Think Like A Monk: Jay Shetty On Purpose, Compassion & Happiness

Last week we went deep with an actual monk. Today we extend this exploration with a former monk -- a renounced renunciant who returned to relate the wisdom gleaned for the betterment of all. Meet Jay Shetty. If that name rings a bell, it's likely due to his social media omnipresence. With a global following in excess of 20 million people, Jay has a knack for creating what he calls viral wisdom -- snackable videos based on ancient tenets that have surpassed 7 billion views -- making him one of the most viewed people on the internet. A graduate of Cass Business school with an honors degree in Behavioral Science, Jay has been named one of Forbes magazine’s 30-under-30. He's been invited to keynote at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. He is the host of the popular On Purpose podcast. And the occasion for today’s conversation is Jay’s new book, Think Like A Monk --- a distillation of the timeless wisdom learned during his ascetic days on an ashram into practical tools we can all use to live a less anxious, more meaningful life. Today the man Russell Brand (RRP 448) calls 'a cat-eyed mystic' shares his story. This is a conversation about Jay's most unusual journey. His decision to shirk the predictable post-college path and instead move to India. The three-year exploration of austerity that indelibly changed his worldview. His decision to return home, fueled by a desire to make an impact. And the most remarkable path that followed. We discuss the insights he gleaned along the way -- and the many tools freely available to underscore our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Among many other subjects, we explore the plausibility of conscious capitalism. The double-edged sword of social media. And how to use commerce and attention for good. To spread love. Encourage laughter. And arouse souls from the waking dream that defines the lives of far too many. Note: This was taped pre-pandemic over 6 months ago, when the world was a very different place. Coronavirus delayed the original release of Jay’s book from Spring to Fall, so I agreed to hold on publishing this episode until now. You can watch it all go down (in my original home studio) on YouTube. And as always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This conversation is more than just whimsical ramblings. Jay’s methods for mindfulness and self-actualization are evidence-based and platitude-free. Just perceptions and practical takeaways you can adopt right now that will positively reconfigure your reality. 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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• 1:05Speaker 01

  We're all wired to serve. Naturally, as children, as kids, as people, as humans, service is also serving through your calling, your talents, your skills, your purpose that benefits other people. But we've been educated for greed. When I was 18, I'd met people who were beautiful. I'd met people who were rich. I'd met people who were strong. I'd met people who were powerful. But I don't think I'd ever met anyone who was truly happy. But because I met these incredibly powerful people who wanted nothing from me but just to give, it changed my life. And that's the opportunity I want. And for people, it may not be a monk. But when you think like a monk, you recognize that actually, am I exposing myself to as

• 1:49Speaker 01

  many alternative methods of thought? Am I really allowing myself to experience everything the world has to offer? Because if I'm not, I'm already limiting myself in a world that's actually unlimited. And that's the challenge I see, is that we are living at a time when you have the most choice available, you have the most experiences available, but we still put ourselves in these prisons. And there's a seat with your name on it in the theater of happiness. There are infinite number of seats. And just because I'm already in there doesn't mean you can't be in there. Just because you're in there doesn't mean I can't be in there. And as soon as you realize that, you free yourself from realizing there is a seat with your name on it. And all you've got to do is claim your own seat, and no one else can take that seat from you.

• 2:28Rich Roll?

  That's Jay Shetty, and this is episode 544 of the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:43Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:52Rich Roll?

  In the last episode, we went deep with an actual monk, Radhanaswamy. And today, we extend this exploration by convening with a former monk. His name is Jay Shetty. And given that he has amassed a social media following in excess of 20 million people, I wouldn't be surprised if that name rings a bell. A cultural, social media luminary with a knack for sharing wisdom that goes viral. I suspect that at some point, you've watched one of his many 400-plus videos, which all told have surpassed more than 7 billion views, making him one of the most viewed people on the entire internet. Jay's been named one of Forbes Magazine's

• 3:34Rich Roll?

  30 Under 30. He's delivered keynotes at places like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. He's the host of the popular On Purpose Podcast. And the occasion for today's conversation is Jay's new book, Think Like a Monk, in which he basically distills the timeless wisdom that he's learned over the course of his life during his tenure as a renunciate, and translated it into practical tools that we can all use to live a less anxious and more meaningful life. I should mention that this one was taped pre-pandemic, over six months ago, way back in early March, when we were still doing the show out of my house,

• 4:15Rich Roll?

  and the world was a very different place. COVID pushed back the release of Jay's book, so I agreed to hold on sharing this one until that date. And that date has now arrived, and so now you shall have it. We talk about what led him to India, life on an ashram, and why he returned. We discuss meditation. Jay's a guy who meditates two hours a day, every single day. Talk mindfulness, conscious capitalism, the double edged sword of social media, how to use it for good, how to live a life of greater meaning, purpose, and service, and many other subjects. I really enjoyed this one.

• 4:56Rich Roll?

  It's packed with plenty of practical takeaways that I think can upgrade your perception of reality and thus the quality of your daily life experience. So here we go. This is me and Jay Shetty.

• 5:13Rich Roll?

  The cat eyed mystic is in the house.

• 5:17Rich Roll?

  A favorite phrase of mine coined by our friend Russell.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. Yeah, Russell has a lot of names for me.

• 5:23Rich Roll?

  Does he?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Over the years.

• 5:25Rich Roll?

  He seems to come up with them relatively spontaneously.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does. He does. I mean, that's who he is, right? He's one of the most.

• 5:31Rich Roll?

  It's incredible.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  He's one of the most spontaneous people I've ever met.

• 5:33Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  But he's great.

• 5:35Rich Roll?

  Welcome. Great to have you here. Thanks for driving all the way out here. It's been a long time in the works.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  It's my pleasure. I'm so grateful to be out here, Rich. I know we've become recent friends and I'm excited. I'm excited to bond more and get to do this.

• 5:48Rich Roll?

  Likewise, two times in like two weeks because I was, I did your show the other day. So this is great. We're on the precipice of your book coming out, which will be out when this comes out, which has got to be an exciting time for you.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  It is, man. It's, I feel like every year I try and do a new first. And this time it's the book and yeah, it's like I get all the nerves. I get anxious and in a good way. I love it.

• 6:12Rich Roll?

  It's cool. In preparation for today, I was poking around the internet and you know, I've been following you for some time, but just trying to get up to speed. And I gotta tell you, I'm falling in love with your wife. She's adorable.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  So you know, I get literally, so this is the story of my life, basically. People like me to some degree, I hope. They spend time with me and then I introduce them to my wife and then they go, oh.

• 6:37Rich Roll?

  And then it's over with.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally. No one ever wants to see me ever again. It happens all the time.

• 6:41Rich Roll?

  I know the feeling.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she's amazing. Like, we talked about it with your wife too. And it's, my wife is amazing. She's incredible. I'm not surprised that people love her more than me. We both upgraded, which I feel good about. You know, I'm happy to be with someone who's better than me. It's a blessing.

• 6:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've had that experience many times over. We do this, I was telling you earlier, we do this retreat every year in Italy and people show up from all over the place, you know, 40 people for this week-long experience. And most of them arrive under this idea that they're gonna like go trail running with me and they're gonna learn about plant-based cooking and maybe do a lot of little meditation. It's just gonna be fun, like, expectations are low. And then it becomes like a whole Julie experience. And they're like, I didn't know that we were gonna get this. And then they all fall in love with her and I become very secondary to the entire experience.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so we've got a lot in common then. We've got a lot in common, yeah.

• 7:38Rich Roll?

  Plus the plant-based thing, Ayurveda, all this stuff that she's into, which is cool.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, my wife is, she's a real, she's a real genuinely powerful soul. And she does everything from her heart and she's always been that way.

• 7:50Rich Roll?

  And you guys have been together for a long time, yeah?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  We've been together for seven years, been married for four, and we just feel like we've got stronger and stronger. It's been really interesting for us because our life literally turned on its head when my career really started to take off. And so in 2016, I moved job three times. We moved country. We bought a house, put it on rent, found an apartment to rent, and got married all in the same year.

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  That's a lot.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  It was a lot, but it was also a lot of... Bonding together and forming. And I think we had a moment where I think it could have gone either way. Like, it literally could have broke us, or it could have made us. And thankfully, because of how she is and how I am, and what we both wanted from our relationship, we've really been able to build something special. But, you know, it's taken a lot of work, and that was definitely a tough time.

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I have no doubt. I mean, I think that level of change could easily and most likely splits apart most couples, especially when one person in the relationship suddenly goes on a crazy trajectory that isn't like, that doesn't, where the other person isn't kind of in a parody type situation, you know, and without, you know, a lot of relationship skills and communication, that ends up, you know, planting the seeds of, you know, the demise of many a relationship.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we had our tough times. Like, I remember knowing that every time I went out to work, that my wife was at home, my new wife, like, as in my, you know, very new in terms of time, she's at home crying because she's just been moved away from her family and her home.

• 9:24Rich Roll?

  And you're off, like, in your bliss.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Totally. I'm there trying to follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say, and just like trying to build my purpose. But in the back of my mind, I'm feeling the pain of the fact that I'm like, my wife doesn't have any friends here. We don't have any family in New York. We don't have a community here. Like, we're feeling that gap, and then me trying to play both roles and wanting to, I used to set her up on these dates. So I would literally set her up on dates with women that I'd met that I thought would get along with her. And she'd be like, why are you keep trying to set me up on dates with women? But it was just, I was trying so hard. And I really made it my priority that she became my priority. I was like, if she's not happy here, if she doesn't feel like this is her home, if she doesn't feel satisfied here, then it doesn't matter what happens with my purpose.

• 10:09Rich Roll?

  It's not gonna work.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  So I would say she actually became my top priority when we lived in New York. And when we moved to LA, it's actually been the opposite, where she loves LA and has made the best friends of her life and has an incredible community around her.

• 10:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And I haven't had to have that. Whereas in New York, I really felt that sense of pressure to help her feel at home.

• 10:28Rich Roll?

  It's interesting, because usually it's the other way around. New York... Is a place that that feels easier to get socially acclimated than LA. I think LA can be an incredibly lonely place.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  When you arrive and you're new and you don't have a community because everybody is so dispersed and in their cars, it's just not as spontaneous as New York or or it's difficult to connect. I mean, I think the onus is on the individual to really make something happen.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we were lucky. We had. We had a couple of friends here who really opened us up to their world and their friends and that led to us making friends, but also just I found in New York, and I guess it also depends where you are in your career and and all of that kind of stuff, too. But I felt like in New York, people like came late to meetings and left early and always had 30 minutes to see me. And also, one of this was the biggest one, and this is huge. It's a weird one. But when you think about it, it really, it really resonates. People in LA have homes or they have larger apartments. And so people invite you to their home. Like today, we're in your home and you have a beautiful home. And when people come to your home, you end up spending more time with them. So I remember the first weekend we came here, my friend threw a party and we went out and we spent eight hours with someone.

• 11:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  And I was like, whoa, we just spent eight hours with someone. I never spent eight hours with someone.

• 11:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if you were in New York, you'd be at a bar, a restaurant.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 11:46Rich Roll?

  It would be a bump and run.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  And I think that's a big thing about it. I think when you meet people in their homes, when you meet people in their genuine, natural habitats and environments, I feel like you get an opportunity to really see them and and they feel exposed in a genuine, natural, vulnerable way to you as well.

• 12:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's part of the reason why I like doing the podcast at my house.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:07Rich Roll?

  I like having people over and I have this theory that each person that arrives and spends time here deposits this place with their wisdom and their vibration.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Oh, that's beautiful.

• 12:20Rich Roll?

  And it just elevates, you know, the whole experience of living here.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  That's beautiful, man.

• 12:24Rich Roll?

  It's like, it's like a deposit.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  You must be very careful about who you allow in. So I'm glad, I'm glad that I snuck in. This is.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  Well, I try to, you know, I try to be mindful of that.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been holding on to your crystals ever since to make sure I don't.

• 12:38Rich Roll?

  So when I, when I take a 10,000 foot view of who you are and what you do, it, it seems to me that your, your gift or your, your real facility is this ability, this facility for taking ageless wisdom, these spiritual precepts, these philosophical tenants and ideas and translating them in an entertaining way and a digestible way for a very broad mainstream and, and perhaps young, you know, audience. Is that fair?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Sounds good to me. Yeah, no, it's, you know, it's, there was, there's a statement by Albert Einstein, which kind of underpins all my work and it's, if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough. And when I was exposed to the Vedas and all these spiritual texts, that some of them date 5,000 years back, I was reading them and I was like, there is magic in these texts. Like there is so much energy in these texts. There's so much weight and gravitas and there's so much power. But guess what? Most people will never be able to experience it because it's in another language. And when I say another language, I don't just mean Sanskrit or Hindi or, you know, and, you know, Chinese. I'm, I'm in another language of it's speaking to a different age and there's beauty in that.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  And I love that and, and I appreciate that. But I could see that I wanted to try and see if I could explain these things to people that I grew up with. And I was always connecting with the person who grew up in London, you know, I'm born and raised in London. I grew up liking anything an average Londoner is into, but I got so fascinated because of the way the philosophy was presented to me. And I felt a responsibility to want to do that for others. So yeah, I think that's a, that's a pretty good breakdown and 10,000 foot view. And I, and I appreciate you saying that because that's what fascinates me. That's where I get my buzz from is how do I read, study and learn so that I can share, support and serve? And that's, that's where I get my, my meaning from.

