Rashad Evans reveals how a 2021 5-MeO-DMT experience triggered his vegan shift, linking it to spiritual detachment and mental clarity, while debating Jon Jones’ controversial fight wins and MMA judging. He praises Zabit Magomedsharipov’s hybrid striking, critiques flawed training gear (75% of injuries stem from sparring), and credits LifeCycle mushroom tinctures for endurance gains. Now training fighters at Team Mercy Lago, including his godson Devin Smith, Evans focuses on mental resilience over technical drills, mirroring Rogan’s psychedelic-inspired humility—success shouldn’t feed ego. [Automatically generated summary]
Every single time I clean it out, I tell myself I'm not going to put any more cards in there except for the ones I need, but it just attracts the cards.
And carrying a bag actually helped me be more prepared than ever because, I mean, I would always be, one of them dudes can't carry enough stuff, and I'll always become things, wishing I had things that I didn't have, and I'm like, you know what?
It's also like, if you think about it, if your body thinks, okay, I have to eat animals all the time because all this motherfucker eats is animals, right?
that's a very underrated psychedelic oh my god it that that will yeah that's the the first really but i had done mushrooms before but i did a fairly small dose i mean fairly small in that i could walk around i was pretty whacked out but i could walk around a couple grams but the 5 meo dmt was the first one where i just ceased to exist
i just stopped and it made me really aware of ego really aware of like even the way i express myself the way i would frame sentences and say things I was just, I was trying to sound cool, or I was trying to portray something in a way, like, not just trying to portray the information, but trying to impress people, and it made me, like, feel real gross.
Yeah, I feel like regular consciousness that most of us exist in most of the time is a veneer.
It's a very thin veneer.
And through some things, you get a taste of what's under the surface through meditation and yoga and all these different methods that people use, holotropic breathing.
You get a taste of what's underneath the surface.
Kundalini yoga, apparently.
Kundalini yoga, apparently.
I've never really done it, but some people say you could really trip out if you do it in a certain way for long periods of time.
People have very intense psychedelic experiences akin to DMT. Yeah.
Well, you know, that thing about the center of your head, there's a lot of speculation on what the Egyptians were trying to draw when they were drawing certain images, but there's certain temples that seem to mimic certain shapes in these temples that seem to mimic the pineal gland.
Like even the eye, there's that famous Egyptian eye that has that sort of dip down in that weird sort of Egyptian shape.
There's been a bunch of different scholars that have tried to figure out what exactly that meant.
And one of the theories is that that's a cross-section of the pineal gland.
And they think that what they were emphasizing was that that is the area where the brain produces all the psychedelic chemicals.
They speculated this for a long time, but Dr. Rick Strassman, he's the guy that wrote that book, DMT the Spirit Molecule, and there was actually a documentary on it that I hosted.
He's done a bunch of work with this Cottonwood Research Foundation where they've shown now that it exists in live rats.
And that it is actually produced by that gland, that DMT is actually produced in these animals by this one particular gland that they associated with spiritual awakening with the third eye.
So it actually is a real thing, that feeling that you get.
And the thing about mushrooms that's really interesting is mushrooms actually mimic natural human neurochemistry.
There's 5-MeO-DMT, there's N-N-DMT, and then what mushrooms, what's processed, the way your body processes, it becomes something called 4-Fox-4-Aloxy-N-N-dimethyltryptamine.
So it's all real close.
I might have butchered that technical description.
But it's real close to human neurochemistry, so your body absorbs it very easily.
I had two ACL surgeries on my right knee, and that completely just, it changed everything for me because, you know, being a smaller light heavyweight, all of my power was all in my legs, you know, and whatever I couldn't make up for in the size department up top, I was usually able to make up for with the power of my legs, you know.
That always drove me crazy, because I'm like, why the fuck is a guy training for a world title fight in a regular class where everybody knows people collide into people in regular classes all the time with millions of dollars on the line?
We would train crazy as hell and put ourselves in some crazy situations.
And you try to put yourself in a situation because you're like, you know, I did it before and I've done it so many times and nothing has happened.
But when you start to move up and there's more on the line, then you always have to take every single precaution because you can't afford to take a step back.
Right.
For me, once I had my knee injuries, though, I just mentally was not the same person.
When I competed, I wasn't the same person.
Then it affected me because then I'm like, I'm not the same person.
My leg would get tired, you know, and it didn't have the same bounce, the same rhythm, and it kind of felt heavy, and I couldn't really feel it in the front, you know, the front part of my knee.
So they cut the front open and then they take the piece of the bone, they take a slice of the patella tendon and a piece of the bone on the bottom and they replace your ACL with that?
And I admire guys who can come back and look phenomenal and do it still because when you mess up your knee, for me, it just kind of mentally messed me up a bit.
The first time, I didn't do it as well as I could have because I'm like, I bounced back pretty easy.
And I did.
I felt like I was bouncing back pretty easy.
But when it went the second time, then it was harder because not only was I healing from the ACL, but then my knee was healing in general just from the previous surgery and then plus this surgery.
And then I had...
Something different because in a first surgery, it wasn't too invasive because I wasn't using my own tissue.
I was training for another fight thinking I could get back in shape and fight again.
And then when I was training for that fight, it blew out again.
I was scheduled to fight Gustinson and then AJ ended up taking that fight instead.
But it was one that just...
First of all, when I was out for two years healing from injury, I got to see what it was like when all the cameras stopped flashing, when people stopped caring to get your pictures.
