Behind the Woo: Practical, Tactical Ways to Create a Map of Reality and Hack It with Michael Gustin

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart, and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now. Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart, and today I am joined by Mr. Michael Gustin. What's going on, Michael?

Not much, man. Just here in South Georgia. What's going on with you?

Just looking out at the ocean. It's been a rainy day here in Cardiff. We need it. There's been fires in San Diego and around it. So really excited. I slept all night just hearing the pitter patter of the rain. Slept till 8am today, which is just nuts for me. I never sleep that late. I guess I needed it. But, yeah, life is beautiful. We're in flow, everything's good. I'm grateful to be on this podcast with you and learn about what you got going on. Basically hacking reality, which is freaking exciting, right? So let's dive into that. But I want to first get really clear on kind of who it is that we're talking to. Right. For the people at home that may have never heard of you, Michael, let's talk about your hero's journey. Because ultimately, it's not the successes that really excite people. Yeah, they'll respect you for that and that's cool. And they'll get interested in hearing what you have to say, but the failures. Let's get into the nitty gritty stuff where you've just failed time and time and time again. Because I think more people can relate to failure than success and ultimately come from a place of, okay, this is a real dude that I'm listening to and not just some facsimile thereof.

Yeah, awesome. Let's do it.

Okay. So hero's journey so far, what's it been like for you?

Oh, boy. Well, shoot, man. The last couple years have been, you know, I'm 25. The last three years have been really in substance, completely different than the previous 22 before that. You know, I grew up in. I was born in Portland, Oregon. I grew up to a single mother who was addicted to meth and was put in foster homes at about three months old. I was in and out of foster homes until I was seven. I went through a lot of sexual and emotional abuse in foster homes, and I was adopted when I was seven and I moved down to California. Palm Springs, California, not too far from you I grew up in Indio and dealt with a lot of therapy, a lot of prescription drugs. I was actually pretty much forced on my first prescription drug at age 4 after I was raped. And there was not a lot of getting to the root of what was going on in my life in all of the therapy that I did. And that really turned into a lot of drug addiction, anger. I probably attempted suicide five times. I was in tons of psych wards in middle school, super angry. I always fought. I hated life and I hated people. And I was very depressed, to say the least, I guess.

Yeah.

And that really pummeled into just tons of darkness. And I attempted suicide in 2009, overdosed on 4,200 milligrams of antidepressants and ended up flatlining. And after that, I woke up 72 hours later in a hospital bed. And after that, was put in inpatient rehab in Murrieta and was up there for about a year until I graduated high school. And after that point, I had a pretty good handle on what I was doing. I went into college, played some college football, all that kind of stuff, but I ended up getting in a car accident in 2010. I was rear ended at 80 miles an hour, and that completely destroyed my spine. Had to quit football, had to quit everything. And that really turned my life. I feel like on the trajectory that that has led me to where I am now. After that point, I became very spiritual. I joined a bunch of churches, ended up traveling the United States as a youth pastor, as a senior pastor, Spanish churches, English churches, Puerto Rican churches. Was just all over trying to find the truth about life. And over the course of the years, I saw clinically dead people come to life. I saw deaf people receive hearing. I saw blind people given sight. I saw food literally appear out of nowhere. And so a lot of that in me triggered an intense desire to see that power turned on. 24 7, I was not content with this idea that, well, it happens when it happens. Like, you know, it's just random. We can't tell. We just gotta hope it works, right? And so a lot, although a lot of the emotional stuff I still dealt with even throughout my ministerial years, I dealt with a lot of the insecurities and projected that in my theology and my ideas about life as I traveled the country. And I feel like the flagship moment, it was in 2015, I had this crazy experience where I had just lost all personal sense of Michael. I didn't know who Michael was. And I kind of looked around and realized that everything that was alive Everything that was going on was being expressed by the same source. It all was the same source expressing itself in a bazillion different forms. I realized this God I had been worshipping for so long out here and felt depraved and insignificant without was in here all along, and I had just failed to realize it. And from that point I began to dive into Buddhist and Taoist and a lot of Eastern culture, which led me into things like Law of Attraction and Wayne Dyer and Hermetic philosophy, which ultimately brought me to a man named Neville Goddard, who I met my business partner, Dave Smith, and we started the Reality Hacker Academy through. And so that is really the short version of the long story that is my 25 years of life.

Wow. I just want to honor you, Michael. You've been through a lot of stuff. And to have such a positive attitude after all that, I mean, really, like, I always talk about being grateful for your pain, but without all that nonsense in the beginning, you know, all those terrible things happen to you and continue to happen to you even as an adult, you wouldn't be where you are today. You wouldn't be helping the people you're helping now. So let's just get really clear for people listening, what is the Reality Hacker Academy like? Who should be interested in it and why would it help them?

I think that the Law of Attraction has become such a. Phantasm, a fanatical idea that so many people have heard about, but at the same time so many people have no understanding about. In the Reality Hacker Academy, in my opinion, we place the most actionable practical principles that we've learned from different people that don't necessarily preach or talk about the Law of Attraction, but understand that in a nutshell, thoughts become things. And one of the things that if you were to talk to one of our clients, they would say that we've taken these mechanics of thought and creation and, and condense them into the most actionable, efficient and practical principles and tools that anybody really has. I think the Reality Hacker Academy is for the person who is sick of just being positive and not seeing any real change. Because while positivity does create some ripples in our life, there are a little bit deeper of a foundation that we have found is required, that is needs to be tweaked in order to really affect massive change in our lives.