• 14:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, crystallizing these texts down to these kernels of wisdom or teachable moments is no small thing. I mean, if you, you know, if you read the Bhagavad Gita, I mean, it takes a prodigious mind to just keep track of all the characters. Like, these stories are insane, you know? So it's like, all right, you know, Arjuna is doing this and, you know, so and so's over there doing spirit, you know, killing these people and like, what's the lesson that I'm supposed to get out of this?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  So I'll have to send you, when I, when I studied it, I made a family tree. So I literally had to physically, for anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, we're talking about the Bhagavad Gita, which is part of the Mahabharata, and there are a million characters. And I remember having to, not million, literally, but I remember having to literally piece together the family tree, because I was the same, I couldn't. And, and the messages are so profound and so powerful and, you know, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a blessing to be even, be able to be exposed to them, let alone trying to share them.

• 15:30Rich Roll?

  Well, let's take it back. Tell me about, you know, what it was like being a kid growing up in London, North London?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, North London. So I grew up, in the most common place that people would know is a place called Tottenham, more specifically, you know, yeah, North London, for anyone who doesn't know. And I grew up as a, you know, I was a very obedient kid growing up, especially in my, up to 14 years old. I was very, I would say I worked very hard at school. I was a good son. I, I followed the rules. I was very overweight at that time as well, so I got bullied a lot. So I was bullied for my weight. I was probably one of the few Indian kids at school, so I was bullied for being Indian and...

• 16:08Rich Roll?

  Parents' first generation?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. And, and I just was very fortunate because I guess it was a mixture of love at home, but also resilience. I never really felt that affected by any of it. I just, I kind of accepted it as normal. I didn't see myself as different. I was just like, oh, this is just what kids must go through. And, and I kind of got it. And then at 14, it kind of switched where I was like, well, being good doesn't work. Like, it doesn't add up to anything. I'm not happy. It doesn't make me more successful. I still experience racism and bullying, so I might as well be a jerk. Like, and I don't mean a jerk as a bad person to people. I meant like, I might as well not follow the rules. I might as well experiment with... Uh, everything else, whether it was getting drunk or whether it was, you know,

• 16:51Speaker 01

  experimenting with uh, smoking or weed or whatever it was at the time and just feeling like I wanted a thrill and an experience in life and that being good didn't stack up to what I was told. I was told if you were good, that you'd be successful and things would work.

• 17:04Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  And I didn't feel that.

• 17:06Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  So I kind of went.

• 17:06Rich Roll?

  So you have a, you have a conscious memory of making that decision?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 17:11Rich Roll?

  Meaning at some point when you were 14, thinking like, I'm gonna change tack here?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know if it was conscious in the sense I was like, oh, this is not working. Let me try this. It wasn't like that. In hindsight, I can see my reasoning behind why, because people often, like, I've, I've always considered myself to be a well-intentioned, good person. Like, that's, that's who I am at the heart and the core of it. I could never hurt anyone. It's not who I am. And so it's, it was weird when I, when I got involved in the wrong circles and I started doing things I can never imagine. And I became the opposite. And when I reflect on that, that's what I feel is the reason. So, no, I don't think it was a conscious decision at the time. But when I reflect on it in hindsight, it was very clear to me that that was the reason that brought it out.

• 17:53Rich Roll?

  Right. So you're getting into a little bit of trouble, but not too much trouble. You're still, you know, are you the eldest son?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  I'm the eldest son. I've got a younger sister who's four and a half years younger.

• 18:03Rich Roll?

  There's a certain mantle that you have to carry.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:05Rich Roll?

  A certain level of expectation and uh, and, and, you know, academic prowess that you have to demonstrate to your parents to remain in good stead.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I did good at that because my, my parents, you know, Indian parents are generally like, if you do well in school, that's all that matters.

• 18:20Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And so I kind of took that to literally. I was like, okay, as long as I'm doing well in school, I can do anything I want. So I was performing well in school, but I started to really, when I was 14, really dive into what I was fascinated by. And I found that there were three subjects that really took my attention. So it was economics, art and design, and philosophy. And those became my three. Favorite subjects at school and it was very different to what my parents wanted or what I thought at primary school where the maths and sciences were more stressed, but I started to see that I was connecting. I would talk to my art teacher for hours about different art that we would, you know, dissect together and think about why the artist had juxtaposed those two items like that and the meaning

• 19:02Speaker 01

  behind certain brushes and strokes. And I loved like breaking something down philosophically and I really owe my art teacher a lot for that because he made me gain that taste for questioning why things were the way they were rather than just accepting them at face value.

• 19:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but that seed kind of was under germinated. It seems like finance originally kind of won out in that in that race war.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  I would say that I thought that I would go off and do graphic design or marketing at university. Or I really was about to apply, I remember for Central Saint Martins, which is an incredible art school in London. And I remember, it's funny you say that because I remember applying and then my art teacher, I think messaging me or saying to me at the time, however we did at that time, I can't even remember, but I guess emailing me and saying, oh, you sold out.

• 19:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  And just like calling me out on it. And it was just my, it was just my young Indian mind in London of just feeling that there were a finite number of options and that I didn't really even, I didn't even know that there were other careers, like genuinely, like if you asked me then, like what careers existed in the world, I literally could only think of medicine, law and finance. Like I didn't even know that anyone did anything beyond that or that anything beyond that was even available. And so for me, I was like, okay, well, can't do the first two, so I'm going to end up doing this one. And so it wasn't that it won from the heart, it's that it won from a safety, security, stability, reliability platform. And the reason why this is so important to talk about is I think today,

• 20:36Speaker 01

  people look at me or may perceive my work, if they're aware, to be quite risk-taking. And you know, I think I'm very different now, but there was a time in my life where I made decisions based on feeling I wanted a secure future and a stable future.

• 20:50Rich Roll?

  Right, medicine.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Law.

• 20:53Rich Roll?

  Law or failure.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So I had three options growing up.

• 20:57Rich Roll?

  What about engineering? That seems to, that would have passed the test with the folks, right?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  No, but I wasn't, I think that's very India centric. But like, British Indians, I feel are not as good as engineering. So you don't find, I don't know, maybe, maybe it's just me. But, but yeah, no, it was just, I was always, I, I, I never, I never, I, I realized very, very early on that I didn't engage with the same things as the people around me. And I couldn't even force myself. My intuition was so strong and I didn't know it was called intuition at that time. But I knew that it was so strong. It was dragging me towards art and design and philosophy and all of this kind of stuff.

• 21:35Rich Roll?

  But you're a social animal. I suspect that you had lots of friends and ran in popular circles.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  I did in my teens, but not up to my teens. And even in, yeah, I did in my teens, but I felt that, I felt at that time that, you know, you're just finding yourself. Like when you're in your teens, you don't know who you are. You don't know what you stand for. You don't know what your values are. And everyone at that time, I mean, I went to a school where majority of people were probably smarter, smarter than me. They're, you know, super smart kids in my school and really accomplished and getting the best grades and, you know, best resumes and all of that kind of stuff. So you never really, you, you, it was good. It was very humbling being at my school. You got a very, every year they would literally, we'd get a report which would rank you in every subject, one to 180.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  So we had 180 students in my year. And for every subject and you would, you'd get it sent to your parents, to you, and you get a number, one to 180. So you can know when you're at 144 and, you know, there were some subjects where I was at 144 or lower.

• 22:39Rich Roll?

  That's some true serum right there.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  It was so bad, but it was, you know, it was humbling. But the good thing about it was very early on, my school was able to show us what our strengths were and what wasn't. And and now, when I look back in hindsight, I'm like, wow, my school really pointed out to me what I was going to be successful in, what I wasn't, to the point that my school didn't allow us to take certain subjects later on, between ages sixteen and eighteen.

• 23:02Rich Roll?

  You're done with that.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:03Rich Roll?

  That's not going to work for you.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally, that's that you would go into this room with your parents and the teacher would sit you down and they'd be like, yeah, we don't think Jake can take chemistry. It was literally as real as that. And I'd be so scared of those meetings because you'd be scared of how your parents are going to react.

• 23:18Rich Roll?

  So you go to university and you study business?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I studied management science and I focused on behavioral science. So all of my thesis and my my dissertations and all of that, I was focused on analyzing behavior. That's kind of what I got fascinated by.

• 23:32Rich Roll?

  So walk me up to this pivotal monk moment.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, I've talked about it before and and this is a great conversation already because I'm telling you stuff I've never said before, which I always love. So I, you know, I mean, this is, this is really fun for me right now. And I, and I want to approach this as well. I'm always, whenever I tell this, I'm always trying to relive it.

• 23:52Rich Roll?

  Well, it's, it's this thing, you know, apologies for interrupting, but when you're in the, the process of telling and retelling your story time and time again, what I always, I'm always sitting here thinking, when I'm doing it myself, thinking, because I'm just repeating, because I have like, you know, I know the thing and I know what to say. And I think, is that really what happened?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:14Rich Roll?

  Let me really be honest with myself. Did this happen differently or is my, is my memory playing tricks on me and telling me that something happened because I've just repeated it so many times? So I'm always kind of like using that as a reference point.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah, me too. And I'm always trying to, what I find is, I know, and I've asked myself that question as well, and I know that I'm telling what happened, but I'm always trying to discover a new truth about it. So whenever I'm telling it, I'm like, oh, what can I discover this time about?

• 24:40Rich Roll?

  Well, let me ask, let's do it this way, though.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Go for it.

• 24:42Rich Roll?

  I mean, basically, as the story goes, you, you developed a, a proclivity for seeking out interesting people to go hear talk, business people, sports figures, et cetera. And suddenly, there was this monk who was going to be speaking. You were initially not interested in hearing what that person had to say, and you agreed with your friends to attend only on the assumption that you, you guys would go to a bar afterwards.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. That is the story.

• 25:12Rich Roll?

  That's the story.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 25:13Rich Roll?

  So, so let me ask you this. Let's talk about. Where that resistance came from?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  The resistance just came from, I think, this skeptical version of me that didn't really believe there was anything beyond success. And that's partly why I called the book Think Like a Monk, because I think a lot of people look at that and like, why would I want to think like a monk? Like, why, you know, but, but that's the point. Like, I'm trying to break through that barrier of, I think so many of us have been conditioned to believe that success looks a certain way, and that happiness looks a certain way, and that joy looks a certain way. And I was one of those people that was very skeptical about anything else outside of my space. Like, if, if someone wasn't pulling up in their fast car, or if someone wasn't pulling up in the best clothes, did I give them the time to really share their perspective?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  And I love the fact that that, the best moment of my life, that moment, up till that point, was also the most humiliating moment of my life for myself, because I was being humiliated to myself. Like, it was so humbling to walk out in there and be like, ah, you had it all wrong. And so, I love that. I, I really celebrate the, the humbling that that moment gave me. And, and it's exactly that, that when you hear someone speak, and they speak about things that you never knew you were interested in, you never thought that you'd be fascinated by someone talking about service, but when he spoke about service, it just penetrated my soul, and it just spoke so deep to my core in a way that nothing ever has, that I could hear about someone talking about making a billion dollars, and it wouldn't

• 26:47Speaker 01

  feel the same way.

• 26:48Rich Roll?

  What was it that he said specifically?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  He, he was, he was quoting another writer, and he, he mentioned this, this phrase. He said, "Plant trees under whose shade you do not plan to sit." He said that the best use of your talents and skills is not to use it to become rich, famous, and successful, but to use it in the service of others. And when he said that, I was like, wow, like, that's a pretty bold statement, like, you know?

• 27:11Rich Roll?

  Well, you could have easily had the alternative reaction of like, fuck that.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I think for me, it was, you know, it was partly, my openness just came because, and, and I've said this before, but I'll, I'll repeat it because it, it really hit me. It's like, when I was 18, I'd met people who were beautiful, I'd met people who were rich. I'd met people who were strong. I'd met people who were powerful. But I don't think I'd ever met anyone who was truly happy.

• 27:38Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And he he looked and I still know him. He's really happy.

• 27:41Rich Roll?

  What's his name?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Gorangadas.

• 27:43Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  So he's he's like, he's just like this big joyful, like anytime I spend time with him. And he has a crazy schedule, like the the way he lives and how powerfully like he's he went, you know, he went to I I T, went to the Indian Institute of Technology. He's super smart.

• 27:57Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Like one of the smartest people in his year, like very accomplished. And he gave it all up. And I was like, either he's really smart or he's really crazy.

• 28:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  And I wanted to find out. And I think that's all I had is that I was like, he must be on to something because if he had it all lined up. But he gave it up and he's really happy. What is it? Right? Like that's that's kind of where the curiosity.

• 28:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it sounds more like confusion, like I don't understand, you know, I need to, I need to, I need to square this equation.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, partly confusion, but partly also curiosity in the sense of just like. He he must be really smart. He must be really crazy. Like if he's smart, he's on to something like. How did he gain so much joy, satisfaction and contentment in not chasing the dream that everyone around him was chasing?

• 28:46Rich Roll?

  And that society is constantly sort of pushing us towards.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. And I was I was fascinated by.

• 28:52Rich Roll?

  What was his or he's still alive, right?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's still alive, he's young, yeah.

• 28:56Rich Roll?

  What's his uh particular genus of, you know, spirituality? Like what what tradition?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  So he's a Hindu monk. He's a Hindu monk and he's what I would consider, I I in the book, I break down and think like a monk, I break down Dharma. And purpose and calling. So he would probably sit under the leader type of individual. He's he's very ambitious, very focused. He can get a lot done. He's a power has to be around. At the same time, he wakes up at two A M. To meditate every day. Uh takes care of his health. He's just, he's one of these like all rounder types of people who's just. Yeah, really good at taking care of his mind, body and and spirit. But at the same time, he really wants to do something for the world. He has that energy.

• 29:36Rich Roll?

  There is something about certain individuals, I'm reluctant to say the word enlightened, but. People who are carrying a a higher level of consciousness. That when you're in their presence, it's undeniable, like it's you can't, you can't reduce it to words. But there is a sensation of what it feels like to be. In that person's presence.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. And, and he introduced me to his spiritual teacher, who's also one of my spiritual teachers, Radhanath Swami, who's been a monk for forty years now.

