#2024 - Hulk Hogan

First of all, the great and powerful Tony Hinchcliffe, the biggest pro wrestling fan of the world, totally appropriate that he's here today because we have the king! Whoa! We share a birthday, we share four letters of our last name. The fucking man, Hulk Hogan. Do I need these things, brother? You don't have to. I like them. They lock everybody in. They look great with your durag. Can't even hear you, man. You can? Is it not on? Little cranker. Chest, chest, chest. Whoa! Here we go. Thank you for having me here. Please, it's an honor. Great to see you, man. Yeah. What's cracking, we were talking about back surgeries before this. I can't believe how many you've got. Let me wake you up here. I need to do the Hulk Hogan thing real quick. Okay. Well, you know something, Joe Rogan? When I walked into this place, that was the perfect style for me, dude. The paintings, the mugshots, all the people that I beat up, I knew this was the place to be, man. So what you gonna do when Rogan and Hogan run wild on you, brother? It's a good question. Yeah! Yeah! Let's go! I'm good now. I'm a good boner. And an adult boner. I'm good now. I'm good now. Let's go. Very good. Coffee's great, thank you. My pleasure. It's great, and thanks for, you have a cannabis company now. Mm-hmm. Tell us about this. Well, I got hooked up with Mike Tyson, Flair, and all those. Same company. Yeah, guys. And our buddy Chad put the whole deal together. There's kinda like, it's like the Italians, you know. There's an open lane, there's more room at the table for one more to eat. Yeah. And it was a situation we started talking about, the CBD stuff, the energy, and the sleep stuff, and the whole nicotine thing, and there's a way to whine backwards from all the crazy, crazy bad stuff that a lot of us have participated in over the years. Yeah. And so it just made sense to move in that direction. And you know, my brand's been around for so long, there's a lot of people that we really think we can help out with this stuff. So that's why we're going down that road, because a lot of my boys, you know, from the pharmaceutical side of things, made a lot of missteps, and aren't around today, where I think this could have been a situation that might have helped them wind down from that crazy high they were on from the crowds, and the lifestyle, and everything to be able to settle back and become who they really are, you know. Also pain management. Yeah, that's a whole nother trip, brother, because I've had 25 surgeries in the last 10 years. So when people say, hey, you know, the wrestling's fake, it goes right up my ass. Because at the end of the day, it's predetermined. If you and I are wrestling, they're just gonna tell us who's gonna win or who's, but all that stuff that happens in the middle, it hurts, I mean, you know, and you know, it's a rough way to go, so. Well, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I think you guys have literally the hardest job in old show business, because you're out there on the road. How many days a year in your prime? Well, we were talking earlier. When I was doing this full time, before this John Cena and the Rocket, and these guys came around, I was really flying 300 days a year. 300 days a year? Yeah, and I was wrestling 400 to 450 times a year. Jeez. I would wrestle twice Wednesday, like a Saturday morning, I'd sell out the Philadelphia spectrum at one o'clock, and then that night be in Madison Square Garden. Then Sunday in the morning in the afternoon, I'd be in the Boston Garden, and then Sunday night I'd be at the LA Forum. You know, so it was a pretty good stretch, you know? That's an insane amount of work, and an insane amount of punishment on your body, especially knowing what you did, and the way you would fucking drop down. I mean, how many of those impacts Oh my God. that you've experienced? Thousands, thousands. I mean, now when I see it, you know, the guys are younger, faster, smaller athletes, but they're super athletes, you know? And the equipment, the rings they have, oh my God, it's like they're perfectly made, where, you know, I'd go wrestle Andre the Giant, and let's say Baltimore Civic Center, instead of the normal 18 foot ring, it'd be a 22 foot boxing ring. It would be harder than the concrete. And Andre would go, don't go down. Which means if you fall down, you're not gonna get back up. So we'd actually have a match on our feet, because Andre was like the boss. He was the leader, you know? And he was my guy. So, you know, the equipment's so much better now. A lot of the guys getting hurt today are getting hurt, because of how athletic and the crazy stuff they're doing. But, you know, we were just getting hurt from just pounding on each other so much. I remember watching Brock Lesnar do a front flip, and land on his head. And I'm like, any other human is paralyzed from that. Any other human, to be 300 plus pounds, to be built like a fucking superhero, and to do a front flip, and land on your fucking head. Most people are dead. I think it was a back flip. I think it was a moonsault, right? Was it? Yeah, I think so. You would know more than anybody. It was like an inverted, he stood forward looking at you. It was like an inverted, sepia-stranded. So it was forward, there it is, Tony. Oh, it is forward, yeah. Look at the fucking size of it. Oh, it was a forward back flip. And he landed on his own head. Oh my God. Dude, that's insane. Most people are dead. Most people are dead. I don't know what permanent damage he suffered, but by the way, he went from that to fighting the UFC. He fought in the UFC after that, which is insane. Well, I got him first when he came back from the UFC, okay? And I was kind of like winding down, putting guys over and doing my thing. And Vince, because I want you to work with Brock, I went, okay, well, I knew his buddy Brad Riggins, who was with him in Minnesota. He was the coach of the Olympic team several years back. And so when Brock was in high school, we had heard of him and we kept an eye on him, you know? But when he came back from UFC, they gave him to me first and he was really intense, brother. You know, he was really intense. So my whole thing is we always grab somebody and squeeze them and give them the office. Like if you got in my head and you're about to break my neck and give them the office suit, lighten up, you know? Squeeze the piss out of giving them the office. Finally, I just started calling him Broccoli. Now I said, Broccoli? I got him to laugh a little bit. So let me tell you something. If you keep hurting me in here, if you don't loosen up on the old man here, I'm gonna make you look really, really bad because you're gonna be in here by yourself. You know, I used to tease him all the time because he's a really good friend, you know? And so when I got him first, he was really, really intense. And now he's like, he's turned out to be one of the best workers this business has ever seen. I mean, he brother, he draws money. He back pedals, he sells, he's got instinct. He's got placement, he knows where he's at. He listens. Like you don't have to tell him what to do. You don't have to have a right to write the match out. He goes out and listens to the crowd with his mind and his heart, you know? And it's something that's a lost art form. He's got it, man. So he figured it out. That's interesting that it's like a lost art form because for people who don't know how you guys do a match, like there's a lot of improvisation going on. Yeah, if you're really good at what you do, you're in the back and all of a sudden, if you're really good at what you do back in the day, I'm talking old school stuff, the referee would come to you and say, hey, you know, Hogan, they want you to go over Piper with a leg drop or they want a count out or whatever, you know? So knowing that, you know, Piper was so good at what he did or Mr. Wonderful, a lot of guys I worked for, if we were in the same dressing room, we wouldn't even talk. I'll see you out there, brother, you're going over, and I'm like, okay, I'm going over. It was that good, you know? And the crowd will tell you what to do if you listen. And you guys have worked together so many times. Yeah, and I mean, there's a lot of times where you run into guys like Chris Jericho. First time I ever worked with him, you know, they wanted Jericho to put me over and Jericho and I went out there and I didn't know what to expect and he was brilliant in the ring. It was like magic, we didn't even have to say a word. I told Vincent, give me that guy every night. I was like a day off, you know? I didn't get hurt at all. What's incredible with Brock is that Brock went from pro wrestling to being the UFC Heavyweight Champion. I mean, and did so with such a short amount of time of training in MMA. I mean, obviously he had a spectacular amateur wrestling career. He was a legit top flight amateur wrestler and a fucking genetic freak, all those things. But to be able to make that transition to winning the fucking world title against a guy like Randy Couture, I don't think he gets enough credit for what, I think a lot of people say, oh, he was so big and he was this and that and he did steroids and there's all these excuses. Like you don't understand what that guy did. Like what that guy did is nothing short of insanity. Like no one's ever done that before. No one's ever gone from, I mean, the way he did it too and to fucking get in there and beat a guy like Randy, who's one of the best of all time. Like Randy was a real pioneer and Randy was still really at the top of his game back then. It wasn't that, it was just, he was just fucking a freak, just a real freak. Like I always said that if like that guy, like fresh out of college, like if we were doing a different era, like if he's coming fresh out of college today and someone like Farah Sahabi or Henry Hoof, like some top flight MMA instructor gets ahold of him as a young man and teaches him how to really, teaches him how to strike where he's comfortable and he can move just like elite guys of today, fuck. He would have been unstoppable. He would have been unstoppable. He's a monster, brother. He's a monster. He still is. Still is. He's like the biggest genetic freak maybe I've ever seen in the sport. Me and my crew used to go to the Royal Rumbles for a few years, a few years back. It's 30 people, one comes out every minute and that's where you really see what a freak he is because it stands out amongst 30 other wrestlers. You can tell with two, but with 30 and he comes in and he's flying, he's faster than the other people. He's stronger than the other people. It's the closest thing to it is like watching LeBron James play basketball. You're like, how does he move like that? He just got to the hoop in two steps and that's what he's doing in the wrestling ring. You ever see his NFL combine numbers? He had like legit top flight combine numbers, like ridiculous numbers. See if you can pull those up because just a fucking freak, man. Like a real rare one, very fast too. Like his run was fast. Look at this. 6'3\", weighs 283 pounds, a 40 yard dash of 4'7\". 4'7\", at 283 pounds. That's insane. Jump 35 inches vertically and 10 feet from the standing long jump. He's hurling almost 300 pounds, 10 feet. He can bench 225 pounds for 30 reps. 225 for 30 fucking reps. That's crazy. Dude. Oh, look, it's me. Astounded. I've been astounded multiple times by that guy. There's a few guys that I say like- He can still go, brother. Yeah, I'm sure he can still go. Well, there was talk about him fighting again in the UFC just fairly recently, like a few years ago. I'm sure in the back of his head, he still wants to stomp some people. He's intense, brother. Last time I was around him, I was in Saudi Arabia with him. He's real intense. He hasn't changed a bit. I mean, the guy went from, he goes and fights Frank Mir, who was a former UFC heavyweight champion, right into the top of the food chain, gets leg locked, comes back and beats Frank Mir in the rematch, just beats the shit out of him. I mean, he was the real deal, man. A lot of people don't give him enough credit. And then there was a problem with the diverticulitis. So he had to get a long section of his intestine removed, I believe. I believe it was his intestine. Well, he eats everything that he hunts. That's the deal. Yeah. You know, so he's always out hunting stuff. I don't know how you get diverticulitis. Anthony Bourdain told me it's a real mystery because you could actually get it from a seed. Like a seed could get stuck. He goes, it's not just like people say, oh, he ate too much meat. That's not necessarily the case. He said there's a lot of things that could have happened. But either way, so he has that. And then he comes back and fights Aleister during the juicy juice days, when Aleister was on everything known to man. Wow. I think he just got kicked in that spot, right? Exactly. By a K1 Grand Prix champion. Like Aleister over him was the elite of the elite for kickboxing. And he was saucy. I mean, he came in saucy. There was no use out of back then. So you just had to pass a test on the day of the weigh ins, which is like an IQ test. Yeah. And then just using all these masking agents and shit. There's like, you know, it's a different world back then. You know what's crazy, dude? I found out that slap fighting, they have to test those guys for drugs. What? Wouldn't you want your slap fighters on mass? Yeah, I want a fucking energetic slap fighter. Oh my God. I don't want a slap fighter who's fucking drinking green tea and taking creatine. I want my slap fighters drunk, right? Don't you? Oh my God. It's ridiculous. Apparently they're treating it like a real sport. So it has to get approved by the athletic commissions. They just want their money, man. Yeah. That's one there. You know, you talk about like, I wonder how many times can you do that? How many times can you just get let dude smack you in the head? Like you got five of those in your body, 10. How long can you do that for? You know? Bro, I don't know. First time I was ever knocked out from a slap was from a girl in the garden, Sherry Martell. Scary Sherry, I don't know if you remember. Oh wow, of course, sensational Sherry. I had Macho Man hooked, you know, took him over to the apron. Sherry stepped on, she went to slap a heat duct and she cupped my ear and I was, stumbled and went down on one knee when you go down, you know, my leg went off. Yeah. And I came back up and then I sat on my butt and I was kind of like out for about 30 seconds, just from that slap from a girl. And you know, Sherry was a tough girl and she was strong, but still I was surprised she could knock me out with it. People would be stunned at how easy it is for them to get knocked out. They really would. If someone has good mechanics, if they could really throw their body into it and I would imagine a woman like her who's been pro wrestling for so long. You gotta get hit on the button too, the right spot. Yeah, it is the right spot. Yeah, but it's stunning, it's stunning how like easy it is to get K, especially if you're not expecting it. When you think about all the injuries that you've had, and you think about like how many matches that you wrestle, I mean, we're talking about almost like a science project. Like how many human beings have gone through that amount of punishment over that long period of time? And before you, there wasn't really a lot to gauge before you guys, because like what year did you start wrestling? 77. Oh my God. What? That's insane. 77 all the way up to Brock Lesnar. Yeah. Isn't that wild? Yeah. That's incredible. So like the amount of just physical collisions you've had with gigantic men, it's off the charts. Well, you know, I hate to keep going back in the day thing, but you know, when I first went to New York in 78, I'm sitting in a dress room, you got King Kong and Moscow there, 340, sweet handsome, 350. Of course you got Andre the Giant there. I was like 300 pounds. I was like a medium sized guy. You know, when I first went up to New York, I was like, holy crap. You know, so it's, and you know that type of people pushing on, you know, especially back then it wasn't all the high spots and jumping up there and diving over the top rope. You stayed in the ring, grabbed a hold and wrestled and kind of would fight your way out. And you know, if they were gonna choke you out in the middle of the garden and the lights are 120 degrees, you gotta learn how to breathe through it and think through it, you know, the reversal. So there was a lot of grinding with people that were big. So it kind of like wore you down, you know, a lot more than me and Jericho or me and The Rock doing our thing. It was different back then, though, the physicality of it. So you started in 77? 77, yeah. 77. And what was the first match that you did? Like, how did you get into it? Like, did you amateur wrestle? No, I didn't. I messed around in junior high school, you know, but then by the time I got into high school, I was playing in a rock and roll band. Oh, no shit. Yeah. What did you play? Well, I started out playing guitar for several years and my dad had bought me guitar. My dad was a construction worker and he bought me a cheap guitar and I took guitar lessons. So, you know, through junior high school and stuff, I was playing in these little garage bands on the weekend. And then by the time I got to high school, we were going up to the University of Florida, Gainesville and playing for the fraternities and having a blast, you know, so I started, you know, playing music that, you know, for many, many years, for 10 years, I played music to make a living, anything to avoid working a real job. And then, you know, I started making good money, you know. When I was in high school, I ended up, you know, having to leave home when I was 17, as per my father's request. And I, you know, lived in a hotel over on Davis Island in Tampa where they had this kind of like, disco era, like the Tower of Power, the syncopated music, the dun, dun, dun, you know, that real funky stuff. And I started playing bass in a show band there. And so that just kind of ran its course. And then, you know, at the end of the day, all the rest, when I left for a while and I was traveling on the road and doing session work out of a central artist in Atlanta. And when I came back, I got like the good drummer from the good high school band in one of the bands. And then I grabbed one of the really good lead singers from another band that was around the area and kind of like grabbed all the good keyboard players when I was growing up. And we put them all in one band called Ruckus. And yeah, there it is right there. Look at that, whoa. How'd you do that, man? Jamie's a wizard. How'd you do that? Jamie's a wizard. What's up with that, Willis? How'd you do that? So anyway, that band Ruckus, all the wrestlers started coming in, you know. Hold on, is that you in the far left? I'm in the middle. Oh, there you are. Oh, you're in disguise. Yeah. Kind of, I don't know. That book's all gook in to me. But he's in the back. Well, the thing is that you're kind of kneeling. That's why I was confused. It looks like you're sitting on something. Yeah, the other guy in front of you is sitting too. Anyway, all the wrestlers kept coming in, right? Well, you must have been towering over these dudes. So you probably had to sit. Yeah, I was, I mean, I'd started lifting weights, you know, when I was 18. Oh. And I was- Which is unusual for a band, right? Oh, there's another band, yeah. Look at that. Look at you. Wow. Oh. Yeah, that's kind of like a funky little disco type band I was in. I remember very clearly when I was a kid, watching Rocky III and watching you in Rocky III and saying like, what the fuck do you do if someone's that big? Because this is like during my martial arts days. And I remember watching that movie going, there's nothing you're doing. You're not doing anything. If you're getting old, you're so fucked. That's- Yeah, that's crazy. That's because he was so wild. That's crazy. It was so in tribute to pro wrestling too, even the way you talk to him after the match. Yeah. It's like, he thought it was real. He didn't know what the fuck was going on. And after it was like, hey, that was a good job. And it sort of let everybody know a little, maybe one of the first ever windows behind the scenes where you could see what the top flight pro wrestlers actually do. Like you can call it fake, but it's not, there's nothing fake happening. It's like, it's just orchestrated, or at least there's a predetermined outcome, but the fucking physicality, it's bananas. Well, I gotta give it a slow one. He took all the hits and all the bumps and- Oh, he was an animal. Yeah, I kind of messed his collarbone up, you know, by accident, but you know, he was amazing. I mean, I remember when I was gonna go do that film, Vince McMahon Senior fired me because of that, because of that movie. What? Well, I'd got the call. I didn't know there was a senior. Oh yeah, Vince Senior, that's what I started working for, brother. Yeah, Vince McMahon Senior. So it's not the Vince McMahon that's an old guy now. No, no. His dad was the star? When I first went to New York in 78, Vince McMahon Senior had a couple Phil Zacco and a couple partners, and Vinnie Jr. had one building, I think, and the Cape Cod and Vince would come in once every three, because he'd hold a stick like Mean Gene, you know. So when I first started there 70, Howard Orr, I lasted till probably mid 80s, and I told Vince Senior, I got this crazy call to come out and do a Stallone movie. First, I was in the dressing room and Gorilla Monsoon gave me the note. I'm like, yeah, right. I threw it away, because, you know, Stallone was like 150 feet tall in the public's eyes. I saw Rocky, one and Rocky too. I was like, oh my God. So I said, yeah, another wrestling joke, you know, like pooping in my bag or putting locks on my stuff, you know. So I split to Japan for like eight weeks. And when I came back again to TV again in Allentown, they handed me a Western Union letter, this time from Stallone. So I flew out there and talked with him and got the ring with him and did a couple things. If you want to hear about that, that's a little different, but. What would you do? Well, when I went out there, I just had my nose broke in Japan for like the second or third time. And when I went out there, I was so enamored and such a fan of his, you know, he goes, they had a guy with one of those big cameras, old school cameras, you know, when I came in, so I knew I was on camera, you know, sorry. At least I knew that much back then. And so he goes, hey, let's just get in the ring and move around. I had jeans on and cowboy boots. He goes, oh, let's just get in the ring like this. So he goes, I'm gonna try to hit you. I said, well, if you want to, you can hit me in the nose. Cause I saw the camera. I thought it'd be cool if he splattered my nose. That's how crazy I was. This is right after no surgery? No, I didn't have no surgery. It was right after having my nose broken in Japan. Oh, you just had it broken again. Yeah, I flew back to TV. I'm just assuming you had it fixed. No, no, no, Andre fixed everything for you. He just stand behind you with the sums and push everything down. But so I got in the ring. He goes, you know, try to hit me, you know? And so he went to hit me. I just grabbed him. I said, I don't want to hit you. He goes, well hit me. Give me everything you have. I said, no, brother, you don't want that. I said, there's a certain place I can hit you harder than others. But if I hit you as hard as I can, it's not going to be cool. He goes, well, give me 50%. I really don't want to. I said, I could go. No, it's the best. No, no, no, no. He was because they were filming this whole thing. So I said, well, you try to hit me. I'll grab you. I'll bend you over my hammer between the shoulders. And I hit him. I probably gave him 50%. And as soon as I made contact, his face hit my cowboy boots. He came up and his lip was bleeding. So that's perfect. That's perfect. So he was all excited just because I hit him. What a psycho. Yeah. And then we got out of the ring. He goes, you're a fake wrestler. Boxers can kick a wrestler's ass anytime. Get mad. So he wanted me to do an interview, right? So I did, let me tell you something, that whole stick. So he goes, I want you for the film. And I've never had an agent. I've never been in a movie. I don't know anything. He goes, I'll give you $10,000 to do the film. Me being the negotiation genius that I am, I want $15,000. I want $15,000. So he gave me $14,000. And I signed whatever they. Oh my god, he bargained with you? