Brandon Epstein, a former college football player turned performance coach, reveals how hypnosis, NLP, and psychedelics rewired his clients’ minds—like UFC fighter Sean Brady—to crush self-doubt and injuries. Epstein’s Program to Fail (formerly The Success Code) blends neuroscience with Eastern medicine, using techniques like visualization to boost muscle strength without exercise, while Rogan highlights the UFC’s free Paramount Plus deal as a game-changer for accessibility. They debate cannabis’ role in fighting, from pain relief to altered states, and whether belief alone can heal trauma or just mask it, citing placebo studies and Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill’s advocacy. Epstein’s approach—experiential over academic—suggests elite performance hinges on dismantling subconscious blocks, not just physical training. [Automatically generated summary]
The episode of Guys We've Had On, Fall into the Camp, who had their YouTube channel deleted, and were talking about wellness, like doctors talking about COVID stuff.
The world of medicine is interesting because you've got so many positives, right?
Like people are healthier.
They live longer today than they ever have been before.
If you get certain diseases, they have cures for it that didn't exist before.
But there's financial incentives involved in prescribing medications that maybe people don't fucking need because they can make more money if more people take these drugs.
And that's the problem.
Like there's, we got to separate the baby from the bathwater and know what to throw out, right?
And it's, you can't throw out medicine.
Like, that's crazy.
It's amazing.
Like, what these pharmaceutical drug companies in coordination with all these brilliant scientists have created is the greatest medicine system the human race has ever known.
At least probably as long as maybe the Mayans knew some shit.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, yeah, maybe some like civilizations that collapsed because the Europeans gave them all fucking smallpox, ironically.
Who knows what the Egyptians knew?
You know, who knows what those people knew about health and about medicine.
But what we know today is that there's incredible stuff that comes out of the pharmaceutical drug companies.
But also, they fucking lie to you.
They also, they'll publish fake studies or not fake studies, but they'll publish studies that they've engineered to be successful, even though they're not going to be.
They'll hide data that shows that it causes side effects.
They want to make money.
And it's not the people that are making the medicine.
That's what's crazy.
Like, the people that are making the medicine are fucking geniuses.
It's the money people.
It's always the money people in everything.
And that's the same thing with YouTube.
And that's the same thing with everything.
It's the money people.
And there's, there's, when you have a giant corporation, you have like all kinds of stuff going on.
But the number one thing that's going on is everybody has to make more money every quarter.
We're experiencing it a little bit in the comedy community because, and this is, by the way, this is like a normal thing that happens to young comedians.
They want to be further than they are.
Maybe they think they deserve more than they're getting.
They think they deserve more shows, better spots on shows.
And it does happen.
And then there's also, you know, like there's a competitive drive involved in it.
So there's a little bit of delusion, a little bit of a competitive drive.
It's very similar, I would imagine, to fighters.
First of all, we just tell everybody, success code, you're a mind coach.
He talked about this openly, but after the Bilal fight, that's when we started working together.
And it was because, I think this happens to a lot of fighters, a lot of high achievers, is he built this identity of being unbeatable, right?
So all his belief that was wired around who he was was, I am unbeatable.
And so when he lost, everything shattered.
And so he was broken.
He didn't know how to pick up the pieces after that.
It was like, how is this possible?
I believe I'm unbeatable, but then I lost.
And so we literally had to go into his nervous system.
And it's almost like clearing out, almost like we're doing surgery at an energetic level of clearing out all the bullshit around these new beliefs that are starting to form like in the confusion of like, I am beatable.
Well, am I going to lose my next fight?
And we had to clear all that and bring him back into that state of being of I'm unbeatable again.
When we first started, we would send stuff out to third-party labs to get it analyzed, right?
And we were finding all sorts of things in it that aren't supposed to be in there.
Like different vitamins, creatine, all kinds of shit that's just not supposed to be in there.
Like, why is this stuff in there?
This doesn't make any sense.
And this is what you hear about with tainted supplements with fighters all the time.
So what happens is we found out that some of these companies that mix your products for you, say if you have like some B3K2 supplement, you put them all together, they're mixing them in the same bin where they're making steroids.
They're mixing them in the same bin where they're making creatine.
You just got to find a company that has like a great history of a bunch of people that have tested their stuff and that use their stuff.
And Pure seems to be one of those companies.
I mean, I'm just using that name because I use it, but there's a ton of like super legit supplement companies where you know if you're going to get 10,000 milligrams of D3, that's exactly what it is.
They're just above board.
They know what the fuck they're doing.
Like everything else, man.
Like you can get the shittiest car in the world or you can get a fucking Mercedes.
But it's like that real animalistic primal part of yourself that comes out and goes, I couldn't even constantly tell you why, but like, I can't go there.
But what we want to do is we want to get to them in place where they're matter of fact about what they read, which sounds like almost impossible for a lot of people who are listening right now.
Like, what do you mean?
This person's talking shit about me.
But Brady is matter of fact about this now.
Like, truthfully, he's wired in a way that where someone starts to talk some shit about him, he can laugh about it.
He can just matter of factly not be emotional about it.
Well, it could be until you take into consideration the second Kamaru Usman fight because Usman couldn't take him down.
That fight was primarily a stand-up fight because Leon's takedown defense had gotten so good.
And I think there was that bump in confidence after the knockout, and he really felt like the champion now.
So for Bilal to just step in and put a stop to all that, and then, you know, to see then him lose the title to Jack Della and then see what Sean just did.
And you look at the whole thing, you're like, what a crazy shark tank of all these killers.
