Know Thyself - E38 - Humble The Poet: How to Find TRUE LOVE by Becoming It

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

In a culture that tries to convince us that we must buy more, do more, and achieve more in order to attain love, Humble the Poet explains that actually the greatest love is the one that comes from within ourselves. He unpacks the illusion of love that is fed to us in mainstream culture, and how to navigate the 'game' of dating while staying true to yourself. He dives deeps on self acceptance, vulnerability, boundaries, and identifying red flags before it's too late. Humble shares his own story of coming into a deeper knowing of self love through a painful heartbreak, and how it manifested into his recent book "How to Be Love(d)".     ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 4:13 Illusion of love - Mainstream got it wrong 10:45 Love yourself, First 24:01 Self Awareness & Acceptance  31:59 How to be Vulnerable  40:47 Setting Boundaries  46:26 Pattern vs Potential 50:45 Red Flags 54:16 Playing the Dating 'Game' vs Authenticity  1:02:43 Fear of Losing Love  1:05:50 Healing from Heartbreak  1:21:18 Conclusion ___________ Humble the Poet:    HUMBLE THE POET (aka Kanwer Singh) is a Canadian-born artist, rapper, spoken-word poet, international best-selling author, and former elementary school teacher. He is the author of The Globe and Mail bestseller Unlearn and Things No One Else Can Teach Us. With his tattoos, beard, head wrap, and silly smile, Humble commands attention. He stimulates audiences with ideas that challenge conventional wisdom and go against the grain, with dynamic live sets that shake conventions and minds at the same time. He has performed at concerts and festivals, including Lollapalooza, and has been featured in major media including The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Huffington Post.   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/humblethepoet/ Website: https://www.humblethepoet.com Book, "How to Be Love(d)": https://assist331.wixsite.com/website-2   ___________   Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg   Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927     André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/   Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How much of who we think we need to be comes from this template of culture and society. And then when it comes to love, we're being told these ideas that you have to be something, you have to do something, you have to accomplish something. And then when all that happens, then you qualify for love. A second date is love. Attention isn't love. Validation, attraction. None of these things are love.

What type of love are we desiring if it could be so reductive? Don't we want that love that is so massive, so abundant, that there isn't a qualification? for it to exist. But I was in a relationship that after a few years ended. At that point, in my pain, I was trying to figure out what I did wrong. The only way for me to feel like I made it worth it is to continue on this trial and error and figure out who I am. Because we can continually buy endless things, chase endless things,

climb these mountains that have no peaks and just live out our entire lives, never realizing love was inside us the whole time. You had to know yourself. Self-awareness is the only path of liberation. Beautiful humans, welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. for every single week. We get the honor and the privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind and open heart, sometimes a dear friend and somebody that we can learn, be in conversation with and learn more about ourselves in the world that we live. Today, my guest is a Canadian-born rapper.

He is a spoken word artist, internationally best-selling author, former elementary school teacher and his new book, How to Be Loved, is out now. And it really in a beautiful way challenges the mainstream narrative of what is love and how to find it. And so this conversation today is going to be filled with nuggets to come back home into ourselves and realize the source of love that we are. So humble the poet. Thanks for coming on the show, bro. Thank you so much for having. Yeah, it's my pleasure, man. I think you bring up a lot of amazing points in this book and congrats for writing it. I know, you know, this psychologist once said in regards to our creative urges, what's in must out and this book that was in you because of the various things that

going through life had to come out and I'm glad that you're able to share it as a gift to the world man so you know like I said you do challenge a lot of mainstream narratives of what love is because if you tune into media and what we're told especially in Western society it's if you want love you need to find it in a partner you need to buy more stuff and you know the shift really is to internally source it instead of externally trying to find it all around us because that could be a never-ending game and so why do you feel like that's such an important shift to have? I think it's really important because we have to just recognize that we're also not living, you know, I think it's humans. We're not living the lives that we've generally lived for the

last 10,000 years. We're not in small communities anymore. Our survival is no longer based on the approval of other people. We've moved into this, we've shifted into this new paradigm where we live in these larger, you know, metropolitan societies. And the lights stay on with this like prevailing religion of like buy stuff be happy and messaging all the messaging that comes to us is really with that goal in mind and someone like edward bernay's kind of inventing marketing is realizing you can get to somebody emotionally that way so we we constantly have our emotional heartstrings being pulled um in order for us to be a part of that life you know in order for you know so and then when it comes to love we're being told these ideas that you have to be something you have to do

something, you have to accomplish something, you have to be worthy, you have to be enough. And then all of that's required, or you even have to be perfect. And then when all of that happens, then you deserve or you qualify for love. When really love is the constant, love is what's always there. And all these ideas are actually just creating blockages, obstacles, rubble in the way. And it's just really important because we can continually buy endless things, endless things climb these mountains that have no peaks, you know, kind of unconsciously in our lives and just live out our entire lives, never realizing that the love was inside us the whole time. I get the picture of somebody like spending their whole life running from point A to point B, like an

ant on a planet that is just searching for something that is right under their nose the whole time. And, you know, that's sad because once you do realize that you, once you remove what's in the way and the barriers of love, then you actually just experience more. of just your being and your being is synonymous with love in my experience. When you tap into deep stillness and you remove who you're not and who you are, you experience as this energy of love. And so, yeah, why do you think it's so important to discover that and to realize that first before trying to externally be in relation to others? Not that you can't obviously be in relationship. And a lot of times we discover the love that we have for ourselves by virtue of being in relationship.

but it's just most people have it backwards. So is there anything you want to touch on there before you move forward? Yeah, I think one of the reasons I think people are resonating with the book so much is it's not that I'm kind of coming out with these like revolutionary ideas. I think what I'm doing is reminding people of what they've already experienced. I think people have all had genuine experiences around love, maybe around their family or maybe around a certain activity or a certain moment in their life. and it's really about priming them to let that be the standard of love, you know.

So instead of saying, you know, you have to be something and you have to be perfect for love, you know, reminding them that the people in their lives that they love deeply and dearly aren't perfect. And they know that. But none of that disqualifies them from their love, reminding them that they have been full of love holding a baby for the first time and not having that love reciprocated and it didn't matter. So these ideas that love has to be reciprocated, is you have to, you know, it's tip for tad, it's got to be 50-50, or love requires you to be prettier or richer or more valuable as a person. They're not real and we know this because the love that we actually have in our lives has never required any of that for us.

I think the challenge is when we start getting into this idea of romantic love and finding a life partner. Now all of a sudden, what is very credible as qualifications for a first date and to get a second date, you know, you might have to come to. and fresh, you might have to show that, you know, you can bring something to the table, you might have to be interesting, you might have to be showing that you can provide an individual safety or security or peace or whatever. All of those things start to get mixed up with love. You know, a second date is love, attention is a love, you know, validation, attraction, sex, none of these things are love. And these are things that we're pursuing and we start to mix that up. And a lot of that, I think, I believe comes from messages that were being sent.

like, you know, you think about your favorite TV couple, you know, there aren't many healthy couples shown to us on TV because if they were actually healthy relationships, they wouldn't be eventful enough to be on TV. You know, a healthy relationship looks like peace. And looking at peace on television is like watching the fireplace channel, you know, there's not much going on. And I think, so when we think about, you know, the couples that we grew up watching, whether it's like watching Ross and Rachel on Friends, you're watching these cat and mouse relationships. That's somebody with an anxious and avoid an attachment style. Those are two people that should never be together,

but that makes for entertaining stuff. So I think for me, it's really about encouraging this level of just awareness. You know, I think step one is just not to float through life unconsciously anymore and be aware of why things are the way they are. There's a reason why we're meant to believe these things. At the end of the day,

if we didn't participate in this economy, you know, things would probably crumble. It would be an uncomfortable situation. So that's why they have to convince us to buy a bunch of stuff. You need more than one outfit. You need to wear all these cosmetics. You need to drive a certain type of car. And all of these things now have an emotional attachment to it.

You know, if I drive this car, it means I have a lot of money. If I drive this car, it means I care about the environment. If I drive this car, it means that I care about, like, rugged and durability. It's not I bought a car to go from A to B. There's such an emotional attachment to that. So I think it's just really important to recognize that. And George Carlin said it beautifully. You can't tape sandwiches to your body to address your hunger.

