How to Unlearn: Humble The Poet On Simple Truths For A Better Life

We craft our identity around story. And that story is comprised of beliefs. But you are not your beliefs. And that story isn't just incomplete, it's generally wrong. The path to self-actualization requires deconstructing that story. And disentangling your beliefs from the truth of your highest self. To do this we must unlearn much of what we reflexively accept as truth. And open ourselves to a more expansive perspective. My guest for this exploration is the Toronto-based, rapper, author and spoken word artist, Kanwer Singh, known broadly as Humble The Poet. Covered in tattoos, a thick beard, and Sikh head wrap, Humble commands attention with his silly smile and warm, inviting presence. A former school teacher turned artist, he challenges conventional wisdom with dynamic live sets that simultaneously entertain while questioning the status quo. Humble shares his distinctive style and point of view on his wildly popular blog. He's been featured on a multitude of media outlets, including CBC's Canada Reads, as well as on Apple's first Canadian ad spot for their #ShotOnIphone campaign. He's the author of Unlearn: 101 Simple Truths for A Better Life* and the upcoming book, Things No One Else Can Teach Us*, hitting bookstores everywhere October 15, 2019 and available for pre-order now. Flipping the script for happiness, Humble's point is simple — our hardest moments are our greatest teachers, because they invite us to change our perspectives. We can't control the setbacks in life but we do have the power to control how we react to them. It's a process that begins with unlearning what we think we know. And being open to a new story — about ourselves, others and the world we share. This is a fun and wide-ranging conversation about that very shift. Sharing raw and honest stories from his own life — from his rocky start to becoming a rapper to nearly going broke to his worst breakups — it's an exploration of how a change in mindset can radically alter our outlook. It's about arresting our negative impulses to see the positive opportunity in everything. It's about the power of gratitude and mindfulness. It's about art, creativity, and authenticity. It's about the difference between paying attention and getting attention. But mostly, it's about the power of story. How you are not your beliefs. What we all may need to unlearn. And how a change in perspective about one's own story can transform everything. The visually inclined can watch our entire conversation on YouTube here: bit.ly/humblethepoet461 (please subscribe!) Humble brings great energy. I loved learning about his life and experience. And I sincerely hope you enjoy the listen. 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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• 1:05Speaker 01

  Many of us have a lot of tools and personality traits that were probably beneficial to us at different times in our lives. You know, I grew up in a challenging neighborhood. The way I had to act, the way I had to maneuver back then doesn't apply where I am now in my life, or even apply when I was a teacher. You know, I grew up in a high school where making eye contact meant you wanted to fight. But working as a teacher, you're supposed to make eye contact and say good morning to everybody. So, learning certain things and realizing that, hey, you have to let go of a lot of these things, and understanding that these things, many of them, you know, were socialized into us, and we have to not simply look at this debate of nature versus nurture and see how they both work together.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  So, for me, Unlearn was the idea that we can let go to really gain more from our lives, as opposed to acquiring some new mystical skill that people have yet to tell us, and it's a secret. But we are constantly growing, evolving beings, and we can't remain stagnant. So, Unlearn for that, I took it from a perspective of not to make it about myself, but to help people, you know, use my abilities to put words together to help other people figure out their own situations.

• 2:14Rich Roll?

  That's Humble the Poet, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:30Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, what's happening? How you guys doing? My name is Rich Roll. I am your friendly podcast host. This is my show. Welcome or welcome back. Today, my guest is Conwar Singh, aka Humble the Poet, as he is known to most people. Based in Toronto, Humble is a former teacher turned rapper, spoken word artist and author, who's known for his very distinctive style. This is a guy who rocks lots of tattoos. He's got a long beard, a head wrap, this infectious silly smile, and he's constantly putting out into the world positive uplifting messages. And this point of view that I think is fair

• 3:10Rich Roll?

  to say at times challenges conventional wisdom, shakes convention, and once in a while goes against the grain. Humble has been featured on popular television programs such as CBC's Canada Reads. He was featured in Apple's first Canadian ad spot for their Shot on iPhone campaign. He is the author of a book called Unlearn: 101 Simple Truths for a Better Life, which is really a great read. And he has a new book coming out in the fall entitled Things No One Else Can Teach Us, which you can preorder now. Humble came on my radar, I don't know, a year or so ago. I got hip to his Instagram. I just loved what he was putting out in the world, and I thought he would make a great podcast guest. And I think

• 3:55Rich Roll?

  I was correct in that intuition. So, a little bit more about him coming up in a couple few, but first.

• 4:09Rich Roll?

  Okay, Conwar, Humble the Poet. So, this is a really fun conversation. We talked about lots of stuff. We talked about the cost of being a free thinker, what it was like for Humble growing up in the Sikh tradition, but also being a kid who loved rap and hip hop. We talk about art generally, creativity, authenticity, and the power of story.

• 4:32Rich Roll?

  We discuss gratitude, mindfulness, the difference between paying attention versus getting attention, and the dark side of social media. And we talk about how you are not your beliefs, and of course, what we all may need to unlearn. I really dug talking to Humble. There's so much wisdom here, so much to learn, so much to unlearn. So without further ado, this is me and Humble the Poet.

• 5:00Rich Roll?

  Tell me what that is on your wrist.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  So it's a kara. So I mean, in Sikh heritage, there's, you know, different articles that people rock. And the kara, historically, they'd wear multiple, you know, going into battle. It's served as a weapon protection and everything else. And then from a spiritual context, I mean, it all depends on who you ask, because everyone has their own context for it. But I've been told when I was a kid, it was your handcuff to the divine. I was also told it was your reminder to be self-aware. I've also been told it's a source of iron, because it's made out of iron, so just rub it in your skin. It's a reminder of infinity, because it's a circle, no beginning, no end, like creation.

• 5:41Rich Roll?

  Is that specific to the Sikh tradition?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's part of that. So normally, it's usually what most people, you know, it's kind of become the cross. In some senses, it's just like...

• 5:53Rich Roll?

  But why only one?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  I used to rock a whole bunch. I mean, I started making a lot of noise when you move around. Yeah. And then I used to have one on this arm as well. Then I think when I first got a tattoo, I think I took it off just for the healing. And then I never put one back on after that.

• 6:09Rich Roll?

  Well, listen, man, really excited to have you here today.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  So grateful to be here, man.

• 6:14Rich Roll?

  Delighted to meet you. Been following your stuff for a long time. And you're somebody, you're just one of those people that is kind of out in the ether. And I'd see your stuff from time to time. And I'm like, that guy's cool, man. Like, he's, he's like, rocking like, an awesome vibe. And kind of made a mental note, like, he'd be awesome for the podcast. But for whatever reason, like, I just didn't, I didn't know you, or I didn't, I wasn't, I mean, our friends' circles, like, overlap. We know tons of the same people.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  And that only got revealed after we connected.

• 6:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know, right?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  It's like, oh, you know, so and so.

• 6:43Rich Roll?

  I know, I know. So I think it was, well, it was Neel Pasricha, who basically then connected the dots for us. He's a good friend of mine.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Who I ran into on a plane.

• 6:51Rich Roll?

  At the airport or something, right?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ended up sitting beside each other on a plane. And then he's just like, oh, you need to talk to Rich.

• 6:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's cool. I want to get Neil on the show too. Amazing author.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:59Rich Roll?

  And then just the other day, you shared our mutual friend, Utkarsh, little clip of him like on stage at TED

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:07Rich Roll?

  With Freestyle Love Supreme.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:10Rich Roll?

  So I, I texted Utkarsh yesterday and I was like, come on, man, you gotta come over. Like Humble's coming over. He wanted to come and hang out, but he had to work this afternoon. So, but he's the best, man.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  He reviews.

• 7:22Rich Roll?

  Like five or six years.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:23Rich Roll?

  And he's been on the podcast.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  We just, we just met at TED.

• 7:26Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did. Oh, so you were there. Were you there in an official capacity? Were you, did you give a talk or?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  I didn't give a talk. I went there as a guest and trying to figure out how to, you know, stand beside the stage and see if they let me on. And.

• 7:38Rich Roll?

  Spontaneously?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like if just one of the speakers just wasn't cutting it and they just grab a hook and just hooked them offstage and I would just run on and be like, hey, guys.

• 7:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  This is my impromptu TED Talk. So I was hoping for that to happen and it didn't happen. But, uh, I think it's just me. I'm obsessed with learning communities. So whether it's TED Talks, Google Zeitgeist, uh, any, I think World Domination Summit is gonna be the next one I attend. Just any, any, anything and anywhere where just people are open to learning new stuff and I can just sit there and just have my biases, challenges, here an idea I haven't heard before. So I try to, I try to wiggle my way into all of this. So this is my second year at TED and, um.

• 8:12Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  I had a mutual friend with Utkarsh and then they're like, hey, you have to, you have to, here, take his number. You gotta find him when you're there.

• 8:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And then we hit it off.

• 8:18Rich Roll?

  He's the dude, man.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  He's the dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Super talented.

• 8:21Rich Roll?

  Um, and World Domination Summit, I spoke at that event a couple of years ago. Uh, it's pretty cool. Like in the world of kind of like big conferences and the like, like Chris really runs an amazing show.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:32Rich Roll?

  You'll enjoy that. But I'm surprised you haven't done a TED Talk.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  I, I've been invited to a couple of TEDx's and I, I think just trying to wrap my head around how the culture works. And I think, um, understanding as well as in addition to my own personal ambitions, what it represents for me, uh, having a turban and a beard, wiggling my way slowly into the mainstream ethos and, and, and how I need to kind of navigate that. So I've been really trying to figure out the best way to, to make that happen and have an impact and learn the, I guess, the subtle nuances of that community and what they're looking for. Cause apparently it's not just as straightforward as, hey, let me just do a TED Talk and they just give you 20 minutes. It's like, it's a little bit more curated than I thought. So I think I'm learning about that. I applied to be a fellow last year. I didn't make it. I'm gonna apply again this year and see what happens.

• 9:19Rich Roll?

  Well, on that subject of kind of being conscious of your roots and, you know, your heritage, your ethnicity and your heritage and all of that, like, how conscious are you of that in the process of, you know, creating the art that you create? Like, is that a, is I guess what I'm getting at is sort of like, you are who you are, and your ethnicity doesn't, it permeates what you do, but it's not the sort of top-line subject matter, like, in a very, you know, express way. Does that make sense? I didn't say that very articulately. But, you know, it's, it is who you are, and it's the ethos behind, like, everything that

• 10:02Rich Roll?

  you express and your sensibility. But it's not like, you know, you're not using it as a weapon, I guess.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely not. I'm not. I mean, I feel like the times have continually changed to kind of make that happen by itself. I think having Donald Trump as president definitely threw me into a whole different direction, as people started to view me superficially as, oh, this would be a great guy to put front and center. This guy represents everything that we're trying to promote to fight that certain energy. And me being cognizant of that and being like, look, I don't want to just simply become the benefactor of reverse racism now, because all of a sudden, everyone's looking for quote-unquote diversity and inclusion. You know, I, there's substance to what I'm trying to put out there. But I

• 10:50Speaker 01

  think what I also started to realize is now, kind of being in my 10th year as an artist, starting to actually see the cultural impact of my existence for my community, which I wasn't thinking about when I first started. I was just a guy with personal ambitions, trying to make it in music, trying to, you know, impress a couple of girls and have fun. And now, 10 years later, meeting artists and coming across other creatives and them giving me very specific stories about, oh, when you made that song, or when you wrote that post, or when you first released this book, how it impacted me and changed stuff, and starting to see it in the way, you know, people are tying turbans the way I tie it. I met a, I met a kid in New York that had copy Some of my tattoos. There's a guy in India that has my face tattooed on his neck. So you start to realize like there's an impact there.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  And I was heavily influenced by hip hop culture. That's what helped me find my foundation and my self confidence. So now being more mindful of it, not trying to assume some role model role or ambassador role. But more so being like, hey, this is an opportunity because fifteen years ago, when people thought turban and beard, they they thought enemy combatant, they thought terrorist, they thought certain things. And now it's an opportunity where I might not be able to do anything with the older generation. But you know, kids are growing up and if Humble the Poet's their point of reference, then I think that's something very healthy.

• 12:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would imagine as inspiring as that can be for you and as energizing it can be for your art. It also poses the risk or the danger of of causing you to get too much in your head and get overly calculated about what you're doing. You know what I mean? Like, there's a purity in your expression. And once that becomes, not contaminated, that's the wrong word, but kind of influenced by those externalities. Do you do you concern yourself with like, well, if I if I start to think like, well, there's that kid in India and I need to appeal to him? Or it needs to hit these sort of demographics, then you're sort of losing the thread of what makes you, you know, you.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Whenever anything works, whatever I put something out and it works and that gets stuck in your head and that little voice in your head that you should do more of this, you know, whether, you know, the first song I ever released that passed a million views on YouTube, all of a sudden you're like, oh, I should make more of that, even if it was a happy accident.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  That's my personal, you know, challenge that I've enthusiastically approached where it's like, hey, I have to be more free thinking. I have to let go. I have to be less analytical and less strategic and be more of a creative and an artist. I also kind of feel like I see where the energies are headed and things are really kind of heading in the direction I wanted them to head. So when I first published Unlearn, I had swearing in it when I independently published it. And that wasn't something too too common. And then working with my first publisher in in Canada, you know, they were trying to double down on the swearing and they wanted to change the title to put swearing on it. And you're like, whoa, this is a lot different than when I the resistance I first got. So I feel like. The authenticity, authenticity is what people are hungry for.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Uh, it just becomes a challenge when people are manufacturing their authenticity.

• 13:56Rich Roll?

  Authenticity has been co-opted and now it's manufactured.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think for me, for my mental health, I realized that I have to focus on paying attention, not getting attention because getting attention is this uh, peakless mountain that I can continually chase. And now it's like, oh, look at these beautiful flowers. Oh, let me take a picture beside these beautiful flowers to document them. Oh, these beautiful flowers didn't give me the likes I wanted to get. And I think I realized for me, it was like, no, you know what? Instead, pay attention to what you're putting out there and now challenge yourself to outdo your own work uh, from a craft perspective. So it's like, okay, I wrote that. Oh, I had to, I edited that because I didn't want my mom to read that story about myself. Well, now that's what I have to lean into that discomfort and that fear. Um, or hey, people might misinterpret these words and get

• 14:45Speaker 01

  offended. Well, you know what? Let it happen. You know, to be a free thinker, you, you have to run the risk of offending some people. And I think for me, I've been focusing a lot more on that and the craft. And I mean, I'm very fortunate to be one of the only, one of the few people on Instagram that doesn't have to post pictures of himself to, to have a loyal followership.

• 15:05Rich Roll?

  Meaning you're, you share your words.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  I share my words. Yeah. I share my words and, and I got plenty of words.

• 15:11Rich Roll?

  You on there though.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  There's a couple of pictures. If somebody, someone's taking a picture of me and then I, and they send it to me, then, and it, and it looks okay, then I can definitely post that.

• 15:18Rich Roll?

  It's kind of that, that Jay Shetty formula of like quote, image, quote, you know, you mix it up a little bit.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, the grid, the, the wellness grid.

• 15:27Rich Roll?

  Is that what it is? There's a term for that?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I'm, I'm coining it now. If you're feeling wellness, you better get on that grid or.

• 15:34Rich Roll?

  I don't know. That just makes me want to go in the other direction.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then, then you start to ask yourself that question, right? Which is like, why do I not want, why do I need to be different for this? And when I was an elementary school teacher, that was one thing they really put in my head, which was stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

• 15:50Rich Roll?

  Right, but you have to counterbalance that against, there's this formula out here and this is what works. And if you wanna, you know, be seen in this way, this is what you do. And as an artist, isn't it your job to question that and to deconstruct that and? And and say, well, what is my own personal way?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Completely, completely. And I know for me, like when I started to see a lot of those videos, which was like, um, you know, if you're heartbroken, you need to watch this. Or, you know, or

• 16:15Rich Roll?

  I didn't know how much I needed to see this until I woke up.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:19Rich Roll?

  Certain things and you're like, really? All right.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's a little bit clickbaity. And then it's also kind of like, it it turns and I'm I'm also an influencer. So I work with brands and I work with um, agencies and then they send you these white papers that give you all the tips and tricks to like, ensure you have maximum engagement.

• 16:36Rich Roll?

  Oh, really?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  And yeah, and then all of a sudden you start to get these little tips as well. And I guess as that nonstop balancing act of trying to be like, okay, well, I'm I'm existing in this attention economy. And, you know, we're we're kind of governed by these Greek gods known as the algorithms, who don't care how dope our words are. They just care about are we feeding them content, content, content? And then deciding to yourself, okay, how much of this matters? Because this is a never ending journey. You're never going to have enough. The word enough doesn't exist in that space. Um, and I think for me, the question has just been like, are you having fun and figuring it out? So for me, I've been able to kind of participate in that world, but kind of working with other people. I have an assistant now. So now when I write my content, it's an email.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  I'm I'm taking a quote, taking an idea, I type it out in email, I hit send. I don't get any immediate gratification because it doesn't go up maybe for like two weeks.

• 17:28Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  So I don't get any gratification knowing if people like

• 17:31Rich Roll?

  So it goes into some queue and your assistant puts it together and posts it for you?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  It goes into a queue and then my assistant just makes sure there's no spelling mistakes.

• 17:38Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  She makes sure I didn't like repeat the same word too many times. And then she ensures that the grid stays the grid.

• 17:44Rich Roll?

  Wow. How do you uh, how do you balance the the commerce aspect of what you do with the creative aspect?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Um, I think now, as of lately, taking this as my responsibility and not as something I want to do and hope people will allow me to do. Um, realizing that, hey, I'm like, I don't know how to swim. Um, I love to dance, but I'm not a good dancer. Um, you know, I love to sing and I got a decent singing voice, but when I put words together, it helps people understand their own stories. This is my responsibility. This is how I contribute. To this grand scheme and from that you need resources and if you find ways to get those resources, it'll help you amplify this and I live a super simple life. I don't own a car. I float around. I don't really, you know, buy clothes. I make my own stuff and people give me stuff. So it's like, I kind of know my struggling artist days, which was a solid

• 18:37Speaker 01

  five years, really made me an involuntary minimalist and I haven't let that go now that my bank account's in a better situation.

• 18:45Rich Roll?

  Well, there's a freedom with that. Once you realize you don't need all of these things, you're liberated from that. And if you can kind of maintain that, that sensibility, it just opens up doors and possibilities for you because you're not constrained by your material relationships.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's kind of like now, how am I going to use these resources to either amplify the message or further this or take six months off and isolate myself and work on something. And a new idea I heard recently was, you know, go somewhere where your ego has nothing to do. You know, go places where, you know, your ego does not have an opportunity to shine or do something and that's by yourself, where no one's watching. And now all of a sudden, once your ego decides to take a nap because there's nothing there for it to do, you can start that journey of self-discovery. And being, you know, being a realist and focusing on pragmatism, that requires resources as well.

• 19:39Rich Roll?