I really love to say that the Law of Attraction doesn't mean jack without the Law of action, right? Get off your ass and take action. Because even if you attract opportunities and whispers in your life, if you're not willing to say, oh, that's the thing I wanted, thank you, and move it to the next thing. If you're not willing to catalyze, then what's going to happen? Right. If you had the Law of Attraction, let's say that the law of attraction is the only thing, and you thought of a pink elephant and it just appeared, and that was a pink elephant in your. In your room, that would be a problem. It would be hard to walk through reality. You know, manifesting pink elephants in real time. However, you have a gap. Right. I'm what they call in human design, a manifest generator. I manifest stuff constantly. I got to be careful because I can manifest heaven and I can manifest hell very quickly.

Yeah.

And that's something I had to learn about myself. So I really, truly believe in some of this stuff. I truly believe that there's stuff about the universe that we just don't have any scientific knowledge about. And what we don't know, that we don't know could literally fill the entire universe. And it does. However, I do feel like we have pieces enough of the puzzle to say, oh, this is what's working, even if we don't know all the pieces. Right. It's like you get into a car, you don't have to know how the solenoid works in order to put your foot on the gas pedal or shift the gear. Right. We don't need to know how all the pieces of the car work in order to drive it.

Right. Right. And I think that's one thing that a lot of Law of Attraction people teach is what you just said is that essentially you can sit on the. Sit on the couch, eat a sandwich and feel good and stuff will happen.

And.

And that's not what we teach, because action, what we've learned is that the action we take on a regular basis is in direct alignment with our states of consciousness. And so the results that we create from the action that we take is directly correlated to the states that we are in. And so what we're all about is doing the inner work that changes the outer work because they're both one and the same, like you said. And I think one of our core tenets is that in Western culture, we have had a tendency to look at reality as some sort of separate objective entity that is not affected by us on a daily basis. And we teach the complete opposite, that we are absolutely one with the world that we come into every single day, and that our deepest concepts of self and assumptions are always reflecting themselves back into Us in the form of people, relationships, circumstances and encounters. And that can never be escaped. You know, I think that the problem with the majority of the entrepreneurial mindset today is that it preaches change by force. But the truth is what I've learned is that trying to change circumstances by force is like trying to break a mirror to change your face. Because what's at least again, this is just stuff that I have found. And we teach our clients that if I am to go and really examine my subconscious assumptions and beliefs and ideas about myself and myself in relation to the world and shift those, I found that people will begin to tell me things that I have only told myself. But the only reason they are telling me those things is because I have shifted my own subconscious levels about that very thing.

Right?

And so I saw somebody on Facebook the other day and they said, you know, you can do all the inner work you want, but if the outer work doesn't change, then you just need to hustle. And I was like, that's completely wrong. Because if the outer work doesn't change from the inner work that you've done, the inner work that you've done is fake and doesn't mean anything because action is a direct byproduct of everything that we feel and think and do. One of my favorite offers authors Charles Hannl. He actually influenced Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill accredits a ton of his success to this guy. He says one thing that I absolutely love. He says, we can only do to the extent that we can be, and we can only be to the extent that we are. And what we are is completely determined by what we think. So our concept, our self image is directly responsible for everything that's going on in our life because the action that we take is in direct correlation to the self image. So what we do at the academy is help people shift that self image. So we have tools, we have a whole toolkit that is bent around helping you step into the state of being the person that you desire to be. Because the action that you're going to take from that place and the results that are going to be created are going to be completely different than coming from a place of, oh, well, I'm just, you know, I'm not enough, or, you know, this isn't good enough. So we're really shifting those underlying assumptions in order. The action that we take creates completely different results.

And I come from a science background. I'm just going to put that front and center. I was a biologist, I wanted to be a doctor. And they Teach you how to interact with reality in a way that allows you to explore what are the rules, what are the laws here. Like gravity, for example. You can say gravity is not a law, it is a theory. Right. It's the best theory we know how. But if you walk off a building, you're going to fall to your death. That's gravity in action. Right. You can try to test as many times you want, you'll get the same result. That's good science.

Yeah.

Where people get upset about this, you know, quote unquote, woo woo stuff, if you will. This law of attraction secret stuff is because it's like part of the puzzle and it might be true, but there's just more to it and most people don't have the attention span to really dig into it. So there's parts of it that are really useful and practical and tactical and actionable. And that's why I like that you're, you're getting people really clear on what those pieces are and helping them troubleshoot it. But there's also parts that we just don't understand yet. Right. It's that car and solenoid analogy we used. I've thought a lot about this myself from a scientific perspective. What can I do in reality that gets me a result, then when I get a result, noticing that, so that I can continue to do those things, whether it be internal, external, physical, process wise, system wise, so that I'm in line with reality, continue to get the results that I want, and then ultimately pull back from that creator designer role and allow that system to run by on autopilot by having those people and systems and incentives and rewards in place that have it consistently happening. Right. So, like, this podcast is a great example. There's five people working on this podcast all the time. Between booking guests and me actually doing it and promoting and the systems and all the little, you know, pieces of software. And I feel like I've eliminated anything that's not necessary. I feel like I've automated anything that couldn't be eliminated. I feel like I've delegated all the things that I can delegate. You know, instead of just, you know, showing up and then trying to go back and oh my God, I gotta do this, that and the other thing. I've gotten it down to a simple set of steps so I could take the entire Tuesday of my week and record five to seven podcasts so that I'm always ahead of the game and we can and consistently bring amazing stories to the world. That's just one example of how I've scientifically gone from I want to start a podcast. I don't want it to take up all my life, and I want to really help people to. Now it actually happens. And I wake up on Tuesday excited with my inbox full of just amazing people that I get to connect with. And that's incredible. That's just one example of how you can do this in your own life. I'm not some wizard. I just had a clear desire. I knew who I wanted to be, I knew who I wanted to serve.

