Spiritual Minimalism, Purpose, & Living A More Fulfilling Life With Light Watkins

27:26And so what the meditation does, the stillness practice, is it will turn up the volume a little bit on that still small voice, enough for you to hear it, just enough to take a little, I call them a hop of faith. Forget about the leap of faith. It's too scary. I get it. But take a hop of faith. Just take one tiny step in the direction of whatever you're hearing or whatever you think you're hearing. And then you have to kind of split test. Right. And then over time from split testing, what you think is your heart voice with all of the other voices, maybe a hundred times, you'll start to become more and more familiar with the feeling tone, that expansive feeling tone that you always get when you follow your heart voice.

28:11When you take the little hop of faith, you get a feeling tone of expansion as opposed to feeling contracted. You know, like if something's telling you, say something negative right now, you know, curse somebody out, it may very well be justified in your mind, you know, flicking somebody off in traffic, but does it make you feel expansive afterward is the question. So now, you know, okay, that's definitely not my heart voice. But if something says, okay, forgive this person who wronged you, right? No two ways about it. They wronged you, but you're gonna be the bigger person here. No one ever steps into the role of being the bigger person and then you like deeply regret that later on.

28:56Right, right. Or going above and beyond, going the extra mile, doing an exceptional job with something. It's hard work and you don't know how it's gonna turn out, but it feels good going and doing a workout that is really taxing on you, but you always feel good after having been pushed in that way. And that's how you know you're listening to that heart voice. Yeah, I mean, I think there's certain actions that are probably universal to all humans, like extending grace, forgiveness, et cetera, gratitude. And then there's a subset that's very particular to each individual. And this idea of these baby hops I like because I think we get in our heads about things like purpose and meaning and all of that.

29:44And we're sitting around waiting to be struck by lightning before we move forward. We wanna know exactly what it is and all the steps it's gonna take to get to a certain place. But I think you're absolutely correct. And certainly it's been my experience when I made a very conscious decision to start heating those little voices that had been lingering for a long time for no other reason than it just felt like me. And over time, it started to bring more joy into my life. And through a zillion serendipitous situations has led me to sitting with you today, right? And I love in the book, you have your version of that story and how all these strange things that you could have never predicted kind of came together to, in a conspiratorial way to allow you to more deeply invest in that heart song.

30:41And there's just something really magical but also undeniably true about it. And in the most simplistic way, I would say, and you point this out in the book, it's about changing your attention away from the head and towards the heart, right? Like how do you flick off the navigation system in your brain that's responding to all of these voices and the social conditioning and the baggage, et cetera, and really attune yourself to what this thing right here is trying to say that perhaps is a more divine navigation system, but in so many ways, because it defies rationality and logic is hard for the Western mind to kind of get behind.

31:28Yeah, I'll give you an example from my personal life. So I was teaching meditation, this is years ago, I was teaching meditation in New York City. And I'm constantly at that time, I'm constantly thinking, how can I teach more people how to meditate? So late at night after one of my trainings, I'm walking back to my apartment, I'm walking through Union Square and something tells me to go and get a Rubik's Cube from Barnes and Noble, which is at the North end of Union Square and learn how to solve it. It's the most random thought. And so at that point in my life, I have such a strong relationship with my heart voice that I try not to question it.

32:08So I just went to Barnes and Noble. They were gonna close in like 10 minutes. And I knew where the toy section was on the second floor. So I went there and I found, they had one Rubik's Cube left. So I got the Rubik's Cube and I paid for it and then got back to my Airbnb that I was staying in. And on the way there, I called up a buddy of mine who is one of my close friends who talk often. And I told him that I'm gonna learn how to solve the Rubik's Cube. And then he did what society does, which is he starts saying, what are you talking about? You're a grown ass man. You don't have time to play on Rubik's Cubs.

32:40You have to be figuring out how to market your business and da, da, da, da. And I said, well, I have to do this. It's just something I feel like I need to do. So I go online and I figure out how to solve a Rubik's Cube, which I never even investigated before. Turns out there's an algorithm to solving a Rubik's Cube. I used to think you needed to be a genius to solve a Rubik's Cube, but you just have to memorize these series of steps. So I started working through the series of steps. A couple of days later, I learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube, which is a pretty incredible thing to do on a New York subway to sit there and solve a Rubik's Cube.

33:15Everyone's like gawking at you. Is he gonna do it? Yeah. But anyway, what I learned from that experience was the way you solve a Rubik's Cube is very similar to the way meditation works. You solve it in rows. So the bottom row is sort of like the base. You solve that first, then the middle row, then the top row, and then the whole thing solves. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, this is just like how meditation works where you solve the base of rest first. And then from that, you get digestion back online. You get immunity back online. You get reproduction back online. and then everything comes back into balance.

33:49So now I'm just captivated by this comparison that I never would have known otherwise. And I decide I'm gonna make a video about this and I'm gonna put it out on this new website called YouTube. And cause this is back when YouTube had first started. So I make this video in my living room in Los Angeles once I get back from my trip and it goes viral. And then all these people start reaching out to me to learn how to meditate. And that was at a moment in time where you were kind of at a crossroads with like the business of your meditation teaching. Yeah, I'm looking for ways to teach more people.

34:24Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like my heart was leading me to the solution just by making me curious about these other things. And it came up with a solution that was even more eloquent than what I was thinking before, which is, should I run Google ads or what should I do? And it was like, no, do this beautiful thing that can be unique to you. And that's the power of following that curiosity. But you're right, you have to be able to hear it first. And I've been meditating for many years at that point and I attribute that for allowing me to be able to hear that voice a little bit. Well, and you had kind of practice this habit of investing in your curiosity so much that it's become reflexive, right?

35:09It's just like anything else. It's the inner gym, right? Like this is just one thing. And part of like the whole getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, people think about that in terms of like fitness or whatever, you gotta suffer, et cetera. But the discomfort in that context is trusting when there's no reason to trust for any purpose whatsoever and still kind of like pulling that thread and following that muse and making a conscious decision that, oh, this is my curiosity. I'm somebody who follows my curiosity. We're going to Barnes and Noble and we're getting this thing, right? And you have to decide, am I gonna be more loyal to other people's opinions?

35:49Cause that's really what's stopping us is the potential of looking silly or wasting time, which then leads to people questioning, well, what were you doing with your time? Oh, I was playing with a Rubik's Cube. Oh, that's why you're a failure. That's what plays out in our mind versus being loyal to our heart and just trusting that whatever we're hearing is going to help us to move towards our path and our purpose. So if we start living a more purposeful life.

36:23The other like wisdom nugget that I get out of what you just shared is this idea that these things are subtle, you know, setting aside the lightning bolt, they don't come pre-packaged with like, here's your path or this is your next goal. they're like tiny, it's like the, yeah, like I'm gonna turn left here instead of turning right, meaningless, tiny little details of life that I guess on some level are kind of analogous to atomic habits. Like they're just tiny little things that in and of themselves are seemingly meaningless, but they're like minuscule breadcrumbs, right? And you're on some kind of like, you know, treasure hunt.

37:05Yeah, and that's why I say in the book, one of the principles is that you have to treat life like there are no throwaway moments. So every little thing, go to Barnes and Noble, get a Rubik's Cube. It wasn't easy to learn how to solve a Rubik's Cube. It took a lot of time and practice, right? So when you are moving towards your path, a lot of people think, oh, that's when my life is gonna get easier. Actually, that's when your life becomes a lot more challenging because you're introducing resistance that on the surface looks unnecessary. But as you continue moving through that process, you're learning things, you're expanding your perceptual acuity in ways that are outfitting you for whatever your path is going to include next.

37:46And if you hadn't gone through that experience, then you would not be prepared to do the things that you ultimately envision yourself doing. And I think that's something we under appreciate. Right, and it also allows you to frame everything that happens as an opportunity, rather than label it as positive or negative. And I'm reminded of the story. I think you told the story last time, but it's kind of like your male model origin story and you're going to Paris and the flight keeps getting canceled, but you're getting these$500 vouchers each time. And those are kind of mundane, annoying moments, but maybe positive because you're actually profiting off of it.

38:27But when you finally arrive in Paris and kind of enter this agency, there's this assemblage of people that happened to be there when you were there that lead you on this whole path that kind of created a life for you for a certain amount of time that had you gotten on that original flight and it wasn't overbooked, et cetera, maybe those people wouldn't have been there, it would have been a whole different thing. So there are no mundane moments, there are no real, like that was those setbacks in not getting to Paris in the manner in which you would have preferred could be seen as problematic, but actually it was this amazing opportunity, right?

39:06That led you in a way that you couldn't have led yourself. Yeah, and I'll share another one just because I think it's good to reflect also on the opposite when something seemingly bad happens, right? Which everyone on the surface would say, yeah, that's not a great situation, which is, I was teaching yoga back in the day and I was living in West Hollywood and my yoga class was at Crunch Gym, which is in Sunset Boulevard, Sunset Plaza. So my commute was literally half a mile down Fountain Avenue, right? And I had everything timed out. I would leave my apartment. It would take me probably five minutes to get to the gym.

