Vinny Shoreman, a Muay Thai veteran and mind coach with 30 years of experience, reveals how hypnosis and timeline therapy—like redirecting UFC fighter Joe Schilling’s mindset via "Sir Galahad" or using "Warrior" as Liam Harrison’s trigger—break cycles of trauma, from bullying to toxic relationships. He critiques cults like Scientology (where a $50K ceremony allegedly shielded Rogan’s neighbor’s wife from negativity) and fake healers, comparing them to placebo-driven "zone adjusters" in combat sports. Shoreman’s disciplined, results-focused approach—seen in clients like equestrian Donna Tainter—contrasts with exploitative practices, proving mental tools can reshape performance and confidence without deception. [Automatically generated summary]
You know it seems like it seemed like five No, it was longer than that.
Yeah It was like I remember the beginning part and then all sudden it was over I was like whoa and there was some weird Dream state stuff going on in the middle where you were talking about some things, but I was thinking about other shit But when I was thinking about shit, I was like, wow, I'm in a weird state of mind right now while I'm thinking about these other things.
I better get back on track about what Vinny's talking about.
Well, there's different states that the brain operates in.
We all know that.
There's states when you're stressed out.
There's states when you're super happy.
There's states when you're very focused.
There's states when you're in danger.
There's states when you're in love.
And we all know that these are weird places that your brain can go to.
Weird frequencies or weird vibrations or whatever you would call it.
To be able to manipulate it like that, to be able to put someone into a state like that, or help them, assist them getting into a state like that, that's a very unique skill.
But that state that you achieve when you hypnotize someone, when you put someone in this really relaxed place and you have them focus on very specific things and you get them to this weird state where your mind drifts off into that dreamland, that's very different than a movie or very different than driving home in your car.
They're all imaginative processes, anyway, you know?
They're all imaginative processes.
But with hypnosis, you're focusing on a specific problem, normally.
You know, you're focusing on a specific problem, so it's the leading to it.
It depends how the client is.
I don't always use hypnosis.
I am a mind coach.
I don't class myself as a hypnotist, although hypnotherapy is part and parcel of what I do.
I class myself as a mind coach because there's different facets to it, there's different ways of leading people into various things and considerations about what they say, especially using language, when it's out of sync sort of thing, doesn't make sense.
And then you might have to make sense of it and then unconsciously, your unconscious mind deciphers it and gets you the best results really.
Well, it's fascinating to me because for the longest time, mind coaches were sort of unheard of in combat sports.
It was almost like it was a scarlet letter or a mark against you because you were so weak that you needed someone to figure out how to hypnotize you or how to talk you into being strong.
You should just be a fucking man and get out there and do it.
Who are very very skilled get beat by their own self You've seen that you know their own minds and then it's it can be a very It can be very hard for people well the reason why I was gonna bring that up because I think that fighting in particular is probably the most difficult of all Chosen endeavors.
Outside of being a soldier, it's the most difficult of all chosen endeavors as far as chosen goals that you're trying to accomplish.
What you're trying to accomplish is you're trying to use your body, use your bones and your muscle to defeat other people who are also using their bones and muscle.
And the techniques are all readily available.
There's no secrets anymore.
I mean, there's a few...
Secrets, if you have really good coaches, you can get some tips, but essentially everybody knows how to punch, everybody knows how to kick, and you're just trying to figure out how to maximize your possibilities, maximize your potential for victory.
How to not get in your own way not how to not trip over your own fears and anxiety and That's where this mind coach thing comes into play and that's where I think it's applicable not just For fighting but also for just life in general because I think that for a lot of people their success or failure of A big part of it is predicated on how they view life and how they view themselves and how they approach each
thing, each obstacle, each goal, each endeavor that they're attempting to solve or to give their own expression to.
If it works on fighting, it'll probably work on anything.
And if you can get someone to a better place mentally, where they can become a more effective fighter and stay out of their own way, in terms of their anxiety and their fears...
I do work with fighters because I come from a Muay Thai background.
I've been involved in it a long time.
30 years now.
It's...
You have to, fighting's hard as you know, of course, but fighting yourself as well as an opponent, as well as trying to listen to your corner, as well as hearing people scream your name or other people screaming for the other person to kick your ass, it's difficult.
You have to kind of go within, you know, and control everything that you're doing and try and impose what you've got to do on the other person.
And in life, I mean, and again, it's analogous to life.
Doubts and fears on top of the reality of the difficulty of what you're trying to do, whatever you're trying to do.
Those doubts and fears, they're like, it's like a heavy weight vest that you're carrying on top of the burden of whatever you're trying to accomplish in the first place.
And for fighters, it can be just smothering.
I mean, we've had many instances of guys backstage that either didn't fight or almost didn't fight because they were having anxiety attacks, because they were freaking out, because the moment was finally there.
And their mind was just running away from them.
Their mind was trying to figure out a way out of this.
Like, we can figure out a way out of this.
