Kyle Kingsbury unpacks his UFC journey—from a 26-year-old ex-football player with quick knees to a keto-adapted fighter guided by Kane Velazquez—while debunking myths like "calories in, calories out" via Tim Ferriss’ study. He links ketosis (0.5–3.0 mmol/L) to mental clarity and reduced sleep needs, critiquing Gatorade-funded carb research and psychedelics’ role in breaking emotional patterns, like his ayahuasca-induced shift on body image. Rogan shares Propecia’s sexual side effects and compares factory farming’s hidden cruelty (exposed by ag-gag laws) to unresolved personal conflicts, urging growth over bitterness. [Automatically generated summary]
They say that the best way to knife fight is actually to put your arm forward, you wrap your clothes around your arm, and put a knife in your backhand.
Meanwhile, why the fuck do I know what the best way to knife fight is?
What are the odds you're ever going to get in a knife fight, like you and another guy on the beach, like circling each other with a knife and your jacket wrapped around your forearm?
No, there's some real footage of the actual Medellin cartel, and there's some real footage of Like the different busts and some murder footage, some bodies that they really, like some of the horrible atrocities they committed.
They show you real footage of that.
But for the most part, it just is the story of Pablo Escobar and his rise to power.
I'm on the ketogenic diet now or trying to get into it.
And you talking about it with me sort of inspired me a little bit because one of the big things a lot of people are saying, you can't do explosive activities.
I'll tell you what, man, if you get into any sort of a diet online or tell people you're gonna try something, the fucking experts come crawling out of the woodwork.
I just couldn't stand, like, over the years in the UFC, I just would say, oh, sure, yeah, I'd allow you to be friends, allow you to be friends, that kind of thing.
And then over time, you've got 5,000 people that think they're your pals.
At least on Twitter, I follow who I want to follow.
I'm sure with 1.7 million people following you online on Twitter alone, you post, you're going to do this, and people come up to woodwork about it.
I would write about like, oh, I just read this book.
It's phenomenal.
Check it out.
And then everybody's got to come up with this.
Well, here's an article I found online.
I'll send you the link, and this guy's a total whack job.
He's an idiot.
This one paragraph somebody wrote is going to totally dispel and throw out the window what this guy spent years researching and putting together in his book.
You can jumpstart that window with fasting, which is a total pain in the ass, especially if you're Carbohydrate dependent.
Or you can cheat it by using MCT oil.
So if you up your MCTs the first three days, kind of borderline where you might shit yourself, then you totally negate any of that really feeling like groggy, like I don't have energy, or fuck man, I can't move.
Well, this is, first of all, this marks this on detail earlier.
This is grass-fed, free-range, all good stuff.
I don't have a lactose intolerant or a dairy intolerance.
So let's iron that out right now.
I don't recommend this to anybody who does.
But this is an easy way to get more fat.
And that's really what you're trying to do.
We, as natural people, from a primal standpoint, went in periods of ketosis, no matter where we were on planet Earth.
So I know you were talking about the other day, like...
What is this ancestral diet stuff?
That kind of stuff.
Well, that's based on where you lived.
So if you had ancestors from the poles, then you likely had big game and fruits and vegetables and things that grew in colder climates, you know, like kale and shit like that.
If you were by the equator, smaller stuff, smaller live animals like chicken, fish, those kind of things, and then much more carbohydrate.
But both, no matter where you were from, you had periods where you didn't eat.
So that's when you'd produce your own ketones.
To remain in a ketogenic state, You really do have to have a much higher level of fat than people think, like way more.
It's counterintuitive, especially with cholesterol and things like that, but the research is out.
I mean, these guys are putting together things.
Dr. David Perlmutter wrote Grain Brain in 2013. He had research from 2013 and 2012 and 2011 all in the book.
In 2015, he followed up with BrainMaker.
Brand new studies are being put in that book.
So this is like the very latest, and what they're showing across the board is for All the mental disorders like Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, they all have to do with really high blood sugar levels over time.
So one person might manifest as type 2 diabetes, another person might get Alzheimer's.
It's just your genetic coding.
That's the genetic difference.
Eating like shit is going to get you to have that disease, you know, manifest itself.
Look, for putting on size, I'm not going to tell Dorian Yates how to put on size.
They eat that way specifically for gains, and that is scientifically proven to help with gains.
You're eating like a child, basically.
You have a newborn.
They eat every two hours.
And they're eating everything, carbohydrates, protein, and fat, right?
So when you want to gain size, that's the way to do it.
But for this, you don't necessarily need that.
And you can employ different methods like intermittent fasting, where they talk about skip breakfast and just eat between 12 and 7. That protein window of, oh, my nitrogen balance is lowering.
I'm going to lose muscle mass.
It's total crap.
Everybody would tell you, oh, you skip a meal, you're going to get weak, bro.
Total crap.
All the hormones that give us...
Recovery, anything like that, IGF-1, growth hormone, they all go through the roof when we don't eat.
So the longer we fast, the higher our ketone production is, the higher our anti-catabolic hormones are, so they're muscle-preserving.
Now, you could do a fast incorrectly and you go run a long race or Or if you did high-intensity stuff fasted, then yeah, you'd be running into problems there.
Yeah, that was a really cool conversation and very eye-opening.
You know, one thing that really opened my eyes or really had me thinking was they've shown on studies recently on children that have epilepsy that putting them in a ketogenic state seems to stop epileptic seizures or significantly reduce them.
He's the guy who fasted for seven days and then lifted 500 pounds for 15 reps, did 585 for a single, then gave a lecture to 300 plus people on fasting and ketogenic diets.
If I'm in a ketogenic state and keto-adapted and I'm producing my own ketones, I feel a huge bump from a product like that.
Exogenous in addition, right?
If I'm in a carbohydrate...
Necessary energy system, and I haven't been in ketosis for a while, and then I have, like, oh, okay, well, I'm going to get low sleep tonight, so I want ketones.
I might feel like a slight difference, but it's not going to be nearly as dramatic as if I'm already in ketosis.
Well, you're holding water in, for every gram of glycogen, you hold four grams of water in the muscle cell.
So it makes sense if you're loading on carbohydrates, even if you're not carb loading, but if you're carb dependent, your muscles are going to hold more water than if they weren't.
I mean, this is all coming out of Steve Finney and Jeff Volek.
They wrote The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living and The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance.
And Mark Sisson references them.
They really broke down studies on athletes in a ketogenic diet and things like that and saw exactly what kind of enhancements were being done.
And they kind of broke through the mold of what was done before when they ran tests.
You know, Gatorade was running tests and it was coming up like, hey, if you do this, you simply aren't going to be able to outperform somebody who has carbohydrates.
I can't write off numbers off the top of my head, but I mean when they talk about how much calories you can hold from glycogen pre-stored in the liver and all the carb loading you can do versus how much fat you have in your body, you could run for days.
