Ep. 10 | From Federal Prison to Functional Health With Samantha Lander

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Hey, everybody.

Hunter Williams (1:16)

This is Hunter Williams. I hope you're doing amazing wherever you might be in the world. I have a very special guest and a special friend of Taylor and mine today. Her name is Samantha Lander. And what I'm excited about for this one, when it comes to just doing any podcast on peptides and things of that nature, I love talking to other people that are actually in the trenches of doing this on a daily basis. And as far as coaching people around peptides go, I know she's probably one of the top 20 or 30 people in the world that just sees coaching clients and then also uses peptides from an application standpoint to help them. So I'm really excited to talk to her. She also has a very, very interesting and I will say almost like out of a movie type backstory that she's going to kind of fill us on today. But Samantha, how are you doing?

Samantha Lander (2:04)

Good. Good. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. I've been excited about this since I mentioned it. Like, what is it, a year ago, I feel like.

Hunter Williams (2:12)

Yeah, when we met in A4M. So we finally got around to it. At that point, we were also too, it took us a few months because we had not built the podcast studio to make the production at the space look somewhat like we do this for a living. So, anyway, let's go into your history of how you got to where you are today. Because I think out of all the other people that work in the space, it is definitely one of the more fascinating stories of how you got to where you are today.

Samantha Lander (2:37)

Yeah, and I will say my story of how I got here isn't even how I got into peptides. It's like two really intense stories, I feel like. But all right. So for me, I think that I was always, when I look back and I try to analyze how I got, basically I'm an addict and I'm in recovery, but I got highly addicted to drugs and eventually down the road, I relapsed on alcohol and it's like, how did that ever happen? I didn't grow up in an environment where my parents were alcoholics. I do think that looking back, there's the emotional trauma that you deal with that a lot of people, they just push it under the rug. So that's not really a big deal because it's not like you're growing up with an alcoholic parent and they're not abusing you. So like that's not really a big deal. And I think there was a lot of bullying in middle school and a lot of just emotional, like a lot, I have a lot of anxious attachment, you know, relationships and I think that comes from my childhood. And I think that's that anxiety is kind of when I turned to using drugs and alcohol at a very early age. So the first time I drank, I was in seventh grade and then shortly after I know I got arrested for smoking pot in eighth grade. And then it just sort of like that's where it just, it just I was like a little types of manian devil, just like it went off. And I had this idea that living life meant you had to do drugs and like party. It wasn't like now I'm like, you're going to biohack and you're going to live forever and you're going to travel. And so everything was just like, I want to party harder and just like go super extreme on like anything sort of like illegal and that took me out of where I was presently in my life, in my relationships with the girls at school. And anything that that felt uncomfortable and gave me anxiety. So, you know, it's a lot of masking uncomfortable feelings. And then shortly after that, I would say fifth grade is when my health was struggling. So in fifth grade, I had a lot of stomach problems. And that's where they just started throwing me on medications. My dad's a doctor, so a lot of Western medicine. I remember I was on three different medications like for my stomach, like Metamucil, Belladonna was one, like so many different things to try to, right? And you look it up, it was some weird like witchy herb that they made into a medication. And so I just never puked, a lot of constipation, a lot of diarrhea, weight loss resistance started. I don't remember having like a lot of hormonal stuff as a young child, but like looking back, I know that I didn't want to feel those feelings. And if I was drinking or doing drugs, like I would go to the bathroom or I would feel better, or I wouldn't be thinking about it. And that I think carried over to my relapse after I had a lot of time sober.