I'm Travis Bader
and this is the Silvercore podcast.
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We've had some spectacular guests
on the show in the past and today is no exception.
I'm joined by a four time bestselling author and specialist
in Human Science, Neuroscience, Quantum Technology and Futurism.
Welcome to the Silvercore Podcast, John. Sonny.
Thank you so much.
Wonderful to be here with you and thank you for having me on.
Coming all the way from Dubai, this is quite the time difference here.
I think it's 730 in the morning for me and about the same time at night.
For you over there? Exactly.
Exactly.
12 hours apart.
Exactly. On the dot.
You know, we were talking about this previously and like,
what is a guy from a show about firearms and hunting?
What are you talking with a futurist?
What value am I going to bring over?
And had a good laugh about that.
But, man, you've got some amazing content.
So, you know, might as well just get out of the way.
You've got a podcast called The Expansive. Yes.
If people haven't heard of it, they should.
I mean, you guys broke some records last year.
I think what you were ranked.
You and Eric Kruger, top five
top four global and most shared globally on Spotify
and top one 1.5%
top podcast on Apple.
So some good stats there.
Also actually quite surprising to us.
It was really good that we got those stats.
why surprising.
You know, I think
we just are busy researching and trying to add value to the world.
We we're not tracking these things, you know what I mean?
And in fact, late last year we were planning
to rethink our podcast and think about new things and new names.
And then all of a sudden Spotify sent us the rap
You know that year end rap and it's all of us are in the top 5%.
And both Eric and I were like, Seriously, That's unbelievable.
We didn't we didn't expect it to be at that level.
Right?
And we actually looked up some other podcasts that we liked
and we saw them share and they weren't in the top 5%.
And we were we were quite surprised.
So pleasantly surprised.
Yeah, they kind of blew me away.
When I look at these things, it means you're on the right path anyways.
There's yes, you know, when we're talking before you,
like what does a guy like me get to bring to you?
And just for the audience, I think you know, a little bit
we'll talk a little bit about what it is that you do.
But through your podcast, through social media, we'll put link
links up to this and the description so people can kind of check it out.
You have some very well thought out ideas and opinions on how to deal
with adversity, how to be optimistic,
how to unlearn and relearn meditation.
You know, I've spent enough time out in remote wilderness areas
in a very contemplative state to come to the conclusion
that there seems to be some sort of natural order to things.
things seemed to resonate on
on a level that if you're attuned to it
and able to pick up on it, you can interact
with your natural environment in a better way.
You can interact with others in a better way.
And even though that might not necessarily be your world
of hunting and firearms, that's only a small portion of me.
And I think that we're all very interconnected,
whether it's us as humans or us as animals on this planet
in kind of a unique way in some of the things that you're talking
about really resonate with me in what I've noticed out in nature.
So that was sort of what compelled me.
Wonderful. Thank you so much.
And you're so right.
You know, I think I think we've forgotten the symbiosis that is happening
naturally between us and reality, let alone us in nature.
And how nature has evolved over the last billions of years
is really a very patient,
wise and relaxed approach to reality.
And it seems as though over the last 200 years we've been bamboozled
by shiny objects and have driven ourselves to sickness
and death and disease to chase
some ridiculous notion of goal out there.
And the media machine has been in overdrive driving these messages to us.
And so I just have I've had to break out of that that that cycle myself.
And I was very much stuck in it in my twenties.
And coming out of that, I feel a responsibility to a certain
extent to try and help as many other people realize that it isn't the only way.
And it's just a unfortunate programing that we've got ourselves stuck into.
So you're very wisely have noted that when you're out in nature,
it becomes quite obvious. When we come back into the cities,
we almost get caught up in the rat race again.
And as the saying goes, if you win the rat race,
you're still a rat.
Yeah,
that's a good saying
Actually, I've heard it differently about arguing on the Internet,
but it's not quite as politically correct as that.
That's, I guess I do like that one.
So, you know, we've we're coming out of COVID.
We're coming out of what I saw in my spheres in my environment,
because while I am interested
in the outdoors and hunting and I wouldn't call myself a gun guy,
even though other people look at me and they say, Trav, you’re a gun guy
I've seen a fear in people
of what's happening around them in the world.
I've seen people wanting to be prepared and recognizing their lack
of preparedness.
And so in the outdoors industry, you saw a lot of people
just clamoring towards finding
courses or products that will help them survive in the in the outdoors.
But I've always been a very firm believer that it doesn't matter what you buy
if you don't have the right mindset to be able
to use the tools available and around you, you're kind of lost.
And that's where your area of expertise is, is in dealing
with that mindset and those those tools.
What do you feel about that?
So yeah, yeah, look, I think there's a panic in the world
and I think that if we think about any transformation
that we going through, whether we want to lose weight,
change careers, or just think about the transformation
that humanity is going through at the moment, it's a massive, massive
undertaking of change that's happening all around us.
And there's always three phases to the hero's journey of change.
There's the sadness where we have to leave the shore of familiarity.
Sometimes we have to leave our identities and often
we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and years and years
developing these identities, developing this level of knowledge
and the portal, the pandemic portal has pushed us out of this comfort zone
that we were in,
even though it was very hectic and very driven by fear and anxiousness,
it was still a comfort zone to a certain extent.
We kind of had some level of certainty of the future and coming
out of the pandemic, we realized that there is really no certainty.
There is really a total unknown ahead of us.
And so we have to deal with the sadness.
And many people, if not most people, avoid sadness at all costs.
And the problem is when we avoid sadness, it shows up as anger.
There's a great saying that says, I sat with my anger
long enough until she told me her name was grief.
And right.
The idea that when we don't process certain emotions,
they bubble up as other emotions
and if you think about some cultures in the world, I'm in the Middle East.
But if you think about Arab men and Russian men in general,
and I don't want to generalize totally, but they seem quite angry
just from just from their culture, just the way they talk.