• 30:10Rich Roll?

  In England or back in India?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  In India, in India. And he's older as well. And it's like, I feel like that when I'm with him every time. Like, it's just, yeah, it's that undeniable presence. And I always say to people, you need to, you need to feel it to believe it. Like, you need to be there. You can't, like you said, you can't reduce it to words. And, and yeah, I feel that now. When, even when I go to temples, when I was in South India particularly, and your home reminds me a lot of South India, because there's a lot of these stone statues.

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  Well, the mountain out there, we had, we had some proper Swami here. We've had lots of Swamis passing through here over the years.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:44Rich Roll?

  And, and one of them looked out at the mountain across the way, and, and he said, this feels like my home. And we, and his home is Arunachala, you know, the mountain of Arunachala.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 30:55Rich Roll?

  Which is a very kind of like powerful spiritual vortex.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. And vortex is the right word. So when I went to South India, it's a city with these powerful gates. If you look at South Indian architecture, it's like these, and you, you've got a lot of it in your home, but it's like this incredible kind of like, almost like Avengers Marvel meets spiritual culture, kind of like spaceship, kind of these, these doors and gates. And, and it's, you know, the temples there are like five thousand years old. And, and when you walk through those corridors, there's one that literally feels like you're going to walk through it and be transported to another dimension, because the way the pillars are built, and this was built thousands of years.

• 31:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like Star Trek.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally. Yeah, exactly. It's just, yeah, super, what's it, what's a, what's a more up to date reference point? Kind of like Doctor Strange. Like, it's like Doctor Strange, but on steroids. Like, it's just, yeah, it's expansive. And I, I think that is one of those things, that you have to sit in that presence, you have to go there to believe it. And, and I think anyone who has, whether they have a faith or not, and, and that's really what's important to me is, How do we share these teachings in a way that it's not bound by faith or religion or spiritual tradition? Even for me, like, this book isn't about becoming a spiritual tradition or a particular philosophy. It's about living like you and thinking like a monk, right? Like, that's the balance.

• 32:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, two things. There's two powerful precepts here. One is, you can't transmit something you haven't got. Like, when you're in the presence of somebody like that, you know it. And, you know, there are a lot of pretenders to that type of vibration, but it's pretty transparent, like, who's really carrying that kind of wisdom and who's pretending to. And second to that is this idea that you really fully embrace, which is meeting people where they're at. Like, if you show up in robes and you're framing your presentation in a way that creates a distance between you and the person you're trying to communicate, then you're already, you know, basically behind home plate in terms of, like, trying to connect or transmit.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's two things you brought about there, which I think are really interesting. The first is, it's all about the frequency you're operating at. So if someone is fooling you or pretending or trying to be something, if you're operating at a lower frequency, you may follow for a while, and you may not know. But when you start upping your frequency, that's when you can really see that, oh, right, now I can see the difference. And it's not in a judgmental way or a critical way, it's just frequencies. And the second point you're making there around, you know, really speaking to people about where they're at or meeting them where they're at and connecting with them.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  For me, it's just, I think compassion is not expecting people to be more advanced than they are. And that's what people have done with me. I mean, when I went to the ashram and when I split up with these monks, I mean, I am in no way, and even now I'm not, I mean, their compassion even to spend time with me now. And I feel like when you've experienced that level of compassion where people see you, they look through your soul, they watch you, and they just think, they can see everything about you that you don't like about yourself. And they will still find that spark of potential and the spark that makes them believe that we should invest and serve and help this human being. And for me, when you've experienced that level of compassion...

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Even if you are still dealing with stuff yourself, you want to pass it on. And so when I see anyone at any level, I don't judge anyone because hey, hey, I've been there before. Hey, I'm still there, kind of, in some ways. And I know how hard it is to get out of that mess. And so how can I judge someone just because they're three steps behind?

• 34:45Rich Roll?

  So you have this experience with this monk.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:49Rich Roll?

  Apparently, everything changes. So how does it change?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Well, my lifestyle, and I've talked about this before, like, my personal lifestyle stayed the same. I was still dating. I was still, I'd given up alcohol by that time and I'd given up, like, you know, drugs and stuff. So I wasn't really playing and I was always very experimental. I've never been an addict or a regular consumer of anything. I've just been an experimenter my whole life. But for me, it was my, my, yeah, I was still dating. I was still doing everything that anyone ever did. There was nothing changed in that, but I was now mentally curious and checking it out. So I spent the next four years, half of them in my summer vacations, interning at financial companies in London, where I thought I would end up working, just because my university recommended that.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  And the other half of my breaks, I'd spend them living in India with the monks to experience that lifestyle. So I would literally go, as I explain it, from steak houses, bars in suits, to robes, sleeping on the floor and meditating every day.

• 35:48Rich Roll?

  Right, so was that, was that the, this monk's teacher's ashram?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 35:54Rich Roll?

  Where was that, like Bangalore or something?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  No, it's two hours outside of Mumbai. So it's in the middle of nowhere, but it's, yeah, about two hours outside of Mumbai.

• 36:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and were there other Westerners there?

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, plenty, yeah, plenty of visitors from all over the world. People from Australia, people from Europe, people from London. And yeah, they definitely have a lot of visitors, even the US, yeah.

• 36:13Rich Roll?

  So initially, it was a couple of years of half the summer.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't long. I'd go there for like two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. Like, I'd go there for short bursts of time and just, just experience it and just, just live like them and live with them. And for me, and I didn't know this, I'm again, in hindsight, It was me really getting to live both options of life. Like, I was getting to live in the city, I was getting to wear a fancy suit to work every day and get to perform well in the workplace and, you know, go through all of whatever that is, networking and meeting people, and then I would get to do that. And I just got so much more satisfaction from it. I felt satisfaction from the service we did. I felt satisfaction from the meditations. And if I'm completely honest, the biggest thing that got me at that time was I didn't

• 36:58Speaker 01

  have to think that ego and humility and vulnerability and empathy and compassion, these weren't just going to be concepts anymore. These were going to be real practices.

• 37:08Rich Roll?

  Or weaknesses.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, weaknesses. These could become focuses that I could really wrap my head around them. Because when I was back in the city and I was trying to perform and I was trying to show my boss who was the best and who was performing well, it was hard to maintain that level of gravity because, not because it's impossible, because it's not. That's what I lay out and that's what I'm trying to teach right now. It was harder because I hadn't had that training. And so now that I've come out of the ashram, I feel like my monk training has allowed me to continue to practice those principles in the real world. Whereas at that time, I was just an eighteen-year-old kid who was still conditioned by everything else.

• 37:49Rich Roll?

  I suppose the distinction, it's one thing to make a decision after you'd lived as a monk during that like three-year period, making this hard-line decision, okay, I'm going back into the world. But when you kind of have one foot in both worlds.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:03Rich Roll?

  I suspect that it probably became progressively more difficult to relate or connect with your friends back in London, right? Like, what were they? They must have been giving you a lot of shit.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, you know, I was very open with the closest friends. I remember one of my friends saying to me like, oh, well, you know, he was always, we would always talk about women together, right? We'd always talk about girls, like which girls we liked and who he was dating and all this kind of stuff. And all of a sudden, every time I'd come back from being a monk, I'd have a monk moment and, you know, try and like resist the urge to just talk about women in that way and the way it can be done and. My friend would just be like, what? So we're not, what are we going to talk about? It's just like confused, like where's this life going? And other parts of, but other part, and having to say, and I want to give credit to my friends too. Some of my other friends were just really intrigued and so they actually wanted to learn. And so I ran a society at university called Think Out Loud.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  And every week I would present a topic based on philosophy, science and psychology. So I would take a movie, I would dissect the characters. I would, we would watch half the movie together and then we'd break down the roles. And I would talk about philosophy, science and spirituality and psychology to students. And when I started it, we had like 10 students. By the time we finished university, I had 100 students coming every week and it was totally free. There was no catch, there was no followers, there was no nothing. It was, it was just this beautiful experience. And that's kind of where I got into the habit of everything I learned as a monk, I would teach it. So if I was learning about karma, I would teach it that week. If I, if I went that summer and I learned about ego, I would talk about ego.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And so I just started sharing what I was learning because I found that to be the best way of letting people connect. And that's kind of where I got fascinated with this whole thing.

• 39:44Rich Roll?

  So this whole trajectory gets planted then, like you're, you're starting to teach and share even before you go off and be a full-time monk.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Way before.

• 39:51Rich Roll?

  And that experience of reviewing movies and discussing it really is, I mean, that's the germination for these videos that you do now.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, like that, that really was the beginning. And that was when I was 18 years old, so 14 years ago now. And I just loved putting on a session every week. And then I got invited to other universities. So I'd go to the London School of Economics and present, I'd go to this other university. And I was just loving the fact that I was finding so many young people in London that wanted this over anything else. Like that's what I was impressed by the most, that there was a need. And that convinced me very early on that if presented effectively, there was a community for this and people really were searching.

• 40:32Rich Roll?

  It's very similar to Andy Pudicombe's art.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Andy's awesome.

• 40:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:37Rich Roll?

  I mean, he's the only other person who's had.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Well, he did 10 years.

• 40:40Rich Roll?

  Right, I know. But him coming back from that experience and returning to London and then kind of hosting these salons.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:47Rich Roll?

  He meets Rich and then they start kind of, you know, basically doing informal get togethers that then, you know, become and grow into Headspace. But the idea started in a similar way to kind of what you're talking about.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And this was, I actually remember, I told Andy this, I said to him that the year I first found out about Headspace is the year I became a monk.

• 41:08Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And I told him this, I was so impressed by what he was doing. And I said to him, if I would have had the money, I would have invested. But I had no money. I've said this to Andy, he's been on my podcast and we've done a few panels together. But yeah, he's amazing. I love Andy and, and I said that to him, I was so impressed by what they did. Because I was just starting that journey and, and I saw what he'd done. I was like, wow, that's fascinating, you know? It's so great to see that. But yeah, I, I think this is, the reason why I'm sharing this too with you, Rich, is,

• 41:35Speaker 01

  you know, I've been doing this online for like three to four years. But in my life, I've been doing this for 14 years. Like I've literally done this every single day of my life for the last 14 years in some way, shape or form, whether it was reading, studying, or teaching, or sharing. And so for me, it's become my life. And when I left being a monk, I didn't want to not do that anymore. And, and what I get to do now is what brought me back to that, to be able to learn, study, teach, share, and, and live in that element, which I feel so much connected to.

• 42:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and meet people where they are.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that's always been my thing because, because I've been, you know, I've been plucked out. Like, you know, it's when you've been drowning in an ocean of material thought and someone had the compassion and empathy to reach down and grab you, you feel like you want to do the same thing. And, and that's just my meditation constantly, you know? You don't, you can't ever go back from that. The amount of gratitude I have for the people that have invested in me and that opened up my eyes. I was 18 years old, I would have gone down the path of becoming an, I probably, if I had it my way, I probably would have wanted to become an art director at a massive company. I probably would have done pretty well for myself. I would have traveled the world and, and wasted my life. Like that's, I always think about that moment of.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Sliding doors, what could it be?

• 42:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  And that's why it would have been, but because I met these incredibly powerful people who wanted nothing from me, but just to give, it changed my life. And that's the opportunity I want. And for people, it may not be a monk, but when you think like a monk, you recognize that actually, am I exposing myself to as many alternative methods of thought? Am I really allowing myself to experience everything the world has to offer? Because if I'm not, I'm already limiting myself in a world that's actually unlimited.

• 43:20Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  And that's the challenge I see is that we are living at a time when you have the most choice available, you have the most experiences available, but we still put ourselves in these prisons.

• 43:31Rich Roll?

  Not only that, those prisons are one of self-seeking. I mean, you mentioned giving. I mean, giving is, you know, service is the cornerstone of this whole thing.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:40Rich Roll?

  Being in selfless service to others.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:42Rich Roll?

  Which is just counter-programming to the way entire, you know, our entire infrastructure of Western civilization is constructed.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. A complete counter-program. I remember when I was giving a talk, this was probably about like, oh yeah, probably about four years ago, and I was speaking to a group of executives, and one of them came up to me afterwards, and he said, how old were you when you became a monk? I was like 22. And he said, when did you get the realization that life was about selfless service? And I said, well, I'm still getting there. I'm not there yet. But the first time I fell in love with that idea, I was 18. He goes, the first time I realized that life was beyond me, I was 42 years old, when, you know, my child was growing up. And he goes, that was the first time I realized that life was not just about me.

• 44:22Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  And I was thinking, wow, like, to me, it was, to me, it's weird, because I got exposed to it at 18. I couldn't believe that someone didn't understand that. Even today, like, the reason why we're all repeating messages and continue to, I think, remind people of these messages, and even ourselves, is because you could hear that life is about service a million times, but until you practice it, and until you really...

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Until you really mold it into every area of your life, like this podcast is your service. I think we think of service also very limited. We think service means to go out and help a charity.

• 44:56Rich Roll?

  Right, or being at the soup kitchen or something.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Correct, and that is beautiful and people should do it. It's wonderful and I think we should all do it. And I try and do as much as I can, but service is also serving through your calling, your talents, your skills, your purpose that benefits other people. And it can be different, like, you know, yeah, so, yeah, there's so many methods.

• 45:16Rich Roll?