  Right. But it's also your obligation and your responsibility as an artist. You need that solitude and that reflection and that ability to distance yourself from culture and kind of the gestalt of society in order to have perspective that you can share.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Well, and it was Neil that shared me with one of his great ideas is he devotes two days a week to just spending going on long five hour walks.

• 20:03Rich Roll?

  I know. That's what he does. Like, I'm like, I don't know how he does. Like, he'll send me these long texts and I'm like, I don't have time to respond to this. But he seems to have a lot of time and he's unbelievably productive, like turning out these books and he's like, I was walking through Toronto today and I had this amazing conversation with a shopkeeper and I was like, this is not my life.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. He's efficient.

• 20:22Rich Roll?

  And it's beautiful.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's efficient. He's efficient with the way he's set up his life.

• 20:26Rich Roll?

  And he's a dad. He's got kids. It's not like, you know, he's living, he's some single dude.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got three kids and he's and he's earning money and he's working and but he he set it up in a way where he he sees the the value in these two days a week and he makes it happen and.

• 20:39Rich Roll?

  And that makes his work better.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  That makes his work so much better, yeah. And I think so I I'm I'm taking a lot of cues from him and other artists that I'm seeing who have doubled down on the craft more so than the pursuit of attention and kind of playing the popularity game. Because very quickly, this can just become a a a a bigger example of middle school. Where everyone's just chasing for attention.

• 21:01Rich Roll?

  And it's not only exhausting, it's unsustainable. And ultimately, it works at cross purposes with the ultimate, like if your goal is to really create a legacy and have impact, um you're just burning yourself out. In order to really create something of lasting import, you need that time away and that reflection that we were talking about.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Completely, and you need three days just to let go of some of those inner bullies in your head that are just saying a bunch of stuff like, no, you gotta make this a hit. You gotta get on the New York Times Bestseller list. You gotta you gotta prove that person who didn't return your texts wrong. Like now they're gonna feel bad when they see you on Jimmy Kimmel, like.

• 21:39Rich Roll?

  But then you're just a ping pong ball reacting to your environment all the time. And I know and I say that as somebody who does that. Like, I'm not saying that I've exempted myself from that.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Oh, and I think we're all guilty of it. I think that's where it just takes time for these voices to subside. And it's been, I've become very cognizant of the people I hang out with now because in the beginning, you know, very superficially, people like, well, don't be around negative people. I was like, alright, I'm not around negative people. Well, also, you know, be around people with purpose and who are productive. Like, alright, cool. Some of my sweet, nice friends that that aren't really doing much with their existence, I'm gonna spend less time around. Not that I don't like them, I just need to feed off the energy of others. Now I'm around, you know, ambitious, productive people. But now amongst them, some of them are a little bit too caught up in the game. And I'm like, oh, this is this is rubbing off on me. Cause now they're making me think about things that I was never thinking about. They're making me self-conscious about things.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  I never thought about, you know, had friends worried about being seen sitting in coach on an airplane or friends talking about, oh, we gotta. Oh, we're going to this event? Oh, we gotta, we gotta get the Uber Black. I'm like, why can't we just get the Uber X? No, not, not, not to this one. They had, they can't see this in an Uber. And I was like, okay, there's nothing wrong with this person, but they're, they're getting lost in sauce. I have to find people who, who might not be doing that as much. And I have to kind of control my dosage accordingly. And it's just, it's a never, it's always levels to this and always being cognizant of it. And it does lead back to just much more alone time, which so many people avoid because they don't have that relationship with themselves.

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I think it, it, um, I have a little bit of a countervailing opinion on that, which is that your ability to kind of navigate those different types of people in those circles is contingent upon your spiritual fitness. If you have a porous boundary and you're around negative people or people whose priorities are at odds with your own, then yeah, that's going to seep into your, you know, consciousness and impact your behavior. But if you're like a Jedi master, you can go anywhere. It doesn't matter. And every person that you see or you encounter is a learning experience, a mirror to help you reflect on your own behavior and kind of sharpen the sword of what's most important to you.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  And how we, how do, how do we approach Jedi master and, and from your experience?

• 23:57Rich Roll?

  I don't know. I was gonna ask you that question, man.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  I feel like, the way I always look at it is, um, we, the longer, my mom would so we say, you know, you don't have to be in the fire to get burnt. You'll still feel the heat and, you know, be mindful of your company. And we, and we have an idea called Sangat, which is the congregation. And they always talk about Sat Sangat, Sat being true, uh, being one of the true congregation. My mom always looked at as be around people in the temple who are praying and worshiping. Um, I took it more holistically in being like, you are a product of your environment, no matter where you are. If I spend more time in New York, I'll probably pick up the accent.

• 24:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Um, so I, I guess for me, my boundaries may be rigid and then slowly they become more porous and slowly they get to get chipped away at until I realize that. And I think, um, Bojack Horseman said it well. It's like, um, the LA tar pits is a, is a big analogy for the whole city. It's that you stand in one place long enough, you slowly sink in without realizing it. So that's why I've been doing the fifty fifty is like the moment I catch myself saying something.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  The moment I catch myself describing a dilemma as a problem, then I have to go home. You know, and that's what I what I see out here because when I go home, then I encounter people with real problems.

• 25:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Whether it's health issues, whether it's, you know, dealing with certain traumas or what have you. And out here, sometimes people are like, oh, this person didn't acknowledge me enough. And they're losing their stuff over that, or this girl didn't text me back. And I was like, okay, if I start to validate these as problems.

• 25:30Rich Roll?

  Get out.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  I need to get out. I need to go back to some of the realness and just hang out with my high school buddies.

• 25:34Rich Roll?

  L A is very weird that way, and it's an easy target. It's an easy, you know, destination for a takedown on all of those, you know, for all of those reasons, which are all valid.

• 25:46Rich Roll?

  You know, I found that as somebody who's lived here for a very long time, that there's a lot of beauty here, too, that gets overlooked. I think you just, you have to be a lot more intentional about what you're doing. You go to New York, life happens. It's right in front of you. You can't escape it. You fall into the flow of, you know, whatever's happening just by virtue of being present there.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:06Rich Roll?

  But here, you'll just be, it's it's easy to be incredibly lonely here. And it's easy to fall in with a crowd that you don't resonate with. You have to really spend enough time here to figure out where are my people? Where's the place that I like to hang out and seek those people out? And exert a lot more energy and effort to cultivate that community. And it it takes a lot longer.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. And I think people out here have really forced me to ask myself the question.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  What are my priorities? I think all relationships depend on priorities lining up. And the challenge is, A, you know, if I want to have a relationship with you, whether it's business, whether it's friendship, whether it's romantic, I have to know what your priorities are. I have to know what my priorities are and see if they line up. And that is the whole dance, just trying to figure out what's really important to you. And that might not come out through your words. That might only come through your actions. And then doing the work myself to figure out what's really important to me. And I think coming out here, that that was one of the big challenges because it was a situation where my my, I came out here as a struggling artist. I came out here with with not much. Promise to everything I was working on, not picking up any traction and then

• 27:18Speaker 01

  kind of like, like, like a chicken without its head, just running in any direction. When I saw something working for somebody else, oh, this person is dropping a video every other day. I should just drop videos every other day. Oh, this person is getting involved in this type of project, I should do that. And then having to stop back and being like, is this you? Do you want to do this for the next 10 years, the next 20 years? Are you just trying to do this now because you feel like you need to make a quick buck? And that's when taking that step back, slowing down and then really paying attention to the people I was around and being like, oh, well, this person is doing very well, but they, they're doing something that was fun for them eight years ago. And it's not fun for them anymore, but their audience won't let them do anything else.

• 27:58Rich Roll?

  Right. They become a prisoner of their own sort of system that they set up for themselves.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then I realized that's more important than adding another comma to my net worth. Um, that's more important than getting recognized by peers or acknowledgement by, you know, some award show. And, um, that really started a journey for me and now, and uh, uh, I got dropped off here by my book agent. I had said, I said, listen, now everything I'm going to say to you comes from the idea that I want to have fun. And, you know, I, this is the first time I released a book with a major publisher and some things were completely amazing, some things were, you know, banging my head against the wall and being like, if this is not going to be fun, then we're going to have to explore different routes and, and these are the ideas I think that will make this more of an enjoyable collaborative opportunity. And none of these involve getting a bigger advance.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  These involve more collaboration, more transparency, you know, them being more open to some of my ideas, then presenting less roadblocks when I try to do things on my own. And I think chasing the fun and I, and a big one that I learned that from was Jay Shetty. You know, just really reminding me like, screw the pot of gold, it's all about the rainbow. And if, if the rainbow doesn't sound enticing, then that pot of gold won't make up for it.

• 29:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're seeing a lot of that in the creator community right now, especially with the vloggers, like all these kids that kind of came up doing daily vlogs and, you know, at some point, like it, this is not a sustainable lifestyle. You know, at some point you're going to, you just flame out on that and kind of that moment has arrived for a lot of those people. And you can see them wrestling in different ways with. How to find the best way forward from that, still maintaining their connection with their audience, but not being chained indefinitely to this kind of expectation around their output that is just bananas.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's never ending. Like, you know, back in the days, the first generation of YouTubers was like, drop a video once a week, make some good money and get some great opportunities. And then people came in disrupted that by dropping two videos a week. And now all of a sudden, it's like three videos a day.

• 30:03Rich Roll?

  And they're getting better and better and better. And the pressure to, it's just like, yeah, you can chase that forever. And, you know, so then, mental health becomes an issue with a lot of these people. Then they're coming out and talking about that, which is healthy, obviously, for the ecosystem, but.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  But that in itself can be turned into a commodity, like.

• 30:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, commodifying, like, you know, all these sort of confessional culture of like, you know what I mean? It's crazy, man.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, this is like, yeah, hey, I just want to let you guys know that I'm going to be taking a break because of my mental health. This announcement was brought to you by Audible.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  You know, and you start to see it, like, you know, now it's like, everybody has to come up with that. But, and at the same time, I know it's not all disingenuous. And I'm starting to see now where people are existing in the space where the lines are blurred. Like, I had a friend pass out from like, heat stroke at a concert. And he was a larger dude, and he fell on top of me. And then, like, I caught him, but I fell with him. And then we got him down. And everybody was really kind. And then, while, you know, he was, he was waking up, one of the first questions he asked was like, did you guys get it on camera?

• 31:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, man.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  And I don't take anything away from him as a person. I think he's a wonderful person. But I think it's, the culture out here has kind of normalized it to the point where everything needs to be documented. And nobody questions why anymore. And I have a friend who's a model in Sydney, Australia. And she came out here and she's like, oh, my God, it's so acceptable to just like, carry your tripod around and take pictures anywhere. Like, when I'm in Sydney, they look at me funny. And I was like, I don't know if that's a great, it's probably a great thing if you're a creative consultant and a stylist, and you were too scared to share your stuff when you were in Sydney. And here, people are okay with it. And it's just really trying to find that, because everything can be documented and everything can be used as currency. Our vulnerability can be currency.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  You know, if something happened to us, we can, we can lean on that. And that. Gets people interested, people, we as human beings want to hear stories and as we should. Stories are what pushes us forward. It's just got to a point now where it's like, okay, well, how can I peppers peppers these stories in or add some spice to these stories to make them more interesting? And then you get to yourself to a situation where you're like, well, the last story I told was amazing. What's the next one going to be? Well, maybe if I can't, if I don't have a story, maybe I can create a story. And then I think that's where we get to this manufacturing of authenticity.

• 32:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's it's a pathology, really. You become, you become, you really become a victim of your own life because you're unable to ever be present in the experience that you're having. You're always calculating your next move when everybody is the star of their own personal Truman Show.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:50Rich Roll?

  I mean, really, the litmus test for me is like, why am I sharing it? Like, what is the purpose of sharing this? Is it sharing it to share it? Or is there some message that I'm trying to convey? Or some experience that I had that could be of benefit to other people? But if I don't run that mental calculus and you're just doing it for the purpose of doing it, because you think that's what's important in order to be relevant, then you've lost the plot.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I completely agree, but I also feel like each individual is going to kind of have to go through it themselves and kind of hit that breaking point, hopefully. I mean, I used to, you know, casually take a picture of myself in business class and try to make it look like it wasn't about me being in business class, but it was me taking a selfie, but just making sure the audience kind of knew because I'd get some validation from it. Because in the early years, your fan base is, they're celebrating you like family and friends. So like, oh, our boy made it. Oh, our boy's, you know, getting recognition from the mainstream. Oh, our boy is getting paid to sell Nestle chocolates, you know? In the beginning, you know, it was them watching you kind of grow and then me realizing that,

• 33:58Speaker 01

  hey, is this the message I want to put out there? Is this, you know, I got a 14 year old nephew? Is this what I want him to aspire to? Is these the things that matter? You know, getting to go to the All-Star game and him being really excited because, you know, he's playing basketball. He's like 6'2", you know, young kid. And him being like, oh, man, I wish I was there with you. And me realizing, hey, I'll be more excited when I get to watch you play, you know, and letting him know that that's more important to me than getting to sit courtside this year and being like, hey, those are the things that are going to matter in the long run for me. And that's the idea I want to put with you that despite all these things, that that 1% of each of our lives that we show on Instagram, carefully curated, the stuff that really matters are

• 34:40Speaker 01

  our relationships, the people that we connect with, these new experiences, the opportunities that we have to lean into our discomforts and be guided by our, let our fears not dictate our actions. And we find some growth and some validation that we can continually evolve as people. I think these are the more exciting things, but you can't capture that in a photo, you know, without kind of still sharing the story and having the same narrative of like, you know, people taking pictures and being like, I'm so grateful to have this opportunity to be here. And it's like, are we grateful to be here? Are we grateful to be able to document it and give the impression that we're grateful people?

• 35:20Rich Roll?

  Well, I think there's a difference between, for example, if I was to take a picture of myself sitting courtside at the All-Star Game versus you, I mean, I saw that photo. You're like sitting next to Spike Lee, right? Like right on the court. It's insane. And for a community of young Asians, like, that's very impactful to see somebody who looks like them in a situation that they, you know, that they can relate to as being embraced by mainstream culture has, you know, a sort of, you know, downstream impact on how young northern Indians or Sikhs or anybody from, you know, the part of world from where you

• 36:02Rich Roll?

  come to think differently about their own personal potential.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it eventually turns into becoming, you know, children of the diaspora, where it's just like, hey, my family came from another place and they came here. My parents still think The ways of their old country. I grew up in North America with completely different priorities. I want to do X, Y, Z. My parents want me to do A, B, C. And there's always this clash. And now here's a guy that still, you know, hangs out with his mom all the time. And she, she still wanted him to, you know, get married, have kids and be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, and he went and did a whole bunch of other different stuff, but without conflict. And I think that is, as I said, the cultural, the cultural part of it. And that courtside picture to me is no different than the grid. It's giving them something familiar, something they value. And I learned that after going to a movie premiere.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  And the only, you know, and wanting to be, wanting to acknowledge that I was, I was invited to this movie premiere and give a shout out to the movie. But the only thing that they had, uh, the only signage they had was on a Lamborghini. So they had their, so I took a picture with the Lamborghini. I don't, that's not quote unquote on brand for me. I don't take pictures with nice cars. But the engagement blew up, you know, and realizing that people like, most people, they dig that stuff. They dig fancy stuff. They dig pretty things. They dig shiny things and really trying to deciding, okay, well, how do I put the pill in the applesauce? All right, I took a picture. I was, I was given a picture of me at courtside and with a bunch of very, you know, influential individuals. Now that's the, that's the applesauce. What's the pill? Well, let me write it in the caption.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Let me share my stories. Now let me share stories about things that I've experienced and now how hopefully this can create an impact and, you know, culturally show people, because we're going to get to a point where I will, I won't be the first to do anything anymore. And for South Asians in general, we won't be celebrating the first South Asian to get our own NBC show, the first South Asian to win an Emmy, the first South Asian to win an Oscar. Once we pass that and, and my nieces and nephews, the generation grows up and they're just like, well, we can do anything. And, and that's embedded in the subconscious. You know, the same way a young child of color can believe they can be president because they saw Obama. So I think for me, that cultural impact is important and that does require recognizing

• 38:18Speaker 01

  how these mechanisms work, whether it's considered playing the game to change the game or whether it's considered respecting your environment accordingly and not being too disruptive. But I think it was God Adams that said, in the beginning, you have to give them what they know before you can give them what they need. Yeah. Super interesting.

• 38:47Rich Roll?

  Let's take it back. So you grew up in Toronto.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Born and raised.

• 38:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Your parents are Punjabi.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Punjabi, yes.

• 38:53Rich Roll?

  Your dad had an engineering degree, but was like a cab driver?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  He had a, he had a master's in economics. Yeah. He got a master's degree in economics. Uh, yeah, came to Canada in the early seventies and um, came to Canada to get married. They, his, their generation didn't really have a lot of uh, uh, choice in the matter of what they did with their lives. So his, his parents said like, you gotta move out to Canada. We found a girl for you. You're gonna get married. Arranged marriage.

• 39:19Rich Roll?

  Oh, so the purpose of the move was to, to have an arranged marriage?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the purpose of the move was most likely, um, we found a girl in Canada and I think my mother, before they got married, was already doing the paperwork to sponsor him over. And then, once he was over, he'd be able to bring all his siblings over. So it was very transactional and strategic. Yeah.

• 39:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  So then he came out and then as soon as he came out, he got married and then he started uh, working. He had to start working immediately. And I think he worked in a factory for a bit, a furniture factory, while he was taking the course to get his taxi license. And then, once he got that taxi license, he drove that for the next thirty years.

• 39:58Rich Roll?

  And you're only, only child?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  No, I'm the only boy. I have two sisters, two older sisters, yeah.

• 40:03Rich Roll?

  So you grew up with that uh, sort of educational pressure, expectation, engineer, doctor, lawyer, this is gonna be the path for you?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  That, that's the path. It was uh, very often, my father would always say, as long as you're in school, uh, you don't have to worry about anything. He would always say that. You know, you don't have to worry about money. You don't have to worry about whatever you need, I will give you as long as you're in school. And he was saying this to me when I was like eight. So I was, I was thinking about like pizza lunches and stuff like that.

• 40:30Rich Roll?

  Were you a good student?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  I was a very good student, but I wasn't a hardworking student. It was just, I had the, uh, in just different, we all have different learning abilities and learning styles. Um, so I'm a, I'm an auditory learner and a visual learner. So I can see and learn and I can hear it and learn. Um, most, most people who struggle in traditional schools are kinesthetic. Need to have an opportunity to work with things and manipulate things, which isn't always uh available in the classroom. So I was doing very well all the way up through high school, but not really working hard, yeah. Until I hit university and university requires a little bit more effort than simply brains. And that's when I started to see that I had to step up my my work ethic.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  But yeah, I did very well in school, um got into university, uh did a degree in I T coding, doing all that.

• 41:21Rich Roll?

  Right. So then how do you end up becoming an elementary school teacher?