That whole feeling that happens when you hit that transitional point and stop becoming that guy.
And it was a difficult transition at first because, you know, even though I always told myself I would never, you know, put myself in the mindset of being just that fighter, sooner or later you become just that fighter and that's what happened to me.
When I was into my career and trying to figure out what's next for me, it was hard.
It was just a hard place because I didn't really have anybody to talk to.
I didn't really know what I was going to do next in my life.
Then when I started fighting again, I still was in that place where I just wasn't totally back to fighting, my mentality.
Because fighting is something mentally that it takes a certain mentality for.
And for me, fighting was something that I did to exercise some demons a bit.
You know, but but having some time away from the sport, it allowed me to figure out other ways to exercise.
So demons and, you know, figure out some things around them, you know, the things that made me mad, the things that were my fuel before I kind of made peace with them.
And then making peace with a lot of the things that I was using for my fuel, it just changed the way I fought and the way I seen fighting.
So coming back to fight, I just wasn't that same fighter anymore.
And then when I got to the point where I was like, man, I can't keep myself...
I was like, man, I'm not fighting the way I want to fight.
And, you know, there's...
I mean, what's the point?
If I can't go and compete the way I want to, I'm only torturing myself.
So then I decided to retire.
But then when I retired, I still was in a space where...
I was like, man, there's still something missing.
So then when I did the 5-MeO-DMT, that kind of put things in perspective in a whole different way, you know?
And it just, it changed me.
It changed me a lot.
It changed the way that, you know, like I said, the way I think, the way I eat, everything about it, you know?
So it was so cathartic in so many senses of the word, you know?
I think every fighter gets to a point where you fight enough, then fighting, you kind of get in a weird space about it.
And, you know, I've seen fighters go through that period where they just kind of like figuring out that, why am I still doing this?
You know, they've had great moments inside the cage, but then they have those down moments.
And those down moments are the moments where it's harder to come back from.
And I think those are the times where you, you know, a psychedelic or something like that could put things in perspective and allow the fighter to see the why behind the reason they're doing it.
One of my good friends, Dale Jolly out in Denver, he's the one who told me about the medicine, the toad medicine.
And after that, we just kind of continue to always link up and we do a bunch of ceremonies together.
We do ayahuasca.
And just make sure we always have that connection.
But it was through working with him, you know, I became, you know, part of this group, Unlimited Sciences.
And Unlimited Sciences, what we're doing is, you know, we've been able to, we want to make psilocybin usage because Del Jolly was one of the guys who got, who's on the committee who got it approved for Denver.
I'm not really too sure exactly how it all works with that, but I think that they're still working out the details about how it's going to be, which you can possess on the legal side.
But with Unlimited Sciences, we've been able to We want to take the psilocybin experience where it's one that people can go through for healing and help and get consistent information, consistent data on the full spectrum on how you can use it and the ways it's used.
So we've teamed up, and this has never been done before, we teamed up with John Hopkins University, and we're going to be part of their study, and we're going to do like the first real-world study where we go out and, you know, take information from people, you know, people from 18 and up who can speak English can sign up for our study.
And, you know, what you do is you go and you fill out a questionnaire and everything is It's HIPAA protected, so no one has to worry about getting in trouble for their usage of psilocybin.
But John Hopkins has taken all this information and we're collecting it for him.
And what we want to do is we want to be able to give this back to them so that they can see on which way they want to direct their clinical research.
And what that can do is, you know, with the unlimited sciences, it comes from this group called Realm of Caring.
And Realm of Caring is out in Denver, and Realm of Caring was for medical refugees during the whole, when there was a Medical refugees for cannabis who couldn't use it in their state came to Denver where they were able to use it,
but when they first came there, there wasn't any information on how much to use because Heather Jackson and this other girl who started it named Paige They started the realm of caring and it was just them.
They were treating their child and their children.
They had seizures and epilepsy and stuff like that.
So they tried everything in a medical field to help them, but they could not help them with that.
So then they went to cannabis and there was only two of them doing it.
So they didn't really have much information to go back from.
So then they would share information amongst each other and then they would ask other people.
And then through networking, they created this huge community of people With data and they started to come with more and more data and then they started working with John Hopkins University and made a protocol and everything else.
Now the realm of caring helped thousands of families all over the world just with the information and data they didn't have been able to collect.
They're very interested in diving into the mind aspect and everything.
And I think that the real-world study would be good because what it does is it allows them to put their money and their resources into where people are actually using it and the things that are interesting to the people.
So, I mean, it's one thing to have it in a clinical setting, but it's another thing to do it on your own and be able to get the results from it.
Hopefully to study with John Hopkins University, it definitely changes games and puts things on a level where people can get the healing they need from the mushrooms.
And this is a really controversial theory but fascinating that they believe that – at least Terrence had this idea that one of the catalysts for human evolution that changed us from – Lower primates to human beings was the consumption of psilocybin and that animals,
you know, these pre-human primates would flip over cow patties and experiment by eating grubs and bugs and things they'd find out there and they would also eat the mushrooms that would grow on the cow patties.
And the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years is gigantic mystery.
Like, they have no idea what happened.
I mean, it's apparently, according to biologists, it's the biggest mystery in the fossil record that the human brain doubled.
And not just that any organ would double in size over a period of two million years, but that the organ responsible for the theory of evolution in the first place doubled over two million years.
