Dan Hardy joins Joe Rogan to dissect MMA trash talk’s psychology, comparing Anderson Silva’s dominance—like his Cage Rage knockout of Carlos Newton—to Sugar Ray Robinson’s legendary confidence. They debate PEDs in combat sports, Hardy’s WPW heart condition, and GSP’s humility amid fame, while critiquing societal double standards like Michael Vick’s overlooked cruelty versus Charles Ramsey’s celebrated heroism. Hardy’s psychedelic ceremonies in Peru—ayahuasca, San Pedro—revealed instinct-driven "reptilian brain" dominance in fights, prompting a shift toward yoga, veganism, and binaural beats over adrenaline-fueled training. Rogan muses on aliens, UFOs, and consciousness evolution, suggesting future humans might transcend physical bodies via energy, while Hardy notes modern curiosity pales against past awe at unfamiliar animals. Both celebrate personal growth, with Hardy’s training now blending unconventional methods to promote a "clean and conscious" lifestyle. [Automatically generated summary]
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Anderson Silva became Anderson Silva when he went to Japan and when he went to England.
But England was really where it all came together for him.
Japan, he got some good fights, but he had some losses.
You know, the Rio Chonin flying heel hook.
That was weird, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, he had some good fights.
Who was that kid who was calling him?
Alex Stiebling, the kid who was calling himself the Brazilian killer.
Remember they all got pissed off at him?
Anderson, he beat him, he caught him with a high kick.
And then he knocked out Carlos Newton.
That was probably his most spectacular fight over there.
Yeah, and it was after Carlos dominated him on the ground.
Carlos was very good, very advanced at that time.
He had the most advanced ground game of guys that were fighting in high level.
And he had Anderson down, he had mounted him, and it did not look like Anderson was getting up.
But I think they gave him a yellow card or something like that.
I don't know how they got stood back up again.
I don't know what happened.
But they got stood back up again and bang!
He hit him with a flying knee and knocked him out.
And it was after that, he got his footing with a couple of good fights, but it wasn't until he went to England and fought in cage rage that that's when he became Anderson Silva.
Yeah, and he's almost greater than a Guy Ritchie character because you would never believe a Guy Ritchie character really could be like a top MMA fighter and also one of the greatest armed robbery suspects in the history of the universe.
He feels like he can go in there and just do shit to people.
He can, and he does.
You're right.
It takes a guy like that to do that to a guy like Lee Murray.
When you see Anderson at his best, it's one of the weirdest things, because you can't believe a guy can do what he just did.
When we were there in Brazil and he fought Stefan Bonner, dude, that was like I was watching a movie.
The guy just put his back to the cage and let him tee off on him, and then brought him back in, got to the center and brought him right back in, puts his hands down, stands right in front of him, and then when he decides to strike, throws him to the ground and buries him with one knee.
I remember watching one of the HBO shows with Roy Jones preparing for a fight and it was when I was training at Legends and there was this shot where he was training to run DMC and he's doing his shadow boxing to the rhythm of the music so I immediately downloaded Run DMC and started doing it at the gym in the ring at Legends.
Well, it's interesting because what happened was then Roy, he looked spectacular in the Ruiz fight, but then he drops down to fight Antonio Tarver.
He has to lose a lot of weight because he's a 205 pound, 206 pound guy now.
I mean, he was a small heavyweight, but I think he still got above 200 pounds, which to drop all the way the fuck down to 175 again, that is a big deal.
Yeah, he looked completely different in that fight physically.
Like, his body looked deflated, you know?
Like, cutting weight like that, it just ruined him.
And then he got knocked out by Tarver, and then he got knocked out again, even scarier, by Glenn Johnson.
And those fights, I think, are a direct result of him weakening himself.
to drop down to 175 pounds or a direct result also of whatever the fuck he took to get up to 200 plus pounds not being in his system anymore and his system crashes.
Which is what happens, especially if you're like in your late 30s and you're a pro athlete who's getting head trauma on a regular basis.
Those are all things designed to lower your testosterone.
All those things.
You know, it's almost like nature has it set up like you can only get hit in the head so many times for it to start, okay, slow the fuck down, bitch.
Jesus Christ.
Like literally slows down your testosterone from head trauma.
It's like, look, we've got to figure out a way to stop getting hit in the head and maybe this asshole is just fucking...
Too aggro.
Nature doesn't know that you got a fucking fighting career to think about.