Leon Edwards, Bilal Muhammad, Della Madalena.
Now you got Islam Makachev in there.
And it's like, who can keep it together the most is a giant factor.
Michael Venom Page was at one point in time the best karate point fighters.
And the way karate point fighters fight, they stop after one person gets hit.
It's kind of like an elite form of tag with lethal weapons.
Like these guys are fucking good at these launches forward and blitzes and they're really good at getting out of the way because guys are blitzing at them all the time.
So because of the style of the competition, they developed this very unique skill set of being able to close the distance extremely fast with a lot of a lot of distance in between them and land very unpredictable shots.
Like he's super creative.
And he also knows how to wrestle now and he also knows jiu-jitsu now.
So like now he's a mixed martial arts fighter, but he's got this one skill set that's crazy unique.
And I always said that's the thing that's missing in MMA because we see what happens when you get like a really elite boxer.
We've seen what happens with a really elite kickboxer, a really elite jiu-jitsu guy or wrestler.
We haven't seen really elite point fighter who learns all those other skills because it's a different thing.
It's not like, you know, Pereira fights.
He's not moving around a lot, dude.
He's coming right at you.
There's not a lot of dancing and it's not a lot of, you know, fucking, there's not a lot of San Hagen moves.
You know, San Hagen is like constantly giving you different looks and overloading your mind.
Pereira's stalking you, right?
It's very, what MVP is doing is something totally different.
Like you can't even touch him.
He's hitting guys like guys that have like a lot of experience in the UFC.
He's hitting him with shots they don't see coming.
They can't hit him.
Kevin Holland was like, where the fuck is he?
I can't even find him.
This is nuts.
The guy just launches himself at you, pops, you cracks you, and then he's gone.
And you're like, okay.
He's moving way faster than anybody you've ever fought before and covers way more distance quicker than anybody you've ever fought before.
It's like the difference between someone who is like standing in front of people and knocking sticks and an elite fencer.
This is Raymond Daniels, who's also, he was an elite point fighter who then went on and had big success in Glory and also big success in Bellator because of that style.
It's like a nutty style.
He pulled off one of the greatest, Raymond Daniels pulled off one of the greatest KOs I've ever seen in my life in kickboxing.
It was a jumping sidekick that in midair, he turned into a spinning back kick to the face.
I've done it to a bag before.
I've never done it to a human being.
And for him to do it to a human being in glory.
Now see if you find the kickboxing one.
It's from Glory.
This is the nutty one where he did like a 360 degree punch.
Watch how crazy this is.
Play that because that's what that was, what you just had.
Watch this punch.
So he hits him with its spinning back kick to the body.
Like the too far to like the woo-woo or too far to like, hey, I'm going to follow this textbook where really this work is, it's art at the end of the day, what we're doing.
It's like it's something you feel your way through and it requires years and years of practice to get to any level of mastery.
One of the things that happens in jiu-jitsu when guys first get started, like say if a guy has like maybe a distorted idea of how tough he is and he's like a big, strong, muscular guy, there's those in particular, for whatever reason, seem to have a real problem when they grapple with a really good guy where they get pinned down and then they get like side controlled and mounted and they start hyperventilating.
I've seen it like several times from people that have never trained before, but they're real buff.
And they maybe have this idea of who they are.
And that idea is getting shattered, like just shattered by a guy that doesn't even look impressive, you know, but he's just manhandling you.
And the hyperventilating thing to me seems like a bunch of stuff.
And so if your belief is being destroyed that moment, that's what creates that domino effect of the body and the nervous system reacting the way it does.
Well, it certainly broke it in the eyes of his doctor.
His doctor, when they first saw his knees, because he didn't go in for anything for a long time, when the doctor first saw his knees, he was like, I can't believe you can walk on these legs.
Forget about run thousands of miles.
Like, this is nuts.
He was not just bone on bone, his bone was distorting.
So because it was rubbing bone on bone, it was like forming these like little mushroom curves at the end of it.
It's like it's a type of a, there's a name for it, like that distortion.
It's called wolf something or another.
He said they, it's like theoretical.
Like they'd never seen it in a person before like this.
I mean, he's a freak, dude, but he's like carrying this torch.
You might not want to do what he's doing.
I wouldn't do what he's doing.
But I'm saying it's kind of crazy that this guy can, at 50 years old, can have these endurance workouts with world-class MMA fighters like Israel Adesanya.
And he's got Izzy throwing up in a bucket and he's not even breathing heavy.
And he does like multiple of those workouts a day in silence.
Yeah, I think it moves what your water line is, right?
It moves what you expect of yourself, moves that up a few notches because you know a guy like that's out there.
If you didn't think a guy like that's out there and you worked out at the Y three days a week and no one else did, you'd probably be impressed with yourself.
You know, I'm out that fucking why three days a week using the Nautilus machine.
It's all in who you're comparing yourself to.
And, you know, obviously I can't compare to David Goggins, but when I know that a guy like that is out there in the world, it raises my own personal standard up a notch.
I don't ever, I'm never going to hit what he does.
I don't have the time.
He's working out four or five hours every day.
It's crazy.
I don't have that commitment either.
It's not what I'm interested in.
But him doing that has like raised mine.
When I look at like Jocko's Instagram and every day it says 4.30 on his Timex, he like shows his, you know, he's got one of those.
What is that watch called?
What's that watch that he has that everybody wears?
But that's why there are fundamental ways to actually build belief within yourself.
Like there's steps to do it.
