During his years as a self-proclaimed “relapse artist,” Tyson befriended, and got high with, many fellow addicts. They would go to rehab and then spend the summer partying before returning to do it all again.

“We’d go to Greece or the south of France and hang out, then we’d go to rehab and we understood why we were all there,” he says. “Most of my friends passed away. That’s what happens. My wife had to deal with me through my relapses, my ODs, my heart busting. It was the birth of my daughter that made me say, ‘I gotta stop. We gotta make this work.’ She kept us together, she was the glue.

“My friends had all the money in the world, all the money in the world,” he continues, “and it couldn’t stop them from killing themselves. I’m just grateful I learned the power of gratitude.”

Listening to him talk about life, plenty of intriguing dualities within Tyson’s psyche are revealed. One of the most fascinating is the role fame has played in not just his life, but his journey of self-discovery.

Hidden in a joke he makes about thinking he’s a bit overrated as a boxer, it’s clear that issues of self-esteem have plagued Tyson throughout his life. To many it seems impossible that the boxer who once won 37 consecutive fights, 33 by knockout, would have any moments of self-doubt.

Whenever Tyson goes in public people recognize him and come up to him, and it isn’t a minor annoyance of fame that he brushes aside. Instead it unleashes some of his darker thoughts about himself.

“Nobody is that great where people [need to] stop them in the airport,” Tyson explains. “It’s cool, but it’s creepy. I might not be that bright, but I’m deeper than that. It makes me very uncomfortable.”

As those people idolize Tyson the boxer, we want to know what Tyson the man would want them to know about himself.

“I want them to know I have low self-esteem,” he says. “I don’t even know what you call it, an annihilation of fucking ego, what do you call that person?
The kind of person that has a low self-esteem but has everything, and everybody loves him? Why did God make me this person with this low self-esteem and allow me to have all this?”

Tyson has a very complicated relationship with the concept of ego. In those moments of self-doubt he seems to have none, but when he was on the mic promoting a fight he appeared to be nothing but ego. The reality is somewhere in the middle. Tyson learned the key to controlling his own ego when he looked deeply within himself while on psychedelics.

“I’ve done this serum they call the toad, when I first did it I thought I was dying, I was so scared,” he explains. “My ego died, and you’d be surprised
how much we need that. People say throw your ego away, kill your ego… no. That’s all bullshit. If the ego dies, we die. Don’t let it control you. The ego’s purpose is to protect you. We’re so much more than what we think we are, we just don’t know what it is.”

That statement was intended to be addressing the big picture, the possibilities of the human mind, but Tyson has proven throughout his life
that it is equally true of himself. The public perception of Mike Tyson has been constantly in flux.

As Public Enemy blasted out the speakers and shook all of Las Vegas when he walked out to the ring to fight Razor Ruddock, there was no denying the perception that Tyson was the baddest motherfucker on the planet. As he dropped Zach Galifinakis to the tunes of Phil Collins with the best choreographed punch in the history of Hollywood, the perception was that of an entertainer willing to have a laugh at himself. And as we sit in his living room discussing Che Guevara, his cannabis venture and Carl Jung, the perception is of a deep thinker intent on healing himself and hoping to heal others along the way.