And the reason is, is that their culture doesn't allow them to process sadness.
There's no such thing in that culture to process sadness.
So first off, we have two types of people in the world right now.
We have very sad people and very angry people
because the carpet's being pulled out, pulled out
out of our feet, under our feet, and we don't know what the future is.
Now, the second phase of transformation is the wilderness,
the strangeness, this new world that isn't quite the world
it used to be, and it isn't quite the world it's going to be.
And we are still old versions of ourselves,
and we find ourselves bewildered in this new world.
Now, the problem is, is that you haven't processed sadness.
You're arriving angry, you're arriving frustrated.
You're not actually arriving curious.
You're not actually arriving.
Open minded to take in any new information because you're in survival mode,
because you haven't gone through the emotional process
of processing those emotions to come to a place
where you can become optimistic about all this change.
Now, I'm just
I'm going to I'm going to keep going and then you can stop me if you want.
But the third. Oh, go on.
Okay.
The third phase of transformation is adventure.
And eventually we always get to an adventure
because that's how the hero's journey works.
You're going through a downfall, a recreation of yourself,
and then into a process in time where you start to enjoy and celebrate
this new version of yourself. And then again, what happens?
Winter arrives, the leaves fall off the trees,
everything dies, and then we go up back into spring and summer.
And this is a cycle that goes on continuously in our lives, in the world,
in economics, in pretty much everything that we think about
is not in a linear line, but in a cycle.
Now, the problem is, is that for the last 200 years
we have been indoctrinated and programed
into the Industrial Revolution, which is all about one straight line.
There's no cycles in the economies of scale.
It's about profitability and harvesting at every quarter.
There's no downtime, there's no relaxation, there's no time for sadness.
Please get over yourself, get on with the mission
because you have quarterly profits to get to.
You have a deadline to achieve.
And so for the last 200 years, we've been programed into this idea
that we're part of a production line, we've been part of a system,
and the better we fit into the system, the more successful we become.
The system is called schooling, organizations, and even religion.
The better you are at the system, the better you are.
The following the rules, the better We think we will come out
now when we fit into a system that is driven by deadlines.
And many religions are driven by guilt, not love as much as they'd like to think
they're driven by love, We realize that what this has done to our brains is
that it's got us addicted to a brainwave called a high beta brainwave.
Now, what a high beta brainwave says to our body is that we're in danger.
And when we are in danger, the way we prepare is through a process
of adrenaline and focus on an absolute outcome in a very selfish manner.
Because why? we are in survival mode to achieve, not to rest,
not to relax, not to curate, not to collate, but to achieve and harvest at all costs.
Now the whole world is both sad
and strange and addicted to high beta.
And you can see this
and you can see this because the medical industry
is almost tripled in value in the last ten years.
And you can see that most people are medicating away.
This level of anxiousness and you'll see that everybody is a wine specialist.
No, they're not. They're just alcoholics.
They think they telling us they wine specialists and a
connoisseur of whiskey
and marijuana is just so good for, you know, actually happening.
Is we numbing ourselves because we don’t know what else to do?
Exactly. We just don't know.
So we think it's a socially acceptable
way to numb ourselves.
And so this is really the beginning point of my research is to try
and connect the dots between the neuroscience of anxiousness
and where we are in economic terms and where we are in the cycle of humanity,
and start to unravel this for people
to try and get them to understand there is a way out.
But first and foremost, we must become as become aware
of what cycle we're in and what's happened to us.
Did you have an aha moment where all of a sudden you're like,
I've got to make a change
because you're saying that in your twenties,
you're addicted to certainty and you're addicted to the certain way of
of living or was this a gradual progression
that you just found yourself further and further outside of the norm.
Um, you know, I come from a single mom family and
we were always financially challenged as many single family mom families are,
and I was very frustrated by not having the financial means
that all my friends had.
And so I started working from a very young age,
and I, I worked like an absolute donkey.
I mean, I worked so hard.
And by the time I was in my twenties, I was a multi-millionaire.
I had six restaurants and three retail stores and 28 vending machines
at shoe distribution businesses.
I mean, I was unstoppable.
And I often joke that high levels of testosterone
and lots of money are a horrible formula for disaster
because you think you're bulletproof, but you're really not bulletproof.
Right?
Especially in your twenties
when you think you have all the answers of the world already.
sorted
And the first break in my in my sort of trajectory was bankruptcy.
At 31 years old, I, I lost my businesses.
I lost my house, I lost my car.
I often joked that I had to change my name to Carlos because I had no car,
I had no house. I mean, everything was gone right.
At least I could joke about it.
Yeah, of course.
No, look, in hindsight
I can joke about it, but trust me, when I was there it was quite a pitiful situation.
Sure, that was the first break.
And what has started happening to me
is I started realizing that I was unhappy when I didn't have money
because I just wasn't because I just didn't have money.
And then when I had started having a lot of money,
all I needed was a little bit more.
And then when I had
no money again, I was unhappy again and I was just constantly unhappy.
And in my second book, I started off with a line that says,
Are you running away from the darkness or are you running towards the light?
I like that line, many yeah, and many people are.
And from the outside it looks exactly the same. Right?
But one is driven
by and fueled by anxiousness and the other one is fueled by excitement.
Most people are driven by running away, not running towards.
And you can also run away for so long.
Yeah, but there's also a stigma associated with it, too, because people
maybe they want to change their their position or their lot
or they're not happy with where they are
and they see something more desirable they want to move towards.
And they're like, Well, I want to give up.
I mean, I don't want to be viewed as somebody who's giving up.
I'm already down this path.
I just if I just put my my nose to the grindstone and keep plugging away.
But that little shift in mentality,
are you giving up or are you actually running away
from something or are you running towards something more desirable?
And I really like that framing.
And I think that framing that you have in your book there helps a lot of people.
Absolutely.
