so I can't remember how many fighters,
like 40 or so firefighters.
And so basically, Rip Esselstyn,
who's a former firefighter and former professional triathlete,
very good swimmer.
In fact, he's one of the executive producers on the film.
He actually is the one that introduced us to James Cameron.
And I don't know if you know,
but he just broke the world record in backstroke
for his age group, the 200 meter backstroke,
just a few weeks ago.
And then like a couple of weeks later,
he's beat his own record again by a second.
So he's still like a phenomenal swimmer and in great shape.
And has been plant-based for, I don't know,
20 something years or whatever.
Because his dad's...
Dr. Coldwell Esselstyn.
Yes.
Right, who did the research at the Cleveland Clinic
and was able to reverse heart disease,
evidence through under angiograms,
seeing a reverse of plaque build up
and the arteries opening back up,
they're using a plant-based diet.
So where were we talking about the dairy?
I'm sorry, so the firefighters.
Oh, the dairy firefighters, yeah.
So basically, Rip put them on a sort of whole foods,
plant-based diet for one week.
And I can't remember the exact number,
but there was a drop in total cholesterol
of like 23 or 26 points.
Of course, that's not the only factor.
But again, for a documentary,
if you go into like HDL, LDL ratios and things like that,
and explaining like, there's not just LDL,
there's VLDL and there's the fluffiness of the particles.
And like that sort of people are gonna glaze over
and not a lot of people aren't gonna pick that up,
not because they're not smart enough,
but like for a documentary, you can't go into all of that.
So we actually did test more than was shown
in the documentary and there was improved blood markers
across the board.
People lost body fat and weight during that week
and just better blood pressure and lower LDLs,
better LDL HDL ratio.
And RIP's done this over and over again.
So like not just in the documentary,
Whole Foods, for example, the company,
these companies that self-insure,
there's a vested interest in getting
their employees healthier.
So because they self-insure,
instead of just like paying for heart surgery
and paying for a bunch of diabetes medicine,
they take their sickest employees
and they put them on a one week plant-based retreat
with people like RIP Hesleston and they get healthier
and they get off their diabetes medication often
and they lose body fat.
And if that prevents them from having heart surgery,
then you're saving like 150 grand right there.
So it's pretty interesting to see these large corporations
like Starbucks, for example,
spends more on healthcare of its employees
than it spends on coffee beans.
So it's a large expense for a big company like that.
So they're sort of starting to recognize
that plant-based eating is the way to go
to really help offset that.
But anyway, so it's been repeated again and again.
The cholesterol drop is somewhere in the mid-20s
every single time on average for every group that he's done.
LDL comes down and just improve blood markers.
Now, of course, you could say,
well, the whole plant food, sure, they did better on that
because they now weren't eating processed plant foods.
You could say that the benefit was from that.
You could say it's from incorporating more plants.
It could be nothing to do with cutting down the meat, right?
But so you can't, that experiment,
it's not even a real, it's not an experiment per se.
It's sort of one of three tests or experiments
that are done in the film.
And we're not claiming that those three things alone
are evidence that the plant-based diet is superior.
They're just sort of illustrations of what we know
from the science to be true.
And there is certainly a double benefit, right?
Like there's always an opportunity cost
of everything that you put in your mouth.
So if you put in a whole plant food,
you're then not putting in a processed,
that's offsetting the white sugar and flour
that you could be eating
or the bacon that you could be eating or whatever.
And it seems clear from the evidence
that the benefit is twofold.
It's both from incorporating that whole plant food
into your diet and it's from excreting
the animal foods and the processed plant foods as well.
Yeah, and that's what I see,
is rather than focusing on the absolute proof
of which categorically is the reason for this,
it's like taking a step back from a layman like I am
and saying, but it's working.
Whatever, it doesn't need to be explained.
We're taking out processed food, we're putting in good,
they've got this rainbow of colors on their plate,
they're getting way more nutrients than they ever did before.
And then what I found on my personal journey
was when I started factoring meat back in,
it had totally recalibrated my view of meat.
So now the quantity changed,
I'm not gonna have three meals a day of meat.
And if I do eat meat, it's gonna be a clean, grass-fed.
Ideally even some sort of ethical raising to it as well,
like really delving in,
taking that money that you had,
that you were spending on those three meals
and saying, all right, this is maybe a little bit more,
about where I shop now, it really isn't even that much more.
And then voting with your dollar.
Because if we keep buying the processed food,
we keep telling those companies, this is the demand,
keep sending us the shit.
Instead of saying, well, here's the money,
let's start in areas that you can,
let's promote local farmers to start growing local produce.
It doesn't have to be trucked 2,500 miles
across the country.
And let's encourage, if you do do the meat side,
well, let's encourage the polyface farms of the world.