That's why we can fast.
That's another thing.
To dispel a bodybuilder's myth on muscle, if we lost muscle dramatically from fasting, Then how would we chase down the herd three, four, five days into not having food?
We for sure evolved to be able to do this.
So we could go long periods of time and still have our explosiveness when we needed it.
And they weren't jumping on treadmills and doing stupid shit like we have to do now.
But at the same time, it was important for human beings to be able to have energy still in a fasted state for that long.
And what you're talking about, for people who are unaware, it's called persistence hunting, and it's one of the first methods of hunting that ancient people used to do and still do in parts of Africa, where they will run and chase down.
An animal like an antelope, they run very fast for short periods of time, but they overheat.
They get hot, and they get tired, and they can't run like we can.
We can run at a slower pace for way longer.
We could run all day.
Because we sweat.
And they don't sweat.
So they overheat.
And so what ancient hunters would do is just chase them literally until they dropped and they would stab them.
There's some pretty fucking trippy videos of guys doing that today in Africa.
This is really downplayed too, just because it's the YouTube.
When I go in the studio and see what they've done with it, and you get to play the game, the end game, they have whole teams that do the environment, whole teams that do buildings, everything you can go into.
There's not a door in the game that you can't walk into and have some type of...
If you want to talk about people that work hard, nobody works like, well, I don't want to say nobody, but they work some insane fucking long hours, man.
Putting together a video game, some really time-intensive stuff.
Well, you were in a strange position, too, because you were a guy who came to martial arts sort of late in life.
So you came into it late in life as a great athlete who's learning all the different aspects of MMA, all the different martial arts techniques, and then competing in the highest level of the sport pretty much right away.
Well, it's also when you're a master at one of those things, like sort of how Damian Maia is with jiu-jitsu, he's such a master at it, that all those other things, you know, he just has to be proficient enough so he can get you in a position where he can use his mastery.
And had it on such a high level that anybody he gets to the ground with is pretty fucked.
You're in a real bad spot.
But your path was the path of the ultimate fighter.
That TV show, and not just people that are on the TV show, but people that do well in the smaller circuit, smaller shows, and then they get a couple fights under their belt, and they start looking good, and then they get the call.
Hey, we need a fight.
Someone needs to fight this guy on...
Three weeks notice.
You're willing to do this.
That's how a lot of guys get into the UFC. Fallouts.
Someone from another organization looks attractive.
They've got something going on.
This guy's got potential.
But to engineer a career correctly, you would do it sort of the same way they did with Floyd Mayweather in boxing or someone along those lines.
You would take them slowly through the amateur ranks.
Develop their skills and then test them a little bit more every fight.
A little bit more.
Give them some fights where they can work on some things.
Give them a guy who's a brawler.
Give them a guy who's a boxer but he's feather fisted.
Give them a guy who, you know, he hits really hard but he fades after two or three rounds.
And there's all these different sort of tests that you can give a boxer and know when they're ready for those tests.
But yeah, so I got into it, and then as I was learning, there was a local guy down in Arizona, and he ran a little sleazy organization down there, and he was like, hey, you're big, and you look good, and I know you played football at ASU. Why don't you get in there and fight for me?
And I was like, I don't know, man.
I fought a lot growing up, but it's different.
It's different when you are in the moment, and you want to destroy someone versus some guy who's trained for you you've never met before.
And then I got $1,000 a fight in King of the Cage.
And after I took my first loss, I was still training out, kind of doing my own thing in Arizona.
It's before Bader and those guys had their own gym.
And so Kane was at AKA, and I'm from the Bay Area.
I was born and raised there, so it just made sense.
I knew Kane from college, but we weren't pals or anything.
I just knew him when I was playing football and he was wrestling.
I was like, oh, that's the heavyweight wrestler right here.
here's a bad dude and then when i heard he was at aka already and you already had koscheck swick fitch thompson aka was already aka you know and frank shamrock had already been there bob cook heading in with the ufc that kind of thing so it just made sense to move home and start training there full-time and that's what i did and within i think six months they got me on the ultimate fighter season eight and the rest is history wow wow
Yeah, there's a million changes I could have made to it, but in the end...
I'm really happy with what fighting gave me.
Fighting brought me...
I mean, I can't say, I give this all the credit here, but that doorway opened up other doorways, and those doorways opened up other doorways to me.
And that really, that was a catalyst for me having just deep peace inside.
And all these things came from...
That one little bead in fighting, you know, like wanting to do better for myself because a guy was going to punch me meant learning about meditation, learning about breath work, learning about just getting more to life, you know?
And then, oh, okay, hey...
Psychedelics can be a teacher as well.
You know, these kind of things all kind of came to me in that same timeline.
So it was sort of like the, not necessarily anxiety, but the urgency of knowing that you had to prepare for combat.
That you're constantly trying to better yourself because the consequences of not doing that are so grave that it sort of ignited this fuel for improvement in you.
I mean, when you get inspired, you fire up, you literally can feel yourself getting pumped, right?
Well, what is that?
If you hear a great song where you're working out and you're like, and you just get fucking pumped, that's a real thing, whatever that is.
Like, whatever the feeling that you get that comes along with inspiration, like, Whether it's a great movie or a great song or something that just really gets you, that energy is real.
Well, that's thousands of years people have discussed it.
Some people, oh, that's woo-woo shit, or what are you going to tell me what my fucking aura looks like?
No, I can't see your fucking aura, but I do believe we have this energy field.
In fact, there's books and there's science that back in this now.
Valerie Hunt wrote Infinite Mind.
She was a professor at UCLA, and they actually have a place in UCLA where they can conduct studies on the human energy field.
And they've mapped this out by changing things, the electromagnetism, they can make people have emotional breakdowns, lose complete loss of motor control, like they have just all of a sudden they have to sit, they can't even stand, they can't even keep themselves up.
This is an incredible Radiolab podcast where they put electrodes on this woman.
They sent her through this sniper training video game thing that they do where you have like a rifle and there's a video game in front of you and presented with all these different scenarios like a hostage takeover.
These terrorists show up.
They start shooting at you and you try to shoot the terrorists under duress.
You know, you're stressed out.
And so they take her through this thing.
She does terrible.
Everything's off, just panicky.
And then they do it when they attach these electrodes to her and stimulate with electricity parts of her head just on the outside, like transdermally.
I think it's called transdermal electrical stimulation.
That was the Radiolab podcast sort of focused on some of those people.
Like, oh, well, I went deaf for a couple days.
Like, what the fuck?
Fuck you doing your head man because they're just taking like nine volt batteries and like taping wires to their skull and Juicing themselves no fucking clue what they're doing But there's something going on and they the researchers that are working on it think that they can accentuate learning They can accentuate flow states where you get into some sort of a zen moment guaranteed you're familiar with binaural beats, right?
