Brandon Epstein
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Fall into the camp who had their YouTube channel deleted and were talking about like wellness, like doctors talking about COVID stuff.
And we also live in a culture that wants that like fast food experience, right?
And so it's we're so susceptible to it.
For everything, for weight loss to any issue you have.
Tattoos come to life.
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.
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.
What am I going to lose my next fight?
And we had to clear all that and bring them back into that state of being of I'm unbeatable again.
So I was a college football player and my freshman year in college, I rode the bench and I was looking for solutions.
I was a typical meathead.
The most important things for me was getting jacked and playing football.
Like I was literally at a supplement shop looking for pro hormones.
This is me at 18 years old, just like a hypertensive big neck.
It's just whack-a-mole, right?
They figure out that someone reports it and then they get rid of it and then whack-a-mole, the next one pops up.
It's pretty much the same thing but different branding.
So when you buy it to know it's like pure, it's that good, good.
I think a lot of people have that question though.
Like for me, it's like you just see a hundred brands on Amazon.
You're like, well, which one's actually legit?
Cause you know, some of them are trash.
But, you know, people are listening to podcasts like this.
We're just kind of like listening to influencers in a way.
It's like, oh, Huberman, well, I trust you.
So you have supplements you represent.
That's what we do now, right?
We're looking to these, it could be doctors, but these people who we put our trust in.
It's like that's kind of like the bar that we're setting for like, all right, I'm going to trust you.
And there's a governor, right?
Like a governor in a car that comes up where it's like, all right, I can be successful up to this level, but anything beyond this is not safe.
But it's like that, that real animalistic primal part of yourself that comes out and goes.
I couldn't even constantly tell you why, but I can't go there.
I can't get to that level of success.
If I do, I'm going to tear it all down.
We see people do that in everything.
What if I can't keep it up?
But what we want to do is we want to get to a 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.
It's a compounding of the belief from the physical experience and then the belief that we've wired into him.
So it's both of those together, right?
It's like the perfect confluence of those two factors come together.
But stylistically, that was kind of a fight made for Shawn, though, don't you think?
I know you don't really follow football, but this is like the SEC in football, right?
It's the division that has Alabama, LSU, Texas.
So any given night, anyone could be anyone.
And it's just like, who's going to show up and execute the best?
And that's what it comes down to.
He's just Sanhagen moves.
It's like Dragon Ball Z stuff right there.
So I know boxing a lot better than I know UFC.
I'm just getting more into UFC recently what
Where's this guy in his career right now?
Being vulnerable makes me weak.
That's a core belief for a lot of guys.
And so when you believe that to be true, you're not going to create weakness within yourself.
So you're not going to seek it out.
And there's also a big stigma around guys in this profession, like anything, right?
There's a range to comedians, right?
There's a range to people who do what I do.
there's kind of pussies who do it in a way, right?
There's like people who are very like soft.
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.
Well, because it's not just the brain.
It's the nervous system.
It's the whole body.
It's the energy body system, right?
So we're talking about – you've heard of like meridians, right, that run through the body.
You could call it whatever you want, right?
We all feel like – everyone feels anxiety right here, like in their solar plexus.
This is the patterns I see with all these elite guys I'm working with.
It's like I can just –
My awareness with them is I can just feel the same thing they can feel.
I would say constricted breathing is a byproduct of, like, a blockage in their body, and they just feel it.
I haven't done jujitsu.
a domino effect, right?
Like the constricted breathing, not being able to think clearly.
It's all a domino effect.
And kind of how I operate is like the belief is the thing that starts a domino.
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.
And so belief is formed in one of two ways.
One is just it's formed through life experience, right?
Like the Goggins of the world.
He's a very rare person who just builds belief off of doing it.
How many guys are like that?
My knee's pretty good in comparison.
I think that's an example of how belief can actually break reality of what's supposed to be possible, right?
So like, all right, if that exists, like that could work, but it shouldn't.
Like we've never seen it.
