Guru Singh On Building Emotional Infrastructure, New Educational Modalities & The Impact of Diet Beyond The Physical

As we approach the year's end, I thought it appropriate to reconvene with the great and vast consciousness that helped us usher in 2017 – kundalini yoga & meditation master Guru Singh (@gurusinghyogi). Long-time listeners will well recall our initial conversation from January (RRP #267), one of my most popular and impactful episodes in the history of this podcast. For those new to the show, imagine a modern-day rock star Gandalf dropping mad guitar licks between pearls of timeless wisdom that beautifully fuse Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism and you start to get the picture. Named Best Guru in LA by Los Angeles magazine, Guru Singh is a celebrated third-generation Sikh yogi, master spiritual teacher, author, and musician. For the past 40 years he has been studying and teaching Kundalini Yoga – a 5,000 year old ancient science and school of yoga focused on awakening the primal energy known as shakti for the purpose of spiritual enlightenment. He is the author of several books (enumerated below) and a powerful lecturer uplifting thousands worldwide. An extraordinary teacher, he also serves as a behind-the-scenes guide to many a luminary, including Fortune 500 CEOs, athletes, artists and even Tony Robbins. A peer of rock legends like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, Guru Singh is also a supremely talented musician who began his recording career on Warner Bros' Sire label in the 1960s. When he isn't recording tracks with people like Seal, he's bringing down the house on the daily at Yoga West, his Los Angeles home base. Over the past year, I have become close with Guru Singh — a beautiful and highly relatable consciousness I'm proud to call a good friend and valuable mentor. Today we discuss everything from the benefits of cold-water therapy to the implications of artificial intelligence. We examine the why behind all the recent mass shootings and explore strategies for navigating the treacherous minefields of our deeply divided culture. We envision new educational modalities for future generations. We investigate the effects of diet beyond the physical level. And we consider the importance of maturing the social infantilism of our emotional infrastructure as a cultural imperative. It’s aways an honor to spend time with Guru Singh and it's a privilege to share more of his powerful wisdom with you today. My hope is that this conversation will empower you to more mindfully navigate our volatile world and encourage you to more deeply invest in the development of your conscious awareness, personal boundaries, and spiritual growth. To rise up, you gotta lie down. So let's lie down with Guru Singh. For the visually inclined, the video version of the podcast is also available on YouTube I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Guru Singh?

  We train kids throughout school to do their work on their own, to hide their answers, to do it privately, don't share anything. And the moment they get out in the world, everything is about the need to share. And the people that are the most resistant to sharing are the ones that isolate themselves. They're the ones that end up being emotionally unstable. And then you have things like what's going on with mass shootings and all of this violence that's being created. These are people with unfulfilled gut and unfulfilled heart. They may be able to analyze things perfectly with their head, but the other parts of their being are just not in function.

• 1:50Guru Singh?

  That's Guru Singh, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:05Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how you guys doing? What is happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. The show where each week I go places no man has gone before with some of the most interesting people I can find on planet Earth. Thought leaders and paradigm breakers across all categories of health, wellness, fitness, elite athletics, nutrition, medicine, social entrepreneurship, activism, what else? Environmentalism, entertainment, and in the case of today's guest, spirituality. As we approach the year's end, I thought it would be really cool to reconvene with the

• 2:46Rich Roll?

  great and vast consciousness that helped us usher in 2017 Kundalini Yogi and meditation master Guru Singh. Longtime listeners of the show will well recall our first conversation. That was episode 267 from January of this year, one of my most popular episodes to date. Please go back and listen to that if you haven't already. And since that time, I have spent a considerable amount of time with this man. In many ways, he has become not only a good friend, but also very much a personal mentor, somebody from whom I have learned a tremendous amount.

• 3:26Rich Roll?

  And it just seemed natural to sort of bookend the year the way that we began it by sharing more of this beautiful man's powerful wisdom. For those new to the show, Guru Singh is a celebrated third generation yogi. He is a master spiritual teacher, author, and musician with a very unique talent for translating ancient spiritual wisdom and practices and philosophies into what I think is a very understandable, modern, and accessible language. It's sort of a fusing of Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism.

• 4:04Rich Roll?

  And he does all of this with quite a bit of wit and humor and humility and of course, humanity.

• 4:21Rich Roll?

  Okay, let's hard pivot again away from the material and back to the ethereal with Guru Singh. Three times softer than your average guru, right? I love this guy. I don't know what to say. In addition to being an extraordinary teacher, behind the scenes Guru Singh is a guy who is counselled to many luminaries, many CEOs, executives, athletes, artists, including people like Tony Robbins, and also a lot of people I know you've heard of that are just kind of off the record. But he's just, he's just a huge, beautiful consciousness. He is like a gift to humanity, but he's also a guy who's amazingly relatable and just honestly,

• 5:05Rich Roll?

  one of the coolest people I have ever met. If you ever find yourself in Los Angeles, I strongly suggest that you check out one of his classes at Yoga West, that's his studio. You can go to YogaWestLA.com to find out more about that. And all of his classes are broadcast live on Facebook at Facebook.com/GurusingYogi. And you can learn more about him, take one of his online classes, or sign up for his daily email, which I strongly suggest and love, at gurusing.com. In any event, today's conversation is, well, it's pretty wide-ranging. We talk about a lot of stuff. We talk about everything from cold water therapy to the advent of AI, artificial intelligence,

• 5:49Rich Roll?

  to how to navigate our increasingly divided culture. We discuss the importance of maturing into what he calls our emotional infrastructure and the real need for new educational modalities for the younger generation. One that fosters the development of the heart and the gut-brains as much as the analytical mind. We go into the why behind all the recent mass shootings and we explore the effects of diet on not just the cellular level, but also the emotional and spiritual level, plus so much more. It's always an honor to spend time with Guru Singh and it's a privilege to share his wisdom

• 6:31Rich Roll?

  with you, especially during this divided, volatile time, a time in which I think it's fair to say it's become... More important than ever to really invest in the development of your own awareness, your own consciousness and boundaries and ultimately your personal evolution and growth. And so now, without further ado, I give you my conversation with the great Guru Singh. Guru Singh, my friend, it's good to see you.

• 7:07Guru Singh?

  Really good to see you.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  Super nice to be back in the inner sanctum, the sanctuary. This is my third podcast in this room.

• 7:15Guru Singh?

  I know, I know, man. Getting to be a regular.

• 7:17Rich Roll?

  I know, I'm just gonna, I should just call you up when I'm on this side of town.

• 7:21Guru Singh?

  Hey, just say, I need somebody, I need some place to do a podcast. And we'll go, okay, we got it.

• 7:26Rich Roll?

  Well, the energy is so good in here. And originally, we had talked about you coming out to the house, but the studio space that I have still isn't quite right. And when I started to think about it, I realized like, well, this is an amazing place to do this. Like, what am I, what am I fighting here? Let's go over here. So here we are.

• 7:41Guru Singh?

  This is like a man cave of light.

• 7:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is a very specific type of man cave populated with lots of spiritual artifacts and many, many frogs.

• 7:53Guru Singh?

  Yeah, frogs are, you know, frogs are what we all are. We're that, we're born as one thing and then we evolve into who we are, you know? We're born as what we are and we evolve into who we are. And that's what a frog is. It's born as a fish and it then evolves into a, an amphibian that's able to breathe air.

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I'm part amphibian, so I relate to that.

• 8:20Guru Singh?

  I saw those photos, man. You had to run across an island, then jump in the water and swim to the next island and then...

• 8:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was a crazy race in cold water and...

• 8:31Guru Singh?

  With your shoes on.

• 8:32Rich Roll?

  With your shoes on the whole time, all day long, 10 hours in the Baltic.

• 8:36Guru Singh?

  Yeah. And so then running in wet shoes is kind of blister territory, isn't it?

• 8:43Rich Roll?

  It is. I was lucky. I didn't get any blisters, but my shoes filled up with like sand and little pebbles and things like that. And you're kind of running on that. You just have to get comfortable with that discomfort because you could stop and empty them, but they're just going to fill up again the next time you jump in the water and run up the, you know, the coastline.

• 9:01Guru Singh?

  The beach.

• 9:02Rich Roll?

  So it was an experience for sure. Yeah, it was cool.

• 9:07Guru Singh?

  And you guys did it in what, how many hours?

• 9:10Rich Roll?

  Ten hours and forty some odd minutes.

• 9:12Guru Singh?

  And how many of those, how much of that time were you actually in the cold water? And what was the temperature of the water?

• 9:19Rich Roll?

  That was my biggest fear was how cold the water was gonna be. Um, cuz all you need is one cold front, one storm to blow in cuz you're so close to the Arctic Circle and it can completely change everything. But the water ended up being like, I don't know, fifty-six or something, somewhere around there. So it was cold, but not bone chillingly cold. So, you know, you're in and out enough and then you're running and you're warming up. And just when you warm up, you jump back in the water again. But actually, on the longer runs, it felt good to jump in the cold water. So the, the, the, the temperature wasn't the limiting factor. The, the, the most difficult part for me was just the technical terrain of the land because it was so rocky and slippery.

• 10:03Rich Roll?

  I mean, you're on all fours, climbing up these granite slabs and, and kind of trudging through marshes where the water's almost up to your knees. And, you know, it was, it was more like The Amazing Race or something like that, like, than it was running. It wasn't actual, there wasn't that much actual running. Like, a lot of it was bushwhacking and that really took its toll.

• 10:23Guru Singh?

  You know, of course, you know this really well, that you spend three minutes or more in water under sixty degrees and you reset your metabolism, you reset your glands and organs. It's really, really healthy.

• 10:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, have you followed the work of Wim Hof?

• 10:39Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  You know who he is?

• 10:40Guru Singh?

  Yes, the Iceman.

• 10:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so I had him on the podcast, talking all about that kinda stuff.

• 10:44Guru Singh?

  Oh, man. He's, he's totally devoted.

• 10:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, he's a, I mean, at his core, he's, he's an ancient yogi, that guy. And he studied the practices of pranayama. I mean, it's, with him, what's interesting is it's much more about breath work than it is about the cold. The cold is what gets a lot of attention, all the kind of stunts that he does. And, and what he can do in cold water is amazing. But the breath work is really rooted in the ancient traditions of the yogis. He's found a vernacular to talk about it and teach it in a modern context where people can actually hear what he's saying. And he's had a huge impact. And he's cool, he's got great energy, I mean, he's an amazing guy.

• 11:26Guru Singh?

  Totally, totally.

• 11:29Guru Singh?

  The yogis of the South Asian subcontinent in the south were doing hot yoga year round, right, because southern India is hot all the time. And so they were doing what would be in the modern day vernacular would be hot yoga. And the yogis that were in the Himalayas, in the Himalayas, you know, they were doing it on snow sometimes, right? They would even have moments when they would sit and melt snow with their body. And so, yeah, cold water is a big part, even a big part of our lives, because we do cold shower every morning to flush. What happens is cold water, you know, the largest organ in your body is your

• 12:10Guru Singh?

  skin. And so when you get in cold water, it contracts all the capillaries in your skin, forcing massive amounts of blood inside the body. If you leave it in there for three minutes, that has completely flushed your glands and organs, and now you're ready to go. Literally ready to go.

• 12:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, anybody who doesn't knows you have this amazing, you know, rejuvenating feeling after you've experienced that. And yet, you know, it's still so hard to do.

• 12:41Guru Singh?

  There's an old saying that no matter how long you wait, the cold water never warms up.

• 12:47Rich Roll?

  No, it definitely doesn't.

• 12:48Guru Singh?

  It's that thing of playing in your head, you know, it's like waiting around for jumping in the, doing the plunge.

• 12:55Rich Roll?

  Well, you hear all these stories, you know, I don't know what's real and what's apocryphal about the ancient yogis going into the caves and not eating for, you know, however, you know, extraordinary periods of time, and just going into these, you know, breathitarian fugue states for, you know, eons on end. And yet, the Iceman, you know, Wim, is really kind of doing this in front of cameras and with doctors. And, you know, he injected himself with some kind of endotoxin, and it had no effect on him. And, you know, so it's cool that he's able to kind of carry that practice forward in a way that is visible for a mainstream audience.