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Um, so at that point, it was like, hey, let me just do what was what this one, one guy in our family or a family friend. He went and did an undergrad and did an MBA and got a job at Nike and then got a job at Ford. And we're like, oh, that's how you get a job. Like, you know, he said, so I was gonna take that MBA route. And then I was actually watching that television show, Boston Public and and seeing, you know, it's it's it's a TV show about a high school in Boston. And just watching one of the episodes and being like, whoa, thi- this is so cool. It must be so cool to be a teacher. And I was always attending youth camps since I was a kid, um, you know, camps inspired by sick hi- history, sick philosophy. And just kind of where you learn how to read Punjabi, whether you learn the history, where you learn how to sing hymns.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And they were fun. There was like, you know, thirty percent class, eighty percent going canoeing, skating, skiing. So it's like they were fun things. I grew up in them and then I used to volunteer for them. So like by sixteen, seventeen, I was already.

• 42:18Rich Roll?

  Like a counselor.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Like a counselor. So I had a lot of experience with kids and I had had a really good uh repertoire. So it was my sister that said it. She goes, why don't you become a teacher? She goes, you're actually good with kids and you probably have more fun than trying to get your MBA. And then um I didn't know anything about it. Then I I through mutual friends, found somebody who was a teacher. He kind of schooled me to the, well, this is what you're gonna have to do to become a teacher. Applying to teachers college, going through the whole process, forged a bunch of volunteer hours to get it. Cause it was like two months before the before the application process. And then I got in, I got into York University's uh teacher's program, which is a very difficult one to get into. I didn't know how difficult it was to get in. Um, I do suspect a little bit of reverse racism helped me there as well. Um, cause they started to recognize representation mattered and then.

• 43:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Went to teachers college, um, finished that, got hired right before I graduated at an elementary school. And I taught uh the fourth grade for a couple of years and the fifth grade and then the third grade before I left.

• 43:15Rich Roll?

  Wow. So how many years did you do that for?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Uh, five years.

• 43:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:19Rich Roll?

  Those are really interesting ages.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  They are interesting ages, but it taught me a lot. Taught me a lot about how to communicate. It taught me a lot about my own biases because I started to realize that these kids are like literally empty vessels. At that point, whenever they say anything remotely critical or ugly, you can hear they're just parroting their parents. Exactly. And that really made me start to question like, well, how much of me is me? And how much of me is what other people taught me? How much of me is my neighborhood? How much of me is the media? And that's kind of the premise behind Unlearn.

• 43:52Rich Roll?

  Right, those are the initial seeds behind that that were planted that birth Unlearn.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, because once I had left and I I I had left, assuming I got a record deal. So I was like, okay, um, you know, I was.

• 44:05Rich Roll?

  All right, well, let's slow down here. I mean, the first question I have is, when did you did you have, were you a kid who was making music all along and kind of repressing this artistic sensibility that you had because you felt like it didn't fit, you know, familial expectations? Or was it something you kind of discovered in yourself later in life?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  No, I was I was definitely a kid who was writing stories. I was the kid who was writing music in my head. But definitely Saturday morning, TV shows, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel. None of the kids looked like me, so that was enough for me.

• 44:38Rich Roll?

  It just never felt like it could be a possibility.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I didn't see myself on Home Improvement. I didn't see myself on Mickey Mouse Club. I didn't see myself on any of these TV shows. So I was just like, this is.

• 44:48Rich Roll?

  This dream is not available.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is not what people.

• 44:51Rich Roll?

  So you just pushed it down?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Pushed it down and stayed to the what was more quote unquote realistic. And then what ended up happening was when I started working, I'd, you know, in your evenings, you had a lot more free time. You don't have homework. So I was, I took a second job as a high school math tutor. I was really good at math. I'm still pretty good at math. So I was tutoring kids, high school kids that math for extra cash, trying to, you know, live a life beyond what teachers were getting paid. And I'd be going out to concerts, going out to shows, just doing whatever I could to just, you know, be social, enjoy life. And I saw a spoken word artist perform. And I had never seen that before. And then that was the time that I realized, I started digging into spoken word poetry, realizing that, hey, these guys, this is a reaction to how boring people think poetry is. Like you pick up a book of poetry and you're like, this is very.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Bland and then realizing because you're missing ninety percent of the magic, which is the poet. When the poet recites a poem is completely different. Yeah, the performance, the feeling. So I fell in love with it there and I started writing, but again, just writing in a notebook, just keeping it to myself and um I eventually a friend, we went to like a coffee shop and they had like a spoken word competition and then a friend said, you should enter, you know, try it out, a lot of pretty girls in the audience, let's see what we can do. And then I entered and I won and then that was kind of my first foray into it and then finding a spoken word collective in Toronto, they had a website, they had like monthly events, I started going to those and then from there wanting um seeing things that were happening in my media community and at that point, speaking to other adults and

• 46:22Speaker 01

  them kind of being like these, the kids these days, they don't listen to anybody, the kids these days, they're all messed up, you know, whether talking about drugs, violence or whatever. And me, I grew up in a challenging neighborhood and as well, I taught in a challenging neighborhood. And I said, look, it's not the kids, it's our messaging. So I'm like, let me take a stab at it. And so I was trying to write a spoken word poem called Voice For The Voiceless, which was gonna be about various stories that were happening in our community and I put some music in the back, it was Jay-Z's Minority Report. And then the moment there was music in the back, the words just started to snatch on to that and then that's the moment I realized, oh, I can rap. And then from that point, everything started coming out as poetic rap.

• 47:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  And the name Humble The Poet was kind of the reaction, realizing that, hey, like, rap um is such a high level of literary art that doesn't get that respect that it deserves. And um started just releasing music, lyric videos, this is like two thousand and eight.

• 47:22Rich Roll?

  Right, like, that's not that long ago.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Not that long ago.

• 47:25Rich Roll?

  DIY vibe.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  DIY vibe.

• 47:27Rich Roll?

  Who were your influences, like, who were you looking to?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Andre 3000, Lauryn Hill, Common, CeeLo.

• 47:34Rich Roll?

  High vibe.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, um Jay-Z, I think Jay-Z probably a little bit less because I knew he didn't write, so I kind of felt like he was a little too gifted for me to look up to, he was just like a natural talent. Um. There's an artist out of Carson City, California, Ross Cosse. He really had that juxtaposition of being from the hood, but getting a very high level of education. His mother taking him to museums, teaching him his own personal history. So the way he delivered his message was very educated, but not coming across that he's smarter than anybody. Became obsessed with his work, then the whole Ruckus movement, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Dead Prez. All of that just really connected with me.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  And it was probably seeing Andre 2000 in Outkast, ATLians. They had that one-track elevators, 13th floor, that track. In one of the music videos, he's wearing a turban, and that just like blew your mind. Blew my mind as like a 14-year-old kid seeing this, feeling like, whoa, like, I ain't never seen a cool kid with a turban before. At that point, the coolest kids I knew with turbans were just the ones that fought. You know, that was the thing, like, it was a rough neighborhood, so the ones that fought back were the ones that had respect. And they were the ones that kept guys like me safe at that point. And falling in love with putting words together, and then that just evolved in itself.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  So then I was releasing music, just putting out lyric videos, not showing my face, still scared if the world knew what I was trying to do. And eventually, people recognized my voice somehow. And then that voice with the voiceless, in Vancouver, there's a big drug trade over there. And they have a lot of gang violence in the South Asian community. And over a couple of years, span about like 200, 300 young men were murdered at this violence. So what I ended up doing was, I told that story in song, and then I listed every single one at the end of the lyrics video. And then people just reached out, like, that's my brother, nobody's ever spoken about him in a positive light before. He's only just considered a criminal, or that was my cousin, or I knew that guy, or I used to date that guy.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  And not realizing that I would have ever had some kind of impact, and not even showing my face at this time. And so slowly that just kept evolving and I think in two thousand and nine I was like, hey, I could take this, I should take this a little bit more serious and by more serious, I mean buying humble the poet dot com.

• 49:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:55Rich Roll?

  And at some point, some people take some interest in cultivating this, right? Like you have this opportunity to record an album, like I've heard you kind of talk about it, but you dance around the edges of it. So I'm not sure I really understand kind of what happened.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  So I thought people took interest in cultivating it. What it was is I had connected with a producer, a local producer, but he was definitely the most passionate artist I'd ever met at this point. And he really put a battery in my back where he was like, this wasn't like, we can make it. It was like, you need to be heard, like you should not be doing anything else. Why are you working your job? Like the world needs to hear this. We can make this happen. And me at this time not being, you know, I had, I was working a school job, but at the same time, you know, I had made some investments and two thousand and eight happened and we all got our asses kicked. So I was like, hey, I got debt, man. I'm, I gotta work and like pay that off. But you know, it wasn't anything that was stressing me out because I had a salary. And he's like, look, man, we'll, we'll figure it all out. I can help figure it all out.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  I worked in Japan, I worked with all these artists, you know, there's a lot of markets, a lot of ways to make money in this game that you don't know about. You don't have to get discovered by Puff Daddy. And then we really developed an intense friendship and a brotherhood. And he came from a very challenging family situation and I on the opposite had a very warm, safe, kind family situation where I didn't even realize other people didn't have it as good as I did. And then I welcomed, I welcomed him to my home and I said, listen, where you're living at is toxic, just come stay with me. And really just embraced him and I didn't have any brothers. So I realized now I was just really chasing this feeling of having a brother for the first time. And then he said he had secured us a record deal, which was going to involve actually

• 51:37Speaker 01

  writing for other artists. So he sent me videos of these other artists, young kids, being like, oh, see this kid right here, his dad's rich, he just wants to help his kid become a popular rapper. The kid sucks, we can write for him, we'll get paid in the backend, it'll be great. And it was offering more money than I would have made in two years as a teacher. And I was like, this is a no brainer. Like obviously I love this lifestyle of just getting inspired and writing stuff and now you're saying you're giving me a lot of money to do so. So there wasn't any due diligence done on my part. I really felt like he was somebody that wanted to cultivate my talent. I realized that instead, he, he didn't have something set up and he was kind of. I don't wanna say nefarious, but I think he was trying to set things up where he felt like he was gonna find the money somehow.

• 52:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's just like two, uh, uh, there's a fine line between hucksterism and effective producing. Because part of being a producer is kinda being ahead of the game a little bit, you know? It's like, sort of, sort of, holding yourself out like more is going on than actually is, and that's how deals are put together. But you extend yourself a little bit too much and it's big time trouble.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  That's exactly what happened. And on my part, I, I went all in. So at this point.

• 52:44Rich Roll?

  You developed faith and trust.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Faith and trust in him, but as well as I fell in love with the lifestyle. I spent a summer in, uh, the bay. Uh, living with another, uh, independent rapper and just living his lifestyle. And falling in love with it. And he was, I mean, he was, he was a one bedroom out of a house that he was renting, sleeping on a couch and. But every single day he got up and like, alright, where's the money? Working at Beforem? And sometimes it was performing on street corners. Sometimes it was taking twenty dollar gigs at a, at a local club. But kinda just really falling in love with just like the energy, the vibe, every day being different, meeting new people and just kinda being like, hey, I want this for myself too. And now somebody's offering me an opportunity to do this with some upfront money.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  And, um, it, at the same time, my actual career as Humble Lepore was still working out well. People were discovering me. I was getting gigs and. Flown out to different cities to do shows, none of which were sustainable enough to pay my mortgage and none of them were sustainable enough to not have a second job. But things were still happening and I got mixed up with that at the same time, thinking any moment when I got home from this trip, that, that new check that I'm waiting for will be there.

• 53:49Rich Roll?

  The check's always like ten days away.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  The check's always ten days away, yeah. And I mean, I've since learned, especially working with, you know, legitimate publishers, the check, the check can come in twenty four hours. You know, like there's, there's overnight mail. If the check hasn't come, it's not coming. And, you know, learning this, you know, learning it the hard way. And I was, and I, and I believed a lot of his lies because I wanted to. I take ownership for that. I wanted to. He wasn't a master manipulator. I wanted what he was selling. And I wanted so hard to believe it. And so many people started to show me the real situation and I, I pushed them away. I looked at them as unsupportive. And I'm like, any moment, this is gonna all start to make sense. And then a whole year went by, by the time I realized like, this is not going to make sense. And he had since disappeared and now I caught myself in ridiculous debt.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  With a mortgage, living by myself, not knowing what I was going to do. Feeling super sorry for myself, blaming everybody, including the people who were trying to help me. And just thinking it was everybody's fault. Really trying to elicit people's empathy for me. I wanted people to feel sorry for me. I wanted people to feel my pain. I wanted, I wanted it to feel as if nobody had ever experienced what I had just experienced before. And, you know, having my heart broken by women in the past, being like, ah, I only thought women can break my heart. Now, you know, a homeboy broke my heart. Oh, poor me, you know, like just really sinking deep into it and just turning to substances and turning to inactivity and just really taking that downward spiral.

• 55:18Rich Roll?

  Well, this dismantling is your divine moment.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:22Rich Roll?

  You know, and, and a big part of your work is, is helping people understand the holistic nature of the human animal. And this idea that nobody is all bad and nobody is all good and, you know, together we're, you know, flawed and beautiful and in pain and, you know, the whole spectrum of what it means to, you know, live a life, right? And when you look at this producer, it's very easy to put yourself in the victim mentality and to blame him and to, you know, sort of paint this, you know, picture of a, of a, of a, of a not so good person. But ultimately, this guy gave you a gift, which is he jettisoned you out of a life that you might have lived for the rest of,

• 56:05Rich Roll?

  you know, your days and set you on this journey that has been difficult, that forced you to meet your maker, but that crucible, I think, is what, you know, formed the person that's sitting across from me today.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Oh, 1,000%. And I am, I am grateful to him from afar. Um, I hold no ill will towards him from afar. So this all meaning that there's no bad blood, but we're not reconnecting.

• 56:30Rich Roll?

  There's a difference between, you know, resentment and like discernment or boundaries.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And, and that's been my story with a lot of people in my life, which is like, look, there's, there's nothing there, but at this point, like, good luck to you. And, and that's kind of probably my approach to this as well. Most recently, uh, you know, and the other thing too, in that situation, like the friends that I had met from his, his, his ethos from that situation, when this all went down, he lost them. So I I I ended up inheriting all his friends.

• 57:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  And then when one of those friends recently passed away two years ago, I think he tried to reach out to reconnect. Cause I think, you know, he had, he had also done that friend dirty. Um, he had borrowed money from a lot of people and thought he could just take, take from here and give to here and just continue this going on. And it was, he was operating out of fear more so than some sort of, you know, well thought out plan. He's just trying to make it all happen and keep afloat and thinking short term. So there's no ill will there. And I definitely, when I was at my lowest, um, and I finally hit what was rock bottom at that time. I promised myself, I said, you have to figure out a way to be grateful that this happened to for you, for you to look back. Because at that point, just even thinking about it impacted me physically and it hurt me.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  And, um, I lived in a condominium, I had to sell it, I had to, I'd sell all my possessions and I had to move back with my mom and my dad. I couldn't drive by that condo. I couldn't go, you know, and that was on a popular road to go downtown Toronto. If I saw it, it would, it would, it would give me an involuntary reaction.

• 58:01Rich Roll?

  Just triggering a sense of failure.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Triggering a sense of failure, triggering a sense of what I gave up because I was short sighted and, and, and I was, you know, saying things to myself like, you're so stupid. You're so dumb, you're so naive, you know, that's self bullying, the self talk.

• 58:15Rich Roll?

  So what triggered you out of that? I mean, a lot of people would just continue to dig that hole at infinitum, but for you to have the, you know, the faculty, the facility to, to realize you were going to have to find gratitude somehow in order to move forward.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  I think it was a combination of many things. I mean, the, the, the simple romantic story was, you know, being in bed and hearing some J. Cole lyrics and just like popping out. And J. Cole has some lyrics about, you know, will you, will you let this turn, let, will you allow this to let you turn bitter and cold? Or will you flip that fucking dollar and turn it to a dream? That I remember was the moment where I actually got out of bed, but I do think the two weeks of me isolating myself and just laying in bed, doing nothing, hoping that, you know, hoping to be saved, hoping that check would still come.

• 58:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  I feel like that might've actually been some self compassion that I needed to heal because I was hurt and I needed to take some time. Um, so I think it was a combination of that, it was a combination of, um, Knowing that I did not want to be what he was. He found himself in a difficult situation and ran. And I was, I was not just in debt to the banks, I was in debt to friends, very good friends, people I cared about. I didn't want to be that guy who had to run from them. So I didn't want to, I didn't want to be what he was. Um, so I got to this point where I was like, I have to, I have to, I have to bite the bullet. I have to call these people and say, look, I, I owe you 10 grand. I don't have 10 grand. I don't know how I'm gonna make 10 grand, but I will. I'm gonna figure it out. I'm not gonna avoid you.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  And at the same time, you're not gonna see me spending any money on anybody else. So I think that, once I got out of bed, it was just, okay, this is all, what's in your control? And when I realized, I had to take responsibility to find power. And stop blaming the world, stop blaming other people, stop feeling sorry for myself. Cause none of that was giving me any power or helping me recognize what was in my control.

• 1:00:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's an evolution there. I mean, in order to jumpstart you out of your teaching career, you needed a guy who believed in you, right? And that guy came in a very flawed package.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Very.

• 1:00:18Rich Roll?

  But he served that purpose.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:20Rich Roll?

  But in the process of working with that individual, you divested your personal response, you invested your personal responsibility in him and just said, this guy's gonna do it for me.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Man, where were you back then?

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  When that exploded, you then had to take responsibility of that for yourself.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Rich Roll?

  And I would imagine there's some epiphany that comes with that also, which is, he didn't take away your talent or your ability to write. All of those things remained intact and the same. And the truth is, you had some momentum, right? So you had to get a new prism and start perceiving your world through your own, you know, your own abilities rather than relying on somebody else to kind of do it for you.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. I always had the wings. He pushed me off the cliff.

• 1:01:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  And I've made-

• 1:01:06Rich Roll?

  That's a much more concise way of saying it.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I dabble.

• 1:01:10Rich Roll?

  You're the poet.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know I dabble in the poetry once in a while, but and it was on and I probably would have never done it. And I have other friends that, you know, have extraordinary talents and ambitions and ideas that won't pull that trigger. Because every single year they hold off on it. That salary that they're working on their day job is getting more and more comfortable and they're creating a lifestyle that's more dependent on it. He took me out of that situation.

• 1:01:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  And I'm completely grateful for it.

• 1:01:35Rich Roll?

  And you're like, I'm still here, man.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  It's all gone and I and I got to that point where I was like, all right, you're on eighty thousand dollars debt. You have zero ways of earning any money. There's nothing happening right now.

• 1:01:45Rich Roll?

  Did you think about going back and becoming a teacher again?

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  One thousand percent, one thousand percent. So initially, again, my and at this point, I'm I'm still thinking like, I'm going to die. Like, I'm going to starve to death or I'm going to just go nuts and jump off the balcony.

• 1:01:57Rich Roll?