All we have to do is just go crazy here, and the doctor will come over, and how about you have a few heart palpitations and fall down, you can't breathe, and then the doctor's going to rescue you.
thought you know if he sees that I'm ill I've got a cough and then I don't have to go in there but you know it's it's about controlling that fights are won and lost in the changing rooms sometimes a lot of the time you know you could be the most confident you can be the most confident motherfucker on earth but if you're fighting Anderson Silva in his prime and you're not that good yeah you're probably still gonna get lit up yep and that's that's a problem I mean
Even though they've learned from those mistakes, they always look at themselves as like, God, I'm the guy who did this.
I'm the guy who shit his pants.
I'm the guy who, you know, got in that car accident.
I'm the guy who showed up late and got fired from my job.
And you become, instead of a human being who has a lifelong, just a giant string of experiences, a lot of them that you've learned from and that you're better because of, instead you have the sting, like the emotional sting of those failures that just haunt people.
And that's very common with people.
They get haunted.
That's why some people are haunted by high school, by grammar school and high school bullies.
Being bullied, like, defined them during their formative state.
And, you know, I've known a lot of fighters who, they've carried chips on their shoulders deep into their 40s from being bullied when they were in high school.
A funny story, when I lived in a place in England called Macclesfield, and it's on a big hill where I used to live, and I seen the guy who used to live next door to me, his mum used to live next door to me, he used to live there as well, he was 60, something like that, and I seen him at the top of the road, and he was stood at the top of the road, and he was looking down the bottom of the road like this, and he was looking again, and he was just stood there, and I said, what are you doing?
And he went, there's two guys down there, they used to bully me at school and waiting for them to go, 60!
It is sad, but it also seems to be bizarrely and cruelly a part of human nature, a part of animal nature.
So if the animals fuck with other animals, they try to find the pecking order.
And it motivates the weak ones to be strong.
It motivates people to stand up for themselves.
And that's where, I mean, the bullying is a horrible thing, but bullying is also the reason why a lot of great fighters exist.
Guys like George St. Pierre, I mean, he's pretty open about it.
Like, the reason why he became a great fighter, because he was tired of people fucking with him.
And he might not have ever become the guy who he became if it wasn't for that pressure.
If it wasn't for those obstacles that were thrown in front of his face, you know, and that's...
It's unfortunate that it happens, but objectively, if you step back and look at just life itself, it seems to be an inexorable part of our existence on this planet.
There's a pull and a push, and if there's no one pushing, there's no pulling.
You know what I'm saying?
If there's no negative, oftentimes the positive doesn't reach the same heights.
As a mind coach, you get to know who will carry on doing that behavior.
It's secondary gain.
Some people do the behavior just for a gain, just to, you know, get themselves where they want to get to, to get where they want to get.
You kind of decipher from that.
I don't really, I don't play that game.
I just give them, you know, well, really?
You know, and I just, I'm kind of, they can be kind of tough with it, but, you know, if you want them to change, if they don't want to change, nothing you can do.
You know, I don't want to, I don't have these dragged out long, you know, therapy sessions of, and then this, and this, and this happened, and that happened.
I try and get right to it, right to the core of it.
That's because of the way I was trained.
I was trained by a guy called Colin Mackay, who's absolutely like Yoda, you know, my teacher.
And I was trained that way, and he has good success.
I started, I went to a seminar many years ago by a guy called Keith Meyer.
And I was at a bad time of my life, being a bit of an idiot, drinking, snorting, dancing powder, etc.
I wasn't being the best I could be.
And I went to a seminar, Keith Meyer, loved it, felt great, didn't know why, just really started reading books, everything, Dr. Wayne Dyer and all sorts of things like that.
And then I got hold of, wanted to do a course with a company, and the company was good.
But I found out about Colin, and that was it.
Since then, he's become my friend, and we're like, he's just smart.
Well, if you think about it, like a person, like, say, if a guy was a banker or, you know, an insurance salesman or something like that, and they had a bunch of issues that are keeping them back from being successful at their chosen endeavor, you know, their failure, pro or con, is only financial, you know?
Like the intensity of a guy going into battle like yourself, about to go and trying to find coughs and reasons why someone's going to step in and rescue you from what is ultimately your entire focus for the last six to eight weeks.
You've been ready for this one moment and the moment's here and you're ready to get the fuck out of there.
Right?
There's nothing like that in the world of being a banker.
I've seen so many really good fighters in the gym.
Like, awesome.
Kicking pads, sharp, clinched, everything was sweet.
Sparring was on point.
And then just to see this different...
I think of it like this, like making a really nice wedding cake, and then when you're going to show it to the people that are going to the wedding, just fucking squash it.
That's always felt like to me, just like, just destroyed their own...
Creation, all the stuff that they've done in the gym.
Yeah, I mean, especially like you said, there's people who have been bullied as well.
And you have to consider who you are.
You have to consider everything about yourself, you know, going on that stage, going into that lion's den, so to speak, and, you know, the gladiatorial sort of archetype of it all.
But it is difficult, but there is techniques that work really, really well.