But it coincides with climate change and coincides with these rainforests, and this is all Terence's work, I'm repeating.
It coincides with these rainforests receding into grasslands and then these undulates, these cow-like animals that would live on these grasslands and eat the cow and take shits.
And then the manure would grow, or the psilocybin, rather, would grow in the manure, and they would follow these cows around and then eat their mushrooms that would grow in their manure.
And it also coincides with the earliest civilizations would all worship cattle, like Choctal Hiuk, which is one of the earliest known civilizations.
They had these—it was a real cattle-worshipping thing.
I don't want to say a cult, but the way their culture would operate.
They worship cattle.
And some would say, well, that's because they ate them and they used their milk.
I'm sure, I'm sure that had something to do with it.
But, like, the Hindus don't even eat them.
They just worship them.
Imagine that?
You've got a billion people living in a place, everyone's starving, and they're not eating the cows.
They're not eating the most delicious animal on the planet.
Well, it's because they grew mushrooms!
And the ancient Hindu scripts, like Soma, is one of the main sacraments that they would talk about.
No one really understood.
To this day, they're not exactly sure what Soma is, but it's some sort of a psychedelic sacrament, and it probably was a combination of many things, but a big one was most likely psilocybin, was a part of that.
And that sort of corresponded with their relationship with cows.
They had this This worship of cattle.
They wouldn't eat them.
And the reason is because God came out of their butt.
In their eyes, you know, they would make the manure.
The mushrooms would grow in the manure.
And there's all sorts of mushroom iconography in all of their ancient religious artwork.
And I don't think it's been properly covered the way that it could be, but it's amazing because the minute you eat a mushroom...
At the right dosage, you feel it.
You feel the fact that it's like, oh, this is something ancient because there's something that happens when you go to that place where you lose the self.
When you lose the self, then there's something that happens that's That's just magical.
There really is no way to explain it or dress it up with words.
It's just something magical that happens once you reach that level.
Because I know how I used to think, and I would have dismissed it the same way.
I would have said, this is the foolish notions of frivolous spiritual people that are just being ridiculous, and they think, oh.
Oh, it's all about the mushrooms, man.
But it is.
If you do it, you'll realize, like, oh, well, if you do any real potent breakthrough psychedelic, any real breakthrough psychedelic experience is going to make you humble.
It's going to make you realize, like, oh, there's more to this than everyday consciousness.
There's more to this experience, this existence.
There's something way bigger.
And you only can tap into it through a variety of different methods, whether it's name your psychedelic or name your trance-like state that people can go into.
There's a lot of different ways to tap into it, but once you do, you realize this is not...
This little thin thing that we're touching right now, this is not everything.
I always tend to think of life as my own view of experience.
It's right here.
My life is right here.
Right now it's in this room.
Later on it'll be at the comedy store.
There's places I go.
My life is where those places are.
But when I had my first 5MAO DMT experience, it felt like, no, no, no.
It's all together.
You're in the middle of this infinite soup of life.
And there's no one spot.
That spot is your imagination.
It's like the limitations of your biology that we have...
Kept from the time that we were small little mammals to the time that we were lower primates to the time that we're human beings.
The limit, the biological instincts to survive and to preserve our DNA and to carry that DNA on, all of those instincts are the reason why we're here but also so limiting because they keep your consciousness bottled up in the location that you're at.
It keeps your feeling of life Contained to wherever you're at at that moment and staying safe and then keeping people paying attention to you and making sure you got the coolest shit and all the things that seem so silly when you trip.
When I fall away and the feeling of falling away and not being who I think I am, It's almost the most freeing feeling, but at the same time, it's one of the scariest.
It's one of the scariest at the same time, but it's necessary, and it's necessary in order to reach a certain point of understanding.
When you reach a certain point of understanding of going inside, then you don't need a guru.
You don't need anyone to drop insight or knowledge, because all the knowledge and insight...
It's there if you go deep enough and you know how to go deep enough, you know, and you understand the fact that, you know, there's this knowingness.
And it's hard to explain.
Like, it sounds crazy to say, but there's just this knowingness out there and you can tap into it.
And even in a state, I remember being in a state where I was on one of my deepest trips and I'm in the trip and my friend looks over at me and then I wave him over because I want to tell him the secret that I found about consciousness and about existence.
But I couldn't tell him because the knowingness is telling me if I tell him, then I'm not going to be able to come back and live.
I had to go.
I had to leave this earth.
That's what it was telling me.
So I remember just sitting there just like, man, I want to be able to tell him and be able to convey to him in words what I'm feeling.
The only thing that came out of my mouth was, just go sit over there.
Like, I was in his yard, and I just went and walked.
And as I was walking, this knowingness told me, like, I was walking barefoot in this grass, and I kept getting my feet poked.
And the knowingness told me, it was like, you know, it told me the path to walk.
And it said, the reason why I'm stepping on these, getting pricked is because I'm stepping on live grass, stepping on dead spots where there's no...
And it just came to me just that clear and I just started doing it and I wasn't getting pricked by any grass no more.
Then it told me to sit down and then I sat down and then I just had like the most profound just realizations just hit me like it was like it was like it was coming out of the sun.
It sounds crazy to say.
I was outside and I went and I was looking at the sun and it was like the sun transitioned to something else.
It just became very deep and it had layers of, it was very, very trippy.
But during that experience, I remember looking around and seeing everyone that I was with and laughing to myself saying like, they would not believe this, but I'm actually every single one of them.