I.

Then all of these wonderful people started showing up in my life where the law of attraction comes under. This is all the amazing people that came into my life to make this happen. Once I had that desire clear and I was consistently looking for it, my reticular activating system was activated for those particular opportunities to come in.

Right.

I had a value, which created a belief, which created a pattern of thought, which created words that I would say, that created action, which created habit, which habits consistently done over and over and over again. Create your reality.

Yeah.

And if you don't like your reality, you can't blame anything except what you've been valuing and showing up as in the beginning, right? Life happens to you like a victim. Then life happens by you. You start to realize, hey, I have some control over this. Eventually, life happens through you as a function of, you know, this is just the function of what I bring to a situation, allows things to happen. And without me having to use all my brain power, it's kind of unconscious at that point. And finally, there's some people that get to like, life happens. As them, like Richard Branson walks into a room, millions of dollars start moving. I've seen it happen. That's not because he's so smart. He's just gotten to that place where he's got that cache and that trust and that brand built over so many years in the 60s. Now, it didn't happen overnight. And people know that they want to align with him and help him, and that's what happens. And he can't lose at this point. He would literally have to work very hard to screw it up. Right? And life is like that. It's like in the beginning. You're not compounding, although you are. It doesn't feel like you're making any progress.

Right?

But over time, if you just stick with the plan, it compounds and the compounds get bigger and the percentages get more significant where these 1 little 1% shifts add up. So that's why I tell everybody it's just 1% right. After a year, that's 3,778% compounded. Not 1%. 365 days. It's compounding. So I don't know, I went on a little bit of a tangent because I felt like it was coming through me and I wanted to say it, but I really, truly agree with this as a science. I think more people should pay attention to it. There's a side to it that's really practical and tactical and action oriented and then there's this other side. It's like, what are you vibrating into the world that brings you the things that you ultimately want, need and desire? And who do you have to become after you have that desire? That's just the first step, right? Then the world has to give you the challenges and the struggles and the pain and all the stuff you have to overcome insofar as you need to learn that to be the person for whom these things you ultimately desire show up for. Effortlessly.

Yep, absolutely. You know, we're talking today with a client who was not necessarily getting the results that she wanted. And she said something, it was super simple but super profound. She said, growth, growing is the process and the process is growing. And I don't think that we'll ever get away from that. Absolutely. You're never gonna get it. You're never gonna get there. You're always gonna be going. And you know, I like to look at, I look at each human as a macrocosm of the entire universe. And as far as I'm concerned, the entire universe is not only creating things at all times, but it's always expanding. And yeah, there's theories that it may end up rubber banding and come back to an omega point, but that's a story for a different day. At the end of the day, for the last 13 billion years, the universe has been expanding. And as long as the omega point doesn't happen in our lifetime, I think that we should understand that we're also going to be doing that, expanding.

It's just like the markets. Even in the universe, people are bearish on the universe. Like it's gonna start. Yeah, I know better than God or the universe or whatever, I think it's eventually gonna turn around. I want to be the contrarian and go short on this universe. It's gonna be. I don't want to plan on expanding with it. That's ridiculous.

It's like. No, you'd embrace it. You know, I was watching a Will Smith early Will Smith video earlier saying the same thing, like Successful, successful people fail way more than they succeed, but they have learned way more. Yeah, exactly.

I fail a lot today. I'm going to keep failing this week. I fail hundreds of times a week. It's great. But I also win more as a result.

Absolutely. And I think that something that when we're on this path of personal transformation, learning to embrace that and seeing it as a friend rather than an enemy, and that's one thing I've observed about a lot of people that come into our community, is that we have this very dualistic kind of mindset that evil and good or light and dark are enmitous when in reality they're harmonious. And it's our ability to understand how light and dark interact to build and benefit each other and good and evil and all this kind of stuff and growth and contrast and failure and success. So our ability to step back and see how those two interactions, that I think is what gives us the most momentum going forward. I don't think that dualistic thought can survive in a constantly expanding person. I just don't. Because both are, you know, both are required for both. Like, it's. It's simple. I think you can explain it with the sun. You know, if the sun was to be shining 24 7, I don't think that'd be a good thing.

Right.

I just don't think it would be good for us in the same sense it was to be dark 24 7, we would all die. I don't think we could survive without sunlight. Right. Nothing could survive without sunlight, at least on our planet. Well, some things can. But, you know, again, this whole idea that. Well, one of the others.

