STEVE LUDWIN: I'm going to show you the effects of the
hemotoxin in venom on blood, OK?
And you can already see pretty quickly, it's kind of
congealing.
It's quite gloopy.
And I'm beginning to wonder if that's such a good thing to be
happening in my body.
Sometimes I think, god, that can't be good.
I don't have a medical background.
I have no fucking idea what it's doing to my body.
If I did die due to snake venom or whatever, I'm sure
it'll be quite funny to a lot of people.
And they'll go, you see?
You see?
And even to myself, as I was floating out of my body and
looking down below, I'm sure I'd be laughing my ass off.
Like, you idiot.
You're not supposed to inject snake venom, you fool.
My name is Steve Ludwin, and I've been self-immunizing with
various snake venoms for well over 20 years now.
I'm kind of embarrassed.
I mean, I don't know have that medical background.
I don't even have a proper
American high school education.
There's been quite a few doctors and scientists that
have been horrified by my lack of having things that are
sterile and stuff like that.
We have our Lower Baja rattlesnake.
And bang.
You see that?
That's one unhappy rattle snake.
Relax.
I've always been in good health.
I haven't had something like the flu in
coming up on nine winters.
And as I've gotten older, people have started to
comment, oh wow, you don't seem like you're 46 years old.
I had some doctors do tests on my skin, and they were all
kind of a little bit baffled.
All right, buddy.
Up.
This girl doesn't really like it very much.
This is why I'm always nervous holding a viper because they
can spin their fangs around and actually go through their
lip to get your fingers.
This snake is not wanting to be milked.
Sometimes that happens.
I had quite an unusual sort of upbringing.
I'm the son of a Pan Am pilot.
I had a real "Catch Me If You Can" Leonardo
DiCaprio sort of lifestyle.
I had a credit card.
It just said Pan Am on it with my name, Steve Ludwin, and I
could get on any plane, as long as I was
wearing a tie, for free.
My father took me down to the Miami Serpetarium, when I was
about nine years old, and I got to meet this now famous
herpetologist called Bill Haast.
He was the first westerner to start injecting himself with
snake venom.
He started in 1948.
I was very young and impressionable.
I loved snakes.
From that moment on after meeting him, I was like wow,
you can become immune to snake venom?
This is crazy.
That's called vaccinology.
It's the oldest form of medicine apparently.
When I was about 17, I was like, I've got to get that
venom into me somehow.
This is called a Pope's tree viper, and I'm a little bit
wary of them.
But it's a beautiful snake.
Don't know if you can see those fangs.
Do you see that fang?
It's a hemotoxin and it's going to cause massive tissue
destruction.
People have died from these snakes, so you do not want
that on your finger.
I moved to London in 1987, and I started working in East End.
It was called The Vivarium.
And basically my job for 1 pound 60 an hour was to unpack
cobras and scorpions and tarantulas and reptiles for
zoos and laboratories.
See you later.
I started bringing the venomous snakes home.
My first time doing it was crazy.
I had never even milked a snake before, and I just kind
of had to figure it out on my own.
So what I would do is I would take a scalpel and scratch
like two little scratch marks into my arm.
I would take a little bit of the venom, and I would drop it
into the cut.
And you could feel it the first time.
It was like ah, that burns.
I quickly washed it off because I was scared.
I was like, what is this going to do?
It kind of swelled up and my heart started pounding, not
because of the venom, because it was like, oh my god, is
this going to stop?
Is it going to kill me?
I had no idea.
Since people have kind of heard what I've been doing and
stuff like that, I've seen a lot of people bitching.
They're worse than like "Star Trek" fans, to be honest with
you, reptile people sometimes.
I always thought when the internet came, I was like,
wow, you can communicate with other people that have the
same passion about these animals.
But it's not the case.
There's a lot of bitchiness and who has the biggest snake.
I don't keep big snakes.
Guys that keep big snakes are hiding a secret.
This is the last hemotoxic snake that goes into my
snakebite cocktail.
This is called an eyelash viper.
This is one of the scariest snakes that I own.
This the snake that bit me.