Well, there was that soccer player a few years ago.
I think he played for, like, Chelsea or something.
And he had a heart attack on the pitch and died.
He was, like, 28. Really?
And basically, the problem is that the main heart rate can only go up to about 220 beats a minute.
But the secondary cells that produce the second heart rate, or the heartbeat, is...
That's limitless.
That can go to whatever.
If I'm at 12 minutes into the fight and I'm full of adrenaline and completely exhausted and my heart rate can't keep up, there's a potential for the other one to take over.
Well, Bisping was that guy that had the talent and he's just a natural fighter.
His whole family are just tough guys.
I mean, I started training with Mike before he even had his first fight.
Um, and I was training with his coach and his coach had actually invested money in like bringing him down to Nottingham to train to like, cause he was a DJ at the time.
I don't know whether most people know this, but you know, DJ Mikey B. And, um, you know, he was like in that, you know, the, the, the dance and the rave scene and he was, you know, all that kind of stuff, the glow sticks and shit.
Um, yeah.
So, so my instructor like, like bought him a car and bought him down to Nottingham and like, Fed him and stuff with the intention of making him an MMA star.
And they wanted to study this four weeks before the fight.
So they wanted me to go in and have something put up the inside of the artery of both my legs and one into my neck so they can go in and try and find it.
So the guy was like, oh, so we'll do that, and if we can find it, we can fix it, and then you'll be able to, you know, take a week off and then go back to training.
He's the kind of guy that could knock on your door at like 8am and you wake up out of bed all tired and shit and then next time you close the door and you bought three vacuum cleaners and stuff.
Well, I think we both know that in every sport in the world where there's money involved, people are going to do everything they can in order to be victorious.
That is just the way it is.
There are people who hold principle higher than they hold money, and I know for a fact I had a long conversation with John Fitch once about it, and John Fitch, I guarantee that guy never used anything, ever.
He's just, for him, it was a principal issue.
But that's not everybody.
We both know that's not everybody.
A lot of guys have used stuff.
A lot of guys have used stuff, and they've said, well, you know, I'm just trying to get over an injury, and I'm just going to use it to get over this knee injury.
Yeah, that too.
You're doing that too.
But also, look, you realize when you're around a certain, around a Certain amount of, like, really strong wrestler-type dudes, you go, okay, there's nothing I can do to keep this guy off me.
I gotta get fucking stronger.
Period.
If I want to stay in this game, I gotta get stronger.
I don't know how the fuck he got that strong, but I gotta get stronger.
And it's really hard to get stronger naturally, quick.
Naturally, the shit takes years, you know?
It takes, like, four or five years to put on a good 20 pounds of, like, real raw muscle.
I think there's certainly an issue and there's certainly a discussion to be had.
And especially for testosterone replacement therapy.
That's a big one.
That to me is a big one because that one, for a lot of folks who don't know, like young fighters in their early 30s even, even some guys younger than that, take testosterone, which is really kind of crazy.
Your body should be producing testosterone in healthy quantities like deep, deep into your 30s.
It starts to drop off when you start hitting 40. If you're like...
Yes, and if you're fit, and if you're eating healthy, and if you're sleeping right, you should be okay.
So when you find guys that are like 30, and they're taking testosterone replacement therapy, you go, okay, what are you doing?
Because what you're doing right now is you're putting testosterone into your body that doesn't exist.
So does it not exist because you've been hit too many times?
Which we both know is also a real possibility.
In fact, this guy, Dr. Mark Gordon, who worked with James Toney, he's done a lot of work on that, showing how traumatic brain injury to both soldiers and people who do extreme sports, that traumatic brain injury has a significant impact on your body's ability to produce testosterone.
It's not a situation where it happens in one night.
It's a situation where you're beating yourself up.
You know, I've never fought an MMA fight, but I've watched you guys train, and I see the amount of hours that it takes in a day to do a real proper six-week camp.
And for folks who don't know, it's insane.
It's insane.
It's fucking madness.
And I think some guys think the only way they can get through that is with some help.
Because if you don't get through that, then what are you going to do when you get in there with a guy like GSP when you know he has gone through that?
You're like, well, fuck.
You're doomed.
You're going to keep up with him for a little bit, but eventually he's going to steamroll you.
There's just no getting around it.
If you don't do what everybody else is doing, how can you compete?