Hunger is an internal thing and something has to go inside. And it's the same thing. Like what we thirst for and what we're longing for, you know, can't be dealt with on the outside. And I think it's really important to recognize that because if that was the case, you know, like America's divorce rates at like 56% now, you know, it's not doing it very well. And I think a lot oftentimes is because people are trying to outsource. their solution to their loneliness. And that's not something that we can do. You know, loneliness isn't being alone. Loneliness is not being good in your own company. And that's an

internal job that has to be done. And that starts with feeling uncomfortable by yourself. And that feeling of discomfort that comes from being by yourself is the release of whatever we're holding in that makes it difficult for us to go inwards. I mean, like you spoke to, we just live in a world that romanticizes having eye candy, you know, instead of soul food, which is actually what we need to nourish us on a deep internal level. And I think it's, it's okay, obviously, to want things, to be in the world, to like play the game if that's what you want, but just have clarity and awareness as the distinction of what real love is, because it's a felt experience we can all relate to. Maybe we grew up in a household where our parents told us that they loved us every

day, but their actions didn't reflect that. On the contrary, maybe we grew up with parents that didn't say, I love you once, but the energy of embrace that they carried with them and how they cooked the meals and how they brought you to soccer practice, like, that's unspoken, that's felt. That's giving without attachment, without strings. And so we've all experienced, most of us, I think, have experienced true love, either from a maternal figure, paternal figure, maybe a friend or in a relationship. And I think that's important to have a reference point. as to what love feels like. Yeah.

Because a lot of times it can get too heady and intellectual of like, is this love? Is this not love? But, you know, really there's a quote about decency is having no agenda. Yeah. Decency is in absence of strategy. Yeah. I think it's just really important to have the understanding, that distinction, that context. And then we can go into the world, which we'll go into a little bit later of this podcast.

But first, I want to keep diving into how important it is to realize self-love first. to the degree in which you can, right? We're always going to be limited to what we're unconscious of, what we're unaware of the shadows and neuroses that are operating beneath the shadows that we can't fully see. But once we have, and there's many modalities to gain awareness as to what's going on and what the barriers are within us to love, then we can start to chip away at those and excavate those parts of ourselves, you know, and reown the parts of ourselves that we've disowned.

So for you, man, what's been your process and like why you, you felt like you needed to write this book and how was it an act of your own self-love? The motivation behind writing the book was I had a relationship that didn't, you know, wasn't moving forward. I don't want to say it was a failed relationship. Because even the standards that we measure relationships only, did they last forever? No, it was a failure. And I don't think that's what it is. Relationships can be seasons and they can serve a purpose.

But I was in a relationship that, you know, after a few years ended. And at that point in my pain, I was trying to figure out like what I did wrong. you know, you know, because it was with a wonderful individual who was, it was very clear they were trying their best to love me and I wasn't in a position to receive it. And I was trying to figure that out. And I was very aware that there was a lot of love around me, a lot of people trying to give me love or at least express love to me and I wasn't able to receive it. I had, I had barriers up. And then the journey, what I realized was I had created, you know, we were talking about this earlier, just these protective layers to protect myself, not realizing that I was, imprisoning myself from all of this as well. I was pretty much an upside down bucket. And it was raining on top of me all this love, but the bucket was upside down. So it didn't matter. So for me, it was really about trying to figure that out. And what I started realizing that journey and, you know, where's the title of the podcast is that you had to know yourself. Like self-awareness is the only path to liberation. And that's just picking up on your patterns. That's just looking, you know, taking a step back and observing yourself.

that is, you know, creating a distance between what's happening and how it's being observed. And I think that was a really important thing for me to recognize because, you know, instead of me saying, I am sad, I started realizing that I'm experiencing sadness or I'm happy. I'm experiencing happiness. And from that standpoint, that first thing it taught me was, you know, I didn't end a relationship with a person. I ended a relationship with a version of myself that, you know, wasn't who wasn't honoring who I really was and it had nothing to do with that person. And I think that's really hard for a lot of us.

I've been rejected before as well. And you think it's about you. The person who's rejecting me, it's about them and what they're going through. It had nothing to do with me. You know, if somebody came door to door and started selling, trying to sell you a dishwasher, you don't need a dishwasher, you have a dishwasher. Saying no to them, you're not rejecting them. It has nothing to do with them.

You know, it's about where you are in your life. And I think that became a really important kind of, grounding for this, which was to start picking up on my patterns and who I was. And what I realized was I wasn't also able to receive love because when I was younger, in my mind was still developing, I had pretty much come to a conclusion and an ill, you know, an inaccurate conclusion that I had to earn love. And if it didn't, you didn't earn it, then it wasn't real. And if you, and that I also didn't deserve it otherwise if I didn't earn it. So if people were giving it to me, there would be an internal dialogue in me that was like, well, what's wrong with this person?

You know, if they could love someone like me, something must be wrong with them. And then finding myself more attractive, attracted to people who weren't making it easy, you know, and then falling in love with this journey of chasing, you know. And then the second I caught them, oh, you know, then I see a human being, like, oh, wait, something's wrong with this isn't, I got to go chase the next person who seems like they're, they're, you know, they're too far away. And I think starting to pick up on that pattern and being like, it doesn't matter, you know.

Rihanna can call me tomorrow. And if she starts showing me too much attention, I'll think something's wrong with her. You know, and that's not her story. That's my story. And going back to the self-awareness, I had to start picking up on that self-awareness and then realizing that, okay, none of this matters.

These relationships with other people won't matter until I address my relationship with myself and how I view things. and it's not just in the negative of how I feel about myself, but it's also in the positive. Because all of these were pretty much, you know, during our formative years, but we had developing brains

and we weren't making informed decisions. You know, we're just figuring it out as we went. And we didn't have a lot of understanding of context. So if our parents, you know, didn't treat us well, we didn't have context to know if they were having a bad day or not. We just internalized all of it ourselves. And I think for me, that became a really important thing to go back

and visit that. And then start to say, okay, well, now I'm an adult with all the capabilities and all the resources and all the understanding to begin this journey now. Let's go. And then you start to realize like, okay, well, it's really simple, but it's not easy. You know, and it's work. And we start to understand that for most of us, especially as adults who have any type of skill, you know, we developed them when we were younger, when somebody else was in charge

of making us practice, you know, whether it was reading. whether it was playing a sport, whether it was learning to play the piano, you know, somebody else is kind of overseeing it and holding us accountable. Now as adults, when we don't have any supervision, it's difficult to be held accountable to do something repeatedly. And so for me, this journey of self-love, that's where it got difficult. It was like, oh, okay, so I have to practice gratitude every day. You know, it's not like I'm in the classroom and my teacher is we have half an hour

of gratitude every day and I developed a habit. And that became a challenge in itself. And then you start to see that there's shortcuts, the shortcuts that don't serve us. And I call it fast food. You know, fast food versions of love. So attention is the big one. You know, acceptance, validation.

These are all big. And you start to realize we have an entire economy built on. The social media is putting metrics on how much acceptance we have. So now, easier than doing this internal. work, I can just post some cool, cool stuff on social media and count my likes and my comments and let them decide if I'm worthy or not, you know, realizing that within a day or within half a day, I want more. Yeah. I want more and more, more, more, more. So it's not satiating me in any capacity. And that's why we have to really be mindful that and be easy on yourself for it, which is this

journey is difficult. The gratification is extremely delayed. And you are constantly surrounded by alternatives, fast food alternatives, that will give you gratification much quicker, but it'll be short-lived. And just like fast food, like it's cheap, it's quick, it's convenient, but too much of it over the long run is really going to do a number on you. Yeah. Beautifully said, man, you raise a lot of really important topics that I want to dive into. Like, I love that analogy of like turning the bucket over so you can first receive the love,

right? But ultimately, if you have a bunch of holes in your bucket, no matter how much you try to receive is just going to keep on going, you know, outside of you. And so, you know, you spoke to this narrative that a lot of people are under the misconception that they need to earn love. But it doesn't make sense when you really look at it because how can you earn something that you already are? Yeah. And I like to say that you don't need self-love. You need to realize yourself is love. And so from that energy, when you realize who you are, then you stop the grasping of always needing it externally and feeling like you have to earn it, that usually is a bi-product like you spoke to,

it's a behavioral compensation that you learned when you were young. So you earn love as a kid, and you didn't process it intellectually. You just thought that if I do this, I get love. Your parents represent love to you when you're a kid. But it wasn't love. It was attention. Yeah. Because the love is your parents taking you to soccer practice or putting food on the table. Or working the 12-hour days to make sure you're safe. That's the love. Yeah. What you wanted was after a long day's work, what can I do to get dad to look at me? Right. You know, and that's attention.

And now, as I said, like with social media, what do I got to do to get people to look at me? Well, okay, they didn't like that picture of me at the park. Okay, let me try a picture of me in a bathing suit. Oh, let me try a picture of me beside a Lamborghini. Oh, the numbers are telling me that they like that. Let's do more of that. Oh, here's a picture of me beside a really pretty girl.