And that was like a thought that I remember.
Thinking and feeling like I'm feeling myself right now and it bugged me out.
Do you feel like though that to be an elite fighter maybe you need that burning desire to the point where mistakes burn they hurt and I know as a comedian I mean there's a there's a there's a parallel there like where when if I'm really working hard or really concentrating hard anything I say that Is stupid or comes off wrong or I try something that doesn't work.
It will fuck with me for days.
Just all day long.
Even in conversation.
I'm having fun with some friends and I say something stupid.
It'll sit in my head for a day.
I'll wake up in the middle of the night to piss going, why the fuck did you say that?
Most people that I've talked to think John won the last two clearly.
Most people.
Most people that I've talked to that are experts, most people, few disagree, believe that Dominic Reyes won the first three.
And the third round is the one that seems to be, you go, well, Dominic scored more, but it was close enough where you could see someone giving it to John, particularly since John was pressing the action.
John was pushing forward.
Maybe you give it to John, but they thought Dominic won it.
But they said if there's a disputable round, it is that third round.
But one fucking judge gave John four rounds to one.
That's insane.
This is the same judge that when...
I believe Luke Thomas is talking about this.
I'm sorry if I'm wrong because I'm not saying the judge's name because I'm not sure if I'm correct.
But I believe it's the same judge that...
Trevin Giles, who fought James Krause.
Giles and Krause was an amazing fight.
Giles wound up winning the decision, but the first round, Krause had his back for four minutes, and the judge gave that round to Giles, which is insane.
I mean, for four minutes, Krause had his back.
The guy was fighting off chokes.
Krause was...
Real close to submitting him a couple times during those four minutes.
And the judge, the same judge who gave four rounds to John Jones, gave that first round to Giles, where there was a dude on his back for four fucking minutes!
Most of the round.
And maybe even a fucking more egregious fight was Andre Ewell versus Jonathan Martinez.
That fight was fucking crazy.
That fight was crazy.
That was the most crazy one.
Martinez won that fight.
Martinez won that fight.
Ewell broke his arm, I think.
I'm not sure if it's a broken arm, but he had a significant injury to his right hand early in the fight.
Somewhere in between either the first or the second round.
Not sure, but he really couldn't throw a right hand.
And it was kind of hanging.
You could kind of see it was hanging.
And Martinez put in work.
It was an amazing performance by him.
And he got fucked over, man.
Real bad.
It was bad decision-making.
There was a bunch of bad fights.
There was a bunch of bad decisions.
It wasn't just one.
There was like four or five on a card of, what, twelve fights?
Eleven, twelve fights?
I forget how many it was from the opening prelims.
There was bad decisions.
Just almost like people who don't know what they're seeing.
Yeah, and that's crazy too, especially when we reach the point that we have in mixed martial arts.
I think that we've turned a corner in that, meaning the fact that there's so much out there, so much knowledge out there in the sport and everything else like that.
And if you're going to be judging it, you've got to at least know when somebody is winning a round.
I mean...
You know, there's aspects of John's game that was, you know, scored some points.
You know, he was always moving forward with the action.
But, you know, even when he was moving forward with the action, he wasn't terribly too offensive.
He would come with his legs, but, you know, a lot of times he would allow Dominic to kind of be the first one initiating and then moving off.
And sometimes it seemed like he was just kind of chasing him.
But, you know, I think that it was that third round.
That third round was that hard round to score.
But, you know, I think that Dom had the edge, but if you're going to be the champ, then you got to be the champ.
And I don't think he did that.
Jon Jones impressed me so much with the shots that he was able to take, but more or less the mindset that Jon had.
That mindset that Jon had in those championship rounds, to me, that showed that this guy is...
He is a total package, and when it comes to fighting, just mentally speaking, he's somebody who I thought was frustrated, and working through his own frustration in the fight is difficult.
He didn't succumb to his own frustration, and he just kept that pressure going.
He took some big shots from a heavy hitter, but Dominic Reyes is a problem for anybody.
He's a real problem, especially now that he's got that rub.
He touched greatness with John, who's the greatest ever.
I feel like those last two rounds should count more.
This is my personal opinion.
But John Cavanaugh said something on his Twitter page, I believe it was John Cavanaugh, and it reflects exactly how I feel.
That if this fight was going to go on another five rounds, it's pretty fucking clear to me who's going to win.
This is to the death, Jon Jones is going to win that fight.
If it's to the death, there's no doubt about it in my mind that Jon Jones is eventually going to get him.
Those last two rounds, Dominic Reyes was hurting.
You could see him taking big, deep breaths and trying to move, and his arms were labored, and Jon just kept pressing, kept pressing, kept kicking him, kept punching him, kept trying for the takedown.
And that should mean more.
It should mean more towards the end of the fight.
At the end of the fight, if you win a decision, but you just got your ass kicked for the last four minutes, that seems crazy to me that you won the fight.
Because, I mean, I know this is a dumb way to think about it, but if we were in a schoolyard, right?
We were in high school, and some dude and another dude fought, the dude who's getting the shit beat out of them at the end of the fight is the guy who lost.
When the teachers come and they pull you off that guy, that's who won.
And I know that you can't score a professional sport the way you look, but it is the rarest of rare professional sports because it's the sport of fighting.
And in fighting, when you're getting your ass kicked, You're supposed to lose.
If you're getting your ass kicked, you lost.