And that's what really I want to drive home for anyone who's listening to this is that you can build belief and it's not just banging your head against the wall.
And so he just started teaching me breathing techniques.
He taught me up at the meridians, very simple ones that he's like, okay, visualize breathing energy.
And this is martial arts stuff, right?
So much has to do with breathing.
So he was into martial arts as well.
He'd be like, all right, I want you to imagine breathing up your governing meridian and your central meridian, which is like right on your spinal cord and up the center line of your body.
He's like, all right, breathe in deeply here.
How do you feel?
I was like, oh, I just feel more confident.
I feel stronger.
So he started just teaching me how to do simple stuff like that and then bring it onto like the football field.
I was a D-lineman.
And so I needed to knock people over.
Same thing as martial arts, right?
I needed to feel grounded.
So I needed to connect to my root chakra, which is, you can call it whatever you want.
I don't care.
But it's like the root part of your body, the primal, you know, ball sack area down there, the gooch.
If you can start to breathe into that area of your body, you will feel more grounded and you can actually become more grounded.
So I started using these techniques just to play football.
And by doing so, I was like, I don't really care about studying the system super in depth, but I was just taking the tools that were useful to me.
Like literally use these and use them to get stronger, like to bench press more.
It was just breathing techniques along with visualization.
And they're just following this ancient Eastern medicine.
You put your tongue behind your teeth and you can start to breathe in deeply.
And if you start to visualize, bringing energy down through the crown of your head and then meeting it kind of like in the just below your belly button there, you can just start to build more energy, more power.
You're just focusing energy.
That's all you're doing.
And then if you visualize yourself lifting the weight, you're going to lift it heavier.
And so how much heavier?
There's a bunch of research.
You could look up tons of different strength-based tasks studies that show that visualization increases strength.
I was just stacking what was known as like basic pet lab imagery, P-E-T-T-L-E-P imagery, along with these breathing techniques and visualizing a specific way.
And so there's a bunch of studies like that that just show how when you just stack these different tools together, they can be beneficial.
Yes, in the short term.
For like a fighter, for example, like this is what I'm training my guys.
When we go into fight camp, every single time, we're just training the subconscious to be comfortable being in the setting and just training the subconscious mind, right?
We're just wiring, just digging in those grooves of like, this is what's going to feel like.
This is going to be the experience and just wiring it in a way of having success.
And then what I do is I notice, I'm like, how do you feel?
How do you feel?
How do you feel as we go along here?
It's like, oh, there's doubt that's coming up.
Boom.
Let's go in there.
Let's get rid of that.
And it's not an intellectual thing to remove doubt.
It's a feeling thing in the body.
And honestly, I don't care what we call it.
We call it in the chakra.
We call it just feeling in the body.
You say, all right, I feel doubt coming up right now at this point of fight.
Why?
Well, I have this memory that's created this scar tissue within my nervous system right now because this has happened before that I believe if I try to do this, then something bad is going to happen.
Study whether mental training alone can produce a gain in muscular strength.
30 male university athletes, including football, basketball, and rugby players, were randomly assigned to perform mental training of their hip flexor muscles to use weight machines to physically exercise their hip flexors or to form a control group which received neither mental nor physical training.
The hip strength of each group was measured before and after training.
Physical strength was increased by 24% through mental practice.
Strength was also increased through physical training by 28%, but did not change significantly in the control condition, whatever that means.
The strength gain was greatest amongst football players.
Given mental training, mental and physical training, produced similar decreases in heart rate and both yielded a marginal reduction in systolic blood pressure, the results support, the related findings of whoever that is, that giant name.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
So it definitely has an effect.
And it seems like it definitely has a positive effect right before you're performing any kind of athletics.
So, like, like I'm saying, like, I did this stuff and then I actually abandoned my football career because I liked it so much.
And I went on and did research.
I got a research grant just to look at the effect of using some of these techniques on bench press and performance and also decreasing anxiety.
Because for me, I realized when I was 18, 19, I had crazy anxiety.
I was like, all right, this stuff is helping.
You know, call it meditation, hypnosis, whatever you mean.
If you can progressively relax yourself, right, sitting in a flow tank, right?
If you can just do that, if you can progressively relax yourself, your anxiety is going to go down, your cortisol levels are going to go down.
The whole body's going to thrive.
And this is actually like connected to so much that has to do with our health, kind of come a full circle.
I see so much.
I like professional athletes come to me with these injuries.
The physical therapist working on it, working on it, working on it.
Nothing's happening.
It's just a nagging injury.
Every single time, if I can relax them enough and I can get to the root emotional core of whatever's creating this pain for them, and it's usually emotional.
It's actually like a memory or some kind of mental block, like the governor is coming in, right?
I'll see some guys in like the lower minor leagues.
He's trying to go up to the major leagues.
And it's like these things will just start to express themselves when they're just about to get to that next level.
And if we can move through the emotional side of it, the pain disappears.
So you're talking about like weird stuff that does come up where they're almost like psychosomatic injuries because guys are responding badly to the pressure.
I bet there's a lot of guys too that have, if you think about making a living with your body, you make a living in a sport with your body where you're putting your body through explosive movements that could blow joints out.
So there's always this anxiety that all could go away.
To come back from that is very hard because we're talking about the anxiety of always worrying about getting injured and then you get injured from maybe a kick you through or Tim Sylvia Frank Muir.
Frank Muir broke his arm or Frank Muir Minotaro, his spiral fracture from that Kimura.
Like, coming back from something like that is really hard.
But what do you do for a fighter when you're trying to rebuild them?