I mean, it is the difference between building wealth
and running yourself sick, trying to make some sort of success for yourself.
It's a and building happy money, right?
It's a huge difference.
Okay.
Talk about happy money, because that's an interesting concept.
You know, happy money is when you are not always driven
by comparison and not driven by a sense of lack, a sense of insecurity.
Now. Look, there's
a lot of lot of rich people out there that are driven by insecurity.
I have a billionaire friend and I had dinner with him
many, many years ago when he first became a billionaire.
And I asked him what his relationship with money was like.
And he said to me, No, John, secretly, I'm poor every morning.
And I thought to myself, you know, why?
Why would you want to have that much money and still be poor?
Like, what's what's the...
When do you arrive like when do you actually relax.
And so what we've done is we are celebrating restlessness.
We're celebrating this constant run.
Rockefeller was once asked, How much is enough?
Look at how much money you have.
Apparently, a reporter asked.
It was like, when are you going to have enough here?
How much more do you need?
And he answered, His answer was, Just $1 more, always just $1 more.
And exactly.
I remember growing up and I learned to swim at a friend's house.
They had a swimming pool.
They were very affluent. Father was a dentist.
He was my dentist.
I learned to ride horses sort of on on their property.
And I mean, they got multiple properties
in the states of which he's gladly says hey Trav, if you want.
Go, go.
Stay at them. And we've stayed with some of them.
And I remember sitting in the dentist's chair in my early twenties,
late teens, early twenties, I'm like, So what's it like to be rich?
And he says, You know, the more money you have,
the more bills you have right there.
You have more, you spend more.
It's all the same, though.
And that was his perspective, and I thought that was kind of interesting.
Were you happy?
I think we...
In your twenties, when you're really achieving?
I was in fleeting moments when I was in my sports car.
I mean, that was kind of, you know, I had muscles a sports car
and it was convertible.
I mean, what else would a 25, 28 year old guy need in his life, right?
Mm hmm.
I guess I was.
But, you know, now that I'm 47 and I have money,
but I have a very simple life, I'm quite content.
I am very comfortable and I have happy money
because I'm patient with the process.
I know everything's a process in achieving what I would need to achieve.
And I have new ways to measure my success
and that un ending Chase, that's driven by anxiousness.
And the high beta brainwave is something people think is normal
and it's something people are celebrating
and it's actually causing sickness
because when your body's got adrenaline fueling through it, 24 hours a day.
365 what do you think your body's going to do?
It's like it's like being on the highway
and driving in the second gear at 200 kilometers an hour.
What do you think is going to happen to your engine? Your engine is going to seize
Right. So I think I think it's a maturing.
And because I didn't have a dad showing me the ropes, I just had no clue, man.
I just had I just needed acknowledgment.
I just needed people
to tell me how great I was because I never got that from a dad.
So there was a whole mix of things.
So the first break was my first bankruptcy,
and that began my process of self-discovery
and finding out what was driving my behavior.
And for the for my thirties, I went through an extensive amount
of shamanic work, meditation retreats, silent retreats, body healing.
I just did so much of that.
And then I got married in between.
And then at 40, I got divorced and that was the second break
in my sort of in my in my emotional state.
And that really started to begin me moving to the place I am right now.
And I only really started speaking and working with organizations
and writing books and becoming faculty at these universities.
Post 40 after the second break.
And so I've had two major breaks, and both of them have really cracked me
open in many ways. And that's kind of got me to this place now.
You know, people could become addicted
to that feeling of certainty, to the feeling of
being stuck in the rat race.
Like they'll pick up the phone
if they don't have that energy come in and they'll turn on the TV.
They'll view that for a couple of seconds.
There seems to be an addiction that people have that
I find being outdoors in
a meditative state will help a lot.
But there could also I know some people who are addicted to the failure as well.
when you talk about those breaking points because they learn so much afterwards
that they push themselves so hard until they come to a point
where they break and they're now forced to have to rebuild themselves?
And I've got a couple of friends like that as well.
And it's it's funny that
that addictiveness to safety that some have and
while others push so far that they know the inevitable outcome of their push
is going to be going over the brink and having a figure out a scramble back up.
Well, you know, I think again, let's just think about
what our personalities made up of.
Our personalities made up of
how we think, how we act and how we feel.
And excuse me.
And if we think about how our brains work.
Science has recently proven that we have somewhere between
60 and 70,000 thoughts a day.
And of those 60 and 70,000 thoughts a day,
90% of them are the same from when were 35 years old.
Our brain has solidified itself into a personality,
a persona, a set of values and habits.
By the time we 35 And now what happens for the rest of our lives?
This 90% of repetition thoughts recreate
situations, people and patterns.
And so now what we find in ourselves is that we keep
recreating the same issues and we don't know why.
Why do you always have a girlfriend that cheats on you?
Why do you always have a boss that's not a good guy?
Why do you always get a business partner that isn't working out?
Why do you always have?
It's just it's a repetition.
And I don't know if they actually trying to go and breaking themselves.
I don't know if they trying to go through that process.
I think it's a set persona and personality
that's been hardwired into their brains that they don't know how to break out of.
How do people break out of that?
Because that's one of the things that you help people do. now.
Yeah. Look.
So so the thing is, this is, you know, all my keynotes, all my workshops,
all my interviews, 90% of it is context
is for us to understand what has happened, firstly is to accept
where we are at the moment and give us all an understanding
that we all pretty much in the same boat. This is how our brains work.
It's, it's weird because it actually it feels like the brain is ancient.
You know, the software is so outdated.
It just doesn't it's not built for adaptability.
It's built for safety, right?
So we really have to evolve our consciousness.
We have to evolve of our beingness to be able to become okay with uncertainty.
So now how do we do that?
Now, there's two ways that we have seen through scientific research,
through brain scans, that show us our brain in a state of high
beta where there's absolute adrenaline pushing through
and our brains in a state of low beta and high alpha,
which is the state that gets us to celebrate uncertainty
and gets us to become creative, open minded and imaginative.