I got to do more of that. You know, and it becomes subconscious. And it starts to do that the same when we were kids. Like, well, if I broke a window, they paid attention. or if I got an A plus they paid attention but really when we started to think about it we started doing so much not even to get their attention

we did so much just to avoid their criticism you know we weren't even doing stuff to make people accept us we were just doing stuff to get people off our back and I think that is a really interesting thing to think about because we still do it as adults and that self-awareness piece is so important because you can't break a pattern

you don't know exists like you can't plug holes in a bucket if you don't even know there's a bucket You know, and I think that's always just that first step is just being like, okay, I am not these feelings. I am not these thoughts. I'm not this world. I am the observer. I'm the person playing the video game. And what I'm learning now is, and I'm learning this to like Michael Singer, you know, detachment comes from distance.

Like you can't just be like, all right, I'm unattached to the outcome of my book sales. Oh, I'm unattached to if this girl wants to see me again. Oh, I'm unattached to, you know, if. I get that new opportunity. You know, it's got to be at least some distance. You got to first start by just creating a little bit of distance between us and that. And being like, okay, well, that, that, a lot of what's happening in that situation is out of my control. I can't control if my book does really well.

If, you know, a controversial British prince starts to drop in scandalous stories about his family on the same day. you know that by default is going to suck all the oxygen out of the room i i don't know that when i'm writing the book and that has nothing to do with me that's something that was always going to happen and that's going to attract more attention and that has no bearing on my value as a person and i think recognizing love as like the default when all this mess has gone away as you said like we are love um it doesn't even have to be seen as this like cosmic you know hyper spiritual concept that people need to wrap their heads around. It's more like think about the times you felt the most love.

It's generally a place of peace. And peace is not having everything. Peace is not wanting anything. You know? And it's just getting yourself back to that. What activities bring you there? What people are you around that bring you there? The people that you can have silence with. You can just sit in a room and not say anything.

That's peace. That's love. It's not the people that give you that anxiety. Like, oh, I need to keep filling the void. I need to keep trying to keep trying to say anything. impress this person. I need to keep trying to be seen by this person. I think it was a Chris Rock quote, which was like, the important question isn't what do people think about me? The important question is, why do I care? And I think, again, going internal and asking these questions about us, at least there's an exploration there. And that exploration by default is going to require

a level of vulnerability, which is the recipe for connection. So the self-love is created when we become more vulnerable with us, which is the same way if I want to create a connection with you, it's through us being vulnerable together. If I want to have a romantic relationship with somebody, it's through being vulnerable with them. If I want to create a deep, meaningful connection with an audience of a thousand, it's going to start by being vulnerable. And I think that's the important thing is being vulnerable with yourself will allow you to be vulnerable with others. Be honest with yourself, will allow you to be honest with others. And starting that journey doesn't require anything magical. It could be you a pen in the paper or it could be you in a room just sitting there,

letting all the screaming and the noise and the anxiety happen and just witnessing it. And trusting that in your entire life, not one emotion has ever lasted forever. Every single emotion, the ones you didn't want to feel, the ones that you wanted to last forever, none of them did. They came and they went. They're all hotel guests. And you cleaned up the room and made space for the next one to come. It's going to be the same. same thing when you sit in the room in silence. And, you know, which is, you know, my favorite form of meditation, which is just doing absolutely nothing.

Yeah. And it's kind of enjoying the show of what starts happening inside. Yeah. Because it definitely doesn't feel like nothing. Yeah. In silence, in darkness. Yeah. Talking a little bit before the show, maybe doing a darkness retreat.

Yeah. Crazy, man. Yeah, I think ultimately, most people are under the misconception that love is really infatuated. and when they're attracted to somebody, it's often more of a trauma bond than it is a genuine magnetism. When you are your authentic self, you become a magnet to other people

who are their authentic selves. When you're an inauthentic version of yourself, you become a match to other individuals or an inauthentic version of yourself. Like attracts like. And so first, I think it's really important to have that distinction, have the understanding and awareness.

And then we do live in a world like we spoke to that really glorifies self-improvement. the personal development world is like becoming a better version of yourself. Where for me, I see value in that, but I also see a lot more value in self-realization and self-acceptance because no amount of self-improvement is going to make up for a lack of self-acceptance. And so, yeah, how important do you feel like that journey is to find self-acceptance before just trying to endlessly try to improve the display of your experience of life?

Yeah. And I guess, I guess I don't view. I guess it's, you know, for clarity's sake, like self-acceptanceism is a light switch. You're like, and now I accept myself and now I can go do it. You know, the analogy I like is, you know, keep climbing the mountain and celebrating the fact that you're making progress, but also enjoy the view every step of the way. Like, don't promise yourself a better view a hundred steps from now. It's enjoying where you are.

but knowing that movement is necessary. Like we're, you know, it really is binary in that context that we're either growing or we're shrinking. And we're taking steps forward or we're taking steps back. So I would heavily encourage people to focus on progress over perfection. Yeah. You know, and not hoping that, oh, once I release my book, everything will be better. Or once I make a million dollars, everything will be better. Once I find a partner, everything will be better.

you know, there's no finish lines to any of this, you know, until we get to the absolute finish line, which is, you know, the end of our existence in this form. But beyond that, it's just the journey. And it's, and again, understanding that we live in a part of the world that is very linear, that really does focus on beginning, middle and ends and, you know, Judeo-Christian beliefs. It's like, you live a life and then you die and go to heaven or hell. So everything is leading up to that one moment. But like Eastern philosophy doesn't work like that. It's more cyclical. You're in a cycle. You know, you have your seasons and everything continues in a cycle and understanding that your life will continually work in cycles and you'll have your spring, summer, fall, and winter all the time. And as you make

progress, sometimes progress is two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes it's seven steps back, one step forward. And all you're celebrating is the movement. While at the same time, you know, You know, embracing yourself as you are, you know, sometimes it's as easy as just going easy on yourself, you know, and saying like, yeah, it's cool. I got to take a couple steps back. And I want to take a bigger step forward, but I had to take a baby step. And that's cool, you know. And it's no different than the way you'd speak to a four-year-old. You know, we're speaking to our inner child the same way.

And it's saying, look, the progress is what matters. It doesn't matter if you're perfect. And in the book, I make a reference to, you know, Beyonce, there's a YouTube video of her, you know, a compilation of all the mistakes she's made on tour and falling on stage and all of that. And say, watch it and see if that impacts your opinion on Beyonce. It really doesn't.

It'll make you love her more. Yeah. You know, her imperfections don't disqualify her from anything. It's the progress. And the reason we love our favorite athletes and our favorite entertainers is because we're not just because they're the best. It's because we keep watching them get better. You know, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

There's just a rainbow. And let's celebrate being on the rainbow and just ensure that we have to keep moving. Because if we're not moving forward, we're probably moving back. There is no static in this year. We can't, there is no happily ever after, you know. And we see that in the films, but that doesn't exist in real life. And life has got to be constant progress. And as long as you pick a direction, it could be a vague direction and just have some clarity to that.

I think that's really important. the word sin, you know, defines into being without aim. That's actually what it means. So the only sin that we can actually live is living a life without aim. Just pick a direction and go. You know, and it's less and, you know, you're an entrepreneur, I'm an entrepreneur. We quickly realize that it's less about the right decision versus the wrong decision. It's a decision versus not making a decision, you know.

So it's like pick a direction and go and then adjust. And more importantly than where you're going is who you become on that. journey. And that's what needs to happen. And that's only going to come from focusing on progress and paying attention to your patterns and paying attention to who you are. And that's just reflection. And that reflection again can come through sitting quietly, writing in a journal, expressing it in your gratitude and in your prayer or, you know, creating art. Yeah. That's beautiful, man. That reflection that you're speaking to, the more that you grow in your own self-awareness, the more that you see everything in your life being a reflection for you to grow as an individual.

And you see the relationships that you're in, the career, the job that you have, the friendships, everything that you're doing in life, they're mirrors for you. And they're teaching you something about yourself in some aspect of yourself. And when you have that awareness, it can be exciting because then you can invite that in and you can not resist resistance necessarily, but you can allow it to be a catalyst for growth and to embrace that discomfort because more you go through it, the more you realize how much expansion is on the other side of discomfort and accepting that. especially with voluntary discomfort. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like you either choose pain or you let pain keep choosing you unconsciously in all the Because it's going to find you. And it's, you know, and it's, you know, like I always use the analogy of going to the gym. An easy day at the gym isn't a good day. But also you're voluntarily tearing your muscles. You're voluntarily putting yourself in uncomfortable situations to get stronger.

