Strongman Robert Obert on Working With Disabled Kids

It's like I was, I'm actually like a little nervous about telling athletes that they should smoke weed now. Like that's nerve wracking because like you're whole dependent, you're dependent on your boss and the places you work and the things you do, right? So just saying something like that, if two people find that offensive and they raise enough hell, sure, that's a big fucking deal. But what we're just saying is like, it's better than Viking and it's better than Pills. It's a very much healthier alternative. Well you know what it is man? It's a tool. It's like you can abuse tools, but you could also use them correctly. I mean you don't want to fucking hammer nails with a saw, right? But if you use marijuana correctly and you have discipline and you know what you're doing, the problem is that it's been illegal for so long, people don't understand what the best way to use it for is and what are the side effects. What's the paranoia? What's this heightened sense of awareness that kind of freaks people out? Like how do you mitigate that? How do you get over it? What's the right dosage? All that stuff is dependent upon information and when people are lying to you about it being terrible and making you fucking blind and losing your marbles. Right, you're going to kill people. Yeah, just stuff. People are so confused about it that it also makes you more paranoid because as you're smoking and you're thinking, oh my God, I shouldn't be doing this. What am I doing? I'm ruining my life. I can't believe I'm doing that and then you get even more paranoid and then you're like, I'm never doing this again. Exactly. Yeah. Now what about sponsors? Is it ever an issue with sponsors? The weed thing would be. Right now the only people I work with other than myself is that an analytical solution. So he's actually working on doing a CBD thing and stuff. I don't know if I'll be a part of that because I'm trying to, it's so available now. I'd rather just find whoever does it the very best and not market it because it's so saturated. I just take it for myself. Actually, a lot of people, I worked in group homes when I was in college for kids with autism for a long time and there was actually this little girl who, she had this, it's not a disease, she had this, I'll just call it a thing. She had this thing where she always felt like she was falling. So like she looked completely normal. She was autistic and nonverbal, didn't speak, but imagine all day feeling like you're falling. So she learned as a child, really little, if she would hit herself that people would hold her. So if you weren't holding her, she would literally, I actually watched her break her own nose. She was 11 years old. This sweet little girl, like just super nice and smiley, but like if you didn't hold her, she just whacked right in her own face. We found out that through, I don't remember exactly how it came about, but they gave her THC pills, they gave her THC pills and then stopped. She would walk around the house normally. She was still nonverbal. It's not like I fixed her autism or any of that stuff, but with the whole symptoms of feeling like she was falling, which I don't even think had anything to do with autism. Again, I'm not a doctor, but... Wait, what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to worry about that shit. They gave her THC pills and she was just walking around the house smiling. She would help us cook. She would move around. She would help the other kids because there's four kids in the house. She would help the other kids tie their shoes, stuff like that. Oh, that's awesome. Then her parents came back, must have been four months later, and their friends had guilted them about giving their daughter weed and they stopped giving it to her and she went right back to it. Straight back to it. So stupid. It's just ignorance. I don't understand what it is. It's all it is. Yeah. Oh, that's so sad. I felt so bad. It was one of the things that just ripped me apart from working in that field. There's so much... These little rules that you don't understand. We had a kid that would sit, right? He would feel stressed out and he would sit. The rule was when he did that, we weren't allowed to help him up or move him or anything like that because that was rewarding bad behavior. That's how they classified that. He would just sit in the middle of the road and we weren't allowed to get him out of the middle of the road. Then he learned that if he didn't want to do something, he basically would stay in his room all day. He would stay in his room all day because he didn't like... The only worker he liked was me and I think it was just because I was big and jolly and all that. If he didn't like the person he was working with, he'd just sit in his room on the floor and then they couldn't touch him, they couldn't do anything and he'd just sit there. We'd go days without eating or going anywhere out of the room or anything like that. It was all because we'd put these rules and put these chains on ourselves based off of other people's opinions or worrying what it would look like if we did this. If this girl's taking this pill, what does that look like? If we're picking this boy up off the ground, what does that look like? It was like trying to help these children with your hands tied behind your back. I don't know if it's like that anymore. This was a long time ago, but it was heartbreaking. Everyone was terrified to work with this little boy. He was 10 or 11. He was just a sweet little dude. He got nervous. I remember coming in and one day I was like, you know what? I'm taking him to go to a football game. I took him to a college division one football game. Never had an issue, never had any problems, never sat down, nothing. Sat second row in the end zone and would get all excited every time anybody came by or the cannon went off for a touchdown. It was like the greatest moment of my whole college career was hanging out with this 11-year-old at a college football game. That's awesome. People were too terrified to even get out of his room. That's terrible, but that's so cool that you got him there though. Yeah. I'd like to think that a lot of people worked more in that direction after I left. I'm hoping. You could see in his eyes he was a sweet little boy. I've never met a kid that was evil, ever. You just need to know how to work with him, how to talk with him.