And those two things are psychedelics and meditation,
and those are the two only things that we are seeing at the moment
that gives our brain a reset,
gives our brain an opportunity
to unwire and un-fire
the personality traits that we have embedded and concretized into our brains.
Now, when you look at the brain under a brain scan,
under both of those scenarios, it's relaxed.
And when your brain is relaxed, it can rewire and refire
new thoughts, new habits and new values.
And ultimately, where we need to reach as human beings
is get ourselves to state on a daily basis
of a calm heart and a clear mind.
And what high beta does is exactly the opposite.
It gets us to have a flattering heart and a busy mind,
and we've almost come to think and celebrate.
The busier your heart is,
the more flattering your heart is, the more confused and busy your mind is.
Well done. That means you’re busy.
That means you’re driving and you operating at a high level.
But really, that's not what the future requires.
That future requires a new version of who we are.
Interesting.
So I've got a friend and he's ex-British Special Forces and he fought his
first bareknuckle boxing fight at the O2 Arena over in London there.
So professional fight, raising money
for heroic hearts and heroic hearts deals with
psilocybin and psychedelic
use for PTSD in veterans and in soldiers.
And he's done a lot of research on He gave me a book on it
He says, You should read this, and I never did read it.
Finally, he’s like just watch the Netflix show.
It's got all the information on there.
Yeah, but you know, there is a natural aversion
based on cultural norms to psychedelics,
but meditation has a high acceptability rate
in some parts of the world.
MM In some parts it doesn't, no, of course, of course.
Some places it's like people are saying, What are you talking about?
I mean they, they attach meditation to sandal wearing, lentil eating, man,
bun people, you know, with baggy pants.
Right.
So yes, it's not accepted in some parts of the world.
But also remember that conformity is what we've been celebrated for in our society.
You know, conform and be celebrated.
Go to church and be celebrated.
Drink alcohol and be celebrated.
Take Ritalin, take Prozac.
And you’re Great.
But smoke a joint.
Oh, my God.
God forbid you're going off the rails. Hmm.
Now think about the construct of how society is being built.
Is that anything that helps you heal and open your consciousness is illegal.
And everything that is dumbing us down like sugar, like alcohol,
like pharmaceuticals, is legislated for us to take
and prescribed to us through a medical foundation
that's built into our brain that says,
this is okay, that's not okay.
Very interesting.
And there's I mean, you can extrapolate that all the way to the tinfoil hat side.
But, you know, one thing I've noticed is these people with the and we do an air
brackets here for people who are listening who are wearing the tinfoil hats.
Yeah.
A lot of the things that they've been talking about really isn't that crazy.
It's all in hindsight, right?
Yeah.
I mean, think about aliens, right?
I mean, they talking about aliens all this time in the last 20 years,
all of a sudden we're like, Oh, yeah, of course there's aliens.
I mean, I mean, ten years ago, people off the world would be like, Are you crazy?
Now? It's like, Yeah, yeah.
It's just a matter of time for them to come meet us.
You know?
All of a sudden the tonalities changed.
Yeah.
And why do you think that is?
Well, I mean, I mean, it depends how deep you want to go into it, but what I do
think is that
consciously on a mass
consciousness level, we're getting ready to engage with them, because if we believe
they're out there, we think we out there, we we want to engage with them.
We're not scared of them.
Then they arrive more easily and think about how our imagination works.
And as Einstein said, he said, imagination is more important
than knowledge is the forthcoming attractions to life.
And we have not been taught how to use our imagination correctly
because we use our imagination in the worst way possible.
It's called anxiousness, where we catastrophize the future
rather than think about it in optimistic ways.
And we are constantly using our imagination
because think about this Have you ever wanted to buy a new car?
And then you see that car everywhere?
Yeah, that happens, right?
Yeah, of course it happens to all of us.
And what about that idiot that you don't like that you see at the grocery store?
You see him at the traffic light, you see him at the gym, you keep bumping into him
There he is again.
There he is again and again.
This is our imagination.
And so we don't give enough kudos to our imagination because why imagination
gets us to fit out, not fit in the system required us to fit in.
It wasn't about your curiosity, fascination and imagination.
It was about follow these rules and conform and you'll be celebrated.
And so again, think about how our imagination
is changing around alien interaction
with the filtering of news starting to change.
Two years ago, when the COVID was happening, we get oh,
yes, the Pentagon is releasing papers that, yes, it's been engaging with.
Oh, yeah.
And there's a general from Israel talking about all of these alien engagements
Oh, yeah.
And then there's a Canadian minister talking and all of a sudden
CNN is talking about, Oh, yeah, yeah, this this is normal.
Well, hang on a second.
What do you mean this is normal? This wasn't normal just six months ago.
Now it's normal.
So we are preparing ourselves for it, you know,
And I think that's also something we need to look at on a mass scale,
what's happening to our mass consciousness around that topic.
So that
that idea of mass consciousness, I think is really interesting.
And you talk about fitting in.
One thing that I never did well growing up was fit in.
In fact, when I was in grade three and my parents were ready to ship me off,
they said, They're done.
They're trying to find a place they can, some sort of a boarding school.
It'll take me for free.
And there is a place on the island that they're looking at, and they gave me
the brochures.
I'm looking through it, and I'm like, I don't know.
And somebody says, You should send her to a shrink.
And the shrink says, Hey, he's got ADHD. right?
These few other things here, let's prescribe him Ritalin.
And in fact, let's prescribe him the highest dosage,
because they could only prescribe such a high level.
So they say you'll take eight in the morning,
another six in the afternoon, and we'll just keep an open it up.
And yeah, we'll this will be a test case.
And I did that from I guess around, grade 3 to to, grade seven into grade seven.
I'm like, you know, I'm not likeing this. I hate this.