Yeah. I think the analogy you're going for is like, it starts with energy, Right. It starts with the sun beaming down light, which allows a lot of other things to catalyze and eventually use that energy. That vibrational particle quality of light that allows things to, for example, photosynthesize and create, you know, ATP or, you know, that then those things go on to be eaten by other things that have a different, you know, biological pathway that they use and extract energy. It comes down again to ATP. Like everything on the planet Earth that we know about right now is. Has some function of that in its. In its DNA and its system and DNA is in everything. Right. So we kind of know a lot of the tools and building blocks and pieces of the puzzle, which I'm grateful I had the opportunity to really get deep on all and just knowing kind of how some of these building blocks are built gives You a good sense of like, what is the real reality? Right? What is the closest approximation of the truth we can get to because we'll never know the truth with a capital T. And change is the only thing that's constant, so it's always in flux, right? And the rate of change, if you didn't get crazy enough, the rate of change is actually exponentially increasing as a function of our perspective as human beings. We just don't know what's coming next. So it's just a really cool thing to understand is like, all right, the universe is orderly, it just has to. Right? We wouldn't be able to have this podcast if it wasn't orderly. Planes wouldn't be able to take off and land if it wasn't orderly. Our job as scientists who are not disbelievers in the woo, right, I love that. Is to actually go out and look at the woo and be like, okay, how does this actually line up with maybe laws or systems in reality that we don't even really have a good handle on? How do we create theories or hypothesis hypotheses to test what might possibly be reality and then uncover a new understanding? Because guess what? If you told me 100 years ago I couldn't look inside you, that cutting you open, you'd call me crazy. Now we use X rays and PET scans and CT scans all day long. If you told me 10 years ago I'd have a supercomputer lives in my pocket that cost less than a thousand dollars, I'd call you crazy. But now I do. And I can communicate with literally anybody on the planet. The frickin president of the United States can tweet about stuff from this device on his toilet in the morning, start a war. When was that available to the average human being? Only a few years ago. And what we know about the world next in the next decade is going to change even faster. Just look how fast, you know, blockchain cryptocurrency is moving compared to the beginning of the Internet or even just the industrial revolution. That took a hundred years, this has taken eight years and it's already huge. You know, it's massive. I just think that we haven't seen anything yet. Hold on tight. Question every assumption you think you have and every theory is up for reinterpretation.

Absolutely. Dude, I love that you say that. You know, I am big. So I have another project that I'm working on that I. This is not about, but I'm starting the process of starting a private space company and I'VE always had an affinity for astronomy and space and commerce in space. And you know, I tell people sometimes, you know, we think that it's going to take four or five hundred years to start traveling at the speed of light. But honestly, dude, what you just said nails it for me. I mean, Ray Kurzweil, who's Google's chief engineer, talks about the singularity happening before 2045. And I'm just like, dude, if we have in the last 20 years, like you said, reduced something that was this size to this size, what do you think is going to happen in the next 20? You know what I mean? And so now we look at like Elon Musk's new company, it's called neuralink. And we're talking about linking technology with consciousness and doing this whole matrix type hacking stuff where you can learn things instantaneously. I mean, the sky is really not the limit. And I know there are a lot of risks that come with our delving into this stuff, but it wouldn't be what it is if there weren't no risks. We cannot be afraid of failing like we've been talking about, because that is the whole, that is the whole premise of progress. Failure is the premise of progress.

And we know about it. From another perspective. Life is risk. The risk of being alive is that one day you'll die. So while you're here for however long that is, is risk really a thing? You're gonna die, you're gonna die soon. In the grand scheme of things, you're gonna be dead very soon. In the 14 billion year span of the universe, or however long it is, we don't even know. Have a theory, right? Based on evidence, and that's a theory. But in the 14 billion years that this universe has been around, your hundred year lifespan is a fart in the wind. It's not even a flash in a pan. It's like, it's like a spark.

Yeah.

And during that time, the only risk is really not doing anything with it. Because perceptually, it's very clear and present for you. You're the one in this body. You're experiencing what you're experiencing. You're loving, you're fearing, you're hoping, you're dreaming, you're creating. And you get to do that and you get to be limited in doing that. And that's so important. It's like we have five ways to perceive the universe. There might be hundreds of thousands of ways to perceive the universe. If we were God, we'd be everything and all things. At all time. Thank God we're not that. Because we wouldn't have anything to contrast with.

Right.

We wouldn't have anything to compare this to that or one to the other. Everything would just be this, this blissful, crazy. All things are all times omnipotent on the present experience. What the hell would wean from that? How would we have the gratitude for the pain that you've gone through that's made you the man standing in front of me today? How would I have a podcast to be like, you know, I'm going to go out and choose this value over that value, right?

Absolutely.

I want to choose to create this, this new thought instead of that thought. I'm a crazy person. I think that, you know, we're going to win more through collaboration in the future than we ever did through competition in the past.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that capitalism needs to end and, or evolve in order for us to now get to the next level. Because now we're dealing not in a linear economy, not in an additive economy. We're dealing literally in an exponential economy where one person's actions can affect billions very quickly. And that's pretty soon going to even go faster with AI and automation. You're going to have an AI somewhere one day that's going to think up a billion dollar company when you go to sleep tonight. And by the morning it's going to be traded on the stock market.