Let's get the Joel Salatans to holistically raise the meat
if you're gonna do it that way.
So to me, if we spend time arguing about which is right,
which is wrong, we're missing the middle ground
where we've got a very sick nation overall.
And through just what you said,
introducing a lot more plant-based,
whether it's 100%, whether it's for a certain amount,
whether it's a tiny bit of meat, fish, eggs, whatever,
it's a win-win, you cannot fail.
I mean, that's what we're trying to get across
is like, we're not saying go vegan or go vegetarian,
but we do think that, I mean, I personally think
that there's strong enough evidence
to go 100% plant-based, right?
But what we're really saying to people is,
you should be really getting,
if you wanna be as healthy as possible
and perform as well as possible,
try and get the vast majority of your calories
from whole plant foods.
And then what those remaining things are,
like it's harder to prove the 95 to 100% plants
than it is to prove the 95% plants to the 50% plants, right?
And so, and the thing about plant-based diets,
you know, people think that the paleo diet
is the opposite of the whole foods vegan diet, it's not.
In fact, the longest study where they had a two-year follow-up
on the paleo diet, so they were taught,
the people in the trial were told to give up dairy, right?
They were told to eliminate or complete, you know,
as much as possible processed foods,
white sugar, flour, white bread, you know, this type of stuff.
They were told to increase their meat consumption,
and they were told to increase their fruits and vegetables
and, you know, berries and all this type of stuff, right?
So what actually happened on the two-year follow-up
is that they followed all of the recommendations
except for they did not increase their meat intake.
So to me, you just cut out dairy and animal food,
you just cut out processed foods,
which most people can agree are bad,
and then you increased your plant consumption
of fruits and vegetables,
but you didn't increase your meat consumption.
To me, that is moving from like a standard Western diet
to a more plant-based diet.
You're including more plant-based foods in there.
So I think that's one of the important things.
So if you want to include, you know, a bit of meat
or a bit of fish, a bit of eggs in your diet,
that's one thing.
Again, you know, I think the science is strong enough
to say that there's the opportunity cost
where you could have had more plant foods.
And again, some people will get inspired to go vegan,
and they'll take the meat off their plate,
and then maybe they're not replacing it with,
they just take the meat off and they just eat what's left.
Maybe they throw in more vegetables.
While you could be calorically deficient,
because vegetables are very low caloric density,
and so perhaps you weren't replacing it
with the best things.
There's certainly certain nutrients in animal foods
that you can get easily, so you could argue,
well, I could just eat a bit of meat,
then I can get it easier here.
But with a bit of forethought and planning,
you can really make it quite simple
to get all of the nutrients you need on a plant-based diet.
And of course, there are things like B12
that people should be supplementing.
But again, it's not about what I think,
in my interpretation of the evidence,
thinking that it's best to get 100%
of your calories from plants,
but certainly getting the vast majority
of your calories from whole plant foods
is basically scientific consensus.
Yeah, and what I've observed as well,
I think for me, if I know someone
who's really struggling physically,
I think a plant-based is a great baseline.
For many reasons, firstly,
they were discussing the vegan honeymoon.
I think that's what a lot of people find.
So initially, you're gonna feel great regardless,
whether you introduce meat or you don't.
You're gonna learn how to cook.
Huge thing in this country at the moment.
You're gonna understand what other fruits and vegetables
actually look like, how to prepare them.
So again, if you start pulling things back in,
it's less likely to be from a process thing.
But again, I don't see any negative side,
but you get these people from inflamed and chronically sick.
You get the blood sugar back where it needs to be.
You get their blood markers back.
You get the inflammatory markers down.
Through doing this, which again, like you said,
removing all the nasty stuff that they're eating,
then whatever that morphs into, if meat comes back in,
whatever it ends, you've set this baseline now
of a good nutritious plate of food
and understanding of preparation
and hopefully an understanding of the source.
Because one of the things, especially being a fireman,
we have hazmat teams on our department.
Watching a person in a hazmat suit
spraying our food with chemicals and that being okay
is fucking insanity to me.
Oh, you just soak it for an hour and then it'll be fine.
No, it's in every cell of the house.
Yeah, people think that the pesticides and stuff are just from contact.
They don't realize that most of the pesticides actually are systemic.
So they go into the soil and they're taken up by the roots and they're inside.
So people think, oh, a banana must be saved because it's got this thick skin.
They don't realize that it's gone up through the root system into the food itself.
Yeah. And what I was interesting, I know with Joe and Chris,
we were discussing it and they're talking about
the number of creatures that were killed growing,
but he did reference the pesticides and everything.
And I agree 100%.
I don't think that mono farming is healthy at all.
And it shouldn't be organophosphates and all these pesticides and things.
But if we go back to a holistic organic model again,
then I think it would be interesting to see the study of now the impact, even ethically.