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So I signed. What the fuck, Sly? You're stealing. Yeah. So I signed whatever he wanted back in the day. And that was it. But how rude. Yeah. But no. You might even give him the $50,000. That's some negotiation bullshit right there. But to go backwards, I had called Vince McMahon, senior, that night from Fall River, Massachusetts, because I was wrestling at a high school in Fall River, Massachusetts. And I called Vince because he was my guy. We were really good friends on top of him helping me, giving me the break, Vince, senior. I called him in Fort Lauderdale and said, brother, I'm leaving tomorrow to go to LA to do the film. He goes, no, you're not. He goes, it's midnight now. You have to be in Charlotte at noon for TV with Crockett, because that's where we're flaring all those guys. That's where he was sending me down to that southern swing wrestling thing. I said, no, I told you I'm not going to do that. I said, I'm going to go do this movie. And as soon as I'm done with the movie, I'll come back. He goes, don't come back. You're never going to work here again. Never. So I went, OK. I was single at the time. Spent 20 to 24 weeks a year in Japan. Had a great hookup in Japan, being single with my friends and all the stuff that was going on there. And so I went to Japan. And the movie came out. And all of a sudden, this guy Vern Gagnon from Minnesota called me, wanted me to come in there. So that was the place. Everybody wanted to go. Wrestling the AWA for Vern Gagnon. I don't know if you've heard of it. Of course, yeah. Four days a week, he pays you better than any of the promoters. And I just stumbled in right behind this guy, the Crusher. He was like the Hulk Hogan of the Twin Cities and that whole St. Paul across Wisconsin area with Brock Leizer and Brad Riggins, all those guys. So Crusher was walking out. I was walking in. I wouldn't let anybody see my face. My arms were legitimately 24 back then. And I'd throw my arms up and I'd go, hey, if you guys want to see my face, you got to buy a ticket. I was trying to be a bad guy. And I'd do all my interviews with the back to the camera. My back was this wide back then. And they wanted me to wrestle Jesse Ventura. And Jesse Ventura is the one that actually turned me babyface. As soon as I walked out, they booed the piss out of him and cheered me. So I had that little run in Minnesota for three years. Then we were coming into New York. Vern Gani was going to buy TV time on Channel 9 and all up down the East Coast. That's when Vince Jr. came back and said, hey, brother, I want you to come back to New York. And we had a talk. He came to my house in Minnesota at 5 in the morning. We shook hands. And we did that whole worldwide takeover. Vince called the shots and I went out and did the dirty work, flying around and going to all these places I shouldn't go. Good for you sticking to your guns and doing that movie. I can't imagine if you weren't in that movie. That was such an important scene. Well, what's crazy is that you were told that you'll never work in WWF again. And it was before you became a- I had hair back then. Oh my god. Wow. This is such a fucking great scene. You're so much bigger than it was so ridiculous. Fun fucking fun scene. That was weird because, brother, right before I- If you came to my house and my mother was still alive, she would want to know your name and she had a pencil, she would measure everybody, you know? What? Measure everybody? She had an old thing, bro. Like adults? Come on, man, that was her thing. She had a thing. Yeah, everybody, kids, adults. And your name would be next to the pencil marker, right? That's amazing. So when I went to do the Rocky movie, I was 6'7 on the nose. And I was like 330 pounds. I had like a 34 inch waist. I was in crazy shape back then. And so right before my mom passed away a few years ago, she goes, Terry, I want to measure. I said, okay, mom. You know, this is after 10 back surgeries, she measured me. I was 6'4\". So I lost that much height. Three inches of discs. Yeah, between the- Leg drop after leg drop. The leg dropped for 40 years in the back surgeries and the knee replacements and the hip replacements. Changes your whole look. Yeah, that's what happens when old people shrink. Their backs- Easy on the old, but he's down the old brother. I just turned 70, take it easy. I just turned 56. We have the same birthday. August 11th. Yeah. Happy birthday. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Happy birthday to you too. The Hemsworth has the same birthday as- Really? Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah, what are the odds? 365, wouldn't know. Probably huge. Well, have you heard of the birthday paradox? The birthday problem? Yeah, how does that work? It's one of the craziest things ever. It's some statistical anomaly where if you have, I can't remember the exact number, but I think it's like 45 people in a room. For some reason, two people will have the same birthday. Birthday paradox, known as the birthday problem, states that in a random group of 23 people, there are about 50% chance, Jamie's the goat. How does he keep doing that? When you go to other podcasts, you'll be confused as to how incompetent those people are. I can't believe I get to watch Hulk Hogan learn what Google is. No, it's learn how good Jamie is at getting these things. I know, I keep doing that too. So a random group of 23 people, there's about a 50% chance that two people would have the same birthday. Wow. That's weird. What if that, then if you get with, if you get to 46 people, if it's 100% chance. Oh God. Crazy. Wow, it goes up. Interesting. So with 100 people, it seems like it's gonna happen. That's so weird. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's even weird? Are people who give a fuck about their birthday? Shut your mouth. Yeah. Oh, it's my birthday. I guess, I get it if it's girls. For some reason, that doesn't annoy me. When dudes get really excited about their birthday, come on bro. Yeah. I'm not your mom. That's true. I think 40 hurt worse more than 70. 40 did? Yeah, it hurt worse more than 70. Fuck, I'm 10 months away from it. Dude, trust me, just stay healthy. It's a number, you know, for you. Yeah. The guy like Hulk, the thing about you is just the amount of punishment that you put your body through. It's not your mind. Your mind's in a great place. It's just, I don't think people, the average person truly appreciates the unbelievable amount of punishment you guys go through. But it's not just me. Yeah. My girl Skye that I'm engaged to, I had to slowly bring her up to speed because number one, I didn't wanna run her off because all the crazy lifestyle of my friends that are around and all the stuff I've been through, there's been a few controversial situations I've been through. Oh yeah. But just with the injuries, you know, I mean, I took her to 30th anniversary of Monday Night Rock as I opened the show and so she's starting to see that it's not just me. All the guys kinda walk like I do when they're all hurt. Yeah. And see a lot of stuff on TV with these A and E things and the dark side of the ring where they show you how beat up these guys are. So, you know, it's what the business does to you. Yeah, I mean, you're playing, you're in a rally where you're smashing cars into each other but the car's your body. Yeah, I mean, and a lot of guys, I mean, you know, like, Brock's an animal, you know, Kurt Angle's an animal, believe me. Oh yeah. He's too much. And a lot of guys have come through like Rampage, Jackson, King Mo, T to Ortiz. We've had a bunch of guys come through and whether they're a day or three or four days ago, we don't wanna do this to our body. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? They're in the ring, I mean, after the first day, if you can lift your head up off the pillow without having to pick your head up, you know, you're fortunate, you know, just three or four hours in the ring the first day. But you know, a lot of these guys realize this, I can't have to do this crap every night to myself. What has helped you the most in terms of like alleviation of pain or bringing back your movement? Like what has helped you the most? Well, I don't have the movement back, you know, I've had a real hard time, you know, just doing normal things. I can't. From the back being fused? Yeah, the back and- How many discs are fused? Everything's fused. The whole back. I've had 10 back surgeries, but the thing is, you know, my knees and my hips are so old now because I had the left knee scoped three or four times, the right knee scoped three or four times, then I had them replaced. Then I had the hips replaced, and they're all over 20 years old. You know what I mean? So it's kind of like, they said, oh, you can't wrestle the knee replacement. I was wrestling with two knees and a hip replacement. I wrestled my knee 18, I was dragging the rock around the ring for a half hour. Yeah, you can actually do that now with hip replacement. John Wayne Parr had an MMA fight after he had, actually I think it was a Muay Thai fight, after he had a hip replacement. The knees are tougher, brother. The knees are harder to get by. But- They're doing them now to the point where people can go back to engaging in athletics. And I'm wondering, I wonder if they're gonna get to the point where these things are like a permanent thing. Because they say you're about 20 years, is that what they say? Well, they told me about 15 were the ones I got. 15? I think now they're saying with some of them 20, but it's like, man, that means, like you've got an hourglass in your head counting down to 20 years, where you're gonna have to go through that shit again. Like every operation I've ever had, and I've only had a few, the thing about the recovery is a bitch. It's like a long time for your body to get used to being, first of all, put under. And then if you have something major, like an ACL reconstruction or something like that, you're fucked for months, for months. Yeah, I've had some close calls and some rough ones, man. I mean, they all weren't just cookie cutter surgeries. I've had some major issues go down, so. Have you done stem cells? Yes. Where'd you go? Well, I called Mel Gibson after seeing him on here. Ah, yeah. And Mel, So you went with Dr. Neal Reardon down in Panama? Yeah. I sent my mom down there a couple times. Yeah, and I've already had several experiences before. Yeah. Those stem cells, and they just didn't, I don't know how to explain it. I'm different, my body's different. It's been so much crazier. It just didn't do enough? Well, I went down there to Panama for three days. They hook you up IV-wise, then locally, they blast you all over the place, and they have shoulders everywhere. And after three days, they would call me two weeks later, and say, hey, you know, so I feel the same. Then a month later, they call me feel the same. Then three months later, call me nothing. So I didn't get anything from it. I wonder if your body's so beat up that it's just bone on bone everywhere, and there's nothing that can be done. But there's so much to heal that it's not even getting to the big things, because it's, you know what I mean? I wonder what it would be like if that shit was in America, and if they gave, because right now, you can, there are stem cells that are available in America, but it's limited, and it's a different situation. That's why I always encourage people to go to Panama or Columbia, or Tijuana has a great place too. But if that was legal in America, I wonder if someone like you could be able to go and just do that like once a week. No, that'd be awesome. And maybe it can fix you. Like maybe it's just a dosage and time thing. That was my first thought. You know, if this is what normal people do, whack this stuff once every three months, I need it once a week. That was the first thing I thought. I wonder, I mean, it really sucks because I haven't seen anything negative about the use of stem cells. So I'm just really frustrated that it's illegal in the United States and that all these people are getting great results. I know so many athletes that have gotten problems fixed through stem cells, and most of them have done it in either Columbia or Tijuana, and it's kind of a bummer because if we could do that to people like yourself, it's conceivable that you could really heal somebody. Like they're doing some amazing stuff where they're shooting it into discs and they're creating new disc tissue. Like if they can do that to people and people can avoid getting fused. Yeah, that'd be great. Oh my God. It's such a bummer that it's so restricted because I don't see the danger to it when you consider it in comparison to the danger against some things, like opiates, which are legal. Like why are you restricting this? This seems like, I had a full length rotator cuff tear disappear. Just went away from stem cells. Six months later, I get an MRI. He's like, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. He's like, it's gone. Same, they were gonna give me neck surgery. Constant pain in my shoulder. I thought my shoulder was completely torn out. Got an MRI. They said it was discs at the base of my neck and just all the nerves, it just felt like my shoulder, which is crazy because I literally wanted to cut my arm off. If it was the 1600s or whatever, I was like, this pain sucks, cut it off. And then I still would have had it. But they did it. They set up up to 60 days. You might feel better immediately. It might be in 60 days. In day 59, it was like someone flipped a switch. Waste of all. You were always sitting in the green room like holding your neck. You were always doing that. During Kill Tony, trying to listen to people. I'd have to sit on my own legs if I sat flat on my butt for some reason. So I'd have to sit like this and listen and pay attention and try to be funny. It was a nightmare. I couldn't sit on my butt. And you forget, I would forget. So there's a bar stool there. For some reason, bar stools were the worst. Different than the 90 degree angle of a chair kind of. So it's like a very specific angle you have to hold your head or it hurts. You'd have to hold your hip to a side or something. Because if the weight was straight down, it was just. All I know, the longer you're hurt, the more it changes. I remember I couldn't sit in a chair for the longest time. And then I couldn't drive a car, which of course, is sitting in a chair. And then my biggest thing was when I'd go upstairs and I'd look at my bed, my mindset was I dread laying down because I know when I lay down, it's gonna hurt so bad. And I'm probably gonna wake up with an injury. I'd go to bed and wake up hurt. It's like, how does this happen? But all that being said, the body's an amazing thing. And with all the metal and all the abdominal surgeries and shoulder surgeries and all this stuff that's happened to me, the upside is, bro, I'm living a good life, I'm happy. I may not be able to run as good as him or walk as good as you, but at the end of the day, I'm seven years old. I train every day, I eat great. I hardly ever drink any alcohol at all. And I don't take any pills anymore. Where through all those surgeries, the doctors are just banging me with these pills and different things. And the thing that stopped me, the thing that shut me down completely, where I said enough's enough, is when they hit me with the fentanyl stuff. They almost killed me with that stuff. So that's when I said, I'm done. You know, and I didn't even know they gave it to me. But morphine and dilatas and none of that stuff worked on my back. I'd had so many surgeries. If I just moved, if I see I'm just barely moving my little finger, I just moved my leg that much. I just screamed like a wounded animal. Because everything was so torqued. And then there was one night when, I don't know what I was taking, I guess they had me on the fentanyl things. You stick up under your gums and the patches on my legs and the lollipops. Remember one night, my body just completely torqued and my head and shoulders were facing the opposite way. And it took a bunch of EMTs to get me out of the house. And when I came back, I said, that's it, I'm done. And I called one of my buddies in LA and they prescribed the fentanyl to me. And the insurance didn't cover it. So it was $2,000 every two days. And the pharmacist says, I've never seen anybody on so much fentanyl and still be alive. And so that was the prescription they were giving me because my back was so bad. They cut on me so much and compromised the structural integrity of my back by cutting so much bone away that I was just a mess. And so one year, if I went to LA, another buddy of mine in Atlanta said, I can get you off it in six months. And I laid out everything I had. And I said, I'm gonna get off this crap in two weeks. Two weeks. And I had these 150 milligram patches that go on my legs and they would give me these 280 fentanyl pills and you'd have to stuff them under your gums in the morning and then at night. And they were giving me 15 of these 1,500 milligram lollipop things to eat during the day. That's how it drugged up they had me. And in two weeks I laid it all out and I told my ex-wife at the time, I'm going upstairs, bring me about 15 gallons of water. I don't wanna see anybody. And first thing I did was cut the patches in half and put them on my legs like an idiot. And I called my pain doctor and told him what I did. He goes, take that shit off your legs. That's how people overdose. You know, because it's their time released. And here I'm cutting them in half and putting them on my legs so I'm getting the full blown. Oh no. Yeah, so I pulled them right off. I called him right away to tell him what I did. And so that would have been my first mistake. You know, but I sat up there and I was there almost two and a half weeks. And I sweated through the bed all the way through the mattress and stuff several times. I had people come in and check on me and I saw my ex-wife's teeth come out and talk to me. I saw a plastic squirt gum come out of her chest. And this is coming off the fentanyl. But when I came off the fentanyl, I'd lost 35 pounds. And never, well the only other time I had it was when I, and I was clean, completely done. The only other time I had it was after a shoulder surgery when I got an infection. They had me on a drip line. I kept telling the infectious disease doctor, I feel like my light's going out, brother. Every time I do a two hour drip in the morning and a two hour drip at night, I feel like my light's going out like I'm slowly dying. And you know, the infectious disease doctor goes, well I give this same dose to 80-year-old ladies. You need to man up. So I went, okay. You know, I'll man up. And about day 13, I went down. And I told my housekeeper, I said, Jack, I'm gonna faint. I passed out, did the splits, balls and butt on the ground. Never done the splits in my life. Hip pops out, knee replacement pops out. And when I wake up, the MTs are sticking a needle in my arm. I'm going, what is that? And they're going, oh we're giving you something for pain. I said, well what is it? They go fentanyl. I'm like, oh my God. So they shot me up with fentanyl. I didn't even know it. But I didn't get back on the train again. You know what I'm saying? But since then, you know, after having 25 surgeries in 10 years, since then, when I drink my coffee in the morning, I'm really, really hurt and I'll eat two Tylenols. And then later in the day, if it was to get really bad, because I need a cup of coffee about four in the afternoon so I'll start to nosedive. Sometimes I'll take two more Tylenols later in the day. Sometimes