And I felt like such an asshole saying, like, yeah, I can judge how to do it, right?
You know, it sounds like such a Hollywood douche move.
Like, oh, yeah, you know, you're going to teach George fucking St. Pierre how to throw a kick.
But to his credit, he actually listened to me.
Like, I couldn't believe he tried it, you know?
Because I wouldn't have listened to me.
I'd be like, yeah, bitch, all right.
I'll go watch you kick a bag, you fucking fruitcake.
Fucking actor weirdo.
George was super humble and eager to learn.
He's a really unusual dude.
It's weird how many different...
The way people perceive MMA fighters or even jiu-jitsu athletes or kickboxers, the way people perceive people who compete in combat sports and the way they really are, it's so different.
Like, my favorite people, some of my favorite people of all time that I've ever met have been fighters.
Because there's something about the type of character that you need to have to be able to test yourself in such an extreme environment.
Like, that's a rare quality.
It's a very rare quality.
And some people mistake it with being a barbaric thing because they think that somehow or another we should not be violent because violence is bad.
And even though it's a competition and they both agree to do it and they can be respectful, it still seems like it's anti-societal.
But they don't understand.
They just haven't experienced anything really intense themselves and known that there's only one way to develop real character and have confidence in that real character.
That's why a lot of MMA fighters are interesting people.
After a certain amount of time of being in the gym and being so focused on yourself, you become very self-aware.
Usually from that comes a lot of self-confidence and just being very comfortable in different environments, which usually means you stand out because you put that out there when you walk into a room.
And it was, like, one of the most high-speed, scariest rides I've ever been on.
Like, he's, like, sitting in the driver's seat with a shirt with, like, guns all over it and a big chain with a gun on it, sunglasses on, and he's just, like, speeding, and every now and then he's, like, police track thing will beep, and he'll, like, hit the brakes, and I'm like swerving in and out and talking 100 miles an hour.
And it's like two hours from there, isn't it?
So I have four hours of that as well as a training session in the middle.
The BART? Have you ever done the BART in San Francisco?
We were filming Fear Factor in Oakland, and I ate I had a pot cookie or something in my hotel room, because I was hanging out with the crew, and they were really cool guys.
But, you know, I was like, I have this cookie, and it would probably make it more interesting to hang out with these people.
I take this, it's not an insult, but they were straight is my point.
I couldn't say, hey, who wants some pot cookies?
They'd be like, oh, not me.
Oh, no, no, no, you're not going to get me to eat that.
He's got this older woman, she's quite a bit older than him and less attractive than him, but he's young and fairly useless and like this fake guru type character.
It's because it's an insanely rare quality to be truly enlightened or even truly on a path of enlightenment.
A true path of enlightenment.
With...
True focus and, you know, and on a path for a real, the pure sake of trying to figure out what this life is and figure out how to live this life better.
There's so few people really, really doing that, that to even, like, attempt to do it is so douchish.
It is, but it's also we don't like people proclaiming that there is something more grand than the rest of us.
We don't like people proclaiming that they're on the path to figuring it out where you're screaming in your car at a red light and you can't balance your checkbook.
You know what I mean?
People don't want to believe that there's a guy who really does do yoga every day and really does find his center and it's made him a more joyous person.
This is what I hear from you.
A lot of you talking about you, buddy.
That's what I hear.
A lot of you being impressed with yourself.
A lot of you fucking annoying with your flip-flops.
And that's what happens.
There's so many of those guys.
I had this Dr. Amit Goswami in here once, a theoretical physicist guy.
Genius guy.
And he was saying that sometimes people have to fake things in order to really truly make them happen.
He's like, I let people use the word quantum when I know they don't really know what it means.
But if this guy has interest in faking it, maybe it would lead to a real interest in trying to understand quantum science.
And I was like, wow, that's a fucking interesting way to look at it.
And see, like, so...
I go, so, like, false gurus and play, I go, so let them fake it.
Which I guess.
I guess.
But, you know, then they start, you know, fucking everybody's wives and...
Yeah, I mean, it's like, I was up in Utah a couple of weeks ago for the Victory Dogs reunion, which is basically the dogs that were saved.
I think they took 58. Some of them were euthanized because they were too bad.
But most of them we're taken to a place called the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary and some of them will stay there for the rest of their lives because they can't be with other dogs and you know.
What you're about to hear is a 911 call placed by hero Charles Ramsey after he found Amanda Barry, a woman who had been kidnapped for the past decade.