But regardless, he's breaking what reality is supposed to be in a way, right?
When you compare it to a very large sample size.
He's just built it through pure willpower.
I would say most people, almost everyone else in the world, they don't have the ability to build that level of belief through their willpower.
So why do you think millions of people read his book and then such a small percentage of people can kind of replicate that example he's setting?
But guys like that, guys like you, you guys are dogs, right?
You get inspired by that.
Some people, they just feel deflated when they see that level.
They're just like, oh, God.
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.
So I'll talk about how I came to know them.
I was playing football and walked into the supplement shop looking for my next pro homeowner.
We came back circle.
So 230 pound, five foot three dude in there.
And I'm like, hey, what pro homos do you have?
And he looks at me, he's like, you know, he's very, like, zen type of dude.
And he's like, what do you want?
And I was like, I'm trying to get on the football field.
Like, what else could I do?
Like, I need to get stronger.
It's the only thing I can do.
And then he's like...
He said, how do you feel?
I'm like, how do I feel?
Like, this is me, 18 years old, atheist, don't believe in anything, biggest skeptic you're ever going to meet in your life.
And he's like, I want you to try this exercise.
And he has me just look off into the peripheries of my eyes.
How long had you known this guy by then?
Literally meeting him.
And he just starts going in on me.
Well, we can get into that.
Yeah, well, he's just that type of dude.
So I call him like a sensei now because I've known him for— Oh, you know him still.
Yeah, yeah, no, no, no.
So I'm still— So he's just a weird guy.
First, I was like, fuck off, man.
I'm looking for creatine, bro.
You know what I mean?
But, no, he just made everything feel approachable to an 18-year-old meathead.
So he started teaching me these breathing techniques, like, for meditation.
And he worked at a supplement store?
He was working there at the time.
He was studying for his neuroscience degree at a college.
To get his master's.
Because nobody was talking about anxiety back then.
I had crazy performance anxiety.
I didn't know that was a thing.
I was just like, I don't feel good.
Nobody was talking about their emotions.
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.
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.
I was like, oh, I just feel more confident.
So he started just teaching me how to do simple stuff like that and then bring it on to like the football field.
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.
The root part of your body, the primal, you know, ball sack area down there, the gooch, that 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.
So there's some breathing techniques I'm sure you do in martial arts, right?
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.
There's a bunch of research.
You could look up tons of different strength-based task studies that show that visualization increases strength.
That breathing exercise?
I was just stacking what was known as, like, basic PETTLEP imagery, P-E-T-T-L-E-P imagery, along with these breathing techniques and visualizing a specific way.
OK, so there's two types.
So there's like, for example, there's literally a study you could look up and it's like a bicep curl.
There's four different groups.
The first group just didn't do anything.
Second group just did bicep physical curl.
The third group did bicep.
Curl plus visualization of doing curls.
The fourth group did just visualization.
The group that did just a bicep curl and the group that did just a visualization performed the same.
They had the same increase in strength.
And the group that performed the best was the one that did the visualization plus the bicep curl.
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 my 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 as we go along here?
It's like, oh, there's doubt that's coming up.
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 shock or we call it just feeling in the body.
You can say, all right, I feel doubt coming up right now at this point in the fight.
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.
I'm going to lose the fight.
So we need to actually accept that.
Zen proverb, what I can't accept won't change.
So you use these breathing techniques to accept your way through it.
The body kind of relaxes through it.
And then we let it go.
And then we choose the opposite belief.
And that's the alchemy of the process.
There's a bunch of them out there, though.
That just means the people who didn't do anything.
They didn't visualize and they didn't do it.
And I think these studies are over like at least a six week period of time.
So if you want to see like strength based tasks improve over time, like they're incrementally getting stronger, right?
It's not just then they're kind of maintain that strength.
I imagine as long as they continue to do the visualization.
Yeah, this is peak performance stuff we're talking about.
Like I'm saying, 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.
I realized when I was 18, 19, I had crazy anxiety.