I won't. Done with it all. That's why the stuff we brought in, what I've seen with all my buddies and all my wrestlers, there's gotta be a better way than these opioids and crap. Do you use CBD? Yes. Do you take it edibly? Do you use it as a muscle bomb? Like how do you? Well we got the drops and then we got the gummies, the CBD gummies. Yeah, those are great. Yeah. Man, they've helped so many people that I know with arthritis. Dude, I don't need to tell you. I don't wanna bring it up, but yes. That's something else I've inherited from my parents. Because before my mother passed, my mother lived to be 88. I mean, my dad lived to be 88, my mom lived to be 90. And their hands were just twisted and crippled. And when I was in my prime wrestling, seeing my parents all the time, because they lived close by me, they'd say, Terry, you need to be careful with that wrestling. I was gonna make that arthritis kick. I said, Mom, knock it off. I'm not gonna get that crap. Sure enough, man. It's coming. I can feel it. Does CBD help ward it off for you? Yeah, it does. It does. Do you use a lot of other stuff, like using curcumin and turmeric and stuff like that? Yeah, bro, I've got a nutritionist and a whole vitamin regime that I take. Did you get some of that turmeric coffee? I don't know what I got. This coffee's great, man. Yeah, I think that's what you got. That's the Laird Hamilton one. Laird Hamilton gave us a machine. And he has all the, like he's a- That's the surfing guy. Yeah, he's a freak, like a real physical freak. And just, guy's a maniac about training and recovering and nutrition. And so he has this super food coffee line where it's like turmeric, coconut oil or coconut milk and he blends them into these different coffees and it's just, you press a button for whichever one you want, but they're all like super healthy food, coffee. And it tastes great too. It's very addictive. This is gonna really sound weird to say because I've never admitted this in front of anybody, but I wanted to be him. You wanted to be Laird Hamilton? When I saw him riding those big waves, bro, that big tall blonde guy that was built like crazy, I said, man, I wish I could have been him instead of me. That's crazy, because you're Hulk Hogan. No. Can you imagine riding one of those waves, bro, in a rush? I have several friends that are big wave surfers and I am in awe. I can't, just the risk you're taking and the way they're able to adjust their weight and balance on a fucking wave of energy coming from the ocean. On a short board. It's crazy. I mean, that's insane. Bro, you fall off, you may not come out of that thing. No, you might be dead. You might get knocked unconscious by the force of the water. I mean, the amount of water you're talking about is so insane, you're gonna get driven to the bottom of the ocean for sure. You could bang your head off a rock. I mean, these guys are fucking maniacs. Yeah. And they're some of the nicest people. Do you surf? You know, I used to. I used to. My old attorney, Henry Holmes, old school gangster entertainment attorney, he was the president of the Malibu Surf Club. Ah. I don't know where the wall was. I kept a home in Thousand Oaks and Westlake for 23 years during my first marriage, because my first wife's family was from there. So during the summer, I'd spend a lot of time out there when the kids were out of school. And Henry, being my attorney, I was always hanging out with him, and he took me down to the wall and taught me how to surf, you know. And there's those little baby two, three foot breakers real consistent right there. So that's where I learned, you know, and did it for years. I mean, you know, whenever we'd stop in Hawaii, you know, we'd grab a long board when the rental boards would go out and paddle as far as we could to Diamond Head and catch that thing. I wouldn't ride it all the way back in. I was headed to Jet Ski to pull me out, because it took, it was about a mile to get out there, you know, so yeah, I did it for a long time. It's the only sport where you have a real possibility of interacting with monsters. Like, you're literally like doing a sport where monsters live. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's frightening. Oh yeah. Did you see the shark in the LA River that was raised from Hurricane Hillary? What? That's not real. Oh, it's not? I'm such an idiot. Bro, I live on the beach, all right, Brighton, Clearwater Beach, Florida, Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. We have friends come over, you know, because especially when the sun's going down, they come in and they just kind of like, there's a Clearwater Channel, then I live up the beach, but you can see them come down, you know, the coast, and they're going to the Clearwater Channel because all the fishing boats, all the chum and the fish heads in there, and they're just, you know, from like seven to eight at night before the sun goes down, they're just cruising along, you know, taking their time. They'll hit something if it's in the water. So when our friends come over, they have young kids or stuff. I don't want them in the water. Fuck that. Even, you know, waist deep just in there. So it's kind of like. It happens. It's a real thing. Yeah. They just found a shark in Idaho. They found a shark 500 miles from the ocean. I believe it was a salmon shark. And it's very rare. There it is. No officials find strange shark on river bank in the Landlok state. Jeez. That is insane. That's crazy. They suspect someone left the creature by the salmon river as a prank. I wonder if someone like let it go, like someone had it as a pet and let it go into the water. But they know that there's certain sharks like bull sharks. They can live in fresh water. You know, that whole movie Jaws is based on what happened in a river. It's based on bull sharks in New Jersey. Bull sharks. Those are the worst, bro. There's something about them. They're very aggressive. But there's also something about their metabolism where they can breathe fresh water. And they just urinate way more. It's like they have like some different system. So they can survive and thrive in fresh water. They just piss all the time. Well, they're the only ones in Florida that keep coming back and love the taste of humans. They'll come back and keep hitting you. You know, you'll get hit by a lemon shark or a tiger shark or a hammerhead. They may just bite you just to see which are. They could keep moving if you're lucky. But those bull sharks, they don't go away. They're full of testosterone. Man, they just finished the job. What kind of shark was it that killed that dude in Egypt? That horrific internet video that everybody's seen now. You've seen that video, right? With a guy screaming for his father. Yeah. Tiger shark. Tiger shark, yeah. Those are highly aggressive too. A lot of those are what bites people in Hawaii. Yeah, we've dealt with a few of those. Whoa, fuck that. Yeah, I was back in the day, I was filming a show with Carl Weathers and Chris Lennon. Two different shows. One was Thunder and Paradise. And the other one was a Sullivan, Devil's Island. Some two hour TNT movies, you know. And we went down and had to do the whole Navy Seal thing. And Stuart Cove, who was down in the Bahamas, the shark wrangler, I don't know if you ever heard of him. You know, I haven't. But if you go to the Bahamas, you can go to his place. He'll take you on a shark dive and they'll put the mesh on you. And you can sit around the big metal can where he's got all the chum. And you just sit there and keep your arms in with a metal mesh on. And you can have all the sharks circle you and you get the shark dive experience. Oh wow. Yeah, we used him for a couple of the shows, you know. And we caught a tiger shark about seven in the morning. And he was very irritated. So all the stunt guys anchored him to the bottom. Tied a rope around his tail, a couple ropes on him, which was kind of like crazy. And Stuart Cove goes, oh, we'll come back later in the day and he won't be able to auction his genetic skills and he'll be real docile. So me and Carl Weathers are going good, you know. And so right when we popped up at about 7.30 in the morning, because we were all diving, of course. And we loved being in the water. We were playing Navy Seals and having fun with it. We were all certified. So whenever we could dive, we could. And we watched them catch the shark. And then we came back up. And when we did, there was this like 100 foot plus Coast Guard cutter that pulled up on us. So what are you guys doing? We were all making excuses. And if they would have known what we were doing, we'd have been in a lot of trouble. And so we took off. Came back later that day, dove down to where the shark was. He was pissed. I mean, he was pissed from being tied down all day. They needed one shot. They needed me swimming underwater with what was supposed to be a dead Navy Seal on my back. And the stunt guys drilled holes in the shark's tail and put monofilament line in the tail. And as I had one of those little scooters, and as the shot came in the frame, I had a guy off to my right that was going to give me the thumbs up one to turn around and bump him with a scooter. And we got the guy on my back, the stunt guy, who had shark bites all over him because he works with sharks all the time anyway. And he's got, he put chum in his BC, right? Oh, god. So I'm swimming underwater with these crazies. And never done this before, so I'm listening to what they're telling me to do. And all of a sudden, the guy gives me the thumbs up. And when I turn, I couldn't even get the scooter under the shark's mouth. When I turned, I bumped him in the nose. He was so close to our heads. And those stunt guys jerked him with that monofilament line. And that shark disappeared like a magic trick. Jerked him like 10 yards away from me. Stewart Cove goes, he's got the camera. He goes, that was fucking great. Let's do one more. And I went, fuck you. I'm going up. I'm glad that was so great because I won't do that ever again. I'll never forget when that helicopter crashed on the Twilight Zone movie. Remember that? That was the first time it put in my, oh, people die when people do stupid shit. Like if someone does something that's not wise or too dangerous, like that can happen. That can happen in a movie set. That can happen on a TV show. It can happen. Oh, yeah. They take chances. And they take chances with you. And that's a big fucking chance, man. You've got a shark. I mean, most likely the shark probably would have just tried to get away. Because it'd been, I don't think sharks fight, right? They probably just eat and kill. And it probably would think it's in danger. And now that it has freedom, it would probably just take off. But still, it's a fucking wild shark. It's a killing machine. And things just happen anyway. Things just happen and you can't move out of the way. It's like you don't have, oh, Jesus, that's so insane. That's so insane. That's it. Is that it? Yeah. Oh, cool. Dude. Well, there you go. How do you do this, man? How do you get this done? Jamie's the man. Unbelievable. Jamie's the fucking man. This is a. That's it, yeah. I can't believe you got it. This is so dumb. Yeah, tell me about it. And then you wanted to do it again. Oh, my god, dude. This freaks me out just watching it. Yeah. Dude, it was crazy. People get killed. It happens. There was one time, there's been two times when I was filming Fear Factor that I told the producers, like, don't do this. And one of them was riding bulls. Oh, I forgot about the show. I love that show. Yeah, it was fun. Oh, wow, I forgot you did that. Man, that's my favorite show. They rolled some dice when they made people ride bulls. Because I was like, you can't control this thing. It was so weird. Even when you don't expect it, like, I went and did a couple episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, with Chuck. And he's sitting in there at 5.30 in the morning in the makeup trailer telling me about one of those Delta movies he made. Yeah. With the last shot of the day, the helicopter's taken off. And I guess he wanted to get home to his wife and kids and his body double. So, Chuck, go ahead, man. Just go ahead and go on home. I'll get in the helicopter and we'll fly off in the sunset. Just need to get the lift off. Chuck's telling me he's in the car with his driver. He looks at the helicopter. It takes off. He watches it fall out of the sky, and everybody gets killed. Oh my god. Yeah, I was like, yeah, that's how. So I'm scared to get the helicopters. Helicopters and horses. I'm scared to go. Helicopters are freaky. I went up in the helicopter with Bill Burr, though. It was fun. We went all flew around downtown LA. It's like the thing is, it's not like a plane. You can kind of go anywhere. It's really pretty amazing. You could just kind of float around downtown. It's legal. I'm like, we could just do this. He's like, yeah, you could just fly over buildings. That seems insane that you're just allowed to go wherever you want because nobody's up there. It's like you have an open road, but you have a thing that moves very different than an airplane. But Bill does, you know, he takes serious lessons, and he's very good at it. And I knew what to expect, and it was fucking great. I enjoyed it, but I don't know if I'd want to be in a lot of those. No, I will, Bill. No, if stuff goes out, it's not where you want to be. Yeah, they happen recently in Hawaii. Yeah, you can glide for a long time in a plane and a lot of other things. You can survive on a boat if the engine fails for a while. Yeah, for a helicopter, they have some sort of, I think it's called auto-rotating. Yeah, but. But you're hitting hard still, no matter what. You're coming down. Yeah, we did the thing in Hawaii where you go over the volcanoes. It's pretty fucking wild. It's pretty wild, and you have to do that by helicopter. But a lot of those just crashed. Gotta have to be something really special to get me in a helicopter. I can't think of anything that would get me to go up again. Seeing the volcanoes is pretty special. It's pretty wild. You're literally watching the island grow, like because I think it grows like a foot a year. You're watching all the lava pour out into the ocean. I might have made up that foot a year. How much does Hawaii grow every year because of volcanoes? But it's just insane to watch because we know it's real. We know that's how it was created. But to actually see the process, you're just like, whoa, that's the center of the earth. That's the lava. Hot molten rock is coming out and creating the island. Every year, it's lava expands Hawaii by 40 acres. Wow. Wow. Incredible. Speaking of rock, you mentioned WrestleMania 18. Yeah. What's crazy is that it's one of the greatest wrestling matches of all time. If I was going to show you literally, because I've thought about this, because whatever a decade ago, when we would have our crazy wrestling arguments, I had to think to myself, well, what would I show Joe first? And it would be probably that, right? It was definitely a moment I know the rock says he's never experienced anything like that before. I don't think anyone's seen anything like that. It was crazy, man. It was much different than I expected. I'll put a few that way. How so? What'd you expect? Well, I'd been working for Ted Turner for like 10 years. And I started that NWO thing with Eric Bischoff and Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. You probably know who I was. Which was WCW, the competitor with WCW. Yeah, so we've been trying to put Vince out of business for 10 years. And we were killing him in the ratings for like 83 or 88 weeks. We're just killing him. Then there was a turnaround. He brought Tyson on. And we made a bunch of mistakes, programming-wise. Like we were live, live, live. And their stuff was all taped. And we go, don't watch Monday Night Raw tonight. Because Mick Foley's going to beat the rock. And this guy, we'd give him the finishes, just dirty pool. So you need to watch Joe, because we're going to tell you he's already going to win. And so after 10 years with this craziness, I was pretty much done. This was Hollywood Hogan, the bad guy. And I had this crazy run. It was just as big as the red and yellow run as Hulkamania was. It was just as big or bigger. And so at the end of the day, I was done. And Ted Turner merged with American Online. And where his office was, they kicked into the curb. He was down at the end of the hall. So Ted wasn't in charge. Ted's the one I made the deal with. And Eric Bischoff and Harvey Schiller and all these guys. And so I wasn't really going to do anything. I got a call from Vince. He goes, we'd like you to come up and work with the rock at WrestleMania. I said, well, yeah, I can still go. If you need me to come up there, we can make it work. And he goes, well, things, he used to call me monster. Well, you know, monster, things are different now up here. I said, what do you mean, different? And he goes, well, if you're going to come up here, you've got to really bring it. Because you know, the rock he does, the rock does this thing in the ring, like bring it. And so I didn't say anything as a smart ass. So I'm thinking, if you want me to bring it, you're going to be asking me to take it back when I'm done with this bullshit. So anyway, you know, we went up there, had the match. There was a bunch of stuff that happened before the match. It was a little bit different the weeks before. But when I went up there, what we did on TV was I did everything I could to be a bad guy. I was in Chicago, place was just slammed in Chicago, just crazy. I mean, I had so many matches in Chicago. And the past accolades were so intense there that when I came out as a bad guy, that people were like with me, you know? And so all of a sudden, the rock comes out, gets in the middle of the ring, challenges me to WrestleMania. I go to Shaggy's hand, he won't let my hand go. You know, he pulls me back in. And right where face to face, he rock bottoms me, you know? And dumps me in the middle of the ring on the back of my head. So here come my guys. I mean, you have to realize that these are the most electrical moments ever, like in pro wrestling history. Like if you saw it on video, these things, this is the epitome of the entire, what makes the entire thing entertaining. Because you're kind of rooting for both. Both are kind of bad guys, but have such likable qualities. So it's a win-win no matter what. I mean, this stuff is beyond, like this is, this here is like totally top shelf pro wrestling history. I always loved the two-tone beard, bust-age combo. Yes, so anyway, after he dumps me on my head, my guys come down, Kevin and Scott, and we just crucify his ass. We just, we unload on him and we just grind him. So I go out of the ring and I got a toolbox, and I dump the toolbox out, and there's this ball-peen hammer, right? So they got him hooked. And they're thinking I'm gonna hit him from the front. I go, and while they got him hooked, they thought I was gonna blast him in the face with a hammer. I hit him from behind with a hammer, right? I catch him from behind. I'm not killing him, I'm pretty good at what I do. Is it an actual hammer? Oh yeah, oh yeah. I can put this thing between your forehead. I won't even hurt you. Listen, please, not. He's a professional. No, but listen. You're hitting him with a hammer? Yeah. Like actually hit him with a hammer? Oh yeah. But he's a professional. Yeah, I'm pretty, believe me, I can hit you with a hammer, brother, you'd be good. You know, but. What? Yeah. No. It's a hammer. You know who first, if since this guy's so, he's so good at pulling stuff up. Pull up Rocky III where I get stoned in the corner, and I throw that straight in punch to him. Oh, okay, yeah. Because he said, oh, I don't wanna get hurt. I said, you just stand there and don't move. Well, this straight in punch, he goes, I've never had anybody throw a punch that looks like it was gonna kill me. Yeah, no, I think this is it right here. Look, look, look, look. That was straight into his forehead. Yeah. He goes, you didn't even hit me. I said, well, I'm not supposed to. But I did make contact. So anyway, long story short, hit him with a hammer, drag him outside the building, put him in an ambulance, put chains around the ambulance, right? I go get in a semi truck without the trailer on it, just the cab of the semi. And of course, as I'm getting in the cab of the semi, they pull rock out of the ambulance. And I run that ambulance over with the semi. Oh my God. Vince goes, do it again, do it again. Yeah. This is so hilarious. So anyway, I'm- The fucking, the ambulance is chained up. Yeah. So dude, so now the rock's in there, we just, we slide him out when they cut to me, here we go. And so at the end of the day, I did everything I could to be the worst, most evil person in the world, bad guy. And we go, we go get in Toronto for WrestleMania after I've done all these horrible things. Oh my God. Now I had to back up and run him over again. Now after I do all these horrible things, and I come out of the building at WrestleMania, and the place is cheering me out of the building. Yeah. I'm going, oh my God, how are we gonna fix this? Because the rock is splitting to go to the Scorpion King. And I'm passing the wrong way. I'm passing the torch, giving him the rub, everything I can to help him be the greatest wrestler ever. You know? And because that guy was so good in the ring, bro, and I never worked him before, but second, third generation wrestler, instinct, timing, placement, he had everything. It took us about seven or eight minutes, I got it all turned back around. You know? And he had certain input that we did. And I said, well, if some of that stuff doesn't work, we're not doing it, you know? But it was just the craziest situation. I mean, this is it. This is like the craziest shit of all time. And Hollis scores on the right hand. Hopeless to the rock for the rock. The end could be near for the rock. I mean, look, everybody's arms are up in the air. He's in the day. He did all great the time with that move. The leg is low. You're like a fox. Tony is