Techniques that work really well to get the person out of these negative states of mind these negative patterns to get them to get them because what can happen is you can go away with the train of thought so it magnifies and goes on and on gets bigger and bigger and bigger and the self-taught gets really intense so it trips you up completely and then can overthrow you to make you but you know a minimum of what you can actually achieve you know what I mean And you've recently started working with my friend Ian McCall as well.
Yeah, and for folks who don't know, Vinny used to do commentary for It's Showtime, which is one of the bigger kickboxing events in the world before it was bought out by Glory.
And now Glory is struggling a bit in the United States, unfortunately.
I don't know why.
It's just, to me...
I'm such a huge fan of it.
I think, you know, you watch a fight like Simon Marcus versus Arton Levin.
It's a fucking great fight.
I was watching it this morning again in the gym.
It was an amazing, amazing fight.
Five rounds, went to a draw.
I mean, it's just a fucking war between two of the very best guys in the world.
I asked him, I met Joe, it was kind of, I don't know, I'll be honest with you, Joe had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, he was a bit angry and stuff, you know what I mean?
He won't mind me telling you this because he said I can, so he beat me up.
And he, yeah, he was a bit like that and I seen him at K1 because I did K1 in Los Angeles a while ago.
I was talking to him and I said, you're miles better than what you come across on the internet.
You're a much better person than what you act.
And I kind of stuck home with him.
He made me a friend on Facebook.
And then I contacted him and said, you know, do you want me to work with you?
And he went, yeah, sure, cool.
And then we got on.
He's so smart.
He picks things up so quickly.
He's so open to stuff.
We've done some really, really cool stuff that's I can experiment on Joe, if that makes sense.
You know, some things I want to try, and I do them, and he seems to work really well on him.
And Joe didn't want to get injured because he was going to fight, I think it was Robert something or other he was fought on glory, and then he was going to fight on Bellator against Melvin Manhoff.
I'm not saying it's going to work for everything, you know, like, oh, good, you know, it's like your bullets and stuff like that, you know what I mean?
But it was just, it was that, getting his mindset into that, into that sort of, the way of thinking.
There was one instance, Liam Harrison was fighting a tie called Anuak-Kyal-Samlit, and he'd fought him before and got stopped in Jamaica when John Wayne Parr fought against Borkau-Paw-Pamuk.
And Liam had been stopped in, I think it was a fourth round with low kicks.
So we did a hypnosis to make him called...
Hypnosis and the trigger word was Warrior.
You know, he kept this word, because Liam's...
Have you ever seen Liam Harrison fight?
He's an incredible fighter.
I know, along with Jordan Watson and Andy House and all them from Bad Company in England.
And what we did was, we did this hypnosis, and when I was commentating on the show, because he was fighting Aniwat, in round four, and this just freaked me out, really, to be honest, he looked at me, and he looked me straight in the eye, and he went, warrior.
And then beat shit out of Aniwat.
Went on points.
And yet afterwards I said, do you remember saying warrior?
There's one fight where he fought Harold Brazier when he moved up to Light Welterweight, do you remember?
And he slipped, I'm trying to do it, I can't do it by the way, but he slipped, slipped and he just stepped around him and patted him on the arse and I'm like, come on now.
Meldrick Taylor, when Meldrick Taylor, I shouldn't say this, when Meldrick Taylor lost to Crisano Espana in, I think he fought in Ireland or somewhere, oh no, it was on the Razor Ruddock and Lennox Lewis bill.
I cried.
I loved Meldrick Taylor.
He was like my everything.
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I shouldn't say that, should I? It's come out the closet, no!
Yeah, if you listen to that at the end of it, they said, Nigel Benn says, the first person I'd like to thank is Paul McKenna for hypnotizing me and making me believe in myself.
McClellan was in his prime and a destroyer back then.
Everyone was talking about McClellan eventually fighting Roy Jones Jr. That was the big super fight that was on the horizon.
People are anticipating all the different fights right now for Golovkin.
They're anticipating possibly Cotto.
If not Cotto, maybe one day...
Canelo.
Canelo Avrez.
Yeah, that's a possibility.
That's how they were looking at him until the Nigel Benn fight.
And it looked like he was just gonna kill Nigel Benn.
Just beating the fuck out of him.
Two things.
One, the weight cut issue.
That was a big issue because Gerald McLevin was huge and he was cutting a lot of weight to get down to that weight class and that was back when, you know, people weren't doing it well.
They weren't rehydrating with IVs and particularly in boxing, the weight cutting mentality in wrestling is a totally different mentality because you could wrestle dehydrated and although your performance will probably suffer, You are not as concerned about head trauma and the head trauma that these guys get when they're dehydrated is very very dangerous because the bleeding on the brain is just way more devastating.
Apparently all the deaths that have ever occurred or almost all the deaths that ever occurred in boxing have occurred outside of the heavyweight division.
And the reason being that those are the guys that are cutting the weight.
And the heavyweights aren't.
But there's this one guy that got really fucked up on HBO, like I want to say a year or two ago.
He fought that Cuban kid.
Was it Eric Perez that he fought?
Is that the guy's name he fought?
I don't remember.
I'm not doing a good job of remembering it.
But it was a rare instance of a heavyweight being like really badly concussed in a fight and having bleeding on the brain and having to get an operation.