I was like, all right, this stuff is helping.
Call it meditation, hypnosis, whatever you mean.
If you can progressively relax yourself, sitting in a float tank, 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 is going to thrive.
And this is actually connected to so much that has to do with our health, kind of come full circle.
All the 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.
I'll see some guys in the lower minor leagues who are 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.
Stuff that can't be explained.
A lot of times you go to the doctor, like, I don't know what your issue is.
That happens all the time.
I'm speaking about things that are like nagging and you're doing the physical therapy and it's not working.
And not even just the pressure.
It could just be it could be an injury that existed before, but it's just not healing.
For whatever reason, it's not healing, and it's just kind of recurring.
If you can get to the emotional root, it will keep that.
I have fun with this now.
I always look up whenever someone tells me their injury.
I just look at them, chat GPT, what is the spiritual-emotional connection to this injury?
And it's usually right on point.
I'll be like, what do you think about this?
They're like, oh, yeah, that's something.
Yeah broke his fucking hand I'll give you an example like I have so many of these right it might be like someone has like a hamstring that just nagging right a lot of athletes like
I pop my hamstring, it just won't feel normal again, all right?
I look that type of stuff up.
It's like, all right, well, why isn't this going away?
I work with pitchers in Major League Baseball.
It's like, well, why is this coming up now?
And usually there's always some kind of root, and if we can get to it, we can relieve it.
There's only like 10 core beliefs that create fear in athletes I've seen.
Like there's not that many.
And one of them is one you're pointing out right now is like life changing injuries.
Will I be able to sustain it?
You know, the core is like, will I be able to sustain this or will I be able to continue to do the thing that I love?
And of course, like, yeah, if you get injured, then you're gonna lose it all.
Yeah, I mean, he gave me a testimonial, so I think he's pretty open.
Yeah, he put, like, a video testimony.
I'm going to explain what I do.
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.
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, the model.
What do you do with Mike Tyson?
Like, that's what I'm doing with these guys.
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, like, 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.
It's like, ooh, what was twitchy there?
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 can 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.
And through that, we can release that belief.
We can accept our way through it first.
We can release it and we can reprogram it.
Does he have a cult that we could join?
He taught me a lot of different things.
Hypnosis, NLP, timeline therapy.
And then I didn't go on and get a secondary degree.
So I studied, I created my own degree.
I went to a liberal arts school in LA.
The mental aspect of human performance.
But everything I was learning that was helping me and my teammates, I was learning outside of school.
So I was like, I'm not going to go spend $200,000 and getting...
a secondary degree when I'm learning everything else outside of school.
So I've just continued to go to workshops, learn, study with different people who know how to do different techniques.
And that's how I learned, very kinesthetically.
In the same way that if you're doing martial arts, you're just trying to go to as many masks as you can.
This guy jiu-jitsu, this guy kickboxing.
That's just what I've done.
I've gone and tried to find different people who are really good at what they do.
And that's how I learned through doing and actually experiencing the work of myself first.
If it works for me, then I try it on my clients.
If it works for them, I just keep it going.
And I just, I don't have one technique.
I use many different techniques, whatever the moment calls for, that's what I use.
I think sports psychology, I think you can get a degree.
They won't let you smoke the toad at school.
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 system works just limits so many of us from achieving what we want.
Because we're literally like, you all know the girl who's dated an asshole and she's like, all men are assholes, right?
She's deleting the story and generalizing 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.
There's millions of pieces of information that you can see, smell, taste, or touch in any moment.
There's so much sensory information.
We can only pick up on a few in our conscious mind in any moment.
So that's where the ideas come from.
The synchronicities are undeniable here.
Here's how I appeal to my rational mind to make this make sense, right?
So I think about beliefs are like the code of our mind that's constantly filtering in the information.
All this code does is determine how I'm going to feel.
And that feeling is either going to make me want to go towards something or pull away from it.
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.
But you've got to sit in that, right?