Yeah, dude. Yep, absolutely. And I think, man, I love everything that you're talking about. I absolutely believe collaboration is the way of the future. Absolutely. I don't think that we're in a place where that kind of competitive markets can even stand anymore. Because, you know, I think with the progression and development of AI and the global brain, the scintillect think we're going to understand more and more and more the experiential truth that is described in so many religious journeys, that everything is one and connected, experiencing itself in a bunch of different forms. And I think the end of technology is the collective revelation that we're all connected. And what I do, whether you're aware of it or not, affects you and it affects Johnny and affects Timmy and it affects Jenny and all these different things. And one action I take has, has literally an innumerable amount of ripples that it makes. And I am absolutely loving what you're, what you're speaking about right now.

Yeah, man. I mean, look at it this way. How can it not be anything else than that? And literally like the fish in the water, the fish don't know what the water is until you. They'll never know. They never know that they're in water. We know they're in water because we can perceive that. Like we're in, we're in air. What do we ever really think about that we're living in mostly nitrogen, some oxygen, some carbon dioxide. But this is literally like a, you know, this is our water.

Right.

Do we ever really delve into what it is to be human being living on planet Earth compared to what?

Right, exactly. And I think when you do that, you find yourself with so much gratitude, you know, when you really allow yourself to realize the. Honestly, it's just there's so much reverence that comes from realizing that, wow, I am in this body on a spinning ball revolving around a giant ball that is in the midst of a bunch of other spinning balls of gas and rock. And we're just here. And if we're not going to spend this time loving and creating and collaborating, what's the point of it? What is the point, like you said, besides creating? And if we weren't individuals in the way that we were, there would be. No, I don't think collaboration would even be a thing, you know, and so that, this is a lot of the stuff that we dive into in the academy. And I think it requires a lot of transparency with yourself. It requires a real strong bravery, because I think, at least today, the Western mind's biggest hindrance is its inability to be honest with itself. You know, we love facades, we love images, we love idols, we love. The chipped aspects of things, but not the fullness of it. And I think that really relates to, and I've talked about this before, a lot of meme culture is a result of, okay, we know there's stuff going wrong, but we have a really hard time dealing with it. And one of our biggest mantras at the Reality Hacker Academy is to be completely accepting of the fact that our deepest concepts of ourselves, our deepest assumptions, our deepest beliefs, are dramatically affecting our lives. And a tiny tweak in those beliefs and those assumptions and those ideas can radically affect the trajectory of everything else that's going on. Personal transformation does not have to be hard. It doesn't have to be this mystical woo woo. There's a very practical aspect, like you said, that goes with the woo woo. You know, I personally, I love the woo woo. But you know, you said something really interesting earlier. And I realized this year, or not this year, last year, forgot it's 2018. My whole objective after I started seeing these illogical things happen in my journeys through religion was to understand the laws. What are the laws? How does this start, how does it happen? And how can I replicate this law over and over and over and over and over again? Because if it can happen, it does happen. And if it does happen and it benefits people, why not make it happen over and over and over and over and over again to benefit everybody? Why does it have to only happen between a select few? What is the secret? What is the metaphysical principle behind how an idea or a belief turns into a physical substance, a tangible substance?

And it's choice really, if there's a possibility, there's a probability you can assign to it. There's a possibility the world's gonna end today. It's a very low possibility, but it's a possibility. And therefore you can assign a probability to it. And the function of taking action consistently is really a function of choice. Right? I've been reading a lot of great stuff by a guy named Forrest Landry. And he has been helping me re align myself. He's a very intelligent man. He started a couple companies and worked with governments and different people around the world. But they. One of the things that I really love about his philosophy is that he talks about how love is choice. And the more you love, the capacity to which you can love is the capacity which you have choice and free will and can impart that upon others. Right? That's how love shows up. It's like you have a choice. So everybody has a choice whether they want to create heaven or they want to create hell, or something in between. What type of life they want to live, how they want to spend this next moment, this next instant, this next second, they can do whatever they please with it. Now wisdom comes from making the choices consistently based on the probabilities and the possibilities out there that most align you with your desire. Right. Napoleon Hill talks about this in his book. He goes, desire, desire, desire, desire. I didn't get that until much later. I didn't understand. Really starts with a desire which is like that, that communion with God, if you will. It's like I have a desire that's deep in, you know, it's God. Could be the universe, the flying spaghetti monster, the connection, the oneness, whatever you want to call it, right? However you experience God or whatever your story about God is, is just understanding that you have a connection to that. You are created in its image, limited, but created with free will to then co create an experience based on that free will and choice based on all the possibilities that are infinite. And now we're just seeing that speed up because so many people are doing it so much more connected and realizing they have so much more power than they ever did before.

Right.

But they always were doing it at some scale. And it's incredible to watch. And I really love that businesses like yours, who most people are going to disregard and say, oh, that's nonsense, Woo woo, it's garbage, are showing up to say, well, what if there were rules to this game? What if we could put our skepticism aside? Skepticism is important, but not so important that you should shut off your mind to new ideas.