So the day a friend asks you to move a couch, you don't get injured helping them. Yeah. You know, it's that. And it's no different than, you know, you're having the ice flunge and you're voluntarily sitting in there. You're voluntarily putting yourself in a situation where your mind is literally screaming. Let's get out. We're going to die.

Let's get out. I can't feel my toes because I've done it, you know, many, many, many times. And it never gets easier. But you do that because it re-regulates your, your fighter flight system. You know, it helps you reestablish a healthy relationship with your breath. So then when you're in an actual situation, you know, you're in an actual situation. of how anxiety you were more equipped and prepared, you know, the proverbial picking up the couch for your friends. You're less likely to freak out. You're less likely to be reactive and more

likely to shorten your reaction time and increase your responsive time. Yeah. Yeah, man. I think that's a very powerful understanding to arrive at authentically within your experience. And then also, like we spoke to, in terms of accepting your experience of life, it's important to even accept that maybe you don't fully accept yourself to like just be where you are. A lot of times, especially when we're talking about love and ideas that can go off into feeling a little bit more esoteric. It's, it's really not complicated. Like you said, it's simple, not always easy, but it is simple that it's right here.

It's where your breath is. It's where your feet are. And the more that you can come into just being okay with accepting those vulnerable parts of you that you've often shamed because of whatever behavioral compensations you've developed, then you can, like I said, become a match. And especially when you go into partnership or relationship with others, being that vulnerable, expressing that vulnerability allows for intimacy, right? Because I can't connect with you if there's a barrier in between us. Yeah.

Right. So it's being okay with exposing the wound, essentially, of whatever you're carrying. But it does require a safe space for that to be, you know, allowed. It does. And I think the reason none of us, you know, are the most excited about being vulnerable with people we don't know. is because to be vulnerable is to give somebody something that can harm you. You know, they can throw that in your face. And you're scared for that, you know, especially when you don't know them very well.

But I think we also just have to realize the other thing too is that, you know, love is existing beyond this world of duality. Duality isn't simply good and evil. Duality is also just black and white thinking that we as kids were only capable of having, you know, because their brains were developing, you know, neuroelasticity, they were saying goes up to 26. Now there's more evidence saying that it goes even further. But when you're 12 or when you're 8, you can only think in terms of black and white. Your brain is still developing. And then that's when you're making big decisions that formulate your personality.

And what we have to realize is thinking black and white is a reason that we're not enjoying life as much as we have because we're not looking at the gray in between. or the other way I like to put it is like it's not zero or 100. There's a whole bunch of numbers in between. So with that, there's also when it comes to vulnerability, there's ways to be vulnerable that isn't, you know, you don't have to meet you for the first time and start telling you my deepest, darkest secrets that makes me completely vulnerable and I don't know you. There's ways to be vulnerable with you for the first time and not be afraid of, A, you're hurting me, but B, me not scaring you away. And I learned that through therapy. So my therapist had me, she had always had two vulnerable stories in your pocket that you could tell a stranger that wouldn't scare them away.

So one of my vulnerable stories is around dogs. I had a dog growing up, loved him dearly. He lived until he was 11, and we had to put him to sleep. He had hip issues. So one hip went. So now he's a three-legged dog. And then the second hip kept going. So for half a day, he would only have two working legs.

And then, you know, he would have trouble using the bathroom. So we had to make the, but he was healthy. His mind was healthy. His personality was still there, but he just couldn't move anymore. And he was 140 pounds. He was a big guy. So he wasn't someone that we could just carry it around. So then, you know, in the stress and a very non-empathetic veterinarian, we were pretty

much told like, okay, this is the time you should put him to sleep. So we decided to put him to sleep, which was a very traumatic experience because I took him to a vet which scared scared the hell out of him. And I'm watching him cry and he's looking at me like, please get me out of here, but we're putting him to sleep. And it was such a sad experience for me. And then I avoided having dogs for years and years, but crazy obsessed with dogs. You know, I'm one of those weirdos that if I saw your dog at the park, I'd want to sit there and just give him a hug. Then fast forward a couple of years, you know, I, during the pandemic, somebody tells me about a dog that somebody had ordered from this breeder that they chose not to keep

because the dog, they wanted the dog to be born brown and the dog came out black. And I was like, that's really weird. Dog racism? That's strange. And he's like, hey, do you want the dog? And I was like, no, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in, this is, I'm in Toronto still in the middle of the pandemic. I go, once this pandemic's over, I'm moving to the states, I can't have a dog. And he's like, sure.

But, you know, and we're at, you know, an illegal little gathering during the pandemic. And, you know, after a few shots of tequila, I'm, you know, my true self comes out. And I'm like, where's the dog? I want the dog. You know, so it was an impulse buy. And I get the dog. And it's my little puppy boogie. And it's been amazing and beautiful to have her.

And then fast forward a year and a half. I'm in Los Angeles with her. She came here and she loves it here and everything's great. For the first year that I had her, I would take her to. the vet and because of the pandemic, you couldn't go inside. So I would leave her at the front door, and then they would take her and they call you when they're done. So which was great, which was fine. Once we got here and, you know, the closures associated with the pandemic are done. Everything's open again. I took her to the vet, and it was the first time in over 10 years I'd been in a veterinary

office. And the moment I walked in and I saw the metal table, it instantly brought me back to putting my dog to sleep and I had a little bit of a panic attack. So that was something that made me realize like that was unresolved pain. Yeah. That's a story I can share with you. That's a vulnerable story. Yeah. I don't think that's something that's going to scare you away. Right. You know what I mean? That is, but now that gives you an opportunity to potentially share a story with me. Right. And that's what vulnerability does. You be vulnerable with someone. It allows them to be vulnerable with you. And the thing is as men specifically, we weren't always signaled to look at that as okay. We always viewed it as you are exposing your vulnerable areas for attack.

But I have to trust you enough to think you're not going to throw the story in my face and harm me and disrespect me based off me telling you about the loss of, you know, an animal. Yeah. And if I did, that would just be data collection for you to be like, okay, well, I clearly don't want this person as a friend of my life. Yeah, that's a quality. Yeah, that's a quality of a, you know, but I'm not telling you super deep, deep, deep, dark, dark secrets and shadow stuff that I'm still addressing and dealing with. Maybe after, you know, months of us of getting closer and closer, because what we're going to be doing is what we're doing is, you know, we're establishing that pathway. And I know you've had Peter Crone on here before, right?

Like, and that's his idea of you show me what love is. And what we're doing by being vulnerable is we're building that pathway. And then, you know, and the work that we have to do is to keep that pathway clean for the love to flow. It's not about finding the love. is about creating that pathway for the love. And that's what vulnerability is. And that vulnerability is not just me doing it with you or me doing it with an audience

or a community that I've never met before. It's also doing it with myself. And that's why it's important to journal. That's why it's important to pray. Because when you pray, whoever you pray to, you are asking for things that you actually are asking for. It's not performative because you're not worried about anybody else

on this planet paying attention to you. And you're also expressing gratitude for things that you're actually grateful for. And those may not be things that you other people may or may not relate to and you may be afraid in judgment. And I think there's an important side to that because you're being extra vulnerable and deep with yourself. And on top of that, dance. You know, I think, you know, there's a story in the book about dancing and how that's a level of, that's an antidote to loneliness. You know, feeling your body, being in your body, experiencing that.

Again, that's a level of intimacy. That's a level of vulnerability. Dancing with somebody is a level of vulnerability. You know, and people don't just dance in front of strangers all the time. You wait till you're comfortable. It's the same thing with yourself. Dance in front of the mirror. Create that opportunity.

Create that relationship. Do it without judgment. You know, looking at yourself in the mirror naked and challenging yourself to do it without having a critical eye. Again, expressing gratitude. Thank you for being there for me, body. Since conception. Thank you for dealing with my poor diet choices. Thank you for dealing with my bad posture.

Thank you for dealing with me sitting for too long. Thank you for all of that. like just instead of saying I wish my stomach was flatter. I wish my skin was clearer. You know, I think all of these are opportunities to be more vulnerable with yourself, saying thank you and establishing that relationship and that pathway with yourself, which will make it easier for you to do it with other people.