• 13:36Guru Singh?

  And you know that you and I and others, including him, and many others, your wife, my wife, et cetera. Are all, you know, reincarnations from ancient yogis anyway. So, you know, we're just here from the future, trying to get this planet up to date.

• 13:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I'm learning a few lessons along the way.

• 13:55Guru Singh?

  I know.

• 13:56Rich Roll?

  Imperfectly.

• 13:57Guru Singh?

  Let me just ask you one specific question about that race. What, what did you start? Running or swimming?

• 14:03Rich Roll?

  The first leg was like a kilometer run.

• 14:06Guru Singh?

  Okay.

• 14:06Rich Roll?

  And then, and then a long swim, and then a bunch of short little swims and runs. And then it kind of opens up later in the race. There's a longer swim and a 13 mile run like late in the race, but a lot of, a lot of in and out. Um, yeah.

• 14:21Guru Singh?

  What was the longest swim?

• 14:24Rich Roll?

  Uh, 1.4 kilometers, I think. Yeah. So all told, it was about six miles of swimming and 40 miles of running, 75 kilometers.

• 14:33Guru Singh?

  Well, that's a lot of time spent in 56 degree water.

• 14:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Guru Singh?

  That was exuberating.

• 14:39Rich Roll?

  Trust me, I was tired when it was done.

• 14:43Rich Roll?

  But, uh, you know, the Northern Europeans, these guys are Vikings and you should see how they dance on these slippery rocks. I was falling all over the place and landing on my butt and cursing and, you know, all of that. And these guys are just dancing on these rocks like, you know, with incredible grace. So I have a, a learning curve. If I decide to go back to that race, I have plenty, plenty to, plenty to go back to the drawing board on to improve.

• 15:08Guru Singh?

  Do they do it yearly?

• 15:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, the guys that won are Swedish Armed Forces guys. And from what I can tell, a big part of their job is training for this race.

• 15:19Rich Roll?

  They're training on the course. They know exactly what rock, you know, to climb out on and, you know, they know it like the back of their hand. So.

• 15:26Guru Singh?

  And it's called, it's a cool. Called an advantage.

• 15:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, a little bit, but you know, it's a, it's a really cool, um, subculture. Uh, and the race directors have injected this event and this sport, which is growing with a really beautiful ethos of preservation and sustainability. Like they have a, they have a, like a, a no litter policy. If you drop, you know, any kind of like a gel or anything like that on the course and you get caught doing it, you're disqualified. Like it's all about respecting the, uh, the beauty of this incredibly, um, uh, challenging and natural terrain.

• 16:06Guru Singh?

  Hmm.

• 16:07Rich Roll?

  So it's cool.

• 16:08Guru Singh?

  Are the islands inhabited?

• 16:11Rich Roll?

  They are, but the population is very low. And during the winter months, like, almost no one's out there. Like, the island that we finished on, I think it has a population of forty or something like that. You know, and they're tiny little islands, so there's little cabins there and people have small farms. And, um, and I think it's like a very insulated community, um, where people are living really simple lives. And there's something really amazing about that.

• 16:36Guru Singh?

  Yeah, and you know that it was that part of the world and a bit further south that created the lifestyle that neither you nor I have any part of, being vegan. Um, but when, you know, the early migrations of, of pre-humans and humans were adventuring through the, the lands of what's now Europe and, and Russia and have you. Um, and the Ice Ages struck, uh, food was destroyed. And humans who are biologically plant-based beings, right? All of a sudden had to eat, um, all these flesh foods.

• 17:20Guru Singh?

  So those are the areas, they're really pristine, they're really beautiful, but if we were to be in a sustainable situation year-round, it probably wouldn't work out.

• 17:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, humans are incredibly adaptable, though, you know? We're, we, we know how to survive. There's plenty of things that we can eat to, to make it work. Uh, but one thing I took away from that experience was noticing the happiness quotient in that part of the world. And people who are living these simple lives are incredibly fulfilled and content. And in contrast to, you know, Los Angeles or the way that we live, like, do live amazingly sustainable by comparison. And that's something that, you know, I wanted to get into with you. You know, we've moved so far away from that biological imperative of living, you know, communally and connected, uh, with our neighbors.

• 18:17Rich Roll?

  And, you know, as you wrote recently in one of your morning prayers, uh, we're at, what, seven point three billion people on the planet now?

• 18:25Guru Singh?

  Actually, seven point five now.

• 18:26Rich Roll?

  Seven point five now. It changed that much since I last checked.

• 18:30Guru Singh?

  It goes so quickly.

• 18:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and quickly approaching 10 billion. And with that, we've been very good at creating physical infrastructure to support us through factory farms and super highways and mega cities and the like. But we have not been so good at maturing our emotional infrastructure.

• 18:55Guru Singh?

  Can you imagine? Can you imagine a child in kindergarten, first grade, having a course in courage? Having a course in confidence? And then, you know, going out through second, third, fourth grade with those kinds of courses? How about a course in mid-teens of dispute reconciliation? I mean, and actually have those courses equally as important as science, math,

• 19:36Guru Singh?

  and all of the other things which are giving us our advanced technologies and cultures? You know, but we've advanced to such a degree in all those levels that you spoke of. But our emotional body is still very primitive. We're still reacting to each other. And we still feel a threat in the difference that we perceive. Look at how many people across the world still actually believe that the paint job on our body means something, right? The color of our skin. And how many people feel that their

• 20:17Guru Singh?

  that their lives and their lifestyles are threatened by the difference of someone else's lifestyle? And these are just emotional opportunities for us to really enable

• 20:33Guru Singh?

  That which you said was 10 billion people on this planet, you know, to live in harmony. Because if we have problems with the numbers that we have today, we're not going to get anywhere close to 10 billion before we pull the plug on it.

• 20:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, as optimistic as I am by nature, there's a bleakness, this veneer of bleakness that kind of covers everything and definitely infuses my perspective of it. And informed by, you know, the unbelievably divisive society that we find ourselves in right now. You know, it seems as if we should have matured past our differences over our paint jobs. And yet, that seems to be coming up as, you know, one of the biggest issues once again. Like, how can we not have overcome this by this point?

• 21:27Guru Singh?

  Well, I look at it as that people like us, you and I, and our families and our circles are the ones that are in need of showing up. And to me, this world is like a one-room schoolhouse, or as I've now started to call it, a one-room daycare center. You know, I've downsized the metaphor, or downgraded the metaphor. If we are that one-room schoolhouse, we look across the planet and we see people that are all seemingly physical adults, and many of whom are emotionally not mature.

• 22:10Guru Singh?

  The consideration of skin color, sexual orientation, gender, et cetera, is all just an immaturity of the emotional body, when we find that being a fabric of judgment. And when you have that, what you're looking at is, okay, everybody is showing up, but it's kind of like Lord of the Flies, where it's all haphazard. And people like us need to turn it into a more appropriate setting in a gentle way. I look at it as that we've got about, you know, 30, 35 years before the bell curve starts to slide down the backside.

• 22:50Guru Singh?

  And in those 30 to 35 years, we will need to, you know, that gives us enough time, but we will need to multiply ourselves

• 23:01Guru Singh?

  Not in reproduction, but in, in actual information dissemination, where people are understanding that it's their fulfillment that gives us a sense of, that gives them a sense of being able to sit in the presence of something that is completely different than they are and not feel threatened. When you have, Chinese call it qi, in yoga we call it prana, in English it's called life force, you have it all the time. When you have that sensation that you have at the end of a race, not that you're completely exhausted from, but that you're really exhilarated from,

• 23:42Guru Singh?

  that is a life force that is moving in you and that is really fulfilling you. And when you walk in that state of grace, and any of these differentiating factors are in front of you, you see them as all similars, all similarities. And that's what we need to teach people to do is how to not just pacify themselves with food, not just pacify themselves with comfort, but to really activate, you know, right down to the cellular structure, and open up their, their mental capacities so that this emotional body can fulfill itself in a presence that is so profound

• 24:26Guru Singh?

  that no amount of difference is a differentiation.

• 24:30Rich Roll?

  But we're in a zero-sum game, you know, that's the game most people are playing. Like, there's only so much going around. And now this sense of lack and urgency seems to be heightened, right? So if you have, then I have not, or you're a threat to what I potentially can have, or he has more and I want what he has. So there's a lot of, a lot of mental...

• 24:58Rich Roll?

  Barriers that we have to overcome to reframe the paradigm about how we're sort of living our lives on a daily basis, right? I mean, we're being stoked by fear everywhere we turn, even the billboards when we drive down the streets here. The messaging is diffuse and everywhere. And it becomes almost impossible to kind of escape the clutches of the culture that wants to hold us in this place of being afraid, of judging ourselves by what we have and don't have in comparison to our neighbors. And I think this is, you know, wedging this divide that is being, you know, stoked by

• 25:40Rich Roll?

  our governments and people who are lining up on both sides to fight this battle that is just pushing us further and further apart from the solution.

• 25:50Guru Singh?

  There's a great study and a series of books. It's called M-Brain, and the M stands for multi. There's, and doctors are talking about the brain in your gut, and they have neurology in the heart, and they're talking about the brain in your heart. And then there's the brain in your head. Well, the brain in your gut is what connects. It either connects you with nourishment, it's how you digest food. The brain in the heart has a unique quality because it actually encompasses both the heart and the lungs. And both the heart and the lungs exert to give and then have to completely relax to

• 26:35Guru Singh?

  receive. The brain in the head is all we educate. And the brain in the head is analysis, differentiation. It's very two-dimensional, it's very right, wrong, good, bad, yes, no. So if all I'm doing is walking around with the brain in my head educated, and I'm a bit ignoring all of the other brains, then I am unfulfilled. And I am seeing that what you have, I want. I am seeing that you having it means that I can't have it, and there's a limited zero-sum factor involved. But if I'm connected with my gut, if you and I are connecting at the gut level, which is where you get your gut, you know, sensation, then what you have, I have.

• 27:19Guru Singh?

  And your happiness is actually my happiness. Think about the heart-brain, which is one of the most interesting factors. And that is that in order to receive, I have to completely relax. Most people are in this world and they're getting. In other words, they're striving to get, striving to get, striving to get. Well, if you're always in that hypertense striving to get, you never receive. And so if I never receive what I've gotten, then I'm always gonna need to get more. And this is where greed comes from, this is where over-consumption comes from. This is why we're deforesting the entire planet.

• 27:57Rich Roll?

  I like that analogy of the heart and the lungs, because that's, that's true. The exertion is in the giving. Like if you're, by extension, in a place of using your, your, your willpower, your energy, your chi, your prana, your life force, and channeling that into providing for others, giving of yourself, then when you relax, that's when it comes back to you, right?

• 28:23Guru Singh?

  Your lungs are naturally open. A collapsed lung is a big, serious event. But when you're running, your effort in breathing is on the exhale.

• 28:33Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:34Guru Singh?

  And your inhale, it actually happens naturally. And the same thing happens in your heart. The effort is in the pumping the blood into the body. And then when it completely relaxes, that swell of blood that's been pushed out into the body comes rushing back into the heart.

• 28:58Rich Roll?

  I like the idea of, of, you know, focusing on these different brains. The heart-brain.

• 29:06Guru Singh?

  Education, right?

• 29:08Rich Roll?

  But our education system is about the head-brain.

• 29:10Guru Singh?

  The head-brain only.

• 29:11Rich Roll?

  That's it. And what I've experienced and what I've seen other people experience is when you lead your life by, by your head-brain and you're ignoring the other brains, you end up with some form of disease, either mental, emotional, or physical.

• 29:26Guru Singh?