Absolutely, absolutely. I believe it was Aristotle. It was Aristotle that said that, you know, it's a mark of a mature person to be able to hold two ideas up without bias and examine them objectively. And I think it's super important because. And that's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. With our business, we have very core principles and tenants that we adhere to, laws of consciousness, as you might say. And yet I'm still asking myself, okay, are these refinable? Are these growable? Are these, you know, is there more to this than I currently understand? Exactly, because they work now. And the idea is that they're going to work forever. And you know, these are how, like you said, we've always been creating our lives. And that's what we teach. From the time we were literally came into this body, we've been using, whether it's unconsciously or not, feelings, desires, ideas, perceptions, concepts of ourselves, all this kind of stuff to provoke stories, inner dialogue, feelings and action to create results. Right? And so I think that the most important thing that we can understand is two things. A, that we are loved beyond belief. B, that the potential inside of each of us is much more greater than we have ever given ourselves credit for. In the truth, I really hold to the statement that all things are possible for those who believe. And with my life, I think that is the statement I aim to kind of invoke in everybody that I come into contact with, that if you simply have a strong enough desire, a strong enough belief, magic in the sense that things that we don't understand, how they happen, it can happen. When I was growing up, I told you that I was put on prescription meds at 4 and I was put on over 30 by age 18. Antidepressants, antipsychotics, you name it. When I was 18, I was in ministry school and I said, look, I said, God, as I thought of it then, if you're real, I'm going to be able to stop all of this and be completely straight. And so I literally just went cold turkey against everybody's advice. And it's now been seven years, and I am more emotionally stable, mentally stable than I've ever been. And I have not touched a prescription drug. One thing in our culture is mental illness in the stimulus that, oh, we're victims and we can't change it. But the truth is we can, we can, we can, we can. Everything can be healed, Everything can be balanced. And I really think that our ability to do that comes down to a couple things. A willpower, belief.

If you guys have been listening this podcast for a long time, you probably heard my story around. Not prescription medicine, thankfully. I never got down that rabbit hole. But alcohol. I started drinking. I was 11 years old. I got really heavy when I was 14 and didn't really stop. I didn't really get it under control until I was like, 26. My dad died from it. My best friend in college died from it. I didn't see any of the warning signs. I just thought it was normal, right? And it was a coach, a really loving coach who said, brad, you really need to take a break from drinking just for 30 days. Clear your head, re establish your relationship with alcohol. And I didn't ever think I was an alcoholic. And I still don't like labels. I don't think that really helps. You know, I've been to, like, a lot of meetings and done all these types of different things and just. Just to see what it's all about. I don't agree with everything from AI think it needs, like a 2018 refresh a little bit with better science. But there, there are really good tenets there and really good, helpful things. It does help people. And, you know, I've done videos on this. It's not my jam, it's not what I seek to promote. But, guys, if you are struggling with a substance addiction, if you're struggling with prescription drugs, if you're struggling with people in your life that are influencing you in a negative way and you want to be free of that, take it from me, your life hasn't even begun yet. When you make that decision, like Michael did or like I did, to just stop, trust that it can be a different life and that, you know, you just kind of can just suspend disbelief because people love to believe that they know everything about life. They love to believe wherever the stage they're at. And it's ridiculous because five years ago, I was a different guy who thought different things. And I Realized how ridiculous some of the things I thought back then were.

Yeah, sure.

I hope in five years I'm gonna look back at 32 year old Brad and be like, oh, that guy was an idiot compared to where I'm at today. I hope that continues to be the level at which we grow. Yeah, I wish that for you too because God, man, it's, it's a beautiful life. I live in a five bedroom house looking, overlooking the ocean. I get to talk to brilliant multi millionaires and sometimes billionaires every day. Really, to create the future. I'm not saying it is to brag or impress. I'm just saying I should have been dead 20 times by now.

Yeah, absolutely.

And whatever your story is, whatever you've gone through, whatever struggles, whatever, that's. Use that, try not to die, but use that fuel to now become the person that you were meant to be and impact people at the level that you were meant to impact the world. Because the world needs leaders more than ever. And a leader doesn't create more followers. I'm not telling you go out and follow Brad Hart or follow Michael Gustin. I'm telling you to be a leader yourself. A leader creates more leaders. So if you can come away with that, is that leaders can create things that weren't there before. They're visionaries that can see the world better than it is. They're realistic, right. They see the world as it is. They're not sugar coating anything. They say, okay, this is what it is. We want to get over here. And they help align connections, resources, opportunities, people, systems, whatever to close the gap.

Absolutely.

That's all you can do.

One of my favorite pastors, Bill Johnson, he pastors a church called Bethel Church in Redding, California. He said something years ago that has always stuck with me. But he says as leaders, we need to be the floor for the next generation. Right. The next generation is going to be going exponentially further than we are if we're really raising up true leaders. And I absolutely agree with you. You know, I love it when somebody that we're coaching does in a shorter timeframe than we did what we've done. Right? Because they're just like, yes, like this. Not only does this stuff really work, it's like there's no limit around how fast it can work, how much somebody can take and apply and run with it and gain from it. And so I'm in the same boat with you, man. I am. Through these principles that we've taught, I have created my dream relationship. You know, I'm in A relationship with a lovely woman who I'm just building with every single day. We've just got a house in Colorado that is 8,000 square feet. We just bought it. We bought a Tesla, my dream car, you know, and we're building the Reality Hacker Academy. I'm building Skytech. We're. I'm writing another book. I mean, there's just so much goodness going on. And I think that all of it comes down to our choices. Like you said, our choices, we can either choose to build greatness or we can choose to build crap. And it's completely up to us. And I don't think there's anything that really, you know, anything that can be said after that, because it's just like, it's all up to us.