My eyes are sensitive to light.
I got headaches all the time, my appetites...
And I don't feel like me and I just cold turkey took myself off.
I said, I'm not doing this anymore. So
that, you know, a lot of things that'll happen in your younger years
tend to be the things that kind of hardwired into your brain
and they can start building your pattern into the future.
But that idea of fitting in,
I've, I've never really had that, but I can attribute that to where I am now.
I wouldn't change anything.
I'd look in what happened in the past is what made me, and
it's created a level of uniqueness, what you talk about or individuality
and you know, the other the other thing that being I guess a bit of an outsider
looking in and watching how things interact
and we talk about this sort of mass consciousness.
One thing I've come to
realize, there's that famous
quote from Viktor Frankl when he was in the concentration camps
and everything was taken from him and he's like, Why are some people happy?
And they're in atrocious situations, and other people in the exact same
situation are just beside themselves and can't even function.
And he came down to the he tried to sum it all up.
He says, You know, the one thing you can't take from me
is the way I choose to respond to what you do.
To me, the last of life's great freedoms is one's ability
to choose your own attitude in any given circumstance.
But with that choosing of attitude, you create your environment around you.
And I'm kind of just going full circle.
When we talk about the mass consciousness, is that the mass
consciousness of everybody coming to or are we creating our own realities
that this is what we see, just like we see the vehicle or whatever
it might be,
whereas somebody else
that the idea of aliens might not even be on their radar
because they're just not on that frequency. They're not attuned to it.
So look,
it's a fantastic question, and let me just start off with ADHD.
And attention deficit disorder means that And look, I also have some of it,
and it means that we didn't get enough attention
from our parents between the ages of one and five, something happened.
You had a younger brother, a younger sister.
Something is going on your parents marriage.
But somehow this AD, this attention deficit, look, think of the word attention deficit.
You stopped getting attention from your caregivers.
Now, it wasn't because they were malicious,
but I got a younger brother and my mom and dad's marriage was atrocious.
And so they were fighting.
There was constant violence in the household,
and I was the one who was not getting their attention.
And guess what?
I was not good at school.
I didn't fit in.
I couldn't go about following, like sitting down for long periods of time.
Thank God I never got to the Ritalin idea.
But, you know, a lot of kids are suffering from this because of what happened
to them in their childhood.
I don't know what happened to you, but I definitely know what happened to me.
And it's and it's quite obvious why I got that attention deficit disorder.
The second question
that you're talking about is I think reality has multiple levels to it.
And there's a great line that says the future has arrived.
It's just unevenly distributed,
which means that
some people are in the future and some people are in the past.
And if you go to little towns around the world, you'll see that
these little towns are stuck in 1983 and they stuck in 1974.
They stuck and they stuck in some time zone.
And so people are very happy to go.
And what happens in those towns, very little
time goes very slowly.
And then you go to other cities and those time is moving and it's fast.
And so I think there's multiple timelines that are happening
and there are two major mass consciousness that are happening around the world.
One that's driven by fear and one that's driven by love.
And so you have lots of people in the world that are absolutely frozen
with fear because the economics situation that they are facing,
the the political situation they're facing.
I mean, your neighbor,
America, is a perfect example of it, where you have half the country
thinks that everybody's coming to kill them and the whole world
is against them.
Then deep victimhood and then the other side of the country
is total liberal libertarians taking the left thing far too far.
It's like, look at how different those two lives are.
It's just it's on opposite sides of the coin.
So I don't know if mass con- there is some mass consciousness.
Absolutely.
But it's divided.
There's multiple layers of it.
In fact, maybe there's an infinite number of layers to it.
There's so many different sort of experiences that are happening.
I think it's quite an... it's quite a high consciousness that's seeing and expecting
and engaging with our ability to raise our consciousness
to even think about aliens and engaging with other lives.
I don't think 80% of the human population is at all in any way doing that.
But they've got other realities that they're experiencing
and we all have our own realities that we are experiencing.
And you might walk past some people and go, Oh, I just don't like their energy.
You know, it's like low energy.
And you might go around some people and say, Wow, they've got really high energy.
I really like hanging out with them.
What you're actually saying is they running on different frequencies,
different radio stations, they on different radio waves.
And so the world is divided up into these massive different waves
and everybody's having their own experience.
I remember for a number of
years ago, there's a company in Burnaby and they make quantum computers.
I don't know if they're still around. I think they're called D-Wave.
And they had some predictions
Okay, And they had some predictions about quantum computing.
And I remember
they're talking about how it works in superposition and that's how they yeah,
every year they've got massive increases and what can happen through that.
But one of their predictions was the, the discovery of
I think it was other worlds or other beings
within the next X number of years based on the use of quantum computing.
And yes, I had a long discussion with an ex JTF2 fellow
and on a show called The Collective talking about A.I., and
I borrowed shamelessly from some of this some of your work just so I could.
Sounds a little bit intelligent, but I reference you.
I referenced you on that. And
but talking
about these realities and what we... how we can create our own reality
they’ve got this nonprofit thing they're putting together
and they're trying to help people from a military perspective,
using what they've learned to be able to get people to
unscrew their life essentially,
or get onto a track that they want to be.
But the the idea
of having other realities,
I think, to my way of thinking anyways, if we can create our own reality,
if we can create what happens around us, just through our actions, intentions
and your energy or vibration as you're saying there.
And if we expect that we're going to be seeing
and we let's say aliens, which could be a microorganism, some
which could be a walking, talking, being or an extra dimensional being,
which might actually even be closer to the fact when we start
looking at quantum reality, where do you see let's say,
we're on that path and we're going towards it in the future.
do you see that as reality and
do you have thoughts or suggestions for people and how they can embrace that?
Well, I didn't
expect the talk to go this direction coming from a gun and hunting show.
But anyway, let's dive in.
Yeah, I love it. I love it.