And if you're kicking the guy's ass, you win.
Sounds crazy, but at the end of that fight, Jon Jones was kicking Dominic Ray's ass.
Both with his punches, but also with his ability to move, man.
He was throwing great kicks.
He was chopping at John's legs.
Out of any fight in John's future, I want to see a rematch.
I really want to see what Dominic Reyes looks like now with this rub, understanding how close he was, and then the amount of conditioning that he's going to have to put himself through to be able to do that again in five rounds.
And it's not like either guy got Fucked up in that fight where they're going to be severely damaged.
It's not like one of those crazy wars where, like, Adesanya-Kelvin Gastelum, at the end of that fight, I was like, oh my god, you know, I hope Kelvin takes some time off after that one.
That was chaos, just wildness.
It wasn't like that.
It was a grueling, difficult, hard fight, but it wasn't a fight where there was so much damage that both Jon and Dominic needed to take a long time off.
I feel like you could make that fight in eight months.
But I think that this is exactly what John needed in that light heavyweight weight class because it was getting kind of stagnant, and I think it needed some time to mature.
But I think Dominic Ray has just said, you better stay here for a little bit.
Like, I watch them after training, and these guys do this, like, it's like a Randori type of sparring afterwards, and they just do, like, jumping off the walls, all these kind of, like, these acrobatic crazy moves that you don't think will ever work, and you see them like, oh, my God, where do you get that from?
They practice it all the time, and they just do all these kind of crazy moves at the end of training.
He's got great boxing I mean, he's a weird combination of a bunch of different styles and he's tall to not that tall length is really Something that helps him out to this Frankie Edgar whenever he goes on him He's like man.
I feel like I can get him down But then I look down and then his feet are still touching the ground.
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I swear I have them up - And his feet are still touching.
It seemed like in that fight, Cater kind of realized towards the end, like, wait a minute, I can beat this dude, you know?
And that happens sometimes.
When you go against a guy who has a bunch of different tricks, You find yourself putting yourself in his trick bag just by being aware of all the things that he can do.
You find yourself like, oh, he's going to set that up.
Oh, he's going to set that up.
And by you being too watchful of what he's doing, you're shutting your own game down.
And it seemed like Cater just threw caution to the wind at third round.
He was like, you know what?
I'm going to just go out and just make it happen.
And then when he did that, he found his opportunities.
And with Calvin's boxing and Jeremy's savagery, the two of them together, and Jeremy has ridiculous power, the two of them together, that's going to be amazing.
And then they have Zabit.
Zabit is now going to fight Ortega.
Brian Ortega's comeback fight is going to be Zabit.
And that's a tough fight to come back to.
Ortega's been out, injured a bunch, hasn't fought since he lost to Max.
He's had a bunch of, like, real problematic injuries that he can't get over.
And then finally he's healthy now, he's going through training.
And, you know, tall order though, to jump right back in the deep end of the pool with a guy like Zabit.
It's different when you've got to crack somebody's leg.
I think, honestly, when it comes to the state of mixed martial arts, I think that once a lot of these fighters start to We were speaking about it earlier.
We were in the dark ages when it came to training and that transition of how to become more professional with your training.
I think nowadays fighters are starting to understand that more with the Performance Institute.
It's helping to educate these fighters a lot more on what proper training should be and what it truly could encompass.
And now there's more professionalism added to martial arts, but there's still an aspect that needs to be covering and that's on the equipment side.
The company that I work with, Onyx, Have you heard of Onyx before?
So we have a whole line, and the line that we have with Onyx, it's really the first MMA brand, like an MMA company that's made for all the way we move in MMA, you know, everything that happens in MMA,
because now the equipment that we use now, we borrow it from kickboxing or boxing, and there's that gap of just efficiency when it comes to manufacturing Yeah, Trevor Whitman sent them to me.
So he started, so what happened is when we were trained, if anything happened to our equipment, we would just give it to Trevor and Trevor would go and he would tweak it and he would make some adjustments.
So then Trevor's like, man, the more he started to do that, the more he started to realize there's a huge gap.
The equipment that we're using is not efficient.
Some gloves that should be 16 ounces are actually 11 ounces.
And there's no integrity when it comes to...
So Trevor did a lot of research and he was like, man, there really hasn't been any improving on equipment since the thumb was put on the boxing glove.
And that's pretty much it.
So Trevor went and he learned how to sew.
He learned how to do everything.
And he was in his basement just making this equipment.
knee sleeve it's like it's like a niece it's a it's a shin guard but it slides into a knee brace you can slide you can slide it's like a knee brace at the same time as well as an ankle brace it secures a whole like whole leg pretty much and it's it feels like you have nothing on and you can kick with like anything and it feels feel it doesn't feel like it feels amazing and he has a really really thin headgear and uh i want to show you these gloves i
I brought some gloves to show you.
So these gloves right here are what we're going to be doing for the competition gloves.
The competition and the training gloves, the 7-ounce training gloves.
Well, see, I mean, and that's where we are at Onyx, you know.
We just want to be able to get a product out there for the athletes and that they can use, but it protects them because a lot of the injuries, like 75% of them happen in training.
Well, Glenn, the guy who put up the cash, I mean, I had heard some outlandish figures that he was in the hole for that place for by the time everything was up and running.
Even his situation, he got himself in a situation where he was doing so much for people, it just became a thing that people expected out of him.