39:46And except this morning, I go to Fountain and there's all this bumper to bumper traffic. So like any good Los Angeles driver, I zigzag through alleys down to Santa Monica Boulevard to see if I can go that direction. And same thing, it was full of bumper traffic. Usually worse on Santa Monica. So I'm inching along and I didn't give myself more than about 10 minutes to get to this class. And I have this thing about being punctual. So now I'm getting all anxious and trying to breathe through it and finally I just surrender to it. And then I get to Fairfax, which is where if there was an obstruction, it would have probably been at, this was the major intersection.

40:21So I'm looking for construction. I'm wondering, was the president in town? Is there an accident? Was there some crazy person in the middle of the street holding up traffic? And there was nothing. There was nothing. The traffic just cleared up. And then I'm even more upset because now I have nothing to blame it on. And it's just that there was a lot of traffic, which as we know, living in Los Angeles, you can't really blame the traffic because everybody knows there's traffic. And now I'm about 10 minutes late to this class that I'm teaching. and I walk in to the class and everyone's in the back of the room and I feel this crunching under my flip-flops and I look down and there's like a million shards of glass all over the floor and I look up and so that particular room has a wall of mirrors in the front and I would have been sitting right in the middle of that wall and right in the middle of the wall, there's an empty space where a mirror was supposed to be.

41:18Apparently, right at the top of the hour, that mirror panel, which is about nine feet tall and about maybe four feet wide, dislodged and came crashing down. So it turns out that phantom traffic jam - Saved your life. That I surrendered to, saved me from having a very unlucky start to my day. Yeah. And that's the opposite side of it too. Just when you, and I talk about this, the freedom of choicelessness. When you don't have an option, you tried everything you could do, you left on time, you hit traffic on one street. Okay, let me go to the other street, hit traffic on that street. You're giving a gift of choicelessness, which means that you are being navigated now.

41:59And instead of getting all anxious and out of the present moment, just surrender to it, understand that it's sparing you from something that's worse than that traffic. That's so hard. That's minimalism. That's spiritual minimalism though. It's really difficult. Because otherwise we're holding on to, oh, what could, coulda, shoulda, woulda been happening right now. which is really just future tripping and predicting something that actually we have no idea whether that's actually the way it's gonna pan out. You may never know. I got lucky in that situation because I got to see pretty obviously what would have happened otherwise, but you may never know.

42:36And you don't know the timeline either of how these things assemble to guide you in a certain way. And there really are no small moments, no minor things because it is those tiny little nudges one way or the other that have this butterfly effect. Yeah, but you look at, okay, let's run the opposite experiment. Let's say I was just, it's better to be anxious the whole time. Well, what does anxiety do? It yanks you out of the present moment. It makes you not present. And a lot of people will say, our greatest asset is time, right? If I can get more time, buy my time back, whatever, then that's gonna be better than not having my time.

43:17But I would argue from a spiritual minimalism perspective that your greatest asset is actually presence because you can have all the time in the world, but if you're never present with that free time, then is it really that valuable, right? Versus not having as much time, but being fully present. And then if you're present, it's kind of like one of those magic eye puzzles, where you look at it and it just looks like a bunch of chaos and you soften your gaze. And then eventually an image starts to appear from the chaos, right? Like that, when you're present and you're not anxious and you're just kind of relaxed, you start to see and experience opportunities and insights and epiphanies that you would otherwise miss because you're so locked into what's not happening or something that you're regretting from the past.

44:11and that's the value of present moment awareness. And that can help you in your relationships. Like what relationship does not benefit from both people being more present, right? And a lot of us are saying, okay, well, as soon as they're present, I'm gonna be present. That's not how it works. You get what you give. And I talk about that and that's a principle. You give what you wanna receive. So if you want more love, you have to be more loving in order to nurture that within the relationship. If you want more presence, you have to be more present. But Light, I wanna wait until they give it to me first and then I'll grant it, right?

44:47Like it's conditional. Run that experiment and see how it works out for you. I know. And then come back and talk to me. It is really true. You mentioned earlier this idea of split testing, like split testing your internal voice. So walk me through an example of what that might look like. Cause I think that's instructive for somebody who's kind of playing around with this notion for maybe the first time? So for people who are familiar with internet marketing, that's what makes a good internet marketer. They split test things. So they run an ad and they run a different ad, but with a different headline.

45:25And they'll see which one performs better. And then they'll change the color on one and keep the color the same on the other. And they'll see which one performs better. And through doing all of those experiments, they'll eventually arrive at the most optimized ad for whatever the purpose is of that ad. And like that with split testing, we can do that with our internal voices. You have the voice that you think is your heart voice and you have imitator voices. And some of those imitator voices are really voices of your ego, telling you to follow a certain path, which may seem altruistic, but if you really are honest with yourself, it's really because you think it's gonna make you look better in the eyes of someone else, right?

46:09Fine, follow it, follow it and see what happens, see how it makes you feel. And then go and do the opposite. It's kind of like that Seinfeld episode where George Constanza decides, I'm gonna just do the, he says, I'm not having any luck at work with women, with anything. And Jerry says, well, just start doing the opposite of what you would normally do. If what you're doing now is getting you the worst results, you can't lose anything by doing the opposite. And he starts doing that. And he starts being completely honest with the women that he's dating. He goes to the job interview, which is at the Yankees or something.

46:45And he says, he starts talking crap about how the Yankees are running the organization. And then he gets hired and he gets these beautiful women. And he starts getting the opposite of what he was getting before. And that's what's so great about life experience is whether you're skeptical about these kinds of concepts or whether you buy into them, your experience is giving you the results, right? That you're getting. And if those results feel fulfilling to you, then great, keep doing more of that. But if they're not, regardless of what you believe or think should be happening, you kind of have to do the opposite in order to really understand whether or not what you've been doing is the thing to do.

47:25And so that's what split testing basically means. is you can still keep following that voice that you've been following, but try doing the opposite a few times and just see what happens. Don't take my word for it, just see what happens. In 12 step, they call it contrary action. It's like, hey, smart guy, you think you know it all? Like your best thinking landed you here. Like how smart are you? Maybe not to keep, I know you wanna do that thing, but that thing actually is why you're here and like go take contrary action. and do the thing that feels very uncomfortable and maybe doesn't feel right because you're not used to flexing it in that way or you've just dug this neural groove and convinced yourself that you know what's best.

48:12And it's only through, that's I guess a different way of thinking about split testing to try to determine if maybe all these other people are saying, I shouldn't do that thing that I wanna do. Like what happens if I take their advice or their collective wisdom and act on that and then just objectively kind of note what transpires as a result. So I had an experience many years ago where I used to drive a Fiat, right? I'm six foot three and I used to drive a two door Fiat. I mean, there's gotta be a backstory there. I just, I was at a place where I was teaching yoga. I didn't have a whole lot of money.

48:49And that was really the only car I could afford at the time. and I would go to the coin operated car wash. And I remember one day washing my car and trying to get the whole thing clean before the three minutes was up. And this beautiful matte black Ferrari was in the next stall. And I'm thinking to my, I'm in my head, I'm like, man, this is so emasculating. Here I am, grown ass man with this little Fiat. And this guy, whatever he's doing has this Ferrari. And what am I doing wrong with my life? Again, I'm teaching people to find happiness inside, but I'm not perfect. I'm still going through my own struggles.

49:23And anyways, we both pull out at the same time to the drying station and I'm drying my car with my little reusable yellow towel. And he's got these really beautiful white towels, like something you get at the Four Seasons and he's drying his Ferrari. This is a big burly guy. And I'm still like in my head around, why do I have a Fiat? He's got a Ferrari and this is embarrassing and blah, blah, blah, and then I pull out my tire polish and I start spraying my tires and I look over and he doesn't have any tire polish. And then something says to me, you admire his car so much, go and offer him some tire polish.

50:00So I went over there and I said, hey, you have such a beautiful car and it would be a shame for you to go back on the road without polishing up your tires. And I said, I would love to let you use my tire polish. And he takes it, he graciously received it. He shines up his tires and I go back to my Fiat and I'm still drying it off. And then he does something really interesting he comes back to the Fiat with his white towels and he starts spraying my tires and shining up my tires. Now, initially I was thinking, let me stop him from doing that because I mean, he doesn't have to do that. And, but I decided to just receive it in the same way that he received it, you know, with such grace.

50:37And of course we started a conversation and he told me his whole backstory. He's, you know, he was an immigrant and he started off working at a car wash and then he worked his way up to owning a Ferrari dealership. And then he ended up telling me to come and teach his employees meditation. And he's like those little moments, every amazing experience that we have, if we go back far enough, there was a moment where something told us to dot, dot, dot, which was that hop of faith. It doesn't have to be a huge thing. Just go with what that voice is telling you to do. My voice at that time was saying, go and offer him, which was an expansive feeling for me, right?