This man saved her life.
5.52 p.m.
34 seconds.
May 62013. Cleveland 911 police.
Ambulance are fired.
Yeah, hey, bro.
I'm at 2207 Seymour, West 25th.
Hey, check this out.
I just came from McDonald's, right?
So I'm on my porch eating my little food, right?
This broad is trying to work out the fucking house next door to me.
So, there's a bunch of people on the street right now and shit.
So we like, "What's wrong with you, what's the problem?" She like, "This motherfucker been kidnapped me and my daughter, and we've been in this bitch." She said her name is Linda Berry or some shit.
Ten fucking years and thinking that it's going to be the rest of your life having these guys just fuck you, hold you down and fuck you every night and feed you fucking oatmeal.
Some run-down house in Cleveland, you're a sex slave for the rest of your life.
And he did a couple of ceremonies in London, a friend's place.
They brought a shaman over and did a couple.
I've always been kind of the guy that if I wanted to experience something, I would go to the source.
If I wanted to do Kung Fu, I'd go to China.
If I want to wrestle, I'd come to America.
If I want to try ayahuasca, I'd go to Peru.
It just kind of made sense.
It was kind of like my reward for getting through the Dwayne Ludwig camp because that would have been a fifth loss in a row and obviously a complete change in career paths.
So I put 12 weeks aside to dedicate myself to that fight with that as a reward after.
A couple of days after the fight, I flew out and spent two weeks there.
I did a tobacco ceremony on the first day.
Two ayahuasca ceremonies and two San Pedro ceremonies.
They basically make a drink of tobacco, coffee and sugar and they cook it up and then you drink a whole load of it and it's like a purge, like a detox.
Like if you've got any kind of toxins in your system you throw up and you sweat and some people are crying and obviously there's all kinds of other nasty stuff that goes on as well.
It's a way of like cleansing your body before the ayahuasca.
Fortunately I've been in training camp for 12 weeks so I've been on a clean diet and I just kept my diet clean until I got to Peru because there's a special diet for the ayahuasca.
We had a light breakfast and then, you know, like a fruit snack around midday.
And then after that you fast and the ceremony starts at 8 p.m.
So the idea is that you go into the ceremony with intentions, the questions you want to ask.
There's always this talk about ayahuasca, the spirit of ayahuasca, mother ayahuasca, and some people during their experiences have an interaction with a female entity of some sort, but I didn't.
But the intentions are still very important.
Going into the ceremony with questions about myself or my life or Whatever, really.
For me, the answers just kind of manifest.
They just kind of show up.
I just kind of all of a sudden get an overwhelming feeling of the right answer.
I don't really know how to explain it better than that.
The problem is that I really feel like we've not got the language to explain this kind of stuff at the moment.
We need to expand our vocabulary to To encompass all the stuff that we experience in these things.
Yeah, a lot of people believe that what psychedelic states, even if they don't believe that you're really contacting the spirit world, what they think you're doing by forcing yourself to take a hard look at yourself, and address some questions that you might have one way or another but to do it with this stuff that it absolves your ego it removes the ego and in doing that it's a rare state that you get to get the fuck away from your ego but it really lets you get away from it to a point where
you can see things so much more clearly and you can realize How much of the ego has really been sort of tricking you and deceiving you and making you believe that you're either something that you're not or you've gone further than you really actually have or your ego has allowed you to sort of delude yourself, to get by this very strenuous existence.
And when you go into a psychedelic state, It allows you to bypass all that and see it.
And that's where people don't understand that you can get to a mild psychedelic state from exercise and yoga.
It's a very intense feeling of connection, and it's very, very potent.
In fact, I think it's like, supposedly, obviously I'm not some sort of a scientist here, but supposedly it's even more powerful gram per gram than DMT is.
But the DMT, the NM-DMT, is what you get in the ayahuasca.
When you eat it, if you tried to eat DMT, there's a stomach chemical produced, you're Your stomach produces something called monoamine oxidase, apparently, and that breaks down DMT. So what these brilliant people that live in the Amazon have figured out how to do is mix the vine of one plant with the leaves of another and cook it all together.
But, you know, I've always thought about this with diet.
Like, people have been combining, like, incomplete proteins for years, like milk and cereal and rice and beans, and not knowing that those two things combined made a complete protein.
