Chapter 1: What inspired Koby Stevens to pursue filmmaking after football?
You are listening to episode 266 of the Howie Games Part B featuring former footballer, now documentary maker, Kobe Stevens. So it's a two-year period. I'm fascinated by your filmmaking journey and what you've learnt, tying in with the concussion. When do you think, oh, actually, I'm going to start making... some form of documentary out of this.
And now when we're talking documentary, this is not a little operation shot on an iPhone. Like the stuff you've sent me is freaking mind-blowing. So just, okay, how much so far would you have spent? Give me a rough estimate. So just to give people an idea of what's happening here. Eric could kill me if I... So Eric being Eric Banner. Yeah. He's like your executive producer? Yeah. This is a big...
budget operation you're putting together to ostensibly talk about a concussion journey and the solutions along the way, which is really positive. So when do you think, right, I'm going to start documenting this and I'm going to, what was your idea? If I said to you 50 words, why are you going to do this and what's it going to be about?
It's hard for me to sit here and talk about it because we've been at it for five years and a lot of people are like, where is this thing coming?
Chapter 2: How has Koby's concussion experience shaped his documentary project?
It'll get there, mate. Yeah, it's more been the financial issues. It's such a crazy industry to be raising money and doing that and we're not far now. We've signed a deal to get it all over the line. Congratulations. At the start, it was more like after I started seeing Brett, I started to see progress and I started feeling a lot better and I actually...
I watched an interview with Dr. Daniel Amen, who's this huge, I would say, psychiatrist and neuroscientist over in America who was working with all the NFL players and he was talking about this concept of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity. Yeah, it's pretty much, you know, we talk about how we can rewire our brains negatively or positively. And he'd worked with all these NFL players.
After injury.
Oh, through everything.
Okay.
Everything.
Whenever you wake up in the morning, today is going to be a great day. You have to nudge your brain, right? We have a conscious mind. We have an unconscious mind. We have a self-image. And your subconscious... is paying attention to the words that the conscious mind is saying. And so if you're like, oh, I don't want to get out of bed. Today is going to be a bad day.
You're going to have a bad day because you just programmed your subconscious mind to do that. Every day when my feet hit the floor, today is going to be a great day.
And me being me, I've always been really I love researching things and I love science. Curious. Yeah, curious. And it was the first time I'd heard someone talking about, well, you can repair your brain. What was that like? I just still thought it was bullshit. But I'm willing to give it a go. But I'm willing, yeah. What's the alternative? Well, I got into this position where I was just like,
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Chapter 3: What insights does Koby share about neuroplasticity and brain recovery?
I didn't want to do it, but I remember someone said to me, they said, if the train's coming, wouldn't you like to see it and try to do something about it? Oh, yeah, I guess. I guess, mate. Yeah, so I went over and saw him and did some work with him. And what was the result? It's like there's still some big issues of that period of time.
But he could tell me, he's like, you know, this is why you're getting this anxiety. There's not enough blood flow going on in this part of your brain. It's where you've been injured. And all these other things, why are you depressed? And started to explain to me that, you know, he goes, well, I'm a psychiatrist. And we're the only medical profession in the world who doesn't look at the brain.
We start diagnosing these things without no real understanding of them. And so I started, all of a sudden, the athlete in me kicks in and goes, all of a sudden, I know exactly what parts of my brain are rigid and what's going on with them. Well, how do we start to fix these things? And I went down some pretty wild routes. Hold that thought.
Yeah. I want to ask you about some of these things. Yeah. We don't need to go into 20-minute discussions of each of them, but yes, no, basically what you felt it did. So you and I are obviously not medical professionals. No. I know that sounds obvious, but we've got to state that. Yeah. But you've lived these experiences. So to me, that's as valuable as anyone be because you've lived it.
So I just did some reading. Yeah. I quote you, I explored everything from functional neurology. What's functional neurology? That's the work I was doing with Brett. Okay. Yeah. Which is obviously a positive. To psychedelic assisted treatments. What's a psychedelic assisted treatment?
Well, I was microdosing psilocybin. You hear a lot about this. Yeah. I was microdosing psilocybin.