Yes, so Explain that for people that don't know what.
I think that came out in the 1950s.
They wanted to see what sound wave therapy could do and things like that.
So you would wear headphones or earbuds, and the basic concept, the premise would be...
I can play something at 8 hertz through your left and 12 hertz through your right, and your brain will match them in the middle at 10 hertz.
Well, 10 hertz is the frequency of alpha waves.
So our brain produces a wide variety of different waves from 0.5 delta when you're in deep sleep all the way up to beta state, which we're in right now drinking coffee and thinking.
In between that, you have an alpha state, which is closer to the Earth's resonance, the Earth's magnetic field.
Where that's like a meditative state.
So you could have a flow state there.
I know Aubrey Marcus has spoken about this.
That is the flow state range between like 7.8 to 11. Somewhere in there.
Then below that, deep meditation, theta state, pre-sleep.
And then delta.
And there's other things in there.
But basically through binaural beats, you put on these headphones.
You can listen to whatever.
The ocean or rain or any of these things.
And you would have these different...
Frequencies playing through your ears.
And in that, you basically trick your brain into producing these brain waves.
And within minutes, you feel like, oh, I just took a really nice nap.
I would think, like, archery or darts or something where you just, like, or three-pointers, you know, shooting three-pointers, where you just get to that feel.
We know every cell of our body is made from what we put in, so a lot of people don't think, oh, I eat this donut and my body will change it into what it needs to be changed into.
Bullshit.
No.
And on top of that, you influence the microbiome by what you put in your body.
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If you put in good stuff, it's easy to see, like, yeah, of course you feel better.
I had salmon the other night at a restaurant, and I said to my friend, I said to Tony, Tony Hinchcliffe, I was like, I don't think this is wild salmon.
And he said, why?
I said, because it's too light.
It's too light-colored.
They said it's wild, line-caught salmon.
I'm like, eh, not really buying it.
And I said, you know, when you see wild salmon, it's like more of a dark orange.
And he said, well, why is that?
I said, well, it's actually because of what they eat.
Well, you know, ultimately that stuff breaks down to protein and water and all the various aspects of it, but if that's all you eat...
No wonder why so many people are depressed.
If you look at the modern American diet, you look at the modern American diet, the sedentary lifestyle, and then you look at the fact that people feel like shit.
And what is depression?
Well, there's all sorts of different kinds of depression.
There's some depression that's absolutely caused by a chemical imbalance.
Your brain's sick.
You know, just like your liver can get sick and your lungs can get sick, your brain can get sick.
But there's a whole lot of depression that I guarantee has to do with people with sedentary lifestyles, shitty diet, and just no real pushing of the body, where your body never gets to flush it out, never gets to blow those hormones up, never gets to get that blood pumping.
I'd argue the brain gets sick because you let it get that way.
You stop moving, you stop putting good things in your body, and then you have this downward spiral that just snowballs into deep depression that your buddy coming over is going to cheer you up.
Whatever it is, you're not going to snap yourself out of that just overnight, and you're definitely not going to get it from popping a pill.
You've got to get off your ass and move and start getting back out in nature.
Well, two dudes that I know, one of them, he got married, fell in love, started his own business.
His business became very successful, started doing really well in life, started feeling better about himself.
And then it all sort of fell together.
And then he said, you know what, I'm going to get off these fucking pills.
And he slowly weaned himself off and he's still happy.
And the other one got successful and got more confident and then realized that the pills were probably like dulling his senses in some sort of a way and then slowly weaned himself off.
But he hasn't really got into exercise.
The other thing he did was he got off Propecia.
That Propecia shit that dudes do to keep their hair.
Yeah, well, they say that, you know, there's a balance that your hormones achieve.
And any time you fuck with that balance with something like Propecia that, you know, that blocks dihydrotestosterone, your body's like, all right, well, what the hell's going on here?
Why is this blocked?
Like, what is our issue here?
And it can cause a cascade of issues.
Like, to treat the body as anything other than a holistic approach.
If you have a holistic approach, you look at it, oh, this guy's depressed.
And, you know, it's funny, I talked to BJ Penn about this.
BJ Penn was hilarious about this.
He was talking to this guy, and the guy was like, you know, he told, you know, because BJ famously got his black belt in three years and won the Mundiales three years in, and this guy had gotten his black belt somewhere, I think, around four years.
And BJ was like, well, he goes, man, you must be really talented.
But they get addicted to, like, pushing themselves.
Like, there's a thing that comes to some people when they get involved in these heavy endurance races where part of the addiction is one more hour, five more miles, ten more miles, push.
Well, you do get into a flow state, and it does...
The longer you go...
The better it feels.
I mean, obviously, you can deal with ticky-tack injuries and things like that or whatever you got to deal with in the race, but at a certain point in time, the mental chatter quiets down and you just find your rhythm and you find your breathing.
And that can be meditative completely.
And the longer it goes, the better for people like that.
Once you're in that state, you know, I mean, I've felt that in half marathons on the last six miles.
And finish stronger in the end than I did in the first half.
You know, I'm sure runners will be like, oh yeah, of course.
If you ran more, you'd know that dummy.
But I get that.
So that's why we sign up for this 50k coming up, just for the fact, like, alright.
So training once a week, I'll go up and train with him in Dublin at CSA, and we do some heavy lower body.
It could be anything.
So we'll squat heavy one day.
We'll do heavy sumo deadlift, heavy conventional, whatever.
There's just...
It's good to train with guys that are way better than you at whatever their respective thing is.
And I feel like I can go in there and learn from him and the guys they got working out there.
That does me a lot of good.
And I love lifting.
Who doesn't want to be stronger?
Once you get a taste for that, that is an addictive thing.
And I love lifting heavy weight because I feel better throughout the week.
I just feel better as a person doing that.
When I'm in shape...
I feel better being in shape.
So going for longer distance runs and having something, you know, if there's light at the end of the tunnel, like April 9th, I'm running this 50K. That makes it easy for me to come home when I'm tired and say, I gotta get at least three miles in today.
That kind of thing.
You know, like I know this event's coming up, so I'm going to put in some road work today.
Like, I see it a lot from people when they're trying to kick.
When I see guys kicking and I see, like, stiffness and, like, a sort of general lack of fluidity in the way they move, I can tell immediately, I'm like, this guy's just not flexible enough.
They're throwing these kicks and there's all this resistance from their supporting leg, there's resistance from their kicking leg, and then there's resistance from their torso.
You can see it all as they start throwing kicks and then the kick will come up instead of go across.
The hip won't be high enough.
There won't be as much forward movement with the hip.
But there was a point in time where I did well with Dana Cormier, or times where I did well with Luke Rockhold, times where I did well with Mike Kyle and Paul Montello.