There's a lot of folks that believe – I shouldn't say a lot of folks, but it's been speculated.
I've read work where people believe that what we've created with civilization and with societies and especially with like modern societies where there's like – Mass speed communication it's like people are sending each other text messages and watching television is that we're missing out key information that is there in nature and that literally if you're in a natural state like if you're living in a natural
state and you're away from the distractions and the madness of The fucking civilized world that there's literally a signal that you can't quite pick up anymore.
And that signal is like a guide to get through life.
I think these are things that are potentially keeping us disconnected from this whatever we're missing out on, this language that we're missing out on from the...
But I think that if you were living in the jungle and you needed to survive there, it is possible that you would at least have an idea of mixing these two things together and cooking them.
Because you've experienced it and you know it's real.
To Joe Construction Worker Lunchbox that's listening to this nonsense right now.
You know, I like that Joe Rogan podcast, but every now and then, they go off the fucking tinfoil hat deep end, and this guy's talking about journey into the spirit world, and I want to be a shaman.
But at the same time, when I first came back from Peru and people were asking me, is this something that everyone should experience?
I was saying yes to everybody, but now I'm not so sure.
I was walking through the Luxor the other day and, you know, God bless America and all the people that were pumping money into those slots and smoking cigarettes and drinking beers.
But they need to do a lot of self-discovery without an altered state before they would be even ready for that.
If you took them and gave them ayahuasca, it would ruin them forever.
Listen, there really are people, and there really are, that really do have a massive amount of power in this world, and they really do.
You don't think that they've wanted to look into that?
Like, why would you not want to look into that?
If there's anything that could freak you out if you were in the Bilderberger group, you motherfuckers sitting around doing ayahuasca, talking to the great serpent as it breaks down your life and the kind of damage that you're doing to society and civilization and how unnecessary it is and how you're still unhappy even though you're doing it.
Even though you're manipulating the banks, controlling the resources of the world, instigating wars overseas, and profiting off of it in some strange fucking shell game that nobody completely understands, you're still not happy, bitch.
And then your brain gets locked in this stupid thing.
And then the cigarettes, you're sucking on these cigarettes that these same people are extracting millions of dollars from the society by feeding people these poisonous fucking weed-filled tubes that you light on fire in.
Basically, we're going to knock cancer out of the box in the next couple of years.
You don't have to worry about it, Mr. Johnson.
Just keep fucking smoking away.
We live in a mad world.
We live in a world that should be a movie, and nowhere is that more readily available or honest than when you have a psychedelic experience.
Because when you see what mushrooms can do, or you can see what...
DMT could do, whether it's an ayahuasca or a regular form, you realize there really is a magic in the world.
And it sounds so stupid that if you haven't experienced it, you really wouldn't.
And even people who have experienced it, they don't want to describe it that way because they don't want to sound stupid to people who haven't experienced it.
So they'll go, look, it's nothing magic.
Your cerebral cortex gets flooded with chemicals.
The visual aspect of your interpretation of the world around you gets hijacked by these new chemicals.
Yeah, because the space that I always experience, you know, with the ayahuasca and, you know, other psychedelics like, you know, DMT or psilocybin, I always feel like...
Like, the place I reach when I've had the right kind of amount is a very familiar, safe place.
I feel like I've been there hundreds of times before.
I mean, what a waste of LSD. I guess you'd want to be doing something creative, but if you were a serious pool player, that's apparently the way to get really awesome at it.
But we're running on, like Terence McKenna would say, an operating system and the one that we're running on is prehistoric.
Everyone's trying to control each other.
Everyone's jealous of what everybody else has got and we really need to get past that and realise that I don't need to be jealous of what anybody else has got because I'm good with what I've got.
People are not finding peace so they surround themselves with things that they think make them happy.
And I think that, like, we were talking about this the other day, swimming in the lake, smoking weed, just kind of hanging out, and all of a sudden it all kind of fell into place for me.
Like, there are certain people that make an effort to reach a higher consciousness.
So imagine them as like bubbles on the table.
Imagine the table is full of bubbles.
And one of those people starts to drift off a little quicker.
And that is going to create a reaction of the people around it and then they're going to pull up.
And occasionally you're going to get like a Jim Morrison or a Hendrix or a Martin Luther King and they just kind of go and just pop and explode.
But they cause such a ripple that they start to raise everybody else's consciousness.
So I think everybody has a responsibility to raise their own.