Which is like something from... This is ignorant. I'll ask ignorant questions here, but people won't understand it. That's from mushrooms? Magic mushrooms.
Okay. It's what it is, but... It's now been proven scientifically that it attaches itself to serotonin like no other drug in the world. Was it a positive for you? Yeah, it was. It was incredibly positive. In what way? The only reason I did these things, everything that I did, some of them were pretty wild, but I had to have research behind it. That's been proven now.
It's been ticked off by the FDA. FDA over in America now and here for depression and being used in... Now, I'm going way off the reservation here.
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Chapter 4: What role does mindfulness play in Koby's recovery process?
Yeah, and I'm actually about to go do an Ibogaine experiment soon, but these things have been proven. Like, you know, there was a study done with Stanford around Ibogaine, which is a more incredible one. It takes like 13 hours to do, but there's veterans who've had incredible TBIs and PTSD, and they did it on a brain scan. It completely changed their brains.
So you had some positivity from the psychedelic. Yep. TMS? What's TMS? It's like this magnetic stimulation of your brain, yeah. I think Owen was doing that. Owen was doing that, yeah. That's sort of what the MMA fighters do, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Positive, negative?
Yeah, positive, yeah.
Okay.
Hot cult? It was just something I had to do for myself every day just to try to settle the mind down, yeah. It wasn't even more to do with healing. It was more just that I felt that it was giving me positive effects to try to calm the mind down. Mindfulness?
Yeah.
Yeah, I took the meditation thing really seriously. And I was doing a lot of that during my career. But that even, again, wasn't so much for ā it was just trying to get on top of that fight or flight. And I worked with Emma Murray who was incredible. She was like a saving angel for me.
But it was a point where I was using this technology where it would measure the blood flow in your prefrontal cortex because that's the part where essentially training during mindfulness. But it was like a game on my phone where I couldn't move the ball unless I was ā Like trying to get that active.
Really?
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Chapter 5: How does Koby's personal story connect with others suffering from brain injuries?
So you're not by yourself? No, no way, yeah. And it's, yeah, you're in this state of doing the psychedelics for four hours and it's pretty hectic. What does that mean? Pretty hectic. Oh, it's ā I don't know. Have you ever done mushrooms? No.
No, I haven't, mate. I'm straighty 180.
Yeah, yeah. These days I drink light beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, mate, it's just a tense experience which takes over your mind and you start ā because they put it ā they do it under a blinds on your eyes ā you just start having all these incredible visions and even some flashbacks. And I found that I was going through some things when I was playing and some of the injuries.
And I started to find, like, that helped my sleep and those sorts of nightmares that I was having weren't as prevalent and I was getting better sleep and I was able to really get on top of that. But I think I did so many different things. Like, even, like, you know, for my guts, after football I... my guts was destroyed from all the pills I was taking.
So I went up to a clinic in Queensland and I did an eight-day fast without eating and started to try to rebuild my guts as well. Like I refuse to take pills these days. I won't even take Panadol. So there's like that part of it as well. And I looked at it, I was like, all right, so... I was doing things like, even just the simple things every day.
I was waking up and trying to brush my hand with my left hand, like brush my teeth with my left hand, just to start trying to game it a bit more. I was playing, Brett was giving me these mind games, which was incredibly, for me, frustrating, like memory games on my phone and I was just playing them every day.
You know, stuff like that, just little things the whole way through every day and I was just trying to build on them more and more and more and whatever I felt was working. And we were having scans during this time too just to make sure that what we were doing was working and the things that were, I'd keep them.
And, you know, just down to my diet, everything was, yeah, I was on a high-fat diet for a while because the fats were good for the brain. And, yeah, a lot of things had to change.
So I'm just going to try... It's the wrong thing to do probably for you, but I think it's the right thing to do for people listening just to try and bite size it.
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Chapter 6: What unconventional treatments has Koby explored for his brain injury?
So there's still a massive... Obviously, looking at you, there's still a massive physical component to this recovery process.