And I have a. I have a kind of a. I like rhymes. I like alliterations. I like black and white animals. Like, I'm kind of a goofball. So one of the things I've been playing with, I don't know if I have perfected yet, but we can brainstorm it together right now is it starts with inspiration, right? That's kind of playing on the desire. So desire, inspire, conspire, right? Who are you working with to create this? And then finally, the reality transpires and starts with that desire, right? I have a desire for something to be different or change great or whatever it is. And then from that, what am I in what. What are the inputs that inspire me or don't inspire me? What are the stories I'm telling myself? What are the beliefs, the values, the structures and thoughts that I'm creating? Finally, who's that attracting into my life? Who am I conspiring with to create this reality? Who's on board with this desire? Because guess what? Under the sun, there's. There's nothing new. People who desire more money, there's plenty of those people. You just go align with them. As long as they have the values and integrity that you're looking for, you can align with them and win. That's the make more marbles philosophy. It's not the hungry, hungry Hitler's grab for all the marbles. Make more marbles. And then finally, what you desire, are inspired to do and conspire with the right people to do. It can transpire, and it can happen very quickly. Tony Robbins loves to tell a story about how he was making 30 grand one year and made a million the next year. And that was in the 70s, when a million dollars was still a million dollars before the gold standard crap and printing Money and all that stuff. So now it's like 10 million. I mean, you could do it. It's not a stupid thing to think. It's rare. Not a lot of people believe it. There's not a lot of models and role models to look up to that can do it, that have done it. But it's totally possible, 100% possible. People make billions of dollars overnight all the time. Like a money thing. Guys get money out of the way as quickly as possible because that's the one story that's so pervasive in humanity, is I don't have the money, I can't afford it, and therefore they stop right there. Instead of getting resourceful, you know, I'll use just a personal example. Bring close to home. Brad is a mutual friend of ours, Brad Newman, who is a guy who, you know, has just been barreling through all the crap in his life and just, you know, when I met him, he was making $12 an hour in addiction recovery. He was three years sober. And now he just went on to close $38,050,000 consistently in two months, back to back. Working for another influencer named Scott Ulford, who you're familiar with your client of as well. And I love that story because it happened so fast, right? It happened from June to now, which is, you know, this is being recorded in January. His entire life is different and still on that trajectory. And yeah, he's gonna hit plateaus. Not every day is the same. And, you know, he's still working through the stuff he's working through. But one of the things I had to coach him on recently, which I think is really important to this discussion, is I said you need to hire a sales coach to work on These last little 2 millimeter shifts in order to make sure you're not missing deals that would otherwise be closable. Right? Help people make great decisions. The worst thing in the world is when somebody needs this, they want it, but they can't say yes. And you can't help them say yes if they're a no and it's not a good fit. That's a different story, right? Leading with integrity, but leadership is allowing people to make the right decision at the right time and not live in the maybe or the wishy washy. So I recommended a really great sales trainer to him named Eli Wilheit. Eli's been Tony Robbins protege for years. They know him personally. He sold more Tony Robbins tickets than anybody in the history of the company besides maybe Tony Robbins. And that's only because Tony's been at it longer, if I'm being perfectly honest. Eli's a beast. He's incredible at what he does and he's just, he's a giver and he's passionate. I love him to death. I recommend the crap out of Eli Wilde. He changed his name. You can check him out@eliwild.com w I l D E Like Oscar Wilde. He's one of the most heart centered leaders I've ever met and I'm just grateful to know him. Actually, Facebook just reminded me this morning that we've been friends on Facebook friends for three years. So that's really nice. Anyway, love Eli. He's also been on the show. You can check out his podcast, Amazing, Amazing man. So the moral of the story is I told Brad to go hire Eli and he said, I can't afford to. And I said, stop, stop right now. Go call him. It will work out if you're committed. And I literally, I had to like give him a kick in the butt to go call him. He was like so nervous to do it. So he did. And this is a couple weeks ago and you know, a few conversations happen. Frank on our team, who runs our sales team, kind of helped him work it out. But it turned out that Eli needed that call as much as Brad did because he had some things that were sticking points in his business that Scott, who Brad works for, could help. So now Brad, thinking like a person who's not just constrained by money, started putting deals together and making it work so that his needs were met and Eli's needs were met and Scott's needs were met and everybody's needs got met and no money even needed to change hands. We'll look at that.

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Dude. I totally, I love that Brad.

Most people would just stop at, hey, I don't have enough money, I can't afford it. And that would be the end of the story.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, that's talking about getting resourceful. That's funny. We. So when we heard about the relevancy engine, Scott Ulford's program, we were like, you know, we were probably cutting honestly two grand a month. And just because all we had was a membership program that was charging $47 a month and we, you know, it's like, no, dude, we're not going to say no. So we went and opened a credit card and paid the engine on the credit card and we started back in November, actually. And we've already five times our company revenue income in a month.

Or.