Yeah, man. Beautifully, beautifully said, I think that this act of moving away from this idealized version of perfection that we're so striving after to making space for the parts of ourselves that we deem unlovable. It's not true that whoever's listening to this, it's not true that you're not unlovable. But there's parts of ourselves where we act like that part is not lovable or whatever our

wounding is. It can manifest in a million different ways. But the more that we make space for it and hopefully find individuals that we can also share that space with, whether it's just one friend or a therapist or a partner or your parent or whatever it is, then you can realize how it's not true that you're unlovable, but it is a reality of your experience right now. It's important to not bypass that. And then you can, like you spoke to you also in the book, to allow love to be a verb, not just a noun,

it's an act of expression that you can carry within your life. And you can carry that into yourself. One of the ways to do that is to set boundaries. You know, a lot of times we want people to feel, we want to be liked, really is what it comes down to. And so we have a fear of saying no. Really setting boundaries is for me at least been one of the most valuable and impactful ways to experience. express self-love because I'm somebody that wants to give. I want to support. I want to, you know, help and be of assistance. And to the degree in which I'm sacrificing my own well-being

or my own purpose or what I wanted to devote myself to, it's sacrificing the love that I have for myself. And so how important for you in your understanding is boundary setting? I mean, I think it's completely essential. And I think going back to this space of going easy on ourselves. It's okay that we want to be liked. As I said, being, chasing likes is actual survival. You know, when we're in small communities, keeping everyone in your community happy with you is what kept you alive. It kept you in line with the needs of the community and it kept you from being banished. And if you got banished out of a community, you probably would die. So rejection feels like death because rejection used to be death. And we, I don't believe that we're going to deprogram

that fear anytime soon. I think we can become aware of it. Like I feel like crap when people turn me down or I feel FOMO feels super strong because I feel left out, but I'm aware why. That's in my, that's in my primitive biological programming. And that's how we've been for the last 10,000, 30,000 years. it's not going to change just because our society has changed its makeup in the last 200 years. So there's nothing wrong with anybody for wanting to be liked. It doesn't serve us to want to be liked. Chasing likes and chasing acceptance from people will deny us love. Because part of being liked is to not have boundaries,

making everybody else happy except for you, making everybody else's needs met except yours. And that's been romanticized in itself, kind of martyr syndrome, you know, putting everybody else's needs before yours. And I know this because, you know, even if I posted it tomorrow on my social media saying, I'm there for everybody, but no one's there for me. It would probably end up being the most successful thing I've ever posted, like this version of self pity that comes with that because self pity is fast food connection with self. Nobody understands what I'm going through except for me, even if my post just got a million

likes, meaning a million people are in the same boat as me. Nobody, nobody ever gets it. So I think the important thing with setting boundaries is you're making it about you and you're not making it about other people. And setting boundaries is pretty much just articulating your standards. And why that's important is because right now we have expectations of other people, which isn't fair. I can't expect anything from you. I can't expect you to be respectful of my time or to be disrespectful to me as a person. But what I can do is establish a boundary saying that if anybody is not respectful of my time or is not respectful of my space or doesn't want to make me feel safe, then I'm going to exit that situation. If somebody doesn't want to treat me kindly,

then I'm not going to invest in that relationship. That's me setting boundaries and setting standards for who I am. And it's allowing anybody else to be whoever the hell they want to be. I'm not telling you who to be. I'm just telling you what needs to happen for me to invest. And you want to be somebody else, by all means, be somebody else. If you want to be into drama, You want to be into gossip. You want to be into all that stuff. You know, more power to you, but I can't be a part of that. I recently ended a friendship with somebody and specifically said that.

I'm not, they said, what if I change? I go, I don't need you to change. You can be whoever you are. But the patterns have shown me that at the end of the day, what I require for a friendship isn't happening here. And I'm feeling used and I don't want to resent you. Because if I resent you, then there's definitely not no love. Instead, I can love you and I can love you from afar and wish.

you all the best and not want to hate or hurt or harm you or view you as an enemy, but still say, but I have to have boundaries and I can't invest time in you anymore. I can't be there for you anymore. I can't answer your calls anymore. I can't do these things anymore because I have to protect my peace because I have to make sure my battery is charged for the other people in my life I want to be there for. But also, I need my battery charged so I can do the things that I'm doing so I can make a living so I can survive, so I can take care of my puppy, so I can take care of my parents. And all of these things are important. Putting our needs last, there's nothing honorable to that. And putting your needs first doesn't make you selfish. Selfish isn't putting yourself first. It's expecting other people

to put you first. And if you don't put your needs first, then you're never going to be in a situation to be of any value to anybody else. You have to make sure your cup is full first. You know, is that, you know, and I make the reference in the book to the oxygen mask in the airplane. You got to put on your oxygen mask first. And I think that's important. And I also, just going back to another point that you talked about with this idea of, you know, qualifying for love and this idea of being unlovable, I think it's important to ask yourself what type of love are we, are we desiring if it could be so reductive and have qualifications? You know, don't we want that love that is so massive?

Abundant. So abundant that there isn't a qualification for it to exist. And as I said, it does exist. The work that you're doing is clearing out the blockages. So you can catch some of it versus, you know, qualifying for it. Like you're trying to get a job or something. On the path to pursuing realizing love, the quickest way to outsource responsibility is to claim that you're a victim and to develop that sense of self-pity. You know, it's the reasons are out there why I don't have it or I can't attain there or I don't feel it.

And ultimately, that's a powerless state to be. When you place it outside of your control, when really you have the responsibility. responsibility to self-source that love. It's going to be a never-ending game. You're just chasing your own tail. And so I love that you spoke to, you know, this energy of to fall in love with pattern, not potential. Everybody has limitless potential. And we can fall in love and romanticize the potential that somebody has to become a partner, to become healthier, to become more enthusiastic, to be more vulnerable to show up in the way that we want them to. Yet, if they're stuck in their cyclical patterns for whatever reason and they don't have the desire to break out of

them, that's going to be the reality that they're going to be stuck in until they choose to step out of it. And so it's nice to see that somebody has potential for something, but it's even better for us to have the awareness of what someone's patterns are. Because then we know what we're going into, especially in partnership where we can see somebody's results in life, mentally, physically, spiritually, financially, sexually, all dimensionally. And if their patterns are what gives them the results that they have. So you can just look at somebody's constitution, the results that they have in their life internally,

not just externally, and the patterns are what caused that. So how important it is for us to have that distinction of the patterns and not just the potential. Yeah, I mean, the chapter in the book is called Don't fall in love with potential. And then later on and say, if you're going to fall in love with potential,

fall in love with your own. Every, you know, you can't love, you have to love what's in front of you when it comes to another person, you know, not who they can. be. And again, they're on their journey and maybe they'll get there. Maybe they won't. But you have to love somebody for who they are. You know, loving them for their potential is denying who they are now. And that's not creating an authentic pathway of love. You know, that's a conditional pathway. And that

pathway is probably going to stay blocked. Now you are familiar with yourself. It's like when people invest in a company, they have to do their due diligence and they have to like see all the blind spots and figure out the potential of the company. The only company that you're aware of is yours. You know, you have the best view of it. And even then, there's still blind spots. But you have to, can confidently say you have the best view in comparison to anybody else. So, you know, when it comes to honoring commitments, when it comes to keeping promises, when it comes to loving potential, that has to be internal. Keep your promises to yourself.

Be absolutely radically honest with yourself. Keep your word to yourself. Fall in love with your own potential. These are things that you can do. Doing it for other people, again, is going to sever these pathways of love because you're creating conditions. And those conditions by default aren't allowed. allowing people to be who they are.

And that acceptance isn't there. You're going back to this idea that someone has to be perfect to qualify for your love, which isn't love. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like we spoke to, we can just really put the idea on a pedestal that we need to find wholeness or perfection in this absolute love within ourselves before we're ready to be in partnership.