And then when he wasn't able to do it anymore, then it was kind of like people were like, oh man, this guy isn't this and he wasn't that.
Right.
He just wanted to do so much and had an idea to want to do things on another level, but at the same time, the finances of doing it was a massive undertaking.
And I just inherited this beef and I was like, you know, it's silly.
And especially since the fact that ATT is like literally right down the street from my house, it would be closer to go there than anywhere else.
But it was weird for a while, but actually talking to Dan and actually getting to know him and, you know, it was a good thing because, you know, I got to get a lot of respect for him and just for what he's done with American Top Team and ATT in general.
I just love that a person like that, like Dan Lambert, can literally change the course of MMA by setting an example and by having a gym that sets an example that's such an insanely high level.
So big, so many world-class fighters there, so much strength and conditioning, everything under one roof, dorms, everything.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of super camps out there now.
It's interesting to see these places.
You have TriStar in Montreal, you have Duke Rufus in Milwaukee, you have Jackson Winklejohn in Albuquerque, you got AKA. When you first started, there was not that many places.
When I was in camp, I really wouldn't travel too much.
So what we would do is that if Nate Marquardt was in camp and he wanted to stay at home most of the time, so we'll stagger it where he'll have a tough guy in camp every single time.
time so I'll be a couple weeks when George wasn't there or when Keith wasn't there you know and then sometimes we'll all come together but for the most part we'll just all rotate into these gyms depending on who was fighting who needed to work he's a guy that I feel is underappreciated Nate Marquardt, when he was at the very top of his game, was a fucking assassin.
That knockout of Tyron Woodley in Strikeforce to this day is one of the nastiest in tight elbow combination knockouts I think of ever, like a video game knockout.
See, Nate Marquardt was one of those guys, I'm like, oh man, you'll get anxiety before training and practice because you knew it was going to be a hard goal.
Like, my training growing up in the sport was just...
It was difficult, man.
You know, training with GSP, Keith Jardine, Nate Marcord, Joey Villasenor, Mike Van Arsdale, and, you know, even Ali Abdelaziz was even up in the mix, too.
But it was, you know, it was training with guys who, like, it was a hard go all the time, you know.
And Nate was one of those guys that I'm just like, oh, my gosh.
This dude is not going to get tired.
You know what I'm saying?
He's good everywhere.
He's super strong.
It was just like one of those like, all right, I got to bring it in order to compete today.
Well, you're obviously, by following this vegan diet, I'm seeing all these supplements.
You're taking spirulina and all these different things.
You're obviously doing it right, which is, you know, there's a lot of people that they're vegan, but they're eating, like, pasta and pizza and shit like that.
They're just not doing it correctly in terms of taking in the proper amount of nutrients.
I read this book, The Mucusless Diet, and it's by Dr. Arnold Ehret.
And this is like in the early 1900s.
He came up with this book and he had some stomach issues.
And it was not until he was fed up and was on like, you know what, he was starving himself.
And then he realized he had some really, you know, it kind of changes his stomach situation.
So then he started looking into diet and nutrition.
And then he became a fruitarian.
And this book is talking about pretty much, you know, the role of food in your body and what it does and what causes mucus and what doesn't cause mucus.
And, you know, through understanding the mucus of the diet and just reading it, It just gave me a different hold on understanding, like a different understanding of why I'm doing this, you know.
And it became to me deeper than just like, oh, I can't have this because, you know, the diet says I shouldn't have it.
It says I can't have it because, you know, this is going to cause inflammation, you know.
I know the deeper reason of why, so it's easier for me to avoid the pitfalls of bad food, you know?
There's also a situation with people where there's biological variability, where some people, some diets just sync up well for them.
them like i know i know a lot of people that they don't feel good when they eat red meat when they fish they feel great yeah when they eat light foods you know their their body whatever for whatever it is their digestion favors certain type of diet yeah and that's what i found too because um uh i don't i don't know if this will work for everybody to It probably won't work for everybody.
I'll come home and I'll eat maybe a hearty shake that I make of fruit, and then I'll put some mushrooms and stuff in it, just like the cordyceps, the lion's mane, and from this brand Lifecycle.
You heard of LifeCycle with a K? So that brand right there makes a really good tincture that you just drop it in there and you don't got to worry about changing the flavor of too much of your shake.
So I drop that in there with my shakes and stuff like that.
And I usually take that.
That would be my first meal.
Then the second one would be a little bit more hearty.
It would be something with vegetables and maybe some potatoes or something so it's a little bit more hearty.
And then I'll have another hearty meal, like a vegetable-type meal, vegetable-based meal, at nighttime.
There's a lot of folks that they're mixing a lot of different dietary yeasts and a lot of different powders and different things and blending these different things.
Some people don't like the way that feels when you're eating like that, but it sounds like what you're eating is much more whole food based.
And I like a lot of Indian food just because of that, you know.
And that whole food diet, it just works for me.
But like you said, these supplements like this, This makes me, like, I feel like when I drink this, like spirulina, and just eat a lot of greens, and even, like, the mushrooms, you know, the cordyceps mushrooms and stuff like that, like, I just have energy to just go and go and go.
They send, like, they have, like, a really nice tincture set that they send out.
I should have bring it, but it has, like, it has, like, Reishi, it has turkey tail, lion's mane, the cordyceps, and it even gives you, you know, a schedule on when you should take it and when it's best for.
But it's a really, really good, good mushrooms because, you know, they put, they infuse theirs with this cockatoo plum.
