Lamar Odom sat down with Talib Kweli on the rapper’s new podcast the “People’s Party” and discussed his battle with substance abuse, as well as the many health scares he’s faced.
It turns out the former Los Angeles Lakers big man says he’s had a whopping 12 strokes and six heart attacks in his lifetime. He also talked about the measures he took to keep playing professional basketball while doing drugs, including using a fake penis during a drug test to suit up for Team USA at the Olympics.
Odom is currently plugging his new book “Darkness to Light: A Memoir,” where he opened up about his sex addiction and sleeping with over 2,000 women.
At one point during the discussion, the 39-year-old said curbing his sex addiction was even harder after he and ex-wife Khloe Kardashian split in 2016. Odom claimed that a lot of women became sexually aggressive, simply because his ex is a huge celebrity, and in their eyes it made him a bigger catch.
Odom also talked about wanting to get into the record business in the past but Jay-Z telling him not to. Odom said that he really believed in the New York rapper Ali Vegas at the time, but Jay advised him to follow in the footsteps of another former Laker.
“He was like ‘Nah homie, you should be doing what Magic [Johnson] is doing. Doing real estate or something,’” Odom recalled. “I think I took it the wrong way, like, ‘These motherff—–s must be scared of me.’ I didn’t listen to big homie, but I wish I would. Sometimes I think, what if I’d have listened to Hov’s advice?”
You can hear Odom talk about the exchange he had with Jay-Z at the 7:25 mark.