And by doing that, we're gonna affect the people around us.
But what you're saying, though, I agree with entirely, even though it sounds like dirty hippy talk.
What you're saying is that we have to kind of realize that the only way to really enjoy this life is you got to not just bring yourself up, but bring up the people around you.
And as they rise up, it'll rise you up as well.
And that we really are all connected.
And it's your ego That keeps you from seeing that.
It's your ego from trying to separate yourself from all these people that are around you and thinking that you're on your own.
Well, it also, the reason why that exists, the reason why those things can happen is that people are willing to overlook Normal human morals and values in favor of profits.
As soon as the numbers, the one and the zero become the almighty, then you're fucked.
Because then you're caught up in the wave of ones and zeros yourself.
You can become just as disposable as anybody else.
That alone should Get people recognize that.
Humanely, if you want to get through this life humanely, you cannot only look at the ones and zeros.
Because that's everything that's fucked up about the world.
Whether it's war, whether it's manipulation of the markets, whether it's controlling a natural...
And the people that have built this society around it, this operating system that we function under...
They've kind of corralled us into a position where we don't have to make these decisions.
We don't have to ask these questions about, you know, does the Hummer that I drive drink far too much fuel and am I having too much impact on my environment around me?
But then on the flip side, you know, should I drive a car that drinks so much fuel so eventually we can get through this quicker and then the people that have control of the fuel will lose their power.
They're tired of picking people's pieces up and having people say, listen, you fucks, you can't be out here because it's dangerous and too many of you dummies get drunk and fall off cliffs and die.
But let's just take all of the safety precautions that we have, fences around moving parts and crossings.
If you can't make it across the street without getting hit by a car, another thing as well, and I have a lot of people that disagreed with me when I spoke about this on Twitter, 15 mile an hour zones around schools.
If all the time, when I was a kid, I grew up around cars moving at 15 miles an hour, Why would I ever take them seriously as a threat?
unidentified
You know?
Like, we need respect for these things because these things are fucking dangerous.
Yes, I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, there's too many dumb cunts out there that need a sign that gives them an unreasonable speed limit.
It's just they slow the fuck down when they're around schools.
Like our friends that we're talking about speeding and texting, you can't have a 60 mile an hour speed limit in front of a school It's all driving, okay?
Because someone's little kid's going flying over the hood.
This is going to sound kind of odd, because I carried on fighting after the experience, but I kind of saw the futility in it, the pointlessness in it, you know?
I mean, there's a British comedy that kind of captures it really well.
They do like a parody of a soccer commercial.
And they're like, you know, talking about Manchester United and Arsenal and they'll win and they'll see who wins now and then next year it'll carry on just the same and there'll be more guys that win.
You know what I mean?
It's the same thing.
Like, I could be the champion for 10 years, but once that 11th year comes, there's going to be somebody else that's a champion and it will just continue on forever.
And it's the absolute core of the capitalist approach to life is to actually beat someone down to take food out of their mouth.
Which is really kind of odd, and I've never seen it like that before.
Normally it's like, yeah, I'm going to beat the hell out of that guy.
I'm going to take what he's got.
But now I'm kind of...
I like the competition.
I like the actual physical test of fighting, but not for the same reasons.
Yeah, because, well, the one thing that I was really starting to focus on with the EMEA fight since I went to Peru, with the EMEA fight, and going into the brown fight as well, and this is the reason why I would at least like the option to carry on fighting.
I would like to be able to get cleared so I can I don't think I'll go back to fighting three times a year and chasing the belt because my focus is elsewhere now.
I'm trying to understand the distinction between the different areas of the brain.
The reptilian brain, which is obviously responsible for all the aggressiveness, the instinctual stuff, the fighting and killing and all that kind of...
That's the reptilian brain, the political side of us, basically.
And then after that, then you've got like the old mammalian brain, which is where we start to make kind of like basic connections with people and understand that if we work as a group, we can survive better.
And then the next level up is obviously a higher consciousness, is having deeper understanding, deeper relationships and communications with people around you.
But there's a point when you fight where the reptilian brain takes over.
And I usually feel it after I've been cracked a couple of times.
Like when I was fighting Ludwig at the MGM, I was very conscious for the first 30 seconds or so of the fight.
And then as I stepped in, you remember he cracked me with that right hand right on the chin, and I rushed him up against the fence.
And immediately I switched over to instinct, and it's like being a passenger.