  What's mom and dad doing?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's mom and dad? And at the same time, because it was like, oh, they're gonna judge me. They're gonna, they're gonna, you know, they're gonna think I'm a failure. People are gonna think I'm a failure. And then that voice in my head's like, look, your worst case scenario is embarrassment. Your worst case scenario is in death. This isn't a problem. And I went back home and they did, like, it wasn't open arms. It was, we told you so. Why did you do this? Where where's all your money? How did you spend all your like, we don't like, they were like poking at me like, explain this, like, what did you do? And me having to be like, eat this, eat these consequences. You you you put yourself in this situation, you don't get to run from this, you have to eat it. And it was a very uncomfortable couple of years and me figuring things out, but.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  And there was nothing magical happened. I didn't win the lottery or anything. I slowly started looking around, talking to different artists and being like, well, how do you guys earn money? What's what's going on? And it was like, hey, I applied for a grant. I got five grand to do a project. Hey, I sell T shirts at my shows. Hey, I use crowd, I use crowdfunding to book shows. I use, hey, I I I sell products and I I I've read an article from James Altucher about self publishing. And he's like, hey, this is how you self publish and doing this. And I was like, hey. And at the same time, music, I could, I was like, I'm gonna keep making music and maybe I'll start getting gigs. And then music was moving slow because it's such a collaborative process, working with other people. People and I was full time and they couldn't keep up with my pace now because they all had jobs and lives and wives and stuff to do.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  So then I had to figure out what could I do by myself that didn't require collaboration and that was writing. So I was free writing and and and finding images that inspired me and writing stuff on Facebook and and writing stuff in different places and all of that ended up being my personal therapy to kind of get through these situations because what I was doing was I wasn't telling my story, but I was telling what I was learning from these stories. And I was like questioning because realizing that, hey, I was idealistic. I believe that anyone who saw my talents wanted to help me, you know, that's, you know, that was my my crash course into the entertainment industry, realizing that that's not how it works. Most people that see your talents want to figure out how they can profit off of it.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Um, and that's, but that's my responsibility to manage my expectations accordingly, understanding that, hey, if I'm kind to somebody, that that doesn't necessarily mean the contract is they'll be kind back to me. And understanding the nature of people and the nature of how things work and learning that you can't simply pull on people's heartstrings and and and get them to do what you want, you know, people are in it for themselves as well and understand this and don't get all sad about it and say the world sucks. And there was a lot of this, but I I was I was a student in school, then I was a teacher in school. I was in this insulated, insulated, safe environment. The school is the safest environment, the most idealistic. If, yeah, if there's, you're taught as a child, like if someone does something bad, just go snitch on them to the teacher and the teacher will handle it.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  You know, that's the lesson I was teaching the kids, like run to the authorities, they will save you. But in the real world, that's not how it is. I had to leave that zoo and go into the jungle and there's a lot more freedom, but it's way harder and it's a lot more work and a lot more danger and, you know, a lot less security there.

• 1:05:09Rich Roll?

  Well, perhaps the most devastating is realizing all these adults that you think had it all figured out and know how to handle shit, don't really know what they're doing.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  At all. At all, yeah. When I passed that age where my mom had me, that I'm like, holy crap. I don't know what I'm doing. And maybe they don't know what they're doing. So maybe, you know, their words are no longer the gospel and, and I should also kind of be forgiving that they're not these flawless human beings and.

• 1:05:33Rich Roll?

  Which brings it all back to the subject of unlearning.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it all goes back and that's what I realized. So, and that's the title of the book is Unlearned, because it wasn't that I had to figure out something very specific. There was, there was a key or a secret to success. It was, hey, I'm, I'm carrying a lot of baggage and ideas that are no longer relevant to this new life that I have. And I have to ask the important and uncomfortable questions to let them go. And I have to say to myself, you know, what, what hand did I have in this mess? And the bigger hand that I had in this mess, the bigger hand I had to clean it up. And that was a really big one. Cause I don't think up until that point, I ever had to take any responsibility for anything on this level. Um, you know, why, why can't I drive by these

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  buildings? Why is this shaking my heart as if, you know, I'm, I just saw somebody step on a puppy? Like, why is this really hurting me? And it was regret. It was a reminder of my failures. And it's like, well, when, when is this gonna go away? And it was a combination of, well, it's gonna heal with time, but also it's gonna, it's gonna heal when you find a lesson out of this. When you find the value from this. And like, all right, I learned, I learned my lesson. And then as time went on and I slowly earned some more, and I'm talking about over four, four to five years, I got, I got my, you know, this all happened at the end of 2011. I got my bank account to zero at the end of 2014. Um, and it was, okay, you've, you've hit that point. And now you've learned a whole bunch of skills on that way. And this was me simply being like,

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  all right, Calgary, I want to come to, to, to play at your city, but we gotta sell 50 tickets before I even start organizing this. Can we sell 50 tickets? And then the people rallying and getting those 50 tickets sold. So now I got some seed money to throw the show, to throw the show in Calgary and then realizing, hey, I can sell my book alongside that. Hey, I can sell some t-shirts alongside that. Okay. Learning the business of it as well. And even that came at the sacrifice of the art. I went a whole year without creating because I was on my laptop being administrative and making flyers and throwing shows, but it added up and it gave me a lot of tools and tricks. And at the same time, continually putting other work out and the book never going away, people, anybody who found the book and opened

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  the book connected with it. So it went from an independent release to two years later getting picked up in Canada by Canada's biggest bookstore, Endo Go.

• 1:08:02Rich Roll?

  So it initially came out self-published 2011?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  2014.

• 1:08:07Rich Roll?

  2014, okay. And it's only now coming out in the United States under Harper Collins. So this book has had like an unbelievable life that I want to kind of, you know, deconstruct here in a minute, but I don't want this point to be missed, which is it all began with you taking responsibility over the one thing that you had domain over that didn't cost any money, which is this discipline of writing every single day.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:35Rich Roll?

  And I think it was Lilly Singh, who was the first person who was like, you don't need money. You just have, you have this thing that you do, like just start doing it and show up for it every single day.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yes. She was like, listen, I create, everything I create, I do by myself. And she's like, figure out a way that you can create by yourself.

• 1:08:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  And I was like, I don't know how to make music myself. She's like, then don't make music, do something else. And she's like, what else can you do by yourself? I'm like, well, I can write. She's like, then just do it. And then obviously I started thinking, but I don't, I don't know how to write. She's like, just stop making the excuses and just get started.

• 1:09:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're already making excuses and you haven't even started yet.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's the thing with all of us. We're either making progress or we're making excuses.

• 1:09:13Rich Roll?

  Right. And not to like underscore the point or anything, but like Lilly Singh is now getting an evening talk show on network television.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:21Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  And I mean, you can, you can still put your money on her because she's just getting started.

• 1:09:25Rich Roll?

  I'm not against that person.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. She's, she's still just getting started. And again, and it's, and it's, it's so clear cut with her as well. It's, she's going to continue to rise because there is just this work ethic that I have never seen in any other human being. And, you know, I'm sure we can, you know, deconstruct her drive and her history and how, how it came to be, but. I got, I, I, I met her, her friends from high school that said she, when she worked at the fast food joint, she was this much of a nerd as well, like making sure she was cooking the burgers perfectly, making sure all the straws were lined up, all the forks were lined up. She's always been about give everything.

• 1:10:01Rich Roll?

  Anything is how you do everything.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  How you do anything is how you do everything. And it was such a gift that we crossed paths. Cause at that point, she had not been doing anything. She was, she was just starting YouTube. And I was one of three South Asian guys who knew how to use YouTube because I was releasing a music video like once every three months.

• 1:10:19Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  So she had reached out to me for that, but then she, she took the comedy route and, and, and again, applied her talents with her work ethic and took it to a whole new level. And she, yeah, she saved my life in so many ways by, by giving me that kick in the ass to, to start writing every day, but also continually not allowing me to stray to the, to, to the path of least resistance, knowing that, hey, this is who you are. You, you're not, you, you're not, you're here for the slow cooked work. You're not here for the quick, fast food content. You're not here to simply win. You're here to have a bigger impact. And she started creating an environment for me to do so, which like, all right, come out here to LA and now I have a

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  place. Here's, here's a room for you. Here's a space for you. I'm not, you know, and being like, make what you make. And if it takes six months to make it, take six months to make it, but make sure you're working and, and don't fall into these traps that you see all my, you know, my colleagues doing, which is just chasing the new trend, looking up the next thing that's popular because that's not going to be sustainable. And that's not why you're here. And that put me in a situation where it allowed me to plant a lot of seeds and years later, now everything's starting to sprout.

• 1:11:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So whereas that original producer was the guy who promised you a fish, she's saying, let me help you learn how to fish, right? She's giving you like these lessons that allow you to, you know, kind of, um, create this foundation.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. And as well as to think, look, this is how I fish. Take what you can from it, but figure out a way that

• 1:11:55Rich Roll?

  Figure out your own way of fishing.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Figure out your own way of fishing that that that works for you. Because if you start copying me, you're gonna you're gonna lose yourself. And, you know, and being able for us to have, you know, open, naked communications. And then we worked on music together. And then I released a few songs with her and then those songs did very well. She's got a great platform. And, um, you know, she took me on her world tour and I got to travel the world and perform on stage with her. And they did a documentary and the documentary people hired me to be one of the filmmakers for the world tour because I had the ability to turn on the camera during some of the more uncomfortable situations that they wouldn't have been welcome into. So just a lot of opportunities were created from that. And, um, it it really taught me a lot about

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  how much power we had. Again, I think being very successful in school without having to put in a lot of effort almost robbed me of the the importance of work ethic. I didn't realize how hard I could work, let alone the importance of it. And then, um, getting getting into her environment, into her world and seeing how she did it was like, this is all work. None of this involves talent. This is all work. And now, all of a sudden, you've you've written so many scripts and you've written so many posts or captions or pages that, you know, that's your 10,000 hours are coming because you're doing the work. And all of a sudden, your stuff sounds good. But it didn't it you weren't some naturally gifted individual. It was the baby steps were adding up.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  You know, and you can't see it while it's happening, but looking back and be like, oh, I've been doing this for six, seven years. I'm getting really good at it.

• 1:13:32Rich Roll?

  People just look at the results and somebody like that, it looks easy.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  It looks very easy, but it's not. I don't I don't even encourage, I don't even tell kids that they can grow up to be like her. Because I'm just like, I still don't, I mean, we just, we just had a Game of Thrones premiere party. And then even the process of decorating the house and putting the the whole thing together was harder work than I enjoy doing. And I'm just like, I'm like, why do you like, I go, why do you enjoy doing this? And I even said to her, I was like, why do you enjoy doing it? And then I I I sent a picture to one of my friends of like the decorations. We had like heads on stakes. We had banners, flags, we painted an entire tree, just all these characters and things from the thing. And my friend was like, oh, this is what you rich people do. And I was like, No, rich people hire other people to do this. We spent the whole day doing this.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  This is obsessed, crazy people who loved and this and that's throwing parties is considered her. My art that I do for myself that doesn't have an audience. Like it's not going to go on social media that I threw this party. This is from my personal satisfaction. So I think she used to like bake cakes in a previous life. But the work ethic behind it is just so intense. And I'm just like, this is bananas. So I realized that just being in her presence and even having a fraction of her work ethic puts me ahead of most people in the game because people don't realize how much work it is. And I know Will Smith just posted something recently where he's just like, everybody says they want to be an actor, they want to be this, but they're not willing to do the work that it takes. And it's an unhealthy amount, especially if you want to be a good person and do it.

• 1:15:07Rich Roll?

  Well, I think social media has put a lens on on that in a new and interesting way. Like you have guys like Kevin Hart and and The Rock who, you know, and Will Smith who share like, look, this is what it looks like behind the scenes. And you just see like this is just incredible work ethic that goes into what they're doing. Yeah. Relentless, you know, or Mark Wahlberg getting up at like 2:30 in the morning to like go to the gym. Like this isn't just, it doesn't get like rolled out in front of them.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  And it's not for display purposes. We, um, you know, The Rock is a mentor to Lily and we, we were hanging out, uh, his, his daughter came to hang out with us, Simone. She's, she's awesome. And I asked, I'm like, is he really waking up that early? She's like, yeah. I don't even, I'm like, even like different parts of the world. She's like, yeah, I don't even know how he does it.

• 1:15:51Rich Roll?

  He like flies in, he goes straight to the gym.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he flies, yeah.

• 1:15:55Rich Roll?

  No matter what time it is.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I could do that if I'm in Toronto for like three, three months in a row, or I can do that out here. I got by the gym memberships. But it's like the second I get a little jet lag, like I make the excuses not to go to the gym. And it's just like, these people are doing it and they're constantly making themselves uncomfortable. They're constantly leaning into the discomfort and the new. And that's where all the growth exists. And it's in the beginning, as what I experienced, it was involuntary. Life, life, life just smashed me in the face. And it was either stay down or get up. And, you know, after some time, I got up and I learned a lot from it. But now I'm in a position where I have to lean into these uncomfortable situations if I want to continue to grow. Because life doesn't happen on autopilot. There is no happily ever after.

• 1:16:38Rich Roll?

  Is that part of why you decided to write a book rather than do an album? Or try to find a way to pursue music first?

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  The music never stopped and I'm very fortunate to have still a very, a very good music career. I still have, you know, I released an album in 2017 and passed a million spins and streams and a couple million views on YouTube from my self-directed videos. I think what I realized was when I was in that phase where I had to earn, earning, earning money was essential for my survival. It was spilling into the art and I didn't like that. So I kind of made myself, I made myself a promise that, hey, we have to figure out a way to, to earn and not let it impact the art.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  And I was really liking, Mos Def, Mos Def had crashed the MTV Video Awards. He rented a flatbed truck and performed outside the Radio City. Yeah, and I just thought to myself like, he can do this because he was just in the Italian job. And like, he's getting those movie checks so he can afford his bill money and he can afford to just make the music he likes. And I always thought that was super cool. So for me, the, again, I wrote the book as an independent thing. And I'm like, this is better than selling a $20 t-shirt. People will find more value. And then just slowly it went from, you know, a lot of young, young gentlemen coming to my hip hop shows, putting their hands up, you know, and having fun to. A lot of girls showing up with book in hand, thinking that they were attending a reading.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Cause I would just be like, Humble the Poet, live in Vancouver. And they were just like, hey, you're not gonna read from the book? And I'm just like, oh, I never even thought people were interested in that. And then, you know, that in combination with my affiliation with Lily gave me an even bigger female audience. And, you know, as an educator, understanding that most books are geared towards the learning styles that females have. And more females read books than males, just based on how we kind of present books to them. So that really kind of shifted things. And again, it just didn't go away. Like, I finished the book and then the moment I got out of debt and found different streams of revenue, I went straight back into music. And then, when I got my first offers for book deals in 2017 in Canada, I said no to all of them.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  And I said, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna just focus on music and have fun. Cause at that point, I'd just done an Apple commercial, an iPhone commercial, and I got.

• 1:19:02Rich Roll?

  I tried to find that online. They've like stripped it from the internet.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have it.

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  I couldn't find it.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  It's a, they, they had it living on YouTube.

• 1:19:11Rich Roll?

  They took it down, it's gone now.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was for Canada's 150th birthday.

• 1:19:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Um, so I think they probably just played it for that, for that month. But, um, I'll send it to you, I have it.

• 1:19:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Um, but, um, that, that put me in a good situation as well. So then I was like, okay, well, the, this publishing deal doesn't sound, cause when they offered me a publishing deal, it was like, hey, we want it for the next book. And I was like, well, this book that I have on Learn has been doing very well independently. You guys are a bigger trampoline, can we bounce it off that? I really think it's gonna work. And, uh, at that point, all the traditional publishers, the big three, said, oh, we don't traditionally do that.

• 1:19:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's pretty rare that they do that.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they don't. And I think at this point, I was already kind of warned, hey, anytime somebody says, we don't traditionally do anything, run the other way. Like, at this point, like, that, those aren't the kind of people you wanna work with. So I left and then, uh, Indigo, which is the, I guess, we can kind of say the, the Canadian equivalent to Barnes and Noble. Uh, they, but they found a, they found their, they found their space. They're, they're doing well in Canada. They, they, they sell more than just books and, but they're the biggest bookstore in the entire country. They're like, we're starting a publishing wing, we love. To take that first book that you wrote and and and re republish it. And at that point, they literally just wanted me to email them the the files. So I sent over.

• 1:20:26Rich Roll?

  That was it.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a PDF. That was it.

• 1:20:28Rich Roll?

  Had you been selling a lot of books up to that point? I know you had like a television appearance that kind of that's where it clicked in.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, Canada Reads.

• 1:20:35Rich Roll?

  You had a book.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was on I was on a show where we debated books. And then I debated a book called Fifteen Dogs. And that was just a fun that four other public figures. And we all picked books that were near and dear to us. And we we had to debate which book we felt the whole country should read. And and I had picked a book called Fifteen Dogs, which was about fifteen dogs that were granted human intelligence by these two Greek gods who were in a bar having a bet about whether human intelligence makes us miserable. So they gave these fifteen dogs in Toronto human intelligence. And we just followed their stories until they die to see if any of them can die happy. So for me, the showrunners had sent me boxes of books to pick from. And all the books were about the immigrant experience, the South Asian experience,

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  like very superficial. And I was like, well, the things I actually love are I love dogs, which you probably noticed. I love dogs. I love my city of Toronto. And I love this idea of is being intelligent more of a gift or a curse? And this book and it was short. And then so I picked this book. And I was probably the only person who didn't have a personal stake in his book where his book wasn't telling his story. And I ended up winning the debate very easily over the over the week. And yeah, that put me on the map with quite with quite a few things. That's that also.

• 1:21:54Rich Roll?

  And you have a book?

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And yeah, that also helped me get that Apple commercial. That also that's also what helped me get that. And I had never heard of the show before, but it was a very popular show. And they also played it on the radio. So it was it really got me very popular with the with an older demographic, which is very refreshing. You meet them on the street and they're not asking for selfies. They just want to have like real conversations with you. So that was a a super dope change of pace. And yeah, publishers hit me up. They all they all did not want to publish the book. I moved on to music. And then while I was making my music, Indigo reached out, sent them the PDF, forgot about it again, kept working on the music. And then when they dropped the book, it hit the bestsellers list. And before that, independently, I probably sold about five or six thousand copies over a couple of years.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  But I mean, independently, I was probably making. Eight, nine bucks a book, American and in Canada, that's even more. So it was, it was enough. I think I was like averaging like two, three books a day. It was enough to help me keep afloat with my, my simple lifestyle. And then once I started doing very well with them,

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  I started speaking to some folks out here and then they connected me with Mark, who you just met. And then he, uh,

• 1:23:06Rich Roll?

  And now it's coming out in the US.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Now it's, yeah.

• 1:23:08Rich Roll?

  What's crazy is this is five years later and it's just being introduced to an American audience. Like this is a book that's had this long, crazy life and you know, in publishing, there's so many books that come out and books come out and they do really well, but then they're gone.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  They physically, yeah.