  Think about the kids that are no longer able to cope with school. And it's, the numbers are rising. And these are the kids that go out into the world and they have great relationships and they have great this and great that. They innovate, they're entrepreneurs. I mean, look at the biggest corporations, corporations in the world right now are all being CEO'd by college dropouts. And the, the bottom line here is, is that kids these days need that education on all three brains in order for them to experience fulfillment. When we educate the gut brain, the gut brain is all about connection. So we would have courses in school about connecting with each other. And what we would also do is we would have collective testing.

• 30:10Guru Singh?

  In other words, we train kids throughout school to do their work on their own, to hide their answers, to do it privately, don't share anything. And the moment they get out in the world, everything is about you, the need to share. And the people that are the most resistant to sharing are the ones that isolate themselves. They're the ones that end up being emotionally unstable. And then you have things like what's going on, you know, with mass shootings and, and all of this violence that's being created. These are people with unfulfilled gut and unfulfilled heart. They may be able to analyze things perfectly with their head, but the other parts of their

• 30:54Guru Singh?

  being are just not in function.

• 30:56Rich Roll?

  They're not in balance. Yeah. I mean, I want to get into the mass shooting thing, but before we get into that, like a couple of observations, you know, I think that we have an education system that has essentially remained unchanged since the Victorian era.

• 31:11Guru Singh?

  Totally.

• 31:12Rich Roll?

  It predates the, or it's sort of, you know, the way we teach kids now kind of came out of the industrial revolution and it was about training young people to prepare themselves for the job market at that time. And it's kind of stayed stuck in that.

• 31:26Guru Singh?

  Well, you know, they-

• 31:27Rich Roll?

  Despite all, everything we've learned about psychology and education and motivation and all of these things, like we have not been able to evolve how we are raising our children in the classroom.

• 31:38Guru Singh?

  And we pay the teachers the least. So we get those who are not necessarily striving to be extremely successful. But they say that if you took professionals from two hundred years ago, including teachers, and dropped them in the world of today, like lawyers, doctors, engineers, what have you. The only one that would recognize their job is the teacher because nothing's changed in education, but everything else has. So we're educating children for a world that doesn't exist anymore.

• 32:05Rich Roll?

  The world has definitely changed dramatically.

• 32:10Rich Roll?

  And that's a huge, that's a huge problem. And it is interesting that so many innovators, you know, are people that had the, the audacity, the gall to step, you know, one step to the left or three steps to the left and opt out of that system, which has allowed them to, you know, think more freely and unrestrained.

• 32:28Guru Singh?

  Yeah, Microsoft was started by a dropout. Apple was started by a dropout. You know, all of these other major corporations were started by dropouts. And the end result is, is that they figured something out that wasn't going to be taught in that educational system.

• 32:45Rich Roll?

  Right. My daughters go to, you know, a very progressive school that in certain respects is innovating in certain ways and trying different and new things.

• 32:57Rich Roll?

  And yet, the other day, my ten year old came home and said that they ran a drill at her school where they had to prepare for what would happen if there was a mass shooting. And it just, it crushed me. It just, it broke my heart that my ten year old daughter had to think about that as a possibility and prepare for it.

• 33:16Guru Singh?

  And put that into her brain. Because all of a sudden, fear factor is going to be dominant. My, our son went to a school that you would take, everybody graduated with straight A's. And here's how they did it. It was not about testing, it was about teaching. So if you took a test, first of all, you only took one course other than English and PE. PE was every day. Physical exercise was a mandatory event. And you took English and then you took one other course. And you would finish a course in a month or six weeks. It was because you were really focused on it.

• 33:54Guru Singh?

  You take a test, you get sixty percent on the test. Well, most people, that would be a flunk. Set aside the sixty percent, you start studying the forty percent. Take the test again. Whatever you pass, you set it aside, take the test again, until you're down to what you know, every single piece on that original test. And not only that, but you were twinning, you were twinning with somebody else, and being able to bounce ideas off of them, so that they were training you to work together, and to never accept failure.

• 34:26Rich Roll?

  Right, cooperation and teamwork.

• 34:30Rich Roll?

  That seems like a much better way of doing it. You know, the idea of depth over breadth. But now it's just, we got us, you know, it's like a rock skipping across the surface of water. Like, they're moving so quickly through so many subject matters, so rapidly, but only dipping, you know, a centimeter beneath the surface on every single thing, so that, you know, the child takes the test, and they're on to the next thing, and they've forgotten what they, you know, did. Like, I don't remember anything that I studied in high school. I took AP Calculus. I don't know what calculus is.

• 35:01Guru Singh?

  Can you imagine if as a, if as a professional, from nine to ten, you were one career, and from ten to eleven, you were a different career, and from eleven to twelve, you were another career, and then you went to lunch, and then you did three different careers after lunch? Not a good idea.

• 35:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a school in Russia, I forget what it's called, there was a documentary made about it. And I think it's called The School, I could be wrong about that. But it's this experimental school where all the kids, irrespective of age and grade, are kind of cohabitating and in the same classroom, where the younger students are helped by the older students. And they do just that, they pick one subject, and they go super deep into it, and they all cooperate and help each other until everybody's mastered it, and they don't move on until they've kind of conquered that, and then they go on to the next thing. So it's very focused on one specific thing.

• 35:54Guru Singh?

  And group effort, collective effort. You know, they say that if you want to learn something, read about it, or listen to it, Which is good for these podcasts. If you want to know something, write about it. And if you want to master something, teach about it. And so a system such as that one you just described would have all of those things. It would have, it would have reading, writing, and teaching. Because the younger would teach the older, the older would teach the younger. And the mastery would be phenomenal.

• 36:24Rich Roll?

  Let's get back to the mass shooting thing. So there was this shooting in Texas just the other day. And this is the second one in, you know, how, two weeks or a week and a half or something like that. The rapidity, the frequency of these tragic, unbelievably violent acts is accelerating. And this is unprecedented. And I think those were, like, the last two were two of the most devastating violence in the last 35 or something like that. What is happening in our culture? Why is this going on? And what is the, the malaise, the sickness that lies at the, the core, the locus of what's going on in our culture that's leading to this? And why is it happening now?

• 37:10Guru Singh?

  If you look around the world and you, you see industrialized, and I use quotations, civilized nations. The only one that is having this kind, that isn't at war, that there isn't an actual war being fought on their soil. So that takes away Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan and those places that are, you know, there's serious combat taking place. But you think of the United States and Canada and Mexico and Brazil and, and Russia and

• 37:50Guru Singh?

  UK and France and Germany and all of the other countries around the world. There is only one country in which this is happening at this level.

• 38:03Guru Singh?

  And you've got to realize that America is more than a nation, is a commercial organization. And so commerce will take precedence over health. We're the only major nation that has created an industry out of healthcare, in which there's profit in a company when a person gets sick. And so that really changes the game. We're the only country that has this free form of weapons

• 38:42Guru Singh?

  that can just be sold in shows and unregulated circumstances. And somebody supposedly has a database that checks, background checks are run through. But then it was an oops, we forgot to register this guy's violent nature with the database. And the oops is always on the side of commerce. Because anytime there's a mass shooting, the sale of weapons and the sale of bullets and the sale of all of these things goes skyrocketing.

• 39:24Guru Singh?

  And the stock prices of the publicly traded weapons companies goes skyrocketing. And all of this incredible capitalist, and I'm not saying there's something wrong with capitalism, but there's something wrong with having capitalistic needs over human needs of health and, and actual safety. So we have a country that is focused on the marketplace, more so than any other country on earth. Therefore, it demonstrates its ability. You said something about the happiness factor of the people where you were running is much higher. The happiness factor in America is very, very low.

• 40:08Guru Singh?

  Because we are focused on capital markets rather than collective health, collective well-being, family unity, et cetera.

• 40:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that all of that is correct and right, and I would agree with that. And I think also, you know, beneath the surface of that, or as you dig deeper, it is about the disconnection. You know, this is, this is an illness, not just of the human beings that are perpetrating these acts, but an illness of our culture, right? It is a dis-ease that I think is being driven by dissatisfaction and depression and disconnection because of the way that we lead our lives. Like, if we were living in a communal, you know, village-based society where there is accountability and there's joint purpose and there is a collective understanding

• 41:05Rich Roll?

  about how every, in each and every person is contributing, then I don't think that you see these things. Because even in these war-torn parts of the world where firearms are, you know, proliferate and there's plenty of guns around, they're not going into their own communities and decimating people. You know, that's just not happening. So fundamentally, the individual who is the perpetrator of these acts is almost an agent or an example of a larger malaise that I think is, is, is a chronic condition of, and an indicator of where we are at as a culture.

• 41:44Guru Singh?

  If we were educating children as an emotional creature as well as, as a mental creature, we do a little bit of physical education, very little. The diet is terrible across the board.

• 42:03Guru Singh?

  But if we were to check out the physical education, check out the emotional education, as much as we focus on the mental education, then what you're saying wouldn't be taking place because connection would be paramount. My connection with my friends would be graded as high as my observation of mathematics, calculus, like that you can't remember, calculus, and yet you were in AP calculus. That means you were in advanced placement calculus, right? You know, I can't remember things that I studied either, and most of those things were crammed the night before because you were having too much fun doing the other

• 42:43Guru Singh?

  things that should have been covered in education, to just spend all of your time studying. The idea that we could educate children to be able to, you know, when the pressure builds up inside, because these guys are explosive, and that's why they're shooting. The guy that's shooting from Las Vegas, he's exploding, that's why he's shooting. It's an expression of who he is. If we could create an opportunity so that we could see the explosion beginning to rise in each other, and do the things that comrades, that fellow human beings do for each other,

• 43:22Guru Singh?

  be like grazing animals rather than by territorial carnivores, and I take it back to our diet again. The only creatures on the planet that are territorial are carnivores. They mark their territory, they protect their territory. Herbivores share their territory, and they love it when they are grazing together. So taking it from the physical level of diet, moving that into the emotional level, because when you eat blood food, you become aggressive.

• 43:55Guru Singh?

  The blood is forced between your teeth and your gum and there's sensitive nerves in there that when you get blood forced up in there, you feel like you're dominating your environment. And this is just something we're not prepared for as herbivores. The human being is a plant-based biology and it is not prepared to feast on blood. It is not prepared to have those kinds of aggressive attitudes. And then put that together with complete lack of emotional education, you have this brilliant creature who's super aggressive, emotionally unstable, and now he can go to the corner store and buy a gun? This is an absolute mess.

• 44:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Guru Singh?

  And nothing has it more advanced than this country, the US.

• 44:42Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's been completely systematized.

• 44:44Guru Singh?

  Hmm.

• 44:45Rich Roll?

  You know, and it's a, it's a display of utter desperation on these, these people who are in tremendous pain, who feel like they've been passed over and they're not being heard. And the only way to be heard is to perpetrate and act so horrible. And the amount of pain that that person must be carrying in order to do that. And then the way the media covers it just perpetuates the cycle because it plants the seed in the next person who's coming down the assembly line, who's feeling the same way and sees that as the only way to get some level of public validation on the way out.

• 45:24Guru Singh?

  Recognition.

• 45:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 45:26Guru Singh?

  Become a superstar.

• 45:27Rich Roll?

  On the, on the subject of, of taking in, you know, eating animals and, and, and what that does to us spiritually and emotionally, you know, Julie always says like, if you're eating the animal, you're taking that violence into your body. And there's no way that that can't be impacting you on not just, you know, a cellular level, but an emotional unconscious level. And I was just at this conference. In Austin the other month, it was like the Conscious Capitalism Conference and all these amazing CEOs there who are socially minded, who are trying to do good in the

• 46:08Rich Roll?

  world. It was really inspiring. And I met this one guy, this doctor, Dr. Zach Bush, who is an epidemiologist by trade, and he's done all these incredible studies. And I got into this, this is a guy I've got to get on the podcast. He was just like, he was blowing my mind. But he was telling me about studies that he's conducted in-depth, detailed analysis of what happens to you physiologically when you eat meat and taking in like the, you know, when they, when they kill these animals and they're terrified, of course, when they're being killed, they're in a hyper, this hyper acute emotional state where the hormones are raging. And so that in turn, when you take that into your body, you're, you're taking in those hormones. And he's been able to gauge like the impact

• 46:52Rich Roll?

  of that on your own, your endocrine system in the human body and how that translates into, you know, errant behavior. It was wild. I mean, he can say it much more intelligently than I, but.