Do you take each fighter as a unique project and you just want to know everything about them and what bothers them about themselves?
It's going to sound woo-woo, but I also want to contextualize it with the fact that I didn't believe in anything.
It's just my experience of doing this stuff for 17 years now and just seeing and feeling my way into this art that now I speak about things that the old me 15 years ago, 20 years ago, would be like, shut the fuck up.
Right.
But so what I do with any of my clients is I bring them to a very relaxed state.
You know, like think of custody model.
What do you do with Mike Tyson?
Like that's what I'm doing with these guys, right?
So I'm bringing them almost into a hypnotic state and I'm bringing them down into this place where they finally let go.
They're no longer trying to keep me out, defend, keep up this like identity they want to project into the world so they can actually get to the insecurities because I don't touch any of the beliefs that are working for them.
If someone has positive beliefs, they're successful.
I don't touch any of that stuff.
All I'm trying to find is their insecurity, their fear, their anxiety, their doubt.
And so I'm just digging deeper and deeper into their body until we start to think about things they want to achieve.
And it's like, ooh, what was twitchy there?
Right?
Something twitches in them.
It's like, I'm feeling like I'm getting angry now.
Why are you getting angry?
Why do we get angry?
It's because we're afraid and we're trying to defend ourselves.
And so if I find something like that, I feel into it with them.
And then I ask them, I'm like, what do you believe to be true that make you feel this way right now?
And if I sit there long and I hold him in that tension, it'll eventually come up.
Are there even degrees that you could get in human performance that would sort of match the kind of studying that you're doing?
Is there anything, like if you went to a major university, do they consider human mental performance and human performance, whether it's in athletics or chess or anything like that, where you have to really think through things and deal with pressure?
When you think about this conversation that you and I are having, one of the things that we're talking about is how important it is to have a mindset that allows you to work your way through difficulties and become successful at a thing and just get out of your own way.
Everybody wants to do that.
So if that's a real thing, why wouldn't that be taught in every major university?
Like if it's a thing, if we all agree, and I bet any competitive athlete in any sport has experienced anxiety.
You've had days where you felt amazing and you performed amazing, and then you've had days where you doubted yourself and you fucked up and you dropped the ball or whatever you did.
There's this weird battle that goes on in the head and it's all, it has a giant result, whatever's going on in your head and how you perform.
And you always talk about where do ideas come from, right?
Like where do they magically come from?
I don't know where they come from exactly, but I know how they're getting filtered.
And it's just through the beliefs because our belief system deletes, distorts, and generalizes information.
And the fact that nobody, not nobody, but many people don't understand how that filtration works just limits so many of us from achieving what we want because we're literally like, you all know like the girl who's like dated an asshole and she's like, all men are assholes, right?
She's deleting, distorting, generalizing like her best friend who's married to an incredible guy, right?
But when you believe something, you literally shape the world to make it match it.
I don't think you can manifest your own reality, but I think you have a part in the process and the thinking part about and the visual, not necessarily visualizing, but staying on a path.
Yes.
There's an element that's going on there that's affecting reality itself.
There's a weird exchange of energy between human beings and between reality itself.
that I don't think we figured out how to measure.
I don't think it's as simple as, you know, life is a series of events and it all takes place randomly and good luck too.
There's some stuff that's weird that makes me think without going full woo-woo, maybe we just don't have a grasp of the full spectrum of all the things that are happening, of all the factors at play, and how many of them have to deal with, you know, we would air quote, energy.
So I just want my beliefs to push me or pull me towards the things that I want because it's going to lead to me behaving in a way that gets to an outcome.
Because most people cut themselves off at like the head and they just stay in the thoughts, the negative thoughts, but they don't actually go into the feeling.
What I'm getting to this is though, like, you know, you're dealing with a guy like Sean Brady.
He's already tough as fuck.
He's already a, you know, elite MMA fighter.
He has this loss, but he's already a beast of a human being.
When you're dealing with people that don't have any athletic background and, you know, maybe they just have a job and they just have no fucking confidence, but they're sick of it.
They're sick of like living life in this anxiety pit of despair and they want to find a way out.
There's got to be like multiple different things that have to happen, right?
So it's not just the way you think, but there's also like actions.
It seems to me that people with depression in particular, like one of the best cures for depression is regular exercise, any kind of exercise, whether it's, you know, fucking go jog around the lake, whatever you want to do.
Listen, even before any of this is low-hanging fruits, like in the book, I take it, I have people do an intake of their life.
And I have them also kind of just look at all the low-hanging fruit of like, if you're drinking vodka bottles at 7 a.m. in the morning, like that's a low-hanging fruit you need to start to find a way through.
Drink one instead of three, right?
There's all these like small steps you have to drink one bottle instead of three.
And the reason why I believe this, one of the reasons why I believe this, it's like I've had some of like the best mindsets ever in my life after yoga classes and long stretching sessions where I'm working on something.
I'm just like, you know what?
I'm going to stretch out here and I'll just sit and stretch for an hour and a half, two hours.
And when I get up, I feel wonderful.
I feel like the world is beautiful.
I want to hug people.
I feel so peaceful.
I love doing that like right before I do stand-up.
It's like one of my favorite things is to really stretch out right before I do stand-up.
And I just feel so relaxed.
It's so different.
So you're carrying around actual physical tension that affects your mind.
That's why I think, regardless of the tools that you use in terms of all of it.
Anytime you're trying to just like squeeze in, hold it in, hold it in, whether it's the inspiration you have, whether it's like, hey, I want to go play this sport.