• 1:23:24Rich Roll?

  Like they'll hit the New York Times bestseller list, but then it was yesterday's news. And it's pretty rare that you find a book that withstands the test of time, continues to sell over the long run. I mean, that's the thing that I'm most proud about with my book. Like it's still, and that's because of the podcast. Like there's new people being introduced to it.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:41Rich Roll?

  The fact that you have this book, it's coming out now and you just get these continuous bites at the apple of introducing more and more people to.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  And it's interesting, as you, as you said, it's not common in publishing. So the book dropped about a week and a half ago and we're on a third print.

• 1:23:57Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  And I mean, I, I'd love to say that they printed a whole bunch and that's why we're on a third print. But I think it has to do with their managed, managed expectations.

• 1:24:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden I got the email like, oh, Amazon just, uh, indicated to us that they're running out of stock. So we're, we're going to be doing more prints. So I'm, I'm happy that I'm exceeding their expectations and I'm still learning that space as well. Again, coming from digital, things move a lot quicker. So I was like, oh, you know, we hit, we, we peaked at thirty seven on Amazon, um, of all books. And I hit number one on poetry, even though it's not a poetry book.

• 1:24:28Rich Roll?

  Thirty seven of all books?

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Rich Roll?

  Is that right now? That's happened at, on Amazon?

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Uh, the first week, yeah.

• 1:24:33Rich Roll?

  First week?

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  I think now we probably slipped a little bit, but, um,

• 1:24:35Rich Roll?

  That's, that's amazing.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. And, and, and people, a lot, you know, sent it out to a lot of influencers, a lot of them posted about it. But then it started reaching outside my grasp and, and then people that I had never met before started posting about the book. People with big following, sharing it. Um, and again, and I always believed it. And it's to the point for me now is just, I don't even. Take personal ownership of this book. It's it's it's what saved me. It's it's it's it was the process of getting me out of the hole I was in. And I tell people, I'm like, this book saved my life in so many ways, and it will help other people. And, you know, I've had to let go of my my my Canadian sensibilities and my my quote unquote humbleness to be like, no, no, this book, this one has legs and and and you just have to open it. You can open it to any page.

• 1:25:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  You will connect with it. That's and that's the thing that I've been really pushing on people. It is working and I'm really excited now that it's out on on on the biggest stage you can be out on. And it's being bounced off the biggest trampoline it can, because I feel like it's going to be around for a long time.

• 1:25:33Rich Roll?

  Well, like any piece of art, once it's released to the world, it is, it becomes the public domain.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:39Rich Roll?

  Right? It's it's not yours to define.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:25:43Rich Roll?

  For the audience to decide what it is.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Rich Roll?

  And to make it their own.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  Completely. And I think and I feel like my my only job right now is to do the work to get people to just want to check it out.

• 1:25:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  See if they can.

• 1:25:56Rich Roll?

  Well, explain, explain this concept of unlearning a little bit more.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Um, it's the idea that many of us have a lot of tools and personality traits that were probably beneficial to us at different times in our lives. You know, I grew up in a challenging neighborhood. The way I had to act, the way I had to maneuver back then doesn't apply where I am now in my life or even apply when I was a teacher. You know, I grew up in a high school where making eye contact meant you wanted to fight. And but working as a teacher, you're supposed to make eye contact and say good morning to everybody. Um, so learning certain things and realizing that, hey, you have to let go of a lot of these things. And understanding that these things, many of them, you know, were socialized into us. And we have to not simply look at this debate of nature versus nurture and see how they both work together.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  So for me, unlearn was the idea that we can let go to really gain more from our lives as opposed to acquiring some new mystical skill that people have yet to tell us. And it's a secret that.

• 1:26:54Rich Roll?

  We're so hardwired for that, though.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Rich Roll?

  We just want to accumulate and accumulate.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Accumulate, yeah.

• 1:26:58Rich Roll?

  We live in an additive frame of mind.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Uh, but I feel like that's on this side of the planet. I'm not sure how how I feel like that's it is a consumeristic. Religious experience to kind of experience it that way. And I feel like in other parts of the world, people aren't acquiring as much. And they're kind of just going through the motions or existing and not doing the forty, fifty, sixty hour a week work grind the way we do it. And I think just being mindful of that, having to travel and be like, oh crap, people live differently. People have different priorities. Being in India once and seeing these two kids knocking, I was in, I was in a car and these two kids were knocking on the window saying, you know, mujhe pukh laggi, I'm, I'm hungry, I'm hungry. But at the same time, they're both laughing

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  uncontrollably because they, they've just been trained to beg. But they were having a good day and they were just laughing at something that they were goofing around with and being like, these kids are happier than right now than most, most other people I know. And starting to disconnect the relationship between our circumstances and our happiness. And, you know, it's difficult for someone to be like, hey, money won't make you happy. And say that to somebody who doesn't have money. Because somebody who doesn't have money is gonna be like, well, give me all the money then if it's not making you happy. But then slowly growing into a situation where you're like, well, I was struggling and I promised myself to feel great when I'm no longer struggling. And then realizing like, hey, I just filled, I just dealt with one challenge and new challenges opened up because of that. Whether it was having a relationship with the taxman, or whether that

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  come with, you know, having family members that have, have expectations of you now, you know, certain things, people finding out I'm gonna be on certain podcasts and being like, oh, I better be there when you're on that podcast. And I was like, that's, that's not how it works. I can't just have my family sit here when I'm with Rich Roll or with somebody else.

• 1:28:41Rich Roll?

  They could come.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I appreciate that for here. And then, then, you know, maybe just kind of being like, oh, I, I didn't know that these, these are new challenges. And kind of really owning this idea that, look, you solve one problem. Life is, is a series of obstacles and challenges. There isn't, you're not gonna overcome the last one and just write out your days like we, we used to see on television.

• 1:29:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, this, this idea that permeates your work also is this idea of, of cycles and life being cyclical instead of this, you know, where we've set ourselves up to You know, adhere to some perfect upward trajectory of happiness and prosperity. That's, you know, obviously unattainable and just makes us feel ashamed and terrible about ourselves. When in truth, life and all its natural systems work in these cycles. And the more we can embrace the natural aspect of that, then the happier and the more content we can be with those obstacles that we face when they arise.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Completely, and I think that's, you know, you hit it on the head. And I think that's the idea where we have to be like, well, why do I think it's that way? Why am I thinking linear, in a linear sense to begin with? Why do I believe that just over the horizon, everything will be better? Why do I say I have to, I'll have some fun after I'm done my work? Cause the work's not gonna end. You know, why do we believe in these happily ever afters? And then starting to recognize the sources of our influence and then being like, okay, well, if I wanna let go of this idea and, and, and make room for a new idea, or go back to how I used to view life when I was a child and, which was full of curiosity

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  and confidence and, and, and risk-taking, what, what was piled up on top of me to get to this point? And, you know, really trying to take the rust off, take the, you know, take the, at the back, I say, you know, this book is the sandpaper, to, to take that rust off and take some of these old ideas away. And also recognizing that, hey, I had to, I had to have some of these qualities because they were important at one point in my life. But we are, we are constantly growing, evolving beings and we can't remain stagnant. So I learned for that, it, it, the, the idea behind it was to, to let go of these. But I took it from a perspective of not to make it about myself, but to help people, you know, use my abilities to put words together to help other people figure out their own

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  situation. So, you know, you'll learn, you'll learn about me through reading this book, but not a lot. This, this book is not about me. This book is about us and the fact that we're all in the same boat. The fact that this book was only written because people read my writing repeatedly, said, you should write a book because they connected with it. So, cause we all have regrets from our past. We all have worries for our future. You know, we all have expectations that we don't know where they came from. And then we all get very unhappy when those expectations aren't met. You know, we all make decisions to avoid failure. We all make decisions to avoid heartbreak. You know, we all can get. Starts thinking in hyperbole's and and and saying that this always happens.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  This is never gonna happen. We all do this. And I think if we recognize that we're all in the same boat, then we can all find something new to connect upon with each other and start that process of letting some of these things go, especially if they're just holding us back in life. Uh, we all hold grudges, you know, we all are carrying around a lot of baggage that is not serving us any purpose other than it weighing us down. So on learning was this whole idea that you already have what you need. And there's just a lot of stuff that needs to get unclogged. And I'm not here to promise you some sort of secret other than forcing you to ask yourself some uncomfortable questions and being completely honest with yourself to to go through this process. I don't wanna, I don't want you to read this book and think I'm a self-help guru

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  cuz I'm definitely not.

• 1:32:36Rich Roll?

  You kinda look like one, though. You could be one if you wanna be one.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Hey, you know, I think, uh, you know, with the popular, yeah, with the popularization of like, you know, Osho and all of these Netflix documentaries and, you know, people thinking I'm wise cuz I got a nice beard. Yeah, my beard is my source of my wisdom, but I I think the the big thing I just want the world to understand is I I'm a flawed human being that enjoys making mistakes because I'm I'm gonna take the time to learn from those mistakes. And the more of a public figure I become, most likely those mistakes are gonna become more public. And I want y'all to just hear about them, be like, yeah, that's our boy. Like, he he got himself in some dumb shit and we're excited to see what he learned from that. As opposed to me trying to be all high and mighty. And again, the the goal here was

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  I taught eight-year-olds and I I'm I was aiming to speak to everybody's inner child here.

• 1:33:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  And use language. They taught me so much. They they definitely did. And I think that's the the process. That that was the the big pull for me to get into education was wanting to be a lifelong learner. Sick means student, you know, uh, I don't like the idea of the years going by and and being like, where did the time go? I wanted to be like, hey, who I was in 2017 is so far from who I am now because the time didn't fly by. It's just all these new experiences and challenges brought a whole new side of me out. And that's exciting. And then like going to TED, learning certain ideas that I'd never thought of before.

• 1:34:03Rich Roll?

  Also, this Sikh idea of oneness and unity, you mentioned unity a minute ago, kind of informing your perspective and your writings and all of that. And I'm curious about how you then take that perspective and how that informs, how you think about your own cognitive biases and what separates you from your fellow man, and how you kind of navigate the toxic, treacherous waters of dialogue breakdown that we see in social media or in any kind of like political dialogue that's happening or with respect to the daily news.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for me, my heritage, specifically being Punjabi, and specifically being of Sikh heritage, Sikhs are very martial. We have a history of mobilizing, forming armies, fighting oppressive regimes, never being passive. And I mean, that goes back from our founding, the founding gurus of Sikhie all the way up to Punjabi's representing 2% of India, but making about 40 to 50% of all people who died fighting the British for our independence. We've always had that. So I think my, I grew up having a certain relationship with conflict,

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  which was, it's okay, it's normal. And for me now, as an adult, that's not really manifesting itself in terms of violence, but it does manifest itself in terms of just like having uncomfortable conversations, having a little bit of friction, being okay being challenged, being okay to challenge other people, not enjoying any type of passive aggressiveness. And I think for me, enjoying being challenged. So even in this conversation, when you state an idea that is, you know, say, "I have a counter idea to what you have to say," like me getting excited to hear that and knowing that, "Oh, at this age, I'm about to learn something new." Because so few of us are putting ourselves in these positions to continually learn new things.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  So I think my biases on that point, I keep them very, I don't plant them into my identity. I am not my beliefs. You know, I am. Um, I heard a very good quote that there is no generation gap. There are just people who are open to new ideas and people who are not open to new ideas. And I've definitely seen that. I've definitely seen very young people who are, who have been raised a certain way and they're not open to an idea different than them. I myself have the fondest memories. I, I used to be homophobic. I used to think it was wrong to be gay. Like I, like I was allowed to have that opinion. And I got to have beautiful experiences, meeting people and seeing the human side of all this and being like, who was I to make these judgments?

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  And being grateful that, you know, I was open to changing and evolving and becoming a better person. And I'm excited to continually do that, whether it's realizing um my priorities or, or my values. They might not be what they need to be. Um, even today, meeting with my agent and having a discussion about, okay, well, you know, what, what leverage can we, you know, for a next deal? What type of leverage? He's like, he goes, I don't think you should look at this in terms of leverage. Look at this in terms of collaboration. You know, I'm being like, okay, this is, I'm learning that there are people that, he, he, he sees this in a much more mature manner than I'm seeing it in right now. And this is a business meeting. So, and I like that. I like being proven wrong.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  That's like, you know, I like knowing that I'm not going to be stuck as who I am. So I think for me, there's the excitement there and there isn't a challenge um when there is friction with that. And I also feel like I learned something new this past week uh when dealing with conflict. And it was enter conflict with a question, not an answer.

• 1:37:49Rich Roll?

  So give me an example of that.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  If, you know, if we went political, you know, right now people are like, Trump is the devil and other people are like, no, he's the savior. Everyone's coming in with an answer. And maybe just going in and saying, let's have a healthy dialogue. Well, wha- what is it about this, this candidate that's making you so excited? And hearing and most likely, you'll probably hear a bunch of answers of somebody sharing the same values that you share, which might be like, hey, I feel like my job is more secure with this guy in charge. Hey, I feel safer with this guy in charge. Hey, I feel like my voice matters. And you might start to hear things and then a healthier discussion can, can, can arise from that. And I'm not saying everybody will join your team, but there might be a healthier version of agree to disagree out of that. Um, me personally, looking the way I look.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  In the beginning, it was, I felt it so frustrating that I could never just blend in. I could never be a fly on the wall. Um, because people were constantly either challenging me overtly, like, why do you look like that? What is that on your head? What, you know, I remember being nine and being told, a woman saying, I'm offended that you came to my country looking like this, not knowing what the word offended meant. Um, and then somebody else, you know, learning the term at, at probably eight, you know, when in Rome, not knowing what that meant. Someone was like, why, why do you look like that? And I was like, well, you know, this is how my people looked. They're like, well, when in Rome? And they didn't even finish the sentence. And in the beginning, I hated it. I, I just wished I could just be invisible and not be noticed and not be seen by anybody.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Now I've seen the value of it, you know, and I, and I grew up in Toronto. I grew up in one of the most multicultural places on the planet. My brother-in-law grew up in a small farm town outside of Toronto and, you know, hi- his family owned a corner store and people stopped doing business once they, they took over that corner store. And he'd get chased by kids who were trying to like beat him up with a baseball bat after school. And you could see the resilience that that built in him and the value. So I think I see the value in conflict. I see the value in that, um, historically, sick people being a minority everywhere that they exist. We've never been able to, we've never even heard this term, safe space. That's never been something there, you know, it, 200 years ago, you know,

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  the ruling king of the area was paying people to bring our heads. You know, you find a sick, you cut off his head, I will pay you for it. You know, and these guys had to decide, hey, should we hide? Or should we just tie bigger turbans and be like, all right, try, come, come try to get it.

• 1:40:23Rich Roll?

  Stand taller.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  Stand taller.

• 1:40:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but always being the minority among the minorities.

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  Always being the minority, exactly. And I think that's where, you know, there isn't, I don't have a homeland where I fit in. Even, even as me as an individual, you know, I'm, I'm exotic when I'm out here. I'm exotic over there. I I can't blend in in India. I can't blend in in Punjab. They see the tattoos, they see the way I walk, they see the way I dress. They know I'm not from there.

• 1:40:48Rich Roll?

  Right, but you just double down on it by by putting on just like crazy sweats and like, you know, just rocking the super bright turban and the whole thing. You're like,

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean,

• 1:40:58Rich Roll?

  I am here.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  I I am here. I mean, there's definitely moments where I'll, and I'll be completely honest, because I think when I was younger, I used to see these very eccentric dressed people and I thought they were weirdos. And there have been moments when I'm walking down the street and then like I'll pass by a mirror and stop like, oh, I didn't even realize how weird

• 1:41:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  I looked and how bright I looked. And it might be LA because in LA, this doesn't even stand out. Nothing stands out in LA. Everybody's

• 1:41:23Rich Roll?

  There's some notable, like, Warris, right? Who's the guy in New York?

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Warris on the wall.

• 1:41:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's always impeccably dressed.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  He's a, he's a, and he's an artist. He's such a, he's such a brilliant artist. And I just recently connected with him a few years back and learned his story. And it was kind of the same thing. He was like, man, I just wanted to make cool stuff and find cool people to make cool stuff with. I didn't think about my relationship to the community. I grew up in a neighborhood where our people, there weren't any of our people. Um, so for me, it was, now it's kind of like, I'm always chasing community and I'm chasing people that I feel would understand me. And it ended up being these, you know, like these pants are from a Toronto designer, you know, and she gifted them to me. That's why I'm wearing them. I designed this shirt, that, you know, you know, this was given to me as a gift too. So I'm wearing, I'm wearing, the shoes were gifted to me. So I'm, I'm wearing stuff that was, was given to me. And

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  I think I, I definitely got so used to standing out regardless. And then once I became a public figure, even independently, I started standing out amongst my own people. So that was no longer a place I could just blend in, even in Toronto. So if I'm in a high Punjabi community, you know, in, you know, the Bramtons and the Maltons, which are west of the city, you know, they all know who I am. So I, so I'm getting stares for different reasons. And then if I go an hour outside of Toronto to like, the hockey towns, they're all staring at me for different reasons. And you just get used to being stared at. And then you're just kind of like, okay, this is my reality. It's no longer uncomfortable. I built a resilience because they've been staring at me since I was eight.

• 1:42:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but this, this sort of acute, um, kind of awareness of different kinds of stares, like, is that, you're at the hockey, is that like, I want to kill you stare? Or, or like, oh, I saw you on YouTube stare?

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  In the beginning.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  You know what? So in the beginning, I interpreted literally every stare as I want to kill you. And then I had a.

• 1:43:10Rich Roll?

  That's the warrior default.

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  The warrior, well, life, the ninety percent of the experiences I had were were very violent on some level. There were, they were, they were people yelling at me. And this is in pre nine eleven. I mean, just, just kids, you know, teasing me, making fun of me. You know, taking the stereotypes that they saw in the films. You see a guy, you know, you watch, go watch Men in Black, an Indian guy driving the cab. It's, it was a lot of stereotypes and, and, and I'm not the only community who has stereotypes in Hollywood films. And then after nine.

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  Sorry to interrupt you, but like, this is what I spoke with Udd Karshal a lot about, like, you know, and he was talking about these, just these very same things. And the iconography in pop culture is just deplorable, right? You know, there's the, the guy from The Simpsons, what's his name? Yeah, and like, that's basically it. It's like the guy who works at seven eleven.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  And, and he works at seven eleven, the accent doesn't exist, you know, and, and, and going even the idea of being Indian. Indian isn't a language. Indian isn't a food. Indian isn't a type of music. You know, India is a collection of cultures and foods and languages and, and faiths. You know, India should be a continent, not a country, you know, and it was created by, you know, the empire. And so for me, dealing with all that experience, within nine eleven happened. And now, when you think of what a beard and turban represented, so then it was like, get out of my country terrorist. Then it was people thinking, putting, you know, trying to punch you in your face would help them score some points.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  And, you know, Bill Beer Sing Sodhi was, was a man with a beard and turban who owned a gas station in Arizona. And he was just gardening outside his gas station and, and somebody shot him in the head. And that man said, I'm doing what George Bush is too scared to do, you know? And then, and then also being in that situation where you're like. I don't want to tell people I'm not Muslim because that's just still throwing another group under the bus and trying to find ways to deal with that. But getting used to that to the point where you're just, you're always on edge. Like, why is that person staring at me? And then having these, these moments of beauty, you know? There was one moment in New York where I was at a, I was at a hip hop concert in Brooklyn. And from the corner of my eye, I could see this red headed guy who looked very drunk, just staring at me very intensely.