He was a Russian guy.
Anyway, point being, that McClellan fight was pretty crazy.
And all of the documentaries have missed that out because I watched it and I thought, I remember because I just, you know, something sticks in your head.
I just thought, he's not mentioned that.
They never mentioned how he was, and probably they sparred really hard and all that.
Yeah, they couldn't have no rap music, any swearing as well.
And he believed in, like, when Lennox Lewis fought Oliver McCall, he made Oliver McCall wear white boxing boots because he thought that he made him move quicker.
And then there's some sort of animosity between the two of them.
They leave, they come back, and you see a lot of that, and it really trips a lot of fighters up, those contentious relationships they have with their trainers.
I think a lot of the times, though, with fighters, sometimes it may take the position of a father figure, you know, or an elder brother, or, you know, especially a father figure, because a lot of, like, have come for him.
You know, not the best start in life, you know what I mean?
It is, and I think that's why a guy like Emmanuel Stewart was so successful.
Not just because of his deep knowledge of boxing and his understanding of technique, which all were certainly there, but also just because he was such a great guy.
When Thomas Hearns fought Sugar Ray Leonard, I remember reading that Emanuel Stewart and Tommy Hearns locked themselves away for two weeks and just cried.
When Steve Collins fought Chris Eubank, he came in with earphones in and knelt in the ring.
And it played with Eubank's head because Nigel Benn had used a hypnotherapist, Paul McKenna, to go through all that to beat Gerald McClellan.
And then Eubank, because he'd injured Michael Watson so badly...
That he had this in his head that if Steve Collins is like this, he won't know when he's hurt because he'll get in such a state, he won't know when he's beat.
That one thing that he did, that speech where he described what it was like to walk into the ring and what he felt like and how he had all these doubts until he got into the ring.
Back in his day, when he left Blend and Ingle, they had a really close relationship from Severn and, you know, an old Irish guy, and he's got loads of stories and, you know, metaphors and blah, blah, blah.
And when he left Winkerbank, which is in Sheffield, it's not far from me, really, he wasn't the same.
But again, it comes back to what you do and what your focus is, where it is really about mental states.
That mental state of wanting to please the father, wanting to please this mentor, wanting to this person that you love and care so much about their opinion and their idea of you, that it becomes a significant motivating factor.
And that tapping into these factors, tapping into whatever it is that allows you to achieve that amazing state of success.
I don't know, my sound may come across a bit, I don't know, gushy, but I just love it.
I really love it.
I just love the way, I love fighters.
I like people achieving.
I like people getting out of darkness.
I know what it's like to be there, you know what I mean?
And it's nothing more of a relief than not being there, you know what I'm saying?
Just point in the right direction, see people just glow, and they think, you know, and they get that eureka moment, the light bulb moment, where they've done something wicked, or they've done something they didn't think they could do.
That, for me, is priceless.
I didn't get paid for it, of course, as a job, but it's priceless to me.
You know, I think, I don't know if you agree with this, but I think when a coach has been a fighter, there's a transition from him being still a fighter to a coach, you know?
I've got a friend called Frankie Hudders who's got a really good gym in Withenshaw, in Manchester, and I see that with him.
He was a fighter, a very good one.
And I can see the transition now of how he is being a coach.
He's like, got all these kids that look up to him and, you know, like Jordan Watson's coach, Richard Smith.
It's the same.
You can see the transition because they were fighters and then they become mentors and coaches.
Yeah, I mean, I would like to get into coaching people to be mind coaches.
But I want elite people.
I don't want...
I don't want that.
I want people as passionate as me.
So, you know, we're going to be doing that in 2016. Colin's got a thing now, so if anyone wants to know about it, they can get me on my website, VinnieShulman.com, or Facebook or whatever, the hypnosis page.
And we can tell them about it's got a new sort of...
A series of videos where you can go step by step to learn to be a mind coach.
My long-term goal is just to keep improving, keep getting better myself, because I love it, reading all the time.
I'm quite boring, really, going on about it to people.
My long-term goal is, well, look how well Mike Dolce has done.
With his diet, you know, and I'd like to be that.
I'd like to get that to be the man to go to, the go-to guy.
And I have other people that have the same passion, you know, regardless of if it's fighting or not.
Just people that just want to achieve or at least get something a little bit further, if not really far.
And people come to me, it's always the same thing.
They come in, because I work from home.
I want to work on Skype or FaceTime, and they always talk about what they don't want.
That's the first thing out of everyone's mouth, to talk about what they don't want.
And when you ask them what they do want, they still talk about what they don't want.
So you have to change the direction of the thought pattern because they're just so focused on, say, it's that rock, and the rock, the rock, the rock, and you have to just move them to where they want to go, and then say, now what do you want?
Instead of focusing on that, now where do you want to go?
Now what are you doing?
Okay, we deal with that in various ways.
Timeline therapy, hypnosis, whatever.
And then we move them towards where they want to go to.
Yeah, and it's also, many times, whatever's holding them back is also what led them to be in that relationship, that toxic relationship in the first place.
