CTC Podcast - S0102 - Prologue - V2.2 HD.mp3
Gareth: [00:00:00] I realized that for me it was really a journey of healing and a journey of being able to be comfortable with being on my own. Because I realized that as long as I'm not comfortable by myself and I try and move into relationships or even friendships, I project all of the things that I don't believe that I have or that I'm not lovable or that I'm not worthy into my partner or friend or whoever it is that I'm connecting with. And yeah, it's been a significant realization for me that there's nothing that I need to do except give myself permission to be authentically me and to keep checking in every single day where I'm making choices that don't align to that and don't make those choices for too long so that I can live from a place where if God whispers a new direction to me, that I'm genuinely in a space that's open to listen and receive the magic that comes from listening to your intuition.
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Gareth: [00:01:46] Welcome to episode two of the Call to Courage Podcast. Today's episode is constructed of a series of voice notes that went backwards and forwards between myself and Matt. Inside the call to Courage Conversation. And the purpose of this episode is to get our community up to speed with the journey that Matt and I went on. How we met and how we came to be co-creating together. In today's episode, you'll hear how we met and how a psychedelic mushroom journey on the side of a mountain in Mexico cemented our friendship and was really the confirmation that Matt and I should be working together. You'll hear about how I experimented with the Law of Attraction and manifested $1,000,000. And Matt will share his journey as an investment banker, where he was sometimes making $1,000,000 a day. You'll also hear about the struggle that Matt and I went through over the three years as we created the Live More Perfect Days business, employed a team of people and put a whole body of work out into the world. But the business made no money. This difficult realization got us to a point where both Matt and I were forced to answer a call to courage which resulted in the evolution of the Livermore Perfect Days brand into Fathers, Sons, Brothers, and the Cult of Courage podcast that you're listening to today. Part of today's episode talks about the use of psychedelic substances and for transparency. Neither met nor myself or health care professionals. And don't recommend that anybody undertake any use of any psychedelic components without first consulting with a grownup health care professional or your doctor.
Gareth: [00:03:27] With that out of the way, sit back, relax and enjoy. Episode number two The Prologue. Once upon a time there was an old bull and a younger bull standing on top of a hill. And in the field. Down below the hill was an entire paddock full of cows. And the young bull, super excited, says to the older bull, Come on, man, let's run down there. And each just fuck one of those cows and the older bull just has another mouthful of grass, quietly finishes it and says, Why don't we finish what we're doing here? Take a walk down there and make love to all of them. And that, for me, feels like. The story for me, maturing as a man, the reference to wanting to rest on that and quickly fuck something is also relevant for me based on yeah, the strategies and patents that I ran in my world. And so the old bull and the young bull story is really for me indicative of my journey and the maturation of me as a, as a man. And today I've had the honor of hanging out for the entire day with a mentor of mine, a dear brother who I met two years ago. He has. Yeah, he's older. I think he might be mid-fifties, close to 60 and has sailed around the world, has raised two beautiful kids. And he's got a lot of experience in doing trauma counselling and he's an incredible space holder.
Gareth: [00:05:16] I've been in a circle with him and he has a calm presence about him that lets you know that everything is going to be okay without him saying anything. And it's that it's that level of certainty and that level of comfort comfortability that you feel with yourself that lets you know and lets other people know that you're powerful, that you're courageous, and it doesn't need to be said when we're young, the young bull needs to prove everything and is running around chasing shiny objects, whatever those might be for you, and wanting to let the world know that I'm okay and that I'm I'm validated through the things that I spend my time on. And then there's the old bull and black Karam, my mentor, who don't need to do any of that. They've probably done all of that. They've been through the journey, but there's a level of awareness and presence that comes with someone that's certain with themselves. And this is our journey. This is the journey that we're on, is to be so in love and comfortable with ourselves that yeah, we're certain of what it is that we want. We trust that things may not always go our way, but we're we're stoic and unattached to the outcome either way. And I say this with you to let you know that I'm grateful to be in the presence of my mentors. And in this coming week, myself and Araminta, my partner, are going into an estate retreat.
Gareth: [00:06:50] You'll hear us speak a lot about this particular trait over the next few weeks and months. It's also a retreat that has been, from what I understand, really powerful for Matt on his journey. It's been instrumental in us. Evolving live more perfect days into fathers, sons, brothers. And it shapes a lot of this conversation. And the reason that I'm sharing that is that one of the. Let me say this another way. We all have superpowers and we lean on them. We know what they are. They support us. They get us through. They support most of our strategies for survival and thriving and whatever those are. And it's good to know what they are. It's also good to recognize where when you become over identified with your superpower, it actually becomes a blindspot. And so what that looks like for me is sitting in a circle, a transformational circle, a men's circle with someone like Kareem. I have another mentor called Rex. And these men sit down in a circle and are confident and comfortable enough to trust that their intuition will guide them. And they'll be able to read and feel exactly what that circle needs without having to have everything planned and limited and written down to the last minutes and the last detail. And Matt and I are fuckin amazing planners. We're incredible system creators. Our lifestyle design systems are amazing. We're going to share them with you and this community over the next few months, and our work is shaped by the feedback that we get from our community.
Gareth: [00:08:42] But where that strength for us becomes a blindspot is where we need to have a plan and know where we're going next. And I just had a call to courage, which is like in the schedule of voice notes to share into the Call to Courage Conversation Group. It's my turn to go and we've got some ideas of what we want to do next. But my call to courage was, Can I lean into the part of trusting my intuition that I just press the record button and whatever comes through me is going to be exactly what is needed for the circle right now, rather than having to have the script to know exactly where it's going to go. And so that was it. It was my turn to go. I need it to be shorter than 5 minutes. This is longer than 5 minutes, but I wanted to share that because it felt like it was coming through me and it wasn't on our script. But I trust that, yeah. Having spent time with, with Kareem, this mentor of mine today and yeah, just having the story come through me felt like something that I wanted to share. And for me, as myself and Matt and this community starts to grow, we are going to grow into space holders that are going to create with a plan, and we're really good at that part. And I think our edge is.