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  And my, my, my, I went, I heightened. I was like, shit, something's gonna happen. And then he got closer and closer and closer. And then he was right beside me. And I was like, oh crap, like, like trying to find a beer bottle or something to protect myself. And he's like, are you Punjabi? And I was like, yeah. And he goes, I just spent four months in Chandigarh, which is the capital of Punjab. And he goes, I just landed and I'm flying back to the bay. And I'm so happy to see you Punjabi because I lived with Punjabis for four months. And you're making me so happy to see you right now. And all of a sudden, me just like, being like, holy shit, like, why, you know, why did I assume that this guy was coming to me with, with, with such aggression? And it was, it was love. There's been times too, where just even like, women have looked at me and I was like,

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  are they judging me or? And then coming up to me being like, I love everything about the way you look. You look so handsome. And realizing that, hey, there are people that, that look a certain way and, and have judged me a certain way, but there are other people with open hearts and open minds that don't see that and they see something completely different. And then, you know, getting out of my own bubble and starting to see that and realizing that different cultures find beards attractive. And now that we have new generations of kids that are growing up seeing this multiculturalism, they've seen Warris and the Gap ads and, you know, they've seen comedians like Just Rain on, in different places. They've seen my stuff, you know, Lily has, has helped, you know, catapult me into a lot of homes and into a lot of people's ethos.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  So now it's kind of being open to it, being like, look, they may be approaching with love, they may be approaching with aggression, trust yourself to handle it accordingly. And it's not going to go away either way. And I was in Peru a couple of years back and that was. The adults, literally in the same minute, and one adult walked by and goes, "Hey Osama." And then literally, another child walks by and goes, "Hey Bob Marley." You know, and it's been like, it's all, yeah, it's all context.

• 1:47:19Rich Roll?

  But I think that's illustrative of, of not just how polarized this is right now, but how heightened it is. I mean, with, you know, politics as they are at the moment, and the way kind of,

• 1:47:34Rich Roll?

  you know, social awareness has grown also kind of in tandem with regressive ideas around culture. You have a celebration of multiculturalism like we've never seen before, and an acceptance and an embrace of it. And we also have this, you know, fear-based relationship with it that is at a, you know, a peak that I haven't seen in my life. So, you know, I would imagine as you navigate this, kind of being at the vortex of it, like you're, you're, you're gonna get these extreme encounters on one end or the other.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  And I think that's what is really happening is the fringe, the, the opposite ends of the spectrum, they're have, they have such an amplified voice now, even if they don't represent what most people are thinking. And I think I've had those experiences where, you know, I have been accused of, you know, pushing a far-left agenda, or I've, I've also been accused of pushing a far-right agenda. I've also been accused of working for the Indian government to pollute my own, my own population. I've also been accused of, of working for terrorist organizations in the Sikh community to, to, to dismantle the Indian government.

• 1:48:44Rich Roll?

  You got all the bases covered.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  I got them all covered and everyone, everybody, you know.

• 1:48:47Rich Roll?

  No one's happy.

• 1:48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz I'm, cuz to be puny, jobby.

• 1:48:50Rich Roll?

  Congratulations, you're an artist.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  Yes, you're an artist. And I'm okay with the idea that my stuff can make people feel uncomfortable, even though I don't really think I'm doing anything too controversial, but I understand that people's beliefs, people have mistaken their beliefs for their identity. And that's a chapter in the book, "You Are Not Your Beliefs." And I said, "I am here to fuck with your beliefs." What you believe is what you believe, it's not who you are. If somebody criticizes your beliefs, they're not criticizing who you are. And I think that's an important thing to understand. And we need to be open to the idea that we can pull out these, these flags of beliefs and let them go if they're no longer serving us a purpose. And if that, you know, again, I'm, I'm big, a big proponent of self-responsibility.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  In a political standpoint, that means, listen, you gotta not lean on the powers that be to take care of you anyways. And if you're self-sufficient, most of this stuff is not going to impact you the way it is. And if you're not happy with the way things are, get off your computer, go outside and, and mobilize and vote somebody new in. Or, you know, organize some sort of campaign to make things happen. And if you're not happy with the homeless situation in, in your neighborhood, get involved. Don't call 911. Like do things to be involved, take some personal responsibility. And sometimes that comes off as an unpopular opinion, but it's important to say, and, because it, it does get people feeling, and that's the, the purpose of an artist. The purpose of an artist is to introduce ideas that may not have already existed on

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  this planet. And their number one enemy is always going to be the fundamentalist. And fundamentalism, on the simplest definition, is those who think the past is better. The way we did it before is better. And we're, we're seeing that now. People are missing the good old days and make America great again.

• 1:50:36Rich Roll?

  Well, a core, yeah, a core, a core component of fundamentalism in whatever, you know, body it finds itself is that close identification of identity with belief, right? If you can't separate those two things, you are gonna be, you're gonna be unable to not only have, be able to learn anything new, um, you're gonna be going through life in a fixed mindset. And I think this is at the, the core, at the very center of this breakdown in healthy public discourse.

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Rich Roll?

  You were talking earlier about, you know, how you kind of bridge that gap on an individual basis through your own personal experiences with people. But how can we scale this up? Because when I look at... The health of conversation right now.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:22Rich Roll?

  It's pretty poor.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Rich Roll?

  I think unless we can address and heal this, we're, we're going to capsize as a culture because we can't communicate effectively, because we're so siloed and we're so, um, our beliefs are so identified with our identity. And any, any sort of challenge to them is an attack on who we feel we are as human beings.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  You, you're absolutely right. And it's, it's the economy of, of social media that dictates, hey, uh, Rich likes this type of content. Let's only put this type of content in front of him, which creates these echo chambers. You know, now it's, you're not going to come across somebody who says something you don't like to hear, because the social media platforms, their business model requires you to stay on their platform as long as possible. So they don't want to offend you, you know? Um, they, they want to get you engaged. So they might put, put some outrageous stuff in front of you. They might put some conflicting stuff in front of you, maybe even polarizing stuff in front of you. But at the same time, they're still curating your feed. And I'm, I'm not even sure if the average social media user understands that their feed is curated for them specifically.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  Your Netflix is curated for you specifically. There's, there's hit shows and, and, and movies on Netflix that you're never going to see, because it doesn't line up with your viewing habits.

• 1:52:40Rich Roll?

  And the more we're looking at these screens, the more our respective realities diverge from one another.

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 1:52:47Rich Roll?

  But we're unaware of that. We think everyone's looking at the same queue of Netflix movies and shows. And don't realize, you know, the person sitting next to you is having a completely different experience.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  Completely different experience. And I think it goes back to that personal responsibility of being mindful of this. So for me, I, again, even online, I try to dip myself into, uh, places I wouldn't normally go, whether it's on conservative websites and, and, and reading what they're trying to say, understanding how they're trying to say it. I was, I was speaking with somebody yesterday who wrote for the Daily Show and he's like, you know, the, the level of education required to just try to decipher the truth out of the news these days, it's so high and nobody wants to do the work, let alone even read the articles. They just want to read the headlines. And for me, it's, it's recognizing that on a grand global scale, to shift that wave is only going to be able to happen by holding some of these social media companies accountable.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Um, I had, I had some talks with some of the higher ups in social media companies and they. You know, I think the one honest thing that they keep communicating to me is that we can't do anything overnight. Um, I think the other part is kind of like, well, can you change, even if you could do it overnight, would you? Because your business model requires the economy of attention. Your business model requires us to pay as much attention as possible. Will it ever be in a situation where people are like, all right, you spent enough time on here today, like, we're gonna cut you off. And me personally, I have, you know, I'm a big Reddit nerd. I love being on Reddit, which is also an ecosystem that we can curate for ourselves.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  But I've set a timer on my browser for 30 minutes, so I have 30 minutes max on Reddit and my favorite hip hop websites. And they're all junk food. It's all quick gratification. It's all, you know, I'm not immune to reading up some gossip. I'm not immune to staring at pictures of cute puppies and just all these little drops of dopamine. But it's becoming aware of it and realizing that, hey, this stuff is no different than fast food. It's quick, cheap, easy, convenient, but you keep doing it for a long time.

• 1:54:48Rich Roll?

  And addictive.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  Very, very addictive.

• 1:54:51Rich Roll?

  I think we need to really appreciate the extent to which it creates an addictive response. And I had, I had Jack Dorsey on the podcast and we talked about this very thing with respect to Twitter. And he seems, I mean, he understands the problem and he seems committed to addressing it. One of the ideas he had is to reorganize the feeds such that it becomes less dependent on likes and retweets and also less dependent on following individuals and more in alignment with following issues or subject headings that can then be curated so that it contains a mix of perspectives to broaden, you know,

• 1:55:34Rich Roll?

  people's perspective outside of their silo. Now, whether that's idealistic or doable, time will tell, we shall see. But at least these conversations are happening. And I think the more that people can get in touch with the fact that the information, your information diet is tailored specifically to you. And to the extent that you can create habits that force you to step outside of that and entertain different perspectives and ask more questions and do more listening when you're engaged in those in real life conversations, you're at least living more on the solution.

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  Completely. And again, addiction is addiction. And I know some people will be like, well, I'm not addicted. Or look at all these people addicted to their phones and I don't. But I think people have to understand that addiction is, we might have made some poor choices to get to this point, but once you're hooked, you're hooked. And we have to view it with some sort of compassion. It just can't simply be like, kick that habit. It's the same thing with alcohol. It's the same thing with other substances. It's the same thing with self pity. It's an addiction manifests itself as a result of some of our poor choices. And we might not have had the tools to make the right choices to get here. But now that we're here, we have to approach it. I feel like we have to approach it the way we approach people with diabetes. You know, we have to, we have to look at this as something that, as a health issue now.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  And we have to approach it with treatment like a health issue instead of just kind of waving our finger at these people and being like, well, you're hooked on to this stuff now and you're part of the problem.

• 1:57:05Rich Roll?

  Shame on you.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, shame on you. And I mean, I'm very curious to see, because he also was at Ted and he did a Q and A there.

• 1:57:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he got excoriated for that, though. What was it like in real life?

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  It was, um.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  The format was challenging, so they all gave us a hashtag to ask him questions. And then the questions ranged from like smart questions to like, why haven't you deleted Trump's Twitter yet? To, do you know you're the devil? And at the same time, these are all scrolling in the back. And then I think the moderators are like, okay, well, we're not going to read these. And at the same time, everyone's just kind of reading.

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he's sitting on a couch with two, with two folks, and I don't know if this will ever make it to the public Ted forum, but he's sitting there with the, with two moderators and then they had the beautiful screen in the back and then they, they were putting everybody's tweets on the back and that's just scrolling. And I guess their plan was to originally read some of these questions. But the questions weren't like cute and fun.

• 1:58:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  They weren't like, what's your morning routine? They were just like, why haven't you deleted Trump's Twitter? How do you feel that you're part of the problem? And like stuff like that. So none of the challenging questions kind of made it to him. They did kind of poke at him when he didn't answer a question clearly. Cause he did kind of dance around a lot of it.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  I do kind of feel like a lot of these, these, these guys who created these just like world denting ideas in, in platforms. Um, whether it be Twitter, whether it be Google or Facebook. I feel like they are probably looking, uh, they, they're probably zoomed out a lot more than we, we might realize. And they're looking at this from a completely different perspective. And I don't know if they can articulate that perspective as well. But at the same time, I mean, like, who is the priority? Is it the shareholders? Is it the people? Is it, is it, is it the mental health of, of the situation? Is it the, the healthiness of democracy?

• 1:59:00Rich Roll?

  Well, the honest answer is there are competing interests.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:02Rich Roll?

  Right? And, and that's what makes it difficult. And, you know, with respect, you know, I can only speak to Jack because he's the only one I know.

• 1:59:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:10Rich Roll?

  Um, but I have kind of a controversial, you know, hot take on it, which is that, and this is based purely on my personal experience with him and listening to him in other interviews. My feeling is that he is a very intelligent person who helped create this thing that he could have never foreseen, you know, would, would put this dent on the universe in the way that it has. And he's now in an almost impossible to win situation of trying to figure out how to curtail it and, you know, curate it in a way that does promote healthy global conversation. Whether he can succeed in doing that, who knows? But my sense of him is that he really is, uh, he's trying, you know?

• 1:59:55Rich Roll?

  He's well intentioned and he does care because he doesn't have to go to Ted and put himself in these situations where he's going to get criticized on that level. Um, and I think he does think about these issues deeply and he's committed to finding a solution. Um, and I think that in a

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  How long ago did you, did you talk to him?

• 2:00:15Rich Roll?

  I was at his house like a month ago or something like that. Spent like a whole afternoon with him.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  If we don't, how long for you personally, uh, before, if we don't see any new feature ads or any new changes, are you gonna be like, okay, that was just kind of?

• 2:00:29Rich Roll?

  I got played.

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  I got played or he, he's saying?

• 2:00:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. Um, you know, was I, was I manipulated or did I see this human being as I want to see him? Um, but I do feel like this is a guy who like has gone to great lengths to keep his life very controlled and sparse and minimal in some of the ways we talked about. Walks to work every day. He's into intermittent fasting. He's taken a lot of grief for that. Um, there's no entourage at his house. Like he, everything is very not what you would expect from somebody of that stature. And I think it's, it's done in a way to help him think about these big issues without the clutter of, you know, the day to day of what it must be like to run like

• 2:01:17Rich Roll?

  two of the biggest tech companies. And in a Silicon Valley culture of a lot of bros who are chasing the money, like he just doesn't strike me as that kind of person. Like I feel like he's somebody we should root for and he's flawed and doing the best that he can and doing it very imperfectly. But like, who would you rather have helming this thing right now? And I'm not so sure I can think of somebody I would swap out for Jack.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I feel like a lot of the, a lot of these top impactful people who have, who have impacted multiple lives on this earth through their ideas. I think oftentimes they were just simply people who were obsessed with solving a problem. Not, and, and none of us, you know, remember the, the fact that the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.

• 2:02:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  And it's like, you know, Twitter solved some problems and created new problems and whatever new feature gets added in tomorrow to try to. Promote empathy, you know, whether it's, I I saw one woman do a presentation, it wasn't this year, it was last year, where it's like, as you type up your comment, like a second window pops up and it shows, is is this what you mean? Like, are you meaning to say this person is?

• 2:02:31Rich Roll?

  Just to give you that extra moment to reflect before you.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  Like, do you actually understand what you're about to say to somebody? And thinking that that might promote some more stuff. And who knows what what can happen with that? And, you know, being in the YouTube universe and seeing all the challenges that they're having with censorship, uh, you know, AI censorship, learning machines, trying to figure out how to catch uh, inappropriate content or or or violating content before it happens. And seeing people game that system, you know, watching somebody post a video that said, uh, what was the video? Uh, hanging my gay pride shower curtain, you know, and then knowing the words hanging and gay pride together, we're gonna get flagged.

• 2:03:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  You know, and and now that the news will pick up on that and then be like, oh, you know, signs of homophobia in in in YouTube and always realizing that someone's trying to, there's always somebody there to just kind of shooting, shooting an arrow at you. And maybe being okay with that. So.

• 2:03:26Rich Roll?

  Part of that is good, though, because it pressure tests the systems and helps refine them.

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  And at what point are we taking responsibility? Like, at what point? You know, I think for me, there there definitely was, especially with Twitter, was like, all right, well, I'm gonna decide who I follow, who I don't follow. And then one day, it, you know, we start seeing posts from people that you don't know, and you're like, oh, Rich follows them.

• 2:03:46Rich Roll?

  Because somebody liked something.

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  No, sometimes it's not even liked. I I'm I'm getting, I'm getting features with like, you know, Rich follows so and so, and I'm just seeing their.

• 2:03:54Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, I see that as well.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  And I think it's them going back to that, doubling down on that idea that we need to keep your attention. And if you like his stuff, then you might like the stuff that he likes. And it's just kind of like, hey, here, here are multiple endless rabbit holes that you can fall into. We just need you to be here. And at the same time, the cost of us all being there is is it's, we're constantly exposed to too much simulation, where we're constantly identifying the gaps in our own life in relation to whatever we're seeing. So, you know, if I'm, if I'm watching you hiking with your shirt off, and now all of a sudden, I'm just like, oh, man, I gotta stop eating carbs. I I gotta, I gotta get my body weight down. Or or if I'm seeing, you know. Somebody publishing a book or doing a book tour, oh, I published my book, but I haven't done a book tour

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  or I haven't done a signing in New York yet, or I haven't done a signing in South Dakota yet. I need to make that happen and just our minds going all these different places and the toll it takes on the machine that is our brain.

• 2:04:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we don't even have any grip, I don't think, on the long term impact of this.

• 2:04:58Speaker 01

  Do you have like a strategy for dealing with this right now?

• 2:05:02Rich Roll?

  Well, I have to, I have to exert a lot of energy and to create boundaries around it. Because I'm, I'm an addict through and through, dude. Like if I don't, you know, if I don't really create boundaries, then, you know, I'll get lost in this kind of thing. In the way that I can use anything to try to take me out of whatever emotional state that I'm in at the moment. So yeah, it's problematic for me, like I have to put it away and, you know, try not to check it in the morning. And especially, you know, as, as somebody who, you know, is a creator in different ways. You can just occupy all of your free time scrolling or passively consuming other people's creativity.

• 2:05:43Rich Roll?

  And now more than ever, for perhaps the first time in history, like you have to really go to the end of the earth to like remove distractions so that you can do what you're here to do. And I find it, I find it hard.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you don't check it in the morning, that's one, I guess that's like a.

• 2:06:01Rich Roll?

  I wish I could say I'm perfect about that, but I certainly am not.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Everybody buy an alarm clock.

• 2:06:06Rich Roll?

  I have rules, you know?

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to have rules. I, for me, I got a second phone. And then I learned from Neil, uh, make, make your main phone black and white.

• 2:06:18Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  Take all social, yeah, take, take, take, take social media off that first phone and then the second phone. Let that be your junk food phone, but don't carry it around with you.

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  It works and then all of a sudden I gotta go on a trip and I don't want to carry two phones. I put everything on one and then back. Just kinda doing that.

• 2:06:35Rich Roll?

  You relapsed.