The worst pain that I've ever had in my life.
And I've had lots of accidents with venom.
But it felt like you had put your hand down on a marble
table and someone took a sledgehammer and smashed it
onto your pinky.
But the funny thing is that that pain never subsided for
eight fucking hours.
And I had some scientists in the States saying get yourself
to the hospital.
This is not a good snake to be bitten by.
But I kind of waited it out.
I had confidence that I was going to be OK.
But it's a really aggressive snake, and it's
really tricky to milk.
There you go.
Whoa, there's lots of venom coming out there.
Thank you.
So those are our hemotoxins.
I posted a really beautiful snake that I have on YouTube.
It's called a macrops pit viper.
Just because I'm handling this snake,
it's called free handling.
There's death threats and people have just gone crazy.
I could poke it in my eye a million times and
it would not bite.
"These snakes can and will kill you.
Everybody take a good long look.
The moron attached to that arm is the reason why you have
trouble keeping your reptiles legally." I'm not a moron
attached to this arm.
Oh, yes I am.
"To think we lock up pedophiles and murderers when
sickos like this are free to roam our streets.
What's wrong with the world these days?" Now, I think
that's somebody being sarcastic.
OK, here is a good one.
"You, to put it kindly, are an ignorant fucktard.
I sincerely hope you get bit hard.
And I strongly dissuade anyone watching this video from
repeating the actions of this small-penised individual.
Stupid dick hammer." Now, that's good.
That's good.
This next snake is the Naja kaouthia which is responsible
for a lot of deaths every year.
In the time that I've been working with this snake, I've
had some injections where I was a little bit cocky with it
and got the dilution sort of wrong.
They were like volcanoes.
I had three of them.
I had two on this leg and one down here.
And they were growing and growing and burning.
And for days, I was like, oh god, I
could feel this pressure.
I touched it and goo shot out five foot
across onto the carpet.
And I was just like, oh my god.
Oh fuck.
I'm fucked here.
And I got this massive needle for
injecting horses or something.
I put on some ACDC and it just gave me the strength just to--
against all your will, just push this down and you could
feel it going down into something.
Do I have the nucleus yet?
I'm pulling on this.
No, I don't think I've got the nucleus.
I think I've gone through it.
Pull it back out, hit the nucleus, and it was just like
pwaaachh, just pulling back on the most disgusting stuff that
you'd ever want to see.
And I was like, oh, I'm just going to squeeze it.
And I squeezed this, but it actually made a sound.
It was like peuh.
I looked down in there and there was a
fucking hole in my leg.
I could see inside my leg where all the tissue had sort
of rotted away.
And I noticed flies coming to it immediately.
And it stunk.
It was like death.
It was rotting.
I never want that happening again.
You hear it?
This is not the hemotoxic snake.
This is something that's got the neurotoxin, the Naja
kaouthia, which is the monocled cobra.
Simple.
And let go.
Since I've kind of discovered the possibilities with the
neurotoxins in this cobra venom, I've been using it in
sporting activities recently and kind of testing it.
It's Kind of added a little bit of extra speed into my
normal abilities.
I've been doing tests on my skateboard from my house into
the West End.
I see how fast I can get in there.
I just use the roads, and I think the cobra
venom helps with that.
It's just sort of like, I go in between cars, I go in
between buses, I go in the middle of the road.
I just cane it.
I feel like I've got so much energy and speed.
When I'm skating, I've learned to actually start
moving like a snake.
And I found myself just kind of using that S-shape--
carving and carving, and it actually starts giving you a
little bit of power.
-William Haast, director of the Serpetarium, has had much
experience in handling cobras.
But he still treats them with the greatest respect.
Gather 'round, folks, but not too close.
STEVE LUDWIN: Bill Haast really is my Beatles and
Rolling Stones and Beach Boys all wrapped in one.
He died last year.
He was just like two weeks shy of 101.
He'd say that he hasn't been sick a day in his life, and it
made me start thinking, OK, wow, there's something here.
He was really my parameter of sort of
going, is this dangerous?
It's working for this guy.
He was treating people with polio, people with MS. He had
like 4,000 patients.