Well, I think a big part of that resistance is a fear of failure.
There's a thing that hovers over people, that's fear of failure, and that actually keeps you from just doing the things that you need to do to be successful.
So I ran like a big fitness channel when I was trying to make it before I started working with cool clients who were like Sean Brady and built a big fitness community.
And I would see that like a mom who's not doing her exercise.
And it's like, why don't you just do it?
Just do it.
Just get up.
Just do it.
You go down into a subconscious to find, oh, well, I believe that if I start working out, I won't have time to be the mom that I am right now.
And then my kids will leave me.
Completely irrational.
But subconsciously, that's what exists down there.
For so many people, they think they're going to lose out on something.
And if they lose it, it's not worth it subconsciously than doing the thing that they're inspired to do.
So for him at that elite level, it's going down and it's clearing out anything that comes up during camp.
It might be, and this isn't actually Sean, but like I work with a lot of other fighters and for them, it would be, oh, I'm losing in some of my sparring sessions.
And so their confidence is actually going down because of that.
And so it's literally reprogramming that belief inside of them.
And this sounds woo-woo, but if you ever want to do a session, you'll actually be able to feel it with me.
And what happens is we transmute the energy to make them feel that it's okay to believe that even when they're losing and sparring, they're getting better.
And so something just shifts inside of them.
Instead of it creating a seed of doubt, when they're like working on something, they're drilling something and they're not winning everything.
It's an extreme intimacy because I talk about something in the book called The Core Wound.
So the worst thing that ever happened to you is the worst thing that ever happened to you.
But some people have, you know, they might have witnessed a murder or maybe they lost a parent when they were young, like something really bad.
Another person might have been bullied when they're in the fourth grade and kicked out of a friend group.
If we identify what that core wound is for them that fundamentally hurts their confidence to this day and we clear that out, we can exponentially increase just their confidence and their self-belief.
But the only way we get there is they're telling me their deepest, darkest secret.
I don't even know what the, I don't know how to explain neuro-linguistic programming, but I will just tell you what it is fundamentally.
You're just playing with perception, right?
So someone has something's easy for me to get rid of is like the fear of flying.
I had this baseball player this year I'm working with.
Every time he gets on a flight, he starts freaking out.
Unnecessary.
So what do we do?
We imagine him on the plane, and I have him sit, visualize being on the plane, and starting to get to that place of anxious where the thoughts, oh, the plane's going to crash.
He knows it's irrational, but why is he feeling this anyway?
We have to go into it, feel the emotion, feel the emotion.
Then I have him imagine, for example, a giant picture in his mind, in his mind's eye.
And this picture is holding him and all the anxiety and the worst case scenario happening.
And then we, boom, get rid of the color in the picture.
And then we imagine this picture becoming super tiny.
And then we imagine it just disappearing.
And then we put a new picture in there of him being able to fly, not crash, be able to do it all the time and be successful.
Yeah, but it would seem to me that it would be very difficult to get people to actually change their beliefs that easily.
Like, the idea sounds solid, but the actual process of shifting how you view the world, depending upon the person, is like turning a battleship around.
I mean, how do you, there's some things we can't explain, right?
Like, how do you explain going through the veil in a psychedelic experience?
It's something that you can't really explain when you come back on the other side.
It's that kind of thing where it's like, when you're in the experience, it's like, how is this supposed to be possible?
I explain the techniques irrationally, but like, what are you talking about?
Same thing if you have this immense psychedelic experience and you're passing through the veil and you're seeing all these things, having this experience of interconnectedness, and you try to come back and you tell someone who's never had a psychedelic experience.
Honestly, I don't know what I'm going to do before I go into any session.
It's all I just feel it.
In the present moment, I mean, you could think of it like I have all these tools I can use, and then I feel into what their issue is, and then I do my best with the tools I have to fix their issue.
It feels like so much weight on your shoulders to try to help a person, like, especially try to help an elite athlete, like knowing what to say and how to get their mind tuned in right and what to introduce and whether or not this technique is effective.
Like, how did you know that this was going to be like really effective, especially on someone like a fighter, where it's like, this is a really complicated gig?
Like, you really, you want to talk about a sport where you have to have your mind right?
Yeah, there's a physical factor there, too, that whether or not a guy like Wideman never wants to admit because he's so tough, because he has this incredible belief in himself.
But a catastrophic break of a bone like that when you're in your late 30s, that is hard to come back from, man.
You know, he eventually reached a higher level than his first fight back, but he doesn't, you know, necessarily look like Chris Wideman when he beat Anderson Silva or Chris Wise.
But it's also everybody has their own specific way that they interact with the world.
And if you're taking psychedelics to justify your specific way of interacting with the world, and then you start indoctrinating other people to your specific way of running the world.
You try to have a branch off civilization.
That's like this thing that happens to guys in particular.
You don't see a lot of female guru psychedelic ladies, you know, or they're more like mother figures, but not like gurus.
The gurus are all dudes.
And it almost always goes.
Almost boys down to pussy.
Almost always.
Or dick, depending on what you're into.
Because the guy out here in Texas, in Austin, was there was a there's a building that Ron White loved called the One World Theater that we were actually in contract under contract for before I wound up buying the mothership.
He was teaching yoga to folks in West Hollywood and slowly but surely formed a cult.
And then after Waco, remember the Waco thing went down, everybody panicked and the cult awareness network apparently was like looking for him and looking into him because like a lot of the family was like, we lost my son.
He went to that.