Because most people cut themselves off at the head, and they just stay in the thoughts, the negative thoughts, but they don't actually go into the feeling.
Just to sit in the shit pit of full awareness of all the feelings.
Then from there, set an alarm for the next week that go, okay.
feel what's coming up, and then ask yourself, what were you focused on?
Then you can start to take some kind of ownership over like, where are those thoughts coming from?
How is my focus creating the way that I feel, right?
And you can start to see your beliefs by connecting those dots of like, all right, why is that making me feel angry?
So you have to feel first and then notice what you're focusing on.
And then you start to come into this feeling of, all right, well, I'm seeing it, right?
It's the four stages of learning.
You're getting to this place of conscious incompetence.
I see that I make myself feel bad.
I don't know how I'm doing it.
And then you can go, okay, what if I started to flip the focus and I started to build that muscle?
Because this is the way I think about the mind and all of these things is it's a muscle just like the body.
You can start to train it.
Your mind just picks up on these patterns of repetition.
Just like striking a bag, just like anything else, if you do something over and over again, right, you say the same things to yourself over and over again, the repetition starts to make its way down to the subconscious level.
So you don't want to focus on the thing that is good for you because it feels like, oh, yucky.
It's like I'm lying to myself.
But that's the exercise.
Just continue to flip it.
The second half of the book is a literally playbook.
Just do everything in the second half of the book.
And I think this is an action, right?
Step into awareness.
The next set of actions, the next week, step into awareness of what you're feeling and what are you focusing on that makes you feel the way that's another set of actions.
Well, listen, even before any of this is low-hanging fruit.
So like in the book, 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 take.
You know, the tiny bottles.
You know what I'm saying?
If you're drinking vodka in the morning, like you've got bigger problems.
Bro, I've had clients who are like high-level executives that are so stressed that they drink first thing in the morning.
And I've helped them get off it completely.
But it starts with something like that of like, all right.
That's why I'm not just mental performance.
It has to be all of it.
so important right the gut brain axis it has to be nutrition exercise rigorous exercise how about your career living a life where you have like some sense of meaning right and starting to move towards that right don't do something you hate just because it pays you if you have an option to do something that you might possibly love if you want a better life that's the life even if you're making less money that's the life you don't want to be doing something you don't want to do
You're trying to decrease the amount of stuck energy in you.
That's what you're trying to do.
When you feel suppressed, you're not doing what you want to do, the energy gets stuck.
In the back of your head, it's just always there.
It's never too late.
That self-suppression creates a depression in any aspect, right?
Anytime you're trying to just squeeze in, hold it in, hold it in, whether it's an inspiration you have, whether it's like, hey, I want to go play this sport.
But I just never make time for it.
That's self-suppression.
Like, you have to make time for your natural inspiration to flow through you.
And if you don't, I think that's what creates depression.
That resistance that Pressfield talks about, that's exactly what I'm talking about here, right?
Whether you're an athlete, whether you're creative, I mean, I think it applies to everyone.
The resistance is whatever's holding you back from following your natural inspiration.
There's so many reasons.
Like, I'll give you an example.
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?
You go down into a subconscious and 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.
Well, that's the power of transmuting the energy.
So just flipping the energy on it, right?
To go from this is going to make me a worse mom to this can make me a better mom.
And maybe that will give them enough juice to actually go do the workout.
making sure the process is airtight right it's got to be like really tuning it in right like making sure it's finely tuned yeah basically fight week i want his energy i want him to be matter of fact about everything just matter of fact just neutral just sitting right here you know the feeling you have in your heart where you're just like present just right there right there but what how do you get there like what's the way to get there
So for him at that elite level, it's going down and it's clearing out anything that comes up during camp.
and this isn't actually Sean, but 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 in sparring, they're getting better.
And so if 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.
Now it's okay, I'm getting better.
And it's just a feeling that shifts in them.
Rationally, of course.
Sparring at a good place.
But that survival instinct or that goes, I should be winning everything, doesn't like that.
