TrueLife - Mindscapes and Magic: Navigating the Psychedelic Experience for Spiritual Growth

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/I’m a self funded, independent, content creator, anything helps!Please support the showhttps://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_UShttps://patreon.com/Truelifepodcasthttps://magicbrad.com/Hi! My name is Brad Gudim. aka MagicBrad.I live in Minneapolis (Fridley), Minnesota and have been self-employed most all my life. At a very young age (4 or 5), I found an interest in magic and took it on as a hobby which evolved into a full-time career as an entertainer (magician) in the 70s, 80s and 90s. (yep, I still do gigs now and then.) My activity as a magician moved me into the event industry. I’ve created multiple events, (Minnesota Event Planners + Suppliers Expo) as marketing platforms for my business and also for others as clients. In 2004, I formed MediaMaxEvents.com (The Expo Guys) as a partnership and then resigned in 2012 to pursue a simpler life. I studied digital marketing and created a hybrid (online/offline) event marketing strategy.Then fast-forward to 2020 the “covid thingy” caused all EVENTS to stop dead.I didn’t quit… I innovated.I’ve accelerated my online activity and invested in more “internet real estate” with methods that are more hybrid, synergistic, automated and scalable. The Synergy Collaborative.This is where we are now.MY 2023 MANTRA is Passive – Recurring – Scalable.Time and Money – Time is precious and each day is limited to 24 hours.Money is abundant and available to everyone.~ PASSIVE~ RECURRING~ SCALABLEI invite you to connect with me and collaborate!Together We Accomplish More! One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. Hope everybody's having a beautiful day. It's Monday, which the 3rd of July coming up on a big holiday tomorrow. There's a whole lot of magic in the air. And for those who watch my channel, you know I'm a fan of the mystical experience, magic mushrooms,

and the whole idea that reality is more than you could possibly imagine. And today I got on the one and only Magic Brad. Brad Goodham coming to us. He's been a magician. He is an entrepreneur. He is an incredible individual that's been doing magic since the day I was born in the 1970s. So, Brad, I'm thankful that you're here today, my friend. How are you? It's good to be here.

I'd rather be with you where you are because you're over in Hawaii. I'm here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's something pretty magical about Hawaii that just fundamentally changes who you are. And it's a beautiful thing to be here. It's magical. I mean, there's no other way to say it. But you know, Brad, you and I have some similarities. And we and I have been continuing this conversation on your channel and mine. And for those who may want to get more of a background, they can probably go back and check out the links in the show notes and check out some of our conversations.

But as we move the ball forward here, I kind of really want to dive into depth about the difference between and the similarities between doing actual magic on stage and the perception of that and the perception and being under the influence of like a magic mushroom or something like that. So I have a question for you here today, and I'm just going to kind of throw it out here and get your opinion on it. So altered states of consciousness, when we think about that, you know, both magic and psychedelics can induce altered states of consciousness. Magic often involves rituals and sometimes meditation or other practices. But I'm wondering from your perspective, what is it about perception that allows magic to happen? Okay, that's kind of a deep question, isn't it?

Yeah. I think part of it is because there's laws, you know, universal laws, like the law of gravity. But if you were to go into an altered state of consciousness, you can fly around. Are you really flying around because of the physical laws of gravity? Are you really flying around? Or is that something that's just in your imagination? And if it is in your imagination, are you really flying around? it's just in the ethereal world rather than the physical world.

You still might be doing that. But some people say, well, you're just making that up in your head. True. But everything was made up in our head. I mean, Henry Ford said, I'm going to start building these cars. And all of a sudden, they turn into physical reality, right? It started in his head. Yeah.

Right? So that's how, I think that's how magic works. And they say seeing is believing, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. and then the word truth, what is true? Is there an absolute truth or is there a perceived reality? Because I've had situations where I thought I was going to die. I had situations where I thought I saw a guy disappear. I had a situation where I saw a cup slide across a table,

like it was some kind of telekinesis. So can that be explained with sleight of hand magic? or physics, or was it something that I think I saw? So you make it up in your net. Yeah. You know, I once heard a quote that said, truth is like a collective belief. So if enough people believe something,

that thing becomes true, even though it may not be true in actuality. Yeah. So as you're performing, like let's say you're performing magic and there's a crowd out there. And is, Is it an exercise and getting people to believe what you want them to believe? What is that like?

What's that process like? I'm not real. Well, kind of like that. You're talking about the process of performing slightly. Yeah. You do. You do have to get inside of the person's head and get them believing. Like an example that I use, I take a coin, I put the coin in my hand, I throw it up in the air,

I follow it with my eyes, and I see it disappear. And I react to it. I act as if it disappeared. And a person would replay that to a friend and say, I saw him take the coin, he flipped it up in the air, and it disappeared right in the air. But that's not really what happened. But that's the way they replayed in their head. So I'm sort of doing that by miming it and going through the gestures of,

I feel the coin in my hand, throw it up in the air, and then it disappears. they see all those emotions and physical reactions. So they just assume that I actually took the coin. I really put it in my hand. I really threw it up in the air. And then it really disappeared up in the air. When the reality is, I never put it in the other hand. But I went through all those motions.

And because of the capability of doing sleight of hand where it looks like it's actually being put in the other hand, some people think that the hand is quicker than the eye, because that's what magicians used to say. But it's not about the speed. It's about the believability that I actually took the coin and put it in my hand. In fact, I've seen people do things where there is no coin. They just say, I'm going to take this quarter and I'm going to put it in my hand like this.