But ultimately, like within I'm sure both of our experiences, we realize so much of who we are and the capacity of love that we can hold by virtue of being in relationships where there were, you know, reflections in that mirror. So it's, you know, while we're speaking to a lot of these insights of how important it is to have that self-awareness and recognize and realize your own self-love, ultimately it's a journey. And it's a path that keeps on unfolding as you get further on it. And so getting into relationships can often become the biggest catalyst because a safe space

is created for us to have the courage to look at whatever our show. shit is. Only in the dynamics of, you know, really loving somebody, are you drawn to work through the shit that you otherwise wouldn't be, you know, incentivized to work through because it's causing resistance and friction in the relationship. So it's, it's important to also realize that being in relationship and the space that's created within it, that container of love, is oftentimes the catalyst for us to realize these big insights firsthand. Yeah. And that's just abandoning the ideas that all relationships have to last forever. Yeah. You know, like, and again, I don't know so the quote, but like, you know, no one is my friend, no one is my enemy, everyone is my teacher. And it's that

idea of these experiences are going to teach you on your own journey. And they're going, not only are these external relationships going to inform your internal relationship, your internal relationship informs these external. And again, perfection denies vulnerability. If somebody was actually perfect, it would be no vulnerability. And then what are you going to connect with them on? You know, it requires, we require imperfection and we, we require accepting people as they are. And also from a superficial, pragmatic standpoint, also realizing that all of us are unique individuals consuming the world in unique ways. So things that I feel may make me unworthy or difficult to be around. I may connect with a person who's like,

oh, no, I grew up with that. That's my happy place. Like, you know, we were talking about environmentally. I grew up in a loud environment. I need to be around noise. You know, you live in a very quiet environment, you know, and I know a lot of people refer that as peaceful. I refer to it as it felt like I'm on the set of a horror film because I'm so used to quiet for me when I see it in a horror film, I'm used to the hustle and bustle. I feel a little bit more comfortable knowing that there's a million people outside my window versus I'm in the middle of nowhere. And so interesting to me. Yeah, but I think the interesting thing with that is knowing that I'm aware of it. So, you know, but that's also something to do with, you know, I think about,

I think, for example, you know, one of my last relationships, you know, the way I speak, I sometimes speak in very straight lines and it can sound really aggressive. And I remember, you know, the person I was with expressing that saying like, you know, you're very harsh sometimes. And then I brought her around my friends, you know, a night out with the friends. And I was like, you're going to realize I'm the most civilized out of all these freaking Neanderthals. And I'm not even the loudest.

I'm not the most aggressive. And I'm like, you're going to realize that I'm like a tone down very. version of these guys, but then realizing, like, you know, going home for, you know, during the holidays and having dinner with my sisters, realizing that even they speak to me like that. And I'm, I'm used to that environment. So that's what, you know, and they're, you know, so my sisters would probably, you know, and they have, you know, there were people that speak like that as well who are very straight to the point, no filter type, type conversations just because we're used to it. So whenever you think, you know, as my therapist,

you know, the true meaning of a red flag is a special accommodation, you know. So for some people, that's a hard stop. Like, oh, you're like this. That's a hard stop. And for somebody else, we're like, oh, no, I'm, I'm, I had a parent like that. I'm used to being around somebody who's social battery drains after a while. Or I'm used to, you know, I'm just trying to think about something even lighter. Snoring. A girl said, yeah, I used to, I used to sleep in the same room as my grandpa and the snoring was something I got used to. So I'm only going to be with somebody who snores. It's a comfort sound. Yeah. You know, and again, that's not everybody, but, you know, for some people, like, something that may be a deal breaker for somebody else may not be for somebody else. And it's like,

our job is just to be able to articulate that. Be aware of how you may be difficult to be around, because if you want is difficult to be around. And that may mean challenging this idea of like putting all these best foot forwards on the first date and, you know, throwing on your Instagram filters. doing all this stuff and then watching it all be downhill slowly over time. It's more about, hey, look, here's a real person, here who I am. Again, it doesn't have to be the overnight stuff overnight given the deepest stuff. But you got to start with this level of vulnerability versus just kind of like everything is a job interview. And I think especially for us for as guys, we spend so much time trying to win over a female if you're in a head of sexual relationship

that by the time they decide that they like you, you haven't even begun to figure out if you like them. You're just spending so much time trying to win them over. Then it becomes that game. Then you start to pull away. Yeah. You know, and then that's what we call a fuckboy. Yeah, man.

I think I would like to speak on that actually because we want it. It'd be ideal to be able to come into magnetizing a loving partnership where you don't necessarily feel like you have to, be anything that you're not, which essentially is what the game is. You're putting on, or maybe you're embellishing parts of yourself and you're putting your best foot forward. And I get it. It's part of wanting to be attractive and be attracted. So how do you balance? How do you recommend others balance between like playing the game, but also just literally being authentically who you are and like understanding that you're going to become a match to who you're going to become a match to and you can't force somebody to be in your life? I think it's really about a,

figuring out the feelings associated with most of the stuff. So I think, for example, you know, I moved out here a year and a half ago. And then, you know, instantly you start to see the way people are addressed, for example. And, you know, if you look at it from a surface level, you start to get signals like, oh, I need to buy a designer. I need to do this. I need to do that because that's the surface level. And I think after, you know, spending more time around the city and starting to pick up on patterns,

I realize, oh, what it really is. is that everybody in L.A. dresses like it's the first day of school every day. Right? None of that requires you to buy expensive clothes. That just requires you to, what does the first day of school look like for you when you were a kid? It probably just meant, you know, signifying effort.

You know, there was this, you know, having a conversation with my therapist with a female about this idea of like signaling wealth, you know. And her saying, you know, it's not about attracting a gold digger. It's about signaling to someone. that you don't live in your mom's basement and that they don't have to take care of you financially because more girls than you will realize have had to take care of a guy financially. And many of them don't want that again.

And without asking you bluntly how much you make, because that makes them look like a gold digger, you create signals about what that is. And oftentimes people think those signals could be a watch or a car or shoes. And then again, we live in, especially in this city, like people would rather look successful than be successful. People would rather look happy than be happy. There's a lot of outwardly appearances. So then you have to develop a thicker bullshit meter

to kind of look through all of that. But understanding that what somebody is looking for is they're not chasing a successful. You know, a female may not be chasing a successful man. She's chasing safety and security around that. And, you know, what she needs to also do is realize what is safety and security? Is safety and security being with an athlete

who is one injury away from losing it all anyway? ways. If he's a football player, their contracts aren't even guaranteed. I have some NFL friends who they get paid weekly and they can get cut weekly. And, you know, so their job can be over at any moment and their paychecks can be over at any moment. So what is this idea of safety and security? And is it reduced to his height and his income? You know, these are things that we were told and we don't take the time to reflect on them and be like, actually, is somebody over six feet, does that actually make me feel safer? Will that matter if we're surrounded by eight and us or whatever the hell, whatever danger people think that we're going to be in, you know,

or is it going to be that guy that you realize may not even have the best job, but you see him put 110% into everything. He cooks a meal, 110%. He puts IKEA furniture together. It's 110%. Whatever he does, he gives it his all. So you know he's always going to give it his all. That's probably a better signal than his current income than his current height or anything like that. But again, it just requires us to kind of go from that. And it's the same thing when it comes to, you know, me, me realizing what I find attractive. I think very often what I learned is how much of that related back to my upbringing, me realizing I don't see people that look like me on television, me feeling like I was always an outcast, me dealing with a lot of racism. So then trying to overcompensate for that, you know, and then I got

into modeling for a bit. I didn't care about being a model, but the validation is what I was chasing because I felt like I didn't belong. But then going a level deeper, I realized, oh, what really just changed was the decision makers are new people who grew up at the same time as me. And, you know, diversity and representation are naturally going to occur as new decision makers come. The same way, Push a T has an RB's commercial. Because the guy who's in charge of the RB's commercials now grew up on Pusha T, you know, and that's what it is.

And the powers that be that used to be these old disconnected, you know, most likely white men who were trying to create a landscape for this country, they're gone. And a new generation is coming up. And it's going to be an even newer generation of younger folks that would be even more diverse and exploring more representation. And that's just a natural occurrence. That's beautiful. Yeah. Nobody got there, nobody got educated and changed their mind. You know, it's just the dinosaurs died out. And the modern thinkers were there. And I think, so I started, you know, starting to recognize a lot of that and realizing that, okay, you know, what I was taught just because I didn't see myself.

on Saturday morning cartoons or on the Disney show or, you know, there wasn't a kid in a boy band that looked like me. That doesn't mean that I'm the definition of ugly. And now I don't have to just constantly chase as much validation as possible. Again, I'm saying this with the awareness that I still make that mistake. You know, I have very clear, I have done the work to clearly define what I think I would want in a partner. And the moment I come across somebody who's just ungodly beautiful to me. I'll just forget the whole list. And I'm being completely honest. This is me with awareness. And the only benefit to that is when it blows up in my faith, which it always does, I don't feel sorry for myself. You know, it's no different than you eating completely

healthy. And then one day being like, all right, we're doing Taco Bell tonight. And then you eat Taco Bell. And then, you know, you spend the next three hours on the toilet being like, I saw that coming. I knew that was, like, I understand causality. And I think I've experienced. I've experienced the same thing when it comes to even dating. Which is just like, oh, I want somebody who is currently doing the work. And I think bare minimum of that for me is in therapy. Then you meet someone who's like, oh, I'm not in therapy. But I was like, oh, but your face is so symmetrical.