And I'm not someone that's going to say,
I'm never going to kill an animal because I see that other side of it.
But you could definitely reduce it.
And then even with the meat consumption,
and I know that a lot of the hunting community,
they kill one deer and it lasts some months and months and months.
Whereas most consumers, three meals a day of a plate full of meat,
if you just took two of those meals out,
environmentally you'd have an impact.
If you then demanded holistic raised meat,
environmentally you'd have an impact.
If you demanded organic food,
fruit and vegetables and beans and legumes,
environmentally you'd have an impact.
So we can again vote with our dollar to force this nightmare
that our food has become this industrialization to go back to local farms.
And if you're in bigger cities,
then of course you can't grow it in the middle of New York City.
But New York State has so much arable land further out in New Jersey,
then we just help the LA's and the large cities of the world by one or two states over.
But we found ourselves in this bizarre Terminator 2 style environment,
but with our food.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, it's not black and white where if you eat all plants,
there's no animal deaths.
And if you eat just...
I think what you have to compare, though, is apples for apples.
So what sort of Joe will typically do is he'll take the best possible scenario
of hunting wild deer, which is not sustainable for the whole population.
And in a way, it's a little bit elitist, right?
Because Joe can afford to fly to Montana or wherever he does,
take a week off and go hunting.
And there's certainly people that live in rural communities that can do that.
But for people that live in LA, it's just not like a realistic scenario.
And also this sort of argument that there's more deaths of animals when there's wheat.
I mean, where are the majority of wheat and soy and everything?
Where is that?
In a realistic system, where is that being fed to?
95% of the soy crops that are grown in the Amazon are fed to livestock.
So those fires that are being illegally created now,
those are being laid down for both to grow crops for those animals and to let them pasture.
And also, there's been a lot of twisting of the facts.
So that main animal study came from a single acre in a 2003 study,
which said that there was 33 deaths of mice in a single crop area.
32 of those were actually found to be killed by predators.
Only one by the combine harvester.
And the fault with that study is that there was an assumption when they said that vegans kill more animals than, say, grass-fed beef.
There was an assumption that vegans and omnivores use the same amount of land as each other to grow the total amount of food.
And that's erroneous.
So when that study, there have been environmental scientists that have now reviewed that study and said, wait a minute.
And if you take the data from that study and take into account the amount of land that's used by a vegan versus an omnivore,
there are still far less deaths created by the vegans.
So there's a little bit of twisting, right?
Because people like to pick their things based on their bias.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think if you go in and we know about wild meat, not just in terms of the environment and animal deaths,
we know that wild-caught meat is healthier.
So the best, there's not really studies that I know of that have been done on elk.
But if you take in Australia, their sort of equivalent would be wild-caught kangaroo meat.
So that has actually been tested for the inflammatory markers.
They used both CRP, which is C-reactive protein, something called IL-6 and something called TNF-alpha.
And these are markers in the blood which are representative of inflammation.
So they tested sort of traditionally grown meat, factory farm type stuff, with the inflammation of these kangaroo meat that was wild-caught.
And certainly it showed there was about half the inflammation from these markers across each marker as there was from the meat.
So it was still inflammatory, but it wasn't as inflammatory.
And again, potentially better for the environment.
Certainly, I think there's an argument for that wild-caught.
I think it's questionable when we talk about grass-fed beef and grass-finished beef,
because a lot of cows are grass-fed anyway.
They're finished on grain.
But certainly, I think if you're going to choose some meat, I think going out and hunting some elk,
so long as you're not shooting it with lead bullets, by the way, because there's been implications of the lead in the meat and that sort of spreading throughout the meat.
So you're probably better shooting it without lead bullets.
It's probably going to be better to have small amounts of that than having factory farmed or even grass-fed beef.
Yeah. And that whole discussion to me, it kind of reminds me of the global warming discussion.
Like you got everyone who's for it, not for global warming, arguing that it's a thing.
And then the anti-community.
And I just remember standing in LA going, why are you two groups of ding-dongs are ready to kill each other over this?
I can't even see that mountain that's 50 feet away because of the smog.
So why don't we just focus on that instead?
The byproduct is probably going to be if global warming is a thing, we're going to improve it anyway.
But start with the things that you can see.
And the same thing with what we're talking about.
While we're arguing about veganism versus carnivorism,
the middle ground is can we please stop spraying our crops with pesticides?
Can we stop keeping our animals in these horrific factories and feeding them antibiotics because they're basically about to die?
And these chickens, their breasts are so big, they're breaking their legs.
And like, can we start there?
Then we can work out, you know?
And that's the thing. To me, it's almost a distraction.
I think these middle corporations are loving the fact that there's this back and forth because the middle ground is, you know,
is where most people are going to connect with, right or wrong on the outside carnivore.