Now, watch the quarter. So your head right now is going, okay, he grabbed a quarter and put it in his hand, even though I didn't. But you believe it. So when I take it and throw it up in the air and it disappears, you say, oh, my God, Where did it go? It's not up your sleeves. Got short sleeves on.

If you're on the ground, I didn't hear anything. It must have disappeared. So I create that illusion in your head. Okay, so this brings up a critical point for, I think, psychedelics and healing. Because a lot of people have trauma with what happened in their life. And if we can use the idea of trauma analogous to a magic trick, you know, when we remember something, we're recreating it in our head. So the chances of us creating it the exact same way that it happened is slim to none. But what we remember happened becomes a lot like that quarter in the palm of your hand.

If you believe it happened and you replay it in your mind that it happened, then it happened. You can say, oh my God, I can't believe that person treated me like that. Boom. And that's the magic trick in your mind. So I think that we can learn lessons from the ideas of magic where if we go through what you said and say, look, that's not exactly what happened. Let's replay it in our mind. Let's recreate it and remember it and change it. Then you can either put more magic into it or take more magic out of it. It's an interesting concept. If it's all an illusion, whether it's a magic trick, whether it's a

quarter in your hand or whether it is being, you know, the way in which you recreate a traumatic memory. It's pretty similar, right? Well, you know, some of the religious faiths, they say, that God gave us free will. That means we have the will to choose. So if we believe that we were abused as a child, like I'll even give you a real life example for myself. When I was a kid, I had alcoholic parents. They liked to go to the bar at night.

So they would leave me at night by myself, which is traumatic for a little kid. Yeah. And they would then reward me because they'd left and I was sad and everything. So they bring me back a nut goody. Candy buying. So I went through a breath session because I was trying to heal this thing.

I had this abandonment issue. I didn't know idea what it was. But with hindsight, realizing that it was my parents leaving me as a little kid at home by myself in the dark with creepy noises, scared. Yeah. I had this issue. So I guess that might be PTSD or whatever. I had some stress going on being abandoned. So then there's another biblical thing.

Forgive them for they know not what they do. I ever heard that one? Right. So I have to forgive my mom and dad because they didn't leave me because they were abandoning me. They left me because they were addicted to alcohol and they had to go drink. So if I forgive them, I'm no longer wounded

when all of a sudden my wife decides to go out with some friends and I don't go. I don't feel abandoned anymore because I've healed that wound that had as a kid. But it was my belief that mom and dad left me by myself. But that's not what the truth was. The truth was they were addicts and they had to go get their alcohol. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it speaks volumes of allowing yourself. And I think this is similar to magic is that you create the meaning of that event. You can create, hey, this is a magical event or, hey, that guy's just palm in it. You know, it's like it's whatever it is that you want to believe. But sometimes those illusions are so good that we want to be, we want to believe. It's almost like we want to have that feeling of either being mesmerized or sometimes victimized. Well, well, there is that situation where when something lucky happens to you, right?

You say, my God, I can't believe that. Why can't you believe that? Why can't you believe that a miracle happens? Some people, I can't believe that happened to me. Sure, I did. So it's really a perception in my mind of how you want to look at it. You can flip the coin on the other side. Like we were talking earlier about how the day was.

I didn't have that good a day. I had someone stand me up at a meeting. So I had to drive all the way 30 minutes to a meeting and then they didn't show up. So I could be angry at them. But I look back in the texts and I guess they had a doctor's appointment yesterday. Maybe something came up. Yeah. So I can be angry that irresponsible bitch.

What the hell? How come she didn't show up my meeting? You think time isn't it worth anything? I could get all angry. Right. Or I could go, holy cow, maybe they're on their deathbed or something. Maybe I can forget about me and start thinking on a holistic way. And the reality is, I sat there on my phone, had a cup of coffee and a croissant and enjoyed myself.

Enjoy the moment, you know? Yeah, it's a good point. And I think that there's real. possibilities in there. In some ways, it makes me think about this idea of connection in magic. You know, what do you think is the connection between

sometimes when I watch magic, like someone disappears, or there's that classic trick of somebody cutting a woman in half. It's almost like sometimes magic has this spiritual connection to it. Like it's defying spirituality. And I think psychedelics also have that sort of bridge in there.

What can you speak to with the ideas of magic and spirituality? Well, I think definitely that kind of thing where you've got this physical world where you've got physical constraints. We have to abide by physical laws. Like a force in motion tends to stay in motion and gravity and what are some of those other like inertia and stuff like that? You fly off the merry ground if you get going too fast. Those things happen. But when you get into the more the metaphysical, and beyond the physical and into the etheric world of imagination and doing whatever you want,

you can spin as fast as you want if you're on a shroom trip or whatever. And I've never done that thing, so I don't know. Right. But I'm just saying, okay, I'm flying on this merry ground, and I decide you've got two things can happen to. You can fly off the merry ground and get thrown against a wall of spikes and die. Or you can just get thrown into the universe and turn into vapor and fly around. and you can create whatever you want because there are no physical,

you know, dimensional time and space limitations. Yeah, it's a great point. It makes me wonder, have you, have, sometimes there's these things called like dark magic where, like, if we look back at like Alistair Crowley or, you know, some of these people in which they conjured up spirits that dwelt inside of them and there's all kinds of movies about it.