But because you travel, and I travel, because I commentate on Infusion and Yokau and stuff, if you had a girlfriend, mine soon's going to be my wife getting married in August, if you had that sort of where you're going, who you're with, blah, blah, blah, you're never going to, it can't work.
It is, and it's also patterns that people fall into because life is very confusing and because life is very stressful and there's a lot going on.
So they fall into these patterns of making these same mistakes over and over again from one relationship to the next because there's comfort in those patterns.
And you recognize it early on because there aren't any real issues.
We've only known each other for a short amount of time.
You already fucking screaming at me for nothing?
Why are you screaming at me?
You're screaming at me because of some other shit that you've got that's trapped.
You know, both parties can drown, because you just can't get out of them, and you're constantly involved in conflict, or the worst is conflict and resolution, conflict and resolution, conflict and resolution, and they get trapped in this high of making up, of fighting and then making up, fighting and making up.
Because time is something you're just not going to get back.
Ever.
You know, regardless how rich you are.
I went to a seminar by a lady called Dolores Askoff Nowieski, who's part of the thing called the Servants of Light, which is an esoterical belief school.
It's also very difficult to stop and take account of what's going on in your life and try to figure out whether or not it's serving you to the best of its ability.
If time is serving you, or if you are serving your own life, if your focus and what you're doing, your actions are serving Your own existence to the best of your ability or whether or not you're trapped in momentum.
Because that's often the case of people.
Being trapped in momentum could rob you of your life and you won't even realize it until it's too late.
But it's also really hard to figure out if you're trapped in an environment where the people around you haven't figured it out and they're stuck in some patterns, maybe alcoholism and cigarettes and all the bullshit that's involved with whatever they've got going on in their life.
Catch weight for MMA, it's usually because someone got a last-minute fight, or short-notice fight, and they don't want to cut all the weight.
Like, say if a guy fights at 155, like a Gleason Tebow, he fights at 155, but he really walks around about 185, and he cuts a lot of fucking weight, and so he has a process to cut that weight, and it's pretty scientific.
They've got to kind of stay with that process, and if they don't, Like Benson Henderson when he fought Brendan Thatch.
Benson Henderson, former UFC lightweight champion, took a fight at 170 because it was a short-notice fight.
Stepped in and fought at 170. And the reason why he fought at 170 is because this way he wouldn't have to cut the weight and he really wouldn't be able to take a short-notice fight at 155. It's just too hard to lose the weight.
They have to do it over a long period of time, otherwise they're significantly weakened.
You know, they get down to a certain, you know, 10, 15 pounds away, and then they dehydrate themselves down.
That's one of the most exciting things about MMA today is that you're seeing these guys like these Yair Rodriguez's, these young kids that are coming up 23 years of age that have so many fucking tools!
It's like you compare them to young people coming up 10-15 years ago.
Well, that's another Emanuel Stewart success story.
Emanuel Stewart figured out how to get him to box right, and probably engineered that whole style that he's developed, too, this just pop-and-grab style.
That's one thing that used to disturb me most about MMA gyms, maybe say 10, 15 years ago.
These guys really didn't have, I shouldn't say these guys, some gyms really didn't have the best, most technical striking coaches that had a deep knowledge and understanding of striking.
So these guys would be beating the fuck out of each other.
Just like throwing bombs at each other in the gym.
You would watch it and they weren't Working on technique they weren't working.
They weren't sparring to get better at the art of hitting and not getting hit They were just wailing on each other and you know that was toughening them up in quotes air quotes and then they would go into the gym and or go into the ring and fight and they were carrying all the damage that they were accumulating in these sparring sessions and a lot of these guys now are kind of speaking up like Jamie Varner who's a former WEC champion and Top lightweight contender in the UFC just recently retired and he's talking about the amount of sparring
that he did and how fucked up it was.
Also, he was sparring with much larger guys.
He was sparring with Ryan Bader, who fights at 205, and he's fighting at 55. And Ryan Bader's world class at 205, so he's fighting a guy 50 fucking pounds heavier than him.
This is an amazing time for MMA. It's such a young and blossoming sport.
The level of striking is slowly and steadily getting faster and faster and better and better.
It's really an amazing thing to watch.
The jiu-jitsu is getting better.
Everything is getting better.
There's no comparison whatsoever.
I mean, I don't know what the difference between 1993 kickboxing was.
I mean, I know if you watch like...
Andy Hoog or Mike Bernardo, they were very good, but they're probably not as good as Badr Hari, right?
But the difference between, say, fighters from UFC 1 and fighters of today, I mean, you're talking about a massive evolution, like generations of evolution, like a thousand years of growth.
Yeah, Remco got him in a headlock and took him to the ground and just blasted his brains out with elbows.
I mean, he elbowed him like four or five times while he was unconscious.
That was an important fight for people to realize that ninjutsu's bullshit.
A lot of people really believed they were going to do karate chops on people.
That's also one of the reasons why performance enhancing drugs are so prevalent in MMA is because there's so many different things you have to work on.
Like, if you're a boxer, okay, what do you have to do?
