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.