And sometimes books, about it. But do you, have you ever seen anything like that in the world of magic where people call inside of themselves a spirit and fundamentally change who they are? Yeah, I've seen it. I don't know if I believe that,

I mean, you know, you change your personality. But I think that that might be a more of a placebo effect or like you see actors. Yeah. They're this way. And then all of a sudden they act and they're a whole other way. Right.

Are they really a whole other way or are they just, are they just possessed by the characters and they become the character? You know what I mean? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Because there are people that will go on the dark side. And there's also in the magic world, there's people that utilize magic to make money by doing a trick and getting people to believe that the trick is actual real stuff.

Like I was doing a thing with some bending forks. You know how you can bend spoons and forks, and some people believe that people can actually do that. Now, I come from two places because I believe that I can sort of decide. In physical reality, you can't bend that physical metal with your mind. Right. Unless, you know, you're in the matrix and you say there is no spoon. Right. You see the spoon, but there is no spoon.

You know what I'm saying? It's an illusion. So I can then create it to bend with my mind. not in the physical world, but in the imaginative world, you can make that happen. How did Yuri Geller do it? Yeah, I always remember that guy. That was pretty impressive. They will believe that.

They will believe. Like, I was at an event once, and a woman says, yeah, I've got a friend that can do that. He does magic? And he goes, no, she does it for real. Okay, whatever. I'm not going to argue with that. I don't believe that you can bend physical reality unless you've got these supernatural powers, which I don't think physical beings can do because we've got physical limitations.

Like flying. How does an airplane fly when it's got hundreds of people inside of this big chunk of aluminum? How is that flying? Physics, right? The shape of the wing and the lift and the drag and all that stuff. It's physics. But isn't technology, isn't magic just another name for things we don't understand? Could be.

Yeah, because, you know, people say like, oh, magic, that must be so fun. It kind of is, but when you know how it works, it's really not that amazing. It's kind of underwhelming. Right. As far as slight hand magic. Right. So I think that's where people get into it. They think, oh, that's really cool how you can, you know, make that dollar bill float

in the air or the coin disappear. How did they cut that lady in half? That was amazing. Yeah. It looks miraculous. Just like bending a spoon. How did you physically bend a spoon? And I think, you know what? If you can physically bend a spoon, maybe you can do something like bend steel girders and things. And if maybe a couple of these telekinetic people got into place, they could prevent bridges from breaking with their mind instead of sending all those work. workers up there to do it? Couldn't you do something more than banning a spoon? That's true.

You know, sometimes I wonder when I think about the ideas of magic and what is possible. You know, I think that we talked about magic being a technology that people don't understand or physics or something they don't get, but there's another side of it, too, that I often wonder about. And it's, it's, it's sort of synonymous. It's like this idea of premonitions. Like, sometimes you can be so tuned into your environment that you can almost forecast what's about to happen. And that kind of seems like a little bit of magic to me. And I think that that's something that has been harnessed by, you know, people that read palms or, or some fortune tellers or even a fortune cookie sometimes, but also by psychedelics. Like, it seems to me that there's

an extra sensory perception that is magical in a way. What do you think? I believe in that kind of thing. I believe that matter is finite, you know, molecules and protons and neutrons and they eventually break down and they turn into energy and then, and comically they may come back in a different form, but they still have that consciousness or that memory to them. So I believe that there are coincidences and serendipities and synchronicities that when certain things, two little molecules, they're in the ethereal realm and they come together and they solidify and they click together and all of a sudden you've got the beginning of something physical. It comes back into place. So if you and I are thinking, say we've got a concept, an idea. And we put our heads

together. We both think, I'm in agreement. Two or more agree. Yeah, let's do that. And we keep the ball rolling. You've got two things that come together. And then all of a sudden, somebody else comes in and says, yeah, I want to do that retreat thing in Costa Rica, too. That's a good idea. And then some yoga instructor, here's our podcast. And then they go, you know, I've wanted to do a yoga retreat in Costa Rica, too. What are you guys doing? And all of a sudden you got three people involved, four people involved. And pretty soon you got a real event in Costa Rica. Yeah, it's almost like when you put the ideas together and the energy together, you're creating an idea that can be translated into the universe and become tangible. And the more people that believe in it, the more power that goes to that idea.

Yeah, the concept is there. I mean, if you were to get like, just really get into your imagination, you basically start thinking about all these bizarre things like a dragon with wings, carrying a candy cane. And you make up all this stuff in your head, but those are all things that you know about from your past. You know about candy canes. You know about dragons. You read them in the books. You saw them breathing fire. So you're making all that stuff up to create this other entity.

I've never seen a fire breathing dragon with a candy cane before. So that's a new thing. It's still built off of old imagination. Let's bring in something that's totally new that we've never even heard of. What would that be? Like a flying tetrahedrogram that has one arm and lives in the sun. It's something that's an arm that you've heard of. It's got to be something that's never even heard of.

Like maybe there's some kind of portal or something that you climb through and go into an alternative universe. And I used to say there are only, there's only one universe because uni means one. But it can't there be two ones. Now you've got parallel universes. Yeah. Yeah, I think that that, you know, people that take a lot of psychedelics often talk about being in a place that is ineffable. Ineffable? Is that the right? Ineffitable.

There's no words for it. Yeah. Like there's no words to describe some of the states you find yourself in. And that is the true definition of alien, right? If something is alien, you can't see it. You don't understand it. You can't describe it because it's alien. Right.