Well, if you do your road work, and then you're going to do your boxing work.
You know, you do your sparring or your pad work.
I mean, that's what you do.
You spar X amount of days per week.
The other days, you're hitting pads and working the bag and doing your combinations.
But you're only working on one skill.
In MMA, you're not even just working on boxing when it comes to striking.
You've got to train elbows.
You've got to train kicks.
You've got to train knees.
You've got to train...
A different stance because you're worried about being taken down, so you have to work on your sprawl, you have to work on your takedown defense, underhooks, wizards, step away from the cage, how to get back up, then you have to work on your jujitsu, you have to work on sweeps, you have to work on actual submissions, and you have to figure out, like, how much can I do?
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why MMA has become so popular is because it's so difficult to go from that to like Floyd Mayweather versus Pacquiao, where it's like not much happens.
There's like a lot of movement, which I loved.
I loved that fight.
But the reality of the variables, like the different variables that exist in MMA, where a guy can take you down, a guy can kick your legs, a guy can do so many different things to you.
You can't just stand in front of him and shoulder roll and box and then clinch.
There's just so much more going on.
The clinch is just the beginning.
They're going to press you up against the cage.
They're going to pull your ankles out from under you.
They're going to mount you.
Elbow you to the face.
They're going to cut you open.
There's going to be a lot going on.
It's not nearly as simple to defend yourself as it is in a boxing ring.
Because you can get, you know, they can be in shape, they can, you know, the strength and conditioning, the right diet, and then if their heads are not right, their body doesn't perform.
I mean, especially in high school or in college where you're about to go out into the world and so much of your success or failure is predicated on your attitude, your mindset, and how your brain is organized.
There's so much stuff that you can do that can help people learn and take in information differently than just the cliché, read that, that's what you've got to do, you know what I mean?
That's why it's so interesting, because there's so many different types of people, ways of thinking.
You know, like we did earlier, we did the hackle, I always remember, where we...
What we did was we did hackalow first to kind of lead you into a hypnotic state.
You see these things on these rapid inductions and I went on a course of rapid inductions where What is that?
Rapid inductions, they call it snap inductions, what they do is, it's like you put, it's like a shock, so you shock the cysts, you shock them, and then you go sleep, or whatever, and it puts them under very quickly.
You see it, you can see it on YouTube and all sorts, so I don't, I can do them.
They're very showy techniques as well, but I don't really dig them.
I've done it when I've been in therapy with the client already because I'm talking hypnotic language and do various things and stuff and just maneuver them into that state.
So I don't really...
You see people walking up on the street and these treat hypnosis and all that, which is...
Well, when I was a kid, when I was first starting out doing stand-up, there was a guy in Rhode Island named Frank Santos.
And he was an R-rated hypnotist.
And up until that point, I thought hypnosis was bullshit.
Until I saw this guy over and over again.
Many, many, many, many, many times.
He had a night once a week at Stitch's Comedy Club in Boston.
So I saw him...
Dozens and dozens of times and he would hypnotize giant and he knew when people were under and when they were bullshitting He would get guys who would look at them and you go.
No, you're not.
This is not working You're faking it come on and he would take them off the stage He knew when people were under he knew when they weren't but he could get a whole group of people and Maybe, like, bring ten people on stage and by the time he's done hypnotizing them, six or seven of them would be totally under.
And he'd have them doing all kinds of ridiculous things, like they thought they were having sex, they'd cum in their pants.
Like, really...
Amazing.
I mean, I know for you, you're thinking, like, this isn't helping anyone.
Um, because it's, they, if you go to a hypnotherapist and they say, uh, you can't hypnotise me, then fuck off.
What did you come for?
You know, what's the point?
You know, you've got a pizza to buy a pizza, you know, what comes the hypnotherapist?
You come to get hypnotised, you know?
So you half go along with it anyway, you know, and it helps if the client's got an issue, they want to change, then they're more likely to change if they want to change with you, you know?
Um...
But the people that do on the stage, they just...
They want it to happen to them.
They don't mind looking daft, so that's cool.
But what I did with you is we did the magnet as well, which was just...
I just stood away because we did the peripheral vision and we just imagined that there was a magnet that could take negative energy from your body.
And what that does is you use your own imagination to take the negative energy out.
Because obviously there's no magnet and your mind thinking that negative energy is being pulled out of your body, is that just an adjustment of your attitude or an adjustment of your perceptions?
Is that related at all to what Frank Santos used to do by getting an entire group of people to think that they were doing wacky shit in front of an audience?
Derren Brown, yeah, he's a hypnotist, he's an entertainer, he's a magician as well.
He's fantastic.
And he did one called The Experiments.
I think you can watch them on YouTube.
And he did one where they shot Stephen Fry.
Stephen Fry is like an English...
Comedian guy, and he's very posh, very, very, very intelligent guy, member of Mensa, but super smart.
And they, he got this certain guy, they did a lot of elimination techniques, you know, to see he was more susceptible, and they used a certain guy to go and shoot Stephen Fry, you know, not with a real gun, obviously, but just whether, I don't know.
I don't know.
It's interesting.