So then he decided to change his name and then he moved to Austin and he had his followers build him a theater so he could dance in front of them.
And that's here.
And it was, there's a crazy documentary called Holy Hell.
But this guy, this is what's crazy.
The people that hated him at the end of the documentary, the people that said he was a giant scammer and he was a piece of shit and they wished they had never met him.
They all said they had gone through this thing called the knowing.
And the knowing was like he would withhold it from them.
And a lot of them are like really upset.
They weren't getting the knowing.
And it was this thing that he would do where he'd make them, I think they were on their knees, and he would touch their face and tell them that it was going to happen.
And they would all say the same thing.
They would all say afterwards it was one of the most beautiful, the most beautiful experience of their life, that they felt a complete, total connection with God, and it changed their worldview and their perception forever.
Like it's available in your mind if you believe, if you truly believe.
And they truly believe that this guy was like a legitimate mystic, that he was a legitimate guru.
And because they believed that, even though this guy's a gay porn star and a hypnotist and a fucking psychopath, because they believed that when he put his hands on them, they felt it.
So what a complicated relationship.
You have this guy who, one of the guys, left the cult and he's like, hey, man, this guy's been hypnotizing me and fucking me for 10 years.
I think there are guys that are living a very different life.
Just like, you know, we're talking about like someone who could get to this David Goggins level of discipline and physical will.
I think there's guys like that with meditation.
And I think there's guys who get so far out there.
And if you recognize that they're so far out there, I bet you sync up with the way they're seeing the world.
You let them think for you and you believe in them.
And then they do something to you.
They put their hands on you or whatever they do.
You believe it's going to happen and then your mind allows it to happen.
I think we have access to a bunch of different states of consciousness.
We just don't know the tools to access it.
We don't know the code to crack, to open them.
And for some people, it's a near-death experience, which is like seems to be a chemical reaction.
It's like an undeniable reaction that people have when they come back from the dead.
But for other people, it's not.
For other people, like sometimes it's some sort of a life-changing revelation.
For some people, it's like it's falling in love or having a child or there's something that happens that like rewires the way they see the world.
And whatever those states are that are inside of us, I can't imagine why there's not courses at major universities studying how to access this stuff, studying how to achieve endogenous states of psychedelic experiences.
Like that, like James Nestor's book, when he talks about holotropic breathing and all these different things?
Anything that you can do, that's why jiu-jitsu is so awesome.
Because you could find that you find the physical struggle, but also this incredible mental puzzle that you're figuring out every day.
And then also you're dealing with all these anxieties and emotions and these weird feelings.
Like, fuck, I don't want to roll with him.
Oh, God damn it.
He's going to get me.
And you're rolling with people, then you got to learn how to relax.
You got to learn.
And they're like, oh, my God, he didn't tap me this session.
Like, maybe you got dominated, but at least you didn't tap.
And then next time, maybe you reverse someone.
Maybe you sweep someone that you never swept before.
And you're just like, oh, my God, I'm getting better at this.
And you've got this puzzle.
And then you've also got this extreme physical activity where the rest of the day seems so easy.
It seems so, like, so relaxing.
No matter what happens, you're so calm because you've been getting your fucking legs yanked on and your neck yanked on and fucking taken down and side control crushed and getting arm triangled.
And this is easy.
Like no matter what you experience outside of that, your bar for what sucks is like your thing you do the most that sucks so hard is what you love.
And it's such a smart move for Paramount because you have a built-in audience that's immediately going to jump over there.
Because everybody, you have to renew your ESPN subscription anyway.
You know?
Like, you have to renew it.
So just buy a Paramount subscription.
By the way, ESPN has everything too.
It's great.
I'm kind of bummed out.
And I hope they don't lose the relationship that they had with ESPN with all their MMA shows.
I hope they don't go like, fuck them, they went to Paramount.
I hope it's like a mutually beneficial thing.
Like the UFC at least does some content still on ESPN because I think that's also a big factor in pulling people from like casual viewers that watch other sports that might occasionally watch a UFC fight and then they see like Dustin Poirier versus Max Holloway and they're like, holy shit.
And then they're hooked, right?
It's like having that coverage on Sports Center, that shit's huge.
Having those post-fight shows on ESPN Plus, that shit is huge.
Like Murab is like a David Goggins in that respect, that he's so far down the path of pushing himself that it's almost like you're never going to catch him in that game.
You know, like six months of not jerking off and staying off TikTok, I don't think that's even close to enough.
I think what he's been doing has been really insane for a long time.
Everybody that I talk to that's trained with that guy say he's fucking superhuman with his cardio.
And his work ethic is through the roof, man.
When DC went to see him the day after he won the title, he was out running.
DC's filming his garage that his garage gym set up.
He's like, this motherfucker is out running.
He's out running the day after winning the world title in a spectacular five-round performance where he shows superhuman cardio, like superhuman pressure.
He pushes an insane pace and he doesn't get tired.
He melts dudes.
He just melts them.
You know, he does stuff where you just go like, what?
How are you pushing this kind of pace?
It's like a middleweight version.
Someone said it in the comments, too, that Murab was in Roman's corner because they're both from Georgia.
And he's like, Murab is in the corner while Roman fights the middleweight version of Murab.
Because it really was like that.
Fluffy Hernandez is wild, dude.
It's like whatever he's doing in his training or whether he just has a like some people like Cain Velasquez had a natural cardio gift.
I don't know what it is, but it's insane.
He submitted Rodolfo Vieira multiple times World Jiu-Jitsu Jim, just exhausted the fuck out of him and guillotined him, which is just nuts to watch that guy tap.