That's where most people are going to connect with.
And right now we have a very unhealthy society, an absolute dependency on these chronic disease meds.
And as a paramedic, firefighter paramedic, the number of people that I've lost in a cardiac arrest,
I had a sack full of these meds.
I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars in this bag that we're told this will fix this, this will fix that.
When the reality is exactly what you, you know, where you and Joe and Chris agree, which is however it's done,
changing what goes in these people's mouths as a, you know, the majority of it is the key, you know?
And that's what really frustrates me is both sides are right.
You know, both sides are thriving. Both sides are saying, look at me, this is working for me.
But, you know, instead of the information being immersive where, you know, they're listening to you, listening to them,
it's turned into this, you know, frickin Trump versus Clinton battleground.
And in the meantime, everyone's so distracted that they're still eating the shit.
And, you know, like game changers, for example, oh, I just heard that was bullshit.
I'm going to go back to McDonald's and get my burgers again.
Instead of as an interesting view, you know, person X, whether I agree with it or disagree,
it's definitely inspired me to look at my plate and go, OK, there's definitely some shit on here that I need to remove.
Right. Yeah, totally.
And the good thing is that's the thing about a documentary.
Don't just buy into whatever a documentary says.
Like look into yourself a little bit.
Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful. Reject what is useless.
Add what is specifically your own, as Bruce Lee would say.
And that for me was like, you know, I was originally on this search for truth in combat.
And I felt like I went for this search for truth in nutrition.
And I feel like I'm like a fairly smart guy that's like trying to be objective.
Of course, there's always like some biases and perhaps you believe in certain narratives or whatever.
But people should sort of it's tricky with nutrition, right?
Because people don't have the time and they don't have the necessary experience or the wherewithal and know how to read these scientific studies.
And there's so many and there's so much conflicting data that I do think it is tricky to know what to eat.
But I think, yeah, I think the issue with, you know, the factory farming and all this sort of stuff,
which I think most people would agree is not the right way to go, but is that people like want the most amount of food and the tastiest food for the cheapest amount.
So I think it's going to be hard to get away from that model because people just don't want to spend the extra money to pay for higher quality food.
You see, but it's interesting because you guys are in L.A.
So you don't have that arable land around you, but where I am in Florida, for example,
and most of America is pretty rich farmland.
If you look at it, I can go to my farmer's market and buy fruit and vegetables cheaper than the non-organic stuff in the grocery store.
Yeah, there are cattle farms around us.
There's a place called Earth Fair that has a great meat section if you're a meat eater, but it is it's grass fed, grass finished.
And it's really not that much different.
So I think there's also a fallacy of it being more expensive if you're in Newport Beach at Whole Foods.
I'm sure it's going to cost a lot more, you know, but, you know, if it's supply and demand, if everyone ends up demanding to have that kind of food, that's going to bring the price down.
Yeah, totally. I think I heard I can't remember what the guy's name was, but he was like the main purchaser for food for all of Walmart.
And he was saying it was like around 15 percent, 10 or 15 percent, when 10 or 15 percent of people were buying a certain like if they
10 or 15 percent bought organic fruits and vegetables all the time, it would basically bring the cost down nearly to the same as conventional.
I don't know if that's true, but that's what I heard.
So it'd be interesting to see.
And hopefully it does shift in that direction.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I want to get some closing questions because I know I'm going to let you go.
So before we talk about where everyone get the film, actually, this is one more thing, because this is another area I want to discuss.
I know they talked about it on on their analysis, but the erections.
OK, so in the movie, you know, they do that experiment.
They do the meat versus plant based.
They find that there's longer and stronger erections for these men that they use.
What is the long term?
Because I'll interject with kind of my my understanding of some stuff in a moment.
But that was a one day kind of observation, a two day observation.
Talking to Dr. Spitz, what's his kind of data on longer term, like overall sexual health with people that have moved to the plant base?
Yeah. And so the penis is considered by urologists to be the barometer for men's health.
Like if you get erectile dysfunction, it's considered the canary in the coal mine.
So arterial disease anywhere is arterial disease everywhere.
It is manifest and you just call them different diseases.
But the arteries that go to the penis is on the smallest in the body.
And that's why we asked Dr. Spitz if he thought there'd be an impact.
So the work on animal based heavy animal based meals and arterial function has been done for over 20 years.
That's that's pretty well known in the scientific literature.
And so we thought it'd be interesting to ask him.
And he was taking a step back.
People say, oh, we showed, you know, cloudy blood.
That's hypertriglyceride.
I think it's called. I can't remember the basically having lots of fat in the blood, you know, animal saturated fat especially.
And so it's called postprandial lipemia, which means fat in the blood.
And there's lactescence, which means the milkiness of the blood.