Gareth: [00:10:06] To.
Gareth: [00:10:08] Press the record button and just trust and surrender that exactly what needs to come through will come through and.
Gareth: [00:10:15] Yeah.
Gareth: [00:10:17] It feels edgy, but much like working out, it's a muscle that you can build. And I think I would be a better space holder when I'm really, really strong, both in the planning, which I feel like I already have that part dialed in, but also in the surrender of just trusting my intuition and not having a plan or being okay to just let the plan go and see what else wants to come up. And so, yeah, that's what this voice note was, me moving more towards being the old bull. And again, thank you, Matt, for your dropping and for making the time to record the audio note with everything that's happening in your world. And yeah, an invitation to you just to share exactly what's going on in your life at the moment. So, so that we can all feel where you are. And it's an honor to be creating with you, bro. And I'm really stoked about going on this journey with you and what a powerful portal to have launched this conversation at 22 minutes past the 22nd hour on the 2nd of February 2022. That's a lot of twos. Much love from the lake. The next voice you hear is going to be Metz Cha Cha.
Matt: [00:11:33] Yeah. Gareth, I hear you. I hear you on the structure versus the flow and and sort of just turning this thing on and seeing where it goes and sticking to what it is that we want to talk about and allowing it to be organic. And part of that gets me super excited because I'm seeing this cult of courage conversation evolves super quickly out the gate. And there's another part of me that, like, cringes because, yeah, this is a call to courage for me. This is this is an edge for me to step out of my comfort zone. And well, let me take a step back also and say that I have a story in my head that I am really good in one on one conversations or small group conversations where I can trust the people that I'm with and be open and intimate about what I'm thinking and feeling. And when it comes to a public dialogue like the one that we are putting together here. Yeah. I stutter and I stumble, and I want it to be perfect. And I want it to. I want to present myself to the world in a certain way that feeds my ego, I guess. And so with this called a courage conversation, with creating these audio notes and having this this dialogue sort of on the public record within this group, it's it's something that gets my heart going, man. Like, like right now, even, you know, walking up and down the street talking about it. I feel the the energy and the excitement and yeah, so let's use this opportunity to dive back to a little bit of organization.
Matt: [00:13:19] And I want to go over just a quick bit of housekeeping, and that is it sort of plays upon what you were talking about there. Gareth This feeling of this conversation comes from not just what you and I are talking about, but also the the participation of the audience and us feeling sort of what this circle needs, what this conversation needs, and and giving it from a intuition point rather than from a structure point. And I want to invite everyone who's listening to join this conversation through the leave a comment section that you see beneath each audio note or video share or link that we share. The idea is that this is an ongoing conversation not just between Gareth and I, but with people who we invite on the channel. And for an audience like yourself, who is listening and wants to contribute their voice to the conversation. So the invite is you can click that comment button and and say something about what we're talking about. If we say something that resonates with you, if you have something that you want to add to the dialogue, that's the place to do it. And this conversation will continue to evolve as we go along with it. Okay. So now what? Let me look at my notes. What's going on in my life at the moment? Well, I am currently actually on a vacation with my wife and son. We are navigating a COVID restriction world where I'm seeing signs up at restaurants only letting in vaccinated people.
Matt: [00:15:08] And I'm seeing fear. And I am witnessing a bunch of news that I think creates genuine fear in people and people are buying into it. And that's the world that I'm bringing my son up in my son's four months old. And I realize that the world that he grows up in is going to be extremely different than the world that I grew up in. And yeah, navigating that aspect of fatherhood, of how I want to show up for him in this world and to. In order for me to explain to him how this world works, I have to make sense of it myself. And yeah, part of this call to courage conversation is to support that. And yeah, that's one of the things that that I'm battling with in my life right now is stepping into this new role as a father and putting the tools and the team and the network and the other fathers and the people in my life who are supportive of that. So I think that's it. I think that's it for this audio note. I'm not sure where we're going from here, but I'm sure Gareth will pick it up and. Yeah. Whoo! You know, it's funny, man. I feel. I feel. I feel nervous. Like I should be signing it off in some particular way. Like this. This note needs to end eloquently, and it doesn't have to. I can just end it right there. Thanks for listening.
Gareth: [00:16:49] Life has the most magical and beautiful way. Of bringing us to presence when we wander off the path. And the best story that I have to illustrate this is called God Whispers. And the story goes that. When you are being called to take a new direction in your life or follow a specific path, the idea is that God whispers. And if you don't move in this new and potentially exciting direction for your life. He needs to ask a little bit louder. And if you continue down the the incorrect path or a path that's not necessarily aligned, he needs to shout. And if you still don't wake up, he sends a boulder to really shake you and wake you up to getting back aligned with the reason that you came here. And I've definitely noticed that story to be true in my life. The point of this voice note is just to give you some backstory about who I am and how I got to be co-creating in this group. So my name is Gareth Pickering and I am a South African currently living in Guatemala. And. Having completed my high school in South Africa, I went out on the road, I went travelling. I spent some time in America as a water ski instructor and following that I spent about four and a half or five years in London, in the UK, where I worked as a restaurant manager in a busy restaurant in the middle of London.
Gareth: [00:18:33] And it was a beautiful time for me, young in my twenties. It gave me access to cash and enough money to pay rent in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world. It also gave me access to some incredible people that I got to hang out with and party with. And I spent most of those five years doing what a single early twenties guy does in one of the capital cities in the world. And that was go out and drink and party, do all the drugs, sleep with as many women as I could, and just really experience everything that this amazing city had to offer. And while I was there, I connected with somebody who worked in investment banking. And one night he told me about his £3 million bonus and. Something about that statement set me off on a path that made me believe that. Accumulating wealth was the path that I needed to be on. And so. I came back to South Africa, added a finance degree and spent about four years going through the process of looking for a job in finance, which didn't come through.