We'll just overlook it. And then you start to see the issues, you know, two weeks later that come from that because you guys are operating on different frequencies because you've done different levels of work. And now you have conflict. And I'm at the level where I'm like, okay, I saw that. coming. Yeah. Like I'm not blind to that. I'm not going to feel sorry, but I'm working my way up to being like, no, I'm sorry. I respect you as you are, but I can already see that we're not going to be compatible. I'm not there yet, but I'm being honest about that. Yeah. And everybody has

different levels of sensitivity within themselves. So some people really, we oftentimes in life discover what we want by virtue of experiencing what we don't want. And, you know, you could write down the list of an ideal partner of like the maternal qualities that they have. and how they're so heart-centered and they're creative and all these beautiful aspects of a partner that you want. And then you encounter somebody who's breathtakingly beautiful on the physical meat suit level. And that's so attractive and you go into it

and you realize, oh, actually I value long-term, the interquality is more. And sometimes we need to go through that cycle multiple times, sometimes once, sometimes 100 times, to realize what's most important, you know, because good looks don't raise children. But I think then we can start. start to learn and grow that awareness and like see what ultimately it's like what do you want

and right now of what you want is somebody that's high in the corner on the crazy hot matrix scale i don't know if you've seen that that that's totally fine and if you want somebody continually thinking that there's a you know there's an exception to that rule right yeah man so ultimately when you do come to the place where you find somebody where there is a potential for deepening into falling in love and all that sometimes people have the fear of just the fear of love because one day it's not going to be there. And you know, like not all relationships last forever. In reality, no relationships last forever. They all have an end date. They all have an expiration date. And that can be a tough pill to swallow. But it's also very liberating because it kind of takes

a pressure away of, you know, being just present to what's alive in the moment of the relationship and the possibility of falling in love with somebody. But have you ever experienced and, you know, how do you chat with people that have that fear of falling in love because they have that, um, hesitation of the suffering that could come one day from it no longer being there. Yeah, I think it was the 50 cent quote, which was, it's the kid, the kid who avoids the fight at school is the one with the black eye, right? And you see that where it's like the things that you're avoiding, you end up manifesting, you know, so like I don't want to get hurt. So I'm going to avoid doing X, Y, Z. I'm going to avoid. So for example, at a conversation with a female recently where

it was clear she wasn't expressing what. she actually wanted because she didn't want to hear a no because she knew she was going to hear a no but what she wasn't realizing was she still wasn't getting what she wanted yeah so she wasn't avoiding the no in any capacity she wasn't expressing a need so she wasn't going to have her needs met and i think that the you know operating through fear you know doesn't lead us anywhere as well as the unpleasantness of not getting what you want, the unpleasantness of being into somebody and not having it reciprocated, the unpleasantness of having a situation end earlier than you wanted to.

You know, these are the lessons in life. Like you don't learn when you're happy. You don't grow when you're happy. You know, all the growth comes from discomfort. Again, it comes from ripping the muscles in the gym. It comes from sitting in the ice. It comes from doing a plank. It comes from just being voluntarily uncomfortable.

And I think entering these situations is that. And finding a lens to view it from, you know, when, when I came out here and people would say, oh, how's your dating life? I'm like, well, you know, the human in me is frustrated. The writer in me loves it, you know, because there's plenty to write about from all these unique experiences that I'm having. I could do a whole TV show off of it. But, you know, my heart feels like it's getting stomped on.

But a broken heart is an open heart, you know. And it's, you know, is you want to keep your. yourself and your spirit and your heart in perfect mint condition, like an expensive comic book until you die? Or do you want it to be a baseball glove that's like well worn and used? And I think that's the choice everybody gets to make. But the truth is, you know, there is an expiry date for all of us whenever it's going to be. Do you want to arrive to that safely or do you want to have a depth and a width of life

experiences to show for it before this little vacation from not exist? in this form ends. That's so powerful. And I know a big catalyst for you, even writing the book off the rip, was because you went through the separation with your fiancee at the time. And like that heartbreak that comes from that, like you said, it allows the light to come in because it's an open heart. And you can like some of the biggest growths in life, I feel like come in those moments.

Because you're just cracked open to life. And like what you truly value becomes more clear. And the things that you truly. cherish and the things that you love and all of that comes to the surface, how have you been able to reconcile your own journey on the other side of that? As I said, I think the big thing it made me do, because at that point when it ended, I couldn't, like if you said, hey, why did, why did you end it? I wouldn't have been able to articulate a sentence. Yeah. You know, at that point, I just, it was just a buzz, an endless buzz, an endless anxiety and a hum.

And then, you know, years later now, now it's been, you know, over almost three years now, you know, going through therapy, self-reflection, meeting other people, you know, it's become a lot clearer to me of, as I said, there was a version of myself that had to exist for that to survive, and that wasn't a version of myself that I knew needed to exist. as well as, you know, we create these, you know, as you're talking about creating lists about your ideal partner. I didn't create a list before an ideal partner. What I did was I went back and relived my love life, my entire love life from my first crush in the first grade all the way up to the present. And I wrote down everything that made me come to life. And that ended up becoming my list more than anything else.

And I realized that list is way more specific to me than it is going to be to anybody else. You know, it's not, I just, you know, a generic. So I think for me, the reconciling of that was starting to realize that and then start picking up on patterns in terms of people's ability to communicate, people's ability to address conflict, people's ability to, you know, self-regulate or understand the difference between an interdependent and a codependent relationship. All of these things became a lot more clear for me. And again, I can say all of that without, you know, having a negative thing to say about, you know, my former fiancee because they're an amazing individual.

but if the shoe don't fit, the shoe don't fit. And that was up to me to realize the size of my foot. You know, it wasn't on them, it was on me. So I think reconciling that was, I think, extremely important. I think it's gotten really interesting now as I start to pay attention to the world externally in this 3D form and kind of understand like, okay, well, you know, I have sisters with kids, and their kids are teenagers. now and having that conversation about like what does it mean to have kids and how much of this

was like an urge how much of it was biological how much of it was culture you know and again going back to the idea like how much of who we think we need to be comes from this template of culture and society which i want to say 500 years ago was probably very important because it kept everything moving and alive even if it wasn't the best there were roles for men they were roles for women. I don't think the rules were fair. But had they been doing the roles for 10,000 years, they found a harmony to make that machine work. I feel like now the survival and the roles that we're playing are really to feed a society and an economy. You know, and it's almost like, you know, I have friends who are very popular YouTubers. And sometimes their quickest end to a very powerful person

is through their kids. You know, it's like, oh, the CEO of McDonald's, their kid is a fan of mine. So they just flew me in on a private jet to meet their kid. And now I got to connect. You know, it's not, you know, it's this idea of like, there's a whole economy based off buying your kid's stuff, you know. So it's very incentivized to make people have kids or even, you know, and we're on the West Coast. So it's a lot, there's a lot more exploration around the definition of a traditional

relationship, you know, people exploring polyamory, people exploring different types of relationships over here. You think it's, I think it's really important. to begin those conversations because I think each individual has to figure out their shoe size and what's going to fit them and be okay with the trial and error of it. It really is, you know, endless trials and errors that make life. You know, the Ray Dalio idea of not 10,000 hours, but 10,000 trial and errors will help you figure things out. So I think for me, reconciling this has been that, which is if I want to honor the pain that came from that

relationship ending, the only way for me to feel like I made it worth it is to continue on this trial and error and figure out who I am. You know, this book, you know, was one of those steps where it's like, let me take this and share this with the world, hoping it brings value to them. Knowing that, you know, my specific skill set is putting words together because I rap, I do spoken word poetry. I taught kids for a number of years, having to take ideas and package them in simple forms. these you know these aren't natural gifts these are things that i spent my 10,000 hours on i can put things

into words there's a chapter in the book about another ex-girlfriend who has kids you know dogging me for not having kids and saying you know how you write a book about love you don't have kids and me saying it's less about her judging me and more about me feeling like that she wants me to use my skills of articulation to articulate what it means to have a kid because she can't put it into words the love that she feels so what i'm realizing and and all of this is like okay At the end of the day, the only trade-off we have for the intense pain that we feel in life is to create from it. And, you know, creating from it may not benefit me.

You know, it's planting that tree, you know, whose shade I may never sit under. It's that. And that's what I look at this book as, but also on my own personal journey, being like, okay, well, you've suffered many deaths, you know, to be in any relationship. with anybody is to mourn the death of who they used to be. Everyone keeps changing. And I had to mourn the death of a version of me that I had to leave behind in that relationship.

Make it worth it. And what is that going to be? Go deeper. Take more risks. You survived that. You survived the family awkwardness of ending a relationship. You survived, you know, the, you know, as I mentioned in the book, having a mother who's still not okay with that years later, you know.