• 47:04Guru Singh?

  It's chemicals. And those chemicals don't, don't die. Those chemicals aren't even cooked out of the food. So the, you were just saying the animal is in a heightened state of terror, heightened state of rage. Now you're eating terror and rage and some protein. And that's all the meat is. And we don't need to be eating this because there is, as you know, I mean, we're obviously talking to the audience here, not to each other. But the fact is, is that when our bodies are trained, you can't do this overnight, but when your body is trained to break down vegetable protein into its individual aminos

• 47:49Guru Singh?

  and then reassemble it into an animal-based protein, it's actually working out. It's like lifting weights. It's like your spleen is lifting weights, your, your kidneys are lifting weights, your liver is lifting weights, everything is exercising. When you just put in already made protein, already produced protein, and with it, you're putting in those chemistry components of fear and rage and terror and betrayal.

• 48:19Guru Singh?

  I mean, we're raising these animals, they're like pets. Well, they're pets in captivity in a very cruel state. But they're being taken care of, and then all of a sudden we come in and we slaughter them. Yogis throughout history have said that killing an animal out of necessity and killing it with respect has a certain validity. But raising an animal and then slaughtering it has such an effect upon the human psyche that it actually turns you into a murderer. Even if you're not the one that has been murdering all these animals, you're letting slaughterhouses do it, you're eating the chemistry of murder.

• 49:03Guru Singh?

  So you're becoming a murderer. Mahatma Gandhi was once in jail, the many times he was in jail. And suddenly he started to have these murderous thoughts. And so he sat with them in deep meditation, and it came to him that, well, perhaps there was somebody that was involved with his food that had some of these kinds of thoughts. And he found out that the guy that was the main cook in the kitchen was in jail for murder. So all of these components are very subtle. You talked about the Dr. Bush at the conference. The endocrine system is a ductless system.

• 49:47Guru Singh?

  In other words, the transmission between the endocrine glands is happening on an electromagnetic basis as well as on a chemical basis. And so there's radio waves going in our systems, radio waves going between our systems. And if I'm preparing food, I've got radio waves from my attitude going into the food. In the Buddhist tradition, they always had the highest monk being the cook. And then everybody was eating the highest food that could be prepared.

• 50:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Julie always tells a funny story about a yoga retreat that we went on when we had first met. And we would go to the center, and it was this place nearby, and it would be all vegan food. And the food like looked delicious, but everybody got sick or everybody just felt terrible after eating this food. And it turned out that the person who was preparing this food was just a very unhappy, angry person. And so, you know, she, she was injecting the meal with all of that angst and energy. And it seems like, okay, well, this is a crazy hippie idea.

• 50:52Guru Singh?

  No, it's totally real.

• 50:53Rich Roll?

  But, but I think that there's truth in that. And so Julie's always like, you know, look, you can prepare the most beautiful plant-based meal, but if you don't prepare it with the right mindfulness and spirit and approach, then you're missing the point. And what was great about Dr. Bush is like, look, you're, you're, you're guru singh, you're, you're a Sikh yogi, you know, musician guy. I guess I'm a hippie. I don't know. But like this Zach Bush guy, he's like legit, not a hippie at all, like not a, he's not a vegan activist or anything like that. Like he's just like, this is what the science is showing me.

• 51:26Guru Singh?

  Yeah. Well, that's what we're going to need to convince the convincible. And not everybody is convincible. You know, it's a one-room schoolhouse once again, and we go through many lifetimes and many incarnations. And some of those incarnations are on this earth and some of them are on other planets that are like this earth. And those of us that have been into the future, which means we've come from planets that are 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 10,000, a million years more advanced than this one. And we come back to this planet, we are actually from the future. And we're the ones that are actually the ones that are responsible for this one-room schoolhouse, this one-room

• 52:10Guru Singh?

  daycare center. We're the ones that need to show up. I feel that we're the ones that are responsible for the mess because we're the ones that are responsible for cleaning up the mess. And we're the ones that have to show up in big numbers. I mean, big numbers in terms of what it's possible is somewhere in the neighborhood of, you know, 22 million right now, 22, 23 million. But with our awareness.

• 52:35Guru Singh?

  We could shift this planet so remarkably. Think about it. The iPhone has now been around for 10 years. And everyone on the planet is totally screen fixated. Think about what it would be like if we were 100 years in the future and what we would have advanced to. We may have already gone through the crises that we're going through here on Earth. We may have already gone through the collapse of society that we may be experiencing in the near future on Earth. And we've come out the other side. So we've lived on those planets. We know the secrets of how to get through it. We've been sent back to here in another incarnation

• 53:17Guru Singh?

  to kind of cross-pollinate that awareness. Now it's our job to awaken that awareness inside of us. And we do awaken it by going on crazy races in the Baltic Sea. We do awaken it by in deep meditation. We do awaken it by doing yoga. We awaken it through all these methods. We're the ones that need to show up. Because we have to then take, like an adult would in a daycare center when two kids are squabbling, only in this world they're squabbling with weapons, and throw our arms around both of them and say, "Okay, we're going to take a time out. We're going to go walk out in the fields." And however we end up doing that,

• 54:02Guru Singh?

  we may not even know. Just like 50 years ago, a touchscreen was unthought of. And now a touchscreen is in everyone's pocket. So the technology of how we will emotionally take care of that move, we may not know yet. But if we really force ourself into a corner... We're going to discover that means, and that's what I'm working for. I'm working for discovering the means of creating the impossible. The ability to go into really, really high tense situations and find peace and find calm.

• 54:42Rich Roll?

  And so how does one comport themselves if we take a case study? Let's take the shooting at the church the other day, right? And given the fact that we're all screen obsessed and everyone's staring at their iPhone, you know, what I spend a lot of time thinking about is how do I leverage the platform that I have and the audience that I have to communicate in a way that can sort of elevate the conversation and raise the frequency beyond thoughts and prayers? Or by taking a side and pushing back and fighting? And so what happens to me is I don't really know how to navigate that in the best way.

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  And so often I end up remaining silent on issues that I have an opinion on. Or perhaps I could provide a perspective that would be helpful, but I'm not sure the best strategy for approaching that and, and being an agent, like sort of trying to be that, that, that agent of positive change.

• 55:44Guru Singh?

  Well, I think being silent is sometimes very helpful because another opinion isn't necessarily the answer. And so I, I'm, I'm with you on that. I look at it in these kinds of realistic terms and some of it seems realistic to the listener and some of it will seem a little bit of a stretch. But a bee is leaving the hive and it's in need of a flower. And so it flies into the air and it has, there's pheromones in the air. There's fragrances in the air. There's colors in the air. There's all of this that are coming from around its environment.

• 56:24Guru Singh?

  The environment can be a few miles away, but the bee is still sensitive enough to be able to pick up on those messages, the fragrance messages and the color messages. And it follows. follows those tracks because the color from the light that's coming from the flower is in the air, is, is in the, the track that the bee is going to be following. The pheromones from the flower, just like a, a dog can smell a lot more than we can. The bee can smell that. So it follows those pathways and it finds the flower. What if many of us were so aware, so acute, just like the bee, that we could smell

• 57:05Guru Singh?

  an unresolved violent temperament arising in some location nearby? And we would then be attracted to that circumstance, which is, in this case, a person that is starting to stockpile guns because they're not resolving their angst, they're not resolving their anger and their rage and their fear and their separation within themselves. And so, all of a sudden, these millions of people, I call it millions of avatars, millions of messiahs throughout the planet, and I'm saying the next several decades are going to be used to build that.

• 57:46Guru Singh?

  And that we can actually sense who in our community is, is feeling this way. And we could go up to them and be an answer. There was a great story about a school in the mid-south, somewhere like Tennessee, Kentucky, a few years back. And a lady was working the front desk. And this lady working the front desk suddenly sees this guy with a couple of weapons standing in front of her. And she went into a state of shock. And a state of shock is the, literally, you, out-of-body experience. And the reason they call it an out-of-body experience is because you actually go into

• 58:30Guru Singh?

  an etheric consciousness. You go into a precursive consciousness, like a precog from the movie Minority Report. And you, all of a sudden, you are in that, that precognition of realizing that there is a condition that you're working with. And she said that when she started talking, she didn't know who was talking inside of her. But she started to communicate words to the gunman. That were very soothing to him, very understanding for him. And in about three to five minutes, the gunman was setting down the guns and saying, "I want you to call the police.

• 59:13Guru Singh?

  I've just about done something that I would have terribly regretted." So she went into this altered state and literally engulfed this person in what love that we've never kind of experienced. And she brought him down. She brought him down from that heightened state of anxiety, that heightened state of disconnection, to where he just said, "Call in the authorities because I want to be controlled now." And this is what I'm talking about, that we would become aware of where those situations are happening. They could be happening three miles away, but we would be called to it.

• 59:53Guru Singh?

  We would then be able to be in that state of really a state of a channeling kind of bringing in the love, bringing in the understanding. The Buddha had a great prayer. "Places I am to go, I shall go; people I am to meet, I shall meet; things I am to say, I shall say; that which I am to achieve, I shall achieve." And to be in that state of just that pure channel of love, being able to assist somebody that, as you've said prior, they're in desperate need. The perpetrator of these crimes is in desperate need. And if somebody could get to them before they got to their act, that would be the state of grace.

• 1:00:33Rich Roll?

  And that requires a level of connectivity, I think, that we're lacking right now. You know, I think Los Angeles is perhaps the greatest example of, you know, dispersed individuality because we're all in our cars and we, you know, it's such a sprawling, you know, place where it's very difficult to connect with other people, you know, and to not know what your neighbor is doing or even know their names. And bridging that gap, I think, requires not only, you know, going back to what you said earlier about really connecting with that, you know, that gut and that heart brain in order to develop that awareness. Because I think if you're...

• 1:01:16Rich Roll?

  If you're really present with an individual and you can get past your thinking brain and you're just with them and you're looking at them, their eyes are telling you.

• 1:01:25Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 1:01:26Rich Roll?

  You know, but everything is there. Like, we were in, Julie and I were in Miami the other day and we had a dinner with a bunch of people and we sat next to this guy who was sort of jokingly saying that, that, that, uh, that, that he could like, you know, read minds or that he was empathic in a certain way. And he, and he started to say, this is, you know, who you think you are, but this is what's really going on with you. And he, and he was very accurate, like, and he did it with a couple of people, but, you know, he was just sort of being a mentalist because he was paying attention. And I think we're all wearing that on our face. The signals are there, but instead, we're gazing at our phones and we're in our cars and we're, you know, on Twitter or we're doing what we're

• 1:02:05Rich Roll?

  doing. And that disconnection is only widening rather than, rather than shortening.

• 1:02:12Guru Singh?

  Every power that any human being has ever had here on earth is in every single one of us waiting to be activated. It's like you have almost the identical genealogy that I do, as the identical genealogy as everybody does. We're like within micrometers of our DNA, and yet, which one is activated? In you, it's brown eyes, in me, it's blue eyes, et cetera. Which one is activated in our, let's call it, superpowers? The superpowers of the Buddha, the superpowers of Lord Krishna, the superpowers of Muhammad, the superpowers

• 1:02:55Guru Singh?

  of Jesus, the superpowers of Zoroaster, of all of these incredible human beings that have walked the planet at one time or another, exist within every one of us, every one of those superpowers. And therefore, it's time not for another great leader, it's time for great leadership. And that means that all of us who have an inclination to sort of question the current way things are going and not try to get on to it, right, and get ahead of it, but actually to get under it and, and, and stand under it and understand it and, and support it.

• 1:03:37Guru Singh?

  You could develop, I can develop, all of these superpowers. And I'm not talking about we need to walk on water, which would have been very helpful in your race.

• 1:03:44Rich Roll?

  That would have been good. Maybe if I spent a little more time with you before the race.