It's like I have no conscious decision-making ability in that time.
It's all instinct.
I'm not focused at all on what he's doing.
I'm just reading.
I'm just feeling.
And I want to see if I can get to that place for a longer period of time.
Do you know what I mean?
With the Amir fight, I felt like I would slip in and out of it.
The first round, it was so overwhelming because it was hometown.
My name was being shouted by 8,000 people or something.
I live next to the arena, so it occurred to me that if I lost, that would be on my mind every time I looked out of my window.
So the first round, I lost it.
I mean, I just kind of moved around and backed up.
And when I sat down in my corner after the first round, I apologized to my team.
I said, I'm sorry, I just had to get that out of the way.
But then the second and third round, I felt like I could reach that stage sometime where I just kind of allow my body to take over and just switch off and effectively just watch.
I just think when the fight starts, he immediately switches over.
But you can see it in people's eyes.
Like, Vanderlei's a great example.
If you watch one of Vanderlei's highlight reels where he's got a few of his stare-downs, he immediately switches to reptile mode as soon as he's fighting.
Those guys that have just got that, like, instinctual rage, it just kind of comes on.
And this is why, like, you know, I've always kind of heard the term, you know, you...
You maintain 20% of the things that you learn in the gym in the actual fight.
When adrenaline and the actual fight is occurring, you only keep that 20% of what you've learned in the gym.
The idea is, being in the gym, you train yourself to the point where it does become instinct, and then when the fight happens, you just switch to reptile mode, and reptile mode uses the skills that you learn to get the job done more efficiently.
Do you think that becoming more aware or reaching a higher state of consciousness because of your experiences will actually help you because it'll abandon a lot of the distractions that you present yourself almost unknowingly?
It's so important and that's why I've always been so vocal about all the stuff I listen to.
I had a training camp playlist so I'd tweet everyday songs I was listening to and that kind of thing.
It is important.
And the other thing as well, like, earlier on in my career, I would use music to anchor feelings.
So, like, when I fought Ludwig, I used a song called Iron by Woodkid, which was the first time I'd switched it up from England Belongs to Me for, like, you know, a bunch of fights.
So, like, for the 12 weeks of that fight, I was training with Frank Mir.
We were going up to Mount Charleston and out into Red Rock and, like, doing hill running and stuff.
And we had some real tough sessions.
I mean, you know, we really put ourselves through it for that training camp.
And as soon as I got back in my truck after the session, if I felt like it was a good session, it was productive and I felt positive, I would put that song on.
So I would constantly connect those feelings to that song.
So then when I'm walking out and that song comes on, immediately I get that feeling again.
If your focus has moved slightly off of fighting and you still are interested in fighting and you're still interested in seeing what sort of state you can achieve inside the Octagon, what else are you going to do with your time?
And obviously when you've got a training camp, I always felt like I was wishing my life away because I'm constantly waiting for a date that's five, six weeks ahead.
George was talking about how much he enjoys training in between fights because then he just will go box for like six weeks or eight weeks, just only boxing, concentrate only on that.
But I want to start kind of promoting more of an alternative lifestyle of what I'm doing, what with my diet and my teacher plants, medicines and And my approach to training and health, you know.
I'm really, really focused on getting strong and flexible right now.
That's my main focus.
Through, you know, kettlebells and bodyweight exercises and lots of stretching.
And I'm just kind of interested to see where this journey is going to go.
I mean, it's not that bad, but I think that it's been proven that when you see like red, deep red salmon, and then you see like the salmon that you get, like this farm-raised salmon where they have to dye it pink, it's been proven that that wild stuff tastes better.
There's something better about it.
It's probably better for you.
I don't know if it's better for you, but it's probably better for you.
It was a cargo plane, and they think that the cargo shifted, the load shifted, like it wasn't tied down properly.
And when that happens, if the load shifts, the plane just immediately, all the weight goes to the front or the back of the plane, and it just nosedived.
We'll end on that for a nice, beautiful, cheery way to end.
Just to let everybody know that you could defy gravity for short periods of time every now and again, but if you fuck up, or it fucks up, or there's mechanical failure, or...
One day when we have magnetic UFO looking things that can't even run into each other because they have magnets on the outside so they go like this when they bounce off each other.
They always talk about whenever serious physicists discuss the possibility of space travel, like interstellar space travel, like Stanton Friedman, like how could aliens be doing it?