All these fears that I had came true. Yeah. And here I am. So what does that mean? Take more risks. Other things that I'm afraid of, do them too. See what happens. And then use that.

Use my skill set of putting it into words and putting it onto the page to help other people find value from it. Yeah. Yeah. And just no one makes it out of the sucker alive and to keep on going and like learning through those trials and tribulations that, you know, if we're using the soul as an analogy for your foot, there's periods of life where you go into relationship and it's a perfect match. but our souls infinitely keep growing. And sometimes that soul contract, I like to call it,

where you come together and you swap the codes you need to, you exchange and resolve the karma that you needed to in that dynamic, whether it's for 10 days or it's for 10 years or 100 years, we don't get to make that decision, you know. And also just recognizing how dynamic we are living life. Like, again, man, like, you know, my parents grew up in a village without electricity. Like, you know, they're working. world was 100 people.

Like, there's not a lot going to be happening on a day-to-day basis. You know, we're living a world of just like hyper-connectivity, hyper-productivity. There's just, we know the news from everywhere around the world. We know everybody's bad news. We know everything that's happening all the time. All of this is impacting us. And, you know, I mentioned in the book, like, we can't romanticize grandma and grandpa anymore because they don't have the same challenges that we do, you know.

They weren't constantly texting each other all day and then expected to have. have a good conversation at the end of the day, something beyond how was your day? You know, and he wasn't constantly looking at filtered women on Instagram, comparing his partner to that, or she constantly wasn't having FOMO looking at other people's hashtags, couple goals, or whatever. Like, you know, we are exposed to so much. And we got to go easy on herself for realizing that. Like, it's way harder.

It's way more difficult. And we're in a transition period with that where, you know, you know, thankfully, you know, every single day, women's voices are getting louder. But with that, it's going to come a transition period. You know, and I've seen that in itself where it's like, that transition period requires is going to take time. You know, that's going to take a generation or two for everyone to find a harmony in that.

And right now, going back to this concept of people being victims, you can go on social media and any group you identify with, any group you identify with has already created a narrative of how they're a victim. and there's no empowerment in that. You know, there's no power in that. So that allows anybody who feels that their day-to-day life is being inconvenienced, they can find an empathetic voice for them saying that, oh, you're a victim, you know, masculinity is under attack.

Oh, it's just the traditions of marriage are under attack. The way God wanted the world is under attack. Oh, you know, what America used to be is under attack. You know, everyone's saying something and everyone's a victim of it. And it's tough to be mindful of because you're inundated with all of this stuff. And it probably would be a lot simpler to be in a relationship with someone and live in a small community where you were unplugged from all the other noise and the echo chambers that happened. Yeah, I mean, just the dating pool is so much smaller. You don't have an infinite amount of options with the time that we live now.

There's always more distractions. Well, the illusion of options. You know, they're not actual options. There's just an illusion of options. Right. And one of my best friends, the human I've known other than my family members, but the friends. but the friend that I've known the longest, he,

you know, he's a, he's a successfully recovered alcoholic, and he was, he's been sober now, I think, seven years. But during his darker times,

was when smartphones, when smartphones became a thing. So he was just lost in the mud. So he never upgraded his little crappy, Blackberry, or a flip phone or something like that. He never, upgraded. So he never, and then even once he became silver, he never got onto social media,

ever. So to this day, he's not on social media. And it's such an interesting, like, I feel like I'm watching a documentary. Like, I see, he, he lives in Europe now. And I go visit him. And I just watch him like he's a zoo animal. So I'm just like, what do you do all day if you're never looking at your phone? And how do you make decisions? And it's like, it's just so interesting because he doesn't make any decisions for the grant. Like he he travels to rural countries and he farms because he wants to learn about farming and like he's not taking a picture that he's there. And he lives by himself and he's sober. He's accountable to no one and he maintains the sobriety. And it's just super interesting. And then I'll show him Instagram for like two seconds and I can see his eyes get white. It's like

giving a kid a potato chip for the first time. And I'm like, oh hey, hey, don't you don't want to. He's like, you know that girl? You know, and I'm like like, that's not what she's going to look like in real life. But also, yeah, because he's not even familiar with like filters

and any of the stuff. And he lives for him, man. It's brilliant. And it happened accidentally. It wasn't, he didn't say, I'm anti-social media.

Yeah. And I think it was just something really interesting from that looking at his life and being like, wow, it's so interesting because you're never thinking about the caption or the photo or caption. or capturing this or letting people know

and it's like and it's interesting now because I know like he has an iPad he's from Toronto and he lives in Europe so he uses the iPad literally just to watch

sports highlights he doesn't even watch the games live he's just going on the website whatever's happening in the NBA he watches five minutes of the highlights

and then he goes back to his like super analog life and it was just it's just really interesting to see that people can live like like he of course

When I landed, he said he picked me up from the airport. And then there he was when I got off the plane. But he took the bus. Like his definition of picking me up from the airport was taking the bus. And I was like, wow, like you. I'm like, this is like what we did in high school. And he's like, yeah, I don't need a car over here. Like he owns a bike and takes the bus.

And it was just this kind of concept of like what. And he and he does things for fun. He's not like a monk, you know. And when he's single and he, you know, he enjoys a company of women. and he, you know, he saves a lot of money and he eats at nice restaurants and does cool things. But it's just really interesting to see like this disconnect from like needing external validation for your decisions. Yeah. I mean, we just live in a culture where it's become normalized and almost shamed if you're not in the rat race of social media and in doing all that.

And the liberating idea that I learned, I learned this from Father Bronx, who was a brilliant podcast called Make Art Not Content. the liberating idea was society rewards behavior social media rewards behavior but it doesn't punish so not playing the game does not result in any type of punishment it just results in being left alone society wants you to do certain things because that fits what society requires for society's survival get married have your two and a half kids buy a house with a picket fence that helps It helps society because the engine of society requires all those purchases. But if you choose not to, society won't throw you in jail. Society will just leave you alone.

And all the perks and privileges that come with that, you won't get them. But those aren't punishments. And it's the same thing with social media, which the social media might be like, give us content, content, content, expose yourself, violate your own privacy. And it will give you all these likes and all this attention, all these followers. But if you don't, it doesn't punish you. like your phone doesn't self-destruct you just don't get the followers

you just don't get the attention which isn't a punishment yeah and this is why we can't think in terms of black and white right that's why we need to cultivate self-discipline because social media's not going to discipline you you're not going to put in time off or not using it yeah and we got to prioritize our self-respect over the self-esteem yeah absolutely

and that discipline that's what the self-respect comes from and and that that energy and that vibration will resonate and help you connect on a deeper level with people as well. Yeah. I love that. I love that distinction as well with self-respect over self-esteem. Man, today's podcast has been really beautiful. We touched on a lot of really amazing topics. And I think that what you've done here in this book and how you've been sharing on your media run and going on different podcasts is a beautiful reminder for people to understand the difference

between grasping for love and becoming it and realizing that you are it. And is there any poem or rap that you have or piece of art that you want to share? I feel like I have. I have a seen that as much on podcast. Is there anything that not? I don't, I mean, I mean, it's funny because it was, there was a podcast that I did something and then I realized this is the first time you've performed anything in three years and it didn't work out well. Easy. No worries. It didn't work out well to the point where the host who is, who is commonly known for making fun of people, texted me and said, hey, do you want us to delete that part? Because they did make fun of me after. And I was like, no, you can leave it. I'll own it.

No, but there's a line in a poem that I wrote that I think it's just important. I said, we loathe loneliness so much, love becomes something we lust. And the truth is we're just scared to die alone, but love don't help us die in pairs. And I think these are kind of concepts that I think are just really important to understand. It's just how much of this outward, we're looking for outward anecdotes, outward antidotes to our loneliness is not there. And as I said, I have a story in the book where, you know, a girl's not paying enough attention to me. And I'm trying to scare her and guilt her into spending time with me by being like, you're going to be lonely otherwise. And she lets me know that, oh, I do get lonely, but I just dance.

And dancing is how I deal with my loneliness. And I think that's kind of the big idea that I want to take away with this. It's like all the answers are internal. And it's not easy, but it is that simple. Beautiful. Thank you so much, man. For everybody that's been tuning into this episode

of the Know They Self Podcast, How to Be Loved by Home of the Poet is available. Now check it out. Links are in the description as well as where you can find Humbold on social medias. Thank you for self-inquiring about the internal sources of love

that you can realize and how that can end the rat race of always trying to externally grasp for it. And for tuning into this episode, if there was an insight, a realization, and upload, a download that came in. Let us know in the comments section below

and we shared clips on social media so be in touch there and until next time be well