So, yeah, like I think that sometimes I think that what this whole idea of alien is is and what this whole idea of something that's ineffable is, it's the changing of sense ratios inside the human organism. If you look at the world we live in, we have a certain ratio of vision to hearing, hearing to touching, touching to sounding. And people often talk about that they have one modality that's better than the other. But if you just change one of those senses, you fundamentally change the sense ratio in your world. And you fundamentally change how you see and live in the world you're in. And that, I think, is what's happening on a mass scale right now. I don't know too people talking about it. But what do you think about the idea of magic and sense ratios?

define again what a sense ratio is so a sense ratio is in the world we live in we're primarily visually we're heavy on the visual sense we look at typography we consume media we're constantly judging things based on what we see oh sure see things we hear things we can feel things yes yes it's things what about that other sense yeah yeah just saying that it seems to you with magic what you're trying to do is you're trying to throw people's sense ratio off like you don't believe your eyes because that's magic will show you a different illusion and so it's tricking your eyes thus it's tricking your ratio of senses sure well what came to my mind when because I had a little thing sitting over here when you said the whole thing is

okay now that like the word words mean things like the word or there's or or there's iron ore. Oh, yeah. There's an ore you row your boat with. So when you say that word and it vibrates into the universe, you need to know more of, more context of, I just said the word or. What am I referring to? Am I referring to the paddle?

Am I referring to the mineral or the steel? Or am I referring just the word? So your mind has to put that, connect that with something. Right. So here let me show you an example. Sure. I've got an example. I've got these cards.

Okay. So here's an example. There's four cards here. So we got a whole card. See the hole? Yep. Yep. The hole in the card.

Then we've got a whole card. The whole card is there. Then we've got another whole card and another whole card. So you got two hole cards and two whole cards. So if I should take the whole card and on the back of the whole card is a back. If I put that behind the card, that makes it look like a spot. So a hole turns into a spot. And this on the same side, it ends up being two cards,

but they look like they're spot cards now instead of whole cards. Cards. Doesn't that make sense? Yeah. So now if I say take the car, the thing off there, now the spot is really there. It's not a whole card anymore. Hmm. I go tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Now that card has spots.

The whole cards are turning into spot cards. Well, same thing here on this side. Same thing here. There's the whole card. And if I put that behind there, it becomes a big, giant spot card. It's not really a spot card. It's a hole card

with a spot. Because you're looking at all the spots, you're not watching the hole. That is beautiful. I love it. Play on words. Right.

That kind of means nothing, but I thought when you brought that up, I had to bring this effect out. I've been working on it. It's kind of fun where it plays with the, is he talking about a hole or a hole? Yeah. Depends on the context of the word, you know what I mean? Yeah. And I think it brings up the idea of words and magic spells.

You know, when you're playing on words, you know, a set of linguistic instructions can be a programming to a computer or to a person, depending on how you use those words. You can paint pictures in the minds of the people around you. Well, look at different languages and things, and then you've got people that are speaking in tongues. Are they really speaking in tongues, or are they speaking in a different language that someone else can interpret, but some other people can't? Maybe it's a foreign language. It's actually an alien language. Maybe it's coming from, you know, the cosmos instead of a continent. Yeah, it makes sense.

I mean, if you look at the brain is just a receiver, I think they call it, you know, glossolalia, where I'm just, If I just, ah, she's a little bit of a king, all that. You just make stuff up. And you see kids do it all the time. Yeah. But, you know, it's, who's to say that that's not a language in the other one dimension we were just talking about? Especially if someone is, like, singing it or something with a vibration.

And a person closes their mind and tries to imagine what that person is saying. You know, all of a sudden they start visualizing a cow that's being milked in its squirting out lemonade instead of milk. And, you know, you never know where it's going to go. And I think that's where maybe the hallucinogenics come in. And some people have good trips. Some people have bad trips. And they probably have bad trips because they go in with a bad attitude.

And then those are the demons they're going to see. And then someone else might go in with a good attitude. And those are the angels they're going to see. Yeah. And then your vortex. Yeah. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of truth to that in that there's a, there's kind of two different camps. One camp says that you should always go in with an intention.

You should believe and think about and meditate on what you want to work on. And there's another camp that's like, that's just pointless because you're going to get shown, whatever you want, the psych it does going to show you, whatever you need to be shown. And so, you know, with those two different camps, you know, you could probably take a journal and do 10 exercises with intention and 10 exercises without intention, and you probably get a 50% ratio on both of them, just depending. you know so it's it's kind of back to the whole card scenario but well here's a another quick example it's me and uh my magician friend when we were kids we had our magic assistants they were one of them was my girlfriend and the other one was that a friend of his and we were going to our intention was to go

out to california to a magic convention we never got there we had so much fun doing other stuff We stopped in Colorado. We went camping by this river and stuff. And we never made it out to the convention. So the intention was there. Right. The trip we took was different and just as enjoyable, possibly better. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a great example of how psychedelics work. You know, you think one thing is going to happen, but maybe you end up doing something else that is fundamentally better or is exactly what you needed it to be. And that's where the magic comes in. Yeah, maybe somebody said, okay, I'm going to do this trip. What would you call that? Like a healing journey or whatever? Sure.

I'm going to do this thing. And what I'm going to do is I have the intention to remove this block that I've got about abundance. I've got these blocks about abundance. So my intention is to remove them. And then all of a sudden you go off somewhere else and you find out that that's, that abundance thing is minimal compared to I was in Vietnam and I saw a bunch of guys get their legs blown off. And I'm all, no wonder I'd feel in lacking abundance. Yeah.