  Well, the ultimate is when you can find that thing that lights you up and channel that in a way to give back to others and also support yourself and your family in doing it. I mean, that's the secret. That's what this does for me. And I just feel like the luckiest person in the world to have, you know, live in this time where this is possible and to have kind of stumbled into this.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. There's a beautiful story that I share that you've reminded me of now. And it's the story of two monks that are washing their bowls. And while they're washing their bowls, they see a, one of the monks sees a scorpion drowning. And so he helps the scorpion out of the water and puts it onto the side. And in that process, he gets stung by the scorpion. And the other monk says, what are you doing? Like, you know, that's stupid. He said, oh, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. The scorpion falls in again to the water. The monk picks it up again, gets stung in the process and puts it onto the side. So the other monk's just like, okay, now you're just being ridiculous. Like, what are you doing? He said, why are you saving the scorpion when you know that its nature is to sting? And the monk replies, goes, I know that the scorpion's nature is to sting, but my nature is to save.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  And so he understood how hardwired his service mindset was, that he was willing to go through the pain to act in that way. So what I'm trying to share with that story is that we're all wired to serve, naturally, as children, as kids, as people, as humans, but we've been educated for greed. And you see this, there's countless viral videos of kids who like walk up to their television screen and wipe the cartoon characters tears off with their tissues or like kids like running to help the person next to them. And we were all once that person. But it's just the education that we get. And I'm not just talking about school. I'm just saying generally, the the education of becoming self centered. And whether you look at it from a scientific point of view,

• 47:07Speaker 01

  the studies that have been done, when people help people, their depression goes down, their mental health goes up. When people help people, they're able to feel more joy and experience more happiness in their lives. Like, we are happier when we serve and help people. And that, I think, has been so lost, that if someone genuinely asks them, so because I think everyone hearing that will say, oh, yeah, but I like to help people. I try. If you really did an audit of how much time you spend every week genuinely helping someone who is giving you no help, or was genuinely helping someone who does nothing back for you, I'd find that we'd say a very, very little amount of time.

• 47:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The key is doing it when it's not convenient.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Correct. Yes, exactly. That's the best way to say it. Yeah, exactly.

• 47:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's tough. I mean, listen, you know, you hit it on the head. I mean, it's not, it's not just school. It's like by osmosis. It's like, I hear what you're saying, Jay, that's great. But like, I got to get mine, dude. Yeah, you know, times, the clock's ticking, and time's running out. And I got my hustle on.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:11Rich Roll?

  So.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  You want my response to that?

• 48:14Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, my my response to that is, that mentality will get you the thing, and it will get you the number, and it will get you the money in the bank. But you won't feel satisfied. And that's my hypothesis. So go test it. And I would gladly let anyone test that. And I guarantee you that's how you'll feel.

• 48:34Rich Roll?

  What happens, though, is you get it, you have that experience of momentary elation that quickly fades. The half life on that is very short. And then you think your next thought isn't, I need a new path. Your next thought is, well, when I get that next thing, that's really gonna lock in.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's the hamster wheel, right? It's the conveyor belt. And it's that's the it's the treadmill. That's the that's the challenge with that. And I think that's what we have to learn. From people who have got there and feel that way, I think we have to. It's like, you know, when you hear Jim Carrey say like, everyone should get everything they want and become everything they ever wanted. Just to realize it's not the point. When you see everyone who gets to the peak of financial or fame or beauty success. They then try and serve like that's just what everyone ends up having to do.

• 49:24Rich Roll?

  We're in the world capital of that right here.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:26Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 49:27Rich Roll?

  Los Angeles.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  And, and, and you see it like, you know, I, I can't remember who said this, but you know, it's, it's talked about like your success. I can't remember who said it, but, but your success is based on the depth of the problem you solve. Right? And, and it's like, if you look at any success, even if it's Jeff Bezos and Amazon, someone goes, I want to be Jeff Bezos. Jeff has solved, not that I know him, but Jeff has solved a issue that people had. So it's still service. And I think that's what we miss, that anyone who's winning even financially, whether we agree with their business model or not. They are performing some type of service to people. And because he's serving more people with an issue that they have, he's able to make more money.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  So even from a totally financial perspective, service still wins. Like it, there's no, there's no, you know, there's no taking away from it.

• 50:17Rich Roll?

  I get that. It's a, it's a more, it's just an expansive definition of service.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Correct, correct. But, but it's still so, service ultimately is, is solving a problem that really is a core need in people's lives. And I think that could be a starting point for someone if they're still like Jay, I don't get it.

• 50:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  I'm still, I, I'm just trying to.

• 50:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Meet people where they're at.

• 50:36Rich Roll?

  I'm with you, dude. All right. So you make this decision to go be a monk full time. You live in this ashram for three years.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we traveled a lot too. So we lived in ashrams across London, Mumbai and Europe as well.

• 50:48Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. And I think similarly, Andy was in, he went, he was in Russia, he was in Russia and Scotland.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Scotland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He told me about Scotland.

• 50:57Rich Roll?

  So walk me through like a typical day in the life of that experience.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you wake up at four AM every day, no matter where you are. And four thirty is collective prayers and meditation. So four thirty till about five fifteen, then five fifteen till seven thirty is personal meditation time. So that's personal meditation practice, often in a communal space with other people. It can be private too. And then seven thirty to eight is, seven thirty to eight thirty is a class, so a class on philosophy from the Bhagavad Gita or the Schumered Bhagavatam or one of these spiritual texts, Upanishads, Puranas. And so that'd be an hour class given by one of the senior monks or senior teachers usually. Uh, one of my favorite things to look forward to in the day because that's, I was like, kind of like, I was always waiting for that

• 51:43Speaker 01

  because the, the classes were just so powerful and hearing people who've studied all the commentaries in the books. And then eight thirty is breakfast. Uh, breakfast is usually in India would be some kind of Indian dish, kind of similar to, uh, I don't know how to describe it. It's called flat rice and that's the easiest way to describe it. So it's some simple food. Uh, and then from then on, it would be different every day. So the way it was split up is the morning was about yourself

• 52:08Speaker 01

  and the afternoon and evening were about service. And, and that's where I, I fell in love with this routine of self and service. And I think today now the world's coming a lot back to self-love. And, and I feel like that's where we got to experience both very clearly. When you spend half your day taking care of yourself, you spend the other half serving, you get this beautiful synergy between the two. So for the rest of the day, we'd be out uh, feeding children. We'd be out building the sustainable village that we were at. We'd be out, um, teaching, we'd be out helping, like we'd be out doing something.

• 52:38Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  And that would change every day depending on what the need was. Sometimes it would be chores as well, like washing your clothes. I mean, washing monk robes are not, not fun at all.

• 52:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Uh, they're these huge bed sheets. So yeah, that's kind of like.

• 52:49Rich Roll?

  Seven days a week, you get a day off where you can go, you know, do whatever you want.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  You know, I always, I was one of those guys who wanted that day off. I was like, I was like, if I make it a five of the four AMs, can I skip the other? No, you don't get to. It doesn't work like that. And I mean, there's a lot of reflection time in the day that you get. And you have to really work through a lot of stuff because your ego gets in the way, your opinions start to get in the way. And living communally is a real experience. Like when you live communally with that many men in one place.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  It's like you really have to face your ego, your pride, your competitive mentality, your comparison on a daily basis. It's really tough.

• 53:34Rich Roll?

  Did humanity ever just percolate to the surface and dudes start fist fighting?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  No, no one ever actually like, the only time monks would ever get physical.

• 53:43Rich Roll?

  Humans are humans. I don't care how much you're meditating. At some point, you know.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  No, it was never that bad. The only time the monks ever got into physical was when the, the special sacred food came out. So there's sacred food that's offered and like there's these sweets and we didn't, you know, we didn't eat a lot of sugar or anything like that there. So whenever these sweets came out, uh, they're, they're, they're these milk sweets sometimes. And so these sweets were like the, the kind of like.

• 54:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Um, I've never spent time in an ashram, but I've been.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Well, we have to go. We should go together.

• 54:16Rich Roll?

  I would like to. I mean, I.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  I'd like to take you.

• 54:19Rich Roll?

  I would enjoy that.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  I'm being serious. I'm, I'm being deadly serious. We should go together to the ashram. I go back every year.

• 54:24Rich Roll?

  Do you? You still do?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, every year. So I go back every, usually December, January period because the weather's good to go then.

• 54:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  For, for anyone who's not from India, like I struggled during the hot times in India too. So that's the best time if you're visiting, but I'd love to take you. It'd be so fun.

• 54:38Rich Roll?

  It'd be cool.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:40Rich Roll?

  In my experience of, of, you know, sitting in meditation with various, you know, swamis over the years and, and, and being around, you know, various types of those kind of communities.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:52Rich Roll?

  The thing that I noticed, like the humanity that I see in that is the, um, is the institutionalization of the guru, right? And then it becomes like this pecking order of who's close to the higher consciousness. And there seems to be a lot of jockeying around, like that's where I see like the sort of character, like the, the, you know, our innate humanity percolating to the surface and manifesting in character flaws.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. That's a really good point. And, and I saw that too. And I feel like, I feel like my teachers did a very good job of not trying to.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Create, enjoy, or build that type of culture. They tried their best, but the follower's mentality is so strong. So I'll give an example, like, so, so whenever I was with one of my teachers, if we traveled together, whether, and, and, you know, I'm, I'm, you have to put yourself in the mindset of I'm a very junior monk and spiritually very junior too. So I'm like, I'm like right at the bottom of the pile, right? And it's like, so when I would travel with the senior most teacher, uh, there was a respect in where we pay physical respects, as you've probably seen before, where people pay physically bow on the floor to show respect to teachers, to et cetera.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  And, and he, at 70 years old, there was never a day behind closed doors when no one else was watching that he wouldn't get back and pay those respects on the floor. And to me, that was the, that was the moment where I was like, he's real. Because there was no more, no one to show off to, I was not senior that I deserved it. Like, there was no, you know, from, from the point of view of a hierarchy, even though there wasn't one. But he would have the humility and the, the hu- humanity to, to recognize that if a soul or if a person is showing me respects, then I'll show those respects back. And I, and I felt that at 70 years old, I'm, you know, I'm like, what, 22 years old? Like a 70 year old man, like, that's beautiful. Like, there, there was some beauty in that, and that was, that was part of it.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  And the other part was the, you know, and, and it's funny, because we talk about this a lot, even, even with the other monks and other people, that about, my teacher would never have a favorite or a number one. And he never verbalized this, but we all knew it. And, and one of the senior monks, he always said to me, he said, if you want to be the number one, you won't last very long. Right. And he literally said that to me, he goes, if you want to be his number one, go to right-hand man, all that kind of stuff, he goes, you're not going to last long here. Because he said, anyone who wanted that position, they never got it because he doesn't want it to exist. And so you will fail. And we, I remember having this conversation with him and he's, you know, because he's been so close to him for so long. And he said to me, he said, there are times, this is Gorongadas, he goes, there are times

• 57:36Speaker 01

  when I've had to be really close to support him, and there are times when I've had to move away and step back and let him do what he needs to do. And it's like, he goes, it, it doesn't work like that. And so I think that good leaders always try and avoid creating that culture. But our follower mentality is so strong.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  That we want someone to worship and idolize and we want that, we're seeking that.

• 58:02Rich Roll?

  Well, and our, our identity is informed by proximity to that person.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:08Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and there's two types of proximity. So I'll, I'll tell you, anyway, you're sparking all these memories. So we're walking on this beach in South India. It's called Setuband. It's a very holy place and like literally the, the tip of South India, if you were to look at a map. And so we're walking on this beach. It's about 25 monks and our, and our senior teacher, and we're all walking behind him. And everyone's trying to walk close to him. And he's just walking, like, he's not even talking to anyone. He's just walking and he's doing a walking meditation and everyone's around him. And it was there that I had a, had a realization. I was like, there are two ways of being close to him. Either I push everyone away and try and walk through the middle, or I push everyone closer. And, and be close because everyone else is closer too.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  And I was like, I remember having a, a real reflection point at that moment. I was like, wow, like these are the two options in life we always have. You either get closer to people because you try and push everyone else out the way, or you get closer to people because you take everyone with you. And I was like, I'm gonna try to do that second one for the rest of my life. If I want to be close to someone, I'm gonna take everyone close to that person. I'm never gonna be that guy who's trying to, and that's my hope, you know, that's my meditation.

• 59:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that requires that you dispense with the zero sum game mentality.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Explain it.

• 59:21Rich Roll?

  Meaning that your success can only come at the expense of others.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 59:27Rich Roll?

  As opposed to the, the universe is infinitely abundant.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:30Rich Roll?

  And there's room for everybody here.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:33Rich Roll?

  A, a non-fear-based perspective on that.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Think Like a Monk, I call it, there, there are an infinite number of seats in the theater of happiness. So we in our minds have started to believe that every, we think now, if you're booking a cinema theater or a movie theater, there's a finite number of seats. You've got to get tickets to the Olympics. There's a finite number of seats. There's tickets to the, uh, Coachella, whatever it is. It's like, there's a finite number of seats. And so that finite, finite, finite, finite has been drilled so deeply into us. But there are infinite number of seats and there's a seat with your name on it in the theater of happiness. And just because I'm already in there, doesn't mean you can't be in there. Just because you're in there, doesn't mean I can't be in there. And as soon as you realize that, you free yourself from realizing there is a seat with your name on it.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  And and all you've got to do is claim your own seat and no one else can take that seat from you. And when you start living like that, you can collaborate, you can grow together, you can build together. And you see this as being the epitome of, I was just reading Bob Iger's book, and and in there, he talks about how it was, and I may get a few of the names wrong, but I think it was it was Steven Spielberg for sure, it was George Lucas, I think it was Quentin Tarantino, who's saying they used to get together and they would critique each other's movies before they came out. So to give each other feedback. You're talking about some of the best of all time, like being comfortable showing their work to their competitors.

• 1:00:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Now, that's the point, right? Like, I've never watched a Quentin Tarantino film and felt I was watching a Steven Spielberg film. And I've never watched a Spielberg film thinking I'm watching a George Lucas film, which just shows, A, how incredibly creative and talented they are, but also how much they trusted what they were offering to the game.