The best that I ever felt was when I fought Tito Ortiz.
I was eating red meat, but I also was coupling that up with a lot of spinach.
I was eating a lot of spinach.
I would go and get a big bag of spinach.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was doing.
I'd get a big bag of spinach and I'd just put it in a blender and just grind it up and then throw some apples in it to make it a little bit sweeter to change the taste so it wouldn't be so greenish like I'm eating grass.
And then I would just drink those all the time, but it just made me feel so strong.
And another thing too, this is another reason why, because when I wasn't fighting, that was the problem because I would get into these bad eating habits because I would always know that when I had training camp, I can just cut the weight and just lose it like that.
But after a while, that just becomes your habit.
Anything you do over time, that becomes your habit.
It becomes your lifestyle.
And I was eating a lot of sugar, drinking a lot of booze and shit like that.
So I was like, man, I need to make a change for my life for the rest of my life, you know?
The problem is people could take it too far and then really it's about getting other people to comply with your idea of wokeness.
And then it becomes almost like a religion.
You just want people to comply with your ideas about how to speak and how to talk and how to live.
Exactly You just become a dictator A little woke dictator Exactly That's what it is But the idea of like being woke Meaning aware You're spiritually cognizant Of your effect on people The life that you live And that's all beautiful That's great The problem is it gets abused I'm a dictator.
Well, my place is not affiliated with Beekram anymore because he's got arrested for some scumbaggery.
He's actually been arrested, and I don't think he can come to America.
I think that's the thing.
I think he's got to, like, stay in hiding.
The thing about it, that guru life, that's the problem.
That is a problem.
It really is a problem when any one person has that much influence over so many people, particularly a male having so much influence over females that worship him, especially if you're a scumbag.
And he...
This is the thing about this.
He did not invent those postures, and he didn't even invent that sequence.
He brought it to America, and he popularized doing it in very hot rooms.
The benefits, though, forget him.
Take him out of the equation, because there's so many people that practice it, and they've had incredible benefits from it.
It's really unfortunate that it's connected to this very controversial individual because then people associate Bikram Yoga with this guy that's been accused of multiple sexual assaults and rapes and all these different things.
But you take that away from him as a human being and the people that practice it, what they get from it.
First of all, you know exactly what you're going to do every day.
There's 26 postures and two breathing exercises.
One breathing exercise in the beginning, 26 postures, one breathing exercise at the end.
It's 90 minutes.
It's 90 minutes at 105 degrees, and it's fucking brutal.
And I did it right before I got here.
I like to do it in the mornings, first thing in the morning.
I do it before I've eaten anything.
I go through a 90-minute yoga class.
I really like doing it that way.
And then at the end of the day, I have a couple different places that I do it at.
I like to mix it up.
But that hot yoga for me is the way to go.
Because first of all, I know the postures.
They all serve a purpose in terms of helping my body, helping my balance, keeping my flexibility, strengthening my joints.
There's so many really positive physical benefits from it.
And then two, the meditation aspect of it.
Because no matter what kind of bullshit I have going on in my life, if I just...
Breathe and think about the exercise and then you know my brain starts racing and I'll forget what I'm doing and I'll start thinking about other shit But I bring it back bring it back bring it back breathe just breathe You're not going anywhere for 90 minutes.
You're locked in this room literally the doors locked when the class starts So I am just breathing and going through these and I know that I can get through it because I've done a thousand times before just breathe and get through it and There's a cleansing Of like all the, your brain, there's like residual, there's residue of like shitty thoughts bouncing around inside your brain.
Anxieties and fears and regrets and anger and frustration and all this shit that's in your head that just gets in the way of clear thinking.
It gets in the way of being able to see things in an objective, beneficial way.
And to be able to see things the way other people see them as well.
Like sometimes, you know, I have an issue, and I think a lot of people do, that I don't see how other people are seeing things.
I see how I see things.
And then I go, well, okay, let me look at it from their way.
Let me just abandon.
Oh, no, no, no.
Well, they're fucking wrong.
That's right.
Abandon all that shit and try to look at it from other people's ways.
I feel like...
What yoga does for me is it allows me to be free.
It allows me to clean up all my preconceived notions and clean out all my misconceptions and just see things.
I awake and I'm in a place and I'm just with these three massive beings like tall as a building and they were like half human and they were half snake.
And I got a snake from the waist down and that had a human from the waist up but had like a snake face.
I don't know, but it was weird because during that experience, all three of them were staring at me and they were looking down.
And then one of them reached for me and then I started going up and then I started going around their body.
And then I went around the body and then...
As I was going around the body, every once in a while, I would see the face of it, and it would open up like a cobra, and then it would close.
But it wasn't scary.
It wasn't terrifying.
And I went all the way up the body, and it was like I was able to see from another angle me up in the body, and then it opened me up like a flower or something like that.
People say that a lot of these people that are making it, either they're not making it correctly or they're making a light dose because they're worried about gringos going crazy and They don't want to be responsible for that shit.
So I know people that have gone and they've had these experiences where they've done it with someone in America or someone who's done through a more commercial sort of organization and it wasn't really that strong or profound and then they went and did it with someone who was real.
Someone who's making some fucking super high grade, you know, 97 octane shit.
It didn't give me the experience I wanted, but it gave me the experience that I needed.
That's something that I got after I was over the disappointment of it.
I was like, you know what?