51:21It wasn't like my life purpose to go and get people tire polished, but just in that moment, but then it led to these beautiful other experiences. And that's really, that's the gateway to what could theoretically be your purpose. And you can't act on that voice or you can't hear that voice, let alone act on it, unless you are present. But that's how you can turn up the volume on your presence as well, is by taking acting on in those little moments that would otherwise be dismissed. Oh, I'm not gonna do that. That's crazy. How many times do we say that to ourselves? That's crazy. I'm not gonna do that.

51:56I'm not gonna compliment them because they're gonna think I'm weird and blah, blah, blah. You have to say yes to those things if you wanna turn up the volume. That's a great story. Some of these words get really conflated with each other. And I think they confuse a lot of people when we start talking about fulfillment and purpose and even curiosity and presence, et cetera. And one of the things you talk about in the book is, by cultivating this curiosity and acting on it, you start to get a clearer kind of picture for what your purpose might be eventually. But then you weave in this idea of having a value set or trying to kind of calibrate these decisions that you're making and how you're acting on your heart in conjunction with your values.

52:48So how can you explain that? So it feels like it makes sense and we have some clarity about what all these words actually mean. Okay, so we, in our society, we oftentimes put a lot of value on having multiple options. When actually, when it comes to your heart voice, you really only have one option. which means that there's one option that is most aligned with what you feel inside and everything else may be good, may be great on paper, but it doesn't quite feel aligned, right? For instance, there was a moment back in 2006 when I got into real estate. We all know what happened in late 2006, 2007.

53:35I remember sitting at the table with my realtor who I didn't really trust. He was a nice guy, but I didn't really trust he was giving me the best advice. He was giving me self-serving advice. He made a lot of money off of those transactions. But I remember sitting at the table, everything in my heart was saying, whatever you do, don't sign these papers, right? But I was thinking, okay, I'm going to be able to flip these properties because everybody and their mother was flipping houses at the time in Los Angeles. I can do a lot of good with this money. So I tried to make it altruistic, But really, if I'm being honest with myself, I was really just being greedy.

54:13And I was going against my heart voice in that moment. But on paper, anybody would have looked at that and go, oh, this is a great deal. So I went through with it, ended up losing my shirt and my pants and everything else, my socks. And I came very close to filing for bankruptcy over the next few years. And simultaneously, I had this desire to go to India with my meditation teacher and learn how to become a meditation teacher. And during that time between the real estate bubble bursting and going to India, I also got an email from the Department of Justice Victim Notification Unit saying that I was the victim of a Ponzi scheme.

54:54So one of the ways I was able to buy the property was because I've been in quotes investing in this foreign currency exchange company and it looked like it was going really well. This is before Bernie Madoff came to light. So turns out it was a Ponzi scheme and they were basically manufacturing these gains every week, sending us these PDF statements. And I was thinking I was freaking Warren Buffett. Like I was the smartest person on earth. But it turns out it was all just make believe I lost everything. And so that exacerbated the whole bankruptcy conversation. but during that process, I was getting these credit card offers in the mail and balance transfer offers in the mail because I was in real estate.

55:45And that allowed me to go to India because I needed to come up with$14 ,000 within like a week to be able to pay for this trip. So all that to say, even though on paper, it looked like some bad things were happening, I still was able to sort of course correct by following through on this heart voice, which was saying, go to India. It didn't say, this is how you're gonna pay for India. It just says, go to India, right? And everything in my heart was like, okay, that's where I'm gonna go. I had no money. I was going through these bankruptcy conversations, but at the same time, I was getting these offers in the mail, because I hadn't filed bankruptcy yet.

56:20Right, and you were playing in kind of a big field where a lot of money was getting exchanged. So it just rang some bell somewhere in some bank saying, this guy should, let's get this guy a credit card. And when I got it, even though I would never do something like that, if I was solving, cause it just looks okay. Yeah, it's interest free for 18 months, but then it's gonna go up to like some crazy loan shark level of interest. You're just gonna make your whole problem worse. When I got it, I knew that this was the answer. This was what I was supposed to use. And it was a different feeling tone from sitting at the table about the sign of the paperwork.

56:51It was more of an expansive cause I'm thinking now about the possibility of really truly helping people by learning how to teach meditation. So it wasn't about being a real estate mogul, which I had no passion for, but I was trying to convince myself that I was passionate about it. Right, right, right, right. I'm trying to kind of marinate in the lived experience of you sitting there about to sign these papers and having this instinct that it wasn't the right thing and trying to differentiate that fear, which was a fear of self-preservation or a sort of a sense of yourself that was being animated from being out of alignment versus just that discomfort of suddenly stepping into something new that's unfamiliar.

57:37Like it could have been like a little ripple different. And it's just like, well, I'm afraid because I've never done this before and I'm biting off a lot if I sign this, but I know that this is the right path for me. Like those are two very different energies that show up in a way that can feel somewhat similar unless you're cultivating an adequate amount of self-awareness to differentiate the two. Yeah, and really it just comes down to, just to give it a definition, aligned or not aligned. Like it didn't feel aligned at the real estate table, but it did feel aligned to use that money to go to India.

58:12And then still either in both cases, I had no idea how it was gonna turn out, right? But there was a tangible feeling tone of expansion when I got that offer and I used it to buy my ticket. And then within a month of coming back from India, I was able to pay off the whole thing. And everything kind of worked out from there. But that's why it's called a leap of faith is because you're not gonna know how it's gonna turn out. And both feet have to leave the ground and you have to be scared as hell in the process. And then the net appears. It's just not gonna appear if you have one toe on the ground and the other foot in the air.

58:46Yeah, that's the thing. But you also were quick to note that a leap of faith isn't one thing, it's a lifestyle. And when you see people who make these dramatic leaps of faith, they're generally backed up with all kinds of baby hops behind it that are invisible that you didn't see because they're not dramatic. So in the experience of that person who made that leap of faith, there was some kind of evidentiary backup, based upon all these smaller leaps that took place prior to that. Yeah, and the same thing with me, people may get this book and go, oh, this guy lives out of a backpack. I didn't just wake up one day and decide I'm gonna live in a backpack.

59:26It started with me on the road all the time and then experimenting with what I needed, right? So I would put everything into my carry-on bag and see if I could get through the two week trip or whatever it was just from the carry-on bag. And then I did that probably dozens of times. And then I decided, okay, I'm gonna experiment with this nomadic minimalism thing and see if I can pull it off. And that's when I got rid of everything and got rid of the apartment and moved into the carry-on bag. And then I downsized from that to a 40 liter backpack. And then a year later, I downsized to a day pack.

1:00:00And so it was a process that started probably three or four years prior to that. And even if you wanna really go further back, people say, when did you become a minimalist? I became a minimalist when I started taking my meditation practice seriously. Cause that's what cultivated the internal spaciousness for me to even entertain the idea of letting go of this conventional life and trying out this thing that I had no idea how it was gonna turn out. Yeah, that's interesting. You talk about, you kind of walk through the process of like letting go of all your belongings and giving away things. And even your brother had gifted you a Rolex and you like gave it back to him.

1:00:41I was curious about like how he received that. Like, did he feel, is he still wearing it? Do you want it back? But Also the story around the$4 ,000 that was the only money that you had in the bank. and you giving it to a buddy of yours and saying, if I don't finish my book by this date, you can cash it and use it for whatever you want. Yeah, so it was my first book that I was writing and I had no idea what I was doing. And I went online to try to find freelancers to help me edit the book. I just had this idea that I wanted to get out into the world. And it took me about three and a half years to get that book out.

1:01:30But three years into it, I was so just sick and tired of being sick and tired of thinking about this book and starting and stopping and starting and stopping. And I realized that I just needed something more. I needed to put some skin in the game more so than I had already done. So I reached out to my friend and I said, hey, I'm trying to finish writing this book. I put myself on a deadline of, I'm gonna get this thing published three months from now. So I need to finish the manuscript by such and such date. And I said, to hold myself accountable, I'm writing you this check for$4 ,000. And if I do not achieve my milestone of finishing the manuscript by such and such date, you are obligated to take this money and use it for anything that has nothing to do with me.

1:02:26And I had a whole little contract and everything and I signed it and had him sign it. And then after that, I had all the time in the world to finish this book. Amazing how that worked. It freed up all my time. Right. Because there was no way I was gonna, I couldn't afford to lose that money. It was all the money I had at the time. And sure enough, I got it through. And that taught me something. It taught me that discipline is not really about having the time or the willpower. It's really about honesty. Are you being honest enough with yourself, right? For instance, if you're saying to yourself, I'm going to wake up at six in the morning and then I'm going to write before I go to work or I'm going to write after I go to work, but you've never done that before, you're probably not going to do it on a consistent enough basis to see the thing through to the end.

1:03:15So you may have to move things around and you may have to figure out how can I integrate the writing? Kind of like what James Clear talks about habit stacking. How can I do it on top of something else that I'm already doing? And that way you're going to be a lot more likely to make that time because you're already doing something else that is aligned with it. For instance, me wanting to work out on a consistent basis. Well, I'm going to this gym that's three miles away, which requires me to dress up, get in the car, blah, blah, blah. So I paid a little more money to go to a gym around the corner that I could walk to.