As you know, we talked about... I do. I train every day. I have to train every day. And a lot of it is more mindful than it used to be. I'm not going in there to go flat out. I'm still... I'm still looking like you're going flat out, mate. You're going okay.
Thanks, mate. I'm looking on with admiration.
But, you know, like I just want the body to feel good so I feel good. The things that I eat down to, yeah, the mindfulness part of it, my environment that I'm in and doing the things I love, you know, surfing and fishing for me now bring me great joy. I miss footy so much. Still?
Yes.
I miss being around the lads. I miss that environment. I miss waking up and having that like, what's today? And then the best part of my week was running out in front of a crowd and playing football.
I miss that. More of Kobe shortly. We mentioned in the intro of the episode with Owen Wright. Owen joined us on episode 189 of the show to talk through his surfing life and also for an emotional look at his own concussion journey.
Concussion and surfing, it didn't really exist. It was kind of like... It was a wipeout. Take a wipeout and it was a bad wipeout and you just get up and dust yourself off and off you go again. It's probably the same in most sports, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
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Chapter 7: How does Koby view the future of concussion awareness in sports?
So they don't have the ability to jet off on a plane and go and see a neuralist in America. No, no. So this is a tough question for you to answer, but there will be people listening to these going, shit, Kobe, that's me.
That's me. The amount of people that have reached, like we've sent a trader off Instagram who's down to his last dollars because he couldn't go to work.
Well, this is the examples I'm giving, but we don't necessarily need, you know, a lot of people listening to this show, we don't need 500 people sending you a message saying, what do I do?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the hardest.
Like what would you say to people that are suffering brain injuries?
Yeah, it's such a hard question, mate. Because as you said, everyone's different. I understand that. And like I'm not a medical professional and I think if you've had one, I would be urging you to go get it looked at by someone. Whether it's a neurologist or whatever and someone like that Dr. Daniel Amen, we're starting to see similar stuff come to Australia.
It's like everyone needs to understand that once you have one brain injury too, you're more susceptible to having another, especially if you're playing sport and that's what happened to me because you start to slow down, your motor movements slow down and that's just a fact. That's what happens. But what comes of it is anxiety, it's depression, it's suicidal ideations, all this sort of stuff.
And if you had one or maybe had a couple, go get it looked at. And that is the first step to stop putting it off. The amount of people that come up and talk to me and I've... Like I said, I've kept my story pretty quiet for a long time.
Even through that, on the street... Got more people going to now because people are going to listen to this.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of Koby's documentary for the wider community?
So I hope you feel we've told the gist of the story you want told. Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
I hope so. I'm just glad to see you're happy and healthy, but I appreciate you trusting the show but being as honest and open as you are. Yeah. When anyone comes on and talks about medical stuff, health stuff, mental stuff, well-being stuff, it has an enormous impact and my inbox always gets flooded. Yeah. And with people that it helps.
So I've no doubt this will help a lot of people along the way, mate. And it's huge credit to you that you can talk about some of this stuff in depth that you've learned because it will help so many other people, mate.
Yeah, thank you. And just to back that up, you've got to sit here and go, well, I'm not a medical professional. And hopefully it just gives people hope that these, go see a neurologist or a doctor straight away if you're dealing with those sorts of things. Reach out to your mates. I didn't reach out to anyone. I just kept myself hidden. Don't do that. It's the worst thing you can do.
And know that you're not going insane if it is happening. It's a real issue and it's a real injury. And yeah, thank you very much for having me, mate. I've thoroughly enjoyed it and loved the show for a long time.
Good man. Stay safe. You need to come down the coast for a surf. And I explained to you how inflexible I am and I get worse every surf I actually have. So maybe we need to have one sooner rather than later. I need a surf soon, mate. I've been fishing too much. Okay. Well, there's a lot of fishing down Miami. They catch a lot of tuna off the heads there at Barwon Head. Definitely do.
Mate, look after yourself. The Howie Games team, expect an invite to the premiere. You'll be all coming, yes. But we like red carpet and we want LA and we want Eric and we want you for the full deal. Done. Emmys, Oscars. Look after yourself, mate. Well done.
Cheers.
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