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  Well, and that's the thing. There was a good J. Cole interview where he took a whole year and a half off social media and he's like, I thought when I came back, I'd come with this new perspective. And he was like, literally like eating a potato chip again. It's just like, it's as if you never left. And just start to see the power, like it's so salty and addictive. And it's a, it's such a challenge because everybody's in on it and everybody's doing it. And it's a, it's shaping it. And then for us to exist, you know, for people to know this podcast is coming out. You know, they're probably gonna find it on social media or in an email list or, or somebody else reposting it. And it's like, it, there's a beauty to it and then there's a challenge to it. It's, it's a, it's a weapon and a tool in so many different ways.

• 2:07:19Rich Roll?

  Just like what you were talking about with oneness and unity.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, with one, exactly.

• 2:07:24Rich Roll?

  Nothing is all good or all bad.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  Nothing is all good or all bad. We are, we are, I mean, we're a piece of the puzzle. We are also a puzzle within the piece that we are. And it's just, you know, infinity on the outside, infinity on the inside. And it's remembering that perspective kinda helps us. And in the next project I'm dropping, those, both those concepts are being explored. The fact that the importance of zooming out from where we are to gain perspective and the importance of zooming in. You know, knowing that there isn't, you don't just do it once. Like you don't just achieve balance. And now you're balanced. And you can just walk the tightrope forever. It's, you got your balance and you lose it. Then you have to regain it and you lose it.

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  And obviously, the longer you focus on your balance, you'll strengthen your cores and you can do it for longer. But it doesn't get easier. We, we improve, we get stronger. And seeing that, you know, and sometimes thinking about it gets daunting. And then we have to just remind ourselves that this doesn't all have to get accomplished in a day. You know, this can be a lifelong journey. And, you know, we under, we overestimate what we can get done in a day, underestimate what we can get done in a year.

• 2:08:32Rich Roll?

  I say that all the time.

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Rich Roll?

  Totally underestimate what we can do in five years.

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:36Rich Roll?

  In 10 years. Perfect example being this book. So 2014, we're now five years later.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  Five years later.

• 2:08:44Rich Roll?

  And you're really just starting to, you know, reap the fruits of this labor. It's been a five-year journey.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  It's, it's, and I, and I feel like. I I I want to stress that, you know, now I'm I'm really doing the push and really advocating for people to check it out and open it and connect with it. When I wrote it, I I was my my mind was somewhere different. It was, oh, if we're done.

• 2:09:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's now five years later. You're like, wait, I gotta rewrite this, this and this. Did you revise it from?

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  Um, I I I wrote a new foreword, uh, which helped encapsulate it. I I I read it because I was when when I realized it was going to get such a much larger audience now, I was like, okay.

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  This five years ago, did that did that guy even know how to write compared to like who I am now? Do I agree with these ideas? And I went through it and I was like, oh, this is the this is there, you know, there's a.

• 2:09:35Rich Roll?

  Damn, timeless wisdom.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  Well, timeless wisdom, but I I think more so is like, damn, like you did a really good job of trimming the fat. Like you didn't. You didn't over you didn't over explain yourself. You you kept it simple, short and sweet. And I mean, this actually represents a time when there was the freedom of of freedom of obscurity, which I want a lot of artists to embrace. If you are a brand new artist and nobody knows who you are, there is so much freedom in being obscure. Because nobody is looking at your stuff with a magnifying glass and finding reasons to critique it or to be offended or finding holes or in your story. And there was a lot of freedom in writing this because that guy who wrote this was in such a different space.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  And my only goals was to continue writing until I felt better because I wasn't feeling good about myself. And everything that I was coming across wasn't working for me. So I'd read about like, um, you know, the author of Harry Potter. Um, her name just slips me right now.

• 2:10:33Rich Roll?

  J K Rowling.

• 2:10:33Speaker 01

  J K Rowling. And, you know, her her commencement speech where she talked about, you know, um, rock bottom was the foundation that I built myself up upon. And in my head, I'd be like, well, how do I know when I've hit rock bottom? How do I rebuild? What was your rock bottom? How did you figure this all out? You're you're skipping steps in the story. I'm hearing was on welfare, wrote, you know, a universal international bestseller.

• 2:10:54Rich Roll?

  Time and perspective.

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  Time and perspective and that. But when you're feeling the pain. You just like, give me something for the pain right now. Give me an injection of validation. Uh, give me an injection of attention, dopamine, give me anything, give me some muscle relaxer, give me a shot. Give me something to make it go away right now. I can't, I can't stand this anymore. And I think now the perspective has changed. Like I do, I do dead hangs, you know, at, at the gym and from zero to 10, it's just getting, getting there. And then from like 10 seconds to about 30 seconds, it's like, something's wrong with my lung. I can't breathe. Oh my God, I'm gonna die. I better let go, I better, I better let go. And then telling my mind, like, let's just see what happens. Just like, relax. And then

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  passing that 35, 30 second threshold and then like 30 to a minute, it's like, I don't, I'm not even aware of pain all of a sudden. And it's like, kind of going through this like dark tunnel. And normally I would just give up when I hit that first piece of resistance. And now realizing that that's what it was. It's, it's what happens once you pass that resistance, you know, and the resistance is the essential part of all of this.

• 2:12:02Rich Roll?

  It's a beautiful allegory for the dismantling and, and kind of thing that you went through.

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh completely.

• 2:12:08Rich Roll?

  And deconstruction, your divine moment.

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  And that, and that's what I'm bringing to the table. I, I spent the time deconstructing this because so many sources that I was chasing was, was leaving me not feeling satisfied. Like, reading the quotes of, you know, like, don't worry, God has a plan. God doesn't close the door without opening a window.

• 2:12:28Rich Roll?

  Fuck you.

• 2:12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, fuck off. Like, what the fuck does that mean? How is that gonna help me pay my mortgage? You know, how is this gonna help me get out of debt? How is this gonna help me find the courage to call my buddy and be like, I don't have your money. And then I got to the point where I was realizing that, you know, I had already given other people this advice, which was like, like I said, you're making progress, you're making excuses, or sink or swim, or you want, you want this to be easy, go back to your job, you know, you want, uh, You want results, but you're too scared to take, you're too scared to, to, to take a shot. You know, you have to, movement is your medicine. Like, these aren't, these weren't revolutionary ideas. I had, I'd already heard them and just, it was easier for me to tell them to other people and not apply them to myself.

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  And then I took all these quotes and I plastered them up in my room. And my wall was just full of non-inspirational inspirational quotes. And they were just kicks in the ass, like suck it up, deal with this. You know, your problems may not be your fault, but your problems are your responsibility. And take ownership. You have the power for this. Anybody else you blame, you're just giving away the problem. You know, pretty much saying, you know, do this until you die. And I think that was the big one for me, deciding that I'm going to be humble the poet. Cause I've already been humble the poet long enough at this point. Where I don't want these constant reminders when people recognize me that I, that I failed this. And that's what, that's what the apartment building was. Seeing the condominium was a reminder of my failures.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  And now realizing, no, that was tuition. I paid tuition to get to where I was at.

• 2:14:00Rich Roll?

  So what's the experience now when you drive by that building?

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  Oh, we're good now. You know, there's a, there's a little bit of like, oh, that, you know, that would have been worth a lot of money if I still had it, but um. I had, I had to give somebody back some money when I sold it and um. They, they were very big on appearances. I remember they told me like, hey, if you need more money, I'll give you more money. Don't sell your car. We don't want people to know you're struggling. I didn't take more money from them. I got rid of the car. And then I didn't take more money from them. I got rid of the apartment and then I paid them back. And they said to me, I'm sorry you had to do that, you know, and really kind of reminding me of how embarrassing it was. And I just cock, I cockily said at that point, I'm like, don't worry, eventually I'll have enough to buy two. And um, I'll be honest, I had to get to that point before it became comfortable to look at that.

• 2:14:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  And now I was like, okay, well, yeah, I might not be buying that one now, but you know, I can, I can afford to. You know, buy one of these pre-construction ones that are gonna open in like twenty twenty four and I can afford two of those, no problem. And now I'm just starting over and that's okay, cause I'm starting wiser and and I'm more more patient, more resilient. I've seen the story play out, the seeds, the seed that I planted, I didn't get to decide when it was time for it to grow. And it's the same thing now, even, you know, being super fortunate to to to be on your podcast and and and and meet and meet your platform and and your community of open-minded learners who are trying to better themselves. You know, this isn't something that every author gets an opportunity of. So focusing on the gratitude and being like, it's cool.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  And this time around, the book dropped on April ninth. This time around, it wasn't, I need to drop this book and I need to hit the New York Times Bestsellers list for me to feel good about myself. What it was, was I need to make sure when April ninth hits, there isn't a voice in my head that is telling me what I should have done that I was too scared to do. So this time, I I reached out to every single person. I poked people more than I I my Canadian sensibilities normally allowed me to do. I asked for the favors. I tried to make the deals. I I I I sent the book to people that, you know, I would have been too scared to to bother. Um, I wasn't afraid to burn bridges. I just did everything I could to to make sure that this did whatever it could do without expectation of what it was going to do.

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  And knowing that everybody that I I at that point that I partnered with had a very cautious optimism towards it, but me knowing in my heart and and learning from other people, you know, um, The Rock told Lily this and she told me, you know, he said, listen, don't ever expect someone to give a shit about your work as much as you do. This is your baby. Don't expect them to care and don't hold it against them if they don't, because this is yours. And me being like, okay, this is not my agent's job, it's not my publisher's job, it's not my friend's jobs, it's my job. And I think it's it's the same idea, like, you know, if your car is is broken down on the side of the road, you know, putting on your flashers and waving at people might get you a certain result, but you'll get more results if they see you.

• 2:17:00Speaker 01

  Pushing it and trying to make something happen. And I think a lot of the support I've gotten, the immense, immense support beyond what I thought was gonna happen, came from people seeing me work and showing up and, and, and, and being wherever I needed to be and, and telling everybody, "Hey, you need me in your city, I'm there. I don't, I don't need you to buy my."

• 2:17:18Rich Roll?

  You can't expect them to be excited about it if you're not demonstrating that level of excitement. And I think a lot of authors fall into this sense that the publisher's gonna do all this stuff for them. And, you know, I could tell you that that is not the way it goes. Like, you really have to take complete ownership of it. And I think because you came from that DIY, self-published, you know, experience, you were well-equipped

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:43Rich Roll?

  to, you know, really take ownership of this new phase of what the book presents for you.

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Completely. It, it, it was, and it definitely, had I had this opportunity arose, arose two years ago, or even the, the year I published this book, this would have just fallen into obscurity. Um, I wouldn't have been prepared. I would have sat back and thought, "Oh, you're with the majors? The majors handle it all. This is gonna be, this is gonna be a hit. This is the next Eat, Pray, Love. This is gonna be the next subtle art. This, this is gonna do that." And I think now, this time, it was like, "No, what you were given is a trampoline. That's all you're given." And the trampoline doesn't do anything unless you got the legs to bounce it off. And your only rewards, uh, in, on this journey are opportunities. They're not outcomes. They're opportunities to work even harder, opportunities to do things, to work on things that you care about,

• 2:18:31Speaker 01

  work on things where the challenges are exciting to tackle, not things where you're just like, "Oh, no, not, not another thing I gotta deal with." Work on things where the resistance is exciting, where you're coming out of this a better person. And the personal growth I experienced through, again, writing this book, when I, when I self-published it, I had to build the book. I had to choose the fonts, and I had to set the margins, and I had to learn Adobe InDesign. That whole process is the real reward from this, not the, the money I made from this. Getting the book to, to, to the main stage and getting it, you know, with one of the three major publishers in the world and having... Them, you know, say, hey, we've been following you for a couple of years and we were waiting for the right time to make this happen and being like, okay.

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  You know, this is great, but this is also, why is this touching upon my, uh, why is this touching upon my, uh, anxieties? Or why is this touching upon my, uh, um, what's that called when people think that they're, they're phonies?

• 2:19:26Rich Roll?

  Tight, um, uh.

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  Um, imposter syndrome.

• 2:19:28Rich Roll?

  Uh.

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  You know, why, why, you know, why is this either validating or feeding my impos- imposter syndrome? And then that becoming, okay, well, this is something I have to write about and realizing that, hey, you don't write to publish books, to sell books in the world. You write because you're a writer. The same reason why Bird's saying.

• 2:19:44Rich Roll?

  And you have something to say.

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  And I, well, we all have something to say and that's the important thing. We all have important stories, each and every one of us. And our species has only benefited from people sharing their stories and every single human being is a potential innovator when provided with experience, wisdom, access and education. And now all these tools we have can make that grow at an exponential level. And you don't have to publish a book and get validation from a major publisher. You can carve it on a cave like, like our ancestors did. You can put it in a dance. You can, you can do it through your photography. You can do it in a poem. You can do it in any way, shape or form, never knowing the impact that that's gonna have, but not view it even as a privilege, but as a responsibility.

• 2:20:28Speaker 01

  And I think I got to that point now where like, this is my responsibility. This is what I do. I'm not here for the validation of other people. I'm here to, to live out my duty and my service. And in Siki, we have the concept of seva, which is service and learning that, you know, even every successful business ever existed was because they provided a service to the people that they found value, that they found value in. And that had me changing my, my language. So I stopped saying, please support. It's not, I'm not here to look for support. I'm not here to, to, to, to.

• 2:21:00Rich Roll?

  Like they're doing you a favor.

• 2:21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Don't do me a favor. Do yourself a favor and get this book. Like. I'm not here to tap into people's empathies and care about me. It's this is a collection of what we've all been going through. And my contribution to this is my ability to put words together. The wisdom that exists in here has it already will exist in the reader. It'll already be there. These are reminders, you know, this wisdom you're going to find written by, you know, Guru Nanak Devji in the late 1400s. But you're also going to find this in, you know, Confucius, you know, you're also going to find this in some Kanye West lyrics. You're going to find this everywhere. This isn't some secret mystical stuff. This is the stuff that has to get repackaged for our generation in the way we speak.

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  Every chapter is only two pages because I recognize attention spans, you know? The book doesn't have to be read in-

• 2:21:48Rich Roll?

  For the Instagram generation.

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  This it is. And that's also been a challenge working with the publishers and them saying, okay, well, we're here to to reach out to the people, you know, who appreciate the wellness space and let's connect with people who do yoga. Let's connect with people. And I was like, I want to connect with people who don't know that this stuff matters yet.

• 2:22:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Speaker 01

  Everybody, you know, not some people don't realize that social media is impacting them negatively on their on their mental health. Not everybody is realizing what why they have anxiety. They may not even have made that simple connection that your anxieties relate to your future. And maybe some of the older folks have, but you know, some of the 18 year olds and 19 year olds I'm talking to are sometimes the ones I meet at my shows are the ones I'm meeting at these YouTube conferences. They don't know that yet. And the quicker we can get them to recognize that and promote that self-awareness, then the quicker they can move with more health and the quicker they can pass that down as well. So if it took me 10 years to figure something out, it should be my duty to help somebody figure that out in five.

• 2:22:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:22:48Speaker 01

  And exponentially create that growth. And yeah, so I said, every every chapter in this book is two pages max. You don't have to read it in order. I wanted it to be something where you can just flip it open to any random page. You'll find a quote that you dig.

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  And you'll find something that resonates with you. It's not going to be a long read because books become investments.

• 2:23:08Rich Roll?

  No, you get it's so it's so easy to to digest. I mean, just looking at the the table of contents, like 71. You have like 71 chapters.

• 2:23:17Speaker 01

  101.

• 2:23:18Rich Roll?

  101 with 71. Oh, it goes to the next, yeah.

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it goes a lot.

• 2:23:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:23Speaker 01

  And I mean, yeah, just like there, you just open to a random page as a quote.

• 2:23:27Rich Roll?

  Right. Let's enjoy what we have while we have it and not spend it worrying about a future we may never see or an ending we can't avoid.

• 2:23:36Rich Roll?

  It's another way of saying worry is praying for the negative outcome.

• 2:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, or you know, worries like a rocking chair, gives you something to do, but takes you nowhere. And if that's what my goal is, is to really help people open themselves up. It's what I was taught as a teacher is the best teachers teach themselves out of a job. You know, my goal isn't to keep you coming back. My goal is to help empower you. And then the challenge for me is going to be, okay, I can't do the same thing with the next book. You know, the challenge for me is I gotta go deeper. So now I have a community that I can go on this journey. I'm very fortunate that I finished the other book before this came out because the success of this book would have totally crushed me with the pressure and made me write something completely different. So I'm lucky.

• 2:24:20Rich Roll?

  I like that perspective that you have that that the gift is the opportunities that, you know, come in the wake of it, not like any kind of, you know, measurable like material outcome.

• 2:24:33Speaker 01

  Cause the material stuff lasts for a couple of hours. It literally like the happiness that comes from it lasts for a couple of hours. Like if you're going to spend your money on anything that you think will bring you happiness, at least do make it an experience, you know, travel somewhere. You'll still get some dopamine when you rethink relive those experiences. But you buy yourself a Ferrari. You might enjoy it while you're driving it, but if you're, if you're, if you're sitting at home just thinking about it in the driveway, it's not going to give you that value and eventually you're going to get used to it. It's just the car you drive. And I, I operated with a lot of chips on my shoulders, especially having a father who was a cab driver and knowing that he was overqualified for that job. And most cab drivers in the city of Toronto are overly educated and had no other opportunities.

• 2:25:16Speaker 01

  And one of my goals was to put a Mercedes on our driveway and I did. I worked a second job and I bought a nice C class Mercedes. And the goal was like, it's going to make him so proud and so happy. He never sat in it once. He refused. To this day, I still don't know why. And I caught myself after being broken up with a girl crying in the car. And being like, what, what good is this? You know, I'm, I'm still having my good days and bad days, but I'm just having it in this, this luxurious car that, and, and this, the, the big point for me was I was working extra hard to afford. This wasn't in my means when I purchased it. Yeah. If you can afford it and it's, you know, and, and it's not a big deal, then buy all these.

• 2:25:53Rich Roll?

  You're perfect for Los Angeles.

• 2:25:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:25:56Rich Roll?

  Everybody's stretching to like meet car payments they can't afford.

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, well, I don't even do a car anymore. You know, I think, I, I, I feel like at that, at this point now, you know, just you can take a rideshare service if you can afford one of these nice cars and you can afford to have somebody else and do that driving for you and it'll allow you to get other things done. But that chip on my shoulder, it, it came from my, seeing my father when I was four, he got attacked. He was robbed. And, you know, for the first time seeing my father with like bumps and bruises and cuts on his face at four years old. And he had to put a, a shield in between his, his, his, his seat.

• 2:26:33Rich Roll?

  Passenger.

• 2:26:33Speaker 01

  But that was also our family car. So when we went places, we went in the taxi with the shield and I remember playing with the shield and thinking all this. But the older I got, I had these big chips on my shoulders to like, you know, once I get that Mercedes, it's going to make that worth it. Once I make enough money, I'm going to retire my dad.

• 2:26:50Rich Roll?

  What ended up? You were projecting onto him that he had that same sensibility.

• 2:26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And these, these weren't things that he.

• 2:26:57Rich Roll?

  Didn't care about.