1:03:51And then I started going every day because I had to put myself more closer in proximity to that. And these are questions we can all ask ourselves. If I'm trying to stop eating sugar, but I have a bunch of sugar in my pantry, a bunch of Oreos and nachos and all kinds of stuff, then I'm probably going to find myself in that pantry, talking myself into why I need to have this Oreo right now. But if I get rid of all of that, I have no choice. And if I put carrots or whatever fruit in my refrigerator, now that's the only option I have. And that's how I'm gonna honor my integrity is by putting myself in the best possible position to be loyal to whatever has been happening in the past.

1:04:31So that ended up working out with the book and that's how I got the Inner Gem published. And that's led to everything that's followed. Yeah, but again, it was hard. It wasn't easy. No, I'm sure that wasn't fun. It was hard and that's the thing. Were you cursing yourself? I can't believe I did that. Why did I do? Yeah, a little bit. What made me think that was a good idea? But at the same time, it was effective. Yeah, it worked. I had to admit that it was effective. And so now when I'm trying to do stuff, like I wanted to, I've been trying to learn Spanish, right? Since I've been living in Mexico.

1:05:03And I bet a friend of mine that, you know, I was gonna be able to speak Tarzan Spanish by the end of, or the beginning of this past year. I bet him$10 ,000. I had no intention of parting ways with$10 ,000, but that got me taking this course and just learning all the basic things that I needed to learn in order to navigate in Spanish enough to be able to have basic interactions with people. And I wouldn't have done that otherwise. I know that about me. So did he have to pay you$10 ,000? No, no, no. So you just said, I'll give you$10 ,000. I just said, I'll give you$10 ,000. Right, right, right.

1:05:39Yeah, the kind of reversing the incentive structure a little bit to create behavioral change. I think it's Tim Ferriss who has a spin on that. He had some idea about a relationship with a gym where if you don't show up or you miss your training session or whatever, for every time you do that, you give them money and a donation is made to an organization that you loathe. Tim Ferriss has donated to the MAGA. Exactly, in your name, right. Another, I don't know if it's Tim Ferriss, maybe I heard it on his podcast though, but there's this idea around a decision tree around how to say yes, like when to say yes to things and when to say no, which is kind of at the, that's sort of the practical crux of what we're talking about, right?

1:06:30Like how are you allocating your attention? Well, you have to say no to things and you say yes to things. And that idea that he was speaking of has to do with like the hell yes, right? You know when it's a hell yes and you know you're gonna do it. But when you're like, yeah, I can kind of rationalize. Maybe I should, yeah, there's good reasons for me to do it. Like that's when you know it's a no, right? But you have an added kind of ripple on top of this. It's like the hell yes is easy, right? Like if it's a hell yes, of course you're gonna do it. But the real trick is developing the ability to say yes when it's what you call a scary yes.

1:07:07Yeah, and the scary yes, those are the things that are gonna push you past your comfort zone. And it could be simple things like going to a cold plunge. I personally don't love the idea of doing a cold plunge, but there's all these health benefits around that. And that's just an example of how we can benefit from doing something that you don't really want to do. Like even going to the gym or going for a run, people don't. Even David Goggins talks about that. He stares at his shoes for 30 minutes trying to talk himself out of it. But then eventually he has to say yes to that because that's what he's committed to doing.

1:07:48And that's what I consider to be a scary yes. If you are someone who is codependent in a relationship, the idea of being on your own could qualify as a scary yes. I'm going to say yes to that. I'm going to get out of this thing that's not serving me for whatever reason, and I'm going to be on my own for however long that lasts. That's a scary yes. Or if you're on your own and you've been out doing the single thing, being in a relationship where someone is actually depending on you, someone's holding you accountable to your word, that could be a scary yes. So it's always different for different people, but that's where you're going to be able to grow and stretch into your potential much more than just, doing the hell yes, which is easy to do because it's obvious versus,

1:08:39thinking that you're gonna wake up one day and just rise to this level of potential that you've never quite practiced before. Or that you're gonna feel like doing the thing that you never feel like doing, right? That suddenly you're gonna be struck with a level of motivation to get over the hump rather than developing the habit of just getting into action irrespective of your mood around it. Yeah, and one of my biggest scary yeses personally was seven years ago, two days ago, seven years ago, June 6th of 2016, I hit sin on the first of what became a seven year plus commitment of the daily dose of inspiration email.

1:09:20So that's 2 ,555 emails. Done that every day. Every day without missing a day. And that required not just saying yes to that, but also saying no to a lot of invitations, saying no to sleeping in in the morning, saying no to staying up late at night, and just so many thousands of no's in order to keep honoring that yes. And that's again, what makes a scary yes scary is that you have to prioritize it and you have to say no to a lot of things that look like a lot of fun and can lead to some pretty cool experiences. But that's what requires to be on your purpose is you wanna commit to what your heart is telling you to do.

1:10:03And that's one of the things that makes it really, really scary because I didn't think I'd be doing it for this long, but it's still happening and I'm still having to say yes to it every day. Yeah. I've thought countless times about quitting. Yeah. One year's enough. And the thing is if you decided like, hey, I did enough, nobody's gonna say boo about it. Like it's on you. But it's about me and me. It's my relationship with me. It's not really about anybody else.

1:10:34How long has the backpack thing been going on? Five years. Five years. Five years, yeah. So I've realized I have this period around my birthday, which is May 30th, where I make these big, I say yes to something that's scary. And so the nomadic thing was one and the daily dose thing was one, starting the shine movement was one, I did that. The first one of those was like June the 2nd or something like that. So there's been a few things like that that have happened around that time. And I see birthdays like that. I'm not really that into birthdays. I just turned 50 in fact, this past May 30th. You look amazing for 50.

1:11:13Perfect skin, that's incredible. It's all that meditation. And even though that's a monumental milestone, which I definitely acknowledge, but it's really more about, okay, what can I do this year that's gonna commit me even more to my purpose? And so those are the kinds of questions. So what is that? Like if you, so we're not that far away from May 30. Yeah, we just, it hasn't occurred to me yet. And that's the other thing. I'm not trying to come up with the answer. I'm just facilitating the question. The answer will come. And when it comes, it's my job to say yes to it and without shaming myself and all of that.

1:11:57So right now what I'm getting is to scale back a little bit and to focus your energy on things a little bit more, instead of being a little bit spread out. I love it. You're gonna scale back. The guy who lives out of the backpack is thinking he needs to scale back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love how in the book you kind of thread, like the whole, the book kind of, periodically throughout the book, you return to the backpack and like, here's what's in it. Here's why, here's how I do it. And you've really got this down to a pretty reductionist science. and I can't help but think while I'm reading this, I'm comparing my travel habits to yours.

1:12:42And I have this ongoing frustration with myself because I overpack every time. And I generally rationalize it because typically I'll bring my hard case with my podcast gear wherever I go, just in case, like just in case I might meet that person and the opportunity will arise to do a podcast. So, I bring my whole thing. And sometimes that happens, not always. It just happened in Australia. So, I'm glad that I brought it with me, but that means I'm checking no matter what. So, there's no reason to have the carry on, the small carry on. I might as well just bring the bigger suitcase and half pack it.

1:13:20And then as I'm half packing it, I'm like, well, if it rains or if it's cold, you know, like, and then I end up with all this junk that I'm hauling around all over the place. And then when I get to my location, I ended up wearing like two t-shirts and like the one pair of pants and that's it. And I figure out like, oh, I can wash these here. And I never really unpack my bag. And then I keep doing it and I do it again. I do it again. Yeah, the big game changer for me was learning or teaching myself how to hand wash my clothes. Yeah, you go through that in the book. And I go teach people how to do it in the book.

1:13:52And then I got rid of like 70 % of my wardrobe and just had three pairs of underwear, a few t-shirts, one pair of pants, et cetera, et cetera. And the idea is not, I'm not hand washing my clothes every night. Cause like in my Airbnb, I have a washer and dryer. So I'm using that. And you can kind of source where you're gonna stay based on washer dryer access. Yeah, but - That helps a lot. But if it doesn't have that, it's not a deal breaker. It's like, okay, I can hand wash my clothes. I've done it hundreds of times at this point. And it's actually a lot more efficient than people think. And then ultimately you turn those kinds of things into a meditation.

1:14:28You turn the packing into a meditation. You turn the hand washing of clothes into a meditation. We talk about walking in the book, you turn that into a meditation. So everything essentially becomes meditative. And so it's not like a hassle because it's just an extension of that process that's keeping you anchored in the present moment. And again, that's where all the opportunities are being sourced that are beneficial and relevant to your heart is from that present moment awareness. but yeah, I mean, it's, and I'm also not encouraging people to live from a backpack either, right? But everybody has their version of that, right?