Gareth: [00:19:38] And yeah, I sent me in a slightly different direction. I spent a couple of years working in a business with my dad in an I.T. business. I was in charge of sales. And following that, I moved into my own business and started to build an advertising agency in South Africa, fuelled by the story that. The things that would make me happy in my life would look like a good looking woman on my arm. Perhaps a family accumulation of property, a nice house to live in. Enough money to be able to go on holiday. And to be able to fill my life with the things that I thought would be meaningful. I spent about ten years of my life putting a lot of life force and energy into my business. And it was great in the beginning. I really loved it. I love the opportunity. I love the excitement of growing a team and connecting with new potential clients and building my business. I franchised my business and yeah, we were we were pretty successful and probably at around year seven. I think God whispered that I probably needed to look for something a little bit more meaningful. And I didn't. I didn't even hear that I was so wrapped up in the world that I was in and I carried on down that path.
Gareth: [00:20:58] And for the next three years, I went through the process of. God asking and then shouting and in some ways rolling boulders to wake me up. And how that manifested in my world was just a life of short term relationships, where I continually projected that the woman that I were connecting with weren't quite right for me and that there was something wrong with each of them failing. Of course, to notice the common denominator being me. I also spent a lot of time. Avoiding myself. A four year relationship that I'd been in up until that point fell apart. And yeah, I then focused fully on my business again and worked harder and harder to make more and more money as a way to just keep going on this path that I'd set out on. And along the way, I avoided myself by getting really busy with work. I got really into exercise. I spent a lot of time out with friends. I spent a lot of time out drinking and partying with other friends. I fell into addictions of drinking too much alcohol, drug addiction. And yeah, intimacy addiction was another way that I would avoid being on my own. I mean, the.
Gareth: [00:22:20] Drugs.
Gareth: [00:22:21] No intimacy, no alcohol or a problem on their own, in my opinion. I think where they become a problem is where they take me out of. Really being able to support me and being able to be by myself. And so eventually I was realized my life was spiraling out of control. My business started to fail and I decided at that point to sell my business what was left of it to a partner. And I went out on the road and. As is often the story with these things, I had this idea that I would go for a couple of months, clear my head and come back and laugh at different plans for me. And there was a pivotal moment when I was sitting on a beach in India. Six months into my journey, I had made the decision that I wasn't going to come back to South Africa to continue to build another business, which I had thought was going to be my plan when I left and. I decided I was going to look at my life and make a decision about how the next year was going to look for me on the road. I'd also read the four Hour Work Week, which was a book by Tim Ferriss at the time. It was pretty radical in its approach in how there was an opportunity to be able to travel and live in cheap destinations like Asia or India and Latin America, and accrue revenue by doing digital services in countries that were based in higher income earning places. So for example, the UK or the United States.
Gareth: [00:23:52] And so my plan was to try and find a way to make money that would keep me building and travelling on the road. So when I sat down that day on that beach in India, I opened up my laptop and I opened up a folder called Goals, which I set my objectives for the beginning of the year. At the time I would look at it, but in there was a document called My Perfect Day, and I opened that document and I had almost forgotten doing this exercise. But when I reflect back now, it had probably been ten years before that where I'd read a book that suggested that you take a blank piece of paper and write down what a perfect day would look like for you free from any of the constraints of your current reality. And as I read that perfect day that I'd written ten years earlier, sitting on the beach. A chill run down my spine as I realized where I was living on a beach in India. Waking up every morning, going surfing. I had already started getting some coaching clients. I was receiving a passive income, which I'd written about in my perfect day. So many things lined up in my world that I had written about at a time when my life looked nothing like that. Perfect day could have been ten years earlier. And. In some ways that was my light bulb moment. It was an opportunity for me to be able to. Become aware of the conscious.
Gareth: [00:25:12] Role.
Gareth: [00:25:13] That I'm playing in the creation process of my reality and. Since then. I have not stopped deep diving into. Tools and practices that support me to be able to live my most expansive life. And. In the coming free voice notes, we're going to deep dive a little bit into what reality hacking and what lifestyle design is really all about. At the moment. I live in Guatemala, which is a Latin American country. I live on a lake surrounded by volcanoes. I have an amazing partner in my life, and we've been on a really deep journey for the last three years and. I really see that from the moment I decided to go travelling and go out on the road. While there was all the novelty and newness of going out on the road and travelling and exploring and the hero's journey, I realised that for me it was really a journey of healing and a journey of being able to be comfortable with being on my own. Because I realised that as long as I'm not comfortable by myself and I try and move into relationships or even friendships, I project all of the things that I don't believe that I have or that I'm not lovable or that I'm not worthy into my partner or friend or whoever it is that I'm connecting with. And yeah, it's been a significant realization for me that. There's nothing that I need to do except. Give myself permission to be authentically me and to keep checking in every single day where I'm making choices that don't align to that and don't make those choices for too.
Gareth: [00:26:58] Long.
Gareth: [00:26:59] So that I can live from a place where if God whispers a new direction to me, that I'm genuinely in a space that's open to listen and receive the magic that comes from listening to your intuition. And so. I'm so grateful that all of you are here listening to this and really excited about the co-creation that matter and are putting together with our team at fathers, sons, brothers and looking forward to hearing match his journey. Which in many ways. Is a similar journey to what all of the brothers in this group are going to be on. Some sense of going through life, getting challenged by things. Moving in a direction that's authentically you, sometimes not listening to that initial whisper and continuing down a path that you think is the right path for you, or the path that.
Gareth: [00:27:51] Your.
Gareth: [00:27:52] Family or your religion or culture has prepared for you. And many of us moving into a different version of ourselves by allowing ourselves to listen to what is really true and what really makes us the most happy. And so. So grateful for this community and for this co-creation and really looking forward to hearing Matt's journey. Thank you so much for being here. Sending love from Lake Atitlan.