Another trauma going on. So maybe spirit will take you to the place where you need to be rather than the place your ego thinks it should be. Yeah, it's a great point. You know, sometimes the world we live in plays a giant illusion on us in trying to get us to perseil. the world the way the machine wants it to be. You know, when we think about magic and perception, sometimes I think about conditioning. And it's weird that in some ways, at least in the Western world where I was born, we've kind of been conditioned to have magic played upon us.

And one of the magic tricks that's been played upon us is this magic illusion of success. Like success is having all this money. Success is having all these things. I'm not saying everybody feels that way. What's your take on the idea of conditioning and response? It's definitely a technique in magic. Okay. Some people say, oh, the kids would love that.

But kids are a lot harder to fool than adults. Because adults have been programmed into, oh, yeah, you picked up that glass and you put it in your hand. Because I've seen people pick up glasses and put them in their hands before. A kid might not be savvy to what's going on there. And so if you go to make a coin disappear, the kid just kind of looks in the other hand because he knows that it didn't really disappear. It's got to be where it was. Right. So conditioning is definitely there's there's a misdirection called misdirection or repetition.

Whereas if I do this and I do it again and I do this and I do it again and I go through the motions of doing this and doing it again, but I didn't really do it. Then something happens because you're conditioned to think that that's what the repeating thing is going to be. Definitely. Yeah, it's interesting. Now that I think about it, I'm often reminded of a story I heard about Hollywood and how Hollywood was the wood in which the sorcerers made the magic out. It was like magic wand. They made magic wands out of Hollywood.

And so they named that town Hollywood because they're constantly creating magic spells on people. I ever heard that story? I didn't know that. There's a beautiful of Hollywood and that's where it might have got his name. Yeah, well, I'm like 99% shit. sure, that's why it's Hollywood is the wood in which magic wands are made out of, maybe by the druids. That's really, really interesting because I was just talking with my wife today about, I was thinking about starting a business of making magic wands because I do some of that. I got, I was making magic wands and I was thinking of doing that.

And now you say that Hollywood has got the magic in it. And it makes sense because Hollywood's just a big illusion. Yeah. Yeah. From the very beginning, it was, it's, it's magic, right? Like, you know, I think, I think it's a great idea. That's interesting. Yeah.

I want to, I'm going to jump in there with you. Let's make some magic wands together. We can sell them on the podcast. I think that, uh, we can create some magic, magic moments with our Hollywood. But yeah, if you just take, if you, if you just peel back that onion a little bit further, and you look at the way in which Hollywood movies are very similar to propaganda, at least on some level. You know, whether they're putting ideas into people's heads,

whether it's a pro-America or an anti-China or whatever, you know, anti-pro, whatever it is, the world of moving images has fundamentally changed the way we see the world. And boom, just like that, we're back to the idea of sense ratios. When you sit in a theater and you're bombarded by the screen that's larger in life, and the sound is just this cacophony of music and symphony and just beautiful sounds and sometimes violent images thrust together to change the way you see the world. Boom, Hollywood. It totally makes sense.

And we are conditioned. I mean, all the stuff about hourly compensation. And when the bell rings, you get to work. And when the bell rings, you take a break for 15 minutes. And when the bell rings, you go back. back to work. I'm in the bell rings. You got a lunch. Then when the bell rings, and you do that in school, and then you do it into the job. And then when you do it in college, you get a little more freedom, but you're already conditioned into looking per hour.

And you realize that there's only 24 hours in a day, and my boss will only pay me this much. So I have to work harder and get smarter and be more productive. Yeah. Work for the man. And then you realize, I'm selling my knowledge and wisdom that I paid for all these years at wholesale to this guy that's selling at a retail at a profit. I'm going to be self-employed. I'm doing my own thing. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's like magic and that once you see the trick, you're no longer impressed, whether it's seeing someone do a magic trick or whether it's you or me or someone exiting the work environment. Like, I'm not doing that anymore. That's bullshit. They're stealing it right there. Look at something like a bank.

I mean, we're getting sort of off top. Yeah, perfect. The bank says, hey, we've got a wonderful safe place for you to put your money. And we're willing to pay you like 1% by having it there. And you think, cool, you may I can put my money in here. And then I earn a little bit too. Then they take your money and loan it out to somebody else at a much higher interest rate. So they're using my money to make money for themselves.

Yeah. It's an illusion. It is. And look at the same thing as in the insurance world. You'll protect you. So you can pour all your money into here and monthly payments and hopefully nothing will happen. And if it doesn't, yay, you're safe. If it does, you're covered because everybody else put all their money in there.

You know, they saved up your own money to be your own insurance company. Yeah. You know, shouldn't an insurance company give you money back if nothing happens to you, at least something? You know what I mean? Look, got a good year. happen is your money back. Good luck. The best way, the best way that I've ever heard insurance described was this, this like, I forgot where he was from. He was, I think he may have been somewhere, some Eastern block, you know, he was a really nice guy, but he just had like this

really scary quality about him. And they were asking him, like, how do you, what's the best way to make money in America? And he's like, oh, you just do, you just do what the government does. And they're like, what's that? He's like, Well, look, if I wanted to make money in America, here's what I do. He goes, I would find, like, a poor part of town and maybe like a shady shop, like a porno shop. And I'd go in there and I'd tell the guy behind the counter, hey, look, maybe you should hire me. So none of those bad guys come in here and rough up your shop and steal your stuff. And then, you know, the guy would probably tell me to buzz off like he don't need me.