aroused. I mean, it's unbelievable. You have to realize that this is like it. The two entertainers. How old were you at this time? I was 53 or 54. That's amazing. And I had a hip replacement. That is amazing. And two knee replacements. That at 54, you were still this jacked. That's incredible. Another one. Another one. WrestleMania 18. After being in one, two, three, four, five. And the next year I took Vince McMahon at Safeco Field and actually had a blast with Vince. Got to beat the shit out of Vince. That was fun. He's all in. That crazy nut was all in. He loved it. That's so nuts that he can do that still too. So it was just so weird because all of a sudden the lines were just so blurry. Going out there thinking that I was gonna be the most hated person in the world. I went out there. Oh my God, we got a real problem here. But if Rock wasn't as good as he was, we could have never, you know, it's just like I was in there with somebody that had been in the business instead of 40 years. Like me, 50 years. He just had that instinct that I've been in the room with a lot of guys and he had it. When a lot of people didn't have it, he has it. So back in 77 when you first started, how did you get going? Like what were the first matches that you did? Well, before then, I drove the wrestlers crazy because they were coming in the clubs when I was playing music. Dude, I was scared to death them. They're all 300 pound guys. Teeth knocked out cauliflower ears, beer drinkers. I mean, there was no fluff back in the 70s, okay? So I was a huge wrestling fan my whole life because Dusty Rose was down in that Florida territory and all that stuff. So one of the guys I went to high school with named Mike Graham, his dad was a promoter. He was a big jock in high school and they all hated me because I was playing at a rock and roll band. I had long and had two brand new cars in high school. And then plus I was living at a hotel. I just didn't really fit in. How did you have two brand new cars in high school? Because the lady that was my babysitter, Leila Silverwood, when I was a kid growing up, she was president of Atlantic Bank on Dale Mabry in Tampa. And I bought two brand new road runners. They were like $3,000 a piece back in the day. So I bought a road runner, a four speed, a little 440 and then I bought a date car, a road runner with bucket seats, console, a little 383 car. And Leila Silverwood, who was my babysitter, I was like 17 at the time, gave me the loan and she signed for me. The president of Atlantic Bank loaned me the money and then she signed the note for me. That's insane that at 17 you decided to have two road runners. Yeah. An automatic and a manual, one for dating. Yeah, I'm a big Mopar guy, man, still him. Yeah, I love Mopar. Oh, my stuff's Mopar. I have a 70-year-old character. What were we talking about? I forgot. We're talking about the initial wrestling matches that you had, the first one. So anyway, the backstory is I got used to seeing these wrestlers, you know what I'm saying? And Mike Graham, who went to high school and he was a year ahead of me, I didn't really fit in with these guys. So I went and I'd watch at the sport of Torium every week the wrestling matches. And finally Mike Graham says, look, you've been coming here every week. I'd ran my mouth around town telling everybody I want to be a wrestler, which is the worst thing you can do. So at the end of the day, he set me up with a guy named Hiro Matsuda, a Japanese wrestler. And what they did was the first thing they did was they made me run. And so Matsuda got the station wagon, he got like five or six feet behind me and he made me run around Tampa Stadium two, three times. So I was ready to pass out. Then they got me in the building where the ring was and they had me do jumping squats and push-ups and side-straw hops and jumping squats until everything was white. And I was getting ready to faint. Then they threw me in the ring and Matsuda got between my legs. He stepped his elbow on my shin, grabbed my toe and broke my leg. Oh God. And said, don't ever come back again. They told me, don't you ever, and I had long ass hair, long hair. Well, you saw the picture of the band stuff. They said, don't ever come back again. So I had a four to con online van and you had to put some of the music equipment in with a clutch. I couldn't drive it. So when my father got home from work, he worked construction for Azur Ali Construction. He had to come down with my mom and he drove my van home. When I got home, I really got my ass beat. It was a little bit different. And he goes, don't you ever let anybody hurt you again. So when he broke your leg, what specifically broke? The bone above my ankle. Bone above my ankle. He posted my shin and pulled my toe. And he did it on purpose. Oh hell yeah. So that guy broke your leg and then you went home and your dad beat you up for getting your leg broken. That's fucked up. No, it's just old school bro. It's just, it's fucking, no, no, it's not brutal. It's not fucked up. That's just how things are. That's how you were built. No, that's not bad. But so anyway, make a long story short. Long story short, I, you know, weighed around for three or four months, cut my hair short like yours, went back with the mindset that nobody's gonna hurt me again. So they spent, I saw guys come through I don't know if you know who Paul Randolph, Mr. Wunderforce. I saw him come through six weeks and they trained him and he started wrestling. I'm there two years. I'm there two years and now they got me. So do you have to go back with the dude who broke your leg? Oh yeah. And you're working with him? Well, not only that, I started taking Japan with me when I was wrestling in Japan. We became like best friends bro. Wow. It's a certain amount of respect that goes along with this business if you're broken the right way. And so. So he respected that you came back. Oh yeah, man. They couldn't run me off. Right. They did everything they could. They weren't running me off now. I don't want to go home and face my daddy again. I would imagine though you'd want to get that dude back. No, I was too afraid of him. I was scared of him man. He was like the master. He was the man. You're the student. Submissions, all the jujitsu stuff. I didn't have nothing. I didn't have nothing about this stuff. I'm playing music, you know? Right, right, right. So now they spend two years teaching me how to wrestle, hook, submissions, all that stuff. And they have. Whoa. The arm bar. That's over in Japan. Wow. Oh wow. So in Japan, do they like different techniques? Yeah. See like in Japan, I didn't do any of the ear stuff or the whole, you know, the whole, and stuff over there. I would actually wrestle these guys, you know? Is that what they like in Japan? Oh yeah. Yeah. Well there's a lot of blurriness in Japan too. With. There is now. With pro wrestling and MMA. Yeah. There was a lot of blurriness back in the day when Takata was fighting for pride. Yeah. Takata was a huge pro wrestling star. And they had him as the anchor of pride. That company shouldn't have gone pro wrestling that I worked for over there. Yeah. Pride was their partners over there. Sometimes it would be on the card and the pride guys would be there. And I'm looking at, in the dressing room looking at the lineup, it's all in Japanese. I'm going, good buddy of my crazy Sata is Japanese. I said, oh my wrestling, I hope it's a guy gene. An American, you know? Because I didn't mind wrestling the Japanese. I just didn't want to fight the pride guys. You know what I'm saying? Right, right. Because they were all big man. Back in the day in the 70s, those guys were like 220, 240. They were all big. Yeah. You know. And there was, the pride was the wild west too. Literally, Ensign Inoue went and he had a contract that literally said, I think he said it was in an all capital letters too, we do not test for steroids. Oh God. He's just saying, look we're trying to make the best product possible. So why would we test you for steroids? Have fun. Yeah. And so the pride days were the wild west and people just had insane physiques and they could go for days. And some of the best fights of all time came out of that era. Those pride days, some of the best fights of all time. But the best example of the wild west of pride was a guy named Bob Sapp. Oh yeah. And Bob Sapp was 375 pounds with abs. It was the craziest thing. And he fought Minatoro Nogera in like the most epic fight of all time. I also love watching him. And Nogera tapped him with an arm bar. It was fucking crazy though. But he got pile-derived on his neck and his neck was fucked for the rest of his career. From this one fight. Sapp would get tired, he'd just start swinging wild. Hey maker. Have you seen him, Tony? Okay, you need to see this. Cause it defies logic. You look at the size of him. Go with Bob Sapp versus Nogera. When you see how physically big he is, when he's moving, you're like, this isn't a real person. This is like the Hulk. This is like a comic book character. Like look at the size of him. Watch this. Look at the size of him. So this is the, right away Nogera shoots and he gets pile-derived. Oh no. Yeah. By a guy who's fucking enormous. Look at this. Bro, look at the size of him. He was such a freak, but anyway, as the fight goes on, Nogera actually winds up submitting him and it's insane. But he takes a lot of punishment in the process. He finally gets on top of him. Bob Sapp gassed out. I mean, there's no way you can have endurance when you're that big. It's literally not even possible. He made a lot of money in Japan, man. You can have endurance for a little while, but you're never gonna have endurance like a guy like Nogera who's 230 pounds and natural. Like you're gonna eventually gas out. There's too much tissue. There's too much going on there. He was a huge star in Japan. Giant. He ran a foul with some promoters and stuff and it all went bad for him. But before that, they had like Bob Sapp dolls. They had like, he was everywhere. It was huge. He was promoting so many different products. He was gigantic over there. Yeah, sure was. But those pride guys, there was some blurriness back then because there was a few fights in pride that a lot of fight experts were like, that looks fake. A lot of fans, a lot of martial artists were like, that looks fake. I think that's a fake fight. I think there was some fixed fights. Everything got blurry over there. It was like the wild wild western 70s and 80s over there. It was so different when you went over there. They like to do a lot of freak show things. Like they would have giant people fight small people. They have this lady, Gabby Garcia. Have you ever seen her? Oh, I have at the championships. At Abu Dhabi. Yeah, we went to Abu Dhabi. Yeah, she's so fucking big. She's like 240 plus pounds. And they have her fight women who look like they just pulled them out of the housekeeping and said, hey, put some shorts on. You're gonna fight. That's crazy. It's a complete mismatch. But they do stuff like that, like kind of on purpose. Yeah, that's a difference. When you wrestled in Japan, was it acknowledged that they had a different kind of style? Like what else did you have to change? Like you didn't do the thing with your ear? No, no. Didn't do the drop? That's why when I stayed with the Japanese guy for a couple of years, I didn't know how to wrestle at all. Nothing. I was playing a rock roll band. So they spent a couple of years. And their mindset was, this kid might turn out to be something because they couldn't run me off. And so I kept coming back and coming back. So at the end of the day, I got to where I was warming the guys up and all the marks, like police officers or producers who wanted to be wrestled. They'd give them the meat first because I was in crazy shape. I was like 245, 50 pounds. I got to the point where I could do these exercises all day and I'd wear them out. Then I'd give them the Matsuda and another guy named Gordon Nelson, who's a crazy shooter. And we put wooden bars on the door so they couldn't run and escape. And we kept them in there. Can I explain to people what shooter means? Yeah. There's works and shoots. So for people who don't know what we're talking about, a work is, you have a predetermined outcome. A shoot is like, that's like a real fight, right? Well, even with holds, it's like with a hold here, like a top wrist lock, ouch. He's gonna kill you Tony. No, this is a work. You're dead, you're a dead man. This is a work, okay? This is a shoot. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Just even with holds, even like a headlock. Right. I got a headlock on you. This part of my arm's against your face. It's a work if I turn my hand this way and put that bone across you. Right. Then you're trying to hurt him. Yeah. So anyway, I spent a couple years with him. And then they taught me how to do the wrestling where you hit the ropes and take a backdrop. And the first day they started teaching me, I started crying. Because I had no idea. I was so into this, I thought it was like full blown, you know, shoot, go after the guy. They had me programmed. I mean, they had me beat down so much that I, when Eddie Graham, the kid, I went to high school and his dad got in the ring with me and he goes, and Eddie Graham was a big star, like the Hulk Hogan, Dusty Road star. And they called me and said, Eddie Graham's getting into the ring with me this week and he's gonna work out with me. I was scared to death. I'm like, oh my God. Should I just quit? Because I've been through so much, I don't know if I can handle going in the ring with this main event. God, I thought he was gonna kill me. And he showed me how to lock up and how to hit the ropes. I started crying because I knew they had been screwing with me. Now, it finally clicked. They'd been torturing me for no reason and they could have taught me this a year and a half ago. But back then, their whole mindset was different. If you were a wrestler, they were protecting the business so much, they didn't want some guy to go in the bar and get his ass kicked. You know, they didn't want somebody that they didn't think would at least go fight, you know what I'm saying, if something went down. So long story short, it all worked. And then when I ended up going to Japan in 78, 79, I took Matsuda with me because he was like a God in Japan. And there was a mystique that the Japanese knew what had happened to me with my leg. They knew that Matsuda broke me in. And when I went over there with him, I didn't even have to wrestle, I was already made. Oh wow. Because I was Matsuda's boy, you know. And so that was a good shot in the arm for me. Then a few years later, I took Classy Freddy Blassie with me over there. I remember that guy. And Classy Freddy Blassie used to wrestle a guy named Ricky Dozan over there. And Blassie had two sets of false teeth. One he'd eat with and another pair he'd file down on TV. Then he would bite the wrestlers in the head in Japan, suck the blood on her head and spit it back in their face. No, I'm serious bro. I'm serious. And on TV Asai, on TV Asai, the first weekend Blassie wrestled on TV, three old ladies passed out and died. Oh my God. Now this is the Fred Blassie story telling me. That is insane. So this is Blassie telling me this stuff. So now I've got Matsuda and I'm going over there with Blassie. And Ricky Dozan was the mafia guy. He ended up getting killed by a mafia guy over in Japan. But now I got this backstory of Matsuda and Blassie. That's why I stayed over there 22, 24 weeks out of the year. It was like, I loved it over there. That's amazing. Yeah, it was great. And they didn't call me Hulk Hogan. They called me Ichiban there. Oh. Yeah, so whenever you see me, it was black and silver tights. That's the Ichiban number one logo on my tights. And so. That's incredible. So that's what a great place to experience the different styles of pro wrestling too, right? Cause like American style pro wrestling versus Japanese style. And then there's like Mexican styles, different styles as well, right? Yeah. How many different styles of pro wrestling are there? Is it's bigger in America and bigger in Japan than anywhere else, right? Well, it's literally a different thing because when you see anybody in America, boom, they take your arm, they take your left arm. They always work off the left side, everything you do. Mexico, they work off the right side. Okay, my first time, my first time I was in Mexico City, I was in that big arena that has the hole in the roof, Mexico City, the big building. Yeah. And I'm in a six man tag. They put me in a six man tag for some reason. I don't do tag matches. I got two Mexican partners who don't speak English. And there's three other Mexican guys who don't speak English. They don't even tag over there. You know, you usually have to wait to get the tag. They're just running out of the ring and no tag. It took me like 10 minutes to figure out that you didn't need to tag. But you told me, so it was just crazy. But the stuff they do is just like a whole nother level. You know, the Eddie Guerrero's and Chavo Guerrero's and all these guys, man, they're in Rey Mysterio. These guys are super men. Wild acrobatics. Yeah, and they can wrestle too. I mean, Chavo's the man. He has this whole family. You know, they're legends. So in the 70s when you were first getting going, how many different organizations were there? Were there like small local places? And then there's one big one that was on television? Like, how many different organizations were there back then? Like, when I grew up, I saw Florida Championship Wrestling. You know, and I saw that's the only thing I saw. You know? So that was like a local? Yeah, it was just a local promotion. Was it cable back then? No, no, no. Regular TV. No, no, no. Regular TV. And we didn't get channel 17, Ted Turner's cable. And at the time, I didn't know that there was Madison Square Garden, New York territory. That is New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. And then there was like Minnesota, Vern Gany's territory. Then there was Fritz Von Erich Dallas, Bill Watts had Louisiana, Michael LaBelle had LA. So there were all these little teeny territories. And all the promoters respected each other. So if Joe Rogan had Texas, I would never come in to Dallas and try to run a show in your area. There are these imaginary boundaries that you don't cross your spec. That was Vince McMahon, Sr. And he was loyal to all these promoters. And every once in a while, he's been like superstar Billy Graham down to Florida to wrestle, or Ox Baker from New York down to wrestle. And we'd see these guys come in. I didn't know where they came from. But they'd come in, and the local hero, like Dusty Rhodes, would beat him up, and they'd be gone. So I had no idea how the whole system worked. And all I saw was Florida Championship Wrestling. So after I got in, and I figured out all these territories, I went to Minnesota and wrestled. And I went to North Florida, the Fuller territory, which is Pecola, and all through Mobile, Alabama and Birmingham, that small territory. I went to Memphis and worked for Waller and Jerry Jarrett for a while. But then when I went to work for Vince, Jr., and I went back after being fired, and had my first run in New York, and I went back in 84 to beat the Iron Sheik, Vince wanted to cross all those imaginary boundaries. And I went, wow, this is gonna be dangerous. So Vince says, yep, Florida, I said, yeah, I'll do it. And so Vince stayed in Connecticut in Greenwich in the office. And then I was booked in Lafayette, Louisiana. We'd pump our signal in there for eight weeks. Prime example is Kansas City. I don't know if you ever heard of a wrestler named Harley Race. Yeah, of course. NWA champion, tougher than hell, meaner than a snake. Great guy though, okay? We pumped the signal into Kansas City for eight weeks. And Harley Race has been there like 18 years. He was the NWA champion. I'm the champion of the world, and he's a very proud and mean son of a bitch. And all of a sudden, here comes this blond-haired idiot from New York going, hey, I'm the WWF champion. I'm the WWE champion. I'm coming to Kemper Arena. And we're pumped to signal. So I come, I fly into town. I show up about two in the afternoon. My guys call me Harley Race came down here with a gun. He tried to light the ring on fire. Whoa. And had the cops ran him up, and they didn't arrest him. I went, oh, shit. And they told me, Harley said, when I show up, he's gonna kill you. So I go across the street, and I go to the rusty scupper of this bar, right? And I was notorious at the time for not kind of being on time, because the matches would start at 7.30 to 8 o'clock, and they wanted you to build me at 6.30. I'd come rolling at about 9.30 after intermission, and I'd have time to put my boots on, because I don't want to talk about wrestling. I just want to go do it. It's like playing guitar or anything. It's like chess, you think, two, three moves ahead. And so now, I don't need to be at the building early. I damn sure don't want to run into Harley Race. This guy's gonna kill me. I'm scared to death of him anyway. I've known him since I was a kid. So now, I'm across the rusty scupper drinking bottles of wine, drinking bottles of wine. And now, I got to go to the building. Okay? So now, I go to the building, and I had to go to the bathroom. My stomach was killing me. So I'm sitting there on the toilet going to the bathroom. And I don't know if you know a wrestler named Davey Boy Smith, the British Bulldog. Yep. Yep. Oh, my God. The fucking king is here. The fucking king is here. He's gonna kill me, Hogan. Davey Boy comes and screams at me. I pull my wrestling velotites up. Don't even wipe my ass. Ugh. You know, as fast as I could, because I don't want to get caught in my pants down. And I don't want to have a fighting chance. I come blowing out of the bathroom. I turn around the corner. He puts that gun right in my face. And we're in Kemper Arena. And he goes, you know what? I should kill you, Hogan, for coming in and doing this. And this is Harley Race talking to me. And then he puts the gun down. He goes, but I really need a