• 1:03:49Guru Singh?

  We got it. But what I'm talking about is the superpower of compassion. The superpower of empathy. That, let me not necessarily read your mind in a, in a, kind of in a small way. But let's, let me read your being. And let me find out, is there anything that I can do for you? Being of service. This is what is going to have to take place on earth. It's time for a superhuman race, which is going to arise out of the existing human race. The kids that are graduate students in the game of life, in the school of life,

• 1:04:31Guru Singh?

  are going to have to rise to the occasion and really set the pace. Right now, those of us that are in these kinds of podcasts are, you know, thought of as, you call yourself a hippie, or they say woo woo, you know, and all of this. I don't think of any of this stuff as woo woo. I think of it as all just pure science and technology.

• 1:04:52Rich Roll?

  Well, the science is always present in all of your lectures and sermons and in your daily prayers. Like, you're always talking about physics and biochemistry. And it's interesting. I think that's important, right? Like, you're super into science, right?

• 1:05:08Guru Singh?

  There's one that's gonna come out. As a matter of fact, I was working on it this morning, so it's coming out in a few days. They have discovered a crystal out in deep space. That's actually a quantum crystal. It's like so tiny, it's not even nano. You know, a nano is six carbon atoms. This thing is below the atomic structure. That quantum crystals that do not apply themselves to the...

• 1:05:33Guru Singh?

  Newton's third law of motion, which is for every action, there's an equal reaction. And that which is in motion tends to stay in motion. This thing, the moment an action takes place on it, it multiplies the action, you know, like in multiples of thousands. And so, an action has a reaction of phenomenon. This is the exact same quantum crystal that is in our spinal fluid. And the fluid around all of our ganglia, our nerve centers, which is our brain, our spine, the gut, and the heart. And this is that, these are those nano-crystals through which the light of consciousness shines. And literally, when you have the awareness to align all of this,

• 1:06:17Guru Singh?

  which is exactly what happens when you're in the zone that you get into, when you're running, when you've passed through hitting the wall in a marathon. That sensation. Or remember Sleepy Floyd of the Golden State Warriors? And he, like, his average points per night was, this was like decades ago.

• 1:06:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is a long time ago.

• 1:06:37Guru Singh?

  Yeah, 13 points a night was his average, and one night he hit 55 points. And they said to him, "So, what happened?" He said, "I don't know." He said, "I dribbled down the court, and the basket was as wide as the whole court. No matter where I threw it, it went through." And that's literally being in the zone where the conditions of your sensory system alter, so that they're in complete control of your muscles.

• 1:07:05Rich Roll?

  Well, you're transcending the thinking mind.

• 1:07:06Guru Singh?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:07Rich Roll?

  You completely overcome that brain.

• 1:07:08Guru Singh?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:09Rich Roll?

  Right? Where time kind of fades away and space gets distorted in a very unique way.

• 1:07:15Guru Singh?

  And it gets distorted in the way of your intention. His intention was to make baskets. Our intention is to, you know, calm people down.

• 1:07:29Rich Roll?

  Well, in a macro sense...

• 1:07:30Guru Singh?

  I don't know if I just got bleeped.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  You can say whatever you want here. It's a podcast. There's no, there's no network here. There's no middleman or intermediary. It's just us. Say whatever you want.

• 1:07:48Rich Roll?

  I think that, as trite as it sounds, in the most macro sense, it is, you know, look, we've all been told this, and intellectually, perhaps, we understand it, that, you know, we walk around with blinders, thinking about ourselves, we're self-obsessed, we're focused on me and my path, and what I'm trying to get and achieve, when in reality, there is no, there is no disconnection between any of us, and we truly are one, we're one living, breathing organism on this spinning globe that's spiraling through space as a spaceship, you know, I mean, that's the truth of the matter, right? And we have such difficulty, as human beings, like, recognizing that fundamental aspect

• 1:08:32Rich Roll?

  of our shared destiny, right? And the more that we can connect with that, that gives space to develop and breed that level of empathy with our, with our fellow humans. But, there's something about the way that we're wired, and perhaps it's about the culture in which we're raised, where we not only forget about that, we, we deny that very essential truth, right? So, if we can cultivate a greater awareness around that, then I think we can be more empathetic, more connected, and perhaps more able to sense that person who is in pain and, and, and needs that help. But how do we, how do we, how do we overcome the massive forces of our culture that want

• 1:09:15Rich Roll?

  to keep us in that space of me, me, me, and what am I gonna get, etc.?

• 1:09:21Guru Singh?

  You know, we feed ourself. We breathe ourself. And these are the functions that we have made important. We have made it important that I have my air, that I have my food, that I have my house, that I have my car, that I have my life, that I have my job, and all of these-

• 1:09:44Rich Roll?

  And my problems.

• 1:09:45Guru Singh?

  And my problems. And all of these "my" orientations have become what we educate the headbrain to achieve the answers to. But in fact, when you sit in a consciousness that is expanded, when you sit in a consciousness that has an awareness of what you were just talking about, that we are, in fact, one, being on this planet, the spaceship sailing through the stars-

• 1:10:14Guru Singh?

  You break that down, what we are is we are an electromagnetic event. You're an electromagnetic event, I'm an electromagnetic event. And what you have done is you have gathered the density of body around your electromagnetics. I have gathered the density of body around my electromagnetics. What we have gathered that density from is the ocean of potential matter in which we live. So we are all bringing our body from the same ocean of potential matter. And in that, we are all one.

• 1:10:54Guru Singh?

  It's almost as if there's this fluid that then becomes a gel, that then becomes ice. And it gets more and more solid as it becomes rich, as it becomes gurusing. And so we are sharing matter. And we are looking out from the center of our conscious awareness in this vehicle that appears to be me and appears to be you, but in fact, it's we. And that we're just two perspectives. I looked at a joke the other day, a cartoon, and it was a big nine to one side and a big six to the other side.

• 1:11:35Guru Singh?

  And the title under the cartoon was "Matter of Perspective." And that's what, when you say mine, right, and you're referring to yours, if I was in your perspective, if I put myself in your shoes, it would serve me. And vice versa. And so here we are, we're these electromagnetic beings that have consolidated the matter around our center core. But that matter that we have consolidated... Is mutual. And so your health is going to improve my health. Your well-being improves my well-being. This is the awareness that we have to teach kids from the age of three, four, five.

• 1:12:19Guru Singh?

  And so that throughout their lives, they're working for each other and with each other, not competing at each other.

• 1:12:27Rich Roll?

  Right, that was the subject of one of your other daily prayers, right? It was like cooperation.

• 1:12:32Guru Singh?

  Hmm, cooperation.

• 1:12:34Rich Roll?

  Over competition.

• 1:12:35Guru Singh?

  Mm-hmm. Well, I understand that there can be friendly competition just to make you better.

• 1:12:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:41Guru Singh?

  At what you do, but that's, you know, the most unfriendly of all competitions is war. You know, but every other competition could just make you better at what you do. Make your body better, make your mind better, make your emotions better.

• 1:12:53Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, sports is a vehicle for teaching cooperation and teamwork through competition. So they're not necessarily, you know, mutually exclusive in a binary way.

• 1:13:05Guru Singh?

  Correct. And the, the key here is that we are all one. And, you know, philosophically speaking, it's a nice phrase. Oh yeah, we're all one, you know? But if you break it down to where it's actual science, we are all one. We are, I mean, think of it in terms of the way the cells came together, right? The, the one-celled animals came together and the first multicelled animals were called colonies. They all ate for their cell, they all shit for their cell, they all lived and died for their cell.

• 1:13:46Guru Singh?

  And then pretty soon, what they did was they started forming specialties. And so some became the, the eaters, some became the...

• 1:13:56Guru Singh?

  The blood circulators, some became the respirators, and that became a multicelled animal. Well, right now, we're at a place where we're so numerous as single individuals that we're going to have to start working with and for each other, otherwise, we can't continue to be at each other.

• 1:14:15Rich Roll?

  But in certain respects, we are, as human beings, almost like the red blood cells of these larger organisms that we call cities, societies. I mean, if you, if you're flying on an airplane and you look down on Los Angeles, it's like a giant virus on the planet that's being fueled, you know, and feed and fed by human beings running around, moving things around for us.

• 1:14:40Guru Singh?

  Isn't it crazy to see that?

• 1:14:42Rich Roll?

  I can say.

• 1:14:43Guru Singh?

  It's like, you're going, I'm landing in that?

• 1:14:45Rich Roll?

  And we are, we are innovating our replacement through, through technology, you know, the advent of, of artificial intelligence is starting to, is starting to, you know, come online here, and that presents a very interesting conundrum for the human condition. I mean, I think we are literally, you know, creating the next evolution of the human beings that perhaps will render us irrelevant, and maybe, maybe that's a good thing, I don't know, I mean, but, but this is happening.

• 1:15:15Guru Singh?

  Did you see where Saudi Arabia just granted citizenship to the robot?

• 1:15:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I did, I did.

• 1:15:23Guru Singh?

  And these robots are basically domestic servants. They're the ones that will take care of your house, but they have a vote, and they have, they have that citizenship, that autonomy as a citizen of, of the country.

• 1:15:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting, I mean, that's a bit of a stunt, especially in a part of the world that still has a lot of challenges with human rights inequality and all of that, but, you know, even beyond that, just the idea that there, that we are creating sentience in a, in a way that we don't consider life because it's not based on organ systems as we understand it, but perhaps is just a new form of life that we have never conceptualized before, like the tadpole turning into the frog.

• 1:16:09Guru Singh?

  Do you know that that particular... Yes, and out of intense request, which is the nature of crisis. Crisis is an intense request for some kind of change. So, yes, in some of those countries where they are quite backward in their relationship between the gender, right? Between men and women, quite backward in their relationship to sexual orientation, quite backward in their relationship to who does the heavy lifting in the society. Wouldn't it be, wouldn't it stand to reason that they might have the most

• 1:16:52Guru Singh?

  extreme anomaly that would take place, like granting citizenship to something that doesn't have an actual beating heart? And that, that, what happened all those billion years ago when the single-celled creature started to team up with another one? And then all the single-celled creatures of consciousness around it went, "Hey, that's not real. That's just, that's just, you know, two people, two things teaming up." And, but it kept progressing and it kept progressing. You know, the doctors now are saying, "Okay, well, you have an artificial lung, or you have an artificial this, or you have a kidney transplant. So who are you? Are the, you the, if you've had all your organs transplanted from somebody else, who are you?

• 1:17:36Guru Singh?

  Are you the transplantor or are you the transplantee? And who is existing in and what is consciousness? And so what we have to now realize is that, okay, um, there may be intelligence in an artificial way. Is there consciousness? And that's what we have to realize is that an intelligent being may not be a conscious being. And an unconscious being may not have the empathy. So we could be creating intelligence that has the ability to function. In an outstanding way. I mean, they've created soldiers that can't be destroyed,

• 1:18:20Guru Singh?

  you know, like the Terminator kind of thing. But if it doesn't have consciousness, if it doesn't have empathy, if it doesn't have compassion, if it doesn't have any of these things stopping its activities, what will we end up with? And that's what happened, by the way, to those cultures throughout the stellar systems that have destroyed their planets.

• 1:18:42Rich Roll?

  As a thought experiment, though, similar to the one of, you know, the old one about the boat, if you replace it plank by plank, at what point is it still your boat? Or is it a different boat? Similarly, if you take AI and it continues to iterate and it continues to develop and it becomes better and better and better as a predictor of human behavior, and it becomes so masterful at basically being able to outwit, outsmart, out-answer any human being and mimic empathy and happiness and sadness and depression, that it becomes so indistinguishable from a human being,

• 1:19:26Rich Roll?

  at what point, if it continues to iterate and iterate, can we say that on some level it does have consciousness? And how does that make you think about what consciousness is and is not?

• 1:19:46Rich Roll?

  That was a heavy one.

• 1:19:48Guru Singh?

  It reminded me of It reminded me of Monty Python.