And then I would just pay these young kids, a hundred bucks to go in there, wreck up all the shelves, throw everything around, threaten the guy. And then the next week, I'd go back in there and ask the guy, hey, man. You know those guys that came in here? I can get rid of them for you. How about 10% of your weekly paycheck? You know, pretty soon that guy's going to start paying me. And he goes, to-da, you got insurance.

And I was like, oh, my God. That's exactly what happens. It's just on a smaller scale. You just rev it up to a higher scale. And then you have the government. I hope you'll get your channel shut down now. Let me say it like this then. You're just kidding.

Yeah. This is a theory. Yeah. It seems to me, And I shouldn't harp on government too much because I think it was John Dewey who said that government is the shadow cast upon people by corporations. So right like that, we're back to corporations. So excuse my rant there. Well, I get it.

It's interesting. It's an interesting topic. But if you want to just pivot it and like some people will, I've got this thing called the peace police, we actually make money from being peaceful. Yeah. And some people don't like that. They don't think that peace should be attached to money. Yeah, war is.

So it's a matter of shifting the vortex because they're going over to countries and blowing them up and then hiring Halliburton to go in there and clean them up. Yeah. If we went over there into countries and fed people and found water and clothes and housing and made it all better and then send people over to make the houses even better and landscape them and then beautify them and stuff, they could do that for money too. Yeah. The problem with that is it's not very lucrative. Like if I come into your, if I come into your country and I get you to hate your neighbor and I stoke the underlying causes of hatred in your community, I set up, set black versus white and man versus woman, now I can steal all your resources without you really knowing about it because you're so worried about your own freedom and your own safety that I can just come in, pay a corrupt government. official and steal all your resources. And that's kind of what the United States has been doing to every other country in the world. And now it's coming back to our country. I think you can make the argument that what you're seeing in the United States is a divide and conquer strategy by

multinational corporations that have bought out not only the Trump administration, but the Biden administration. And there's no longer any sort of real government officials that actually care at all, at all, at all about any working person. anymore. All that we have now is just pure corrupt individuals that are willing to take money to do anything. We did a topic pivot. Yeah. See what happened, Brad? You can be going on the whole magical. See, there's what we got to do some magic and change the perception of what's going on there because you can play in another space. You know, some of these people are functioning off of fear. Right. You started functioning off of happiness. Okay.

Because here's the real deal If someone believes that there's heaven And you're going to go see God because you believe in Jesus And you accepted Jesus as your personal savior and all that stuff You're going to go to heaven What's wrong with just going over to some war And getting your ass blown up and dying? You just ascend to heaven, be done with it.

So there might be good that the government comes in And takes all your food You'll just die and go to heaven. That's all good. Yeah. There's plenty of places that utilize that strategy. You just strap on a vest and you're off to see the beauty that lies ahead of your world. All the virgins?

Yeah. Why not? Why not? You know, if we were to take back the narrative, like what would that look like? You had a pretty awesome idea about the peace police. Maybe you could share that with the people. I can. In a nutshell, it's basically rewarding people for being kind.

and they end up getting citations when they're caught by the police doing something nice. So if someone bends over and picks up a piece of paper and throws it in the garbage can, the peace police would write them up and give them a $20 gift card to Target Corporation to go buy whatever they want. So it's that kind of thing. You'd have the big vision of it. I've done it before at concerts and stuff that we produce here in Minneapolis. But on a bigger picture, I can see peace police precincts and peace police patrol cars, where instead of someone getting scared when they see the cops,

they would go, cool, I could get a thing to get a dozen donuts. All that's do is give you a hug, right? And all of a sudden, they're right. And now the corporations are getting business out of the deal. So they're the ones that fund the precincts instead of the tax dollars and all that. We want to save communities. So we're going to raise taxes so we can abolish blah, blah, blah. But if they just shifted that and said,

we're going to get this thing sponsored by, you know, Walmart and Starbucks, and Starbucks is going to donate this for a bunch of $10 gift cards at Starbucks. They get all this advertising out of it, and you just got to drive around in a bunch of peace police cars looking for people doing nice stuff. It would change the thinking of the world rather than you got to, you know, put that person in prison because when you put people in prison, they go to college. and they get educated. How the heck do you break into a Kia and start it?

Oh, man, you just find that on YouTube. Yeah. Now they know how to steal cars. And do you know how much you can get for a catalytic converter? And then they go stealing catalytic converters. But what if the prisons were a different place of education of doing things kind and say, do you know that if you go and you hug somebody and open the door for them, you can make yourself 50 bucks?

What? I just got to stand in front of Walmart and hug people. I can make a living doing that. Right. Sure. Yeah. To a lot reception. Yeah.

Yeah. What about the whole idea of, of commodifying community service? Like, you know, why can't there be, you know, a job board down at City Hall that is like, go paint all these red curbs red, and here's a contract for that? or, you know what I mean? Like, they kind of do that, but they don't give it to the citizens. They give it to whoever their buddy contract. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

That's the corruption stuff. It would be a shifting thing again. Right. So a way to do that instead is to put together a group of citizen painters. And now you can bid against the contractor. But are you going to get the job or is the guy's buddy going to get the job? You know that on that topic, that Andrew Yang guy, he had what he called democracy dollars. Okay.