One of the things they always concentrate on is some sort of magnetic drive.
The guy, Dr. Robert Lazar, he's an often criticized gentleman who claimed to work at Area 51. Whether or not that guy told the truth, I don't know.
But he described some sort of back engineering that they were doing at Area 51, and it was some sort of magnetic drive.
The idea is that you figure out how to use magnets or something to overcome gravity and to create a little hole in space and time and just fly around through that.
Whatever the fuck I even said, Dan Hardy, I don't even understand.
It shouldn't be legal for me to say what I just said, because I don't even know what the fuck it means.
All these different, you know, the real problem with any sort of UFO thing is that it looks silly.
It looks silly.
You saying you saw a UFO makes you a silly person.
More silly even than ayahuasca.
Because at least ayahuasca has a great body of Evidence to support what's going on neurochemically.
Saying that you saw a UFO immediately become a silly person.
All these like former military people, all these people that were air traffic controllers, pilots, all these people report these unbelievably unique experiences.
I don't know if they're telling the truth or not, but if they were telling the truth, if just one of these things happened every now and again, of course it would seem ridiculous to us on the outside.
The people sitting down here, it's natural to criticize it and make fun of it and laugh at it because it is kind of crazy to think that.
But if just one of those is true, if just one of those are a real craft from another dimension, from another planet, If you don't think that that's possible, you're silly.
If you don't think that within, from here, in every direction, infinite space, what does that even mean?
We don't even know what the fuck that means, right?
If we survive, if we, little pesky humans, figure out how to keep going for another couple million years, who knows what the fuck we're gonna figure out.
Well, not only that, it's like to have that experience, like a ship lands and they get out, it would be so less bizarre because it's all taking place right here.
What's taking place also in the dimension that we're comfortable with, where we can walk on the grass and feel the grass, where we step on rocks, we feel the rocks under our shoe, your car is parked over there, you see the clouds above you, and then everything is basically normal except this new introduced element into your environment that you have to not accept.
Fucking little dude from another planet.
Holy shit, this really is true.
That's nothing compared to a DMT trip.
Because a DMT trip, the dimension that you exist in becomes of vibrant, glowing colors with no background and constantly changing geometric patterns that are fractal and infinite.
You know, when the Romans were fighting different tribes and they were taking elephants with them, like when they took elephants to Britannia.
There's a tube station in London called Elephant and Castle, which was, you know, this elephant crossing this plane with this dude sitting on top riding it.
The barbarians that were living there at the time just lost their shit and ran away.
But we don't have those experiences anymore because we've seen everything or, you know, we might see something that's a new species, but it's only a variation of something that's already familiar to us.
Well, I guess we grew up with them though, didn't we?
I mean, if you believe that human life emanated from the lower hominids that existed in Africa and came down from the rainforest into the grasslands, we would have probably been around them.
I mean, essentially if you go anywhere where you haven't been there before and they have some new shit, you're like, what are you doing with fucking kangaroos everywhere?
What the fuck?
I have a friend named Eddie Ift.
He's a stand-up comic.
And he's done very well in Australia.
And he goes over there quite a bit.
And one of the things he told me was that he first encountered a kangaroo.
Kangaroos have killed people, like, many times.
Like, they will fucking rip you apart.
And he didn't know how big they got.
There's two kangaroos, like, a red one and a gray one, I guess.
One of them is giant.
One of them is, like, nine feet tall.
And he was out in this guy's yard, and he saw this kangaroo, and he thought it was a statue, because it was too big.
He started walking towards it, because it was nine feet tall.
And he was like, well, that's not really a kangaroo.
I always wonder whether or not, I mean, the grand theory is the simulation theory, that we're living inside some sort of artificial reality, and that the aliens really are us, and that's why we have this weird image of that being us in the future.
We're already there, and we didn't like it.
It sucks.
It's boring.
We sort of evolved the fun out of life, so we've created this crazy simulation that we all exist in.
That's the grand theory.
That's the grand theory involving the aliens, for me at least.
It's getting the internet through the space around us.
You're telling me that that can't eventually be human consciousness itself traveling through space, through some sort of a mechanism for generating it or promoting it or projecting it?
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All right, you freaks.
We'll be back tomorrow with the great Daniele Bolelli who returns to the Drunken Taoist podcast to drop some knowledge about Religious history and how much bitches like an accent like that.