• 1:19:54Guru Singh?

  Guy comes ashore, sticks a stick in the ground with a piece of cloth waving on it. Says, "I hereby claim this land as far as it travels for the emperor." A little voice comes out of the bushes. "Yeah, but what about us? We've been here for 10,000 years." And he kind of looks around dumbfounded and he says, "Yes, but do you have a flag?"

• 1:20:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:20:24Guru Singh?

  So what is consciousness? Right? What is that? And can that, can that creature reproduce itself? Or does it have to be produced? Can it rebuild itself?

• 1:20:39Rich Roll?

  Let's, let's presume that it can, and that it becomes so adept at it that it becomes self-improving. And when you apply Moore's law to that, it continues to replicate and, and improve and produce at, at rates so quick that before a blink of an eye, it's, you know,

• 1:20:55Guru Singh?

  Taken over.

• 1:20:55Rich Roll?

  10,000 times better than it was 10 minutes ago.

• 1:20:58Guru Singh?

  And there are planets throughout space, because this is not just a single universe. I think we spoke about that before, but it's just divots in a megaverse. And every universe thinks it's the only one because it can't see anywhere beyond itself. But there are ancient, ancient, ancient universes that have already gone through what you just described. And it will be interesting to travel in our conscious awareness to those places to get the answer to your question. Because there is that going on. Because if it can be thought of here, it's been thought of in many places. You know, I always look at this place that, you know, they call it infinity, right?

• 1:21:42Guru Singh?

  And it's got to be infinite because if it's not, it's got to stop someplace. And if it stops someplace, then there's got to be something on the other side of the stop. And so it just has to keep stopping and starting and keep going and stopping and starting and keep going. So it's infinite, no matter how you break it down. In some place in this infinite event, what you just described is taking place full force. And the only way to know the answer to your question specifically is to go visit those places. And the only way to visit those places currently is to visit them in your meditative consciousness in a deep, deep, deep way. Then it would take some effort, but I'm sure that we could come up with the answer to that.

• 1:22:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you haven't visited there yet?

• 1:22:29Guru Singh?

  Not that specific one.

• 1:22:30Rich Roll?

  Okay, where, where have you been visiting?

• 1:22:32Guru Singh?

  You saw the expression on my face. I loved where you were going with that. I just, that was fascinating because, you know, who's ever, who's ever, I mean, obviously scientists are thinking along those lines and, and you've probably had conversations with some of those people that are extending themselves in that direction. It's, it's real.

• 1:22:52Rich Roll?

  It's very real. It's a conversation we need to be having because as much as our you know, human condition is to you know, biologically reproduce, it's become just as much about continuing to technologically innovate, right? And no matter how many stopgaps or you know, conversations we have about is this the right thing to do or not to do, it's happening. Like it's just, we can't stop it. Whether it's gene sequencing and what's going on with CRISPR and all of this craziness, like it's gonna get really weird pretty soon. I mean, it's already getting weird, but like when my little girls are you know, 40 and 50 years old, I can't even begin to fathom what the world is gonna look like.

• 1:23:37Guru Singh?

  Right. Still, we're talking the iPhone 10 years old and now you've just multiplied that times four or five and the advances that will take place. And by the way, when we're talking about what you were just saying in the AI and the betterment and the self betterment and the mimicry of compassion and empathy and all of those things, we're not just talking about something being made out of non-organic matter. We could be reproducing these things out of biomatter and we could be reproducing these things out of waste matter. And this could then become a full-fledged biological entity that's able to reproduce itself kind of germ-free.

• 1:24:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I don't even know if it matters whether it's biological or inorganic. I think we have to expand our thinking about what we contemplate as life.

• 1:24:34Guru Singh?

  And inorganics could sure eliminate the problem with virus and bacteria.

• 1:24:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it's perhaps a more perfect system. We shall see, right? But here's the thing.

• 1:24:47Guru Singh?

  This is a doorway. We've taken the listeners to a doorway and we're saying, okay, stay tuned.

• 1:24:53Rich Roll?

  There's no mushrooms involved, just a lot of frogs around here.

• 1:24:57Guru Singh?

  Right. We're just filled with frogs.

• 1:25:00Rich Roll?

  But shifting gears a little bit, I wanted to talk a little bit about about boundaries. Like as somebody who, you know, we talked earlier a little bit about shouldering the responsibility to carry, you know, a positive frequency and be an agent of positive change through empathy and connection and things like that. But there, there also is, it's also important to have discernment about this, just because you're, it's not like, oh, I'm all love and it's a free for all and you can come invade my space. And, you know, I know that this has come up for you in a personal way recently, you had to like eject somebody from, from your classroom or who was somebody who was

• 1:25:44Rich Roll?

  not behaving appropriately. So I think boundaries are important and I wanted to kind of explore that a little bit with you in terms of how you comport yourself as, as somebody who wants to be of service, but also is not somebody who is there to be taken advantage of.

• 1:26:02Guru Singh?

  I look at it as a, as the sage warrior. You know, you're the sage first and when necessary, you're the warrior. That nonviolence is actually a term that means non-aggression. And that you're not looking to be aggressive, but you're also not looking to be overrun. Because it's important for us to, well, like the whole thing with, with sexual predators that is taking place and exposed in the world today. I said to the class the other day, I said, okay, everybody has to make a promise, raise your right hand. I had everybody

• 1:26:44Guru Singh?

  raise their right hand and then I will learn two really swift moves that can deck somebody instantly. Hmm? In other words, if somebody is a predator and they're approaching you, you need to be able to take a very swift action to put them into a place where they're not going to be a problem. Because we are not here to be taken advantage of. We are here to be an advantage for everyone. And so we have to learn. We have to learn how to have that ability to take someone's aggression down in an instant.

• 1:27:27Guru Singh?

  Yes, we also have to learn the art of eminence, of supreme eminence, of being able to dominate a space to such a degree, like the Buddha, that if you came within, you know, 100 feet of the Buddha, you had nothing but peaceful thoughts. But what if you have a rifle that is capable of traveling far more than 100 feet in today's world? You know, you could shoot a person from a great distance, from 3,000 feet or something like that. What we have to do is we have to have multi-levels to our being. One, know that if there's anything in the visual area that has harm for you,

• 1:28:09Guru Singh?

  that has thoughts of harm for you, this is an awareness, like I was saying about the bee finding the flower. This is the reverse of going out and finding that person who is out of harmony. This is to actually know that there's someone in your area. This is a highly intuitive power, and you've got to be able to have that power. Secondly, you've got to be able to control the frequencies within the close rank, within, you know, a few hundred feet, so that nobody can have that violent attitude or that obnoxious attitude or that aggressive attitude or that predator's attitude within a few hundred feet. And then if both of those things have failed and there's somebody right in your face,

• 1:28:53Guru Singh?

  you have to be able to take care of business. And that's why the sage warrior is the answer. And we're not going to get there overnight. We have to get there, you know, it's years and years and years of practice, but this is exactly what we have to know. And that, for example, let's talk about the sexual predators that are so much in the news these days.

• 1:29:17Guru Singh?

  They're victims of their own inadequacy. They're victims of what we've been talking about, their disconnection. What everybody longs for is their source code. We're all programmed to long for our source code. And the source code is the womb from where we came and the breast from where we were first nurtured. And so this whole obsession with the womb, with the vagina, with the breast, is all about our sourcing. We want to get back to that place where we were either completely held and safe or we were completely nurtured and safe.

• 1:30:01Guru Singh?

  And the only thing that's going to change that or alter that, no matter how sophisticated we become, is if we raise our conscious awareness so that we know that we've been there, done that, and don't need that anymore, and we are here to provide that sanctuary for others. So we don't invade somebody else's space. We don't require sexual favors to kind of satisfy that need of ours to go there. This is, again, an educational... This is a biophysical education whereby we are nurtured to come up from that very basic... I mean, sexual predators are just babies looking for the nipple.

• 1:30:43Guru Singh?

  Sexual predators are just babies looking for the womb. And the reality is that we need to educate everybody so that they can understand that's what's happening. And until we've educated everyone so that that isn't happening, either through AI or whatever it's going to be, we need to be able to take care of ourselves. We need to be able to set up boundaries. We need to be able to not be taken advantage of. Because this is... I mean, we're getting crowded, right? As we said, seven and a half billion people. I mean, LA, I don't know when you came to LA, but it was in the mid-sixties when I first came down here. This place is crazy bigger than it ever was, you know? Used to have some distance where you had some land.

• 1:31:28Guru Singh?

  Now there's nothing. And everybody is in their armored vehicle, you know, driving around. And...

• 1:31:37Guru Singh?

  As we get more and more crowded, we have to set up more and more boundaries that are boundaries of understanding, rather than just boundaries of walls and and lines of demarcation.

• 1:31:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we've set up the wrong boundaries.

• 1:31:53Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Rich Roll?

  You know, and the sexual predator thing is super interesting in the sense that it's coming up now. It's not, you know, the behavior is, has been there.

• 1:32:06Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  It's not that suddenly there's a rise in the behavior. It's it's a rise in awareness around the behavior and the outing. You know, it's like, it's like the pimple has finally been popped. Right? And when you have, you know, Ronan Farrow writes these articles in The New Yorker, and this all comes out, and it creates this cascading effect that is amplified by social media and the Me Too campaign, and suddenly all these women finally feel safe to relate their their stories.

• 1:32:38Guru Singh?

  Safety in numbers.

• 1:32:39Rich Roll?

  Which, yeah, which then, you know, sort of amplifies the, you know, the waterfall of of this narrative, you know, becoming outed. And why do you think that's happening now? Like, the juxtaposition of that against the mass shooting thing is very interesting to me. Like, the timing of it, like, why is this happening now?

• 1:33:05Guru Singh?

  Exposure, what you just said is true. The amount of ways in which something can be exposed, the amount of ways in which people can connect are doing two things. They are allowing people to connect more deeply, more closely, more prevalently. But they're also causing people to feel disconnected to a greater degree. So all of the women on the Me Too campaign are feeling connected. They're feeling a kindred spirit. But as that kindred spirit rises, the ones that have no means of connecting at all are feeling more and more estranged. So the ones that are feeling more estranged become more violent.

• 1:33:48Guru Singh?

  The ones that are feeling more connected become more powerful and less vulnerable to the predator, the sexual predator. And so these two things are happening simultaneously because of a third element. And that third element is that ability of information to travel instantaneously across the world. And now, I mean, let's face it, back in the centuries, sexual predators were called successful people. You know, they weren't even considered to be inappropriate. You've just dominated, you've conquered, you've done whatever you've done.

• 1:34:31Guru Singh?

  In today's world, that law has all changed. I mean, you even heard from one of the predators' own mouths saying, "Well, you know, I was just raised in the 60s when all this behavior seemed to be okay." Well, you know, sorry for the, you know, lack of education, but even then, that behavior of unwillingness, you know, forcing yourself against unwillingness wasn't okay. That was not okay. And the misinterpretation of willingness and unwillingness is, you know, is another factor too, because, you know, the unwillingness and yet the temptation of furthering a career, these are all of these really absurd and gross distractions

• 1:35:14Guru Singh?

  that are being exposed in today's world by media, by social media.

• 1:35:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it goes back to tribes as well. Like you're talking about, you know, the empowerment that this community of women or people who have been victims of this, you know, are feeling. And they can cohere and create this tribe that's oriented not geographically, but around an idea. And the cohesion of that tribe is amplified and quickened in the presence of an enemy that everyone can kind of, you know, counterpoint against, right? The enemy being the predator. When the enemy goes away... The cohesion of the tribe becomes lessened, I think, right?

• 1:36:02Rich Roll?

  So it brings up this issue of the necessity of, of the other, right? To cohere the group. And so I'm wondering, is it possible to, to create these tribes without the necessity of, of that, of that enemy? And I think what I'm getting at really-

• 1:36:20Guru Singh?

  You're really, you're really on to something.