I don't know.
There is a case where I watched when he assassinated someone and he said, definitely, I was under hypnosis.
And everybody's just saying that while he's in prison.
I mean, if you find a guy who's not, maybe never killed anybody, but maybe he's done a few fucked up things, and you can talk that guy into doing something like that through hypnosis.
Yes, and there was one where Derren Brown paid with paper.
So what he did is he gets paper, which is the same as dollar bills, just blank paper.
And there's a confusion technique, so he said, don't quote me on the script, but he said, I've just moved into the town, or I've just got off the train, and I don't know whether to go that way or that way, because my friend said, yeah, I have to get the terrain, but I don't know whether to go that way or that way, or that way.
But do you know where the station is?
But he said, get the train, he says, take it, it's fine.
And then when he's, when he's, he said, he said, well, just take it, it's fine.
So that confuses the people, say, that way or that way?
So it's mixed directing your thoughts, so he's moving his hands everywhere.
I've worked at an ice cream place when I was a kid.
They serve ice cream and hamburgers.
It was a place called Newport Creamery.
And I remember they had someone came in that they called a flim-flam artist.
Where someone would come in and they would give you $20 and they'd say, can you give me...
A ten, a five, and five ones.
And then they would say, okay, okay, actually, can you give me a ten, five, five ones, and four quarters?
No, you know what?
Give me two tens, and then they would start two tens of five and four quarters.
And then all of a sudden, you'd have more than $20 that you'd be giving them for their money.
And the manager closed the register.
They went, hold on a second.
What is going on here?
And they shut the register, and they had, like, this...
Sort of weird eye-to-eye moment with this guy who was trying to hustle this kid that was working the cash register.
It was really fascinating.
It was like a guy who was a con man.
And I remember I was near it.
I wasn't involved in it.
I wasn't working on the cash register, but I was close to it.
I forget what I was doing.
But I remember watching this going, what's going on?
Is something happening here?
And then they had like a little meeting.
They explained when you're working the cash register, you have to be careful of people that start asking you for weird things.
Asking you to, you know, because they start twisting your brain and confusing you and your memory gets all fucked up and you're trying to memorize what they're asking for.
And before you know it, you've given someone $30 for $20.
Yeah, that's a weird hustle, that hustle of trying to confuse people.
But there must be patterns that they try to tap into in the way people recognize money or the way people count things that they try to disrupt and cause confusion.
Numbers, words, especially words, you can confuse people and send them off guard.
We did a thing when we did the masters with neuro-linguistic programming, we did a thing called quantum linguistics, which is really interesting, it's really cool, makes you laugh, it just doesn't make no sense.
One of the best language patterns I was saying, I always, when I was younger, I was always self-sabotaging, I said, I always self-sabotage, and a guy called Chris Bannocks, who I did my masters with, And I said, imagine there's a wasp's nest and I've got a stick.
Don't go near it because you'll get stung.
But because I was young, I always thought, fuck it anyway, I'll get stung and just see what happens.
I'll fight these wasps, stupid.
You're younger, you're daft, aren't you?
And he said, what wouldn't happen if you pretended not to do it?
So when he said, what wouldn't happen if you pretended not to do it?
And I was like, what?
And it doesn't make sense.
No.
But it sends your mind in a, especially when you're in that sort of that, you know.
But it's like, in that situation where it's not like dropped on you, you know, you don't knock on top on the shoulder and say, hey, we'll never pretend to do it.
In the cliche therapy thing, and the paratherapy situation, when it's glided in with language, it works so smoothly.
I've known several people that were Scientologists, but one of them was one of my neighbors.
And...
You know, he and I had some weird exchange about his wife was going clear, so he needed $50,000.
I was like, what?
50 fucking grand?
Like, whoa, what's going on?
He was like, they're going to do some ceremony and his wife will no longer be influenced by outside pressure or, you know, outside thoughts or anybody's criticisms or negativity.
She no longer, they would no longer affect her.
And they needed 50 grand for that.
What the fuck?
But he fucking, looking at his eye, he was telling me, like, oranges have vitamin C in them.
You know, like, for him, it was, like, pretty straightforward.
But I'm not so I don't know if it whatever floats your boat if it's not causing you any but I haven't seen that going clear so I will do so I don't know about anything I say I agree with that as well if it's not hurting you and what do I give a fuck I agree with that as well until you start watching these documentaries you go well clearly it's hurting some people it's definitely hurting people it's breaking up families it's it's really fucked up the way they attack some people that That dissent or that leave or...
I mean, if the people that are on the show, the documentary that are telling...
If they're telling the truth, and that's debatable, you know, only they know and the people that they're talking about know.
There's some mind control going on there.
There's some absolute definite mind control going on there.
And I wonder, is that related in any way to hypnosis?
The ability that these people have to manipulate these folks into...
He was just pretending to be able to read your mind and be able to put...
But he was really...
Really clear about it saying these are just techniques.
I am not really Seeing anything that other people can't see.
I don't have any special ability But the people that do claim that like I don't know how it is in England But in California in particular you'll drive down the street and you'll see four or five of these fucking psychic readings Chiropractors and that.