And of course, we only showed that in Dr. Robert Vogel, who's the co-chair of the cardiovascular committee for the NFL, basically said something about this impairs your blood flow.
But we didn't go much further. If you actually look at the experiments that have been done in the past.
In alignment with the milkiness of the blood is actually up to 50 percent reduced endothelial function.
You can actually like under ultrasound, you can look at the size of the arteries and opening up.
So the endothelium is the lining of the arteries, which produces nitric oxide and also something called prostaglandin, which are vasodilators.
They allow the arteries to open up more oxygen, more nutrients to go to the muscles and other organs.
So it's not just that the fat looks cloud, the blood looks cloudy in the serum.
It's that there's actually a knock on effect for that. And it lasts six to eight hours.
So anyway, we wanted to see if this would have an impact on an erectile function. And Dr. Spitz says, well, it's never been done.
But there is a device called the RIDGISCAN that you can it's a penile plasmograph.
The RIDGISCAN is the brand name. And you can test circumference and rigidity and duration of erection.
So, OK, let's try it. So, again, as Dr. Spitz points out in the film, this is not a scientifically validated experiment.
Now, as filmmakers, we could have cut him out, cut that bit out.
But we wanted to be honest and open, which is what we tried to do throughout the whole film.
We always made sure that the science was anything that we reference was reflective as the preponderance of evidence.
Right. You can always check some, you know, pick some study saying anything.
But we wanted to make sure that it was reflective of the preponderance of evidence.
So we know that a heavy animal based meal will impair arterial function for up to six to eight hours.
We know that the arteries are some of the smallest in the body going to the penis.
So it's likely that it would show up there more than it would show up elsewhere.
Studies have been done on fiber intake, which is a surrogate marker for plants.
Right. Because fiber comes from plants and erectile dysfunction.
People with less fiber have more. So basically, people eating less plants have more erectile dysfunction.
And people eating more plants have more erectile dysfunction.
And I think, you know, my understanding is that Dr. Spitz recommends that his patients eat about a 95 percent plant based diet.
Unless they have prostate cancer, in which he recommends they have a 100 percent plant based diet.
Just to be safe, like the precautionary principle.
And so it's not just about erectile dysfunction.
It's also about prostate cancer and just men's health in general.
But yeah, there needs to be, and there actually are some studies underway to see if the thing that we did in the film plays out with the larger subsets and under, you know, tighter controls and that sort of thing.
I mean, on the Joe Rogan podcast, I haven't watched all of it yet, by the way.
But he was saying, you know, maybe they smoke, maybe they don't smoke, maybe it was the first night effect.
Maybe they had an orgasm one night and didn't. They were asked not to masturbate or have sex.
None of them smoked. They were fit subjects.
Dr. Spitz thought that that might be more indicative of like, it might show up more.
They might be more sensitive to the impact, right?
Being like high athletes, probably got good arterial function at that age.
Regardless of the diet, they're probably eating what most people consider fairly healthy.
All of them were eating meat, obviously.
And so it wasn't it's not a study that you can rest on.
It was one night of one meal, one night of the other.
By the way, we did do some pilot trials before that where we reversed the order and did meat on one night and then we had similar results.
We don't put that in the film.
But, you know, so, yeah, was it well controlled enough?
No, I mean, it wasn't it wasn't like 100 people and like crossover and then a random crossover again and like double blind.
And no, I mean, this but we said that in the film.
We let it play in there. It's all the like that one and the one with the the test tubes and the firefighter.
Those were like narrative illustrations of a reflection of the science.
If we just put a bunch of text up the whole time and talking heads, people wouldn't watch it and find the film interesting.
So when you're making a documentary, you've got to find a balance between like putting enough science in, putting enough interesting stories in, having an interesting narrative.
Like, it's a tricky thing to make a film.
Less than one percent, by far less than one percent of the science that we uncovered during the making of the film went into the film.
So it's tricky. So like anything you do, you can pick apart.
You know, you someone can make a paleo documentary, a carnivore diet, be quite easy to try and take down and pick apart the film.
But there have been, you know, there are some longer term studies on fiber intake and, you know, I think there should be more studies,
you know, randomized controlled trials on specifically a completely whole foods plant based diet versus perhaps a sort of nutrivol diet or whatever Chris Cress would call it.
You know, a paleo diet or a carnivore diet. It would be great to see those things.
But right now we have to look at the totality of the evidence.
And, you know, all of the world's leading health authorities are suggesting that we predominantly eat plants.
And so we have to kind of go with that. And then there's certain mechanisms.
We know that there's more oxidation and more inflammation from the animal foods.
We know that there's anti-inflammatory and antioxidant capabilities of the plant foods, which all suggest that we should be eating either the vast majority of acalyse and plants or exclusively plants for not just erectile dysfunction, but also prostate cancer and heart disease and cancer and diabetes.