• 1:36:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What I'm getting at in a broader sense is, you know, I think it, it applies to the way that I kind of think about our political climate right now. And as somebody who, I'm on social media, you know, my career is kind of, you know, plays itself out there. And I go on Twitter and it's just, it's the tribes of, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans and, and how their, this battle, the, the battle lines that are being drawn. And those boundaries are dictated by, you know, the parameters of, of, of policy and perspective that these two groups have, right? So they cohere in opposition to each other. And it goes back again also to kind of take it a step even further to, you know, how do

• 1:37:06Rich Roll?

  we as conscious beings who are trying to raise the vibration, uh, approach these sorts of issues, whether it's the Me Too campaign and the sexual predator issue or our political climate and do it in a way that is of a higher vibration than just casting aspersions and, and, you know, shooting bows and arrows across the bow?

• 1:37:31Guru Singh?

  One of the things that human beings are moving toward is a social crisis. You know, we've had physical crises before. We're now entering the world of social crisis because we have so many connections across societies. Before it was a village here and a village here and a village here. And what was going on in the village could be either a crisis or a, or a benevolent circumstance. But now with this cross pollination of people throughout the world, the boundaries in political nature are completely dissolving. There's this thing called, um, um, what are they called?

• 1:38:16Guru Singh?

  Net countries. The, the fact that Facebook is a country. That Google is a country and that they have no normal physical boundaries, but people are functioning in them across these boundaries. Human beings have a destiny to come together ultimately. So, and in order to get together, to come together, we have to dissolve our differences. What we're looking at now is, you know, in that Newton's third law of motion again, for every action is a reaction, for every dilemma, there is an accompanying solution. And it's right there, but because our brain is fixated on danger from our survival,

• 1:38:58Guru Singh?

  you know, decades and centuries and millennia, we are focused on the danger, we're focused on the difference, we're focused on how can I keep myself safe from what you might do. Right there with that, there is just as much similarity, there is just as much calm, there is just as much peace. So if those of us that are focused in these ways, that are more inclined towards the peaceful nature, the coalition nature, we can shift the dynamic so that it's not a mutual enemy that gathers us together, but it's a mutual aspiration,

• 1:39:43Guru Singh?

  as opposed to a desperation, that gathers us together. And that is sustainable. That mutual aspiration is like everybody training for the race.

• 1:39:54Rich Roll?

  Right, I immediately am thinking of like a sports analogy.

• 1:39:57Guru Singh?

  Yes, yes, and that's why these things are so important. That's why I follow your career is because I love what you get out of it, I love how you get it out of it, I love the way in which it all takes place, because that is us looking at our similarities. What does he do that I can do? What is he achieving that I can achieve in that same way? Rather than our differences, which is, "Oh, he's achieved it means I haven't achieved it." Or, "I'm comparing myself and I become jealous." Now jealousy can be a positive, because I can become jealous of what you've achieved and then strive to achieve it myself. And so I turn everything into that positive.

• 1:40:41Guru Singh?

  And what will be happening in the future if we have something to say about it, is that we will be able to sustain those tribes that were created out of mutual enemy by introducing a mutual similarity. Okay, now that we've done the Me Too, I'm just acting as if I'm a sexually assaulted person, man or woman, doesn't matter. And I'm a Me Too participant. And so as the inertia of that campaign begins to die down, let's maintain our connection, because that connection is powerful.

• 1:41:25Guru Singh?

  And let's introduce something into that connection. And this is something that people like you and I can do in our work, is that we can come up with the ideas of what to introduce into it that becomes the next meal. That becomes the next meal that gathers the Me Too campaign around a table, to be able to consume that. Okay, so we've accomplished this and we've exposed sexual predators and now we're doing this and that. And now let's use this same coalition of forces in a cooperation to achieve something else and this is what we're going to use to do it. And all of a sudden, we start replacing stimulus of negative, right, the stimulus of a mutual enemy

• 1:42:10Guru Singh?

  with the stimulus of a mutual aspiration.

• 1:42:14Rich Roll?

  I like that. I'm trying to think of a practical example of that, other than sports.

• 1:42:25Guru Singh?

  Well, immediately, I think back to the first part of our conversation, which is education. What about, what about all the women in the Me Too and all the men in the Me Too would sort of combine, you know, almost like group funding, right? What is it called?

• 1:42:42Rich Roll?

  Crowdfunding.

• 1:42:43Guru Singh?

  I love that. I love the new phrasing, don't you? The way that... So what if everybody was, decided to crowdfund educational emphasis on training children from the age of, you know, early education, whenever that is, in not being available? If there's a predator present and there's no meal available for the predator, what is the predator gonna do?

• 1:43:12Rich Roll?

  Predator leaves.

• 1:43:14Guru Singh?

  A predator leaves, or the predator has to dissolve its nature. It's like the old saying in the 60s, "What if they threw a war and no one showed up?" Right? There would be no war. I always thought when, you know, 200,000 Americans invaded Iraq, there was, in the early stages, there was 25 million Iraqis. What if they all just decided that, "Hey, let's all get together on Sunday and surround the Green Zone"? And just surround it, right? And just surround it with love, not with weapons, and we'll put the ones in the very front who are gonna get killed, the ones who, you know, are willing to die for their cause. And then the women and children are, you know, on the way back. But you could have just cut it off.

• 1:43:59Rich Roll?

  You truly are a 60, a child of the 60s.

• 1:44:03Guru Singh?

  Aren't I? Aren't I? Thinking outside that box, huh?

• 1:44:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09Guru Singh?

  But I'm a child of the 60s that remembers the 60s because I wasn't a, I wasn't a druggie.

• 1:44:14Rich Roll?

  No, but I mean, you were, we were talking about this the last time on the podcast. I mean, you were very much of that, you know, of that time and that culture.

• 1:44:21Guru Singh?

  Oh, yeah. And it's coming back because what you just...

• 1:44:24Rich Roll?

  Well, that's what I was gonna ask you. Like, what is the, when you kind of take the temperature of the culture, like, what is the difference between what that felt like at that time, at like, you know, peak 60s, versus the kind of activism that you're seeing now?

• 1:44:41Guru Singh?

  You gotta watch an HBO special that's taking place in two parts right now. It's called Rolling Stone: Stories From The Edge. And it's about Rolling Stone magazine and how it got started and everything that influenced it, right? And what it says in that is what really influenced the 60s was group consciousness. Was the fact that people realized that together, they could achieve anything. Together, they could bring down the bad. Together, they could lift up the good. And that's what's happening here with, with social media, with the Me Too campaign. Um, the Me Too makes somebody that's sitting in someplace, maybe they were in Hollywood

• 1:45:23Guru Singh?

  or in New York striving to be in the industry and they got raped or they got assaulted in some way and it just freaked them out and they left the industry. And now they're sitting in some small town in some state somewhere. And all of a sudden, this Me Too thing comes on and it's in social media. So it comes on their phone and they realize, wow, Me Too. And they're now connected with thousands of other people. And they have been feeling completely lost for a couple of decades because their entire dreams and aspirations got cut short by some predator, right? I just bleeped myself. Yeah, you bleeped yourself. That was good, though. It'll show up on the video. It'll show up on the video.

• 1:46:05Guru Singh?

  And you probably heard a little bit in the, in the audio track. But yeah, because of some, you know, dumb predator, all of a sudden, their career is shattered and all of a sudden, it's reignited in some way where they're feeling a part of a group. That was what went on in the 60s and it was a much different setting because we didn't have any of the media support that is there today. But group consciousness is really, really important. And it's what's going to save humanity if we get it going fast enough.

• 1:46:39Rich Roll?

  Well, crisis provokes that. You know, I think that the heightened sort of, you know, situation that we find ourselves in has motivated people to be more aware and active in a way that we haven't seen. People are, you know, the, the marshaling of, of activism and, you know, everything from people who are physically protesting in the streets to, you know, what you're seeing online is unprecedented in, in my lifetime.

• 1:47:06Guru Singh?

  Yeah, and look at what happened in Houston and Florida and in Puerto Rico where, you know, people just, you know, crowdfunded and, and flew down there and when Haiti got hit by the earthquake, you know, people went down there to help. I mean, the ability to respond to crisis is human nature and the ability to have compassion in crisis is human nature. I remember, you do too, and right after nine 11, you know, the world was saying, we are all Americans. And it was an interesting, floaty kind of sensation for a few weeks until that died down and other things started to occur.

• 1:47:44Rich Roll?

  It's interesting how crisis is the one thing that allows people to transcend what we were talking about earlier, that sense of separation and that, that, you know, zero-sum mentality to be able to understand the wholeness and the oneness of all of us where status suddenly doesn't mean anything. It's what you're actually doing, you know, the guy who shows up and, you know, wherever the hurricane was to, you know, pull people out of their homes and we see these heroes and we, we can celebrate the human spirit in the midst of these tragedies that unite us.

• 1:48:20Guru Singh?

  Yeah, I loved it.

• 1:48:21Rich Roll?

  And so I wish we could, you know, bottle that and find a way to, you know, maintain that outside the, you know, the temporal boundaries of a crisis.

• 1:48:33Guru Singh?

  Well, I think.

• 1:48:36Guru Singh?

  One of the things that would be good is that people like Dr. Bush that you spoke about that was very much into measuring the results of certain things in the endocrine system. We could measure the technologies that take place within the psychoemotional and somatic bodies of what happens in a crisis. And where, you know, a millionaire takes his yacht and literally he drives it down the street that's now flooded in 10 feet of water to save people out of their homes. So he's like the common man now, even though he's got a, you know, a beautiful, very, very expensive yacht.

• 1:49:17Guru Singh?

  Okay, crisis causes that to happen. What other kinds of circumstances? We should do studies and find out what other kinds of circumstances are going to produce the same biochemical consequence so that we can then, okay, well, let's produce some of those. Let's create some of those opportunities and have opportunity produce the collective consciousness rather than just crisis. Because we have that ability. We have the ability to measure today.

• 1:49:47Rich Roll?

  I think the thread that runs through it is connectivity. Like when a crisis happens, people are able to let go of their bullshit and connect for a greater good. And they come together, unified over a central, you know, heightened scenario to collectively overcome it, right? And they have done studies, I mean, they have, we know that depression rates and suicide rates went down in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. And it makes you, because there was a sense of community and connectivity that obviously took place that... You know.

• 1:50:28Guru Singh?

  You just fed me with a new piece of data.

• 1:50:30Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, I think it's.

• 1:50:31Guru Singh?

  I love it.

• 1:50:32Rich Roll?

  And I'm sure there's a lot more on that.

• 1:50:33Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:34Rich Roll?

  But I think it, you know, when I think about that, it makes me think that we need to, we need to re, we need to rethink how we conceptualize happiness altogether. You know, I had, I had, I've had Dan Buettner on my podcast a couple of times. He just came on and talked about happiness and studied all the cultures that are the most happy and the, the sort of thematic, you know, things that these cultures share. And it's not about the things that we prioritize in our culture. It is about that connectivity. It's about, you know, how we're honoring our elders. It's about, you know, how, it, it's about, you know, the small, simple things that we tend to overlook as frivolous.

• 1:51:16Guru Singh?

  Well, diet is important because if we were to clarify our diets, we would be a lot more susceptible to those endocrine chemistries that would make us joyful. And for example, you were talking sports and how sports is a great unifier. You know, in the World Cup, in the Women's World Cup of Soccer, you know, the American team for a couple of, of series, uh, over the last couple of decades, has come out on top and it has really turned the entire country into a soccer fan, which is something

• 1:51:55Guru Singh?

  unusual because number one, women's sports have never been as big a draw as men's sports. And soccer has never been as big a draw as football, baseball and basketball in America. And so achievement is another mechanism by which we can unify, not just crisis, but, so we have crisis, we have achievement, we have diet, we have all of these things. And if we were to create a program, a campaign that is revolving around connection, achievement, compassionate competition, avoidance of crisis and all of these things. And.

• 1:52:37Guru Singh?

  Know that we're going to get heavy pushback from the capital side, which is going to want to have, you know, something else take place that will create crisis or what have you, and not spend our energies reacting to the capital side of things that are going to try to create division, but stay focused on our, on our game. We might have a 20-year plan here.