He had people that couldn't even walk.
And with the right doses and the right ingredients of his
medicines that contained various snake venoms, people--
I've seen footage of it--
they're playing basketball.
But the FDA heard about what he was doing and they shut him
down, even though he was having such success with it.
But the other thing that Bill Haast did,
which is totally amazing--
it's miraculous.
It almost sounds like a messiah.
Because he was immune to these snake venoms, he's given his
blood to snakebite victims that are dying,
and then they survive.
I've milked all the snakes.
And I've got hemotoxins in one glass.
This is the one that kind of had the cocktails.
So I'm drawing that venom up into this syringe.
So here's what I was saying earlier.
There's no such thing as a poisonous snake.
It is not poison.
You see that venom coming out there?
See it on my finger?
You can do this.
Completely safely.
If you don't freeze it, it's just like food.
It's a protein, it breaks down.
So I have months and months worth of various venoms.
This is the hemotoxin.
I'm going to put six.
What I have here is water for injections.
I will start on the actual raw venom, and then what we'll do
is we'll use that injection.
The first time I tried using the snake
venom was pretty scary.
There was no internet back then.
But it felt really natural.
It felt like it was instinct.
This is not diluted.
This is the pure venom.
So now, we're going to do an injection
with the diluted hemotoxin.
The benefits to the hemotoxins, I'm not too sure.
I feel like I need another 20 years to do it.
I had some doctors test my DNA telomeres and when I was 42, I
scored as a 28-year-old.
Perhaps there are some anti-aging
properties to snake venom.
It could all end tomorrow as well.
I'm not saying I'm invincible.
This is the shot glass that has the cobra venom, the
neurotoxin.
Get it all out.
I'm going with two drops of this.
This actual cobra that we're using is more venomous than a
king cobra.
One drop of cobra venom can kill 20 to 30 grown men.
Yeow.
Yeah, I mean it just feels--
yeow.
Feels like a bee sting to start off with.
That cobra venom does have a bit of pain to it.
It's like "Man Versus Food," spicy chicken challenge.
Oh, you motherfucker.
I'm 46 now.
I'll have to see how many years I can go on continuing
doing this.
But you do think that it is quite taxing on the body.
It is possible in two years time, my kidneys fail and I
die due to the venom of all those years, of all those
toxins, all the swelling, all the decomposing
flesh and the bruising.
It all has to filter through your kidneys and your liver.
And it's really bad stuff to be going through there.
Yeow, OK.
That was a little bit more than five mil.
People want to know what it feels like.
It feels like injecting Tabasco sauce and
rubbing it in a cut.
It just burns.
I will take another syringe here, and just basically bring
that raw venom down with the needle, which I quite
like to work that.
Diluting is something that's been quite new to me over like
the last four years that I've learned how
to do and work properly.
I was a bit nervous today when I was milking the snakes.
But when I do these injections, I don't think
anything of that.
Once I know that the dilutions are right, it's as normal as
anything for me now.
I always kind of note the time just in case if I ever did
have any problems where I did need to visit the hospital
again, I would know.
The one time I did have a serious overdose, I injected
three raw venoms a couple years ago.
And I only wanted to put down a little bit in.
And as I was pressing it, just ooop--
the whole thing went in.
Within 45 minutes, my hand was like a baseball mitt.
The venom was swimming in my body.
I had some friends come over because
they knew I was fucked.
They were saying, go to the hospital, go to the hospital.
And I just didn't want to.
And the next morning, I kept on waking up and it wasn't
going down.
So I got begged to go to the hospital.
They saw my arm and they said, what happened?
And I said snakebite.
Three doctors came out and they said, well,
what snake bit you?
And I had to just say, well, I didn't get bit.
There's three snakes.
I purposely injected it into my arm.
They didn't know what to say, and the next thing I know, I
was being taken into another room.
And one of the female doctors just came in and was just
yelling at me and just saying, you idiot.
You can't do this.
And they were telling me you're going to die, and
you're going to lose your arm.
I was in intensive care for three days.
But I was kind of calm throughout the whole thing.