Matt: [00:28:19] When I think about the story that I want to tell about myself, I think about a handful of different versions of me that have that have progressed over the years. My name is Matt Darcy. I am currently 41 recording this, living in Spain with my wife and my newborn son, who is four and a half months old at the moment. But when I tell my story to people who don't know me, I usually start with the version of me who was an investment banker. So once upon a time, I had graduated from college in Texas. I'm originally from Texas, grew up in Houston, went to school in Austin. And when I graduated, I fell into a investment banking group out of Houston that was just me and four other guys. And these guys were fucking smart motherfuckers. They had figured out the entire game around how to take companies public, how to raise money, how to promote stocks, how to sell into those into those inflated markets and make sick, sick money for for the small team. And they took me under their wing and taught me everything that they knew. It was like this masterclass in how to manipulate markets and make money and and how to spend money, how to live the lifestyle that came with making $1,000,000 in a day. In fact, we had a tradition that every time we made a million bucks, we would fly to Vegas party all night and then catch the redeye back so that we could be at our desks in time for the market to open the next day.
Matt: [00:30:01] And that was a tradition we knocked out a few times a year. And yeah, I really love that lifestyle. It was it was an ego trip for me. I was I was loving it. I was spending tons of money on suits and watches and cars and like the material side of life really got me going. And I was convinced I was going to retire by the age of 30 with $100 million in the bank. And then I would just spend the rest of my days traveling. And yeah, looking back, I was a real asshole back in my investment banking days, but luckily I had a long term girlfriend who I was madly in love with who right around my 30th birthday. She told me that she was going to quit her job and go traveling and she wanted me to go with her. And so I told my partners that I was going to leave for a few months to chase this girl and that I'd be back. Get on a plane, go to Costa Rica. We start backpacking around and after three months on the road, I realized that there was no fucking way I was going back. Like I was too happy. I was too happy not working 80 hour weeks, waking up every day at the beach and meeting people who were in love with life instead of being obsessed with money. Not reading the news. Not watching the stock market like that. Those elements of life really got me going. And so that brought this phase of life that was the backpacker.
Matt: [00:31:40] And for the next eight years or so, I backpacked around the world, mostly in the Americas, Europe and Southeast Asia. And regardless of human rights work and started building digital nomad businesses, just like Gareth mentioned, the four hour workweek. I also subscribe to that philosophy and yeah, created businesses that I could operate from anywhere from my laptop and that was a really fun and exciting time. In fact, I look back on that phase and that was in my thirties and what I structured in my life there was how could I do nothing? Like, how could I have as little responsibility as possible and still survive? And that was the life philosophy that I that I led through there. And then the next phase began when I met Gareth. I met Gareth in Oaxaca when I was maybe 38 years old. And we started talking about this idea of lifestyle design. And he was sharing with me all the work that he had done in this area of manifestation and creating habits and routines and exercises to keep you aligned and to identify the life that you want and to to bring it to you and to to step into your power as, as this version of you that you wanted to be. And that that work really resonated with me. And so for the first time, I started building a business with a purpose again instead of just to get by. And yeah, so that, that started this new phase of my life. And then I. I ended up in this transformational retreat in Guatemala, where I met Etana, who is my wife, and we ended up planning a trip to Alaska and buying a camper that we were going to drive up there.
Matt: [00:33:36] And through the course of building out that camper, we got pregnant and it was perfect. It was like this dramatic wake up call to step into yet another version of myself. And we decided to move to Spain, which is where she's from, and got a house in this little village. And we are now focused on well, we're focused on building a family. And it's like this new version of me, this new phase of my life is now fatherhood and it's new and I'm fucking loving it. And I love that fatherhood has allowed me to just. It's allowed me to just turn the volume down on everything in my life. That doesn't matter. All the ego stuff, all the shallow relationships, all of the commitments that I made that I maybe shouldn't have or that that are holding me back. Like, it's just I'm currently in this phase of my life where the intensity of fatherhood is allowing me to just eliminate a lot of things from my life that that no longer serve me and focus on what I really care about. And so, yeah, being a part of this conversation and building fathers, sons, brothers and yeah, going back and cataloging my life and indexing these aha moments where I was able to, to step into a new version of me and transform. That's, that's exciting. And so. That is me. That's. That's me. So I got you. Thank you.
Gareth: [00:35:24] At about 5 p.m. on the 11th of August 2018, the bus finally pulled into Osaka City. I had been on the bus for around 6 hours, an hour and a half longer than the scheduled journey from the coast of Messina to the city. And I had spent the last three weeks falling even more in love with Mexico. I had fallen in love with a girl that I'd met on the beach who we'd just spent a beautiful two weeks together, and she was headed off in a different direction. And we'd had such a sweet and soft goodbye. Despite the fact that we were unlikely to see each other again. And I was excited about the next phase of my Mexico adventure, which was spent a few months in Oaxaca City. Explore the city, get ingrained into a bit of a community. Find a place to retain. Go to gym. Do some cooking. Have a space that I could really nest. And found a coworking space that I could create and connect with other like minded people. And I was really excited about this next phase. And the following day, when I found a co-working space. I met a guy from Texas whose name was Matt, and we exchanged phone numbers and he hit it off that evening. I spent a little bit more time into the evening working at the co-working space on my new projects, and I sent Matt a message.
Gareth: [00:36:49] To.
Gareth: [00:36:51] Ask him whether he knew where I could organize some weed. And almost immediately, without saying a word, he replied back with a video.
Gareth: [00:36:59] And I was like.
Gareth: [00:37:00] I was a little curious him when I pressed play on the video. The video showed someone walking through the front door of the co-working space where I was sitting. It was lots outside in the video, although it was nighttime when I was sitting there and the video shows someone walking up to a bookshelf in the communal area of the co-working space. Opening up a very specific book with a fat. Blue spine. And opening up that page, there was a bowl of hash between the pages. I still laugh at the level of detail that Matt goes to to create experiences like this in his life. And without needing to do another thing, I stepped up from where I was sitting at the desk. I walked over to the bookshelf, found the blue book exactly where it was in the video. I opened it up and there was the ball of hash. It seemed that my ability to manifest the things that I wanted is becoming more and more strong and how I was having order delivered even quicker. And that was really the start of my journey with Matthew and him, and I became great friends and we eventually ended up living in Oaxaca City for a while. But a couple of days after the meeting in the coworking space, I was headed off to another part of Mexico to go and do some free diving.