Yeah. Yeah. You see, and that what what, you know, the film didn't expand on what the discussion with Joe and Chris didn't expand on as well was regardless of that specific dramatization.
One of the most least known facts of male health is that your erection is indicative of your overall cardiovascular system.
Yeah, it's really important.
And so if you were taking a blue pill because you can't get a boner anymore, understand that's the absolute worst thing you could do.
Yeah. And then again, asking, you're masking the underlying cause, right?
Yeah. And so if again, you go full plant based, if you replace processed food with with plants and have your, you know, you don't give up your meat, whatever understanding that this is in your control and you can reverse your cardiovascular health and you can get your erections.
And then you obviously that's going to there's no question there's a link with your libido as well, which may have a knock on effect to the health of your marriage.
But that's what I find crushing is in our in our profession, the sleep deprivation again contributes to hormonal destruction and their testosterone is in the toilet.
So you add that to then some cardiovascular ill health.
You know, I'm 45, you know, you shouldn't be inactive.
But that's like an hour kind of age group is like, well, I am 40, you know, that's why I know it's bullshit.
But it might be normal. It doesn't mean it's optimal or should be as normal for society.
Right. I mean, it's normal for humans.
Right. My grandmother's one hundred and two.
So I mean, I'm not even middle aged yet in her lifeline.
I'm going to give up sex for half my lifetime.
Yeah, it's interesting. My grandmother lived to one hundred and two.
Oh, really? In fact, she was actually alive in three centuries, which must be pretty rare.
Yeah. So she was born in 1899 and died in 2001.
Wow. I bet there's very few people that can claim.
Now, there's some people that's obviously a small amount of people that live to a hundred,
but must be a much smaller number that have actually lived in three centuries.
But yeah, and she ate meat and eat sugar.
Yeah. And you always get, you know, on top of that, you get those.
And I think, again, that generation, you know, I grew up on a farm in England.
So we had a vegetable garden and I don't remember using many chemicals.
And, you know, I think most things just grew, you know, and if they had worms eating them, they had worms eating them, you know.
It doesn't have to look like a symmetrical piece of art if you're going to eat it.
But I think that generation was set up for success because they did cook the local butcher, even if they were eating meat.
You know, I know for me, you know, meat was kind of a luxury.
So you weren't quantity wise. Right. You weren't having as much.
No, not even the junk food as much. Yeah.
Yeah. And then and then, you know, this whole argument about, you know, is is the the clean meat costs, you know, carcinogenic.
Again, let's focus on the process, you know, where we know absolutely if you put nitrites and all these horrible things in this meat, that's sickly in the factory farms.
We know hands down, drop the mic that that's absolutely carcinogenic.
So, again, stop focusing on, oh, is this one?
You know, I mean, if you need to agree with that, like, let's say you spend the same amount of money or a bit less money and you basically got meat that was higher quality.
Right. You cut out you spend that money that you were spending on factory farmed crap meat and you basically had half as much and it was better quality.
Then you're already making a step in the right direction.
Again, I do think that there's arguments to cut it out.
For me, I think they're fairly strong, both for the opportunity cost of not getting in more plants, but also because I do think there's things even inherent to me without the antibiotics, without the hormones.
I think there's environmentalism, people talking about carbon sequestration of eating grass fed cows,
but people forget that if you go grass fed to finish a cow on the grass, it takes up to three years versus the six months on grain fed.
So the amount of methane that they're putting out is actually six times greater.
Now, does the carbon sequestration of being grass fed offset that?
Yeah, my understanding is that it doesn't.
And you're going to get there's some people saying that we could do this regenerative agriculture.
But that's not again, what I would rather do since I don't have a strong enough understanding of that science, I have to go with the consensus of those scientists.
You know, and they're saying that we should be cutting out animals and that, you know,
the regenerative farming of animals is not the way to go in terms of that we should be shifting towards more plant based diets, including the IPCC,
the International Panel on Climate Change is suggesting that we should be shifting towards more plant based diets,
particularly from an environmental perspective.
And again, I mean, even if you're going to eat some meat, just reducing that by two thirds,
to say you have one equivalent of what meal, you know, I mean, that two thirds of the agriculture,
you know, what we see in South America is horrendous what they're doing, especially as a lot of that meat is feeding,
you know, a lot of the processed places that end up in fast food.
And, you know, so we can have a direct impact, you know, and again, bringing it locally without waiting for some politician to push some motion that's going to force some company.
We can vote with our dollars like every single person stop going to McDonald's tomorrow.
They would shut down, you know, within a year.
And I'm not saying demonize McDonald's, but I love the way they're being forced to now bring more, you know, seemingly healthy things are still not, you know, the best.
But I think people misunderstand the power that we have.
And we all look to the top of these people in the White House, like, oh, change our country.