• 2:26:58Speaker 01

  Or he never discussed, you know, like that robbery is not something he ever brought up again. You know, I think he just adjusted. He was like, all right, got robbed in the middle of the night. I'm not working at night no more. Let me work six AM to six PM. Like, let me make certain changes. And, and then he eventually moved from driving taxi in the city to driving taxi to the airport, which was a whole different level of clientele who were taking these limos from the, from the airport. So I think he made his adjustments accordingly. Um, I don't think he really grew up in an environment that promoted much self pity. It's just adjust, adapt, adjust, or you're going to die.

• 2:27:29Rich Roll?

  How, how, how are they now with you?

• 2:27:32Speaker 01

  Um.

• 2:27:32Rich Roll?

  Everything that you're doing?

• 2:27:35Speaker 01

  It's it's it's it's funny.

• 2:27:37Rich Roll?

  It's evolving.

• 2:27:38Speaker 01

  Huh?

• 2:27:39Rich Roll?

  It's evolving.

• 2:27:40Speaker 01

  It's evolving. I mean, again, when hearing in comparison to other people, especially, you know, children of immigrant, children of immigrants and hearing their stories in comparison to mine, my parents were great. They they definitely did not have the tools to have a son like me. They they had never heard, they didn't know any artists, they didn't know any creatives. Um, I still don't know from, you know, who amongst my family passed down any creative genes my way. Um, they didn't foster creativity with me, they didn't promote it, but they didn't.

• 2:28:10Rich Roll?

  I'm sure there were probably some amazingly creative people that just had to repress that impulse their whole life. So you're not even aware of where they fall in your lineage.

• 2:28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, one thousand percent. However, in Sikh heritage, all the hymns rhyme. You know, so like.

• 2:28:28Speaker 01

  Like, it all rhymes. So I was force fed all the hymns as a kid to memorize. That was the not my novelty trick, being an eight year old kid who memorized an hour worth of hymns. And they all rhyme. So I was always rhyming. And then we would sing them on harmonium. So I was also taught how to sing, and I was also taught to play the tabla. So I was given all the tools I needed to be a rapper. I was taught how to rhyme. I was taught rhythm. I I played percussion. Um, in in middle school, I played the steel pan because I grew up in a heavy Caribbean neighborhood. So I was playing steel pan. So I was playing instruments, but none of this was, this was all like extracurricular activities or part of my school, part of my schooling, or part of my parents' religious education upon me. And it gave me all those necessary skills.

• 2:29:11Speaker 01

  As well, as I said, the gurus, um, you know, they they mobilized, they they they ran armies and and and some of the Sikh temples in the Goda in Toronto, they post pictures of of who they considered martyrs, people that fought in the struggles in in the eighties specifically. So being a little kid, I'm looking at pictures of dead bodies hanging on the walls. So our, you know, my relationship with violence was a little bit different. So then, when one of the kids, the local kids in my neighborhood, like, played N W A for me, you know, it was like, these guys rhyme and they kill. And like, this is no different than some of the things that I heard.

• 2:29:46Rich Roll?

  Interesting connection.

• 2:29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because for me, it was, because when I first got into this, I would, you know, people would be like, you're not black. Why are you rapping? Like, do you have an identity crisis? And I was like, this is. This is my heritage since I first started. It's just I'm doing it in English because both my parents had to work when I when I was a child and my grandparents weren't there. So like they put me in daycare when I was two years old. So I wasn't speaking the mother tongue at home. I was speaking English because I was in daycare with everybody else and I had two older sisters to speak English with, whereas they were raised by my grandparents and they were watching the films and everything else. So my my upbringing was a little bit different. So my parents, they never got in the way other than comments. And when I

• 2:30:29Speaker 01

  when I made the when I made the leave, when I left teaching, they saw how much I was already kind of working at this. And I think they realized that we can't really stop him if we wanted to. When I came home after, you know, with my tail between my legs and my head down, as I said, they they gave me a little bit of a verbal spanking and I deserved it. I needed it. I needed to be held accountable. I wasn't blind. As I said, I wasn't manipulated by a master. I wasn't blindsided. But beyond that, it was just kind of like a we'll stay out of your way, figure it out. My mother much more vocal. So like every year after that, she was like, go back to work, go back to work. Like, why don't you go back to work? You know, are you making any money? Cool things would happen.

• 2:31:12Speaker 01

  I got on like, my name was printed on the cover of Rolling Stones India and that was a big deal for me. I had them ship me copies and I was like showing my mom and she was like, but are you making any money? Obviously, you're not making any money for me having your name on a magazine. And

• 2:31:24Rich Roll?

  Do Rolling Stones don't pay you for that?

• 2:31:26Speaker 01

  They don't pay you for that. Or like if I get a gig, sometimes you get a gig where like it'll, you know, they might pay for your ticket. They might give you like a thousand bucks, but it's not enough to to make a full living off of. And she'll be like, what are you saving? Are you making enough? You know, you, I think you've had your fun. Just go back to your job. Will they take you back? Will your principal take you back? And I did go back. I I I in 2013, when I was losing hope, I did go back and my principal just said to me, hey, you have a spot here. You can it was it was in July I went and she's like, hey, you have a spot here in September if you want. It'll be very challenging for me to shuffle around the staff. It'd be much easier if you came back in January. Are you cool with that? And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm only coming back because I

• 2:32:07Speaker 01

  missed the kids. Like, yeah, I don't need the money. Yeah, I'll come back in January. And I left her office being like, you're not going back. Like, you better

• 2:32:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but now you gotta go back and just talk to the kids.

• 2:32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's

• 2:32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's been a challenging thing. In the beginning, I couldn't face that school because, again, it was another source of failure, I felt, in the beginning. Now, there was actually, one of my more recent music videos, I had a, I met this actress, and I had her in the music video, not realizing that I went to school with her older sister, and her older sister used to come to the school I taught at to pick up her little brother. So that little brother had grown up, and he had recently been murdered. And that opened up a lot for me in terms of, like, did I abandon my community? Did I just forget about everyone and move to LA? And then it became a new challenge like that.

• 2:33:06Speaker 01

  And then it's kind of like, you stop picking up somebody's calls for so long, you don't know if you can just kind of pick it up and go back, and if you're going to recognize anything. So that is definitely one of the challenges. Some of the old teachers have come to events that I've thrown, and I've stayed in contact with them that way. I think most of the staff is kind of like, where I'm from in Ontario is going through a lot of challenges.

• 2:33:28Rich Roll?

  But that's your growth opportunity.

• 2:33:30Speaker 01

  That is my growth opportunity, and I have to lean into that. And that's something that just recently happened, and it was, again, it was one of those perspective shifts for me, too, was like, what are you doing this all for? What really is it? Like, you can, and that's what I have to keep asking myself. You can tell, you can say the nice things for the podcast, and you can say, oh, I care about helping people, I care about this, but then, why did you extend your trip two weeks? Why did you go to that premiere? Why did you make sure you got that picture with so-and-so on the red carpet? Why did you do all these things? What, how is that helping? Like, real shit's happening back at home. The real shit that you are extremely fortunate to get out of. My neighborhood, I'm from Rexdale in Toronto, if you're from Toronto, you know the reputation that Rexdale has.

• 2:34:15Speaker 01

  And I grew up on, I didn't grow up in the most challenging part of it, but I went to school, and definitely the most challenging part of it. And I taught in another challenging part of that area. And I was teaching kids who were witnessing shootings. I was teaching kids who were witnessing a lot of violence and what am I doing to, to, to, to help that? What can I do to help that?

• 2:34:35Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:34:35Speaker 01

  And also figuring out whether, whether it's, you know, using my celebrity to poke at the local city councillor to make sure the jungle gym is safe. Like, I have scars on my legs from injuries I sustained on broken jungle gyms in the neighborhood.

• 2:34:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:34:50Speaker 01

  And stitches accordingly, like, and I know I can, you know, and thinking out loud, what, you know, in real time, I know I can do more to, to have that impact. And it's kind of like.

• 2:34:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:00Speaker 01

  You, you start to.

• 2:35:01Rich Roll?

  You look at like, uh, Nipsey Hussle and like what he was doing in his community. It's kind of inspiring to think of, you know, the power and the responsibility of someone like yourself with respect to your community.

• 2:35:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I had just connected with him, um, in the middle of March.

• 2:35:17Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:35:18Speaker 01

  I had tweeted at him and he'd followed me back and I sent him a long message and I'd promised myself, cause I was flying to India for a show and in India straight here. And I said, all right, you are going to find him. You are, you are, and you are not going to take no for an answer. You're going to learn as much as you can because he's, he's very big on ownership and he's very big on, um, independence and taking the slow route. And I was, I was dealing with challenges, uh, with my publishers. I mean, and every time I heard him speak, I'm like, man, maybe I shouldn't have went with the majors. Like, he didn't, you know, I need to learn this from him. And now that I have, he follows me, I have at least one direct line to reach out to him. I'm just gonna go to his store and I'm just gonna camp out and I'm just like, I'll, I'll risk getting beat up to, to

• 2:35:59Speaker 01

  get this knowledge. And then, um, the, the flight back from India, it was Mumbai to, to, to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to LA. And in Frankfurt, I got the news. And then there was a, there was a lot of crying in the bathroom. It was, it was, it was a. That was, that was, yeah, that, that really, that, a lot of, I think I do need just some time to like really figure this out and, but definitely, we as a learning community, me as a hip hop artist, me as somebody who embraces that culture, this is our opportunity to magnify who he was. You know, we, we get to decide now if, if, if we're gonna just hollowly say, oh, he inspired us,

• 2:36:44Speaker 01

  or this is our opportunity to be like, all right, let's do what he did.

• 2:36:46Rich Roll?

  Translate that.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  Translate that. And I think probably, and it was a discussion I had with some of my friends who were Somali, because they're all first generation. They were all born in Somalia and then they came here at like five, six years old. And they're all like, no, we're just working, making our money, and we're going back. Like, we're, we're taking this all back. And I'm like, what, what, what about your kids? Your kids interested in Somalia? They're like, no. And I was like, see, I'm, I'm your kids' generation. And I'm a minority over there, too. I'm a minority back in India, too. And I'm a minority here. And I don't know, I don't, what is my community? And my community actually is the neighborhood I grew up in. And having to support that in some way, shape, or form, and whether that's gotta be, being on these big platforms and shouting out the city and shouting out artists, or whether it's

• 2:37:29Speaker 01

  building better jungle gyms, or whether it's getting involved in politics on a local level. It's, it's a challenge and it's a tricky thing to do, but I'm, I'm working on it. I've, uh, you know, I've, I've got, I've, I've gotten a seat at a table. I think Toronto might be the only city right now that will give a guy like me a seat at the table. And I've been given a seat at the table. And at the same time, I'm still going to some of these street guys' mixtape release parties and getting a lot of love and then trying to exist in the entire spectrum and trying to pass down the education I'm learning from, you know, these, these top CEOs and business minds and trying to apply that to, to these young entrepreneurs who are wasting their money on Gucci belts and stuff like that. And just trying to figure out a way to, to, to share that with them without sounding preachy.

• 2:38:13Rich Roll?

  Well, I think you've earned your seat at the table. And I, I feel like you're just beginning. Like, I feel like I've caught you here today, like, the, the very early stages and, and, and what you're gonna create. I'm excited to see what that is.

• 2:38:27Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I hope, I hope that's the case. I hope it's, you know, you, for years and years to come, you can be like, you know, I, I was messing with Humble before it was cool.

• 2:38:36Rich Roll?

  I don't know, man. I think you're pretty cool out there in the world at the moment.

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  You know, again, I'm nothing but gratitude for you for, again, sharing this with me. You are, you're a super dope dude. And as I said, I, you know, I met, I met your partner at the Marketing Angel event.

• 2:38:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:38:54Speaker 01

  And that's what kind of first introduced me and she was sharing some of your story. And then that kind of introduced me to this world. And I'm so grateful that this world exists where it's just a lot of people trying to better themselves in real time and sharing their notes with a lot of other people who are trying to better themselves. And I feel like it's just going to be an exponential thing.

• 2:39:16Rich Roll?

  We're all in this together.

• 2:39:17Speaker 01

  We're all in it together.

• 2:39:18Rich Roll?

  And elegantly trying to figure it out, my friend.

• 2:39:20Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, man.

• 2:39:22Rich Roll?

  So cool. Really great to talk to you, man. Really appreciate it. The book is Unlearned, 101 Simple Truths for a Better Life. And you can find it.

• 2:39:32Speaker 01

  Everywhere.

• 2:39:33Rich Roll?

  You can find it everywhere. You've got a website for it though, right? Is it hard for people to go to your website to get it?

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it'll help them find the, you know, their preferred spot. So humblethepoet.com/unlearn. But I mean, we're on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the independent bookstores. I mean, now that it's been doing so well on Amazon, from what the publishers are telling me, it's getting on more shelves.

• 2:39:52Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 2:39:52Speaker 01

  Somebody told me that they went to Barnes and Noble inside of the front of the store.

• 2:39:56Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. Nice.

• 2:39:57Speaker 01

  Apparently a big deal. So I'm happy about that. And even just if you check it out, just literally open it to any page, you're going to find a quote, this quote right here. "Heartbreaks, like any other struggle, is essential for your growth." This is my old teacher ways. That's how I used to read to the kids.

• 2:40:11Rich Roll?

  That's how you did that pretty good.

• 2:40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So you'd either read it to the kids and then you'd have to show them the picture. And every once in a while, you'd read it and you'd switch the page. It'd be like, Mr. Singh, you didn't show us the picture. And you had to sit there and just scan the whole room and then just watch them absorb it. So, and I've been doing YouTube videos now, reading from the book and being my.

• 2:40:30Rich Roll?

  I know. I saw those at school.

• 2:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, telling the kids to shut up and sit down.

• 2:40:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:40:34Speaker 01

  It's been fun. But yeah, no, thank you so much for, again, again, sharing your platform for me. I do have a question for you, just for my own selfish personal growth. What is the challenge that you are currently excited to tackle in your own journey right now?

• 2:40:47Rich Roll?

  I've got a bunch of them right now.

• 2:40:49Speaker 01

  Is there one that?

• 2:40:50Rich Roll?

  I'm trying to get, I'm trying to crack another book wide open at the moment. And that's been difficult, not only on the.

• 2:40:58Rich Roll?

  Ideation aspect of it, but also just on the scheduling aspect because my life is so much more full and busy than it was when I wrote my first book, where I had a lot more time and not a lot going on and not a lot of emails and people calling me, you know, and now it's different. So it goes back to what we were talking about, about like, you know, having boundaries around your time and how you're exercising, you know, those precious hours during the day to make sure that they're channeled in the direction of what can move the needle the most, you know, and it's been a while since I've written anything. So that's my mountain to climb this year that I'm excited about, but also scared and intimidated and all of that.

• 2:41:39Speaker 01

  And where are you at right now, like the outlining process?

• 2:41:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, early days, my friend, early days.

• 2:41:45Speaker 01

  I had for the next one that I that I'm releasing, I spent a whole summer and I set the goal of a thousand words a day. Cause like, oh, it needs to be 70,000 words. I was like, all right, cool. I can get this done in the summer. And then the entire draft had to get scrapped.

• 2:42:01Rich Roll?

  Did it. But it's easy to look at that and think that that was wasted time, but that's, those are the pushups. Those are the reps, you know, that make you a better writer.

• 2:42:09Speaker 01

  And that's me leaving one space, you know, spending more time in the digital world than the traditional publishing world and realizing like, hey, this is, these people aren't impressed by my cute little Instagram captions. They really wanted to bring out the best of me. And that's actually what, when I, when I signed with Harper, that was the only promise my agent said to me was, I'm not promising you, you're going to become an international sensation, but I am promising you, you'll leave this a better writer because these editors, they're not forgiving. They're gonna, they're really gonna poke, poke at you until they get, they get the good stuff. And that was a process and a half. So it is fun. Or maybe I'm saying it's fun because I'm done.

• 2:42:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  But it

• 2:42:47Rich Roll?

  It's humbling.

• 2:42:47Speaker 01

  It is. My deadline was November 1st. Yeah. My deadline was November 1st and I finished at the end of February for perspective.

• 2:42:55Rich Roll?

  I gotcha.

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  And I thought I'd be done in September. Yeah, here we are. So that, you know, when that drops, that'll be a fun one, too.

• 2:43:03Rich Roll?

  Cool. So check out the book. If you want to learn more about Humble, check out the show notes. I'll put a bunch of links up there and you're easy to find on the internet, just at Humble the Poet, pretty much everywhere, YouTube, Instagram. Instagram's your main jam though these days, right?

• 2:43:18Speaker 01

  Instagram and Twitter.

• 2:43:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:19Speaker 01

  I like, I like being on Twitter. Twitter's fun. Instagram and then trying to, trying to put some oxygen back in Facebook.

• 2:43:27Rich Roll?

  And are you doing any concerts or live events or anything like that where people can learn, you know, come see you?

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  I'm going to be in New Jersey on the ninth of May at the, at the Indigo store. They, they've made their move into the States. That's their first location. I'm gonna check that out. And I am currently working on a couple of other bookstores in other cities. But one thing that we'll definitely do is a lot of local media in whatever city. So I think, I think looking at Green Apple in San Francisco, trying to secure a date there, maybe Powell's in Portland, really pushing the independent bookstores because independent bookstores matter. And I really want to get out there, meet some more book nerds and sign some books.

• 2:44:06Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Well, come back and talk to me again sometime.

• 2:44:08Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 2:44:09Rich Roll?

  All right. Peace, my friend. Blads.

• 2:44:13Rich Roll?

  It's hard not to like that guy, Humble, right? Like he just, I don't know, he has an infectious spirit. So I really enjoyed that. Hope you did as well. Do me a favor. Check the show notes on the episode page at ritual.com to expand your understanding of his world beyond the earbuds and let him know directly by sharing your thoughts with him on Twitter or on Instagram at Humble the Poet. And don't forget to pick up a copy of his book, Unlearn 101 Simple Truths for a Better Life, as well as preorder his brand new book coming out in the fall, Things No One Else Can Teach Us. We'd appreciate any help you're willing to lend to help support the work we do here on the podcast. The best

• 2:44:55Rich Roll?

  way to do that is just tell your friends about the show or a certain episode that you listened to recently that you enjoyed. Share the show on social media. You can take a screen grab of what you're listening to or share a few thoughts. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, super important. And you can also support us on Patreon at ritual.com/donate.

• 2:45:21Rich Roll?

  I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing and editing this podcast for YouTube. Blake Curtis also doing double duty on audio engineering today. Jessica Miranda for graphics, DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships, Ally Rogers for portraits and theme music, as always, by Analemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. I do not take your attention for granted. I appreciate all the support and I will see you back here in a couple of days with another fantastic conversation with none other than triathlon Olympic gold medalist, Gwen Jorgensen. Yes, hot off the presses from my trip, my recent trip to Glacier National Park.

• 2:46:06Rich Roll?

  Super excited to share that one. You're not going to want to miss it. Until then, be kind to yourself and to the world. Put positivity out there, be grateful, all the good stuff. And I'll see you back here soon. Peace.