And so sometimes we have to rewire those things.
So that's what we're doing as we're going through camp is, like, seeing what comes up, what's decreasing confidence, what – are you dialed in everything?
You know, I'm working with other coaches as well and making sure, are they doing what you want them to do?
And if they're not, what's going on here?
And that's kind of my job.
I would say that nobody knows any of my clients better than them except for maybe their wives.
Better than you know them.
It's an extreme intimacy because I talk about some of 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 our 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.
There's something called, like, hypnosis, right?
You can use it with hypnosis, NLP.
There are all these mind techniques that you can utilize to clear the energy, which clears the emotion.
I've never worked with him, but...
No, I just studied with someone who taught it to me.
I just learned very well one-to-one.
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 have this baseball player that I'm working with.
Every time he gets on a flight, he starts freaking out.
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.
You'd be like, I quit.
I mean, they sound like very simple techniques, but it's something you have to experience.
I mean, this is the stuff that goes beyond the rational mind.
Like, if you were to experience it, you'd be like, okay, I get it.
But it's an emotional experience.
I mean, how do you – there's some things we can't explain, right?
Like, how do you explain going through the veil on 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 and be like, what are you talking about?
So this work, that's why I put together the playbook.
So I give people actual things that they can do because I understand not everyone's going to work with me one-to-one and be able to experience this.
But people can do these simple exercises.
People can audit their life and they can see some of the patterns of thinking that
And just the awareness of seeing some of the patterns you're thinking.
If you study enough, you might be able to change it.
We've all had bad habits.
And sometimes it just gets to a point where we're like, all right, I'm not doing that anymore.
Honestly, I don't know what I'm going to do before I go into any session.
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.
I'm just problem solving at the moment.
I just don't think I surrender to something bigger than myself.
That's what I have to do is just allow...
I lose too sometimes, right?
So like Weidman, I helped him come back, his first fight back from after he broke his leg.
And he said that's the best he's ever felt in his career going into a fight.
He still lost a fight.
I mean, that was me understanding like when I was 18 years old, I'm like –
I'm not that good at football.
Like, I don't have the physical gifts.
Like, I'm just not that athletic.
I'm not going to run that fast.
So this is how I discovered it, right?
I started to learn these techniques.
Like, I can do things like get rid of someone's headache very easily with some of these techniques.
So, like, I have a teammate who had a terrible headache.
I'd be like, all right, let's do some of these hypnosis relaxation techniques.
He's like, my headache's gone.
I'm like, I'm way better than this than I was at football.
And that was a spark within me that made me wonder.
He's not the same species as us.
He's something else.
It's taken a lot of beatings.
That's what inspiration does, though.
You know, I think these guys just want it.
They want to keep going.
They want to keep pushing it.
They want to see what's possible.
Just to keep expanding the possibilities, right?
Exposing yourself to new things.
I think that's why people in my field traditionally, they're not doing psychedelics.
It's not really a thing that people do.
Why do you think that is?
Let's say maybe more sports psychology, stuff like that, because they're more clinical.
They're more clinical people.
They're people who are much more clinical and methodical about things.
Like my full ego death through the Bufo Toad was fundamentally the most important part of me learning to do what I do.
Because in that experience, it created enough space between me and all my beliefs.
You know, it's that like that neuroplasticity that gets created in those moments afterwards where you can actually kind of see things.
You can kind of see the forest from the trees.
And if you never have that experience, then, like, this is something people talk about all the time, right, is the whole thing, the ego is the enemy.
It's like, well, it depends what you're considering the ego because you can't get rid of the ego.
If the ego dies, then you're just in the oneness, right?
So you need the ego.
We have to build it up.
And I think for fighters especially, like, they need massive egos, but they need healthy egos, egos that are programmed to succeed.
That's a deadly combo right there.
You know, there's all those, like, Indian gurus, right, where, like, people tell the stories of, like, all they have to do is, like, gaze on me or touch me.
I've never experienced any of this.