That they're the top of this pyramid. We're the base.
And if enough of us get pissed off and be like, I'm tired of my kids, you know, school feeding them shit, you know, and I just it drives me.
It's it's we have so much power with so much potential if we just join together instead of argue and fix the most obvious things first and then work our way out.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Power to the people.
All right. Well, then this transition, so we are getting a little late now.
The first question I love to ask people, is there a book that you love to recommend?
It can be about what we've discussed today or something completely different.
Yeah. And I think, you know, on this topic, I think How Not to Die by Dr.
Gregor, he was saying what, you know, it's not how to not die.
Right. Because people saying, well, you've got to die.
Yeah, it's not it's not how to not die. It's how not to die.
Right. So he looks at the leading causes of death and how they relate to to die.
And then he's now coming out with a book called How Not to Die, which I haven't read yet.
But interesting to see, because I really think he does a deep dive into the into the research.
So, you know, How Not to Die, I think is a great book and inspired my dad as well.
You know, after I talked to him, he talked to Dr. Esselstyn.
My dad's read that book twice now. So I think it's a great book.
Brilliant. OK, we'll just quickly talk about that.
So in the movie, your dad has a heart attack.
You know, he has stents put in, he switches to a plant base.
So here we are now quite a bit later. How's he doing?
He's doing really well. I just saw him last week, actually.
I flew back to England just for a couple of days to do some press.
And yeah, he seems to be doing really well.
You know, not it's not 100 percent on it, maybe like ninety ninety five percent.
But I think, again, that shift can make a massive difference.
He looks healthier to me.
And again, he was exercising before and he was eating what I would have
previously considered a pretty healthy diet, but he seems to be doing better
eating, you know, the vast majority of his calories from plant foods.
Brilliant. All right. Next question.
Is there a movie that you love?
Got to be into the dragon, I think.
If I can't choose the game changes, of course.
We're going to talk about the game changes at the moment.
So yeah, so I entered the dragon.
You know, it's just terms of martial arts film.
I think it's to me, it's the film. Right.
And then speaking of action movies, one of my other heroes
when I was young was Jackie Chan and obviously Schwarzenegger.
I actually doubled. I was a stunt double for I say double.
I worked in the Terminator two show in studios and I was the bad guy.
The motorcycle cop role of Patrick's character.
But, you know, he had Arnold back in it as well.
So how did you get involved with those guys?
So Arnold is buddies with Jim Cameron.
You know, they did the Terminator together, which sort of really
boosted Donald's career and Arnold's into plant based
eating for both health and but also for the environment.
And again, he's not vegan.
People say, oh, well, I was not vegan.
He's still he's never really drank milk, cow's milk.
He thinks it's for babies.
I mean, I probably take a step further and say it's for baby cows. But
and he's cut down his meat,
so he's cut down his meat consumption by 80 percent.
So I think that's the thing.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
But, you know, he's into the message.
And I think it's important that he gets across.
You know, his message is it's marketing.
You know, you've been lied to. You don't need it.
He likes the taste of steak still.
So like if you like the taste of it, then eat it.
But that doesn't mean that it's healthy or you need it to grow muscle
or maintain muscle or whatever else.
And I think it's important coming from basically the godfather of muscle
and bodybuilding, you know, to say that I used to believe this.
Then I realized it was marketing.
He's done a lot of his own research.
And and again, he's, you know, again, doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Is his message as well.
Just trying to shift in a more plant based direction.
Jackie Chan again,
because he was friends with Jim Cameron and again,
I think he's completely vegan.
He's into the environment, you know, like on set.
Apparently in Jackie's films, if you get a cup, you know, on the first day,
plastic cup instead of throwing it away, write your name on it,
use it the whole time.
So he's into the environment and, you know, into his health,
probably as he's getting older, so he's eating more plant based
and believes in the message.
Brilliant. All right.
So then we'll speak in the game changers.
Is there another documentary that you love?
You spoke of the Cove. Are there any other ones?
Trying to think of some things that I might.
You have seen Get Me Roger Stone?
No, that's a that's an interesting documentary.
You know, about how he's aided
a lot of the helping getting a lot of the presidents into power,
including Donald Trump.
Oh, that that kind of religious society?
No, no, it's just an adviser.
OK, a political adviser that I think also got into trouble recently.
I haven't really followed it, but it was an interesting documentary
to see how, you know, strings are pulled.
The Great Hack was a great one as well.
And if you've seen that.
No, I haven't. Yeah, that was really good.
Looking at the influence of.
Cambridge Analytica on the Brexit and on the presidential election.
Really amazing how they're tracking people's data and using that
and doing tens of thousands of different types of ads
to different individuals to make them vote in a certain way.
I think I did see that because that sounds very.
It's very recent.
It's a Netflix documentary.