1:15:06There's something that in you that's been nagging you about, hey, you know, move in this direction, just explore this, be curious about that. And it would require as much faith in yourself as moving into a backpack required for me. It hasn't been easy, right? It's definitely challenges in a lot of ways. And I do a podcast from my backpack. And I do keynotes talks and I do panel discussions and I go on dates and I go hiking and I go on hot air balloons and all the things from whatever I have in my backpack. But I've had to make some very big choices in terms of, okay, I can't have this quality of mic.

1:15:49I have to have this quality of mic if I want to keep doing this lifestyle. And so, yeah, you have to make these decisions, but when things change, you upgrade the decision and that could all change. I could stop living from the backpack next week. I don't know. If I get the call to do that, then I'll do that. But yeah, we all have that. We all have a version of that. And so the whole message of the book is find your version of that and just start moving in that direction and just see what happens. Don't be attached to any outcome. just be in the process of it all. And you may surprise yourself by how amazing things turn out.

1:16:26And when you go back, it's gonna start with something told me to dot, dot, dot. I think with the backpack thing and thinking about your relationship to it, it is about non-attachment in that it's about not attaching to your material belongings, but it's also about not attaching to how long you're gonna do it or what it means and not identifying as some kind of martyr in doing it. Like you're doing it to learn something. At some point you will have learned everything there is to learn about that. And you will return to some different variation of that that makes sense for you at that moment. One of my pre-sale campaigns for this book is I'm doing a drawing where I'm giving away the backpack, I'm giving away my meditation shawl, I'm giving away my mala beads, like basically all the things I've been carrying with me, I'm gonna give it away to some person who enters the drawing just by purchasing the book and showing proof of purchase.

1:17:20And so maybe after that, something different will happen. Right, right. Well, it's either you'll get a new backpack and fill it with a different version of the same thing, or it'll be that May 30th kind of question will get answered in a new and different way. Yeah, that's right. But it's all exciting, that's the thing. And the thing that's changed for me is I stopped trying to figure out what this means, what's gonna happen and just kind of be in the moment. And it's not for the faint at heart to do that, but it's really exciting. How does it work with dating? I mean, it's a good icebreaker. Probably can go in two different directions.

1:18:03You know, I've said to myself, if I meet someone who I feel a strong connection with, which has happened during these five years, I'll just, I'll spend more time in that area and just make it happen. And so I was dating someone for like a year and a half in Mexico city. And that's one of the reasons why I've been in Mexico city for so long. And before that I was dating someone in Los Angeles. So I was spending more time in Los Angeles, but I'd still want to, we talked about this before. I still would like to have a family one day and I don't plan to force anybody to have this particular lifestyle.

1:18:39I may end up just having a more conventional lifestyle once that happens. I don't know. But I'm open to all possibilities right now. And I know that the way to get there faster and more efficiently is just to be in the moment with all of it. So that's my commitment. It's just, okay, what can I do in this moment to stay in the next moment? And as long as I'm answering that question honestly, then everything else is gonna be sorted out. Just like that traffic jam was saving me from having that really bad start to my day. Could you ever imagine yourself back in a situation where you're like rebooting the shine or a scenario in which you're working with lots of different people and there's a kind of level of complexity and kind of day-to-day interaction that you're currently liberated from?

1:19:36Sure, absolutely. For me, it's really just allowing the guidance to occur from within and not judging it so much and just moving in that direction, just see what happens. I don't know, but I'm open to everything at this point. I'm open to everything. And I could theoretically go from living in a backpack to living in a mansion or living on a yacht. I don't know, but if it feels right in the moment, I'm gonna go for it. Light on a super yacht. Yeah, why not? People send me, oh, like, look at these tiny houses. It's like, I don't like freaking tiny houses. I don't wanna live in some tiny house. I like space, I like beautiful spaces and I just don't need to own it.

1:20:13And that's really the big thing that's changed for me is I can live anywhere, but I don't feel the need to own the things that I have around me. Well, I think there's a cultural movement that is a larger manifestation of what you're experiencing personally. I think there's lots of people with the kind of digital nomad capacity that is available to many more people now that there are lots of people who are living a version of what you're talking about. And then at the same time, like kind of technologically and economically, we're moving more towards this model of like not owning things and just having things available to us when we need them, like to rent them or subscriptions, et cetera.

1:20:59everything from Uber to Postmates and all the way down the line to the point where at some point it might seem lunacy for anybody to own a car when you can kind of summon one to come and get you and take you wherever you want, whenever you want. Like it doesn't make sense. So I think we're having a reckoning with ownership in general. And you're just kind of deeper down that rabbit hole than most right now. But it wouldn't surprise me if 10, 20 years from now, how we think about all of this stuff will be a greater reflection of your experience than mine. And it's been happening anyway, you know, like you don't own your body, you're just renting it.

1:21:38From a spiritual perspective. What is it? I mean, ownership is a contract. It's a piece of paper, honestly. It's a social understanding. It's really not anything more than that. Yeah, and eventually you won't be here anymore and who knows what's gonna happen to this stuff after that. So, you know - What do we really own? You don't really own anything. That's the thing. Even your house, your house is not a house. Your house is a storage room with some sentimental items in it. And I know that's a very harsh way to look at it, but we tend to hold onto things so much so that when we're away from those things, we can't be present where we are because we're too busy thinking about what we have left behind.

1:22:19And you won't really appreciate what presence can feel like until you kind of shift your perspective around that and understand that I don't really own this. I don't own my children. They're insentient beings. There's complete humans and souls and all that. I'm responsible for raising them to a certain point. And then they go off into the world and then you see them on holidays and vacations and they're having their own experiences. You don't really own your car. You may be making a payment on it, but eventually you may go on to a new car and sell the old car. And now someone else is driving the old car, right?

1:22:57And so effectively you were renting the car. It's just whatever your payment structure was, what it was. So that happens with everything. And you may move houses. And so you have everything for a period of time. But wherever you are is where you are. And if you're not fully there, then you're definitely missing something about that experience that you would probably be able to access otherwise if you weren't so locked in on these things that you've left behind. So that's what I've noticed, just not having a home. People ask me all the time, do you miss having a home? Well, wherever I am is my home.

1:23:32Right now my home is with you, and then I'm staying at a friend's place and that's my home. And I can be fully present there because all the stuff that I have is with me right there. And this little Airbnb that I'm renting in Mexico city, it's an Airbnb, I don't own it. So I'm not thinking about what's happening back there. And I think it's a really, it's a simple way and it's really beautiful way to live because it just makes you more available to whatever's happening in the moment. What has been a surprising aspect of living out of the backpack? Anything you didn't anticipate? You always feel like you have too much stuff.

1:24:12Once you start scaling down, you're like, oh my God, I can't, I'm only wearing one of my shirts. Do I really need this pen? Yeah, do I really need it? Exactly. Oh my God. No, yeah, I mean, again, I started with the carry-on bag and then I realized I had too much stuff. So I went to the medium sized backpack. I still realized I had too much stuff. Then I'm at the day pack and I still feel like I have too much stuff and I still over pack. A lot of times I feel like I'm over packing right now. because I do leave some things in my Airbnb in the closet. I'll leave like an extra t-shirt or something like that.

1:24:45But just to realize you don't need as much as you think you need. And if you know how to like wash your clothes and if you know how to, I've been very intentional about the things that I pack. So everything kind of matches. I don't have any like floral patterns. Everything is kind of solid color. Yeah, yeah. So it all kind of goes together. You got your like, this is my sort of uniform. My capsule. This is what I'm gonna, yeah, the capsule, right? That's what I wear. I have a kind of joke around that. There is a bit of a, it's a fashionable trend on some level, particularly with dudes. I don't see a lot of women talking about this, but like, this is what I wear and it removes all this decision fatigue.

1:25:24I don't have to think about what I'm gonna wear because this is what I put on. Like, is that really true? Or I think there's a lot of guys that just are scared about fashion or don't know themselves well enough. And that's a very convenient kind of fashionable thing to say, to hide behind the fact that they're just insecure about how to dress. And so you can say that and you sound like a savvy tech bro, but I'm not sure it's always actually true. In your case it is, this is the capsule that you wear. But I spent a lot of time, Rich I was at the mall yesterday for like three. You're a former male model, you know fashion.

1:26:00I was at the mall yesterday for like three hours, finding one pair of pants. Yes. And I tried on probably 20 pairs of pants because whatever I - You only allow yourself one pair in that backpack, right? So it better be right. I replace, exactly. And my standard is I have to love this item of clothing. If I don't love it, if I just kind of like it, I don't get it. But if I love it and I love the way it fits and I love the way it feels and I love the way it looks, then I know that it meets the standards and I can get that. And then I'll get rid of something else from the backpack. but then that article of clothing will stay with me for however long it lasts.

1:26:37And then I'll replace it again. And so I have - Did you figure it out? Yeah, I did it with the pants I'm wearing now. Oh yeah. I was surprised because they're light. I would think you'd prefer a dark color because you don't have to wash it as much. It won't show the stain. Yeah, I generally do. I generally do, but these probably will only be with me for maybe six months or maybe a year because I wear them all the time. So unfortunately when you wear things all the time, they kind of wear down a lot faster. But you just recycle things, I give them away or donate them and then I'll get another pair.