And, you know, even in my best fights in the UFC, like with Ricardo Romero, I think that was the only time I got to get interviewed by you afterwards.
It took me...
The only reason the fight turned out that way and I was able to get in the zone was because I was so sick the night before.
I fought at like 2.08.
I had fucking sweat the bed.
I was rolling around in my sweat, just soaked the bed.
This worst fever I've ever had.
And in the fight, I'm walking out and I was gassed after two minutes of warming up.
I stopped warming up in the locker room.
Completely gassed.
And I thought, like, I'm fucked.
If this thing goes longer than a minute, I'm done.
And then I realized right then, right when they shut the cage door, I have to fight.
There's nothing I can do here but fight.
And right when I made that realization, that put me in the zone because there was no thought.
That's why the fight is 23 seconds, whatever it was.
It felt like it was in slow motion.
And I could never get back to that point because I didn't have...
The technical skills mentally to do it or just the know-how of how I got there.
I knew I can look back in hindsight and say, yeah, this was the catalyst.
I had my back against the wall and I just completely let go.
I know from...
The ayahuasca ceremonies and things like that, there's a big lesson in letting go and surrendering to the process.
Don't fight it.
Just fucking go with it.
But those things didn't transfer the way I had hoped.
I talked about that before my last fight.
I hoped that the lessons I learned from ayahuasca of surrender would transfer and I would have this, like, I don't give a fuck mentality.
We're going to do this.
And looking back on that fight, I was still nervous as shit.
Even though I look at photos online, you know, Pat's going to punch me.
I wasn't afraid of getting punched.
No offense to Pat Cummins.
I wasn't afraid of getting punched by him.
Not after Glover and Manawa.
And I'm still like, eh, like I'm squeezing a loaf out, you know, right as he's about to hit me.
Like, I'm stiff, rigid, tense.
So there wasn't a transfer there of skills from the beauty of ayahuasca into the cage.
And well, with the fracture too, like even take, for example, when I had a...
One of those fights, I got fight of the night with Maldonado.
That was my only fight that year.
So I got an extra 40 grand, and I was getting 10 and 10. That's 60 grand, 10% coaches, 10% to management, pay the IRS. That's not a lot spread over the year, and it's less than a teacher.
So I needed to work, you know, and then that's kind of how it goes.
If you get hurt in a fight and you only fight that once that year, that could be the difference.
I bet it would be really hard to handle if it was a mismatch.
Like, say, if you took ayahuasca and you had this vision, and then you're supposed to fight somebody who you know, like, in your heart, was really fucked.
Like, maybe they had bad stand-up or something like that, and you knew they weren't going to be able to take you down.
Well, I mean, you still see guys know, like, they kind of snap out of it when they have the opportunity to crush someone who's lifeless and the referee still hasn't stopped them, and then they pull back.
So there's moments there, and there's also moments where you're just, you know, you got the blinders on, and it's like, finish this guy, you know, and I don't give a shit when the ref comes in.
I didn't feel the effects from the orbital fractures, but I could see the effects, right?
And then, you know, you see guys just a couple years older slowing down a little bit, and you learn about health and being holistic and nutrition and what am I doing for myself to be a better person?
How can I get more out of life?
Where's my quality of life, right?
Well, if I'm doing that, and then that's why I could drink in.
If I want to alter my consciousness, there's a better way to do it than with that shit.
The guy was talking about addiction to things, and I never felt addicted at all to drinking, but I definitely drank like an asshole, for sure, many, many times.
But he had mentioned, next time you drink, ask what you're feeding.
Everything we put in our body is feeding something.
Ask what you're feeding.
And it didn't hit me then, but later on in the ceremony, it really stuck in.
I could see all the destructive behavior of, Oh, yeah, let's party.
Let's go balls to the wall.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Slapping five and just, you know, college spring breaker, ASU type, jock, meathead, you know, more, more, more, more, more.
And then just the destruction, the toll it was taking on me.
You know, especially as you get older.
Like, you can drink like that when you're young.
But you get to 30...
Something stops working.
Your hangovers last a little longer, you know, everything, it's harder to keep up.
I think when you're young, like, I remember being hungover when I was young, but I was so unaware of how that, like, what I put in, how it affected my body.
I just thought of myself as, like, I was in such a fog of confusion when I was young, just trying to get through life, that I don't think I was aware of my body like I am aware of now.
Now if I do things, like just changing my diet, I'm really tuned in to what kind of effect is happening, if any.
I'm trying to figure it out.
I'm much more aware.
When I was in my 20s, I don't know if I necessarily recovered from hangovers better, but I didn't notice it as much because I was just dumb.
Actually, hearing Graham Hancock talk about his relationship on your podcast with cannabis and how ayahuasca showed him that, and he quit for a while until coming back on the podcast and spoken with you, which I thought was great.
If you treat it with respect and you have an intention and a reason why you're doing it.
There's a time and a place for, man, I just want to get bombed and feel out of this world or I'm going to push the envelope and maybe do a mega dose and jump into a float tank, which I still need to try.
But, you know, for the most part, you can have relatively small amounts of things like that and completely improve your quality of life with zero repercussion.
Because you put in the time and you have the right intention of, this is what I want to use it for.
So when you look back at your career and you look back at all these wars and all these crazy fights that you got in, do you think about the damage?
Is it something you just put aside and you know that there probably was some done and just move forward and stay positive and be healthy from here on out?
Here's one thing that I... I disagree with people when they say, like, you know, when we grew up, they said, oh, hey, you have a set number of brain cells, and whatever you lose, you're not going to get back.
So we now know that's bullshit.
Like, our brain can create new cells.
Neurogenesis happens.
And the more you do, the more new stuff you do, whether it's learning an instrument or a new language or taking a different trail to hike, whatever, that helps strengthen these new pathways, right?
And make you smarter and just keep your brain young.
I don't think for one second that anything that I've done in my career can't be overcome or that I can't really feel like from diets like this and supplementing with MCTs and different things like that, I feel quicker now and sharper now than I ever have in my life mentally.
So that's good.
But that said, I don't look back and say, oh, this did this to me.
I look back and say, I don't want to do more of that.
I had a conversation with a dude last night at the Comedy Store.
It was really funny because it was hilarious because the dude was hammered, right?
He's like, man, I fucking tried Alpha Brain, but shit, I don't know if it worked.
I go, okay, define worked.
Like, what are you doing?
I was just fucking, you know, I'm just hanging out, man, but it didn't feel any difference.
I go, okay.
It's not going to make you smarter.
The idea behind it is, if you're involved in a task, like for me, Alpha brain and nootropics are really critical for me because I rely on my memory a lot.
Like when I'm doing the UFC, it's a big factor.
I'm constantly bringing up past fights and I'm constantly talking about different situations and transitions and, you know, this happens when you do that or that.