But to submit that guy was just one of the cra like if you had a if you had a bet in Vegas, you know, like if you were on draft sport, DraftKings Sportsbook and you bet Fluffy Hernandez to submit Rodolfo Vieira.
Like 25 to 1 odds.
Brown belt.
He's still a brown belt.
He's still a brown belt in jiu-jitsu.
He submitted a multiple time world champion just by melting him.
Just melting him.
I'd love for you to talk to that guy, find out what the fuck he's made out of.
So for a guy like you that's like a mental coach, I always like wonder, I'd like to you to like talk to that guy and maybe you can pass some of that on to everybody else.
I give these guys these prompts and I just audit and I pull out all their beliefs.
And it's super interesting to hear what beliefs create an elite performer and just hearing all the ones that are making them successful and all the ones that are causing them problems.
I haven't gotten into jiu-jitsu just because I was told by some of my friends that like I would I could re-break my nose just by the pressure of people like leaning on it all the time.
If I got it broken and it was a problem, I'd definitely 100% get it fixed again.
The benefits of being able to breathe out of your nose, and I've talked to a ton of fighters about this.
Some of them are like, I'll wait till after I'm done fighting.
But Drekis Duplessis, who's defending his title this weekend, Dricus, he started his career with a fucked up nose in the UFC, and it really affected his cardio.
His mouth was wide open.
He got it fixed, and there was like this immediate bump in performance.
I mean, immediate.
For sure, he was getting better along the way, and for sure, he was figuring out how to tighten up, tighten up his techniques, and he's just an animal, right?
But on top of that, having that nose fixed was a significant difference.
He didn't have to have his mouth open all the time.
Yeah, I think they do it for sure also to not break your teeth.
Because I went to a dentist once and the dentist was like, yo, like micro fractures on all your teeth.
You're like, do you do you lift weights?
And I go, yeah.
He goes, like, you're clenching your teeth all the time.
Yeah.
So I stopped doing that so much.
And I definitely started.
I worked out with a mouthpiece for a long time, like lifting.
But I think there's a certain mouthpiece that they design that sets your jaw in a certain way that it actually enhances your strength.
There's like some sort of a connection between like having your jaw perfectly aligned and clamping down on this mouthpiece that allows you to actually lift more weight.
Find out if that's true.
Because I know that that was definitely a marketing claim for this mouthpiece thing, but I just don't remember much of it.
But I remember like looking into it years ago.
It was like a weird mouthpiece with like the bottom had like a hole cut into it so you could throw it.
Because I'm going to ask you a couple of different questions.
When I was living in LA, I knew this neuroscientist, and we ran like a little fun study where I was a big stoner.
So he had me stop smoking weed for two weeks, I think it was.
He tested me, did all these brain tests with me, and then he tested me two weeks afterwards.
And I play football, I boxed, right?
So a lot of hits to the head.
And he said that without weed, he showed like it showed that I had a fair amount of like brain damage.
Like my brain wasn't functioning like it would.
When I smoked weed and went back in there, he said there was some kind of like neuroprotective effect where like I was, my brain was like registering as more healthy.
But it flies in the face of this very public narrative, which is pot is for lazy people, pot is for losers, pot's going to rot your brain, pot's going to make you stink, pot's going to make you an idiot.
Also, when you're a dog, you know, like we're dogs.
We like to get after it.
We like to work out.
We like to do things.
I almost like when I was smoking weed every day to be the guy who could be super fit, to be training boxing every day and like be achieving my business and smoke weed every day.
Like I kind of took this like weird pride in it for some time as well.
If you're a person who was beaten by their parents and you were fucking mugged, and then this happened to you, and that happened to you, and you got fucked over at work, and now here you are there.
Like, that's very different than a person who's had a lot of success and been real lucky and got to a point and has a healthy mind.
What I'm getting at is like, maybe as your journey progresses and you get healthy and you get more confident and strong and more successful, maybe then.
You know, you have to find the problem with things being illegal is you don't have that opportunity.
And then you have people that had bad personal experiences with it and they're like, pop makes you stink.
Pop makes you a dummy.
Maybe it does that for you.
Okay, but it doesn't do that for me.
For me, it makes me nicer to my friends.
It makes me want to pet my dog.
It makes me want to chill out.
It's like, it makes me want to have fun with my friends.
It makes me want to laugh.
It doesn't make me stink.
Well, it probably makes me stink.
But it doesn't make me any dumber.
That's for sure.
And it makes me more inquisitive.
It makes me more interested in for sure subjects that I have no understanding of that are fascinating, like cosmology.
There's nothing like getting high and watching a space documentary just to try to put it into perspective, like what it is worth living in.
What is the reality of the physical universe and its majesty that's above your head every day?
Like that is when you're high, you're like, how am I not paying attention to this?
This is really a crazy thing that this is probably the most profound experience that a person could ever have in their life is like being on a planet going through space.
You know, you just, you decide to close your eyes every night and you just disconnect from physical reality for hours at a time and it's necessary and we all just take it for granted.
I think, you know, there's a lot of doctors that they'll tell you, if they're being honest with you, that there comes a time when people die that it doesn't affect them the same anymore.
You know, they're so used to people dying, especially like emergency room doctors dealing with like traumatic injuries.
But that 12th round changed the course of the rematches because Tyson Fury realized that if he goes after Deontay and he gets him on his back foot, he doesn't fight as well.
And so then he figured it out and he just took it to him.
And then he took it to him in the second fight and took it to him in the third fight.