I don't want to ever repeat it.
Since I had heard that the Americans and the Chinese got
busted injecting race horses with cobra venom and it was
making them outperform their abilities, I
immediately got excited.
And I thought boxing would be a great thing to kind of see--
is it possible that I could outperform my ability?
I was working it harder last year when I was on my own.
I actually felt like something was happening.
I was like holy shit, this stuff is working.
It's amazing.
You're discreet, but you can get away with it in London.
Bear Grylls.
I hate that guy.
In those films, he's like, oh, here's the snake.
And you can just bit its head off.
And he does.
He's killed snakes on TV.
That's my fucking family you're fucking around with.
Sorry, just kidding.
One thing I have noticed is that I'm not really feeling
the pain, so that could be the other thing that helped those
horses along.
Why not find out why it's doing these things.
If it's taking away pain, if it's giving you
confidence, or whatever.
Why not give it to your army?
Christopher Columbus didn't go looking for America to
discover America.
He was looking for the fountain of youth.
What does mankind want?
They want to live longer.
Everyone wants to live longer.
Apparently, there's something in snake venom that helps its
food to accept death.
I did feel that once.
As I was lying there, and I could feel the numbness in my
head and stuff, I had this complete feeling of, oh well,
I might die here, but I felt really happy to die.
My heart's pounding.
You're alive for a good 6 to 12 hours.
Like Starbucks has nothing on this.
Yeah, I must admit that it doesn't feel great.
It's kind of like Jell-O in there.
And god knows what it's doing in there.
I wish I understood what's happening beneath that skin.
The next day is always the same with the cobra venom.
It just feels like you're beaten up anyway.
And then I have a good sort of four days where I feel kind of
quite charged.
Come on, let's box.
Come on.
There you go.
-So how many years have you been doing this?
STEVE LUDWIN: Over 20 years, probably like 22 years--
-So you've been quite lucky then, really.
Is there a risk that you take that venom and it
could just kill you?
STEVE LUDWIN: It is kind of a little bit playing with fire.
I've had maybe three incidents in my life where it was
borderline life threatening.
-What you're saying is it's similar to someone taking
heroin or cocaine and injecting it
and taking a gamble.
So you're gambling with your life every time you take it.
STEVE LUDWIN: I've gotten so used to it, I do it without
thinking about it.
And because I know the amounts and I know not to push it and
where not to push it and stuff, it seems
really safe to me.
This certainly isn't physically addictive or it
isn't pleasurable.
-So you believe you could stop tomorrow and stop taking it,
stop doing it?
STEVE LUDWIN: Yeah.
Yeah.
I'd like to do that very soon.
I've done it for so long.
I'd like to actually spend--
I'd like to take a year off.
-And you've done that, you managed that?
STEVE LUDWIN: No, I've never done it.
I've never not done it.
But I'd like to take like a year off.
-So you're not going to know if it's addictive until you
try it, are you?
-Is it possible you could be addicted to pain then, if you
know what I mean?
The way it hurts.
STEVE LUDWIN: I think if I was, I would have other things
in my life.
I'd be a boxer like you.
-Yeah, true, true, true.
STEVE LUDWIN: The day after going boxing, my arm just was
even more swollen than the day before.
But I felt like a truck had hit me.
I felt like I was being digested from the inside.
I was walking around like the Elephant Man for a day.
I can kind of remember it, but I was like in a dream state.
I felt like I had been injected with a thousand
energy drinks.
It just felt slightly wrong.
I would really like to work with a forward-thinking
company that is going to go, OK kid, we like your ideas.
Let's start researching this.
And around-the-clock and get it done.
I visited the University of Southern California a couple
years ago, and I met a professor Frank Markland, I
believe his name is.
He's been working with copperhead venom.
Copperhead venom is the North American pit viper that's
being used.
They've been studying the effects on breast cancer
cells, ovarian cancer.
It actually inhibits the growth of tumors and basically
kind of kills off cancer cells.
So there there's real excitement around that.
Yeah, the possibilities of a cancer cure someday with snake
venom, I'd put my money on it.
Banana?
Banana.