job. Wow. Oh, holy shit. You know, holy shit. I shook his hand, brother. And I was a huge fan. Loved the guy to death anyway. But that's the type of stuff me and Vince were doing. We were going to other people's territories. And then, you know, you go through, you know, you go to hotel rooms and stuff. You never know when stuff's gonna put crap in your bag or stuff like that. We went down to Puerto Rico. But anyway, Harley became a good friend again. And I knew him before I was a fan. He used to come hear the band playing and everything. But anyway, like going down to Puerto Rico. First time we go down to Puerto Rico, I've never been to Puerto Rico before. All the boys tell me how violent it is. They cut you. They burn you with cigarettes. They throw everything at you in Puerto Rico. So I'd never been. I didn't need to go. But now Vince wants to go down to Puerto Rico. And Carlos Colon had the territory there for like 30 or 40 years. So here we come. And I go rolling down to Puerto Rico with Cindy Lauper with me, right? So I go down to Puerto Rico. And we have the match. And we saw the stadium. Me and Macho Man go back to the room and we go walk in his room. His room is trashed. His room is trashed. And so all of a sudden, I go, oh my God, I'm gonna go to my room. So all of a sudden I go to my room. And I don't wanna say the guy's name, but when I open the door, he's sitting there and because he's still really active. And he's sitting there with a gun. He said, if you ever come back here, I'm gonna kill you. So okay. I was going back to Tampa. I hauled ass to the airport. I got on an Eastern Airlines flight, the last one out of town. I flew to LA. I was supposed to be going home to Tampa. About four months later, Bruce O'Brody goes down there, has a little argument. The Booker calls him into the shower, cuts his throat and kills him. Jesus Christ. So that's down there in Puerto Rico. Jesus Christ. Yeah. I don't know if you guys ever heard the Brody story. The promoter cut his throat and killed him? The Booker. He was one of the invaders, Rodriguez. Brody was kind of hard to do business with in the ring. He's really stiff and would beat the shit out of you. He wouldn't put anybody over. And he was a big man, six foot eight, 330 pounds in crazy shape. And they wanted to beat him. He was, nah, not tonight, brother. Wow. So after the match, they said, hey, Jose wants to talk to you in the shower. Brody went walking the shower. He jumped and cut his throat and died right there. And all the wrestlers that saw it were afraid to go back and testify. That's. Wow. So it can't get crazy. You know, that's about as crazy as it gets. So you guys were the first ones to break those boundaries and kind of barnstorm the whole country like that. Vince is a gangster. Bro, that's such a gangster move. How about going to Germany or South Africa? You know, because they had wrestling over there too. How about born in South Africa and you're getting challenged by the South African heavyweight champion, Wilhelm Ruska, that judo guy. My God, it goes on and on and on, you know, with how crazy it got, you know? What was that like? It was different. You know, the good thing was everywhere I went, I had like the crew with me, you know, except for when I went to South Africa. That was a little different, but everywhere I went, it was always the crew and the WWE 20 or 30 wrestlers that were there. So you felt a lot better. Right. I try not to peel off on my own too often, especially when we're walking someone else's backyard that they've been promoting wrestling for 30, 40, 50 years. And all of a sudden you come here and they have the same sort of unspoken rules out there. And we broke them all. Wow. Yeah. I never even considered that as a possibility that there would be these territories. Well, that's what one of the main things that made Vince Jr. so famous and changed the game forever. Vince Sr. always wanted him. He wasn't like a promise, a handshake deal. You can have the company, son, but just please don't ever mess with the other territories. And Vince is like, okay. It's like Vince told me, he goes, if my dad knew what we were getting ready to do, he'd have never sold me the territory. Yeah. Wow. I'm like, okay. He goes, you up for it? I said, yeah. Let's do it. Was the dad alive when this was going down? For a while. Yeah. For a while, he had pancreatic cancer. And he was alive. Like when I went back, when I went back, oh, God, it's such a crazy story. I hate to get into all this stuff, but it's all true. Like when I went back, I had just been in Minnesota, spent three years Hulk Hogan had really that Hulkamani thing and started there. I was on fire there. I mean, really on fire. And so now when I go back to New York, Vince had flown to my house. We talked about doing a deal. So on a certain day, I'm coming back to New York. I did two, three weeks of TV. Then when I was supposed to be the iron sheik for the belt that night, Vince Sr. was there and he always had these half glasses that he'd look over and he's always clicking quarters together when he talked to you. You know, and I'm standing there with Vince, Sr. and Vince Jr. and myself and Bob Backlund standing there who was the champion that the iron sheik beat for the belt. Now the iron sheik's got the belt and Backlund thought he was getting the belt back. And Backlund was my guys, go to Japan, even train within Japan when nobody else would run steps with him and everything in the hotel. All of a sudden I'm sitting there and Vince is clicking the quarters together and he goes, wow, I'm really thinking, you know, that I really don't think we should do this tonight. We should put this off for about six months and Bob Backlund pops up and goes, yeah, I think a real real athlete should be the champion. So I'm looking over at him, right? And like, what the hell is going on here? You know, and then out of nowhere, you know, I said, well, guys, I just had a huge bridge. I just burned down in Minnesota. I built a big bridge there. I tell you what, I'll rest the iron sheik's and I'll put his ass over because that's business. But I'm going back and rebuild that bridge. Thank you guys very much for bringing me up there. I went back to the dressing room. It was about 10 or 15 minutes later, Vince Jr. came in and says, oh, everything's okay. I've talked to my dad. Everything's settled down. I said, are you sure? Now what I don't know on the backside is when I leave Minnesota, the promoter, Vern Ganyu, who worked there, the iron sheik Cosgrove, Cosgrove, Lazaria, whatever his real name was, he was a real bodyguard for the Shah of Iran. He was the real deal, bro. He's got all these huge dents and holes in his head with these to beat him and stuff when he was over there. Little did I know, Cos, the iron sheik broke in with Vern Ganyu in Minnesota, right? So now I come to New York and I'm going to win the belt. And Vern Ganyu was pissed at me for leaving. So he calls Cos up and says, I'll give you a hundred grand to break Hogan's leg. Right? And now this guy's an NCAA champion, the real deal. I'm not, you know, so Vern offers him a hundred grand to break my leg and we go in the ring. And I mean, I'm giving him my arm and take my head and take my leg. I mean, you know, I think we're working, you know, not shooting. And he told us afterwards, you know, my accent's terrible. The iron sheik was, but you know, Vern called me and wanted to give me a hundred grand to break your leg. But I'm a businessman. I just hope we can keep working. So brother, don't worry. We're going to work all the time. But I don't know if you knew about that. If you're a wrestling fan, I didn't know that he was offered a hundred thousand to break your leg. Smart move for him to not take it. You get a hundred thousand there and then you guys never work together. And he's never anywhere near what he became one of the ultimate heels of all time. Yeah. But these are all everybody knows these stories, man. Also, he's an athlete. He's not a hit man. Right. You know, it's kind of fucked up. Like you, it's a different business. You'd be surprised. I'm sure. Those rules don't apply all the time. Yeah, I'm sure. It's just, I love the iron sheik. Oh, he's great. Yeah. I hung out with him one time in that Toronto pot place, you know, where they have that marijuana show where the entire room was filled with weed smoke. Yeah. And the iron sheik got on stage with me. Yeah. He's the man. I roasted him three times. LA, Toronto, and Hamilton, Canada. I told him he's such a nice guy. He'd give you the shirt off his head. He was a freak athlete too, man. You ever see him do the clubs? Yeah. None of us could do it. We all tried. None of us could do it. I couldn't do it. Andre couldn't do it. None of us could do it. Andre couldn't do it. None of us could do it, bro. It's close to like 85 pounds apiece. Are they really? Yeah. They were heavy as shit. He just manhandled them. Yeah. That's really hard to do those things. I do them with these little 25 pound ones. It's hard to do. And the longer the handle, more difficult it is to maneuver. You put them behind your head and do them like college does. Yeah. Shield casting. You do this. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. I don't know. I do these. I do a bunch of different ones with it. But it's a very weird kind of strength. And when you watch him do it, it's like, he must have been spectacularly strong. He was a legit wrestler. Oh, yeah. Amateur wrestler. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Pan Am champion. I can't even have a bunch of other accolades. Yeah. Think about how many real legit at Kurt Angle is a great example. Kurt Angle wins the gold medal with a broken neck. One gold medal in the Olympics with a broken neck. Dude, I'm in the run with Kurt Angle. And we go to Scrove. He gets down an amateur stance. His eyes roll back and it's dark. I'm looking at him going, brother. And so when I first started working with him, I mean, you're supposed to make, you're supposed to, I work with the one man gang a certain way. I work with Piper a certain way. People work with Hulk Hogan a certain way. There's a certain protocol to set a storyline up. Well, Kurt Angle is just coming at me and taking me down and going behind me and yolking my shit up every night. And this is going on for like three or four nights in a row. And I'm like, I know he's kind of like green. He's just getting started. And he's got that amateur wrestling mindset. Yeah. If he can't break me that, he's not going to draw any money. I mean, as soon as Brock got that out of his head, he drew nothing but money. So Kurt's coming to me. Kurt's coming to me. I finally had a sense of, brother, what is your deal? I said, I'm here to make money. I'm here to make a living. I said, what's going on with you, man? Why the first five or six minutes? You're trying to grind me out here. You know? Well, Vince told me to screw you. I said, oh, really? Vince told you to do that? I said, I can't wait to get a hold of Vince now. But Vince put it in Kurt's ear when you're on these house shows with Hogan and nobody sees you, you're not on TV. Go out and grind his ass. So that was a big thing for Vince. If it was wrestling San Antonio tonight with no cameras, he'd sit Kurt Angle on me for the first five or six minutes. Oh. But why? What was the reason? Just for fun, just a joke. Yeah. Because we would all do that shit to each other. It's just a normal wrestling rib. Kurt Angle's neck looks like a waist. Yeah. It's like a normal person's waist. Yeah. Yeah. He's a monster, man. He just has both of his knees done. Yeah. I was going to ask. Like, he must have experienced a ton of injuries, right? Yeah. Good guy, though, brother. Really good guy. So he had knee replacements. Yeah. Matt Serra just had one of those. Yeah. He's back to doing jujitsu. What is this? Kurt? Oh, wow. They swear. That's hilarious. Oh my god. This is so funny. Oh, it's nice. Apparently, I have to start working together. Hilarious. Now you put it in his face. Hey, B's working a real job. Oh, fuck yeah. That's what a crazy story about Vincent taking over the entire country. Yeah. I mean, it's just wild ass times. It's wild ass times for the sport. Yeah. I remember Killer Kowalski. Remember that guy? Oh, yeah. Walter. We used to watch it on like there was like a local Boston channel that would have local Massachusetts pro wrestling. You're from the Boston area? Yeah. That's where I went to high school. Dude, that old Boston gardens was magical. Oh, yeah. Man, I could just look at people in there and they would start coming towards the ring. I'll have to just look at them. They come and it was like intense. I mean, I had some of the greatest matches in there simply because if those people are into it, you just go. Yeah. You push it beyond. Is the new one the TD Garden, is that in the same place or is it a totally new location? Did they redo the old place or did they make is it a totally new location? We were just there this past weekend for the UFC. Yeah. I've wrestled in it several times to tell you the truth. I didn't pay attention. Some of the things that you do, like the hand of the ear and all that, was that Vince or you or you guys think of this stuff together? No, that was stolen. That was stolen. Well, this guy named Austin Idol. Yeah. He's another guy that looks like Flair, just like Flair almost. And I was in Dothan, Alabama one night and I saw him just do this. And it was louder than any reaction you got from the whole match. I saw him and I said, oh, that's kind of interesting. So I snarled. I wound it up and started going in and just placed blue. And then when I'm down and they lift mom once, somebody's getting to sleep and they lift mom twice. And then I lift mom the third time and I put mom and I go stole that too from dusty roads. Saw him do that when I was a kid. How about the Hey Brother? That was mine. Nice. Yeah, that's a big one. But anyway, say your prayers, take your vitamins. That's mine. Nice. The shirt tear, that was an accident. I was in the Rosemont Horizon and I had once again, a six man tag. And God, who the hell is Oh, I know who it was. I was in there with the God, who was I in there with Jerry Blackwell, a couple guys, all three guys were playing the Sheik's. I can't remember what the hell was. I was in the ring with these two guys, Greg Ganya, who was a promoter son, Jim Brunzel. I'm standing in the middle of the ring and they just reached up and ripped my shirt off me. Each guy grabbed my shirt and ripped it in the place. Went crazy. Went Oh, shit. That works. Mm. Plus, I tired carry on that big ass robe and stuff. He had to carry an extra bag at the airport. So t-shirts I'm in, you know, so different things like that, you know, the whole hemania thing. Of course, there was beetle mania, you know, and then all of a sudden that guy that did the ear thing, Austin, I heard him say, I don't mania, you know, do this to his face because he was a good looking guy. Austin, I heard that I don't mania. I'm gonna steal that too. Yeah. Hmm. It all worked out well. Yeah. Yeah. Do you like doing the other stuff too, like movies and things on TV shows and things along those lines? I used to, but no, no anymore. I don't know how many I don't know if I've done 15 or 17 little low budget kids movies or had cameos and, you know, I've done three ninja movies with Lonnie Anderson and Jim Varney, Muffets, three, High Noon at Mega Mountain. I played Dave Dragon, the superhero. I've done Gremlin movies. I've done Baywatch. Oh God. Yeah. I was partners with Baywatch guys. Now, you know, done different. Tony has followed your career very closely. Yeah. But you know, it's the thing was, it was the process. It's like when I first got with Vince, we took off, we did a wrestling movie called No Holds Barred. And Tiny Lester, you know, he was in it with me. Great guy, man. I love him to death. But the thing was, other than that first wrestling movie that I did with Vince, I started doing a bunch of other movies. I did the first couple movies that New Line Cinema ever did. Suburban Commando and Mr. Nanny. It's the first two movies he ever did. And then that guy, Jordan Belford, gave me money to do a couple of movies at Wolf Wall Street. Oh wow. Yeah. If you pull up like Sandwood Muscles, you can see him, Producer Credit, you know. So he gave me money to do Sandwood Muscles and another movie. But I did like... Did you get a chance to talk to that guy? No. No. No, I never did. No, I take that back. I did meet him one time. Met him one time in the Grand Havana Room. And with Brian and Stan Schuster, who were running the Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills, I didn't know who he was when I was talking to him. And they said, oh, this is the guy that put the money up. And I did meet him. But you know, that was the only time. He didn't have a conversation or anything. But... I would like to know how much that movie was made up and how much fat was real. That movie was great. Like, were you really that out of control? That was a great fucking movie. Yeah. My problem was, even when I did American Gladiators with Leila Ali at the Sony soundstage, they would have my RV on the side of the soundstage. You'd be in makeup at 5 30 in the morning and you know how it is. And then all of a sudden, it's getting dark. And they've used you for five minutes. I couldn't stand the process. Right. The whole time I was thinking about I could be out. Doing a lot of things. Yeah. I mean, especially the wrestling, you know? Yeah. To walk away from that type of intensity and that type of money to be locked in an RV all day. I couldn't handle it, man. Well, I think if there's one thing the way like maybe you or I might look at it, because it's just a thing we do kind of on the side, like sometimes do it. But for those people, like, that's like game day. This is what they actually want to do. I don't have that desire for it. I'm on your team. Like they do. Yeah, I get it. I mean, I'm glad that they do. That there's people out there that live for that because I like watching movies. But I would imagine for you, part of the thing would be like trying to pick what to say yes to because you probably have so many different kind of ideas coming at you. Yeah, it's a little different. I mean, I've had the same agent, Peter Young, for over 40 years. Wow. And at the time, my attorney Henry Holmes, we were like a team. And I think the reason Peter's still my agent is because I say no to everything. Because after, you know, the great life I've had, you know, in the entertainment business, I just love being on the beach, man. You know, I said, can we get Joe Brogan to come to us, man? Impossible. Yeah. So, you know, so I mean, that's my mindset. I just hate leaving the beach. He's like relaxing now. Oh, not even that. It's just I just, you know, it's kind of like my girl that's with me now. It's like she understands, you know, and it took a while until she you have to experience it, comprehend it, comprehend it. Everybody has like a whole coding story, you know, and it's true. Now she she goes, I get it. Everybody does. And she's like people come say, man, my dad just want to say hello to he played Venice Beach, played basketball in Venice Beach for five years. So your dad, I said hello, I still love him. I haven't played basketball day in my life. Or my dad grew up with you. I grew up I grew up in Tampa, Florida, or my dad grew up in Tampa, Florida, with he's the one that taught you how to lift weights and so to tell your dad, I love him. And I can't wait to see me. I never lived in Venice Beach. Right. But it's kind of like those stories come along, you know? Yeah. Do you remember riding next to me 15 years ago on an Eastern airline from here to LaGuardia? Yeah, brother. How are you doing, man? The one that kills me the 40 year old guys come up to me and go, do you remember me? You met me when I was seven years old. I'm like, dude, you look a little bit different. When you're seven, you got a full beard and everything. So but it's cool though, because people are so nice and respectful. And most people are really, really, honestly, just really nice people. Yeah. And it's just amazing. You know, there's very few idiots out there. Yeah, it is amazing. Yeah, it's just most people. It's just really nice. So many of us that you hear about the idiots, you know, and they do exist. But there's so many of us that you hear about it. So it's like, you know, statistically pretty small number of people. It becomes the thing that everybody concentrates on all the time. And it gives you a distorted perspective of people of the human race. Like most of them, it's like driving a car. You're driving cars dangerous. Yeah, but it's pretty amazing how good everybody is at it. It's pretty amazing that most days you can get around and never see an accident. Yeah. I mean, you're dealing with so many cars, there's thousands of cars that you see every day if you live in a city. And most days you don't see an accident. Like the vast majority of days you don't see accidents. You know, that's amazing. You mean you might see one that had already happened. But how many do you actually see? Right. In your whole life, you might see like a dozen, you know, it's kind of crazy because it's a difficult task that everybody gets. I think it's just easy to get cynical when you pay attention and bad shit. And that's the news is always giving us bad shit. You know, we always have things to worry about. There's another talking about there's a new strain of the virus. We have to be really scared of like, oh, it's like every day. It's like new problems from all over the world and you're inundated by it. So it's very difficult for people to just kind of chill out. That's amazing. Because the stuff I was looking at was saying, well, we're going to start wearing masks and we're going to isolate. And yeah, you know, yeah, there's some college just put reinstated a mask mandate, which is like, oh my God, you people, you're loving this. It doesn't even make any sense. Because if you're a college, that would mean you're an institute for higher education. If you're in, if you're an institute