But yeah, it's hard when you hear a guy like that make excuses, but you understand, you do more than anybody, the destruction of the belief system and how difficult it is for fighters to manage that.
And for a lot of guys, again, they don't totally know where to start.
Like, say if they have a camp and inside their camp, they have a trainer, they have the strength conditioning guy, they have different coaches for different aspects of their, whatever they're doing, whether it's a stretch coach or a boxing coach or whatever it is.
But they don't have a mental guy, you know?
They don't have someone who works with you and really makes sure that your mind has the tools to manage itself out of there.
And they don't know where to start.
Like, where do you, if you're a guy in your training, you know, what's any contender, and then he gets knocked out and he comes back from that knockout and you're rebuilding him, but he's got all these confidence issues now.
Like, where do you even look?
Like, if you're like, I got to help this guy get back on track mentally, get him back to where he was before.
Like, he got caught.
It happens, but he's still an amazing boxer.
He's just got to recover from this.
And he can still get back on the horse and still be a world champion.
But where do they even start?
You know, if they don't know you, where do they start?
Well, I think they start by going through the process of just feeling into it.
And it's always diving into where you don't want to go, right?
It's okay.
What are the insecurities coming up now?
What are the fears coming up?
What are the doubts?
Usually we try to stay in our head and escape that.
It's about going into it, feeling, feeling, feeling into it, and then seeing what comes up there and even writing it down and just bringing it into awareness.
Once you have awareness of it, then you can actually do something.
It was a year, but with the high-performance playbook for eliminating mental barriers and scaling your career, relationships, and health.
So did you think about like different approaches to like different kinds of occupations and different kinds of ways people are living their life and how it applies?
I would say it started just with coming back the next season and playing football.
I went from riding the bench to becoming a starter to being one of the best players on our team.
So it helped me with football first.
I was like, all right, cool.
That helped.
Then I started to get actually confidence from being able to help other people, which I didn't have before.
I was never something, because football was like, okay, I wasn't great at it.
But once I learned the skill, I actually started to build confidence and just learn to manage my own state, my anxiety, my performance anxiety, and just starting to feel confident.
So for the first 10 years or so about knowing about this, probably first more like nine years, I was mostly using more elementary meditation techniques, some hypnosis, some NLP.
It wasn't until I'd say about seven years ago that I started going deep into the beliefs.
And that transformed my life in a major way.
I mean, one thing I did recently was I had hypothyroidism and I was able to completely heal that naturally.
Change in all the underwriting beliefs and then everything, right?
Everything I do with any client, it's the same thing I'm going to do for me.
It's holistic.
So of course, I went through a huge gut cleanse, right?
Because a gut is everything.
It's the foundation.
So did a lot of fasting, elimination diet, cutting out almost all foods except for a few, boiled chicken, bull carrots, coconut oil.
Started slowly noticing how I felt as I started to increase the portion and start to bring other foods in.
I did red light therapy.
There's some good red light therapy research out there for the thyroid.
If you just put it on, there's a study that showed that people are able to cut their medication in half just by using the infrared rate light therapy.
Yeah.
It's good for a ton of things.
Great for the gut.
So I just started synchronicity, right?
I met this lady on the beach in Miami Beach who studies this stuff, red light therapy specifically for the gut.
And I was like, well, what about the thyroid?
And she's like, yeah, of course it will help.
It's light.
Light heals everything.
So I just started researching it.
So it was all, I did a lot of things.
I cut out caffeine this year.
That was a big thing that I don't think caffeine creates hypothyroidism.
But for me, when I turned on that gene, right, epigenetics, I've turned on the gene for.
I didn't have to have this, but like my mom has it.
My brother has it.
And so I had the gene and I put it on through stress, through excessive caffeine and just a very stressful life in my mid-20s.
So the way to turn it off was turn off the things that are associated with that stress response.
So pulling out the caffeine just put me more on the parasympathetic nervous system, allowed me to relax more.
And then, yeah, all this stuff and just noticing the fears come up when I pull away the things I like, right?
The comfort of the food, the comfort of the caffeine, just all my things that I like, all the comfort and just seeing were the fears that came out through that and just recoding it, recoding it.
This is going to sound very woo-woo, but I was taking the medication because, you know, if you ask a doctor, they tell you, you have to take this medication for the rest of your life.
Well, I wonder if that study that shows that visualization increases physical strength.
Like, I really wonder if you have the ability to accentuate healing, if you just concentrate, like if you get an injury and the injury is going to heal, but if concentrating on that injury helps it heal more.
I mean, if you start going down this rabbit hole of seeing how many placebo studies have been done, that's why it's so hard to find drugs that actually work.
Were randomly assigned to receive arthroscopic debridement, arthroscopic lavage or placebo surgery.
Patients in a placebo group received skin incisions and underwent a similar debridement without insertion of the arthroscope.
Patients and assessors of the outcome were blinded to the treatment group.
Assignment outcomes were assessed at multiple points over a 24-month period with the use of five self-reported scores, three on scales for pain and two on scales for function, and one objective test of walking and stair climbing.
A total of 165 patients completed the trial.
Results.
At no point did either of the intervention groups report less pain or better function than the placebo group.
Interesting.
But this is just like, I always wonder, like, how bad was their injury?
What, you know, what are we talking about?
How many people were there?
How many people were in this group?
165 patients.
Conclusions in this controlled trial involving patients with osteoarthritis of the knee, the outcomes after arthroscopic lavage or arthroscopic debridement were no better than those after a placebo procedure.