I didn't get what I wanted, but I definitely got what I needed, you know, because whenever you sit in a circle and stuff like that, it's always an amazing cathartic thing where you just kind of just like shed and just go through those emotions.
Just watching other people just be so raw with their emotions and just kind of feeling that, you know, just through symbiosis, you kind of like start to feel like the work come through you.
I just train because I'm at the gym, but I like to train with the guys when I'm in there because I can go at a good pace, and I don't mind if they hit me up a little bit, and I will give them a look that some of the training partners won't give them.
Yeah, I enjoy that aspect of it, but I haven't been like, oh, you know, I'm going to come in here.
I haven't dedicated myself to someone's full camp, you know?
you know one of the reasons why i say is because a lot of people that i talk to that have trained with you and work with you one of the things they really like about you is your guidance is that you're a guy that they could sit down and talk to about things and you have a very learned and wise perspective and that could be especially with you know you consider your successful career that could be like very beneficial for young fighters coming up and i just wanted to know like had you ever thought about becoming a trainer yeah i i think about all the time and I work with some fighters now.
And somehow or another, they sold us on this thing, and we all paid money, me included, and we watched this fight.
That was exactly how any expert would tell you it's going to go down.
Floyd's going to fuck him up.
There's another one, maybe an even more egregious one, because at least Conor McGregor was a world champion, combat sports athlete, and a wicked fighter.
I think maybe he had another opponent and that opponent got injured and dropped out and then this MMA fighter decided to try his hand at Muay Thai so he jumped in there in a Muay Thai fight against arguably one of the greatest Muay Thai fighters alive.
You should watch Lerdzilla's highlight reel.
First of all, he's super elusive.
He's an unusually elusive fighter.
But he hit this motherfucker with a left high kick just off the front leg, just whipped it up off the front leg and caught him on the chin and folded him.
And I was like, whoever said yes to that fight, whatever commission allowed that fight to take place, you guys should have to go to trial.
Someone should sit down with you and go, how the fuck did you allow this to take place?
Him and Glenn didn't work out when it came time to it and all the work and chemistry together, you know, because that was the hardest thing because, you know, having all those different coaches and trying to not only have them get along with the fighters, but then have them get along with each other and not try to fight for that, you know, who's the main coach and who's the main guy, you know, and that's...
You know, coaches sometimes have bigger egos than the fighters.
And sometimes it's more deadly because they they they're they're not accomplished.
And a lot of times they're they're coaching because they don't feel that accomplishment, you know, so that coaching becomes that thing that they they want to be validated for.
I would just sit there and I would just kind of like, I would go through moves in my mind and I would go through techniques and I would just kind of go over and over again to techniques in my mind.
I would also do scenarios where I fight in almost every single situation.
Like I find myself, you know, losing and then finding a way to come back after I've been rocked, you know, and just trying to find myself just mentally working through it, mentally working a lot through it.
Almost every single fight, like I'll go round by round.
I had my wrestling coach in college, Tom Minkle, he was always on...
I get nervous.
I get nervous.
I don't know what to do with the nervousness.
And he says, well, you're nervous because you're thinking too much about it.
He said, just think about executing.
Don't think about the outcome.
Just think about executing your technique.
And just only think about executing your technique and how it feels to...
Complete the perfect execution of the technique.
When you hit the pad and it hits that, and it sounds that, you know, they hear that pop, you know, how does that feel?
You know, become attached to how you feel when you execute something.
And then that's what you start to base your fight off of, you know, how you feel when you execute versus all the things that can happen if something goes wrong.
I would get into it because a lot of times I would get so nervous that I would be like, oh my God, I just don't want to freeze out there.
I just don't want to freeze, you know?
So that's part of the reason why I started twisting my nipples.
I'd go out there and I'd twist my nipples before the fight, and that was just to kind of do something stupid and silly, but then it would allow me to just kind of relax, because I'm like, well, I'm not going to embarrass myself any worse than that.
Yeah, so I still do the analyst work, but I also try to do as much as I can with Onyx, and I still do my training and things like that.
But I also work with CBS a little bit, doing analyst stuff for them.
But I'm still in that space, just trying to figure out that next thing, that That I align with, you know, and that's why I'm so excited to work with unlimited sciences, you know, and doing something I'm passionate about, because I'm passionate about psychedelics.
You know, that's what I really like, and I think that that can help people.
You know, now I'm to the point where I just want to help people.
You know, that's where I'm at in my life.
I feel as if, like, you know, I lived a lot of my life for myself at this point, you know, and I've accomplished some great things, but now I'm to the point where I just want to Be able to help other people achieve what they want to in life and just be a part of that.
That's what really resonates in me more than anything right now.
It's definitely something, you know, I've watched you for a long time on your show and honestly speaking, you know, when I first started to, you know, awaken and wanted to understand a lot about these entheogens, you know, I would listen to Joe Rogan and I would listen to your podcast and just, you know, the amount of information you shared and, you know, the people, the guests that you had on, you know, you always have a great experience.
People who speak with some knowledge that I can't even comprehend sometimes.
And that's what it's about.
You feel like when I watch this show, it's such a good tool to learn.
Yeah, you can check me out at Shigarashad Evans at Instagram.
And if anybody wants to be involved in that study, it's unlimitedsciences.org.
And, you know, they can go in and sign up and everything will be, you know, it's HIPAA. So that HIPAA protected so that no one's information would get out.
And, you know, after they send an email, the information would be destroyed.