Look, you like it?
Yeah, I said I love it. I love it, I love it.
Thank you so much.
No problem.
Okay, So let's think about quantum computers.
And the idea around quantum computers is talking about the ones and zeros being
available to us the same time where as Newtonian science
and the old way of computer.
Say there's either a one or a zero.
Okay, but quantum says they’re both around at the same time.
Now- right. In Newtonian times, our idea of reality
was that there's an action and a delayed reaction.
Reality was an objective
experience and was linear in fashion.
We had to wait an amount of time for things to happen.
But what's starting to happen now, through the research of quantum science,
where we have the the idea that people are moving into
deeper and deeper research of smaller and smaller molecules,
understanding that everything is waves of light
and depending on the wave structure, we have density
and then lighter and lighter versions of density and the lighter
and higher your consciousness or vibration goes, the more seamless
your life seems to become through a process of synchronicities.
Now, what starts to happen in a process of quantum science,
you realize that time is malleable, it's not stuck in stone.
And so when you are doing something you love, time disappears.
When you do something you hate, time takes forever.
The same minute is experienced differently
based on your level of consciousness and vibration and understanding.
Now, what quantum science is also proving to us is that there is no time.
There's only the forever now
and the forever now can be perceived
from an infinite number of vibrational viewpoints.
When your vibration is low, your experience of reality
is an echo back to you, of your low expectation, of your self,
your self-worth, and what the future looks like.
So you keep reconfirming yourself
and to yourself based on your low vibration belief systems.
And you keep confirming that what you're believing is true.
But now the very same experience from a higher vibrational point
when your frequency is increased and again, we can get deeper
into raising our frequency and really understanding how to do that
is you experience of time changes your synchronicities increase.
And we must remember that many of these I don't call them aliens, I call them
interdimensional beings and these interdimensional beings
are around us, but on different radio frequencies.
Mm hmm.
We are on this radio frequency.
They are frequency on another level.
They're not as dense as we are.
They much lighter than us.
And so as we elevate our energy, so then it becomes more obvious
for us to engage with them and it becomes more obvious for them to engage with us.
So let me ask you this.
If you're somebody that's working on yourself quite a lot,
do you come across people that are addicted to crack cocaine?
Do you come across people that are robbing banks?
Do you come across people that are involved in pedophile? Not at all!
It's just not even in your you have no idea
that's even happening, you don't know where it's happening.
But that's happening down the street, down the town in it
could be happening at the house next to you, but you don't even see it
because you're not in your vibrational stance.
And then other people have got a very different energy around money.
Every way they look, they see ways to make money.
And some people never know how to make money,
but they live in the exact same space, in the exact same town, and one person
sees it differently to the other.
Now, if we extrapolate this idea of you not engaging with bank robbers
and not engaging with crack dealers, it means that you're reading on a
different frequency.
Now extrapolate this up and think about interdimensional beings.
They’re on a much higher level radio station and frequency to us.
And as we engage with our consciousness and rise it
so these beings become more accessible to us.
I like that perception you know,
a number of years ago I got my advanced ham radio license here in Canada.
So you can operate radios and you have to learn the, you know,
Ohm's Law and all the radio antenna links and how it all works.
And one guy said to me, say,
as he's going through it, he says, he got really deep into it.
Everything's on a frequency.
He says, We talk, it's on a frequency, radio is on a frequency.
We see everything on a frequencies.
Like everything is just on a wavelength of something.
And that kind of
clicked in my mind because prior to that I was always if somebody says, Oh,
you know, change your frequency, it sounds like the man bun, sandle wearing
Yeah, exactly.
It does, doesn't it? Yeah, but it does.
But if you look at it from that standpoint,
you know, everything's coming at us is we got Wi-Fi signals coming around.
We've got we got all these different frequencies of communication.
This is just another level of it.
This is just- Well its science
what I'm telling you actually it's not it's not every faith.
This is science has proven by science.
This is a science discussion.
So I saw recently and I didn't
fact check it, but it sounded interesting.
People talking about what was it they watched a movie
and movie was all about stress and the negative aspects of stress
and what it can have on a person's life and other people.
They watch the same movie, but they were given all the positive
aspects of what stress you know it can.
And they found people came out from the exact same situation,
but because they perceived the stress differently,
the negative effects were identifiable in their blood.
Right? They could higher, cortisol levels higher.
And apparently the same thing for having a milkshake right?
with some say your that's bad and all the rest.
The other one says oh it's good for the brain and this is an energy shake
and just that perception alone of these different things.
Again, I didn't fact check this one, so I don't want to be beacon off here,
but it sounded like an interesting study and it came across as looking factual.
I mean, think think,
you know, you know, cold water immersion.
Mm hmm.
Have you heard about cold water immersion? Now when people don't know
Don't know that it's good for you.
They get hypothermia in 2 minutes.
I've heard that.
I've heard that. Exactly.
And when they're good,
when you think it's good for you, you can stay in there for 10 minutes
and you actually have great results from it.
You're not into panic yet.
You're approaching it with, oh, this is good for me.
And the only thing that changes is your mindset
exactly, that's your approach.
I mean, you're arriving at an airport
and you think everything's going to be seamless
and everything seems to be seamless and you're arriving in an airport
and you angry and you're looking for things to be angry about, and you'll find
five things to be angry about because that's really what you're looking for.
You, you creep, you keep reconfirming your belief system.
The reality we live in is neutral.
It is not bias, you are bias.
Your perspective on something is the thing that's echoing back to you.
They did another study in Miami.
They did a wellness day for the staff of a hotel,
and they explained to the staff of the hotel
that when they rise or raise their heart rates,
they lose weight and they gave them all Fitbits.
And the ladies that were cleaning the rooms started to realize
the heart rates are going up and they started losing weight,
doing exactly the same stuff, doing the same work.
And let's go even one step deeper.