And there's all these like connections that I have to make in my brain.
So verbal memory, recalling fights, things like that.
Nootropics are critical for that kind of thing.
But if you don't have anything that requires your memory, How do you know if it's working?
If you don't have anything that requires you to form sentences on the fly, how do you know if it's working?
So I think he just had a silly idea.
I think he thought that he was going to take this stuff and all of a sudden he's like, man, I know what I'm doing with my life!
But it was hilarious because he was fucking hammered.
The dude was hammered.
He's like, I don't know if I felt it.
I'm like, okay, dude.
First of all, How shit-faced are you right now?
He's like, I'm pretty drunk.
So I'm like, well, this conversation is going to be weird anyway.
You're probably not going to remember what I'm saying.
But if you had to do something, it was important.
And I explained all the different things that's been shown clinically in double-blind, placebo-controlled studies to improve on.
These are statistics.
When you can show it with 60 people and you can show that the people that take it have these effects versus the people that don't take it, this is where it will help you.
But it's not going to just make you smarter.
But for someone who relies on their mind a lot, whether it's for creativity or...
For me, I like to take it now even before I work out.
I started doing it before I work out now.
And I'm noticing less fatigue.
My mind stays fresh longer.
Like in grueling long-term workouts...
Like a long series of pad workouts.
I can maintain my concentration like deep into the 7th, 8th, and 9th round of hitting pads.
I don't fade off as much.
Like where I can't remember the combinations.
You know how you get so tired, you're like, okay, what is it again?
Double jab, right hand, left hook, right kick, step knee.
Got it.
And then, you know, you're into the left hook and you're like, what the fuck is next?
Because you're so tired.
Your brain doesn't work that good.
So I think mental fatigue can contribute to physical fatigue.
They're a few bucks a piece, so I usually just do them at night when the ketones are highest just to make sure that I'm nutritionally there.
MCT oil is usually worn off by that point, so I can tell like am I producing my own ketones as opposed to just getting it artificially raised from the MCTs.
I mean, if you're sending resources to build a human, and you want that steady flow, it makes sense the body would produce that in a situation like that, just in case you ran out of carbohydrates.
It is interesting because women oftentimes when they're pregnant, they crave really fatty foods like they crave ice cream and things along those lines.
Now, say if you're in this ketogenic state and you eat some carbohydrates, you eat like a big bowl of pasta, how much does it whack you out of that ketogenic state?
Because I've been in and out of it for as long as I have and because I work out the way you work out, you know, high-intensity stuff with kettlebells or I'll go for a distance run, whatever, and then still train on the mat.
That's high-intensity when you're grappling.
I had a Saturday, we went off the deep end.
I had like two gluten-free pizzas with Tosh and we had a bunch of gluten-free cookies and a freaking liter of this awesome grass-fed milk.
Loaded with carbs.
I mean, I probably had 500 grams of carbohydrates.
In a ketogenic diet, between 30 and 50 during the keto adaptation phase, which is 6 to 8 weeks.
And then after that, you can play.
But that's the whole reason you check.
Because if you're doing 50 grams a day thinking, hey, I'm within my limit, and you're still at 0.3, 0.4, Fuck what somebody else tells you.
That's when it's time to dial it down a bit.
Or maybe my carbohydrates are fine, but I'm still not in ketosis.
That means you're eating too much protein.
Or maybe I need to add more fat to my meals so the ratio is there.
When they talked about it at John Hopkins, they were talking about for the kids with epilepsy, a 4 to 1 ratio of fat to protein and carbohydrates combined.
Now that's pretty hard to do.
If you think of how many...
You eat a steak, there's 50 grams of protein and there's equal amount of fat, let's say.
Now I have to multiply that by four.
And if there's any carbohydrates to add to that, then I add that to the total for the four to one ratio.
So you're going to have just ridiculous amounts of fat to accomplish that.
And the thing is, you know, most diets, people, I've tried a ton of different diets.
This one, you feel good because you can eat as much as you want.
Like when Dave Asprey talks about eating 4,500 calories a day and working out, whatever he said, 15 minutes a fucking month or whatever, some nonsense.
But when you talk to the Instagram wizards, these dieticians in training, they'll tell you, bro, you need fucking carbohydrates to operate your brain, bro.
It's Gatorade that's doing a lot of the studies on carbohydrate performance.
They're the guys that also proved, oh, this is the tipping point for fat oxidation in an hour, even though they use people that have been in ketosis for two weeks instead of two years.
So when you talk about guys like Jeff Finney and Steve Volok who've been doing this research now since the 80s and Using athletes that have been keto adapted for a while.
That's when you really begin to see like oh shit Okay, this can work and not just from a physical standpoint Like I said the thing that I get mostly from it is the mental it's the it's the sharpness and Dominic D'Agostino was talking about how you can go on way less sleep But there's some type of thing that ketones do with the brain where you actually are more rested even if you were sleep deprived.
So if you had five or six hours of sleep, you could still wake up feeling refreshed and have your sharpness in the morning.
Well, there's also awesome, and then there's better than awesome.
You know, like some people say, like, hey, I've been on this kind of diet and I feel fantastic, so I'm just going to keep it the way it is.
Well, meanwhile, if you added a certain thing to your diet or added a little bit more vitamin D or added a little bit more, you might feel actually better.
Like, your idea of what awesome is.
I think a lot of times it's like, have you ever had water in your ear and you think everything's okay?
Like, oh, this is how I hear.
And then, you know, it pops and you go, oh, I could hear like this.
Like, you weren't even considering that you were hearing like shit.
I've brought this article up more than once, but I read this article written by this woman who's 70 years old, struggled with weight her whole life, and she was promoting fat acceptance, and that people are prejudiced towards people that are overweight, but in fact, she's incredibly healthy, and she's so active, and she does all these things.
She's just always been heavy, and I'm like, mm.
See, scientifically, that doesn't make any sense.
It just doesn't.
Like, if you're eating healthy foods and your body's healthy, you shouldn't be storing that much extra fat.
It just doesn't make any sense.
But she's promoting it in this article, like, if you didn't know any better and just took this article, it's like, well, this is this one woman's account of her life, and by her accounts, she's incredibly healthy.
She's hiking, and she's so active, and she's eating healthy, but she's just fat.
Right, like you're letting go of a thought that you had, like this attachment that you had.
Yeah, I mean, there's a certain holier-than-thou attitude that certain people with great metabolisms and active lifestyles will have towards people that maybe they just, when they grew up, they weren't led towards athletics.
Maybe they were bullied.
Maybe they had poor diets in the home, they didn't know any better, and now here they find themselves X amount of years later, a product to a whole series of things.
Like, how could she fucking do that to me, that bitch?
Well, she doesn't owe you.