That got rid of the lobbying where, you know, we're going to take these lobby dollars and we're going to hire this company to do this because of the lobby dollars. Instead, the way he does it is citizens got democracy dollars and they could vote with those dollars. Now you're really money. They're just units. So, you know, everybody gets, you know, $5,000 democracy dollars. Now you can use that as a citizen to vote what you want to have happen rather than somebody getting a contract because they went to college with the state representative. Yeah. He had another idea that was like a freedom dividend where, you know, the, the everybody got a certain amount of money every month.

And some people look at that, be like, oh, this is just, you know, you're just incentivizing people not to work or, you know, this is just socialism or something like that. But, you know, when you start peeling back the onion, what we, it seems to me that like, no one's alone. Like, we've created this, this system together, whether you, whether you drive a truck or whether you work at a flippant some hamburgers or whether you're an attorney. Like, you're all paying into this system. Shouldn't you get something back instead of just giving your money to like the defense industry and then going and blowing up other countries? Like what if we had some sort of freedom dividend or what if we force the corporations whenever they, whenever they found a new use for a robot that got rid of a human being? Now we tax that automated robot like a like a labor tax or something like that. You know, like, why can't we do that?

That just seems like such a better way for everyone in our country to live. We can, but I think, again, it's a shifting of perception. Because if you look at that, USB, the universal basic income thing, you're talking about, the freedom. Some people look at that as, okay, you're giving these guys $1,000. They're just going to sit on the couch and eat Doritos and smoke pot. Well, maybe, but what if they have a different mindset? What if they say, I'm going to get $1,000 and I'm going to buy some magic tricks and I'm going to start doing magic? at the daycare centers.

Yeah. Because that might happen too. Yeah, of course. Yes, you might get the loser that's going to sit on the couch. Then you get the winner that's going to go out and do something good for society. But the reality is that money is still infused into the community. Right. But if you don't look at it from the point of view of, you know, the corrupt couch potato,

if you don't look at it from that point of view, you look at it as that's going to infuse, say there's a thousand, say there's, I don't know, I'm not good with math. but say there's 20,000 people in a city, and each one of them are getting $1,000. How much money is that? Isn't that $2 million, $20 million? I think so. Somewhere around there.

Every month, there would be $20 million infused into that community. And that'll be the same for an urban or a suburban or a rural community. And it'll go from the nucleus out rather than being spent over. hop down country. So I think it's a good thing if you shift the thinking from lazy people on the couch, because there are going to people that are going to go, you know what, I'm getting so fat,

I'm tired eating these Doritos. Yeah. I've seen this TV show. I don't know how many times. I got to do something with my life. Yeah. Maybe then they'd shift and they'd spend that $1,000 on something else. Yeah.

Whether they spend it for good or spend it for bad, I'll bet they spend most of it locally. Right. Shopping on Amazon. Right. Yeah, I mean, we already do that anyway. We just do it. It just never gets to the bottom.

It's pretty much, you know, if we just look at all the banking collapses, it's pretty much a blank check for every single bank. Like the Fed and the government will never, ever, ever, ever let any banking institution fail. Like, they just won't do it. Insurance company is too big to fail. Banking company is too big to fail. But, you know, why not the guy that has his own business?

Like, he's too small to matter. You know, it's so weird how we have this idea. That's only if you play that game. Okay. What do you mean? If you want to play that game of the money system, or what if you created your own world? Okay. And you say, okay, I'm going to create George Bucks.

Yeah. And anybody that's on my podcast and, you know, if you please donate physical dollars, I'll send you 100 George Bucks. Yeah. What are these George Bucks worth worth? Well, you can buy my. some of my merch, some of my Hollywood magic wands that we're doing, magic grab, yeah, together.

And there's this beautiful Hollywood magic wand with magic in it. They're only 945 or something. Yeah. You've got to buy it with George bucks. So you could take their money, put it in it into your own ecosystem. And now you're not playing that game anymore. It's kind of like bartering. Right.

But you're not doing a straight trade. you're creating your own bank. You create a little thing of units because all money is a byproduct of energy. I get busy and I start making blankets because I know how to do this work with the yarn and stuff. And you're going, Jesus, I'm freezing cold, you know. I wish I could, wish I had some firewood or something. Oh, there's one of your blankets. I'll tell you what, I'll trade you these matches for the blanket.

And we swap. That's all it is. It's just energy and need and desire so we could just create our own money. Yeah. Red, come out. Now we're talking. I'm all for it. I say we do it.

Some people are doing that. They're creating their own cryptocurrencies. You know, you got typical Bitcoin stuff, but why not create your own thing? And I've actually got my own money, by the way. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Let's see. Hey now.

Nice. dollars. It's my magic Brad bucks. It got my little magic Brad logo on there. Now we're back to perceived value. All you need to do is get people to perceive that to be what you wanted to be. Boom. It is a perceived value thing.

I remember when I used to do my trade show, my Expo, I'm doing it again here. By the way, a little plug for me. Nice. When I first did this, I went and had a bunch of these tickets printed and they were worth $6. Six dollar value. to enter the show. And my trunk was full of these things. I had like 20,000 of them.

So I started thinking, geez, if these things were really worth $6, I got a bunch of money here, I can retire. Yeah. So it is a perceived value thing, you know? How much is your energy worth? How much is your podcast worth, George? I think it's immeasurable.