I probably did then because I tend to watch a lot of that.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now that was great as well.
Interesting. Very interesting.
OK, then next question, is there a person that you'd recommend
to come on as a guest to speak to the first responders of military of the world?
I mean, Damien Mendes, great from the film,
you know, the special forces sniper.
And the other the other guy that's really interesting is Paul de Gelder.
He was also he actually worked with Damien.
So he was special forces in Australia as well.
But he lost his leg in his arm in a shark attack.
And now he's doing Shark Week with the Discovery Channel.
He'll skydive in.
I follow him on Instagram.
Yeah, he's an interesting guy.
And funny enough, he also happens to be plant based.
But but beyond that, he's got some interesting stories.
And his mindset is very interesting.
He'd be a really interesting person to talk to, I think. Excellent.
Well, thank you. All right.
So the last question before we go over where people find the film and
you know, contact you, what do you do to decompress when you're not
making documentaries and training?
Just exercise, honestly, like I feel like exercise is so key for
not just for like physical fitness, but for stress reduction.
And I love, you know, jujitsu grappling to me is like one of the best
things I could do because anything where you're like fully focused
and you can't think about anything else.
Like when someone's trying to choke you or break your arm,
it's pretty difficult to be thinking about the mortgage payment or,
you know, what, you know, the interview you've got the next day or,
you know, money issues, you know, whatever it is.
I think doing jujitsu is is one of the best things for me.
Brilliant. All right.
So then where can people find the game changers?
Yeah. So the film's available on, I mean, basically any platform
you could basically think of, it's on Amazon, it's on
Netflix, on iTunes, Vimeo, again, it'll soon be on DVD and Blu-ray.
And and also we're doing screenings now.
So we're starting to, it's like 4000 screening requests we've had.
So if you want to organize a screening in their community or their business,
we're going to have something online where you can sort of follow
the protocol and be able to do that.
And for some places, it's you know, there's no charge at all.
And for large businesses around the world, you know,
there's for large businesses there are, but there is for a licensing fee.
But yeah, just trying to get as many people to see as possible.
And then all the resources and recipes and shopping tips and tips
how to make the change towards more plant based eating is on GameChangersMovie.com.
The social media is Game Changers Movie on Facebook
and on Instagram and GC Movie on Twitter.
And then if you want to follow me personally,
it's Lightning Wilkes, W-I-L-K-S on Instagram.
Brilliant. Now, I love the film.
You know, I know, again, there was that discussion like trying to debunk it.
For me, I've seen so many people who have been inspired to look at how they eat.
Some of my members of my CrossFit Gym have come to me like James, are doing this now.
I've already dropped 10 pounds in a week.
So, again, it's inspiring people to eat well.
You know, I mean, I think Chris talks about the devils and the details.
Sometimes, you know, just forget the details.
Just look at the big picture, regardless of your experience, your interpretation,
like whether it's, you know, what the health as we're talking about before,
or folks over knives, everyone's going to have a different interpretation.
But if it's inspiring you to look at how you eat and improve it,
then you guys have won. I tell you now, you've already won.
For me, the number of people that have been inspired by it,
will they stay vegan, you know, full vegan the rest of their life?
Who knows? It depends on what happens to them.
But if you're going to improve the health of the nation,
to me, it's great because I see a whole bunch of people arguing,
doing absolutely fucking nothing to improve.
You know, we've got a very, very sick nation that we need to bring up.
So I want to thank you for making the film.
Yeah, no, thanks. And thanks for having me on the opportunity.
I mean, I think the main thing for me is if people just look at it
and open their eyes a little bit and sort of understand that,
you know, what they've been led to be believed to be true.
Maybe, you know, it's really not true. It's based on industry influence.
And if people just started eating more whole plant foods,
I think that would be a win, you know, for most people.
And however far they want to take it is great.
But, you know, do your own research, dig into it a little bit,
make some changes and see how you feel.
Yeah. And actually, it's funny because you mentioned earlier
about starting the film and, you know, waiting for perfection.
I think that's a perfect example.
You know, if it resonates with you, then just start. Change something.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to take you.
People used to come and check out my MMA gym,
which I sold because I was getting too busy.
But they'd say, oh, well, I'm going to wait till I get in shape.
And then I'll come down and then I'll come down and train.
And then I never end up showing up.
It's like, no, you get in shape by just coming down.
Like, yeah, it's going to you're going to suffer a little bit
when you first come down.
You're going to ache a little bit next day or whatever.
Just get in and do it.
And just, you know, again, it doesn't it's not all or nothing.
Just start incorporating like more plants.
Maybe you're having less meat on the plate and more plants
or maybe having some plant based meals that you like.
And to me, I think that's a win.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking.
It was almost two hours now talking to the audience.
Yeah, well, thanks again for the opportunity.