She's not attracted to you.
Like, you've got, for whatever reason, the universe dealt you an extremely shitty deck of cards.
And that's just the way it is.
But, so, forever, this person that I know that has this issue, his association with women is of women, they use him, they want things from him, his money, they don't want him, and they treat him badly, and he feels like shit and hateful.
Whereas...
I have friends that are good looking guys that there's no reason.
They were just born good looking.
They just got great bone structure, and they happen to look good.
And women are attracted to them.
And their ideas of women are totally different.
Their ideas of women are, hey, chicks are fun.
They're great.
Don't get tied down, though, bro.
Keep it open.
Move free.
You know, like, their ideas of women are much more light and, like, women are, they're a gift.
They're a great thing in life.
They're not this evil...
So this, like, this association can often be correlated by what kind of a relationship do you have with the opposite sex.
Like if you're a woman and you're overweight and you've always been fat, your whole life has been like a series of drunken moments with men who felt sick after they were with you and you were rejected and any man that you were attracted to wanted to have nothing to do with you.
So your feelings about men are just this, ugh!
They're angry, these assholes, these bros, these douchebags.
Not taking into consideration like, well, what is this relationship you have with him and what's the root cause of it?
Some of it is outside of your, if it's just genetics, completely outside of your control.
There's nothing you can do about the way your face looks or how tall you are or how short you are or how big your feet are.
You know, there's nothing you can do about that.
The relationship between how what you look and how physically attractive you are sexually like people's desire to reproduce with you it really comes down to that in a lot of ways like what is the relationship you have with the opposite sex because boy When you go and really pay attention to, like, hardcore feminists, what you find is a lot of older, successful women and women that are overweight and not attractive.
And you find, you know, all sorts of different people in between there.
But there's an overwhelming number of people that have not had good success with the opposite sex, both from women-hating men and from men-hating women.
And it's, like, extremely unfortunate.
If you look at it that way, it's extremely unfortunate.
Taking out gender inequality, financial issues, all sorts of issues that also come with being a male men's rights advocate or a woman's rights advocate, a feminist, there's an overall attitude that people have an issue with when it comes to someone who identifies with one gender or another gender and despises the other gender.
Oftentimes, it's because their associations and relationships with that gender have been negative due to the fact that they're not desired.
But it's also, the girls that he likes, they never really were into him.
Just not attractive.
He got a shit roll of the dice.
Yeah.
His roll of the dice sucks.
I don't know where I'm going with this.
But what I'm trying to say is...
I'm not trying to say anything, but if I was trying to say anything, I would try to say like there's there's a lot of complex issues that are going on with how people feel both about themselves and how they feel about other people.
And oftentimes what they blame other people for is really some shit that's going on with them.
Like they find enemies out there, external enemies to distract themselves from their internal problems and failures and shortcomings.
Every fucking evil, nasty douchebag that seeks you out to say mean shit to you after a loss and tweets at you.
I mean, I've seen some horrific shit that guys write to fighters directly after a loss, both on Facebook and on Instagram, Twitter, everything.
Those people are all unsuccessful.
They're all failures.
All of them.
That's the only reason why they would do that.
It's one thing to say, man, that fucking guy, he got killed.
Or, man, that guy got tapped quick.
Or, how good is this guy?
Man, I can't believe he ran through that guy like this.
Those are almost analytical discussions that you have with people where things happen and you didn't see it coming.
Like, okay, Ryan Bader versus Rumble Johnson.
Like that fight.
Without saying anything horrible about...
Ryan Bader, you'd go, fuck man, Rumble Johnson, Jesus Christ, you just ran him over, man.
Fuck, who can take that guy's shots?
And you, that's like a non-asshole-ish way of approaching it.
But good Lord, I read some shit online that people tweeted to him, to Bader, and like, you fucking, you should be in a jail somewhere.
You're a monster.
You're looking at this guy like here's a downed, wounded thing, and I'm gonna just piss on him.
I'm gonna find a spot, a soft spot, and I'm gonna jab him with sticks.
I'm gonna see if I can fuck with his head.
Anybody who does that, those people that are doing that, those haters, they're all losers.
It's the saddest thing about it.
It's like they're looking at this one person, this one thing, this object that they can attack, and they're externalizing all the issues they have with themselves, the imbalances they have.
And this new ability that we have to reach people and communicate with people that really don't want to have anything to do with you.
In the real world, Ryan Bader doesn't give a fuck about this guy's opinion.
Greenflower Media did a thing on me talking about cannabis and CBD and how many guys in the sport use and just not naming names and Jose Canseco-ing it, but talking about a lot of a smoked pot.
It helps us sleep at night.
It helps turn off our brain when we're overthinking shit.
And you got something big coming up.
More than, obviously now with USADA and things like that, there's a lot less.
And then, you know, we grew up in a much more technologically advanced era, but our kids are going to grow up in an era that's mind-blowing to us, but their kids are going to grow up in an era of virtual reality that makes this look like a joke.
It makes our video games look stupid.
You know, yeah, my dad's always bragging about how awesome Mafia 3 was.
Yeah, we're probably gonna go to places just like those old Schwarzenegger movies or any of those movies.
You're gonna probably go to a place, you're gonna lie down, they're gonna clamp some shit down on the side of your head and you go, are you ready, Mr. Kingsbury?
Give me the thumbs up if you're ready to launch.
You give the thumbs up and you're in the Avatar world and you're riding a fucking dragon.
That's gonna happen inside of the next hundred years.
It's 100% gonna happen.
It's just a matter of time.
If they keep going, we don't blow ourselves up, we don't get hit by an asteroid, they're gonna come up with artificial reality that's indistinguishable from this reality.
And all of our entertainment is going to be a joke.
Like, why would you actually jump out of a plane and go skydiving when you can get the skydiving experience with this thing on your head that's going to make you feel like you did?
And cities are this bizarre, strange, different kind of life.
Like, I was in Manhattan last weekend.
It's fucking awesome!
It's awesome to visit.
You go there, you're like, you're going from one place to another, and this restaurant, that building, and look at this view, and holy shit, and get on the subway, and you're fucking cruising along under the buildings, and it's awesome!
But it's awesome in a completely different way.
It's awesome in this new way, this new bizarre way that we're sort of adapting to.
And this new way is available to us and wasn't available to people 10,000 years ago.
This is like a mind blower.
If you took someone from 10,000 years ago and brought them to Manhattan and just put them in the 72nd floor of one of those apartment buildings with a crazy view and just look out.
Look out at the city and be like...
What in the fuck am I seeing?
You know?
Like, you've been to Vegas.
You ever been to, like, the top of the Mandalay Bay?
That bar that's up there that has the crazy view and the glass floor?
But I'm willing to bet from somebody who sits too long or has stress, you know, and different things like that, like, there very much can be a physical attachment to emotion.