1:27:11And so it's just, maybe I'll have a pair of pink pants, I don't know. These are the ones that hit me at the mall. And it's like, okay, beige pants. The pants you're wearing right now are the only pair of pants you own. So I still have the pair that I replaced with, but when I leave Los Angeles - You'll leave those here. I'm gonna leave those. That's sort of like a little cheat. There's a little overlap. Yeah, you're allowing your, because you're here - Because I have to try it. I have to try it. I have to see if it passes the test. That's the rationalization. So I need to wear it for a few days first.

1:27:44Because you don't know just from trying it on in a dressing room, you know? But if it passes all the tests, the stress test - Everybody's gonna wanna know what brand. We don't wanna get into all that. We can't do that, right? I'm not being paid by these people to talk about - The other thing that was amazing is no laptop. No laptop. So this book you wrote on your phone and on probably a tablet like this with a little external keyboard to it. Exactly, yeah. I got rid of the laptop in 2019. And again, it's a big decision, hop of faith. Four years, no laptop. Am I gonna be able to do it? And you, surprising.

1:28:19I actually considered just writing it on my phone just for the story, but I was like, I don't, I'm not gonna be that crazy about it. And doing the podcast where you have to kind of deal with larger files and stuff like that, you were still able to do it on a tablet. Yeah, all my podcasts has been done on a tablet. So again, it's just, you have to be creative obviously, and you have to work out solutions that you probably wouldn't even think about if you weren't doing all of that. But it's surprising how much you can get done with less. And it gets just, I just feel, I resonate with that challenge.

1:28:51So that's why I did it. I'm not saying anybody else should do it like that, But at the same time, I'm encouraging people not to use a lack of something as a reason not to do something. There's always a solution if you were looking for it. And if anything, that's the overarching message is to find a solution with whatever resources you have. And then eventually you can expand upon that and end up in a studio. Like you started off in that warehouse in Hawaii and here we are in this beautiful studio in Los Angeles. And maybe you didn't envision the road from there to here. No, but it definitely was a conscious decision to indulge my curiosity.

1:29:39And that was a curiosity that had been percolating for a long time until I finally took some action on it. And there was that echo in the warehouse. Yeah, it was terrible. It was terrible. It didn't matter. I didn't care because yeah, so I just did it for the fun of doing it to have the experience of what it would be like to try that. The curiosity. My assumption was that it would be terrible and I'd never do another one again. And I thought that was fun. And I never thought twice about whether it was good or not. It was like, oh, that was cool. Maybe we'll let's do that again tomorrow. Let's see what happens.

1:30:11Yeah, same with me. I started my podcast in 2020. The sound quality was so horrible that I almost considered not releasing it because it just wasn't perfect. And now I'm nearly 200 episodes in and it's laughable to think that I almost didn't release it because of the sound quality. That's just, it is what it is. That's how I learned how to have better sound, how to get better mic and how to do all the things better. Yeah, you have to allow yourself that leniency, right? And I like how in the book you talk about the podcast and what you've learned over the course of having 200 or so conversations and how you, kind of much like myself, I mean, people ask me all the time, like what's your podcast about?

1:30:54And it's hard because I cast a wide net and talked to lots of different kinds of people, but there is an overarching theme which orients around transformation. Like how do people change or how do they go from where they were to where they are? What was that process like? And I spent a lot of time thinking about that and what I can extract from all of those conversations and people that I've talked to that would be helpful to other people, but you kind of did this very thing and came up with a couple wisdom pearls. So talk a little bit about that. So in that part of the book, I'm talking about the, I call it the Rosa Parks moment.

1:31:35So for those of you who don't know, Rosa Parks was known as the quotes, mother of the civil rights movement. She was the one who stayed on the breast seat and got arrested. And then that started the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, which essentially kicked off the modern day civil rights movement. And people imagine Rosa Parks as this kind of like elderly person, who was too tired to stand up. But actually Rosa Parks was only 42 years old. So she was eight years younger than me at that moment in time. And she said, it wasn't that I was tired, too tired to stand up. She goes, I was tired of sitting down.

1:32:16I was tired of giving in. I was tired of adhering to these laws that didn't make any sense. This whole thing about colored riders had to ride in the back of the bus so that white riders could ride in the front of the bus. And that's why she stayed in her seat. And what's interesting about her story, Rosa Parks was a seamstress. She was coming home from work, working as a seamstress all day long. Now, nobody would look at someone who's a seamstress and say, oh, that person's living their life purpose. That's their calling in life. Because we tend to associate occupation with calling. And oh, I should be a NBA player.

1:32:55I should be a movie star. I should be a singer. I should be a CEO or the tech founder or whatever. And the whole point of that story is to say that it's not about what you do that determines whether or not you're on your purpose. It's about how you are, how you're showing up to those moments. And so your Rosa Parks moment could be the moment you went, you said enough is enough with alcohol or someone else's Rosa Parks moment could be saying enough is enough in this toxic relationship. I'm gonna do something different. I don't know what's gonna happen. I'm gonna take this hop of faith and it's scary.

1:33:33And she didn't know what the hell was gonna happen to her when she stayed in that seat. She could have been lynched, anything could have happened, right? But it just so happened to kick off this movement that made this 26 year old preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., this international celebrity and giving one of the most popular speeches in American history, I Have a Dream. And so on the podcast, my podcast is about people who found their purpose and people who have created platforms to help the world become a better place. You've been a guest on the podcast. And so I take people through basically a retrospective of their life and everyone without exception gets to their Rosa Parks moment.

1:34:10And that's usually what everybody wants to hear about in podcast conversations. The whole thing is just a buildup to that moment because that's what's most interesting about your journey. So if you're in misery right now and you're thinking of making a change, that change becomes your Rosa Parks moment. But the misery that you're experiencing prior to that, when people do interviews with you later on, that's what they're gonna wanna hear about. So I tell people, pay attention. If you're going through misery right now, pay attention to everything, write it down if you can, try to remember as many details as possible because that's gonna become the good part of your story later on once you follow your heart.

1:34:49Yeah, I mean, I think that another way of looking at it is instead of couching it as misery, you're out of alignment. Yeah. Right? And the universe is kind of knocking and they're saying, hey buddy, how's it going over there? Feel good? You feel, sure you feel good? Like you think this is okay, cool, checking with you later. And the longer you kind of stay out of alignment or refuse to kind of heed that heart voice, that thing that's trying to bring you back into alignment, the louder those knocks occur, the more suffering results, the more chaos you kind of reap in your life until you reach an inflection point.

1:35:32You know, in my case, like I've had a couple of them, getting sober was certainly one and they're a function of being in extreme pain and that pain being a reflection of the extent of the disalignment, right? And I wonder, has anybody asked Rosa Parks, had anybody asked her like right before she got on the bus, did she know she was gonna do that or would she have just said, no, she had no idea, just happened in the moment. Just happened in the moment. Right, so, but I'm sure there are like baby hop, little things that were building to her taking that action where it just became the final straw.

1:36:12Yeah, she had the news about Emmett Till, the little 14 year old boy, black boy from Chicago who had gotten lynched by three white men that had just been in the media. And so she saw that. The open casket funeral. Yeah, the open casket funeral. She saw that and she was just like, I can't participate in this anymore. Right, right. But also is not considered a positive thing, right? Right, right. If something is feeling, if it's resonating with your heart, again, it's not gonna make you more comfortable. It's gonna probably require a degree of boldness to be able to stand up. Right, but the pain of staying in that place is outweighed by the fear of taking that bold action or stepping into that unknown or taking that leap of faith.

1:36:57Yeah, and it needs to be, like you said, it needs to be a lifestyle. It can't be something that you're just doing every now and again, because it's gonna be too scary to just wait until the big leap of faith. So you have to start cultivating your ability to do that with the small things. And that's why I'm saying, whatever the heart voice is saying to you, if it's just take the stairs, chill out, read a book, text your friend, hey, I miss you, or whatever the little thing is, start getting into the habit of acting on those little things. And then when your Rosa Parks moment comes, you'll be much better prepared to stand up and face the pushback that you're inevitably gonna have to face from society or from whoever you're standing up against.

1:37:43Yeah, and what I gather from the way you talk and write about it is in doing that, you can avoid or sidestep some of that pain. Like I made these changes because I was in extreme pain and it's probably familiar for a lot of people. But if you're heating that voice earlier on that says you're out of alignment and you are exercising those baby hops and kind of practicing being out of your comfort zone, then those larger inflection points are more a function of curiosity than they are of being in pain. So it's a difference in - And that's a choice that you can make or a setup that you can practice.