I don't know if you've seen
any of this research, but schizophrenic people that are
having multiple personality disorders,
some of their personalities need glasses and some of them don't.
I remember... Some of their personality is
allergic to grass and others aren't.
And it manifests itself physically.
Exactly. If physically.
So if you think about this and further study will show us and this is
this is Einstein's word and phrase, you can look it up.
He says, The medicine of the future
will be the medicine of frequency.
And so what we've started to realize
is that diseases are linked to frequencies.
And so when people are having cancers and these things, they linked
to your frequency of self-doubts, of self-pity, of victimhood,
of anger, of adrenaline, and of high beta brainwave for 40 years,
it manifests as a disease in your energy field. Hmm.
And so when you start to meditate and you start to calm your heart
and you start to change your brainwaves, your diseases go away.
Because why your changing your frequency and the disease doesn't link itself
to a higher frequency.
It's only linked to a lower frequency.
Mm hmm.
So let me just back up here for a second, because I'm a futurist.
Mm hmm.
I am a faculty member at Singularity, at Duke, at London Business School.
This is this is. I teach futurism.
But what has happened in my work and my research is that I keep realizing
that there's no future, there is only the now.
And the way you come at the now, depends and determines your future.
And so, you know,
and so this is my own and like it's an unbelievable journey
that I've been on, because I'm all about the future, but I'm now talking
about frequency and meditation, and I'm like, What happened to my work?
Because I was talking about drones and, you know, blockchain.
And, and the more I dived into it, the more I realized
those things are irrelevant.
If you're arriving at them anxious,
they're irrelevant.
If you're arriving them from a low frequency, they are bad for you.
But if you raise your frequency and become more curious
and creative and collaborative and in an alpha brainwave,
they are incredibly exciting to deal with.
So why would you want to not arrive at them with the right mindset
and heart set so that you can utilize them to do good with?
I really like that way of thinking.
You know, I
in the talk about A.I.
we had on the collective there, I brought something up
and I've been thinking about it
a bit and I haven't had the time to really think it through.
But it's it's interesting what you're talking about here.
about there is no future.
It's just a constant Now, when you type something into A.I.
and are surprised at how accurate it can come back.
And we're just in the infancy of the whole A.I.
renaissance here, I've coming to the conclusion
that I don't really think there's any independent new thought on things.
Everything's just a recycling or of an idea that has happened before.
And I said that, and I know I'm going to be challenged on that in the future one.
And I figure my response to that will be well think of something new
or tell me something new and type it into A.I
Let's see what comes up with. Right.
Because if we can collect all of the information that's out there.
But yeah, because what I was mentioning was,
you know, as we look at A.I.
and I think Elon came out and said something along the lines of the odds
of us living in a simulation exceeds
the odds... is right that we aren't is
and they've got the whole holographic universe theory and
there's also
who's a guy who from reading Rainbow the more you know the
what's his name he's a scientist.
Anyways he says, Look at...
I was really disturbed by this thought that we're living in a simulation,
but my research now says that it's a 5050 chance.
Or maybe 51% chance. Right?
And he's come out to that.
We're either on the very first level that's going
to be creating the simulation.
So what?
What I was looking at essentially was, you know, people are like, well, am I real?
Is this what I'm experiencing around me real?
And the conclusion I come to is essentially
we make our reality and we base that off like Descartes,
who says, I think therefore I am, and who based that off of Saint Augustine?
He was called out on that and he said, No, no, no.
Someone else said that before you and Saint Augustine was leaving at the
I think it was Aristotle who built upon Plato.
And eastern philosophers had the whole butterfly having the dream thing.
But when you look at these revolutionary, groundbreaking ideas,
I don't know if there's anything that's truly new.
Am I off base?
In thinking that, or am I kind of on the right track from your perspective?
No, absolutely. I absolutely agree with you.
I think that from this level of consciousness,
I think we've kept you know, we've kept it.
I, I don't see anything new.
I'm constantly researching and looking and checking.
There's not real new thoughts out there.
I think we need to elevate ourselves to start
to figure out new ways of thinking, new solutions to bring about.
And I think the panic in the world around
A.I. is the fact that if we don't evolve, A.I.
is better than us and smarter than us.
And if we didn't evolve post agricultural times, steam
engines and tractors are better than us, they just are.
But in our physicality, they're better than us, not in our mentality,
but now our mentality is being... is being challenged.
And so we have to now think about our consciousness.
We've never thought about our consciousness.
It's never been something that we've even thought about.
But remember, in agricultural times, nobody thought about a data scientist
or an accountant or a lawyer or there was no such thing.
There was a...
It was a it only evolved in the last 200 years.
And so we are like Goldilocks.
We want our porridge just like it was just at the right temperature.
Nothing must change, just like we understand it to be.
And it's almost like every generation thinks that anything before us
was pretty dumb, and anything ahead of us is far too strange.
So let's just keep things exactly as they are,
which is a ridiculous way to think about the world, is that
we have to be constantly evolving and innovating.
If we didn't, we wouldn't have electricity,
we wouldn't have computers, we wouldn't have telephones,
we wouldn't have a million things that we take for granted today.
We wouldn't have them. So what?
We must stop everything now.
And so we mustn't also be scared of these things.
We must be scared of them if we're not evolving and elevating.
And so look, do you want to talk about the for ways to build consciousness?
And then maybe that could be the sort of the ending.
Yeah, let's actually important because we've been talking about.
Yeah.
So look at the research that I've done around it.
I call it human software transformation,
and it's our software that we need to evolve and elevate.
And again, like I spoke about a bit earlier,
our personalities made a way made up of how we think, how we act and how we feel.
And the first thing that we have to really think about
is our past, our memories and what is created.
Our personality to date.
And much of our personality
has been formed through trauma
and the trauma that sits deep in our subconscious minds
that we don't often even know we have.