Yeah, last month, we. Four times. Anything we had done in all of 2017. And so it's just like, it's. You know, one of my mentors, his name is David, he says that it's not that you lack resources, it's that you lack resourcefulness. And it's just. It's so amazing how when we're committed to something, we can do it, you know, I kind of have a similar story to Brad, I guess, in that sense. About a year and a half ago, I was a stagehand working for some company out in Nashville making 10 bucks an hour, and was slowly diving into investing. So I do. I'm not a big crypto guy. I mean, I have some crypto, but I'm mainly Forex. I do a lot of Forex. No, no network marketing Forex, just my own personal Forex portfolio. And, you know, last year, I remember the first day I made $25,000 in a day from Forex. I, like, literally flipped out. I ran in circles around neighborhoods because I couldn't believe that this was actually possible. And so really stepping into that level, it really is just a matter of being committed, being diligent, and going for it. Not making any excuses, not. Jordan Belfort says that the only reason, only thing that's separating us from the thing that we want is the excuse that we're giving ourselves as to why we can't have it.

And I absolutely just understanding how much money there is in the world, it's so much like if it was a river, it'd be overflowing.

Yeah.

And those amounts of money, as big as they may seem to some people, some people, for a hundred bucks, is like live or die. Right? That's all they got. That's all they think that they should have. And some people, like, if you. If they woke up tomorrow and had a million in their account or 10 million in their account, they'd be like, where the hell did all the rest of my money go? So there's always a level, right? I know these people, like, I've worked with hundred millionaires and billionaires where it's just money's not a thing. Because money, they realize, is a story. It's a very pervasive story. It's a very clear and present story that means a lot of things to a lot of people, but it's a story. There's always more of it. We can always create more wealth.

Yeah.

Adding value never stops. It only completely. It just continues to compound and compound and compound. And everybody's a conscious co creator. Everybody can create value. Everybody can take something as it is and make it better than it is and therefore derive value from that for themselves and for others. And the best way to create is to make win, win wins all around for everybody.

Absolutely. Dude, I love it.

I'm totally nail it for one person. You can scale it to a million people and that's all you're doing right now. You've nailed it. You got your process down. People are getting value now. You scale it and you have the tools to do it. It's a beautiful thing. So anybody who's stuck, we throw a lot at you in this hour, please come back, listen to this podcast because you're going to continue to get little insights, guys that are going to change your life. And you can go down the rabbit hole on Tony or Scott or Eli or any of these people that we mentioned. We'll put some links in the show notes. But at the very end of this podcast, I want you to come away with one thing, is that whatever you believe you can achieve, that's it. But you got to believe it.

That's it.

So, Michael, thank you. I'm grateful for having you on the show and thank you for the amazing conversation. I'm just blown away by what you're doing in the world and how you show up and I can just feel the presence that you bring to things. We're so grateful. Making more marbles. We truly believe in collaboration over competition. We want everybody to win in their way and move their mission forward faster. The way we do that is by connecting resources, opportunities, people and systems together. I call it the crops analogy, or acronym, if you will. So how can we do that for you?

Well, I mean, the only thing we're doing right now, our biggest thing is our alignment engine, which is our flagship program. And we're helping coaches that are stuck under six figures and have been stuck there take their big, take their business flying past six figures with ease, with a couple tweaks in foundations and systems. And so that's really our foundation. If you have anybody that's like that, we'd be honored to just give them strategy sessions and really give them the roadmap to that place. Because like you said, I believe that collaboration is the future. And I think that having a coach, having a mentor, is just as much of collaboration as being with somebody who is, quote, unquote, your equal in business.

You might think, by the way, that mentorship is a one way street. It is not. A lot of people don't get a mentor because they think oh, what do I have to give to this person? Or why would this person want to work with me? You get as much from mentoring people as you do from being mentored, if not more. Honestly, the giving is more than the receiving, and it comes back to you in ways you wouldn't even anticipate. So don't get stuck in that story. If you need a mentor, if you need a coach, reach out to those people. Not anybody, not any idiot that woke up one day and say, hey, I'm a life coach now. Somebody with a track record doing the thing that you want to do. If they have the same results in their life and it's measurable and you can see it their life, then it's probably certain that they can help you as well, provided they have the same types of skills that you have. Provided. There are similar wealth dynamic because sometimes you get really great advice from people. It's obviously worked for and it doesn't work for you because you don't have a different. You have a different flow than them. That does happen. That's a little annoying. And I've been working to resolve that with my mastermind, which is why we geek out on wealth dynamics. But, guys, the help is out there. Get the help. If you resonate with Michael, what he's got going on, get in touch. And how do people do that?

Michael, you can actually find everything on this program at our exclusive website, stopthehustle.com stopthehustle.com I love it.

Stopthehustle.com S T O P T H E H U s t l e.com awesome. Great URL, by the way. Stop the hustle. Start attracting what you want and do it in a scientific way that makes a lot of sense based on what we know about the universe and what we don't know that we don't know and how we can approach that order to create new theories that may or may not work in the future. And it goes on and on and on. And you get to add a note to this beautiful symphony that we call human existence. It's a beautiful thing.

Awesome. Brad, it's been such a blessing chatting with you today. I feel so lifted after this thing, and I know that my night is going to be blessed because of the opportunity that I had to be with you today.

Thank you, Michael. And I appreciate you saying that. And I'm grateful to have you on the show. And on behalf of everybody at make more marbles, thank you. Thank you for being here. We love you. Thank you. And we'll see you on the next one.

See ya.

Thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marbles podcast. For more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing, abundant life in your health, wealth and relationships, whatever that means to you, Head on over to makemoremarbles.com check out our cool explainer video about what we're about and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers. We want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher, or Google Play wherever you're listening your podcast. And please do leave a review. Thank you so much and we'll see you on the next podcast.