for higher education, wouldn't you be paying attention to the latest data? If you were, you would realize that masks don't have a significant impact. That's not statistically significant. It doesn't work. Especially like regular ones. If you have like one of those K95 and whatever the fuck they are, it's tightly fitted. That'll provide you with some protection. Also, you're not supposed to wear it more than an hour a day. They're saying it's not healthy to just breathe through this fucking cloth thing all day. It's stupid. I mean, it's just insane that these people want to give back into this mania again. It's like they miss it. It's weird, right? It is. It is. It's a weird victim embracing mentality. It's almost like people run a hundred mile race. And after they're done, like, I'm never doing that again. And then two weeks later, they're like, I'm going to get, I'm going to do another one. It's like they want to, they want to experience something exciting, whether it's being scared out of your fucking mind, whether it's showing the world that you're a really good person by putting a mask on. All of it is just nuts. So that that throws in the face of what I said earlier. I was like, most people are good people. They are. Most people are. But there's a good percentage of people that are out of their fucking minds. A good percentage. Just bouncing off the walls out there. Well, they're being led around, you know, by people that have a different agenda. It's also shocking how easy it is to just get people to just just to believe nonsense. Like hardly any work has to be involved. It's not something like they don't they just kind of, as long as like experts on TV say it, they go, OK, we're in. And then when it's proven that they're wrong, there's no sort of reconciliation. There's no there's no moment where they go, well, now I'm not. Now I'm going to look at other news sources. Now I'm going to see if there's any experts and scientists that disagree with certain things. But most people are just like, you know, if you're 40 years old, you got a mortgage, you got kids, you're working all day enough time, you don't have time to be paying attention to this shit. You know, we're very fortunate that we're comics. So we have the day to do whatever the fuck we want. And we can read things that maybe, you know, we send each other or watch a documentary or something and get a new perspective. But the more I do that, the more I get bummed out. Like I don't want to hear more about the opioid crisis. I don't want to hear more about just nonsense that's happening in the world. It's just, you know, I don't know, man, it's just a very uncomfortable moment for this country, for people in general, I think. I just don't think that this access to information, the way we get it is good for us. I think it just freaks us out. I think there's just too much going on all the time. Well, if I were to look back, even I was going to say five years ago, but if I look back a year ago, I would never have dreamed where we would be where we are now with all the insanity that's going on. It's very strange. It's like we're kind of awakening to, first of all, how connected we all are. And we're also being integrated to AI. And really quickly, this chat, GPT shit, people are getting busted, using it for school papers already. And it's just so easy to get this thing to do work for you. It's like, why would I do this? Why would I do it? And you can kind of see where the writing on the wall is going. It's like, boy, that shit's overwhelming. First of all, it overwhelms people's emotions with the social media and self-harm is up and suicides among young girls are up from that. And they think that there's a direct connection to social media and what it does to kids. But as it gets more and more, it's going to become a part of us. And we're kind of the last generation that's ever going to remember what it was like before the internet. We're the last generation. Because the kids today, that's just what they know. It's like we know electricity. If you lived a long fucking time ago, an electricity came about, it'd be the most magic shit of all time. It's just a very- It's a tough road ahead, man. It is. But for a guy like you that came up pro wrestling in the 1970s, I mean, for you have gone through all that wildness and to get to where you are today, where people are watching pro wrestling matches on YouTube instantaneously on your phone. It's a pretty amazing journey. Yeah, I mean, we did some great business with licensing and merchandising. I kind of wish the internet would have been around when we were- Oh, yeah, for sure. Once that first Hulkamania red and yellow run took off, it was pretty intense. And that's with no internet. Yeah, just word of mouth. Yeah, I mean, just when you go to Detroit, you had Edsel Ford there and I have Hokey in the front row. Or when you go to LA, you'd have Gene Hackman and Brad Pitt and everybody sitting there. So it was like, it was different. If we go to New York, Blondie was always backstage and everybody. It was a circus, Andy Warhol, everybody was there. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. How did they get the word out? Were they doing TV ads? Were they doing billboards? Like radio? What did you guys do? Well, it was mainly radio and print back then. The launch pin was that WrestleMania one, because I'd been out and I'd done a few episodes of the A-Team with T. And I think I did three episodes and then they wanted me to come back the next year. They wanted to do the salt and pepper thing with me and T. And I just couldn't deal with it, man. T and George McPherd with each other's throats. They're like pulling me back and forth. T's going, don't talk to him. George McPherd goes, let me go over the lines with you. I'm like, you know, I was being pulled back and forth. And it was kind of uncomfortable, you know, but I did meet my agent, Peter Young there, because he was T's agent. So that's why I've been with him so long. And then he just ruined the A-Team for me. Now I know that George McPherd and Mr. T didn't like each other. Oh, dude, they were at it full time. Now I'm so sad. I can't watch old episodes now. Oh, my gosh. I'd be like, oh, who was the dick? Oh, you'll have to say. Oh, I don't know. That was a rude question. I really don't know. I take it back. I pity the fool whoever it was. I pity the fool. I pity the fool. Stop your jibber-jabber. Bro, he was fucking amazing in Rocky 3. Holy shit. He was amazing. He was terrifying. Yeah. Hey, woman. Since your man ain't got no heart, what's going on in my apartment tonight? I'll show you a real man. What? Fuck you. That was a great team. That was good. Him doing the chin-ups. Like, he was a very convincing killer. Yeah. They did a good job on the ring, man. That's going to be the man that Russell Manion won. I had a little bit of a problem with Piper and Orndoff back then, but they ended up being cool about it. They wanted to kill him. Who wanted to kill him? Roddy Piper and Paul Orndoff, the two guys we wrestled. That guy, Piper. Right. Sure. I know Roddy. Piper and Orndoff, because we hadn't had any celebrities come into our sport like that. Oh. They wanted to kill him. They wanted to beat him up. Yeah. And so it was like a couple of mad dogs. I was begging them, please, let's just get through this damn thing. Did they go hard on him? Not real hard, but T had a little bit of an amateur wrestling background. The problem is, is when you're out there, you could do all the cardio you want. You can do all the work you want, but something about your nerves will blow you sky high where you can't even get a breath. And I mean, just standing on the apron. Just adrenaline. Just yeah, just standing on the apron. You know, I knew that he would have a hard time with his nerves once we got out there. And so once he had the first little run in the beginning of the match, and I got back in, I kept watching him on the apron. He was hanging dogging, you know, he couldn't get his breath back. And it was just nerves. It wasn't that he wasn't in shape. It was the nerves that got the best in. But he rallied around and we did get through that. But it was interesting because he brought a lot to the table, man. A whole lot to the table. Oh, yeah, after Rocky three, he was a fucking suitor. He was a he was a major star from that A team in Rocky. He was on fire. Yeah. Yeah. He gave me a great rub, man. Me rubbing up against him made me a bigger star. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, he was quite a character. Back in his day, there was always some talk about whether or not like I also might be misremembering that, like he never talked about like having pro fights or anything. Did he? Was it was there ever anybody made big offers for him? Mr. T. Yeah. No. No. Why did I think there was something? I'm probably misremembering this. There was something after Rocky three where they were trying to get him to actually fight. I know he started out as a bodyguard in Chicago. He was very convincing in Rocky three. He was fucking terrified. So shredded too. Yeah, that was great. The A team was such a weird show. You know, those guys driving around in a van, like solving problems. I've got I've got a bar in Clearwater Beach called Hogan's Hangout. All right. Monday nights are monster, monster nights because we have karaoke there, right? And I've got a Mr. T guy. The kid's about six two. He's got all the jewelry on, of course, it's not the real stuff. And he's got the mohawk. Looks a lot like T and he drives the van. He's got the gray van with the red wing on the side. He drives the A team van. I mean, you could see him at the Bucks games at the Rays games. They've always got him on camera, but that's a weird thing to stick with. Yeah. Well, he's sticking with it, man. It works for him. That's hilarious. But he comes to our karaoke and it's kind of funny when he walks in the place goes crazy. There's something about those TV shows, those nostalgic TV shows. They do make me happy going back and watching like an episode of like the team. Just because it's it's like a capsule in time that it's never there's never they're never going to make shows like that again. Like that there's never going to be a dukes of hazard again. You know, there's never going to be any of those shows. Like when you when you're watching is like a weird peek into a time before there was an internet. And when people were just a little goofier, they were just a little goofier. Yeah, they they didn't need their entertainment to be so multilayered. It didn't have to be stranger things. Oh, what's up? What shows this? C18. This is you in the A team. Are you okay? Yeah, yeah, you got a nail. I'm hulked right now. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I'm fine. Can you find out what year that was? Look at you. I got actually long. And there's the van. I'm sure they'll be all right. Yeah, but what's worse them catching them or them not catching them? Like even the acting. They're acting like someone pretending to be acting. I think it's the directing like how do you see that and go? That's it. Let's move on. Coke. Yeah. Hollywood was all on code back then. Yeah, Roger. Restrictions. There's like there's a moment in Hollywood history where you watch some of the films you go. Oh, they were on coke like showgirls. You ever see showgirls? Yeah, for sure. Someone was doing coke. Whoever fucking wrote that movie and produced and directed that movie that that movies. If you watch that like with like a like lately. No, it's insane. It doesn't even seem like a real movie. You watch like this is crazy. It's like they were doing a very subtle parody of a movie. That's what it's like. And that's just cocaine. It's like cocaine made that movie. I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing. No accusations. But there's a fun time in, you know, Hollywood where you could see like certain films look like people were on coke when they were making them. They just don't make any sense. You guys ever take a pee break? Yeah, take a pee break. Is that cool? Yeah, let's do it. That coffee and this thing's got me. Listen, yep, absolutely. Let's go. So, so we're back. We're back from the piss break. Thank God. Because I think I was rambling about nonsense. We were talking about the just the crazy times that we live in. Are you are you doing any like fan things where you do meet and greets and stuff like that where people can come out to me? Because you're like one of those guys that like everybody wants to meet. It's like bucket list people. You're a pro wrestling fan. You're on the Mount Rushmore. Yeah, I kind of I don't do a lot of them, you know, once again, not to be repetitive, but the sports company I worked with Darren Prince Sports, you know, he tried to get me to work. I mean, his story is he tried to get me to work with him for almost 20 years. I wouldn't do it. I just don't. I'm not one of the weekend warriors, you know, that kind of like now that I'm done with the wrestling, I go out and sign autographs and do that stuff. I just really don't do that. I made like last year. I think I did one, you know, like a big one in Chicago. And then I've got these little retail stores where I sell. I got one in Clearwater Beach. I've got one in Orlando where I sell t-shirts, a number of billions stuff to the kids and wrestling fans. And usually like once a year, sometimes twice a year, I'll do an autograph signing in Clearwater and one in Orlando. But I just don't make the rounds that much and go out every weekend because I mean, I could work every weekend signing autographs of comic cons and different things. I just really have never done that. What are you doing the majority of your time these days? It's a good question. I seem to be busy all day long, you know, my day starts out with training every day. I trained a couple hours in the morning and everything's everything. What kind of stuff are you doing? Weightlifting, you know, and everything's a compromise. I have no Olympic bars at all. And, you know, I have a rack of dumbbells. I have straight bars and easy-curl bars. And of course, the old school I carry in machines, all my equipment's about four years old. You know, the good stuff, a lot of strive stuff, you know, chamber cam stuff we can train around injuries, like biceps that are torn everywhere and all the holes I have in me from tearing stuff that I never fixed. You know, there's a chamber cam that you hit the peak in the top, but you can eliminate this part of it. It's the weak part of your arm training around injuries. So I do that. And then I kind of like get rolling, man. I just I'm a beach bum, you know, I just love being on the beach and just stay busy. The lady I'm getting ready to marry, you know, she changed my life. She's got three kids, you know, and I just on paper, we've talked, you know, seven-year-old man with a younger lady, 47 year old lady with three kids, you know, 16, 14 and nine on paper doesn't work at all, you know, because I'm just way too old for that by fell in love with the kids, you know, and so it's just I just love having people around and felt crazy in love with her. So, you know, a lot of the stuff is her and I figuring out what we're going to do, where we're going, you know, we love to go out and eat and hang out at the beach and she likes to train too. And then her kids are like a full-time job. And I do a lot of stuff on the phone. You know, I make deals on the phone. I could have like a I could sit in my office and have a $50 a day or it could be a high seven-digit day depending on where we're at with this stuff, you know, so I just stay busy all the time, you know, and it's I'm still in the contract with the WWE and just have a ton of licensing and merchandising stuff. You know, I think when I was the world's champion, I had 300 licenses, the 300 different products like watches, headbands, frisbees, tennis shoes, potty seats for kids, child kites, you name it. I had a cameras. I had like 300 licensees now that I'm not the world's champion and I haven't wrestled for quite a long time. I've got like 800 licenses, you know, it's just insane. It's kind of like what's old is new again, you know, and they're kind of like I feel like I'm the Elvis is not dead yet. You know, the way they're licensing merchandise. So I know when I kicked the bucket, my stuff's going to go through the roof through the roof. Yeah. But yeah, it's I mean, I stay busy with all kind of craziness, man. You know, what's really encouraging to me is that despite all the physical abuse your body's had, your mind is very sharp. And even though you've gone through this whole fentanyl problem, you know, the opioid thing with people with injuries, my God, it's so legendary. So many people have had those issues, but you came out of the other end and you seem clear as day. Well, I don't have an addictive personality, you know, because I'm either all the way in or all the way out. And you got to realize that all these wrestlers and I don't know the numbers, but you know, if you said football, how many wrestlers have died in the last 25 years, the number could be 10 or 20. You know, if you said baseball, the number could be 10 or 20. But when you say wrestling in the last 30 years, it's a couple hundred, 250 guys that have heart attack, overdose, this, that, and the other. And I was the ringleader. Yeah. You know, I was definitely the ringleader and I ran real hard. But I just kind of knew when we got to the edge, I knew when to pull back. So what was, does this partying or is this, did it start with injuries and then lead to? It's the schedule. It was the schedule first off and not have any real rules because like, it's like Vince McMahon runs the show. Okay. And so when was to say Roman Reigns goes out, he's one of their biggest stars. Now, I don't know if you guys are familiar with what's going on now, but Roman Reigns is a huge star. And when he goes out to wrestle somebody like Dolph Ziggler, you know, the referee or Vince, whoever's the agent, we'll say Roman Reigns is going to beat you Joe Rogan with the sleeper hold or something or Superman punch. Okay, fine. Well, back in the day, you know, when we first started and Vince took over, I'd go to the Philadelphia spectrum and Vince would say, okay, I want you to beat Piper the leg drop. So, okay. I'd go tell her, Hey, Roddy, you know, Vince wants me to go over and beat you the leg drop. He doesn't know. Okay. Well, what do you want to do, Roddy? You know? And then I'd have to explain business to a lot of guys. I love Roddy to death. We hated each other for years. And then we became really, really close before he passed the last five or six years. And so I would always tease him when we became friends. I said, Roddy, like when you didn't want to do, I, Randy and I would flip the belt back and forth all the time because Randy would do business. You know, if I needed the belt back after the movie, give it back then I'd drop it to him again. And I told Piper, I said, you made a lot of money. Can you imagine how much money? I mean, you got eight kids or seven or eight kids. So can you imagine how much money you would have made if you'd let me beat you one time, then I could have went to Vince to say, Hey, we can trust this guy. Let's put the belt on Piper because I don't need the belt. Right. I got the gimmick, bro. I'm all right. My stuff. I was locked in. What I needed somebody to take the belt so I could chase him. Right. Because if I can put that belt on you, I see a big dollar sign there. I'll chase your ass all over the place. Right. I said, Roddy, can you imagine how much money you would have made if you let me just beat you once? And then you come to WCW. When I'm a bad guy, you beat me every night. Big deal. I mean, it's a work brother, you know, it's all about the money and the miles that there's money to be made. Let's make it brother. You know, so throughout all this stuff running with these guys, I saw them all drop off, you know, one at a time, one at a time. And it was the schedule, which is very taxing because we were running really hard back in the day. It was, you could go to Austin, Texas tonight. I doc, I hurt my back hurt my back. Okay. Piper Hogan, here's 30 perks. And next night you're in Chicago. Hey, doc, I hurt my back. Oh, okay. Every single town, there was a doctor, you know, and that's how this whole thing got started, you know, and then, you know, all of a sudden it ends, you know, for whatever reason, you go get a couple of DUIs or you get in a fight and hurt somebody really better, whatever the case may be. All of a sudden, you're either too old or you get injured or you hurt somebody, you do some stupid legal stuff and your career ends. And then you go home and you don't fit in at home because you've been gone for 10 or 12 years and your wife's raised the kids. You walk in, you don't fit in. So dad's on that. So what are you doing here? You don't fit in. And then that's when the drink in and, you know, then there's a note. I tell my girl all the time, I said, I get this crazy turbulence in me. You know, and it hits me like it's seven or eight o'clock at night. I get like, if it's another man, I'm real good with turbulence with another man, but just with normal, you know, people, you know, like her, I don't want to start anything with her or pick at her, but that turbulence from every night going from playing cards with Andre, you know, at nine o'clock at night until 10 minutes later, somebody kicking you in the head, kicking you and stomping and beating on you and coming up raw. So do you think your body was like programmed to get ready to do violence? Yeah, I could go from sitting here talking to you like this and two minutes later or walk out there and I'm spinning around, spinning around. When I slide it on the ropes, bad guy stomping me in the head and you got to make that adjustment. So all of a sudden at night, I'm sitting around at eight o'clock at night. I'm going like this. I'm watching American Idol. I'm going, what is wrong with me? I can feel this turbulence ramping up with me. And that's why I got the gym in my house because sometimes I go downstairs