• 1:01:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  And that, to me, is such a powerful metaphor, and I mean, it's not even metaphor, it's literal, of how you live in a, there are an infinite number of seats in the theater of happiness.

• 1:01:35Rich Roll?

  On the subject of happiness, you know, I think you would agree that we're suffering from an epidemic of loneliness and and, you know, depression and, you know, people are seeking for answers and different ways of living. They're they're sensing their lack of, you know, their lack of contentment with the path that they've chosen for themselves. And you go online and somebody's telling you to, you know, find your bliss or, you know, seek out your passion. And and I think that that's, although perhaps coming from a good place, is not necessarily helpful and perhaps damaging because it leaves that person thinking, well, I don't, I don't know what my passion is, or, you know, I'm not

• 1:02:19Rich Roll?

  happy, but I don't understand the path forward to find that happiness. And And I I'm unsure about what steps I need to take in order to gird my life with more purpose and to try to find more fulfillment. So with the experiences that you've had, like, how do you speak to that person or meet them where they're at to try to get them to reframe their perspective on how they're living?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think, first of all, it has to be a two-fold approach. And what I mean by that is, there is an aspect of it that is thinking and reflection, and there is a part of it that is action and experimentation. These are the two aspects of anything in our life, and the biggest mistake we make is, we do too much action and experimenting without reflection, or we do too much reflection without action and experimentation. So let's let's talk, let's break them down. So let's start with the thinking and reflective approach. This is an approach you can do on your own. This is the approach you can do right now, listening to this. This is an approach that I, half of it, that I lay out in Think Like a Monk. So the first thing I ask people to reflect on is, is four areas. The first area is things that you have an expertise in but have no passion for.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Make a list of three things that you have a expertise in but no passion for. So for me, I give the example of Microsoft Excel and numbers. I'm I'm OK at it, but I don't enjoy it. Like, I don't have a passion for it, right? So so write down three things in there. Then the next box that I want you to fill out is, ask yourself, what do I have no expertise in, but I have a deep passion for? So for me, it's neuroscience. I am not an expert in neuroscience. I couldn't perform brain surgery on anyone, and I couldn't scan anyone's brain, but I I'm super passionate about it. I love reading about it. I love speaking to neuroscientists. It's something for me. Social media used to be in that category for me once upon a time.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Social media was something I wasn't an expert in or didn't know much about, but I was passionate about learning how to communicate. Then the third box, things that you're not, no expertise and no passion. What are those things in your life that you're like, oh, don't like them, not good at them, right? Maybe doing your taxes, I don't know, whatever, right? Like pretty much everything, everything else. Everything else, yeah. And then the fourth and final box is, what are you passionate about and what are you an expert in? That's the box that you're trying to find, so that box may be empty right now. This is the thinking of, so do that reflection exercise. The reason why it's so important is because most of us, first of all, don't even know what our expertise is and our passion is. And now when I say passion, I'm not just saying, find your passion, I'm saying, what do you like doing? What do you get joy from reading about?

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  What, even if you're watching a TV show, what is it about that TV show that keeps you captivated? Well, when you listen to this podcast, what part about it, which person stands out to you? It's you having to read in to every part of your, it's like, start with something as simple as, what's your favorite cuisine? Most people go, I don't know what my favorite cuisine is. Well, think about the last time you walked out of a meal, you were happy when you ordered it, you're happy when you ate it and you were happy the next morning. That's probably your favorite cuisine. Try and find those patterns in your life, because all of us have a karmic pattern in our life that we've just not zoned into. So I'll give you another example, let's, let's look at the pattern of the best decisions you've made.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  If you looked at the best decisions you made in the last decade, and let's say you pick three, right? Three is a pattern for me, that's, that's where I'm, I'm gonna, I'm, I'm making that up, it's totally my choice, it's subjective, but it's my opinion. Three things are a pattern. Look at the three decisions you made in your life where you knew it was the best decision when you made it. Not when you got the best result, but you knew it even before the result happened that you made the best decision. I guarantee you, if you reflect on those three decisions in the last decade, you will find the same parameters, the same environment and the same decision-making uh thoughts and thought process that got you to your best decision. So I'll give an example, I, when I decided to become a monk, I believe that was my best decision when I made it.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Not because one day I'd be able to write a book about it, because I had no idea I'd even be here. So I was going against the grain, no one agreed with me, and most people thought it was the worst idea. When I left being a monk. I was going against the grain because most monks I joined would stay as monks. No one agreed with me. And I was completely sold that I was doing the right thing for me. When I quit my safe corporate job to do what I do now. I was going against the grain because most of my friends were happy with their salaries. I was um I was doing something that felt really right to me and no one agreed with me. And so I found that that's generally the pattern of my life. My best decisions are those three things. Now, that may not be for you. Your best decisions may be the opposite. So that reflection is really important. Second half, action.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Take the next month, take the next thirty days and every weekend. Plan a new activity, workshop, seminar, course, book, podcast to listen to, person to shadow, person to experience with. Take a Saturday and Sunday and try it out. You've got eight things that you can now test. There are eight days, eight weekends in a month roughly. Test something new on each of those. Go and actually do something. So this is no more thinking, no more reflecting. If you want to be a chef or you think you want to be a chef, go and do a cooking class. See how natural it was for you. See how much fun you had doing the process. Take eight different things and try them out. When you do both of those together, within thirty days, you could figure out what you genuinely are passionate about as a starting point.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  That may change, it may evolve, but at least you've got somewhere to start. And the biggest mistake is we're sitting there doing a personality test trying to figure out what our passion is. Obviously, you're not gonna know.

• 1:07:58Rich Roll?

  Right. A lot of it goes back to if you could just live in the in the mindset of the child within. Like, what did you, what were the choices that you made when you were a kid about what you liked to spend time doing? I think that's also a good place to start.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:08:13Rich Roll?

  And I think those are really powerful exercises. The expertise piece can come later, right? It's not about that at that moment.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  I think the more you engage with those activities that you naturally enjoy, you're creating opportunities, you're creating an environment in which

• 1:08:32Rich Roll?

  Opportunities can come later to further explore that.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  There's a difference between a lack of expertise and inexperience. Right? We think we lack expertise in something, but actually we're just inexperienced at it. And, and that's the point of that second element of you don't have to be the best at something when you start doing it. But as soon as you start doing it, you've now given yourself that opportunity to grow. And, and I think we all know this, there's always something we've all learned and become better at it. But if you're fascinated by it, you're probably more likely to invest more time.

• 1:09:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, don't, but it is also important, there may be things in your life that you have an expertise in, but you don't have a passion in, but then ask yourself the question, why don't I have a passion in? Because you could add meaning to it. Like, there are so many skills that we have that if you added a bit of meaning, you added some purpose to it, you added why you were doing it, you could actually find a great use for it. And I think a lot of us are under, under, underestimating how powerful expertise is. You may have strengths that are just underutilized by your current job, but actually could be really well utilized by someone that you felt activated you.

• 1:09:40Rich Roll?

  Essentially, everything that you're saying are tools for greater self-awareness, right?

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:09:46Rich Roll?

  So when you say, when I made this decision to go be a monk, I knew in my heart it was the right decision for me, despite externality, same thing when you made the decision to leave.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Rich Roll?

  But you're somebody who had spent an inordinate amount of time developing your self-awareness. You're a very integrated person because of all the inside work that you've done to get to a place where you not only are in tune with your instincts, you're able to rely upon them, you know what I mean? And I think most people are so disconnected from themselves and either lack adequate self-awareness or are just living their lives so reactively that their impulses or their instincts are either unheard or entirely unreliable. And I think that, that people make decisions and set goals for themselves in that state that lead them terribly awry.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but intuition is a muscle that everyone can build, right? It really is. I really believe that. There's a study that I mentioned in, in Think Like a Monk where I talk about how men and women are asked to be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes or give themselves an electric shock. Thirty percent of women chose an electric shock and sixty percent of men chose an electric shock.

• 1:10:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Because they didn't want to be alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes.

• 1:11:00Rich Roll?

  The root of all human suffering.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, now here's the thing that intuition comes from asking yourself questions. Basic questions, simple questions, just as it would getting to know Rich. Getting to know Jay is the same process. After I eat something, did I like that? Did I not like it? The next morning, did I like that? Did I not like it? When you ask people, what are your favorite movies? You know how you feel when you walk outside a movie. Not, you don't need to do a personality test. You don't need to do a, a, a three months away in Costa Rica. Like, you don't need to do that to know whether you like something or you don't like something. You can do a sense check with yourself every single day after doing an activity. And if you literally, after you did anything, anything you do, stop and just ask yourself,

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  did I enjoy that? Yes or no, simple question. So let's say I say yes. What did you enjoy about it? Let's have that conversation. What did I enjoy about it? What part of it was uncomfortable, but you still got excited about it? These are three simple questions that can lead you to greater self-awareness. I've done the same with every area of my life and you should really become like an encyclopedia in your own life. Like, if someone goes to me, what's your favorite movie? It's like, I am a big fan of thrillers. My favorite director and producer of all time is Christopher Nolan. My favorite mo- mo- movies are Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar and the Dark Knight Trilogy. They're all Christopher Nolan movies. It's, there's such a pattern in our lives and everyone has that pattern. We just have to look beyond the debris.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  That's all there of the noise and the, the dirt that's stopping us because there's just so much distraction.

• 1:12:37Rich Roll?

  But that practice of self-inquiry is, is really the, the definition of leading an examined life.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Yes, hundred percent, exactly. And, and that's all we have to do, that we just have to ask ourselves questions. The problem is, we are demanding the answer from our partners, the universe, our teachers, people. We demand, we go, why is this happening to me? What's the meaning of this? That's not a question, that's a demand. And a question is a genuine heartfelt request. A question is.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Do I like this? Like, that's a question is is soft and powerful. A question is not loud and weak. And our questions are actually demands. And that's why we don't find the answers.

• 1:13:25Rich Roll?

  Well, they're demands be also because they're they're foisted outward.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:30Rich Roll?

  If they're turned inward, the questions become, you know, what what is, you know, what is the fear that compelled me to do that? Like, what what childhood wound am I trying to solve by, you know, having this exchange with this person or making decision X, Y, or Z?

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that's exactly it. Demands are outwards, questions are inwards. It's beautiful. Absolutely. That's it.

• 1:13:52Rich Roll?

  So you spend three years in the ashram and you emerge, you make this decision to return. First of all, like, you know, what was there a sense at some point that you were going to always stay there? And if so, what changed?

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my my dream was that I would do it for the rest of my life. And I believe that as a monk, I'd be able to write and teach and share and hopefully be able to share that message anywhere and everywhere.

• 1:14:17Rich Roll?

  And where are the where are your parents at this point?

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 1:14:20Rich Roll?

  Like, how are they processing this, you know?

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  So I've always described my parents as as very neutral. They have been neutral participants in a beautiful way. And I mean that in a good way. I love my parents. They've they've never been overly pushy and they've never been overly encouraging. They kind of have always been neutral. It's a really weird situation to be in. So my parents don't massively celebrate everything I do, but they don't get upset when things don't go the way they thought it would.

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  So your mom's not asking you when you're going to go to medical school still?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  No, no, no. She knew I wouldn't get in. You know, I didn't go to my graduation ceremony, so I never got that picture of me holding the I graduated but never got the picture. So my my parents really gave up on me, maybe? No, they they, you know, they gave in to me at that time when I decided to make this decision and then they were open to whatever happened. And I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. And then two things happened. One was I was really pushing it and and really testing myself physically. And I could see that my health was was stumbling from it because I was just like trying to do all the fasts and meditating for longer. And my mom's competitive ego and also competition with myself mindset constantly wanted to test. And at the same time, I started to feel like

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  And this was really tough, like to admit it, and I don't think I admitted it then, and it's only happened afterwards. I think that my meditation and self-awareness got me to a point where I realized I wasn't a monk. In the sense of that that wasn't my path, that I felt that I wanted to share wisdom in a certain way, that I wanted to serve people in a certain way. And a big part of me felt that that wouldn't be realized through that lifestyle. And that doesn't mean that I knew that one day we'd have billions of views or that, you know, all that kind of stuff. It wasn't, it wasn't like numbers and it wasn't fame. It was just like, I feel this deep calling to be with people and serving this way and share wisdom in this way and teach in this way and talk about movies in the way I talk and, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to be immersed in mainstream culture.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  And as a monk, I didn't even know who won the World Cup that year. Like I didn't, I had no idea. And so that was a big part of it. And then my teachers also, I think, started to see that. I, I definitely consider myself a rebel and I think becoming a monk is one of the most rebellious things you can do because it's totally antisociety, but I think they could see that rebelliousness in me and they could see that I wouldn't necessarily last with that mentality as a monk. I think as a monk, it comes with certain sacred.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  It comes with a sacred, what's the right word? Sacred coherence or ah, what's the word I'm looking for? A sacred, um, sacred commitment. It's a sacred commitment to what you're doing. And I think I realized and they realized around the same time that, that it wasn't like that. And, and I didn't realize that at the time. I realized in hindsight. And so when my teacher said to me that he felt that I should leave so I can share what I've learned. At that time, I hadn't yet admitted to myself that I even knew what I would do. And so that really felt like a breakup. It really felt like he was like, you know, it's not you, it's me. It's kind of like an awkward breakup.

• 1:17:22Rich Roll?

  Right, more, um. Less relief, more like he was condescending to you?

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  Correct. Like, because I hadn't yet admitted it to myself, it felt like I'd failed. And I think that's why what failure actually feels like when you haven't admitted something to yourself is it feels like failure, whereas now I look back and I go, wow, I should have felt relieved. I should have felt like someone just opened up a gateway for me to go off and be myself. And I didn't know that then.