Gareth: [00:38:24] And Matt said, Before you leave, let's go up to the mountains of San Jose, which is about a three hour drive from Oaxaca City, and go to a place where they cultivated and farmed magic mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms, and to enjoy a beautiful hostel that he'd spent some time at before. Spent some time in the mountains. Yeah. Going a bit of an adventure together. And despite not knowing each other very well, we caught a shuttle and headed off to the mountains just outside Osaka. It's a pretty profound moment being on the side of the mountain, going on a beautiful psychedelic experience and adventure with somebody. And the story that I want to share with you was. That day. We started our journey at around 9 a.m. in the morning and decided to journey throughout the day together on the side of the mountain. I shared with Matt in as much detail as I could my journey over the past few months having manifested $1,000,000. I had initially heard about the Law of Attraction a few a few years earlier, and had been interested, but a little skeptical. And when this million dollars showed up in my life, I spent the next few months feeling like a magician, that I'd just discovered a magic wand, and I wanted to take what I had learnt and unpack a little bit more about how the thoughts that I think had been so instrumental in creating my reality that day.
Gareth: [00:39:55] On the side of the mountain, I shared my story with Matt and I explained how things like the Law of Attraction had not been part of my experience because I had not really had much of a connection to the Divine and I had for the years, up until, I don't know, my mid thirties pretty much decided that I was going to be an atheist. I didn't have any belief or passion in following organized religion and I'd completely cut it out from my life. And that included anything else that related to spirituality and that it kept me stuck. And so as I was starting to discover the magic of what happens in our reality when we live from a place of intuition, I was really excited to understand it a little bit more and to create a story, a new narrative, to understand the law of attraction for the version of Gareth that had been closed off to something like that a few years earlier. And so as I explained my work around this idea of a factory to Matt on the side of the mountain that day, he picked up a stick and he drew exactly how he had understood my story to be in a diagram in the sand on the side of the mountain that day.
Gareth: [00:41:11] And it's almost like he mapped out the path that I was walking even more articulately and clearly than I knew the path that I was on myself. And it became so clear that I was doing exactly what I needed to do. And I shared that story because it's an important one. On the journey of Matt and I becoming close brothers, best friends, co-creation slash business partners, and really honored to be on this journey with such a dear brother. And as we unfold this conversation in the prologue of the Cult of Courage conversation, I'm listening to Match and he's listening to me share. And both of us have reflected behind the scenes on just how rich this format of storytelling is. Because I really get to hear the same story through Matt's lens, and sometimes I'm even in his story about his investment banking days. I wasn't quite aware of just, yeah, the level of money that he was dealing with. He said, Yeah, I was an investment banker and doing a few things, but yeah, fuck $1,000,000 deals and it's really beautiful to be getting to know Matt better through this format. And we hope that you're enjoying it too. And I'll see you in the next message.
Matt: [00:42:31] Fuck, Gareth. Well put, man. Fuck. I'm sitting here walking. I'm camping right now. I'm. It's our first day camping as a family. After going through like a tough two weeks of COVID, we got clear of it and hopped in the camper van and drove out to this deserted beach on the far west end of Mallorca. It's a full moon. I'm just sitting out here catching up on this audio and yeah, going to contribute my verse to the story and fuck man, I love it. Gareth There's a lot of emotions coming to mind as I think about that moment on the side of the mountain. That was a pretty special intentional journey. And yeah, there's something to be said around intentionality, around plant medicine and the magic of that, and how talking about plant medicine having a format to be able to discuss a mushroom trip is is fucking exciting as well. I remember meeting Gareth actually in the coworking space and yes, in the video with the the hash ball. And I remember when I was asking him about his project, he said he was documenting his journey with Law of Attraction. And yeah, that seemed far out to me. I was like, okay. And I had, you know, I had studied Law of Attraction. I had read The Secret and done a vision board, and that was years ago. And I sort of let it go.
Matt: [00:44:10] It was something that I believed was possible or that a piece of the story was possible. My belief in that as like the ability to like manifest things was not something that I had full belief in at that time. And. And at the same time I could hear Garris talking about it and realized that he was doing more than just believing in this thing. He was trying to create a system. He was he was creating a system of how to harness it and did that through documentation and recording systems and putting together practices and ways of of using the power of your mind to create the reality around you and do this thing we now call lifestyle design and. Yeah. Shit. I'm not too sure where to go with the story. Let me drop the audio right there and come right back with another one. Yeah, I actually what I want to do is, is go back back to Osaka City when Gareth and I met and. I remember he was also asking me not just for a weed connection, but for a good restaurant connection. I suggested what I consider to be the best restaurant in the city, this place called Don Santos. And it was amazing. And it was also like expensive. It was way out of my budget. As a digital nomad, scraping together, just, you know, trying to get by.
Matt: [00:45:46] And Gareth was like, Yeah, man, hey, I'm going there tonight. Why don't you join me and. I could find so many excuses not to go. And that's what I would do socially is, is I didn't want to do something or if I felt like it wasn't right, I would find excuses and then really just kind of go home and be by myself. And at some point in the in the night, I would get angry at myself like, man, I should have gone out and then, you know, sort of that, that loathing feeling. But rather than making the excuse when Gareth invited me, I was like, Man, this really feels like something I need to do. Like I had realized in our in our interaction at the coworking space that there was a lot of alignment there in our life paths, in our outlook on life. And I could tell, I don't know, there was a part of my ego or my intuition saying that Gareth had a piece of the puzzle that I needed, that I wanted, and I didn't quite know what it was, but I knew I needed to get to know this guy. And yeah, we became fast friends, ended up meeting him at that restaurant and we found a ton of commonality. And of course, if you meet if you meet Matt Darcy in Oaxaca City that year, one of the things I invited everybody to do was to go to my favorite mountain town of San Jose del Pacifico.