and I'm frank at night. Just boom. When you're used to breaking that sweat every night and wrestling a guy your own size and fizzly getting completely worn out to where you're like, okay, now I can relax. I've had enough. You know, you miss that. And a lot of these guys go home after doing this, they don't know how to adjust. And all of a sudden they adjust with over-medicating and drinking and then they really don't fit in at home. And the next thing you know, there's a tragedy here. They do too much, too many solos or too much blow or too much. Just, it's just been a repeat scenario in our business. So for me, you know, talking about all this negativity and the stuff that's going down, my life is really good, brother. I mean, you know, I might have some physical issues from all the surgeries, but I'm healthy as a horse, you know, and at the end of the day, I train, I eat good. I mean, I'm, you know, I really have a great outlook on everything, you know, and I have my. You look good. You look healthy. You really do. It's great to see. Well, I mean, you know, I just turned 70. That's amazing. And a lot of guys that, you know, that around that I went to high school, I see them, they looked like they're 95. You know, and I had some guy come, we got the same birth. They were the same age. I looked and it was during karaoke at my bar. And he goes, where are the exact same age? I looked at him, bro. He was like, I'm a hundred miles a bad road. Yeah. And I'm like, what did this guy do? He stopped moving. They stopped moving. They stopped taking care. Well, that's what Willie Nelson told me. He said, Hogan, if you slow down, you go down. But look at fucking Mick Jagger. We went to see Mick Jagger last week to see the stones last year. And it was Mick Jagger's Biden's age. And he has two trailers that he brings everywhere he goes that are just exercise equipment. Wow. This guy trains every day. Trains every day. And that's how you can still move around like that when you're 80. He's up there dancing and singing and putting on this amazing show at 80 fucking years old. Yeah, but I think a lot of it's mindset too, you know, because not the Bible thumps you to death, bro, but I keep one foot in each zone, man. I keep, you know, in this human incarnation, I keep one foot, you know, kind of like in the human encourage, I keep one foot in the spiritual incarnation, you know, when stuff goes down or this goes down or things go wrong in my life, I deal with it, you know, as efficiently as I can. Then I bracket it and I go back to center, you know, and I've got this crazy relationship with God, brother. And I've got this crazy relationship spiritually with who I am and why I'm here. And so all that takes pressing over all the noise, you know, the border, this and the criminals and the government. And I listened to it and I kind of, I kind of am really, really aware of what's going on. But then I go back to center. Yeah, I go back to center because I've got a whole bunch of opinions about certain things. And at the end of the day, my most important thing is to know what my number one priority is and stay centered and stay as close to God as I can. So that's why I look at things really positively. And bro, my girl out there has corrected me so many times that I'm not trying to, you know, say anything weird or anything, but there's so many times where I can go the wrong way quick. And when I go one way quick, I'm all in, you know, so I got to be careful. So if I start deviating a little bit, you know, there's certain people that can talk to me, okay, well, it's not that bad or just think about the big picture. So you know, these guys in the cartel. Cool. Yeah, but I'm just saying what I'm trying to say is all this stuff we've talked about. Yeah. When I look at everything around me, I go back to where I'm at. I'm like, man, life is good, brother. I think this is a very important thing for people to hear because there's a lot of people that dismiss religion because they think they're too smart for it. I think there's a great value in being connected to whatever you believe. If you believe in God, if you believe in Allah, if you believe in whatever you believe, there's a great value to believe that there's a higher power and that there are like, there's good ways to live life. There's a there's a correct way to live life and it does bring you more peace. And it can, it does really work. And so for a guy like you to say that I think is it's important for people to hear because I think when I was younger, I always dismissed religion too, because I kind of dismissed it as stories that were written by people. But that's not dismissing God and the idea of God. We don't know what is going on in this bizarre life that we live. But I do know that a lot of people that I know that are very happy and grounded and centered are also religious. A lot of people. I don't think it's a factor that anyone should discount. And people are very smug about it. They're too smart for that. You're not going to trick me. That kind of shit. When did you were you always religious or when did you start becoming religious? Well, you know, I kind of like would go to a Southern Baptist Church when I was a kid because I went to Biles Point Elementary School in Tampa and right across the street from Biles Point was Biles Point Baptist. And my kids, not my kids, my mom and dad took me to church one time there. And I was hooked. My parents only went once with me, but it was close to my house. Well, you know, back in the day, bro, in the 60s, you could ride your bike anywhere and stay out even when the street lights came on. Nobody's going to steal your kidnapping or anything. So we just stay out throwing rocks at each other and raising hell. I would ride to Biles Point Baptist Church every Sunday. And, you know, I kind of like going there because a lot of the kids from elementary school, their families would go there, you know. And so I would go there to Biles Point Baptist. So I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church. And then when I started playing in a rock and roll band, when I kind of like got in junior high and stuff, I kind of like wasn't going to church at all. And a couple buddies of mine who became ministers, there were twin brothers, Ron and Don Satterwhite. They asked me to come to Hank Lindstrom's Youth Ranch because all the kids were there. It was like a Bible study thing and Bible bros and all that stuff. And they would all sing, but they didn't have anybody to play guitar. So they knew I played guitar. So I went there and I played all the, you know, three chord progressions for the little Christian songs and stuff. And then this minister, Hank Lindstrom, hit me hard with the John 3 16. You know, God's love the Lord, he gave the only begotten son that whoever believe, you know, they gave his son would not perish, but have everlasting life. And I accepted Christ as my savior when I was 14. But then I derailed, you know, kept playing music and rock and roll bands. It got way away from my faith. And then as the years went by, you know, I started seeing how things went and it's got me to the point now where I'm locked back in. I'm locked and loaded, you know, after all the life experiences and, you know, seeing how people live and what money does to people, you know, okay, money makes it easier, but it's not the live and die all situation that some people say it is, you know, and it's just that that relationship I have not so much with religion, but with my Lord and Savior is what I function on. When did this it was a gradual transition to coming back to your faith or was it? Yeah, it was. It was. And the thing was that Hulk Hogan character kind of pushed me in that direction because that crazy character, that Hulk Hogan character that was all the way up here, forget the Americana, forget the blonde hair, forget Venice Beach, California, forget the tan. It was the three demands of the training, the prayers and the vitamins. Bro, I'm captivate, captivated by that left bicep of yours. Who's size of these fucking things? Do you see his hands? 70. Give me a gun. Give me that left gun. Left? Oh, come on, man. I'm all out of gas. Look at this, dude. Just just look at the size of his fuck. Jesus Christ. The motherfucking. 70. My triceps are still on you. I'm saying. I got to try something back here. Hold on. He's got to pull it out. Oh my God. Oh, yeah. Look at the size of that thing. Yeah. That's like a rabbit burrowing under your arm. I forget what I was saying, man. You. Sorry. Sorry. You look fucking amazing. What was? Oh, the character Hulk Hogan. The training, the prayers and vitamins. It took the man Terry Bollea and started bringing me up because all of a sudden I hit on this character training, saying your prayers and your vitamins, believing yourself, the four commandments brother to be a Hulkamaniac. I hit with all that stuff. I was out running around drinking, smoking weed, doing yahoo, going crazy, running wild with my boys. And all of a sudden all these make wish kids want to come see me. And I had years where Michael Jackson, Mr. T Mickey Mouse. I saw more what make wish kids and any of those people. And all of a sudden the character started making me a better person. And the character, this fake character of the training person, Biden started making me a better person. And I kind of realized that kind of really, really worked. And then I bottomed out with my first marriage. There was a situation where I get to this. I was the person that thought when you do this contract under God, for better or worse till death was part, I thought you're supposed to be serious about that. So I used to brag. I'm the only world's champion that was never divorced. I used to brag about it. Flair's been married 29 times. All my boys been married 29 times. Everybody's been married 29 times. And all of a sudden when I went through this divorce and I really bottomed out, it was a tough one. And then my wife split with a younger man. It was a little rough on me. And then I started searching. I started searching and I watched that movie, The Secret. Oh wow. And all of a sudden I kind of watched it and bought into it. Then I had a Mercedes at the time and I had my buddy who had a car stereo shop, deprogrammed the navigation and I put the secret in there. So every time you started the car, the secret would come on on the navigation screen. Really? Yeah. So I probably saw it and heard it 10,000 times. And then I saw what the law of attraction was. It was a natural law that not only does science say it works and the Bible says it works. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Talking about relationships. We're talking about money. We're talking about health. We're talking about everything. You know, you attract what you think. Everything comes to the heart. Your tongue speaks what the mind's thinking. So at the end of the day, I saw that that law of attraction is actually a scientific law that we're given such as aerodynamics. You know how a plane will stay in the air with the wind going over the top of the wind faster than underneath. Buoyancy. You know how buoyancy works. And then gravity is working right now. You're probably not even thinking of it. I'm not thinking about it. Okay. I know you're not, but gravity works too. And also the law of attraction works too. The rich get richer, poorer, poorer. Like attracts like. You know? And so at the end of the day, I've seen the secret thing and having it beat in my head. I went, hmm. This guy named James Ray, who went to prison for that sweat lodge thing. Sweat lodge thing. Yeah. He had a sweat lodge thing. Oh yeah. People dying, right? Yeah. Yeah. James Ray. He, he, he at the time said something that really hit me hard on that secret. He goes, there's probably things in your life that you're not proud of. And there's probably a lot of things in your life that you are proud of. But when would now, and he said the word, when would now be the time to change? I went, I mean, you can change your direction of life by changing your thinking. And I went, you gotta be kidding me. So anyway, I started praying. I want to meet James Ray. I want to meet James Ray and I, and I, and you think like it's already done. So like when you pray, you don't pray, I go, oh, please no healing my back. I'm hurting. No, you say, thank you God for my perfect health for my healing. You pray like it's already done. You know? Oh, that's what you do? Yes. That's what you do. Pray it's already done. And you guys are killing me. You want me to, you want me to shut up? No, I love you. What are you talking about? I'm killing it. So anyway, now I'm praying to meet James Ray, right? Right. Praying, praying, praying. All of a sudden I get a phone call. Hey dad. What's up, Nick? Oh, you know, I'm in the bathroom here at this Beverly Hills hotel. I think that guy's in here that's in that movie, The Secret. I said, ask him what his name is. Nick goes, Hey, excuse me, sir. What's your name? My name is James Ray. I put him on the phone. So now the guy I've been praying to meet, he's in the bathroom with my son. Okay. A coincidence, whatever. There are no coincidences in life, but whatever. So anyway, now the long guy with the dreads, Michael Beckwith. Now I start praying, you know, because I want to want to see him. You know, I want to meet him now. So I'm figuring this crap's work. This works. So all of a sudden I had a really, really bad day one day and I walked off the set of American gladiators. I just walked off and I had the number one show on NBC, eight o'clock Ben Silverman had, I had an office in Beverly Hills. I had one in New York, Ben Silverman, Ben Silverman goes, you own the network. The numbers were crazy. We were doing really, really good. And I had a really bad situation happen. I just walked off the set and I didn't come back and I was in Tampa and a lay law, you call me and she goes, what's up with you? I kind of told her what kind of was going on. She goes, I want you to come to church with me. And nobody's ever asked me to do that. Right. So I said, when do you want me to come? She's, how about this Sunday? I said, I'll be there. I was in Tampa. So I flew out there. We go to church. Guess who's preaching? Michael Beckwith. So I'm like, you know, the guy I want to meet the guy with the dreads. So I started listening to what he said. He ended up marrying me the second time and we became friends and stuff, but it kind of led me down that path, you know, to start searching and finding what worked for me and what I believed in. And ever since then, man, that's been the number one priority and it kind of locked me in, you know, to my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ and what I believe in. And so everything else is a distant second to what happens around me. Yeah. That provides you with a lot of like peace, right? Oh my God. That's the thing that all my friends that are very religious say that it gives them a piece. Yeah. That I don't think people have without it, which is interesting. Yeah. And the craziest thing was Sky, the girl I'm engaged to. It's such a crazy story. I swore I'd never date another blonde. Swore to God I'd never date another blonde, right? That's hilarious. Yeah. So the really cool thing was after I met her, there's a whole long story to that situation, but after I met her, the fact that she's a believer too, it's just really kind of like makes things so easy. It would be probably difficult for you at this stage of your life to date someone who wasn't. Yeah. Well, I was, I was married to somebody the second time who wasn't, it didn't really resonate with her. Yeah. That it was more the universe and the Wayne Dyer and all that stuff, you know, and Esther Hicks and all that stuff. Well, I mean, that's a little bit of the law of attraction too. Yeah, it is. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of idolatry there, bro, and worshiping false idols. So I just, I'm not on that team. I hear what you're saying. Yeah. I keep an open mind about whether or not the law of attraction is that there's probably something going on with our minds and the way it interacts with reality. That's not measurable. And I think you could say, like, we know that people that have a positive outlook and positive thinking and they, they do the right things, they get further and better in life, right? So it's, it's obvious that like the direction that you put your thoughts and your time and your effort into, if you're doing it the right way, yield results. The problem with the, that I have with like a lot of these people that think that you could just think about things and then they happen. It's like everybody that's thought about things and happened has already done, they do a lot of shit. There's a lot of movement. It's not as simple as just like thinking about something. That's, but it might be a real aspect of it. Because I know a lot of talented people that have a negative perspective and shit never seems to go right for them. Even though they're really talented. It's like something about the way they look at life and reality. They're kind of like hamstringing themselves. It's more than just thinking, brother, you have to believe it and you have to feel it like it's already done. And then, then you got a better shot at it. When you said that it's like scientifically proven, how is it, how is the law of attraction scientifically proven? Well, it's just, it's proven because like attracts like, you know, well, positive charges and negative charges are opposites. You know, but they were held away from each other, you know, if you try to put them together. Well, positive, I take that back. Positive doesn't, maybe I didn't misspeak. Maybe I shouldn't have said science. We suck at science. Yeah, you're right. Everyone knows it. Yeah. We're not here for science. It's all Kogan weeds, good. Yeah. A little too good. So a little, it's a little problematic. I'm going to tell you, there were some times I was lost. Yeah, but just, just at the end of the day, everything that I've read, mindset, and, you know, just like you're saying, if people are really, really negative, you're not going to attract really greatness to yourself if you're always, you know, upset or mad or thinking bad thoughts. No, no, you certainly aren't. You know, it's interesting. My friend, Will Harris, he interviewed Sugar Sean O'Malley, and he did this whole series on Sugar Sean before he won the world title this weekend. And there's a, there's a sick, it's probably on his Instagram where he's talking to him and he's like, you manifested this, like you manifested this success. Like you, you had this mindset, you applied the work, but you knew you had a vision in your mind of what was going to happen and you made it happen. And what is that like? He's like, well, I always knew it was going to happen, but still when it happened, here play this, because it's pretty crazy. And don't let me forget to tell you something. Okay. This is for yourself. This shit's so real. Like, or is it like, I mean, you talk, you talked about how you planned all this. Do you wake up sometimes and look at this situation and just be like, man, this is crazy? Yeah, usually in camp, I have more like quiet time, time to myself. That's where I feel like I grow the most is in camps because of that reason alone. Like I'll find myself sitting outside by myself, kind of just thinking about all this shit. Yeah. It's, it is, it's like, if you would have asked me years ago, am I going to have all this? I'm going to do all this. I would have said, yeah. So it's not like, holy shit, what I can't believe this because I can believe it, but it is still like, damn, it was all the vision at one point. You know, I wanted, all I wanted it was like a big, a nice house with a backyard, a hot tub and a cold plunge and a sauna and a Lambo. Okay. Well, I got all that pretty quick. So, uh, what's next? Beaten up Peter, you know, getting a championship belt, maybe two. I want to be, I want to, I want to do big things in the sport. It's good, but it's like, that's an example. I mean, massive amounts of hard work, but also believing this thing and having this sort of unstoppable focus on this thing. There's a great value of that. I don't know if it's, you would say it's the law of attract. I don't know if that's real. It may be real. It might be some aspect of it's just real, but I know that that shit works. Like if you could think like that and work like he does and you have talent, you can make wild things happen in this life. And it's amazing to see. And when someone like when he just won the title this weekend, there's something amazing when you see a spectacular performance that, you know, has come out of years and years of intense labor, intense discipline, and a mindset focused on this. And then you see it happen. People can do extraordinary things. Agreed. It's really, and it's amazing for all of us, as long as you're not a hater. And if you're a hater, you're robbing yourself of inspiration. Yes, agreed. If you're a hater, you're literally robbing yourself. You don't know it, but you're stealing from your own ambition by being jealous of others. It sucks, but that's just what it is. It's like if you can instead look at someone like that and go, holy shit, if he did that, what if I applied myself like that? What if I thought like that? What if I went after something with every fiber of my being, like he went after that title? Could I do something good? Could I do something that I'd be proud of? Could I do something magical? Yeah, you could. Yeah, you could just think the right way. What I want to tell you before I didn't say that, but I said something kind of like that. When I was still playing in a rock and roll band and all these big scary wrestlers were coming in, and I was this long-haired hippie playing in a band, that one of the wrestling managers was kind of like nice to me, you know? And I said, oh, can I come over and talk to you someday? He goes, so he says, yeah, come by my house. And he told me where he lived. And as I'm sitting in the living room, this guy's managing superstar Billy Graham, Joe LeDuc, a guy named Steve Strong, who