And if you've ever had, like, bodywork done and somebody, you have a, you know, somebody's working through a knot and you all of a sudden start thinking of this thing that's been bothering you.
In your head.
Relationship, whatever.
There is physical attachments to mental and emotional things that go on in your head.
From a feel-good standpoint, feeling better at the ocean might just be the view.
But from an electrical standpoint, there are, and this goes back to the studies done at UCLA, there very much is an electrical standpoint that changes from the ionic energy coming from the waves, coming from the water, coming from the wind that's above the water.
That seems to be ingrained in our idea of feeding cities.
It seems like the only way they can produce enough meat to feed all these fucking people in these cities, the way they're doing it now, is to continue this factory farming method.
Like if you spend a little extra, you're going to feel better from it.
But also you're going to help change the culture.
And they show Walmart having an organic yogurt or something on the shelves just because there's demand there.
I mean, if you're going to Costco here in California, they have all kinds of organic shit in Costco, mass produced, wide scale for cheap because there's a demand for it.
You go there in Arizona or Nevada, maybe not the same.
Whole Foods is going to have Whole Foods, but from giant companies like that, they're listening.
And it's just a matter of money.
If people are willing to spend it and this is what they want, they're going to supply it, period.
Yeah, but there's also those ag-gag laws that keep people from filming factory farms where they pack these chickens into these horrible living conditions and you can't film it.
Imagine just living there, like working there rather, like someone who works in there, like the sadness you feel every day and the smells that you take in through your nose every day.
You know, I was on the highway once and I passed this truck and it was stuffed with chickens.
It was just madness.
I was looking at this truck.
It was like, you know, there were some openings where the chickens could breathe, like some small holes in the side of the truck, and you're just realizing this is like a thing that's packed with life that's being treated like a commodity, like stacked rocks, you know?
It's bizarre.
It's bizarre to see a truck just driving down the road, just stacked bottom to top with living things that are just...
It's going to get either ground up or chopped up or, you know...
Well, it's what happened when we made these city things.
This is also something that didn't exist 10, 20,000 years ago.
When they had any kind of agriculture back then, you grew some livestock, you killed those animals, you knew where they lived, you knew what they ate, or you knew the guy who raised them.
And it was real simple.
And then somewhere along the line, someone said, we need like a Costco of farming.
We need to get a big place and stuff everything in there and close it to the general public so nobody can see and jab these fuckers with needles and fill them up with antibiotics so they don't get sick from all this crazy food we're giving them.
Boy, the change from that...
People are much more aware now and they're asking for free-range food and antibiotic-free food and grass-fed meats and things along those lines, but most people can't afford it.
They had a little assembly, and all the kids do their little thing.
And she had this big thing that she was, like, really proud of.
She had to announce something and say part of this little thing that they were going to do, part of this song.
They're doing a song about...
Different languages and speaking French and speaking Spanish.
And so she has to go up and do this little thing.
It's just like this little proud moment.
And afterwards, she's like beaming and she's so happy.
She's five, you know, and she runs up to me and jumps in my arms and gives me this big hug.
The love that you get from that, the feeling that you get of warmth and of love and of connection with this little tiny beautiful human, boy, it's like nothing else like it.
And then you also recognize, and this was one of the big ones for me, as my children got older and I started...
Putting it all, sort of trying at least to put the pieces of it all together.
I started looking at people like they're babies.
Like, oh, this fucked up dude who's all angry at the world and just devastated and just emotionally a wreck.
That was a baby.
That was a baby that just didn't get the love that he needed.
Or a baby that was abused, or a baby that was neglected, or a baby that was rejected, like, whatever it was, this fucked up person, now, in my mind, became a baby.
Like, crazy people.
Like, I'd see a girl, you know, on top of a bar with a fucking top off.
Fuck yeah!
Woo!
That's a baby.
That's a baby that became that.
Any asshole guy, you know, is fucking screaming at people in traffic and pointing out, I'll follow you to your fucking house.
That's a baby.
That's a baby that became this asshole.
It's just this developmental process that goes off the rails and into the forest and it's fucked up.
To get it back on track is insanely difficult.
Insanely.
And the work that's required, most people are not willing to do DMT. Most people are not willing to, you know, to change their diet and to take yoga every morning and to fucking get up early and meditate for 20 minutes every day to try to be mindful.
Most people are just acting on momentum, just scrambling and...
I was listening to you and Red Band talk about this and mescaline and things like that and peyote and I was like, man, I can't believe with having tried other things that you didn't try that.
Jim Fadiman, who wrote The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, I heard him on Ferris' podcast, got his book, read it, and then I saw that MAPS was doing the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, was doing a presentation in Palo Alto down the street from me, and Rick Doblin, the head of MAPS, was going to be there presenting with Jim Fadiman.
I was like, oh, this is amazing, I gotta go.
Once you've had a breakthrough psychedelic experience, it's amazing.
It can be life-changing or it can fuck your mind up, whatever.
You can take that for what it is.
A large portion of his book was on microdosing.
And in microdosing, they were talking about taking a sub...
Sub-perceptual breakthrough level.
So, meaning, like, I don't see shit, I just feel and think differently.
And he said that's really the future of psychedelic research, and that's exactly what Hoffman was doing until he died at 102 years old, the guy who developed LSD. So we went and I listened to these guys speak, and since then I have tried microdosing with LSD, and it is phenomenal.
It's almost like a smart drug in itself, but you feel good.
You have energy.
You can see why people might do it at a festival or a concert.
Everything sounds a little more clear.
Music sounds better.
I could see myself running on it.
You can still interact.
I could talk to cops on it.
You're fine to communicate and to be, but you do think differently.
The problem with acid is the people that want to do acid with you, you don't want to do acid with them.
Yeah, I gotta go dude.
It's all these weird people that are pushing it and they want it like Duncan is the only guy that I know that gets real acid and we've sort of made a loose Commitment to me and him getting together and doing it one day.
I'll definitely talk about it, but The thing that I've been really into that I get these big breakthrough objective moments introspective moments is edible pot And flotation chambers.
There's something about sensory deprivation with the edible pot.
It creates this bizarre Sort of hallucinogenic state, visionary state, that's very unusual.
And there's this weird fractal thing that's constantly going on.
But every time I do it, it seems like these lessons that are wrapped up in these visions with communicating entities, whatever the fuck they are, whether they're figments of your imagination or whether they're real, there's always lessons in there.
And these lessons are always pertaining to either a personal history That I got going on or something that I'm struggling with or trying to overcome or something that I'm constantly focusing on and trying to understand better.
They're letting you, like, why are you even taking this in?
Like, you know, why are you even concentrating on that?
This is pointless.
There's so much more.
And then when you get past that level of the experience, it blossoms into some new level of the experience.