And, you know, especially the older generation,
when I gave my mum and dad coaching sessions for one of their birthdays
and they looked at me very strangely, they're like, Why are you giving us this?
This there's nothing wrong.
Why would I want to go seek coaching?
And I realize that it's their generation just doesn't see like there's
anything wrong.
The trauma so deeply entrenched
that it's just the way it is this the way the world is.
And I'll just get on with it.
So the first step to developing your consciousness
and elevating yourself is actually becoming aware
that your personality is built on false memories.
And very quickly, just as a caveat, you know that all our memories are false
because none of our memories are really true,
because most of our memories are just stories we've decided to hold on to.
I mean, who says they’re true?
And we extrapolated to build on them and something might have happened
that was very small 12 years ago.
But we've built so many stories on top of it to justify our anger,
sadness, frustration and just irritation with the world.
So really, none of our memories are true and we can release that.
And so when we heal our trauma, we release ourselves of old patterns.
Our brain literally starts to change when you release anger for your dad,
for your mom, for society, for race, for men, for woman, whatever it may be.
You literally change your brainwaves.
You change the way your brain thinks.
You start to look for different realities, and all of a sudden
you brighten your future by releasing your past.
And I'll give you one very quick example.
I didn't speak to my dad for 20 years, and subconsciously
by being angry with my dad, I subconsciously created a pattern
that men out there are like my dad,
abusive, angry and bullies.
And guess what? I'm straight, right?
I'm not gay, but I'm talking men in my life, businessmen, older men,
friends.
In many ways were representing my dad.
I kept attracting these gangsters and these terrible men.
Bullies. Why?
Because my idea was much more
keen on my brain, was much more keen on being angry with my dad,
keeping stuck to that identity, projecting that story out into the world
and recreating that persona to reconfirm my belief systems.
So step one wisdom
having memories with no triggers
or as Alan Watts says, the wise, knowledgeable man has to learn
something new every day, but the wise man has to unlearn something new every day.
I love Alan.
Alan, What a man.
So first up, let's clean our past because you can't raise your consciousness
if you don't clean your past.
If you're angry about your past, you can't.
You can't move forward.
The second thing is something that we don't even realize we're not doing
is we don't make any decisions based on our curiosity.
None of us.
We are only making decisions based on outcomes, on absolutes,
on logical ways to do things, on
primal ego, ways of doing things.
We think that curiosity is only there for hobbies.
We don't think we could make money out of our curiosity.
And this is such a lie because our curiosity is our genius.
It's our golden thread to the highest version of ourselves.
And we can see the younger generation doesn't want to fit into a system anymore.
They've created something called the Creator economy
$100 billion already and counting.
What does it mean? People are curious about a topic.
They dive deeper and deeper into it.
They become specialists at it.
They become unique in their currency, and people want to pay money
to be around them. Me That's what I've done.
I'm just curious about neuroscience, psychology,
futurism and business strategy.
Nobody else is. I am, but here I am.
I've written books, I make money, I travel around the world,
I talk, I've developed that, and it's all based on my curiosity.
Nobody tells me I have to write a book. Nobody tells me I have to research.
This is based on my own absolute desire and fascination.
And so we've never been taught because school never celebrated curiosity.
It was if you were too curious, you were too naughty
and you were put on Ritalin.
That's right.
Shut down the curiosity, Son shut down
That curiosity its not for this
the third step and I've spoken about this
already is our ability to learn how to imagine.
And we have shut down imagination to such a point that UNESCO's
future literacy calls it a poverty of the imagination.
The mega-trend that humanity's going through is a poverty
in our ability to imagine a better world ahead of us.
We'd rather imagine worse worlds ahead of us rather than better worlds ahead of us.
And so if we think about reality and frequency and echoes
and projection and quantum science, your imagination is truly
the forth coming attractions to your life.
Just like Einstein said 120 years ago, you know, that guy was ahead of his time.
Mm. And the fourth and the fourth way is through a process of daily meditation.
And if most people listening to this say they can't meditate,
all they're really saying is they are addicted to high beta
and the brain is their boss, they are not the boss of their brain,
and their
brain tells them how to act, where to go and what to do.
They don't tell their brain how to act and what to do and where to go.
And so really, fitness of meditation gives you the ability
to relax your brain and rewire it
so that your personality can change And and and the repercussion
of your personality changing is that your personal reality starts
to change because your personal reality is an echo of your personality.
Mm hmm.
And so this process of healing your past, using curiosity
your in other ways, your passions, desires, fascination and and sort of
inquisitiveness as your guiding light to what you could do.
Imagining amazing futures, creating calm and inviting ideas,
and your subconscious mind around money, around people and around situations.
Look, get your brain to start to seek out those situations
and then to use meditation as the daily tool to unwire and unfire.
Now you start to increase your consciousness
little bit by little, bit by little bit.
I absolutely love that. I have
reams of other things that have coming up off of what you've said there.
I recognize that we need to be able to cap this at a certain point.
I'm sure we'll be talking offline a bit too.
If people want to hear more about what you do
and see what you do, I'll have links in the description.
Check out The Expansive, fantastic podcast.
Check you're on TikTok on Instagram, your own social media,
you've got your website and you do speaking tours all over the world.
Yeah, and I've been told I also have to plug the Silvercore
podcast because people have to remember at the end to check out
if you like it, share it with your friends and subscribe comment.
But John, thank you so much for.
Being on the podcast, it was a truly enlightening conversation
and I truly believe that there's a reason why you and I are talking at this moment.
The Universe has...
I have no I have no doubt that.
Thank you. And no doubt there is.
And thank you so much for reaching out.
And, you know, I got to love the world that it's being so small right?
You're literally 12 hours away from me in the middle of dead winter.
And here we are talking and connecting and having a fantastic chat.
Thank you so much.
And hello to all the listeners and thank you all for tuning in and look
forward to seeing you somewhere in the world soon.