Matt: [00:47:21] And, yeah, I had a whole. A whole list of activities that ranged from hiking in the mountains to a mushroom trip or finding the waterfall or. Just being out there in nature. And so, yeah, we chose the mushroom trip and we were out there on the side of the mountain. I remember when we were out there, it was a pretty powerful plant medicine journey. We took a mushroom known as The Familia, which is seven different mushrooms. One is super tiny and one is generally large, and each of the mushrooms is supposed to represent a member of the family and will give to you wisdom as though that person was your younger brother, your older brother, your mother, your grandmother, your grandfather. And each of those family members had their own type of wisdom and. Yeah. I remember it being a really beautiful trip. In fact, we were up in the mountain and it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere. There's a small village down below and there was a band practicing and every 15, 20 minutes or so the band would break out into some song. And it would be this sort of reminder that, yeah, the real world was out there and.
Matt: [00:48:49] I remember there were a bunch of synchronicities when Gareth and I were were geeking out about law of Attraction and the clarity and these these moments of clarity that we were having around how to yeah. How to use your mind to, to shape the life that you want. Every time we had an Aha moment, either the band would strike up or some incredible act of nature would take place in front of us. In fact, we were walking on the trail at one point and we had just had a really profound moment, and we stopped at just the right time to hear a tree fall in the forest. And it was so silent and we just heard this massive tree fall. We couldn't see it, but it was definitively a tree falling and we both sat there for a good minute or two, just really listening to see if it were chainsaws that that that knocked it down or not. But yeah, a lot of synchronicities there on the side of the mountain and yeah, man Gareth super amped to be in this journey with you and. Yeah. Glad we made it up to the mountain that weekend and. And had the experience we had, man. All right, y'all. That is the mushroom trip on the side of the mountain story. That's all now.
Gareth: [00:50:18] In 2015, I watched a documentary called The Secret. The documentary speaks about the Law of Attraction. And when I watched it, this was the first time I'd I'd really consciously paid attention and became aware of what the Law of Attraction was and. I watched it with a. Mix of intrigue and skepticism. The intrigue because it seems to be pointing to many of the things that show up in our reality are a function of our creation. And skepticism because it was labeled as one of the spiritual laws of the universe. And at the time I didn't have a very strong spiritual connection. And I think this was born out of. A part of me that. Couldn't find a healthy place for organized religion in my world and my belief system. And I needed to go through a process of throwing out everything that looked like formal religion, which included almost everything that sounded spiritual. And so I was an atheist for most of my twenties and thirties and. But having watched the documentary, I was intrigued, although although I could see in my reality how setting goals and following those goals could bring about the things that I wanted.
Gareth: [00:51:34] The actual process of manifesting something into your reality felt new to me in some ways. Jack Canfield, one of the personalities that's featured in the documentary, spoke about his own technique of visualization, where he wrote himself a check for $1,000,000. And within a year or two, a book that he had written that had not done very much suddenly got picked up by a publisher. And as the story goes, he manifests $1,000,000 and goes on to expand into more than that and has created an entire empire around his personal brand and his authoring of the Chicken Soup series of books. And so I wanted to test it out. I wanted to try this process for myself. So I create, instead of a physical item for a vision board, like he wrote himself a check. I created a wallpaper that I made my Gmail wallpaper that said $1 million in my PayPal account. By December of 2016. I reckon that would have been about 18 months out from the time that I watched The Secret and decided to take part in this little experiment. So I go ahead and I make that my Gmail.
Gareth: [00:52:45] Wallpaper and.
Gareth: [00:52:47] That was my Gmail wallpaper for pretty much. Three years. And the first 18 months came and went. Nothing showed up in my world that looked like $1,000,000, and I carried on with my life at the time I was traveling and I had done a trip across Africa and I had been spending a couple of months in Latin America. Probably around a year prior to watching The Secret. Completely unrelated or seemingly unrelated events on a bus in I think I was in Thailand, somebody told me about Bitcoin and I had looked at that with my curiosity and I'd taken some of the money that I had saved from my business in South Africa, put a little bit into Bitcoin and continue to go up and continue to go up. And at some point my my decision. Completely unrelated to manifestation for $1,000,000 to show up in my world. I decided that the nest egg that I had, which was around $60,000, I decided, rather than have it sitting in some retirement annuity thing in South Africa, earning a few percent per year, I was going to swing big, so I put all the money into bitcoin and I carried on with my life.
Gareth: [00:53:59] In December of 2017 when the Bitcoin price went to just below 20,000 per Bitcoin, a function of the money that I had invested in Bitcoin, my portfolio was worth $1 million. It was technically one of the most profound moments in my life. It was the light bulb moment that made me pay attention to many things. One of them was obviously the law of attraction. And. Natural Law of the universe, which seemed to have created something out of what was just a possibility and a Gmail wallpaper graphic into physical reality. But it also woke me up to the fact that I had been pretty closed to anything that had the word spiritual attached to it. And I realized that my human experience is probably being crimped by my own lack of willingness to create space for different ideas and. What set about from there was a process of deep diving and understanding exactly how I understood the Law of Attraction as well as the other 12 spiritual laws to.
Gareth: [00:55:08] Work.
Gareth: [00:55:09] And creating systems that I could use that would have been easy to understand for the version of Garreth that wasn't open to having a conversation about spiritual things. So what that looks like is tools, habits, routines, technology, goal.
Gareth: [00:55:26] Setting.
Gareth: [00:55:26] The exact same visualization process that I used to bring this million dollars into my.
Gareth: [00:55:31] World.
Gareth: [00:55:31] And how I had been using these and continuing to refine these tools to continue to use the Law of attraction to bring what I wanted into my life and. This was what I was explaining to Matt on the side of the mountain in the mushroom trip when he picked up the stick and drew exactly how I had articulated my plan back to me. And it was a pretty defining moment. And in the weeks and months that followed, I spent a lot of time refining the tools that I'd been developing and not sharing with anybody and having a space to really bounce these ideas off and share them with Matt. And so Matt and I ended up moving into a flat together in Oaxaca City, and Matt started to take some of the tools that I had been using and testing them out in his world for himself.