• 1:17:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  So when I left, I was probably in the most depressed state of my life. I moved back in with my parents. Everyone around me now saying, we told you so, you wouldn't make it, like, and then, you know,

• 1:17:57Rich Roll?

  But what is making it, deciding to spend your entire life in the?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Well, I think no one knows what made it mean for me, but it's, what I mean is it's that perspective of like, oh, you couldn't even live as a monk, like, why would you come back? Or like, oh, who's gonna hire you now? And I heard that.

• 1:18:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Over and over again, like, how are you gonna make money? Who's gonna hire you? Who's gonna talk to you? Like, will you be able to reintegrate? And it was hard, like, hearing that noise as soon as you come back, rather than like, oh, we're so happy. Like, it wasn't like a welcoming party. And that's what my parents, my parents were very supportive. I'm talking about the external.

• 1:18:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I got it. Yeah, I got it. But you emerged from that experience with a very powerful toolbox. And it's one thing to implement or practice those tools in the construct of a very controlled environment at the ashram versus trying to take them into the chaos of the world.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  So what was that reemergence process like? And how do you think about the applicability of that timeless wisdom and that toolbox in terms of how we navigate the, you know, vicissitudes of the modern age?

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  Well, I even fooled myself that the tools I'd learned were non-transferable. So in the, in the, in the immediate moment, even I, even after having all that training.

• 1:19:12Rich Roll?

  That was useless.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  I was just like. Great, like, what do I do now? And it came from, again, the noise because I applied to forty companies. And when I say forty companies, I mean, I sent them all specific tailored resumes and cover letters. And I got rejected from all forty before interview.

• 1:19:32Rich Roll?

  Like ad agencies and marketing companies and investment banks?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, investment banks, financial institutions, consulting firms, strategy firms.

• 1:19:39Rich Roll?

  That's just the universe doing you a favor.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  True, but I didn't know that then. Like, you know, I was like, I can't rely on my parents forever and my parents are not financially well off or, you know, so I can't just leech off of them and I need to figure out how to make money. I'm twenty-six years old and what am I gonna do? So I was applying to companies that would have given me a job three years before. And I'm struggling and I'm getting all these no's. And, you know, when you're seeing rejection after rejection after rejection, you really start to question what you have. But I realized that those three years, and I describe it this way and the way you said it, that the three years being a monk were being at school. And the last seven years since I've left have been the exam. And I can genuinely say so far that every tool that I have tested from my monk toolkit works.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  And the biggest one, or most likely, the most powerful one that I felt is, there's a beautiful verse in the Manasmiti I talk about in the book. And it says that, "When you protect your purpose, your purpose protects you." And what I mean by that, and I will broaden purpose to mean what it needs to mean for anyone listening, you have to protect your strengths, your calling, your passions, your interests, your skills, you have to protect them like a precious jewel. Because the whole world will come at you and tell you that it's not a jewel. The whole world will come at you and tell you that it's worth nothing. And if you don't protect it, it can't protect your value back. And most of us, as soon as we get questioned, we just chuck the jewel out.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  We just chuck it away and we go, oh yeah, that wasn't worth anything. And then later on in life, you realize you threw away a precious jewel. So I love that verse because that's what I was test, being tested to do is I was about to go sell myself short. And just go back into the world that I came from and just chuck out that jewel rather than like, hey, I learned all these things. I wanted to serve. I became a monk because I wanted to serve. How can I still serve? How can I not just throw that all out and pretend that it doesn't matter? And how can I apply the discipline and the mentality and all of the great skills? Because guess what? When, surprise, surprise, no one wants to hire someone with monk on their resume for three years. And that, and that's what I had because they couldn't see the transferable skills. I had to see them. So they were thinking, oh, he's probably just gonna be really quiet in the office, right?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Like, what is he gonna do? But I knew that that quiet was intuition. I knew that that quiet was solitude, not loneliness. I knew that that quiet was the power. That, that ability to, to, to read things, to read in between the lines, to connect with people. And so I ended up still getting a job at Accenture. That's the first thing I did. That was the, it, it came about nine months, 10 months after I'd left the ashram. For 10 months, I spent every day in the library, reading spiritual books, spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita. And then reading self-development books and business books and trying to reintegrate. So it's, I spent about 10 months literally reintegrating. And then when I get my job, I remember they did an induction day.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  And you know, at, at these big companies, they have these induction days where they try and do team bonding. So my first day of work was a pizza making class with all a hundred graduates who'd also been hired by the company. So I turn up at this pizza making class and, and I'm just like, what am I gonna do? Like, I don't drink alcohol. I've never gone back to drinking, so I don't, I still don't drink. Um, I was like, oh, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to eat half the pizzas that we make. And, and how am I gonna engage? And how do I talk to people? And I remember being really uncomfortable that day because.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  I was, I was having to decide again who I was going to be in a world that I knew who I would have been before. And now with everything else I learned. So I remember just finding one or two people, having a really deep, meaningful conversation with them. And I found my people and I found a smaller group, whereas I think if I'd gone before, I would have been the loudest person in the room and networking. I was, I was totally different and. And I'm still really close friends with one of the guys that I met that day and, and I love it, you know, it's been, it's been, it was a, Accenture was an amazing experience.

• 1:23:37Rich Roll?

  So at Accenture, your job, was it originally, or did you morph into this role as kind of this social media person there?

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:45Rich Roll?

  I don't really understand how that, what happened.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  So I, I started out as a, as an, as an average analyst at the company where you just get.

• 1:23:51Rich Roll?

  A typical job like.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Correct, correct. And what happened is that in, in our first year, they ran a competition. Where they were going to choose a group of people to be trained by some social media experts that they were working with. Uh, to try and build the social media and digital department inside the company. Cause that was new then. It was like a big, big area of growth at that time. And so thankfully I got into the, the twenty in the competition. And then I came out number one in the full competition and won. And so I got this coaching and this coach not only. Became a coach from a professional standpoint, he became one of my closest friends. His name's Thomas Power. He lives in London. And he just, I don't think he taught me everything about social media. I think he really opened my mind. He would constantly.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Push me to never settle. So if we made a breakthrough or something like I got a promotion at the company. He would never see that success. He'd go, all right, what's next? What are we going to build? Like he, he would just be, give me, gave me this mentality of just. Growth mindset, believing more was possible and just being able to apply all the tools that I'd learned. And so I end up creating this social media role at Accenture where. I'm creating all of this content. I'm learning how the biggest brands in the world use social media. I'm working with executives on social media presence and understanding Twitter and LinkedIn. And I just get exposed to this incredible world and that's where I get to learn these skills.

• 1:25:14Rich Roll?

  Right, so that's basically, you know, the ashram for learning how to become this social media maven with unbelievable knack for creating virality.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it wasn't that, like, I never created, you know, viral content while I was at Accenture, but it just started opening up my mind to what was possible, right? It was just like, oh, these are the tools, feeling comfortable with failure, getting it wrong. It gave me a playground, right? It gave me an opportunity. And this is what, anyone who's listening to this right now or watching this and you're working at a company, your company is giving you an opportunity to learn, to grow, to test. I learned so much about digital and strategy, working at Accenture, that I could never have got from reading a book or going to a course or something, because it was there, like, I was there with it every day with a company that was 500,000 people, you know, a global organization.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  So that's when I hear that people are dissatisfied with their jobs and their companies, my biggest question is, have you learned everything you possibly could from that place? Because the truth is, you could find a lot more meaning and passion in a place that you don't want to be in, because you realize it could be the answer and key to what you could do in the future. And there is so much to gain.

• 1:26:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a cool lens. So what's interesting about this is, I didn't really fully understand, like, that you kind of went into this corporate world before. I thought you kind of were hired as a consultant after you already figured out all this social media stuff and they hired you for that purpose?

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 1:26:41Rich Roll?

  So that's fascinating. But what I think is really interesting here is, from an outsider's perspective looking in, it would appear that so many of these, you know, timeless wisdom concepts don't square with living in the modern world. Like, when we think of detachment, we think of asceticism. When we think of competition, we think of, you know, the zero-sum game, et cetera. But I think when you peel back the layers, they're really highly compatible. So I'm interested in kind of exploring

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:27:12Rich Roll?

  how you take these ideas into the world and how they inform and how they inform your decision-making and kind of how you, you, you know, see yourself.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that. And there's a big difference between, especially from the Bhagavad Gita's point of view, but there's a big difference between detachment and indifference. And I think in our limited mindset, sometimes we think that detachment means indifference or detachment means disconnecting.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  And actually detachment means, and I quote this incredible writer where he said that detachment doesn't mean that you own nothing. Detachment means that nothing owns you. And when you look at detachment through that lens, it means can I use everything that I have for a higher purpose? Can I use it and engage it rather than be consumed and used by it? Now granted, that's a very high platform to live on and it's not easy. But the point being that detachment is not indifference. That detachment doesn't just mean, oh, I don't want anything to do with this. It's actually, how can I use this for more than what it's being used for right now? And that's what's known as by Rupa Goswami.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  He's, he quotes a about, probably about 500 years ago. He created and coined a term called yuktaviragya, which means using everything for a higher purpose. So he talks about how real renunciation, real detachment, real asceticism is how can I use this for something more than myself? And it's not about just getting rid of it. And I love that principle and I think that that's a very, that's a very practical principle that we can all employ living in the real world. So for monks, detachment is real, like we didn't have beds, right? We didn't have a place that we slept. We slept in a different place every night. But if you're not a monk and you want to apply that same principle, this is how you think about it. You recognize that I don't want to be in a position where I am consumed by everything.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Another addition to detachment is detached from the result focused on the process. That's another definition in the Bhagavad Gita that you're not attached to the fruits of your labor, but you're completely committed to the labor, the process itself. And that's something that we miss so often that we think being detached means not caring about what happens. Actually, it means caring about the process and not caring about the result. So when we're talking about writing a book and you know, you've written books and when you're writing a book, if you're writing a book and all you're thinking about is how many copies am I going to sell? Now you're not gonna write a good book.

• 1:29:42Rich Roll?

  No, you're dead out of the gate.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  Totally, you're dead straight away because all you're thinking about is how many copies am I gonna sell? Is this gonna rank? If that's what you're thinking about, you're now not present, which means you're not gonna write a good job, a good book. Whereas if you were dedicated to the process, the result is a given, the result's a natural end.

• 1:30:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I, I fully get having a process oriented mindset and approach to everything that I do. Uh, on the higher purpose piece, what I find myself doing is, is deluding myself a little bit.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:30:14Rich Roll?

  Perpetrating a little bit of denial, like, perfect example, we're here doing the podcast. Now, I can say, and there is a sliver of honesty in, in this, that I'm doing this for a higher purpose. I am like, when I sit down for these conversations, I'm trying to be as present as possible and, and, you know, deliver the best content that I can in service to the audience. At the same time, I'm profiting off of this.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:30:41Rich Roll?

  And I know that if I grow the audience, that then I can charge more and get more advertising. You know, like, sure, there is a very self-serving aspect of this.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:30:51Rich Roll?

  And I'm always, you know, unsure about how those two worlds like butt up against each other.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  So intentions are all percentages. So what you just broke down, you may have, and, and this is me, everyone included, you may have a 50% pure motive and 50% impure motive, or you may have a 75% pure motive and you may be 25% impure. The point is, it's a process of purification, but guess what? Running away from it doesn't remove the impure intention. Doing it, being humbled, seeing it fall apart, failing, growing, being told you're terrible and having to reprocess that, that is what purifies you. So the belief that if I run away from that which brings me down, you'll run away with it. Like it stays with you because it doesn't become purified and that's the process of.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Purification, like when you look at a muddy glass of water, it it needs to be purified to be drinkable and we're the same, we just get muddy. But with us, what happens is when you're in the world, when you're a monk, you're getting cleansed a lot every day. When you're in the world, it's it's described in India as to a dirty elephant. So the elephant goes and bathes in the water and then it rolls in the mud. And then it bathes in the water and it rolls in the mud and it does this all day. So that's what we're doing. When we have impure and pure motives, we're doing both. But guess what? When you're aware and you start being honest with yourself and what you just did was beautiful. You're like, this, I'm not going to be in denial. I'm not going to let myself delude myself. And what happens with that greater self-awareness, you'll get closer and closer and closer to being able to do things with a purer motive.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  And that may mean at some point that you're like completely going to detach from ads or sponsorships or whatever it may be. But that won't just happen if you stop that. That desire doesn't go away just because you don't externalize it.

• 1:32:38Rich Roll?

  Well, the irony is that the more, the more service-minded I am and the more pure I am in my approach, the better it all is. And that ends up being more enriching.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:32:51Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? So you can make the argument that, that somebody should be selfless and in service for selfish motives. Like you can be, like, if I, if I'm trying to appeal to somebody who is a selfish person, the appeal is, well, if you're in service to people, your life will improve. So even if you're doing it for selfish reasons, it's still the right thing to do.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. Exactly. That's it. That's exactly it. Hit the nail on the head. That's it.

• 1:33:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  That's it. And if that's what gets you started, hey, that's what gets you started.

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  So what trips you up? I'm like, now you're in the world, you're very successful, you've got a million things going on. The book's coming out, your, your videos are, you know, you've got billions of views and all this kind of stuff. I would imagine your life is lined with, with spiritual minefields all the time, right? I mean, you're being, we're all being tested, but you know, what are the tests that you're facing? And where do you still find yourself tripping yourself up? What is it that you're continually having to revisit?