So the DMT state is very DMT-like.
But the cannabis, the edible cannabis, the 11-hydroxymetabolite state that you get from edible cannabis, which is dose per dose five times more psychoactive than THC. That's why people, when they eat it, they trip out and they go, oh my god, I think somebody laced it with something.
No, it's very much like an intense psychedelic when you eat it.
That's why you've got to be careful and not eat too much.
People that fucking freak out and have panic attacks, it's because it's strong as shit when you eat it.
But in the tank, Sometimes I go on these journeys that I'm in the forest and I can hear other languages and I understand them and I don't know what the fuck they are.
And sometimes I'm a part of a ball of yarn that the universe is made out of.
And each individual fiber that's in this gigantic strand that's a part of this wrapped up ball of yarn is all the individual atoms that make up being a person or a tree or a book or a rock and all these different things are intertwined and it shows you the fractal nature of reality from the lowest Subatomic particle to the the biggest planet in the solar system to the biggest galaxy in the universe and it just goes out
there in this very strange and humbling and bizarre like a Vulnerable like vulnerability inducing state and then it'll go from that to cartoons fucking like it'll go like neon cartoons Banging each other and producing a bunch of other neon car.
Tasha and I have had him at the beach, and we had a monster dose one time after ayahuasca has really kind of improved other psychedelic experiences for both of us.
And I was thinking, are they going to take our shit?
Are they going to try to steal?
Are they going to have to fight someone?
This is weird.
This is a place not a lot of people go to.
And I kept seeing that.
And then I had to take a deep breath.
And Toshka was like, feel me.
Feel my energy.
She could feel what's going on.
She's like, are you okay?
I'm like, is somebody going to come?
She's like, no.
What are you talking about?
She's playing with fucking sea turtle bugs and shit, whatever.
She's in heaven.
She's looking over at me.
I'm like, am I okay?
She's like, seriously, you're fine.
Don't worry.
You're fine.
I was like, okay.
And I put my head back down.
And I kept seeing.
Then this young kid kind of comes through the crowd.
He's going to challenge me.
And he walks down.
I'm like...
Oh, fuck, I gotta defend us.
I gotta fight.
And I know how fucked up I am.
I can't believe I gotta defend myself.
And I'm like, it's playing out in my mind all the ways that I'm gonna have to fight this guy.
And I realized right then, like, I stand up, open my eyes, like, oh, fuck, it's just a vision.
And I was like, my heart's racing.
I'm like, why would I think that?
And then I realized every fucking day of my life since I was a little kid, I play that out.
Anytime someone gives me a dirty look or says, like, whatever, being picked on as a kid, bullied, that kind of shit, like, I always play that out, like, am I gonna have to fight this guy?
Am I gonna have to fucking defend myself?
How's it gonna play out?
Oh, he's...
He's got a long fucking neck.
I'm gonna take his back and choke him out.
Whatever, you know what I'm saying?
But it just showed me how silly this dumbass mind game that I would play, and I would go down the rabbit hole on a fucking daily basis sometimes.
Like, just playing into this thought of negativity that had no space for me.
And it does me no good to play that out.
Like, well, that's fine, because then I'll do this.
No, no, no.
None of that shit.
I'm wasting time, and I'm becoming emotionally attached to those thoughts.
It's not just, oh, I'm thinking about this.
I'm feeling like I'm in a fight right now.
That fucks you up.
That turns you into not your best version of yourself.
So that vision from Mushrooms was just a fucking game changer.
It doesn't stop me from having those thoughts, but it allows me to catch myself.
You're not going to not know when it's getting ugly.
I always say that about cops.
Sometimes I bet certain people, whether it's the people that deal with the cops or certain people that are cops, things happen that don't need to happen because people have these ideas or have these patterns that are playing on in their head.
And for a cop, I would imagine it's got to be incredibly difficult because you're dealing with all these people that are constantly breaking laws and violating things and you're supposed to enforce them and you're constantly worried about getting shot and getting home to your family.
You're constantly worried about pulling some guy over and he's got fucking 20 pounds of coke in the back and a machine gun in his front seat.
You don't know because his windows are tinted.
And you're like, sir, roll down your window, and you get your hand on your gun, and you're like, what the fuck am I getting into here?
And then these patterns that people have, whether it's as a police officer or as a person getting pulled over by cops, they can change the way you interact with people and change the circumstances of the day and turn a tragedy into a nothing or a nothing into a tragedy.
This idea that there's a perfect person, this is an enlightened being.
There are people that choose to go down certain paths that will lead to them making better decisions, lead to them living a more harmonious life.
But you're just a monkey.
You're just some fucking talking ape that's on this planet filled with contradictions and chaos, and you're trying to get through, like all of us are.
And there's gonna be interrelationship drama, and work drama, and fucking community drama, and neighborhood drama, and sometimes you'll be too stressed out, or too tired, or too distracted, or too overworked, or whatever the fuck it is, and you're gonna have a bad reaction to those things.
It doesn't define you.
That's a real problem that people have, though, is one bad reaction, like you yell at your neighbor, and your neighbor, fuck you, and the cops come.
You piece of shit, I'm gonna slash your tires and fuck you.
And these things that happen, I got a buddy of mine last night explaining to me something that he got into with his neighbor, and he accused his neighbor of slashing his tire, and he fucking yelled at his neighbor, and then he got his car picked up by AAA, they changed his tire, they go, you hit a curb.
So he had hit a curb and deflated his tire and he was blaming his neighbor.
I was like, are you going to talk about this on stage?
He was like, I can't.
I'm too embarrassed now.
I'm not ready to like...
This isn't funny to me yet.
He's like telling me because we're friends and we're both laughing.
I'm like, fuck, man.
Did you apologize to him?
He was like, not yet.
He was like, god damn it.
I don't know what to do.
Like, because his neighbor would get pissed because he parked in front of his house, and the guy had trash cans, and he's like, you're parking too close to my trash cans, I can't get my trash cans out.
I was like, what?
And so he goes out, he finds this note on his car, and his tire's flat, and he assumed that the guy wrote the note flat in his tire.
He's a good guy, but he fucked up.
Fuck-ups.
But if you took those fuck-ups and it's all you concentrate on your whole life, all the times you fucked up.
You will fucking fall into the path of that instead of having the humility or at least...
Getting a little help from an outside source that allows you to take a step back, pull the blinders off and see what's going on and be like, you know what, man, I fucked up.
That's also why objectivity is so important and introspective thought is so important because sometimes people just make excuses for everything they do.
Everything they do, they have a fucking excuse for.
So you never get the lessons.
You never get the growth.
You never learn.
You just constantly repeat.
Constantly repeat.
And then one day you're a bitter old man yelling at these kids to stop with their fucking rock and roll music and your goddamn car driving down my street with your loud muffler.