• 1:53:00Rich Roll?

  That sounds good. Well, given that we, according to you, we only have 35.

• 1:53:05Guru Singh?

  A 20 will be good.

• 1:53:07Rich Roll?

  If we can execute on the 20-year plan, we're in good shape, right?

• 1:53:10Guru Singh?

  Yeah, and I actually don't use the word execute. I use the word implement because to me, to me, execute is like, is like a killing verb.

• 1:53:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get that. I'll, I'll be more mindful about that.

• 1:53:21Guru Singh?

  It's fun.

• 1:53:22Rich Roll?

  Um, well, we gotta, let's see, I mean, we gotta shut this down in a little bit, but uh, I thought like a good way to kind of end this uh, would be to ask you a question, a version of a question that I often ask doctors, uh, medical doctors that I've had on the show, and one of the questions I always ask them at the end is, if you found yourself transported to a parallel universe and you were named to be the surgeon general, what kind of changes would you attempt to implement in our culture? So I thought a good question for you would be, if you woke up in a parallel universe,

• 1:53:57Guru Singh?

  Which I have many times.

• 1:53:58Rich Roll?

  Or another dimension, which is, I don't know, this is a daily experience for you.

• 1:54:01Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:02Rich Roll?

  Maybe you're in a, I don't know, maybe you're in a different dimension.

• 1:54:05Guru Singh?

  I've rehearsed this answer many times.

• 1:54:07Rich Roll?

  But if you were named to be the, the guru general,

• 1:54:12Rich Roll?

  the spiritual master general of, of, you know, Western society at large, maybe not just the United States, but you know, kind of culture as we live it, uh, what would you like to, what, what would be the changes that you would try to implement?

• 1:54:28Guru Singh?

  Well, I would look at a, I would look at a 20, 30, 40-year plan, um, starting from children at the ages, very young, two, three, four years old. Um, and I would look to achieve measurable results in 15, 20 years when the children are coming into their adulthood, um, rather than trying to fix the adults that are already there, I would like them to be inspired by watching the children that are growing up in a new way. And that way would be one of educating the emotional body. Through the gut brain and the heart brain as strongly as we educate the intelligent body through the head brain and have have courses such as confidence and courage and

• 1:55:13Guru Singh?

  compassion and and all of these self-identity, self-valuation. Instead of just having service of others in a 12-step program when people have reached a place of desperate need and trying to step themselves back into equilibrium, let's take the 12 steps and install them actually in all of education at a very early age.

• 1:55:39Rich Roll?

  I love that.

• 1:55:40Guru Singh?

  They don't have to experience addiction in order to go to the 12 steps.

• 1:55:44Rich Roll?

  Prophylactically taking the 12 steps.

• 1:55:47Guru Singh?

  Absolutely, absolutely. And and and find all of the things that have worked throughout those elements, the 12-step programs, the spirit-based programs, the athletic programs, the team-building programs, and have those be as much of a mandatory course, not just an elective, but a mandatory course, and then learn them through what like that Russian school that you were talking about, through group, through group effort, where everybody is working on the same thing and everybody is building towards a common goal. So what we end up with in 15 and 20 years is adults entering the system that the idea

• 1:56:29Guru Singh?

  of me, my, I me mine is is quite foreign to them.

• 1:56:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but the idea of how to collectively collaborate to solve a problem is second nature.

• 1:56:41Guru Singh?

  It's absolutely second nature. Have a funny story quickly, and that is that, you know, we have a school in India, and I came out of our morning daily practice, which, you know, starts before the rise of the sun, where we do yoga and meditation, and I start looking around for my sandals, which in India are called chuppels. And I can't find my, can't find my chuppels. And a little kid comes walking up to me and says, can I help you? And, you know, because there's like been 150 people in the room and there's just a massive chump. I said, "Yeah, I can't find my, I can't find my sandals." He says, "Doesn't matter, just take any pair that fits." I said, "Really?" He said, "That's what everybody does." He says, "You got chappled." He said, "Somebody just took your shoes."

• 1:57:21Rich Roll?

  You got chappled?

• 1:57:21Guru Singh?

  Yeah, "You got chappled because somebody just took your shoes because they fit." So I did. I took somebody else's shoes, which for the first 10 steps felt really weird because, you know, somebody else's shoes have been on somebody else's foot and been molded.

• 1:57:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, man, but we're all one.

• 1:57:34Guru Singh?

  We are all one. So the funny thing is, about three or four days later, as I'm coming in, I see my shoes.

• 1:57:43Guru Singh?

  And they have a story to tell me because they've been on three or four different kids' feet.

• 1:57:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:57:48Guru Singh?

  And that's the group conscious. If, if, if, if yours doesn't work, have mine.

• 1:57:52Rich Roll?

  And you literally get to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.

• 1:57:54Guru Singh?

  In someone else's shoes.

• 1:57:56Rich Roll?

  I like that. That's beautiful. Yeah, and I think that, that, that brings this whole thing full circle to where, where we began. And in terms of the education system, look, when, when every person is walking around with a supercomputer in their, in their pocket that can answer every question and every fact is available in, you know, only as quickly as you can type it or say it into this computer, that has to impact the way that we're educating our kids because it's not about memorizing facts anymore.

• 1:58:26Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 1:58:26Rich Roll?

  When they can find that whenever they need to. It needs to be about how to think.

• 1:58:30Guru Singh?

  Automatic spell check. We don't have smelling tests anymore.

• 1:58:34Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, is it necessary?

• 1:58:36Guru Singh?

  Right.

• 1:58:37Rich Roll?

  And are we talking enough about how we're gonna modernize and update how we're indoctrinating our kids to, you know, inherit this planet from us that is in survival mode and in desperate condition? So.

• 1:58:51Guru Singh?

  I like that expression. How we're indoctrinating, rather than how we're educating, how we're indoctrinating our kids to save a planet that's in survival mode. Ooh. Good one liner.

• 1:59:06Rich Roll?

  It's a good way to end it.

• 1:59:07Guru Singh?

  It is.

• 1:59:08Rich Roll?

  I should let you get the last word, though.

• 1:59:12Guru Singh?

  I think I did, but then you just one upped me.

• 1:59:15Rich Roll?

  Not at all.

• 1:59:16Guru Singh?

  It was perfect. I love it.

• 1:59:17Rich Roll?

  Well, anyway, we'll, uh, we'll pick it up again. You should come on like every month.

• 1:59:22Guru Singh?

  Oh, let's do it.

• 1:59:23Rich Roll?

  On the podcast.

• 1:59:24Guru Singh?

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:59:25Rich Roll?

  I do a coaches corner with my coach where we talk about like sports stuff, but we could have like a guru corner.

• 1:59:31Guru Singh?

  Yeah, and, and we can have, um, courses like what we were talking about.

• 1:59:37Rich Roll?

  I know. I was gonna, um, hold this up actually. So Guru Singh and I are talking about perhaps doing a, a course together.

• 1:59:43Guru Singh?

  We're actually not talking about perhaps. We're talking about doing a course together.

• 1:59:48Rich Roll?

  Yes, we are. And I, I come here and I, and he greets me and he hand, he goes, here, I'm just, I have this, I woke up this morning and I had this idea. So you can see it on the video, but, uh, it says, extreme awareness, elite fitness, the mental and physical muscles of greatness with Guru Singh and Rich Roll. That sounds like a cool course.

• 2:00:08Guru Singh?

  It is.

• 2:00:09Rich Roll?

  I'd like to take it.

• 2:00:10Guru Singh?

  I would too. So let's take it together and let other people take it with us.

• 2:00:14Rich Roll?

  What are we gonna tell people? I guess we gotta figure that part out, right?

• 2:00:17Guru Singh?

  We will work that out.

• 2:00:18Rich Roll?

  Cool. So yeah, I'm looking forward to figuring this out with you. I think it'd be really fun.

• 2:00:21Guru Singh?

  It will be.

• 2:00:22Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 2:00:23Guru Singh?

  And monthlies, I'm, I'm good with coaches guru's corners.

• 2:00:26Rich Roll?

  Guru's corner. All right. Well, I'll put some thought into that as well. Excellent, man. All right, my brother.

• 2:00:31Guru Singh?

  Uh, this is really, really a pleasure. I would tell you, um, just from the first time that we met, you know, two people that live life on the top rather than on the bottom is really important. My father always said, and here's the last word, right?

• 2:00:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, good. I knew you'd stuck it in.

• 2:00:49Guru Singh?

  My father always told me, he said, if you never want to run out of gas, realize that it's just as easy to keep the top half of the tank full as it is the bottom half. And so for two people that keep the top half of our tanks full, I love working with you.

• 2:01:04Rich Roll?

  Feelings mutual.

• 2:01:06Guru Singh?

  Bless you.

• 2:01:06Rich Roll?

  All right. Bless you. Peace.

• 2:01:08Guru Singh?

  Peace and satnam.

• 2:01:09Rich Roll?

  Plants. Namaste.

• 2:01:11Guru Singh?

  Namaste, satnam. Plant-based.

• 2:01:14Rich Roll?

  That's right. All right. Cool. We did it.

• 2:01:18Guru Singh?

  Good job, man.

• 2:01:24Rich Roll?

  Come on, are you serious? I mean, I don't even know what to say, other than the fact that that man is just a beautiful, amazing gift to humanity. Am I right? I think I'm right. I really hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Please let us know on social media what you thought of the conversation. And also, if you would be keen on a more regular Guru Corner edition of the show, I think that could be really cool and really fun. And also, what you think about the idea of us creating an online class or program together, because I think that could be really great as well. I should say that our conversation is also on video and available on YouTube. You can check that out at youtube.com/richroll. Also, please subscribe to my channel there.

• 2:02:07Rich Roll?

  And I would encourage all of you to sign up for Guru Singh's daily email. It's a great way to help set your intention each morning. You can sign up for that on his website at gurusing.com. Also, check out his memoir, Buried Treasures. It's an amazing read. Follow him on Instagram, @gurusingyogi. I've got links to all this stuff, everything, in the show notes, plus tons of other resources to dive deeper into his world, again, on the episode page at richroll.com. If you would like to support my work, please make a point of subscribing to this show on Apple Podcasts. It only takes a second, and it really does help us out a lot with the show's visibility. It helps with extending reach and growing the audience, which in turn will make it

• 2:02:50Rich Roll?

  easier for me to book the very best people for future shows and bring you guys the best content. Other things you can do to support my work, you can share this show with your friends and on social media, leave a review on iTunes, Apple Podcasts. Again, subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com/richroll. And we also have a Patreon account set up if you would like to support us financially. You can find the banner ad for Patreon on any episode page at richroll.com. I also have a weekly email that I send out, at least I send it out most weeks. It's called Roll Call, five or six things I came across over the course of the week that I found inspiring or interesting. No spam, no affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you anything, just good stuff. You can sign up for that on my website as well by just entering your email address

• 2:03:35Rich Roll?

  in any of those email capture windows. As I mentioned in the last two episodes...

• 2:03:43Rich Roll?

  I'm on the hunt for a new filmmaker, photographer, editor, collaborative partner to join me to help bring a more visual aesthetic to the work that I do. For a rundown on the exact details and qualifications for this gig, please see the blog post for this episode at richroll.com. And finally, if you're struggling with your diet and you're looking for a very helpful, all-inclusive solution to dial up your plate, please check out our Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. It will provide you with customized access to thousands of plant-based recipes, grocery lists, customer support, and even grocery delivery in most metropolitan cities in the US, all for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year.

• 2:04:28Rich Roll?

  Again, that's meals.richroll.com, or click on Meal Planner on the upper right-hand corner on any page on my website. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, for production, for help on the show notes, for the interstitial music. Shawn Patterson for graphics. And Anna Lima for theme music. And David Zammatt for videoing this podcast and for his portraits, which are amazing. See you guys back here in a few days. Until then, make it great, be well, be kind, be grateful, be of service. Peace, plants, and namaste.