And then you just feel like you've had experience with God.
Yeah, I guide some guys, some of my clients, like, they leave their body.
You know, they have experiences of, like, leaving their body.
It feels very weird.
So we talked about like, how do we get people on this path?
I think it's these types of experiences that like open a doorway.
It's like a hard reset.
I think actually for most people, they should not do psychedelics.
People who are like in a really dark state.
Most people who are in a very dark state, they're struggling with really bad depression.
I don't think they should go right to psychedelics.
I think there's steps before that.
I think they can do all topic breathing, flow tanks.
Humans need something to pour their energy into.
It could be something very simple.
But just find something that you just want to move on a path.
And that just incremental progress feels good.
We don't have many rites of passages.
And doing any type of martial arts and having to compete is like, oh, this is scary.
It's building, it's building, it's building.
What's going to happen?
And you kind of have to face that fear of death in a way.
It's like you know you're not going to die, but in a way it feels like it when you're going to competition.
It's like this person is going to try to hurt me.
And to come through that and get to the other side, there's something that changes in your nervous system.
Because the average person only knows about the stars.
You know what I mean?
But they're kind of detached because they're only watching highlights.
Now they get to actually watch about the stars.
They're going to be so much more bought into the sport.
For the real dorks like me, that's huge.
Yeah, I think even for, like, the average person that cares more about storytelling, you know,
It's like maybe the wives are like, this is interesting to hear about the drama of their life a little bit and the hero's journey.
Did you talk with him at all?
I would love to talk with him because I know he cut out weed, right?
It's fascinating to look at just that level, the elite, elite, elite, elite level, and to see the commonalities between them.
For me, as someone who loves studying the mind, and it's like, what is different about these guys?
And then is there anything you could do to catch up, or are they just built different?
Are they just wired in a way?
I've got to look out for him.
I've got to go back and watch that fight.
That's what I love to do.
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.
This dude's like, give me all your weed.
When I was doing a lot of boxing, I was smoking a ton of weed.
I was smoking weed every single day.
And I don't anymore.
But at the time, I was like, you know, I had to get surgery on my nose because I got busted up so many times.
I was going to the doctor because I was still sparring during COVID.
And I was going to the doctor and they were just telling me, oh, I think you have COVID.
That's what they told me.
They're like, oh, I think you just have stuffiness.
We're going to have you tested from COVID like two different times.
And eventually I just got x-rays and I'm like, oh, your nose is destroyed.
They took a piece from my ear.
They took the ear cartilage.
To rebuild your nose?
The funniest thing is, so I spent a lot of time in Columbia and
And I went down there for the surgery.
You went to Columbia for ear to nose surgery?
All my stuff in Columbia.
I got LASIK eye surgery in Columbia.
They invented it in Bogota, Columbia.
Medical stuff's amazing.
Honestly, this is going to sound funny, but when I go there, it almost makes the U.S.
feel like a third world country.
Just because it's so inexpensive.
The doctors are good.
The facility is great.
Anyhow, so I go get the surgery.
I'm missing the back of my ear.
I didn't understand that part.
Why didn't they do the rib?
Usually they do rib cartilage, right?
They said they might do the rib, but I don't remember.
They changed their mind and went with your ear?
Now it lays kind of flat.
I haven't gotten into jiu-jitsu just because I was told by some of my friends that I could re-break my nose just by the pressure of people leaning on it all the time.
I just don't want to get the surgery again.
That's the ideal way to breathe, if you can just breathe through your nose, right?
I think I've heard something about that.
I know grunting is supposed to help you lift more weights.
Planet Fitness, yeah.
Because I was looking at all these studies on increased strength performance when I was studying all this stuff.
And I was like, grunting?
It's safe for those people who want to be there.
It's a nice, safe environment.
Like, what do you care if he's grunting?
But that's kind of society, right?
We've got the padded walls in many places for people.
What do you think about weed and fighting?
Because I'm going to ask you a couple different questions.