1:38:28Right. It's a difference in drama and adventure. There's no neutral path. Either you're setting yourself up for some life drama, which is where you're resisting, resisting, resisting those hops, or you can get ahead of it. And it's uncertain. So that's what creates the adventure of it, but you're ahead of it. So it's like you're in control. Instead of waiting for your whole life to like implode before you paid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, losing all your friends and losing all your family and all that. That's one way to do it. That's an adventure too. It's an adventure too, different quality. And then it makes for good podcasting later.

1:39:03Great comeback, yeah, we love a good comeback. Some people don't come back though, that kind of stuff. Well, maybe they come back in the next lifetime. That's true. I didn't know, you told the story in the book about your friend, Will, the teacher and close friend of yours. And I was sad to hear what happened. I don't know. When you went to his apartment when you met Tom Knowles that night. Yeah, but there were a bunch of people there. That was Will's apartment. Oh, that was Will's apartment. That was Will's apartment. That one in West Hollywood. Laurel Avenue, yeah. I was in his apartment then.

1:39:33That was his apartment. I didn't know that. Yeah. And I only knew a few people that were there. Yeah. Oh, that's wild. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So he got dengue fever. He got dengue fever, yeah. And he had an adverse reaction to it. That caused him to - Caused him to go into psychotic episodes. Mental distress. And what's interesting about that is that he was one of the most grateful people and most optimistic people that I knew prior to that experience. So again, it's one of those things about life. You just never know which way things are going in. And he was living in Bali at the time. This is my friend who introduced me to my meditation teacher.

1:40:12And I have to give him credit for really me being here, having the conversation with you, because if it wasn't for my interaction with him, I don't know where I'd be, but that he played a pivotal role in introducing me to everything that I'm doing now and supporting me along that process. So yeah, he ended up taking his life as a result of the psychosis that he was experiencing and the depression that he was experiencing after taking the medication for the dengue fever that he contracted while living in Bali. That is terrifying. Yeah. So was it the medication or was it the - We don't know because they didn't do an, his family elected not to do an autopsy.

1:40:53So no one really knows. It's all just speculation and theory at this point. I have a friend who contracted dengue fever in Bali, I don't know, two years ago or something like that. And it was the kind of recovery from that was significant, but he luckily didn't have any of that kind of symptomology. That's really scary. Yeah. Yeah, and I think the point of that story or that part of the story was just that, it's not all roses and rainbows when you're on your path and when people are there to support you for a reason, a season or a lifetime. And secondly, that's caused me to start having my experiences, not just for me and me being on my purpose, but knowing that someone else who wasn't able to make it, I'm now thinking about him when I go working out and I go doing the things that I do to kind of move this purpose forward.

1:41:54And it's like, I'm living for two people, and that gives even more weight to the things that I'm doing and why I do them. And he's one of the ones that inspired me to actually become nomadic as well. He had gone nomadic a year before me. Wow. If you have to articulate that purpose, How do you explain it? I would say just to keep it really, really simple, leave the world more inspired. So leave situations more inspired. So even your purpose is minimal in its words. Yeah. But I say your purpose is your best editor too. So if you're clear about that and everybody's not clear about it, but if you follow your curiosity long enough, your purpose will find you.

1:42:41And then it will start to become clearer and clearer that, oh, when I behave in this way, when I say yes to these types of opportunities, I feel that sense of expansion. So that must be my purpose. It feels aligned. So now you have your greatest editor in life because that is the measuring stick by which you decide, okay, this is for me, this is not for me. This relationship is for me. This one is not for me because it aligns with my purpose. It allows me to be more of who that person is. But it's a bit of a chicken and an egg though, right? I mean, you can't, if you know your purpose, then you can run that test.

1:43:22So you have to follow your curiosity first. Yeah, like you kind of have to be doing that already in order to - Yes, you have to split test it first. But look, it may take you five years to split test it. Guess what? Five years is gonna go by anyway. So you may as well be intentional about sourcing that because once you do that, you experience a level of freedom that you wouldn't have otherwise. When you think about a difficult day, a difficult day is difficult because it's hard to make decisions, right? It's not because something quotes bad happened to you. It's like, you don't know which way you're gonna go.

1:43:52That's what makes life difficult. And you can be in the same circumstance and it's really clear. And it's very easy to say, this is the decision for me. There's freedom to that because you're being emancipated from your fears that are otherwise paralyzing you by analysis. I'd be careful to be too reductionist about it or binary about it. Like the scenarios I envision, like you have the hell yes, those are easy. On some level, even the scary yeses are easy because you know deep down this is what you should do even though you're intimidated to do it. Where it gets tricky and murky and difficult is when you have important values that are in conflict with each other.

1:44:37Like you're facing a decision and this thing is important to you, but also this thing is important to you and they're both like pretty core, but whatever decision you make is gonna either prioritize one over the other or put them in conflict with each other. And that's where I think a lot of myself, like that's where I run into a lot of issues. And then I don't know if you can split test it, but maybe it's a really big decision. Like, is this something you're gonna run a test on? It's like your example, I remember from our interview when I interviewed you and you were, your whole life was crashing financially and you were thinking of going back to practicing law.

1:45:18And Julie was saying, you can't go backwards. You have to go forward. And you didn't know what that looked like. So those are two very, those are hard choices to make. Do I go back to what I know is a sure thing. I can definitely make X amount of dollars doing this. Sure, it's not my passion or anything like that, but I'm good at it and I know I can do it and I have a family and I have things that I need to pay for and it's a responsible thing to do versus do I take this leap of faith? And you're right, those are not easy decisions to make. And at the same time, there is a direction that may feel, again, more aligned with your vision for yourself.

1:46:03And so what I'm suggesting through this work is while those decisions are both, they seem very, well, going backwards seems like the most practical, most responsible choice. We want to, and following this other path that's unproven seems like the irresponsible choice on the surface that we want to give more weight to the thing that feels aligned without really thinking of it in terms of practical versus irresponsible. And I know that's a hard thing to do in the moment, but that's why it requires practice. It requires practice because you don't wanna wait until you're in that position because you were going to default to doing the practical thing 99 times out of 100.

1:47:00In your case, you had someone, you had an angel there who was backing up your heart voice saying, no, you can't go backwards. And you got lucky in that situation, right? But my argument is that you probably, there were probably some other choices you could have made prior to that, that would have even made it more convincing to move in the direction of whatever forwards was for you in your life. I think it's a little of both. I mean, I was making smaller versions of those decisions and that had got me into that situation to begin with. I wouldn't have been there had I not already been, kind of chopping it up along the way.

1:47:36But to your point, yeah, it was both because I was in fear and in lack and in doubt and it would have been easy to pivot back and it required a lot of courage that I wasn't sure I had the capacity for to keep going forward, but I did have the support. And short of that, I don't know that I would have made that decision. In fact, I'm sure I wouldn't have, but it's that idea of doing the small little sets of pushups every day. So that when you get to that big decision, there's a level of self understanding and courage or sort of conviction because you have split tested it and you kind of know that there's value in trusting your intuition at that point.

1:48:25Yeah, and from a spiritual perspective, the idea of something that is predictable is actually the riskiest direction to go in. And the unknown that feels aligned is actually the safest direction to go in. That's just the spiritual perspective on that. So if you go to some guru somewhere and you're like, should I take the job that I'm good at or should I do the thing that I really want to do? They're always gonna tell you to do the thing that you want to do. And it's not to make more money. It's not to be successful. It's not to be, you know, receive rewards. It's because - Create that alignment.

1:48:58It's to do what feels aligned because you're there to serve in some way. It always comes back to service. And when you think of it in those terms, that's another way to sort of figure out, can I serve better in this capacity or can I serve better in that capacity? And whichever one is the one that's most aligned with the service goal, that's gonna be the one you get the most support from, the quotes, the universe, if you wanna call it, where you get those traffic jams holding you up so that you're safe and you get those, you know, inclinations to go get a Rubik's cube and you get the nudge to go and offer the person tire changer, you know, tire polish.

1:49:37And it's all in service to teaching more people to meditate. But it's not gonna say that. There's no billboard saying, this is gonna help you teach more people to meditate. It's just go through with this and it's gonna create this really amazing experience that you're gonna share on a podcast one day. And if you're trying to answer those questions for yourself or you want to go on your own kind of adventure in experimenting with this, the other thing I think you would probably recommend is that you go out for a walk, that you go flaneuring, right? Had you heard of that term before? I never, no, I had never heard of it.

1:50:13You're getting fancy. But I love this concept. Yeah, flaneuring is an 18th century French term for aimless walking. Now, walking is having a moment right now as well. A lot of people are walking first thing in the morning. This is a whole idea of 10 ,000 steps. And what I've been doing intentionally, especially since I got a smartwatch a few years ago is I've been tracking my steps and then it becomes very addictive to hit a certain number. But in the process, the whole thing with spiritual minimalism is doing more with less. So a lot of people say, I don't have time to meditate. I don't have time to go out and see nature, be in nature.