Matt: [00:56:19] Yes. So Gareth and I were fast friends and we would spend, you know, we'd get up early and go train in the morning and then go to the coworking space and work on our own individual projects. And we'd come home at night and get cleaned up and go out on the town and, like, figure out, you know, what do we want to see? And we'd be like planning out our evening from an energetic perspective, like thinking about, all right, I want to meet people who have the desire to change the world. And we would go out. And before we knew it, we were having cocktails next to inspirational people who were invested in cryptocurrency and doing human rights work. And so we were playing with the law of Attraction in that way and at the same time. I had my own. Like, I was still working through my own shit back then. I mean, shit. I'm still working on my own shit now, but it's like back then I can see clearly that I was very cynical that this Law of Attraction thing, I heard Gary's manifestation of a million bucks and it was like, Yeah, okay. Gmail wallpaper. Okay. Yeah. Visualization. Okay. So that could be evidence that this stuff works, could also be evidence of a coincidence. And so I was really playing with, with that in my head and like trying to reconcile how the, the law of attraction really fit into my day to day life.
Matt: [00:57:45] And so one of the great things around the tools is that they were actual tools. They were things that I could do on a daily basis. They were apps I could install on my phone that would that would remind me to think about these goals that I had set or these orders I had placed to arrive in my world. And things like writing exercises in the morning, a morning routine and a digital order board. These were all things that I installed into my life. And as we started, as I started keeping track of my own Law of Attraction journey, I started seeing how things would just show up in my world that I had written down on a Trello board or on a notebook a few days or a few weeks prior. And one of the aha moments that really made me realize that, okay, there's something about visualization, there's something about this system, there's something about the way the world works where. That these tools can help you access. And anyway, I ended up going to Mexico City. I was living in Oaxaca. We were doing our thing in Oaxaca, and I had a client in Mexico City. I went and hung out with them for a week doing work like every day. And then I took one night for myself to just enjoy Mexico City because it's a rad city. And I woke up the morning in Mexico City.
Matt: [00:59:12] I was staying at a hostel like a 12 bed dorm with like four other dudes who were half my age. And I woke up that morning, I did my morning routine exercise that involved thinking of the energetics and the emotions that I wanted to experience throughout the day and placing actual orders for the things that I wanted to arrive in my day and the emotions I wanted to experience in my day. And I ended up doing this long, almost narrative of the chick I wanted to hook up with that night. And I described this Penelope Cruz spirituality, sort of hippie, creative artist who was a good communicator, who laughed, who was spiritual, who was a little bit hippy, who was entrepreneurial, who was creative. I wrote down all these characteristics. It was like a little five minute exercise that I do when I get up in the morning and then I shut it. I usually don't think about it the rest of the day. Like, that's the whole point. You write these things down and you forget about them and you go about your day. So I went about my day, and my day included a lot of the things that I wrote down I wanted to explore by foot and discover like different parts of Mexico City that I hadn't seen. I wanted transportation to go smoothly. I wanted to meet cool people and all of those things happened.
Matt: [01:00:44] And the one thing that didn't happen throughout the day was meeting this Penelope Cruz looking girl, and I was getting ready for bed in the hostel. It was like 10:00, 1030. And all the kids, the guys half my age who were staying in the hostel come in and they're getting ready to go out. And I'm going to bed because I'm, you know, the 40 year old guy in a dorm and they're twentysomethings and they're like, Matt, no, come on, you got to come out with this. And they get me out. We go out to a couple of bars and, you know, it's it was cool. It was, you know, Mexico City bars. But it's like, you know, everyone's getting drunk and I'm just not feeling it. And I'm just like I'm just kind of hanging on because everyone in the group wanted me to be there. That's how I felt. I really felt included by these guys. It was a good night. Anyway, it's three in the morning and we're standing in line at some posh club on the rooftop of a bar that overlooks the Mexico City Central Square. And it's late, right? Like it's time to go to bed. And there's this. The doorway is this elevator, and there's this long line for this elevator. And there's a bouncer dude counting the people in and out. And, like, he's like, it's too full. Nobody can be let in. I start saying goodbye to everybody.
Matt: [01:01:57] I start saying my goodbyes. Hey, I'll see you all right. Before I'm about to go, the fucking elevator door opens and we get called up. So I go up to the rooftop of this bar, and I'm drinking in my skull on the roof. And as it was one of those places that's super crowded, and to get to where we were going to hang, we had to like sort of cut through this sort of dance zone. And as I'm passing through this crowd of people, this I pass right next to this brunette who gives me a look. We share like a really brief look, you know, it's like crazy dance floor, drunken look, but we shared this one, fucking 2/2 moment as I'm passing by her, and we end up on the complete opposite side of the bar and join our skulls and just talk and shit on the other side of the rooftop. Few minutes go by, I look over and she's standing right next to me. We start talking. My bet is I decide to leave. I ask her, I'm like, What are you doing? She's like, Why don't you stay? I'm like, I'll stay. I tell my buddies, I'm like, I'm good. See y'all. We end up connecting there on the rooftop, making out, and she invites me back to her place. We get back and we are making out on her couch and we decide to go back to the bedroom.
Matt: [01:03:20] But she says, before we go, let's do a ritual. And she sits me down and pulls out crystals. And we do a just a little, you know, three minute breathing exercise, being present with each other, holding these, you know, stones with energy and letting go of the energy of the bar. That was the thing to do. We did that and we went back to her room. We made love. And I stayed the night and. We had breakfast together and I learn at breakfast that she is a chef. She owns her own bakery. So she's an entrepreneur. She's artistic. She's creative. She looks like Penelope Cruz. I forgot to tell you. She looks just like Penelope Cruz. Big eyes, big brown eyes, long brown hair and. Yeah, dude. So I leave the next morning and I go back to the dorm and I'm packing up because I got to catch a flight or bus or whatever I was doing to get back to Osaka City that night. And I go back and I look at the journal entry that I had written in my journal that morning, and I was just fucking blown away that fucking everything I wrote down about this chick was there, and it was at that moment that I realized that was my aha moment. That fuck, man, there's something here. There's something here. And so that's my Penelope Cruz story. I'm going to end it there.