I mean, at least for me, the amount of therapy, the amount of therapy it provides for me, it probably saves my relationship from me having to have all these conversations with my wife that would just roll her eyes after a while. I'm like, enough, George. It's way too early for this. Well, a plug for you.

If anybody's listening, there must be a way that they could donate to your, what do they call that, Patreon or something like that? Yeah. Yeah, I just set up a Patreon page yesterday. Oh, see, there you go. Yeah, I got to put out the, I have to put out the ways in which people can do it. So I got an idea that I set up. And here's what, let me throw this out here and see what you think.

So I'll put the, for those listening, I'll put the Patreon link in the show notes when the podcast comes out. And then I'll also put it into this one once we finish here. But speaking of money and Patreon, so I'm setting up just one, I just have one tier on my Patreon page. And it's called the Microdose Tier. And I charge everybody five bucks. You get exclusive content. You get access to me. You get a free copy of my newest book.

and a few other perks in there. But one of the ones that I really like is that I charge five bucks. And for every subscriber I have, at the end of the month, I give $1 back. So if I have 100 subscribers and they're all paying me $5, the end of the month, I give out $100 back to one lucky subscriber. And that way I feel like I'm kind of giving back a little bit. So if I got, if I had 10,000 subscribers, that would mean that I would give $10,000 back every month. And so it's kind of like a buy-in.

You get to participate. You get some free merge. You get some cool stuff. And possibility of paying your subscription for a year or even longer. So what do you think about that? Well, you know me. I got my perceptions and my ideas. I love it, man.

First off, you're kind of limiting yourself by putting it's worth $5. Okay. And you're saying that if I got this many people, that's how much it would be. What if, no, this is just a what if kind of situation, what if in this thing we're doing and some guy sitting on his phone, he's on the bridge, he's thinking about jumping off the bridge. The guy's a multi-millionaire. He's just depressed with his life and he's thinking about taking his life. He's sitting on that bridge, but he heard some of the stuff that you and I were talking about. And if there is anybody listening to this and you're a multimillionaire, you want to kick down George some money, please do so.

Yeah. Because maybe we gave him a shifting of perception and he realized that his wife was not as bad as he thought she was. Whatever he did, she didn't really do. He just made it up in his head. And now his life is fucking great. Nice. Conversation. So why are you going to limit him to be able to give you $5 when the fuckers got a million?

That's a good point. but my hair covers it. Yeah. So I should set up multiple tears. No, I'm saying leave it open. What if somebody wants to give you a dollar six times? They've already given you more than you're asking for. Yeah.

And there's somebody else that just says, you know what? I just want to give him 10 grand because I feel like it. I like it. Yeah. Well, I'm going to have. to go back and make some changes then. Yeah, I would leave an open one. If Patreon allows you to do that and it might,

you know, PayPal has that situation where you can just donate whatever. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So don't put limitations on people because you don't know what your perceived value is. Yeah, it's a great point. Saving some lives and changing some perceptions and opinions and, you know.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. sending you bills, I would shut it off. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Brad, we're coming up on our hour here right now. I got to say, I love the conversation. I love the fact that we can start off on the magic that is perception, and we can end on the magic that is perceived value.

But still kind of stay in our sphere and be a very comfortable and rewarding conversation, man. Thank you for that. It's been very, very fun. I love talking about this stuff because, my brain kind of developed that way as a kid being a magician when that quartered in the ear. I just saw, how did that happen? And when people say, well, Trump wants to build a wall, it'll stop everybody from coming to the United States. I'm thinking, David Copperfield just walked right through it.

That's right. Around it. Some people go over it. Some people tunnel under it. Some people will grease the palm of the guy at the security desk. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm always amazed at the flowers of rhetoric, the magic words that come out of people's mouth that make them see and act crazy.

I think if people could understand that if you just take a step back and realize the rhetoric that's coming out of people's mouths, it takes away a lot of the emotionally charged feelings. Like you need not be emotionally charged by somebody in a flashy jacket at a lectern or a person. podium. It doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means or it doesn't necessarily mean what that guy may want it to mean. If you could just step back, don't allow the words that people use to have a effect or a spell on you. Yeah. And you look at some people and think, well, that, that guy's fucking crazy. He's who he is. He's out of his frickin mind. Right. And then you see some kid with Down syndrome. You think, well, you know, he's got issues and it's okay. We've got to take care of that person. They're both different. Yeah. Yeah. For they know not what they do. Yeah. Yeah, it's true.

It's true. Like my situation when we first started the thing and I had that woman that didn't show up to my meeting. My response was, how could you stand me up like this? You think my time's not worth anything? But I don't know what really happened. So I got to neutralize it. Okay, cool. All right. Well, before I let you go, where can people, find you and what do you got coming up you just google the keyword magic brad and you'll find the good the bad and the ugly i don't know you have a little domain name right there magic brad dot com and that's just a lot of stuff that's in my head but i've got a lot of other stuff that's out on the internet so if you just google the keyword magic brad costa rica you'll find something about me

you find uh magic brad bali you'll find something about me magic brad yoga you'll find something about me because that's my word magic brad nice Nice. And I am the true life podcast. You can go down to the show notes. My PayPal address and my Patreon page will be down in there. Hope support the show. And we can help get great content coming to you every day and making the world a little bit better. So that's all we got for today.

Check out the links. Magic Brad. Thank you so much. Hang on one second. I'm going to talk to you afterwards. I'm going to hang up with all our friends here. That's all we got for today. Aloha.