1:50:52I don't have time to get into the sun. I don't have time to do X, Y, and Z, move my body, go exercise. Well, with walking, you can do all of that. You can go out of your house for a walk with maybe no destination in mind. And then you're practicing in real time, split testing the heart voice while you're having this sort of meditative experience. So you're kind of going within, you're making choices from the inside out and your heart is saying, go in this direction. And again, there's no throwaway moments. So you're treating everything as if this is as special as some profound conversation with your mentor, with Elon Musk or whoever you admire, Barack Obama.

1:51:34And so go to the left, you go to the left and just see what happens. And maybe nothing happens that's obvious. And then go in the shop and get a iced coffee. Maybe you don't even drink iced coffee, So on the aimless walk, because you don't have a specific destination in mind, you're getting a chance to do the split testing. You're getting a chance to exercise. You're getting a chance to do a moving meditation. You're giving yourself a chance to get some sun exposure. You're giving yourself a chance to exercise. You're doing all those things and you're moving closer to your path and your purpose.

1:52:11And you're setting yourself up for some potentially really cool serendipitous moments. So that's why I'm a big advocate of walking. And then there's all kinds of other health effects, digestion and immunity and things like that get stronger. So. Right, but beyond that, like setting that aside, just this notion of flaneuring, like walking for the sole purpose of walking and wandering without a directed intention to it. And ideally by yourself. Isn't meditation, but it is an active form of engaging with your internal voice. Yeah, and your environment. And your external environment. But not walking under the influence of anything ideally, because that makes you less present and not walking with someone else, obviously in a safe environment, right?

1:52:59But yeah, so that you're just absolutely present to whatever you're experiencing. And so that is a way that anyone can do to check all of those boxes. And so that's one thing I talk about walking, I talk about abstaining from alcohol for three months, even if you're just a casual drinker. And it's not because I'm anti-alcohol, it's because I'm pro-awareness. So if you wanna strengthen that connection with your heart voice, but you're drinking a glass of wine two or three times a week, that glass of wine, while you can easily justify it for whatever reason, it's diminishing your connection with your heart voice.

1:53:37And if there's a voice saying, well, it's just three glasses of wine, you don't know what you're talking about, that's not your heart voice because your heart voice would never tell you to do something that diminishes the connection to the heart voice. So now you know for certain that the dominant voice in your head is not your heart voice. So you need to start split testing to get back to that heart voice. And that's why I recommend abstaining for, you can do a month, but doing three months, you really know, okay, there's not a really big addiction situation here. And I haven't been drinking, I haven't been a drinker for 25 years or so.

1:54:15And it's not that I'm completely sober. Every now and again, I'll maybe have a celebratory, whatever, but it's not something that I do even on a mildly consistent basis. And I just feel like I'm fortunate in that way because I've never really had an addictive personality, but I've had long stretches of time, years, without having anything to drink. And again, you can't appreciate how strong that connection is unless you give yourself a meaningful amount of time between drinks. I think beyond that also, there is a comfort with yourself that is cultivated through the practices that you're talking about that puts you in a place where that idea of muting out doesn't seem as desirable as it once did because you don't have that like unconscious discomfort that feels the allure or the pull of the substance that's gonna kind of just quiet all of that noise.

1:55:21And I think alcohol aside, I mean, alcohol is one, is a substance, but if you don't drink, I mean, we all find ways to distract ourselves or take ourselves out of the present moment or habits, behaviors, and other things that we use to not feel how we feel in the current moment because we don't feel good in ourselves. And part of that is being disconnected or out of alignment. And the more in alignment you become, then the quieter those impulses become as well. And I think abstinence is a way of creating clarity around that because you can really, it becomes a very tactile experience. Yeah, and like everything else we've been talking about is a practice, and you can make that a meditation itself.

1:56:14What can I replace this with? Because I'm not advocating - Or when you feel that pull or that discomfort to just notice that. Yeah, I think I'm definitely a big fan of the tortoise approach as opposed to the hare approach. And I think that habits that are formed in tiny ways end up being more sustainable. And so in the book, I'm not even saying go three months in a row right off the bat. I'm saying go as long as you can go until you work up to three months. So it may take you two years to get to three months where you're getting a drink every week, once a week or something like that. And then you try to go to two weeks and then you try to go to four weeks and then you try to go to eight weeks, right?

1:56:57And that may take you six months. but it's a fun way to kind of be intentional about it where you're not beating yourself up, you're not shaming yourself from having a drink. You're just challenging yourself in a fun way. Okay, how long can I go now? Can I stretch it out to three weeks and then have a drink? And then eventually you make it to a point where you just, you don't desire to have a drink anymore. Or you find it very difficult and then that's powerful information. Yeah. Why is this so hard for me? If you have an addiction problem, Obviously this is not the guide for that, but this is for people like me who were just kind of - I'm just saying whatever you discover as a result of that is just information to help you along the way.

1:57:36Yeah. Right? Yeah. We got to wrap it up here shortly, but what is, you know, what do you, how would you articulate like the main idea that you're trying to convey here or the main kind of takeaway that you want the reader of this book to, you know, to ponder when their head hits the pillow. The main takeaway is that you have everything you need to create the life that you ultimately want right now. Is that that you need more than what you have? If anything is you need less, less distraction. You need less temptation to use coping mechanisms and things like that. You need less stuff to buy in order to be fulfilled or happy.

1:58:21And so if you go inside and you start with cultivating the voice of your inner guidance and you start listening to that voice and you start acting upon that voice, that will take you in the direction of whatever it is that you envision for yourself. You're not expected to know how it happens. You just make yourself as loyal as possible to those little impulses without any expectation or anticipation of a specific result. and eventually you will live your way into that life of your dreams, which is gonna come with lots of challenges. It's gonna come with you being stretched out of your comfort zone and into your potential.

1:59:04And you will look back at those experiences as the highlights of your life and those challenging times as again, the good parts of your story. That's what people are gonna wanna talk about. And it's a real time process. So it's about really being process oriented as opposed to outcome oriented. you just recounted the story of my life. But you did it with me trying to like, how do I explain this? And you just did it beautifully, like concisely. Because that's exactly how I think about it and how it felt. And again, it wasn't easy, it's still not easy. It's not about that. but it's fucking hard, man.

1:59:51But there are like these immutable spiritual laws that time and time again, I'm shown to be true. All of which you speak about here. So I love it, man. Yeah, and then to the point of abundance, like the abundance that's driving us or the desire for abundance, we're seeking it outside of ourselves. and yet it's within us and available to us all the time. You have that quote about the abundance, that we don't create abundance, that the abundance is already there and we either create access to it or limitations to it. Right, yeah. Yeah. And I think back to your book that you wrote, the first one, Finding Ultra, and you getting into the accident and you wanting to quit the ultra marathon and running into the lady and all this stuff.

2:00:51And it's like, those maybe not be your proudest moments, but those are the ones that make you, you. And everybody has their version of that. But you have to get out of your zone of comfort in order to sort of rise to that level of your potential. And I'm hoping that this book helps people find that within themselves with the understanding that it's not gonna be easy. you know, running an ultra marathon is probably one of the hardest things a human can do. Finishing it. Not as hard as this, this inside stuff's harder now, I'm telling you. I'm telling you. But you did an amazing job. I love the book.

2:01:27I love the illustrations too. Thanks man. I worked with this really wonderful illustrator out of Germany. And I've been obsessed with the color blue for a long time. So I knew I wanted to have it. That's the galley copy. So it looks all black and white, but it's really - I have the digital one too. So I've seen the color. Yeah. And it's, what I like about this particular book, kind of like my last book is that it's actually created in the way that I personally like to experience books, which is, you know, anybody who gets a book, the first thing they do is they crack it open in the middle somewhere and they kind of flip through it and they see if anything catches their eye.

2:02:01And so this book is actually written, not to be read from cover to cover, but to be cracked open anywhere. And then whatever catches your eye, you read that section. and each section is only a page or two long and then it can direct you to other sections. So it's kind of like a choose your own adventure read. It'll say, if you want to learn more about capsule wardrobes, go to this page. If you want to learn more about meditating, go to this section. And that way people can kind of have their own little experience with the book that's different from anyone else's, which again is encouraging you to listen to your heart voice.

2:02:34Your heart voice is saying, stop on this page and read it or read it from cover to cover. You get an opportunity to practice that. There you go. Well, beautifully rendered. I think it's gonna help a lot of people. I think it's your best book yet and super fun to talk to you about it today. Always good to see you my friend. Yeah, it's an honor man. Honor and a pleasure being here with you. 100 % right back at you. And yeah, you're welcome back anytime. Beautiful, I'm gonna take you up on that. Yeah, I'm gonna go home and think about what my carry on backpack is gonna look like. All right. Cool, man.

2:03:09Thanks dude. Talk to you again soon. Cheers. Peace. Namaste. Namaste. That was awesome.

2:03:26That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:04:48Portraits by Davey Greenberg Graphic and social media assets Courtesy of Daniel Solis As well as Dan Drake Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting And website management And of course our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt And Harry Mathis Appreciate the love, love the support See you back here soon Peace, plants Namaste

2:05:19Thank you.