When I was living in L.A., I knew this neuroscientist, and we ran 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 box, right?
So a lot of hits to the head.
And he said that without weed...
It showed that I had a fair amount of brain damage.
My brain wasn't functioning the way it would.
When I smoked weed and went back in there, he said there was some kind of neuroprotective effect where my brain was registering as more healthy.
So you think weed decreases inflammation in the brain?
That makes sense because it has that disassociative effect, right?
And so it's easier maybe to get out of your head.
But 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 like –
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 to be achieving my business.
And still smoke weed.
And smoke weed every day.
I kind of took this weird pride in it for some time as well.
Oh, I used to love that.
You also— Forum goes out the window a little bit for me.
But I also hear you on the podcast when you've done it before, like you stay dialed in to a degree.
Like maybe you don't have the same recall.
Don't get too big for your britches.
Maybe it's more nostalgic.
You kind of smoke what you're thinking about.
You know, it gives you time to separate a little bit from being in the grind versus... Well, my point is, like, if you're all fucked up, maybe pot's not for you.
I think to a degree it's good to have some kind of cadence where you have something that allows you to kind of step back from yourself.
It could be some mushrooms.
What are your beliefs around, because I have mine just from my experience, what are your beliefs on where they were before they were born?
Do you think that this is, they have something in them because of a previous life?
There's actually, I think, what university?
Maybe University of Virginia.
There's a whole department that's studying people who've had these near-death experiences that are going back and talking about previous lives.
Well, I think it is oftentimes.
I think it's like you have some kids who are just telling you about someone else's life and they should not know it, but they're like,
I like the framework of it, of thinking about this infinite game.
Because then someone is like, well, why am I going to do this work?
It just sounds like a lot of work, all this self-introspection.
It's like to understand that you're playing this infinite game.
If you deal with your shit now, then your life is going to be more peaceful and have more flow in the future.
If you don't deal with it, you're just kicking the ball down the road.
At least it is true in this life, and I don't know.
I feel like it could be true in your next one as well.
During your lifetime or just?
And that's why they're making them wait.
Infiltrating into your brain.
You got to watch some Barney after that.
Even watching like the House of Dragon, Game of Thrones, like some gruesome stuff before bed.
I mean, just what I know about the mind, how subconscious works, like it's just obvious every time I go to bed, I'm like, you shouldn't have done that.
For some reason, it feels more controlled.
I think it's also the idea of like evil though.
You know, if you're watching something, you're seeing evil take place versus like, for me, when I watch MMA, I'm like, I know these guys, like I see, I love these guys.
You know, I've never met, I've never worked with a guy who I don't love.
They all have great hearts.
And like, I feel this genuine, like goodness.
Like I haven't met that many guys.
I don't know them all, but like when I see it, I don't see like evil.
He didn't grow up the way you grew up.
He's got some unresolved trauma.
This is something I think some fighters think about.
It's like, if I get rid of my trauma, am I going to be weaker?
Do I need this as an edge?
I don't believe they do.
That's been my experience.
I feel like speaking of belief, right, he had an identity that was bulletproof, that was unbreakable.
And I watch all the excuses.
Yeah, I think they're just a byproduct of like he believes he was unbeatable.
So he had to come up with something to tell the story about how he lost for himself.
I don't even think it was malicious.
I think he was trying to cope with what is this reality now.
Yeah, there was like a minute left or something.
But if you do the work to rebuild it afterwards, you're stronger.
Well, I think they start by going through the process, just feeling into it.
And it's always diving into where you don't want to go, right?
What are the insecurities coming up now?
What are the fears coming up?
What are the doubts coming up?
Usually we try to, like, 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, like, writing it down and just bringing it into awareness.
Once you have awareness of it, then you can actually do something about it.
So the first half of the book is my story.
It's kind of like, I'm trying to build rapport.
So I tell people, this is how I learned all this stuff.
This is how it worked for me.
These are my client stories.
So by the end of the first part, you're either like, this guy's full of shit or I believe you.