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think the biggest test is, so since I turned eighteen, I've always had my two-hour meditation practice a day. And when I was a monk, obviously, we did more, but the majority of the quality of it happened in the day, in the morning. For me now, with my crazy schedule, one of the biggest things being tested is my routine, my, my depth, my quality. And, you know, in, in, in the modern world, people may say, oh Jay, you meditate for two hours. My, my monk teachers would say, how deep were those two hours? Like, they don't care about the two hours. You know, they, they, they're talking about depth and quality, not quantity. So for me, the quality and quantity of my meditation is constantly being tested because there are supposedly more important things that I have to do,

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  whether it's social media, whether it's audience, whether it's writing, whether it's doing, right? Instead of being. And so my being is challenged. And that to me is the, the biggest thing that I have to watch out for constantly is when I'm traveling, I have to prioritize my routine. When I'm moving around and I'm waking up later than I always am, or I'm on a plane for too many hours a day, I can't let go of that. And I think that I'm sharing that as a very real battle right now because that's what I'm grappling with. And so for me, that's, that's a big one. And, and I really think that my meditation is the, uh, is, is where the purity comes from. Like, that's my bath. That's my purity bath every day. Like, you, you miss your bath, like, you'll smell, it's the same thing.

• 1:35:13Rich Roll?

  Well, it's rigged that way. I mean, all this, all the being got you to this place to where now you don't have time for the being because it provided you with so many gifts and opportunities.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  Correct. And so I'm just very, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm saying this as much to answer your question as I am for my own vigilance. Like, the more I say this, the more I verbalize it, the more vigilant I become.

• 1:35:35Rich Roll?

  Well, Goggins would just tell you to wake up earlier.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, like, I mean, that, that's part of it. But I think it depends how, and, and you may find this, I find that mentally creative careers or purposes are different and, and they require good sleep. Uh, and so I'm, I'm a big believer, I'm a big believer in eight and a half hours of sleep. I sleep eight and a half hours a day. Um, I'm sleeping before midnight, usually by nine thirty, ten P M. To get my HGH, uh, to be maximized. And I think people, I know a human growth hormone for anyone who doesn't know, but I'm sure your whole audience would know, but sleeping after twelve. Your human growth hormone is not having the moment that it could have. And so you're limiting the quality of your sleep when you sleep after midnight. So for me, I'm, I'm, I'm a big believer in figuring out your routines.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  So that's one thing, that's one thing that I'm challenged by. Another thing that I'm challenged by is, and I'm trying to share, I want to give you real ones that, that I'm grappling with rather than the obvious, easy ones of like, oh, there's so many opportunities and what to say no to and stuff like that. But I'd say another one is, is finding spiritual community. So finding deep community, I think, I've been very fortunate. I think LA has been good to me and we've made some really amazing friends here. But I think I go back to India every year to live with the monks. I take my wife as well. We go together every year. And that for me is my reconnection to remind me of how important that practice is. Because even while I'm here and I'm like, oh, I'm doing all right.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  I've been meditating every day. I'm doing good, I'm doing good. And then you go back and you go, oh, wow. Like, you know, there's so much more that I've totally missed. So that kind of reawakening and humbling every year is really powerful for me. When you go and meditate with the experts and you're like, oh, okay, I get it. Yep, I've got a lot of work to do. And I think that looking in the mirror, and, and you can only look in the mirror when you're surrounded by people who are, who are practicing with greater depth. And so I think that, that's a real challenge as well of surrounding yourself with people who, uh, who, who are aspiring for the same levels of depth.

• 1:37:41Rich Roll?

  Right. And it goes back, you know, to kind of reiterate your sliding doors example to this experience you had, this blessing of being exposed to this monk at an impressionable moment in your life. Like, had that not happened, your life would have had a completely different flavor to it.

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:37:58Rich Roll?

  And it, it, it goes to this point of, you know, not only seeking out mentors, but putting yourself in a position where you're exposed to different ideas, right? Like, you can't model or become something that you're not exposed to.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. No, you can't. And, and that's the biggest thing, right? We've, we've all heard it before. You can't be what you can't see. And, and I think we don't. See, if you don't see enough of something, you don't realize how important it is. And that's why, I mean, the biggest, the biggest monk approaches to everything are so powerful. Like, we talk about routines. Monks have incredible morning routines. Mindfulness and meditation practices. We know that, you know, some of the most successful people in the world, and you've interviewed some of them, and I've interviewed some of them, and they've all got a deep meditation practice. You know, breath work is so powerful. Like, I'm, I'm breaking this all down in the most simplest ways of how, even just self and service, like that to me as a concept of how monks live their lives of half self, half service.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Like, all of those are such brilliant, uh, foundation points of, of how we can construct our lives uh, to find peace and to, and to, to live with purpose. Like, there, there are these simple constructs that we can all adopt.

• 1:39:10Rich Roll?

  Clarity is a superpower.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:39:14Rich Roll?

  As said by somebody we both interviewed, Yuval Noah Harari.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  Love you, right?

• 1:39:18Rich Roll?

  Who also has a, you know, strong meditation practice.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  He's a sixty day, he goes away, I think this year he did thirty, or did he do sixty? He was telling me, we were talking just before, and he, he told me he used to do sixty days, and now because of his busy schedule, he still does thirty days.

• 1:39:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Every year. And, yeah, and I love that about him.

• 1:39:33Rich Roll?

  And, and he will tell you, and I'm sure he told you as well, that his books are a product of that practice. Like, because he requires that level of solitude to develop the clarity that's necessary to write his books, which really are these ten thousand foot perspectives on how we live.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah.

• 1:39:54Rich Roll?

  And it's one thing to be on a Vipassana meditation or in an ashram where you're stripped away of those distractions, but, you know, we live in, in a world where the noise is overwhelming. And the distractions are not only omnipresent, they're, they're specifically constructed to be as highly addictive as possible. And this is an interesting dynamic because your work requires you to have distance from those things, but you leverage those mediums to basically, you know, to have this career that you have.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and I think that it's a, it's a beautiful thing because... The tools are not gonna go away. And social media is not going to go away, so learning how to use it effectively. Like, I was just listening the other day, I really wanna interview him too. I was just, I watched an interview with Jake, uh, Joe, uh, J. Cole the other day. I mixed him up with a football player nearly, but J. Cole, the rapper.

• 1:40:50Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  I don't know if, yeah.

• 1:40:51Rich Roll?

  I know he is.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  His music's fantastic. And I was watching an interview, he's very reflective. And, and he was saying that he took a break from social media to get away. And he realized that when he came back, nothing went away. And, and, and, and this was the point that I'm making, that learning how to engage is more important than disengaging. And this is something that's missed. Disengaging is the first step to reengage more effectively. It is not the step and the final step. And I think a lot of us look at disengagement as the achievement or the final step, when actually disengagement is the beginning step of effective re-engagement. Does that make sense?

• 1:41:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I like that, actually.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  And, and I think that that's the mistake people make. People say, oh, I went on my social media seven day fast, I'm gonna be brilliant when I come back. No, because you haven't still figured out how to reengage. When I became a monk, it disconnected me from the noise. But my re-engagement into society has been more powerful because of the disconnection, but not seeing the disconnection as an end. And so, when you decide to disengage from anything, learn that actually re-engaging is the skill you want to develop. When you learn how to re-engage, reconnect, renew, like, when you can do all of that effectively, that's when you win the battle. So for me, what helps me re-engage with social media is, first of all, I am a creator, not a consumer.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  I consume to create, or I create and I don't consume. So what I mean by that is, when I come onto social media, I'm going there to share or to infuse energy. I don't go there to get energy. And if I go there to consume, it's to learn to create better. So that's a very clear rule for me. I'm not a consumer of social media.

• 1:42:34Rich Roll?

  You're not scrolling and looking at what everyone else is saying.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Not in an unintentional way. Like, I may follow you to see if you've interviewed someone and I'm like, oh, Rich asked that really good question. I won't ask that question, I can ask it from this angle, so that that will help my audience. Right? Like, that's, that's consuming to create. Or, oh, Rich got that amazing guest, like, maybe I should reach out to him. You know, that kind of like, and so. I think being a consumer is important to being a creator, but it is not consuming just randomly and unintentionally. And even if I'm being random on social media, it's intentional. I'm like, I'm going random to see what comes up on my feed because I want to see what's winning. So that's one point. The other barrier that I've made is me and my wife have created no technology times and zones in the home. And we break this all the time, but it's a good rule.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  So we decided that we would not have phones. And I recommend this, to have phones in the dining room or the bedroom, because it's more fun to eat and sleep with people. So don't, you know, don't ruin those spaces where there's time for bonding and connection and conversation. And I think most people these days are sitting in their beds, on their phones, on their devices, and then go to bed, right? Rather than talking or reflecting on the day or asking someone how their day was, whatever it is that you want to do. So I feel like creating barriers and times have really helped me. And even if I fail at it sometimes and we don't always follow it, it's still a useful thing to have. The other thing I have is I make sure, and this has changed my life, just don't look at your phone in the morning, like that. Just the morning time is so powerful.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  So I wake up at six on my best days, and that's my generic across the board, five days a week. And I don't look at my phone until eight fifteen when I go down to the gym, because I'm meditating in the morning and I've got my personal practices. So that, just not looking at the phone in the morning, you're already now not starting the day as a consumer, you're starting the day as a creator.

• 1:44:25Rich Roll?

  I think I heard you say that you locked your phone in your car.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  It's true. It's a true story. So I literally, that was when I came back from being a monk. So when I came back from the ashram and I moved back in with my parents, I used to leave my phone and my laptop in the car, locked in the trunk outside, because I knew that if I kept it downstairs, I would trick myself into going to get it.

• 1:44:45Rich Roll?

  Even after three years at the ashram?

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  Even after three years at the ashram, because that's how this stuff is designed. But again, it was disengaging to learn how to reengage. And reengagement means rules. You have to set rules for yourself. You have to set rules that you can follow and rules that you can commit to. I think the simplest one for me is if you don't like, and I don't know how you live, but I, I live like in a, my, my life is very scheduled by the minute and the hour, even if it's free time or reflection time. And I like living like that because it doesn't give me an excuse. I don't really have many gaps in my day where I can just aimlessly do stuff.

• 1:45:24Rich Roll?

  Well, it takes the decision fatigue out of everything.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:45:27Rich Roll?

  I mean, one hard and fast rule that I have that I break fairly regularly is I never schedule anything before 12.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:45:36Rich Roll?

  So my morning time is meditation journaling and then I go out and I train and that's usually, that's, that's my solitude. That's an active version of meditation that involves trail running or, you know, going swimming or whatever I'm doing. But I give myself like, that seems very indulgent to most people and I have the privilege of being self-employed, so I can do that. And I understand most people can't do that. But by adhering to that rule, like I, you know, people will say, oh, can you do this conference call at nine in the morning? I was like, no, I'm not available until 12. Sometimes I, I, you know, I have to bend for that or whatever, but by making that kind of a parameter and a priority, that's improved my life tremendously.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, that's beautiful. And, and I think that, like you said, if there are people out there who can't make those decisions, make it in the power that you do have. So if that for you is you don't do anything before nine AM or if, if your idea is you don't do anything on Sunday before noon, you know, whatever it is, like find your mini version of that and see how that changes your life. You may not be able to do it to the degree of saying, I'll never do anything before that time, but you can do it one day a week. You can do it for an hour a week. You can do it for 10 minutes a week. Like that expands. I feel like the better we use our time, the more time expands for us. And I think we feel time is limited because we often don't use our time effectively.

• 1:47:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. One thing I wanted to touch on with you is this idea of, of element, environment and energy.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So I talk about how

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  There are, yeah, there are three things that we're all missing in our lives or we're not aware. It's self-awareness. So the first is our element and that to me is your, your Dharma, your passion, your calling. It's when you feel you're performing at your best. It's what, what, what power, uh, what power situation, but not, not external, but what power mode do you find yourself in? So I love being in this mode. I love speaking on stage. I love reading, studying and learning. I love writing. I love synthesizing. Like that's my power mode. That's my element. I love being in that element. Now, that comes with figuring out your Dharma and your passion and your purpose and everything we spoke about. The second area of environment is what environment do you thrive in?

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Now, the reason why I fell in love with your home is because I love solitude and I love silence and I love being alone. And so right now it's just me and you and I was just like, wow, like this is really nice. And so my, I have an office for my team, but I work from my home office. Because I don't like being around lots of noise and people. Now you gotta manage all these people. Yeah, exactly, but. Driving the big social media machine. Yeah, and it's hard. And so, you know, and I'm still, and this is what I mean by this is a challenge, right? Do you protect your purpose or do you give in? This is exactly it's like, I have to work from home because that is who I am. I, I love being alone to create. I need time. I need space. I need, I don't, I, I can't deal with too much distraction. I don't enjoy it. And so I've had to craft my life in a way to do that.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  And I, and just, just to clarify, when I was at Accenture, I did not have my own office. I did not have a corner office. I did not have any office. I worked on the floor and I was able to do this then by putting on my headphones. Or by being very careful about who I spoke to and who I connected with, or finding a space where I could build my own. So you can craft these spaces too, even if you don't have them. Uh, but. Environment, it's really important to know what environment you thrive in because I think for most of us, our environment is just something we accept based on what we get. And we're not good at crafting. Environment could be something as simple as playing the right song. It could be having the right background on your desktop because it brings you to life. It could be having crystals in front of you. This is an environment. When

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  I walked into there, I was like, oh, books and crystals, my kind of, my kind of table, you know, it's like, there's so much, this is an environment and everyone can create their environment, whether they're at an office desk, whether they're in a cubicle, whether they're on the train, you have to create that environment. And finally, it's what energy do you vibe with? And what I mean by that is, you can look at it as simple as fast-paced energy or slow energy, but you can also look at it as frequency of, do you succeed and are you more challenged when you're around people that are teaching you and guiding you? Or do you succeed in an energy that is where you're teaching? Like, knowing your energy of, of power is so important. And I feel

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  for so many people, their energy is low because they're constantly in low-energy spaces. So, places like bars and restaurants every day, of course you feel tired, of course you feel exhausted, of course you don't feel energized in the morning. It's probably one of the worst ways to end the day. And we think that it's decompressing. And actually, no, it's just depressing, right? It's like, there's no decompression, there's just depression that comes with that because you just get exhausted and your body and your mind are now dealing with what's called cognitive load. Because your mind in a bar is not only trying to listen to the person talking to you, your mind is trying, your brain is trying to process all the other cluttered sound because it's trying to make sense of it.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  Now, guess what? Your brain doesn't realize for a long time that there is no sense in it. Because it's still trying to process, process, process. So it's getting drained. And so you have to know what energy you thrive in. And if you need a day to take care of your energy every week, you have to invest in that.