Gareth: [01:04:57] So Matt and I are living in Latin America. Living la vida loca. We are having the most amazing time. We live in Oaxaca City for a bit. We spent some time at a festival in Guatemala. We moved to Guatemala for a while, and the work that we're putting out into the world is expanding the tools and the systems that we're using. And the perfect day exercise as a plan for your life is going out into the world. People are installing this stuff in their lives and it's working. And Matt and I are holding in-person events and doing one on one coaching. And everybody that's doing this stuff and installing the tools that we're creating in their lives are seeing results. And. Matt and I continue to have this dream of wanting to build a location independent business. And for us, that means a business that allows us to generate income irrespective of where we're placed. We could be in Thailand, he could be in Spain, I could be in Guatemala. And we have a business that allows us to move around and not be stuck to a specific location. That's always been a dream for both of us. And the term digital nomad is somebody that is able to make their money digitally online and be nomadic and live in any place in the world.
Speaker1: [01:06:15] And so Matt and I are on a mission to take these tools into the world and change them, so much so that we actually go through and develop an entire personal brand masterclass. It's a six week experience that we facilitate and go through based on three books that we facilitate with some peers of ours. And six of us go through this program to get very clear on what our personal brand is, how we want to bring our gifts to the world. And we go through a process called Ikigai. And this is a Japanese process. I think it's based around happiness and fulfillment. But if you can imagine four circles and the first circle is what you love to do. The second circle is called What You're Good At. The third circle is called What the World Needs, and the fourth circle is called What You Can Be Paid For and where you can find something where all four of these overlap in the middle, that's your ikigai. And so Matt and I were going through this personal brand master class. We went through the six, six week experience with five other people. And we realize that. In order to find out. Ikigai We were doing what we loved. We were doing something that we were good at. We were seeing results in the.
Gareth: [01:07:35] World.
Gareth: [01:07:35] And people needed it. So those three circles of the Ikigai were working. But the final circle of what you can be paid for didn't seem to happen and it felt like it didn't matter how hard we tried with love, more perfect days, we would go down a path of studying a specific coach, taking his book, implementing it, not having any results, trying something else. We were hustling pretty hard to get to a place where we wanted to get paid as a way to be able to create this digital nomad lifestyle business, which was something that both of us aspired to do. And despite all of our best efforts. From. 2018 until the middle of 2021, we really had no idea of how this business was going to make any money. The team that we had hired to create content and manage our online platform and support us in all of these various iterations of building these tools and putting them onto the Internet. We're being paid by building out a loan account that was being funded by money that we were making in crypto. And one of the things when you choose to get involved in a specific game is you need to know what the rules are. And one of the rules in the game of business is you measure your success as well as the impact that you're making in the world by the profitability of your business. And while there's more perfect days was doing what we loved, doing what we are good at, and doing something that the world needs. We weren't being paid. And so. We needed to get really honest with ourselves and say that we couldn't continue to create and put this work out into the world until we could find a way to be able to support us and those that co-create with us. Our team, we need to be able to pay them. It can't come indefinitely from crypto profits. This project needs to stand on its own two feet. And so. We decided that we were going to find and invest in the best possible.
Gareth: [01:09:35] Coach.
Gareth: [01:09:35] That has built and coach people in the type of business that we were looking to create. And specifically, that meant a business that could be operated from anywhere. A business that produced potentially passive income. And a business that made a difference in the world. And so after spending some time evaluating a whole lot of coaches, we chose to deep dive with a coach and started a coaching journey with a coach that. At the very beginning before we went any further with our fancy plans and online programs and stuff like that. Asked us to get very clear on exactly who our market was, who it was that we were showing up for in the world. And despite having been in a huge Law of Attraction group with 200,000 people where we still didn't manage to sell any of our programs, we were forced to get really clear about who our work was for. And one of the ways that our coach suggested we do this is take a look at who you're already having conversations with, who's vibing with your work, who are you really engaging with and. In 2021, 18 months into a global pandemic, both Matt and myself were having deep and inspiring conversations with other men. And all the signs of our new markets seem to be pointing towards us going towards men's work. And despite both Matt and myself having received huge healing and huge. Personal gain and up leveling from the transformational many circles that we had been spending time in over the.
Gareth: [01:11:16] Past.
Gareth: [01:11:17] 3 to 4 years. Both of us found it so difficult. To be able to say the words that our work is for men. And it really felt. In that moment that we were at a crossroads. The business wasn't making any money. We'd invested all this money in this coach, and we needed to get clear on exactly who our niche was. And we installed it felt like we were being given our own call to courage.
Matt: [01:11:49] All right. Also, this concludes the story of how Gareth and I met and how we came to co-create this venture called The Cult of Courage Conversation. From here, we're going to be exploring what a call to courage means, what it means to identify that moment for you to step into a more powerful, a more expansive, a more confident version of yourself, as well as integrating the habits, tools and routines that can support us as men. As we step into our power, as we step into a better version of us and design the life that we want around us. For those of you listening on the podcast, you can join this conversation in our Private Telegram channel by going to call to Courage Live. From there, you'll be integrated into the Telegram group where you can comment and contribute your voice to this ongoing conversation about what it means to be courageous. In there. We're also going to be dropping links to specific teachers. We admire tools that you can implement immediately into your life, and videos like the one I'm about to upload right now, which is an artistic creation of the time. Gareth and I were together in Oaxaca. It's a video compilation so that you can get to know us better as you continue having this conversation with us. So this concludes the prologue. Looking forward to seeing you in the Cult of Courage conversation, and we'll see you on the inside.
Speaker1: [01:13:16]