was, I don't know if you know who these guys are, with superstar Billy Graham. Yeah, sure. As he came in the house, he goes, well, what are you on top of? I said, I want to get in the wrestling business. And I told him this straight to his face. I said, I'm going to be the greatest wrestler that ever lived. And I told him that. Now, not knowing if I was or not, but all I'm saying is the mantra, the very, very positive mantra of the training prayers and vitamins. What did it attract? Yeah. You know, and nothing against a lot of the other wrestlers. I wasn't Mr. Perfect throwing bubble gum. I wasn't doing the Undertaker with Death and Body Bags. I wasn't doing the Stole Cold Thing Drinking Beer. And he's a huge wrestler. All these guys are Undertaker. They're all huge. But for me, that training prayers and vitamins, I just wanted to really get in the wrestling business and make a living. You know, I didn't know that it was going to spiral like that. Well, how could you? No, but he's saying he knew it. I didn't know it. I just said it. Right. Like it was already done and just threw it out there. I'm sure there's a lot of other people that said it and didn't make it though. That's the problem. We're not factoring those people in. It's the thing with the Law of Attraction. You don't really factor in losers. There's not an accurate count of how. That's true. So many people are not quite honest about it either. Because it's very painful to fail. And that's why many people don't try to. It's, I don't know, it's interesting. But it's interesting to me to see a guy like you with a very positive mindset and this new sort of appreciation for your faith and that you're showing great benefits from it. There's times when people, do you know the story of Oliver Anthony? Do you know Oliver Anthony? No, I don't. He's this guy who's the number one song in the country. And he recorded it in his backyard. And. Was this the Red-Haired Kid we're talking? Yes. So this guy gave himself to Christ like 30 days ago. And was having all sorts of problems with substance abuse and the normal chaos. And hit rock bottom. And like, I don't want to speak for him. I don't know what he actually said. But it was something to the tune of Please God. If you can straighten my life. If you can just straighten my life out. I will dedicate myself to you. And I'll be on the right track. And then 30 days later. He's clean and he hits with this insane song. Do you know the song? Yeah. Play that song Jamie. Because this song is insane. And this guy doesn't have a label. He's not attacked. He won't sign anything. People are trying to get him to sign things or offering them like millions of dollars. And he's like, you know, nope. No, I'm not signing shit. I'm gonna be myself. I'll better be yourself. Listen to this. This is amazing. It's such a simple song. Yeah. Which just what is it? What kind of instrument is that? That's not a banjo, right? It's a guitar. It's a guitar. He's got a capo on it. He's playing way high up on the neck. That's a D. If that was where it normally was, it's played an A minor, a C, a G. And that's a D there that he's playing. Does that metal thing where he's strumming behind it, does that change the tone? Yeah, it does. It makes it a little more banjo-esque. Right. But yeah, he's got that capo half up the neck because his voice is a lot higher. Isn't it crazy that just this guy and the guitar just singing just captivates people? That's amazing, right? It's amazing. But this is another example of a guy who just like hits rock bottom fully all in. Well, he's saying what people think, man. Yeah, he is. And people freaking out, like trying to attack him and trying to figure out what's wrong with him. What's wrong with him? This guy's probably got a shady past. Can't people just ever just appreciate someone's thing that they put out there? Can't they just appreciate that? Why don't they just appreciate that? How about judging people? How about just from this moment forward, moving forward? Some people should be judged. There's a lot of criminals out there. I'm not saying we shouldn't judge. I just think we should be more charitable. And when someone just puts out a beautiful song like that, you should go, that's a beautiful song. Just enjoy it. Why can't we just enjoy things? Why is there a way? You know? True words. Yeah. I mean, if people really lived like Christians, it'd be probably a better place for most folks. I agree. When you go to church now, is it chaos? Has everybody tried to get selfies? What's that like? No, man. It's really cool. I go to Indian Rocks Christian Church with Skye. Skye's my girlfriend. You shouldn't probably tell people where you go to church because they're going to go to church with the Hulkster. No. I want more people. I want more people there. All right. We're just going to get it. They're coming. Yeah. Pastor Aaron's my boy, man. He needs to be tested. And her son goes to, one of her sons goes to Indian Rocks Christian. So we go there every Sunday and really look forward to it. You know, it's just kind of like it's something that you don't let go of. A lot of people plug in and plug out, but I don't plug out once I'm plugged in. I'm there, you know, because I've seen it change a lot of people. A lot of people. There's also some real power to a bunch of people getting together to agree that they're there to be a better person in the eyes of God. There's something very powerful about that. A group of everybody that meets together in the community at a certain time, dresses nice, and just all agrees that we're here to try to be a better person in the eyes of God. I've seen it change people. The brother that is responsible for this shirt, the John 316 devotional team, Mel Chancy. He was the president of the Chicago Hells Angels for years. You had Zito in New York. And Mel was the president of the club in Chicago. And, you know, I knew him very well back in the day. And when I go to Chicago, it would be, you know, ripping and running. And then Mel did about nine years, you know, and a bunch of stuff, Rico stuff and all kind of craziness. And actually, when Mel came out, he tried to get a hold of me. I had second thoughts going, whoa, what's up with the brother here? You know, right? I haven't seen him for a while, you know, and one of the last times I saw him, you could probably pull it up as when we were in Knoxville. I had the Hells Angels circling the ring on their Harleys. You know, they said I didn't have any backup. And so I made a phone call because I got a bunch of friends back in the day that were in the club. And so they all showed up in Knoxville. And that's the last time I saw Mel before he went away. And he came out, you know, and people sent me a couple of messages. He was out. I'm going, oh, my God, here we go again. Here we go again. And so all of a sudden we hooked up and touch base. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this was the shit. I think Mel's on the right. I mean, this is peak heel Hogan, bad guy. Oh, yeah, we were evil people. He went from the best good guy to the best bad guy. Yeah. Oh, we were talking about that when we were getting coffee that it was your idea to turn heel. Oh, let me just finish the story. And now Mel comes out of prison and dude, he's been saved. He's accepted Christ as a savior. Yeah, there's a big Mel right there. But anyway, you know, I have these Jesus callings book. I have a Bible in the kitchen. I have two in my office. I have one upstairs in my bathroom because I can't really stand and stand, stand for like brushing my teeth. And one of the things when I pull the ponytail out, I got these fake hair extensions. So like Hulk Hogan, you know, with the blonde hair hangs down, trying to straighten these hair extensions out and do whatever I'm doing. I have a chair, you know, that I kind of kind of sit there and have this, all my Bibles and stuff. And I have Jesus calling in different books and Jesus calling has a morning and afternoon message, you know, so I read this one man. I said, you know what? That's perfect. I'm called big Mel up. I said, I know you got social media, Mel. I want you to go on and read this today. You know, so big Mel, he goes, he goes, I don't know. He goes, you read. I said, no, you read it. We went back and forth a little bit. So he actually read it. Now he's got this huge following and you can, I guess I don't know how you do it. You Google him or something on Instagram, but he's got this huge John three 16 devotion, which is people all over the world are falling down. He puts the word out every Sunday. So I've seen people change brother from being straight out enforcers, bad-ass, crazy people to, to being, you know, people that walk them on with Christ. People can definitely change. Yeah, it's amazing. Change. And that's a, that's a way that people do. I mean, this is a reason why they have it in alcoholics anonymous as a part of the 12 step program, giving yourself up to a higher power. Yeah. But it's, it's like for me when we were talking about the pain pills and stuff and stuff like that, some people, I feel bad because they have addictive personalities, you know, and sometimes they get caught in that web. So as I had all these surgeries and they were hitting me with all this stuff, I should, enough's enough, you know? And so it's kind of like everything I've ever wanted to quit drinking or stuff. It's pretty easy for me, but I just feel bad for the guys that couldn't get out of the cycle, you know? Yeah. There's some guys, man, whether it's booze or pills or whatever it is, like you can't keep away from it. I had a good buddy of mine that died in like, I think he died in 2001, 2002. And he just was always up and down. He just always was coke and pills and, and then booze to calm him down. And then I'm going to clean up. And then he didn't. And later in his life, it got to be pills. It got to be heroin. It was just, whoo. That's what killed my brother. It's, it's a number of main opioid overdoses or, I don't know if it's the number one killer of young people, but it's a hundred thousand people a year. They're dying of fentanyl overdoses. A lot of it is accidental when they're getting it in something else. They're getting it in some, you know, street Xanax or street. I mean, I didn't even know what it was. And when the doctor prescribed it to me, I figured it was something that, you know, kind of like the normal pain pills stuff. But when I got my system up, man, I can't even look at my dogs. I can't even remember my dog's names. I mean, what in the hell? That's why I said, you know, at the time I said, I'd rather be dead than on this stuff. I mean, really, that's where I was at with it. Because they had me so loaded up, I had no idea it was some crazy drug that was going to change society completely and kill everybody that touches the stuff. If you do all these police officers just have encounters opening bags up and then they overdose just from contact. You know, so it's insane. We see this the size of the amount you need to die from it. Yeah. So tiny. It's so fucking sketching. It's coming through the border and the precursors come from China. Holla. Holla. It's the whole thing is just insane. You know, and I don't know how to solve that problem. I mean, there's probably a bunch of steps that should be taken. But the point is, for a person that's gone through it like yourself and has come out of the other end and you're showing that, you know, that this is what's really helped you. I think that's very powerful. It's the truth. I believe it. Yeah. I mean, you speak the truth. It's clear. It's the truth. It's awesome. It's awesome to see you. And it's awesome to see how sharp your mind is, man. Like, what are you, do you take supplements, vitamins and things like that? Or like, are you? Yeah, I used to be the organic guy, you know, and go straight to nature's food patch with some sort of little independent grocery store where we live. And of course, I still buy the food there, but I was buying the vitamin stuff. And then I got with a nutritionist, you know, that kind of like did muscle testing. Or if there's like five or six vitamin C's, she can tell you which one works the best for you, you know, by having the product there and testing it on the spot. And so I've gotten sucked into buying all the vitamins from her, you know. And so I, you know, I got that from the A to the Z, as the chic would say, I've got all the vitamins stuff just, and if I take too many, man, at one time, I have to split them up a couple of times during the day. If I eat the whole water once, man, you just. Oh, so you're going ham. You're taking a lot of stuff. Oh, yeah, I just get sick as a dog nauseated. Yeah, but it sounds as it made a noticeable difference when you started doing that. Not in not in the amount of pain in my body and in the way I feel. Yes, it's just it's just my mindset and everything. You know, it's kind of like instead of going down that rabbit hole I used to, I real myself back in. I got to check myself at the door a lot, you know, because I can be pulled really I don't have like road, I mean, road rage of somebody pulls in front of me or anything like that. But when things happen, business wise or somebody that I care about or a very good friend lies to me or something, I kind of like I get that good Hulk here, the bad Hulk here, you know, and they're kind of like, I'll lean into it. It's just our business. We just handled things differently with men. Like I talked to men definitely differently than I talked to women. Sure. And with men, we've always been able to kind of like don't fuck me, Mike. Come on, buddy. Whatever. It's just it's just it was just the business I was in was so different. If we had a problem, it either be fixed there or out there. And so it's just kind of like I kind of like keep it dialed in now, you know, and so things are good, man. Things are really good. That's good that you could avoid that kind of stress, but you have more access to resources like mental resources when you're healthy. So if you're you're taking good nutrition, you're eating well and sleeping well, you'll make better choices for the most part than if you're tired. Like it's why people make such poor food choices when they're tired. It's like literally something that goes on with your brain when you're exhausted that you'll just go fuck it. Let's pull into a Jack in the Box drive through and you'll eat a bunch of shit. You feel terrible about five minutes after you eat it. But that's just you don't have if you were healthy in the middle of the day at noon, you wouldn't you wouldn't I'm not gonna eat that. I want to feel like shit. You'll eat better. Like you make better choices when you're healthier. And when you have more energy and your body is given all the proper nutrition and rest and fluids and you're well hydrated, you're going to function better. You're going to think better. You're going to make better choices. You're going to do more things. It's just a smart thing to do. Yeah. Well, when I was drinking a lot of alcohol, which, which January 1st, I quit drinking. I went seven months without drinking anything. And all I know is when I was drinking at night when everybody would wind down, I'd be the one eating the popcorn or eating a protein bar, getting the ice cream and all that stuff. You know, I was hovering even about two years ago, I was still hovering around 300 pounds, you know, well, and so, you know, I'm down like to 60 now or to 65. That's kind of like what I weighed in ninth and tenth grade. So, you know, I feel much better, you know, just cleaning my act up and just like you said, you know, if we went out drinking last night and raising the hot, it felt like crap's sitting here. It's so hard when you're, when you've had a few drinks and then you come home, it's so hard not to just go ham. Oh, I go crazy. I eat everything in the refrigerator. It's fucking, yeah. Start making sandwiches and I made two, three egg fried egg sandwiches one night. So I ate six eggs, fried eggs with bakers. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pepper and Chinese. Yes. Oh, man. Yes, yes. Oh, man. And Primo Kitchen chipotle lime mayonnaise. So I've got that. Oh, my God. American cheese melted. Let's go. Let's fucking go. That's great. I ate two of those and I felt terrible after. I was like, what's wrong with you? It's two in the morning. You fucking tipshit. I did Chicago theater Saturday night and Yoni's like, uh, Phillip, uh, from, um, Sushi by Scratch. They have a Chicago location. So they're sending Sushi. I'm like, awesome. That's good. We're gonna feel good. He goes, and also the best pizza chef in all of Chicago wants to actually cook pizza in the kitchen of the green room. He has his own oven. He's done it before he's going to make fresh Chicago pizza. And oh, my God, we went crazy. I must have had 10 slices of pizza and I've been pretty much, you know, no bread because it's like poison once you stop eating it. You know what I mean? But that was basically just like, it's like doing heroin. It was so exciting. Did you crash? Oh, man. I mean, like you wouldn't believe like it was just like, I was just like disgusting afterwards, even compared to like drinking. It's funny because you drink and you eat shit and you feel like shit the next day. But what I've learned only recently is that you can drink. As long as you don't eat the shit, you're going to be much better than if you ate the shit. Like a lot of the hangovers coming from the in and out and from the Chicago style pizza and all that. Yeah. Well, you go to the in and out, dude, you just kind of go flying Dutchman. Yeah. Just the patties. Protein style, animal style. That's the way to go, man. That's the way to go. Well, Hulk, it's great to see you thriving. Tell everybody about your your cannabis line too before we leave. Well, because it confused us for like a solid 45 minutes of the podcast. Yeah. This stuff's too strong. Really? We're back. Yeah, it's good stuff. Back of the crazy stuff down there. We get the CDV stuff. CBD. This sunburn vape pen is amazing. Vape pens. Vape pens. Vape pens. Yeah. Where can people have access to that stuff? Oh my gosh, it's everywhere now. The nicotine stuff is the vapes are everywhere now. I mean, so you guys have nicotine vapes. Did you give us those too? Yeah, those shows away from Jamie. He goes crazy for nicotine vapes. Every day. Every day. He's out there vaping with the kids. Yeah. And the THC stuff is one state at a time. Right. You know, when are they gonna just federally make that legal and get the taxes. Get the taxes from it, you mutts. It should be legal. It should have been legal a long ass time. It's so stupid. We'll go to the Ukraine. Yeah. And do you guys sell CBD as well? Like gummies or any of that stuff too? Yes. Yes, we do. Where's a website where people can go and find out where they can purchase that? Uh. Don't know? Uh. They'll find it. There. Oh, Jamie already found it. Oh, yeah. We've got all that stuff in the bag there. Immortalbyhulkogan.com. So that's what it is. Just go to immortalbyhulkogan.com. You have access to all that stuff. Coming soon, brother. Put your email address in there. Subscribe now. There you go. Hulk Hogan, you're the fucking man. I had my day, brother. A fan since I was a kid. So to hang out with you here and to be able to do this, it was very fun. Appreciate you very much. Thanks for having me, man. It's a really cool setup you got here, brother. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you. Much respect. Shout out to the great and powerful Tony Hinchcliffe. Every Monday on YouTube, the best live comedy show in the world is Kill Tony. It's filmed and recorded live from the mothership right here in Austin. Tony's the master. You're the fucking best at hosting a show like that that I've ever seen. And you know what went on sale during this actual taping that we're at right now is the new podcast, live podcast from the mothership with Rick Flair, which we're filming for the first time next week. That's right. So they're doing you guys. This is so hilarious because you talked about it when Rick was on the podcast. And then you guys went back and forth. You sent me a text message and email. I'm like, I knew how big this is to you. This to you is like, I mean, it's literally like somebody just gave you a Ferrari or something. It's crazy. It's insane. Flair messaging me going, I want to do a podcast with you. I'm like, OK. Oh, that's crazy. So look at this. The goat and the pony. Flair and Tony Hinchcliffe. The tickets are on sale. You could watch it live. And it's a 2 p.m. show on Tuesday, August 29th. And what was the other one, Jeremy? That's two and four Tuesday and two and four taping on Wednesday. So is this a one time deal or you guys gonna be consistent? I think we're gonna do it consistently. It's gonna be fucking huge. Yeah, he's gonna come out for two days every month and we're gonna shoot four during the day, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Release one a week. I love it. The goat and pony. I've never seen you more excited. Don't make him laugh because if you make him laugh, he laughs at his own jokes anyway. Yeah. I love it. He just. We're gonna laugh. That's great. You guys, one thing that you guys all have in common is pro wrestlers like the is the old school guys that I bring in here. You guys have tremendous character. You're just awesome people. It is just fun to talk to you, whether it's Dallas or, you know, Jake the Snake or all this is the Undertaker. You guys are some of the coolest fucking people. We've seen the pyramids. You've seen it all. I know. All the dead bodies are. That's for sure. You've seen it all. And. I didn't mean that. And on Instagram, what is your handle on Instagram? It's Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan on everything. Hulk Hogan on everything. All right. Thanks, sir. Appreciate you very much. Thank you, brother. Tony Anschliff, you're the man. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Oh, are you playing the song? Give me, let me see it. Put it on the screen. Oh, yeah. Hulk Hogan theme song. We'll wrap it up with the...