Well, there's this one guy that used to work with a lot of fighters and he was what they call a zone healer.
And his idea was that he was like sort of tricking your body into healing because he was sort of using the placebo effect telling you that he was healing you by popping your neck or moving your body in a certain way.
But he really wasn't doing anything other than shit a normal chiropractor does.
I was getting bored, and I wasn't giving them the attention I should do.
So I decided to stop that, and then I had a regular job anyway.
And then I just started to get mind coaching and word of mouth, like you got to know me through word of mouth and then it's just spread from there and it continues to do so.
So now that's full time?
I still commentate as well.
I commentate from Fusion and from Yoko, Muay Thai shows and Smash Muay Thai as well.
It's in England, which is good shows.
And I still do that.
You know, I've done GFC and, you know, different things like that.
But I still commentate a lot for Yoko and Infusion and Smash Muay Thai.
And just do that as well.
But I just, I've got a lot of clients from America now.
I mean, that's really what life is all about, finding something that you really enjoy, that you get that buzz off of, and pursuing that, and if you can make a living with that.
You said about Mike McCollum and the left hook, and I like that.
You know, and I went, oh yeah, I forgot about him.
I'm not egotistical enough to think I know everything.
There's a lot of them.
I've seen, like I said, a rapid induction course, and the guy was just like, he was doing this hypnosis gun, and he was going to sleep, and this other guy was going...
I've seen some videos of fake kung fu, and it's fucking amazing.
Like, there's this one dude, and he was teaching this class, and he had this girl, and he was moving her back and forth and back and forth, like a comedy.
Like, it was a comedy, but it was real.
And he'd make her dance and shock her, and then she would fall to the ground, and she was...
Have you seen the recent one there that guy gets his student, he's like a big bellied guy with his gi on, and then she does this, and he goes, give him an Oscar, that was a right performance.
He just like flops on the deck and his arm flew in the air, that was proper funny.
I mean, because I'm here at the moment in America with Jordan Watson, who's like a superstar in Muay Thai, and we were watching it, we were pissing ourselves off, and it was funny.
But how is that different than a guy who thinks, like, I watched a guy who thought he was having sex with Madonna and he came in his pants, because Frank Santos put that in his head and he did that.
I watched it, and the guy was like, he didn't know.
He came in his pants.
I mean, this guy wasn't that good of an actor.
He just wasn't.
He was embarrassed, he didn't know what to do, and he kind of slunked over and sat in the corner.
I'm really fascinated by the full spectrum, for lack of a better term, of possibilities of suggestion that you can go from, you know, fake psychics and fake healers and like...
My friend Brian and I were at the Comedy Store last night.
Were you there when you saw the woman was trying to do the Reiki healing on us?
It was hilarious because I knew I was going to talk to you today and I knew she was full of shit.
Or she probably thinks it's real.
But she was like, can you feel the energy?
Like she said, put your left hand out because left hands are more sensitive, more susceptible.
Okay.
So I have my hand out.
And she is like running her hand over the top and the bottom, like not touching my hand, but getting close to it.
Like, do you feel it?
Do you feel anything?
And I'm like...
No, I'm trying to be open-minded, but I don't feel anything.
Isn't it weird that we have these minds that have such amazing potential, but there's no fucking real good guidebook that anybody's handed, and you're sort of supposed to figure it out on your own, or based on, if you're lucky, you have parents that have their shit together, and they sort of give you a rough...
Outline of how you should live your life or live by example.
But we're not talking about like goldfish or swans or anything fucking simple.
We're talking about human beings with complex languages and mathematics and culture and society and laws and money and all the weirdness that comes with being a person.
I mean, that's one of the things that I appreciate most about being able to do this podcast is that I'm constantly and consistently inspired and curious.
I'm always learning.
You can't know everything.
It is not possible.
There is too much going on.
And once you accept that, then you're just looking for stuff that you find stimulating.
And then find more and more things that you find fascinating.
And this podcast has given me this really unique opportunity to talk to people like you or...
You know, anybody who has some information that I'm not really aware of.
Yeah, I know, but, you know, I'm just like, you know, but nobody's coming in here and then Joe says so nice things, Ian McCall says nice things, and I get to do seminars and get to meet people, and I love it.
But that's what life is all about really is finding something like that that you really enjoy doing and then pursuing it and then if you can God if you can make a living doing that what a what a great way to be, you know, yeah, I like people are like No, I like people like I don't take everyone on as a client because some people just think no, right?
No Have you had like people that are like shitty or just not as appreciative kind of suss them out quickly?
Do you try to explain to them why you're not doing this and maybe give them some help for the future?
Yeah, I just say, well, I can't or I'm busy or just the normal stuff and, you know, or...
Depends on what it is.
It's not often, I'll be honest with you, it's not often that happens.
But, yeah, it does happen.
I just kind of deter them.
There's one guy saying, there was one guy recently, he's like, yeah, everyone in my team thinks I'm rubbish, I can't fight, and I can't talk to you now, my wife's in bed, and just like, yeah, all right.