And then the playbook starts.
And it is something that anyone can use because it's simple stuff.
Like it starts with like,
grade the different areas of your life from one to 10, right?
And then we're looking at closing the gap in each area.
If you're like, my career is at a four, I want it to be at a 10.
Okay, let's get the low hanging fruit of like, what are some of the things you need to stop doing?
All right, the vodka.
Let's cut that out, right?
And just going through that auditing system of understanding like what's holding you back, what do you need to be more conscientious about?
And then I start getting into the training for the mind later on.
Yeah, something I invented.
Just trying to solve their problems.
That's all I'm trying to do.
Just being really creative with my problem solving.
And so over the years, I just picked up better tools.
I've gotten better at practicing things to be able to solve problems better.
I wanted to be full-time at this at 22 years old.
It wasn't going to happen.
I just didn't have the experience.
I didn't have enough tools.
Yeah, it worked for me so much, and it transformed my life so much that I was like, well, this is what I'm supposed to do.
I want to help other people with this.
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.
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 I was like, okay, I wasn't great at it.
But once I learned the skill, I actually started to build confidence and just learned to manage my own state, my anxiety, my performance anxiety, and just starting to feel confident.
So for the first 10 years or so, by knowing about this, probably the 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 gonna do for me.
So of course, I went through a huge gut cleanse, right?
Because a gut is everything.
So did a lot of fasting, elimination diet, cutting out almost all foods except for a few.
Boiled chicken, boiled 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 were able to cut their medication in half just by using the infrared light therapy.
It's good for a ton of things.
So I just started synchronously.
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'll help.
Light heals everything.
So I just started researching it.
So 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 turned on the gene for, I didn't have to have this, but like my mom has, 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 twenties.
So the way it turned 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 where the fears that came out through that and just recoding it, recoding it.
And 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, right?
And they get mad that you even ask about what an alternative is.
Like I've had doctors be like, be grateful.
You just have to take a pill.
Like, get out of here.
But there was actually experience I had two years ago where a doctor wouldn't give me my medication, even though my blood didn't change.
He said, oh, you're gonna have to come back in here every three months.
I want to monitor it.
He tried to put me on like subscription plan to pay more money just to keep getting it.
And it was like flip something.
I was like, I'm not doing this anymore.
I'm going to find a way to get off this medication.
This is something that RFK Jr.
The gatekeeper of this medication.
But yeah, so I just had, I did all these things very holistically, right?
Doing Sodom, doing all these things.
And then just feeling into my body one day, it was just like intuition just told me, it was like, hey, you're done.
You don't need it anymore.
And so what I did, of course, I asked Chachi PT.
I was like, I can't just stop taking it.
What did Chachi BG say?
It said take one day on, one day off.
By the third day of taking it again, my body rejected it.
I felt like a depletion of energy.
It's just three days?
The third day of not taking it.
Third day of taking it.
And the day that I took it again, my body rejected it.
And I was like, I get it.
And I haven't touched it since.
I think there's a lot of things like that.
Well, even just the placebo effect of thinking you got it.
So there's a study, I think it was done on ACL surgeries.
It was one of these knee surgeries where they took two groups.
They give one group the surgery.
The other group, they just cut their knee open and then sewed it right back up.
Same results over whatever the period of time was.
It was one of these knee surgeries.
And they had the same results.
Yeah, get your ACL fixed.
Yeah, no, it's wild, though.
I mean, if you start going down this rabbit hole of seeing, like, how many placebo studies have been done, that's why it's so hard to find drugs that actually work.
And I think like it's weird how we talk about the placebo that way.
It's kind of like diminishing.
It's like, yeah, look, it didn't work.
But that's not what happened.
The people believe they got the surgery.
They did have less pain.
Yeah, it's on Spotify.
You can look up my name because I rebranded it and I haven't changed the name on Spotify.
So just look up Branded Eps and you'll find the book.
Program to fail on Audible.
Success code on EverReal.