• 1:51:04Rich Roll?

  Well, I think answering those questions, like grappling with like, what is the energy in which I thrive? What environment suits me? You know, what is my element? All of this goes back to self-awareness.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Totally, all of it.

• 1:51:15Rich Roll?

  You know, I think if you ask most people, what kind of environment do you thrive best in? I would venture to imagine that most people aren't really sure.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  They don't know.

• 1:51:23Rich Roll?

  How to answer that.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  They don't know. And my answer to that is that that's what I expect. And that's why I'm encouraging that because I'm not trying to give you the answers for you because I don't know and I can't know and no one can know. But what I do know is that if you ask yourself the right questions more often, you will very quickly find out, just like everyone knows whether they like Mexican food or not. It's the same thing. It's not complicated. Like, it's really that simple. It's like you know whether you like Mexican food or not. Okay, you like Mexican food? Do you like burritos or tacos? You know the answer to that. Like, it's not complicated. And it's the same with energy and environment and element. It's just no one's ever asked us. No one's ever asked us, what's your favorite energy? Right? Imagine being on a first date and someone goes to you, what environment do you thrive in? No one asks that. Everyone asks, what's your favorite color? What's your

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  favorite food? What's your favorite movie? Start applying that same questioning to how you live your life. Ask that about people you meet. When you, you literally, I remember, I was given a very interesting offer once by a very wealthy individual. And, and I remember, and it would have been very lucrative for me. And I remember coming back from that evening and speaking to a very dear friend of mine. And he was like, how did it go? Because I was very excited for that meeting. It was very early in my career. I was very excited for that meeting. I don't think I'd ever met someone of that caliber before. And it was, it was quite a moment for me. So I told him how excited I was. And when I come

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  back, when I got back, he said to me, like, so how did it go? And I said, I said, I don't think I'm gonna work with him. And he was like, why not? It sounds like an amazing opportunity. It's lucrative, everything. I was like, I just didn't vibe with this energy. Like, there was just something about it that just, I didn't feel like, I felt like if I failed. He'd, he'd say, I told you so. And if we won, then he'd take the credit. And I just, that's not the kind of partnership I like. I like partnerships which are win-win, where we're supporting each other. And so it's so easy to judge that, but you'll forget that if you don't ask yourself when you walk out. See, when we walk out of parties, we talk about the food and the drink. We talk about what people were wearing. All useless information. We rarely go, do I like hanging out there? Or do I not like hanging out there? Do I feel energized or do I not?

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Those are much better questions to ask than, oh, did you like her shoes?

• 1:53:34Rich Roll?

  Well, expanding that level of self-awareness to better understand how other human beings operate is incredibly valuable, especially if you're in a relationship. Like, if you're somebody who, who, you know, needs solitude, like you said, that doesn't mean that the person that you're with thrives in that dynamic. Like, that person may need something different. And being able to, like, you know, grok that will provide you with incredibly powerful and important relationship tools to maintain that relationship. Otherwise, if you're expecting them to process in the way that you do, you're setting yourself up for a lot of problems.

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. So for me and my wife, it's a really good point, Rich. I'm really glad you raised that. For me, for me and my wife, she succeeds and thrives when she's around her friends and family. And I succeed and thrive when I'm, when I'm on my own, or with her, but on my own in terms of a creative way. And so we know that when I want that time, that's when she usually goes back to London and spends time with her family. Or when she wants to go spend time with her family in London, or has her friends over here, that's when I'm gonna get more time to do that. And so we found that we both require very different things, but we've tried in our relationship to time them, her for me and me for her, time them at the same time so that we both get that. And, and so I can be traveling alone. Like, I just went to New York for a week,

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  but she was here and her friends had moved into our place for, for a week with her. You know, it's like, it's, it's finding out the things that work and, and it's you supporting them to have that environment and they support you to have your environment.

• 1:55:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  Rather than like you saying, oh, well, I like being alone, so you should be okay being alone too. Like, we both know that doesn't work.

• 1:55:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Respecting that and also understanding that, um,

• 1:55:20Rich Roll?

  That person has their own independent experience. And, and, and being in a place where, a healthy, a healthy place where you're trying to support that person in their own personal self-actualization journey, as opposed to making it like a compliment to your own journey, I think is important, right?

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:42Rich Roll?

  It's important to be, to have your independence within a relationship and not be overly defined by the other person.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%, yeah, couldn't, couldn't agree more. And I think with, with couples, that's the challenge. We look for similarities in likes and dislikes. You know, when you, when you're dating someone or you're meeting someone, you're always like, oh, do we like the same food? Do we like the same things? Do we both like being alone? Do we both like this? And you look for likes and similarities on quite superficial things that are not actually relevant to the quality of a relationship. What's, what's really the heart of a quality of a relationship is, do you have the same likes and dislikes as to how to build a relationship in terms of your values about a relationship?

• 1:56:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's about values.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27Rich Roll?

  I mean, you, you can be, me, my wife and I are completely different in so many ways.

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  Me too, yeah, us too.

• 1:56:32Rich Roll?

  A lot of people are shocked that, that it works. And I mean, we've been together for 20 years.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  Congrats, man, that's amazing.

• 1:56:39Rich Roll?

  We figured a few things out, but it's because we share core values, even though from, you know, and from a surface perspective, we look very different.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and core values, not just from the point of view of the deeper thing that builds you both, but I mean, core values of how you view a healthy relationship.

• 1:56:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Like, me and my wife both view a healthy relationship as one where we support each other to reach our own goals. That's a value in a relationship. It's not even just a value. Another value of ours is that we both know that we can trust each other, that we're always acting for each other's benefit, right? That's a value. We both share that. We both share the value of, once you sleep on it, it's done. We both have that. So when we've fought about something or we've disagreed about something, when we've gone to sleep, the next day, we're not bringing it back up as, as ammunition. It's gone. And we both had that value before we met. And so those are relationship values. And that's what you need, values that are similar, or not just values in, oh, we both value spirituality.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  That's, that's there, but this is a deeper level of that.

• 1:57:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not about avoiding conflict or not arguing or not having fights over things. It's about how you process that and communicate to get to the other side and minimize the half-life.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, John Gottman, whose institute is phenomenal.

• 1:58:01Rich Roll?

  He's amazing. Have you been to the Gottman Institute?

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  I haven't been yet. I met at a conference that we both spoke at. I can't wait to have him on my podcast. But John Gottman's done all the research on relationships and he talks about the number one skill needed to have a long-lasting relationship is not date nights, it's not walks on the beach, it's not flowers, it's learning how to fight.

• 1:58:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  And when I read that in his work, I was just like, that is so true. I love that. Because you are going to fight, but most people don't know how to fight. And just as there's love languages, what Gary Chapman so beautifully explained, I believe that there are fight languages. And what I mean by that is there are fight responses or languages that you naturally have. So for example, my wife's fight language is she likes to be quiet, reflect and think, and not talk about things until she processes. My fight language is totally the opposite. I want to figure it out right now. I want to open up. I want to extrapolate. I want to break it down. Guess what? In the beginning of our relationship, that really didn't work. Because she was quiet and I was like, why are you quiet? Why are you not telling me what's going on? Have I done something wrong?

• 1:59:07Speaker 01

  And I'd be forcing her to share it and then she would share prematurely and feel like she said something she didn't mean now. And now I'm upset at what I forced her to share with me. And so we really had to learn each other's fight languages. And I've learned that her fight language is better than mine. And so now the approach is she needs space, I need space, and we come back together and discuss it when we're both ready. And it sounds basic, but so many relationship issues occur because people's fight languages don't match.

• 1:59:33Rich Roll?

  Mindful fighting.

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  Mindful fighting, yeah. Fight for love.

• 1:59:36Rich Roll?

  Fighting is the antithesis of mindfulness in the sense that you're being reactive in the moment. Like something comes over us and we're just spouting whatever and we're repeating these recursive patterns that are embedded deep within us. And to the extent that you could take a step back and deploy the skills that you learn through meditation and the experiences that you had in this ashram to create distance between. Your impulse and the next best move, you're taking out an insurance policy for a better outcome.

• 2:00:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that. It's really well said.

• 2:00:13Rich Roll?

  So let's round it out by like talking a little bit more about the book. I mean, the book hasn't come out yet, so I'm only seeing it for the first time here, but I'm excited for you, man.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Thank you, man. I'm really excited about it. Yeah, the book's like, really breaks down everything that you, it's got all the stories that can inspire and uplift you. It's got all the studies that back up every piece of monk wisdom that I've ever learned, and it's got all the strategies on how to actually do it. And I've got action tips, habits, and reflection questions at the end of each chapter. So it's a, it's a workbook, like it's practical. You can get stuck in. It's not, it's not just text. And, and yeah, at the end of every chapter, you'll see the reflection questions and habits that you can take on. And there's loads of rules and principles and tools. It's, it's a toolkit. It's the monks, it's the monks school toolkit.

• 2:01:01Rich Roll?

  Identity, negativity, fear, intention, purpose, routine, ego, gratitude. I mean, you know, it's a 360 approach.

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, you know, for me, it was like, how do I present the path? My first book, I was like, and I'm gonna write many, so this is the first of many, but I was like, how do I create the path? The, the full path for people in my first book? That was the goal of it. And, and yeah, that's, I'm really proud of it. I'm really, I really feel that if anyone's benefited from this podcast, my podcast, if anyone's benefited from my videos, then I genuinely believe that this is a very natural next step for people.

• 2:01:39Rich Roll?

  Cool. How has the podcast been going?

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  It's been fun, man. It's, it's, so we only launched.

• 2:01:45Rich Roll?

  You've been doing it for a little over a year, right?

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  Just over a year, exactly. February 14th, last year, 2019, we launched. It's easily the most fun I have in my life, just like this was. But you know, I've been. A part of me has not been on to many podcasts because I was waiting for my book to come out. And so I realized how much fun I have also not being the host.

• 2:02:05Rich Roll?

  It's so much easier to not be the host.

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  I've had so much fun today. I'm like, this has been like, I've had revelations sitting here. I've said things I've never said before. I need to go back and listen to some of the stuff I said to help me. I can need to go listen to some of the stuff you said, like, it's been so fun. And I'm like, oh, I need to do this more.

• 2:02:23Rich Roll?

  Well, I appreciate you coming here to talk to me. You're an inspiration to me and to millions of people out there. The content that you're putting out into the world is definitely raising the vibration of consciousness. And that's what we need now more than ever. We need to bridge these gaps and learn how to communicate. Long form conversations are one way to do it. The videos and everything that you kind of, you know, produce as, as really like a spiritual offering to the world, I think is, is a gift. So thank you for that. And I'm excited to see how this book is received by the world and, and what you decide to do next, my friend. And you've always got a welcome seat across from me here.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  Thank you, man. I was also gonna say, you've, I've been schooled today on how to host a really good podcast. This has been, from a veteran, this has been a lot of fun and it's, yeah, you're brilliant to talk to, man. I've really explored so many things today. So thank you so much for helping me re-explore and, and learn and question so many of my own beliefs and values. So I really appreciate anyone who can help me do that.

• 2:03:22Rich Roll?

  Thanks, man. So the book is Think Like A Monk, available everywhere. Support your local booksellers, but you can also, of course, always get it on Amazon. You can learn more about Jay at jshetty.me. He's a beast on Facebook, which is interesting because it's like, I thought we were done with Facebook, but you're like huge on Facebook. That's a whole other podcast. Just Google Jay Shetty. You can find him everywhere.

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  Thank you, man. Thank you so much, mate. Appreciate it.

• 2:03:47Rich Roll?

  Hey, we didn't even talk about being vegan.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  We didn't.

• 2:03:50Rich Roll?

  We'll do that next time.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, next time. Yeah, we've got a lot more. We should do more stuff together regularly.

• 2:03:54Rich Roll?

  Right on.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 2:03:59Rich Roll?

  Good times. Hope you guys got a lot out of that. Jay is quite an interesting, compelling individual. We all could use a little bit more of his sagacious wisdom in our lives, I suppose. So to get your daily dose, you can follow him on Instagram, @JayShetty. You can find him on Facebook or on YouTube, where he shares all his amazing video content. You can listen to his podcast, On Purpose. And of course, pick up his new book, Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose. As always, links to everything in the show notes, which you will find on the episode page at ritual.com. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Definitely subscribe to our YouTube channel.

• 2:04:42Rich Roll?

  We're sharing more and more video content there and really enjoying that. You can share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. You guys already know that. I don't know why I have to remind you of that. I love seeing all the shares out there when you tag me. And you can support us on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who endeavored, who toiled, who worked hard to put on today's show. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for videoing and editing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for portraits. DK David Kahn for advertising relationships and theme music. By Tyler, Trapper, and Hari. Thanks for the love, you guys. I appreciate all of you.

• 2:05:23Rich Roll?

  I do not take your attention for granted, and I will always, always endeavor to improve my craft, to bring you the best, most high-vibe content I possibly can. Until next time, peace, plants, namaste.