The Rich Roll Podcast - From A Life of Matter To A Life That Matters: Jason Garner’s Journey From Music Industry CEO to Spiritual Warrior

Episode Date: September 24, 2015

Imagine yourself a top executive at the very apex of the music industry food chain. Your job requires you to travel the world first class and wine and dine the biggest musical acts on the planet like Jay Z, Beyoncé, Coldplay and John Mayer. And you're making so much cash, you've twice been named to Fortune magazine's annual list of the top 20 highest paid executives under 40. Now imagine walking away from it all. Why?  Raised by a single mom in a series of unstable living situations, Jason Garner learned early and often how to look after himself. With street-wise hustle and natural salesmanship, he worked hard in school and later even harder in business. Scrapping his way from a weekend job at a flea market to owning his own concert company, by the time he was 37 Jason had become CEO of Global Music at Live Nation Entertainment — the world’s largest concert promotion company and arguably the most important corporate entity in the entire music industry. It can safely be said he made it. Unfortunately, never once did Jason pause to take a breath. Operating on the misplaced belief that in order to be loved, he had to be the best, Jason would have happily pursued his career path all the way to the grave. But then something happened. Something that would change everything. In the wake of his second divorce, the single mom that was Jason's everything contracted stomach cancer. Her sudden death brought his life to a halt and his ego to its knees. Compelled to re-evaluate his life top to bottom, Jason finally asked himself a most important question: what really matters? To answer this, Jason did the unthinkable for someone in his exalted executive position: he quit his job. And for the first time in his life, Jason actually breathed. For the next several years, he immersed himself in the study and practice of health and spirituality. He got to know himself and the inner-workings of his mind. And he met the woman of his dreams. Today he is both student and teacher of all things spiritual, mindful and meditative. A man who has spent literally thousands of hours sitting cross-legged with Masters of body, mind and spirit. A journey to wholeness that has left Jason far happier and more personally fulfilled than he ever was in his envious capacity as a prestigious CEO in perhaps the sexiest business in the world. Jason shares his fantastic voyage to self-love and self-acceptance — from living for matter to living to matter — in his quite compelling memoir … And Then I Breathed: My Journey from a Life of Matter to a Life That Matters*. Plenty of further insights can be found on his thought provoking blog at jasongarner.com. Jason is a beautiful, special soul. His courage, commitment and warmth (he signs all his e-mails with “Big Hugs”) inspires me to do and be better. It was an honor to sit in his vibration and I'm proud to share this conversation. A conversation that traverses the elegant arc of Jason's life with a focus on all things meditation & mindfulness. Enjoy! Rich

Without a strong sense of self-love, you're just never okay. And that's why I think this message of self-love, as hard as it is for men to hear, as hard as it is especially for accomplished men to hear, we know it's true because we've listened to the voice inside us for our entire life saying, you're not good enough. That is Jason Garner and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, what's going on? What's happening? How are you guys? I missed you. Good to see you again. What's going on? It's Rich Roll here, your friendly neighborhood podcast host,

the podcast that bears my name. I am your host. It's the podcast where I sit down with the outliers, the big forward thinkers, the paradigm breakers across all categories of positive culture change. And the goal is simple. The goal is to just help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So thank you so much for tuning into the show, for subscribing on iTunes, for checking out the weekly newsletter, for giving us a review on iTunes, and for always making sure to use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. You're going to buy something on Amazon, right? Well, why not click through our banner ad first?

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uh, you guys sort of, uh, availing yourself of the Amazon banner ad. It really does allow us to, to do all that kind of stuff. So really, really appreciate it. All right, let's quickly take care of a little business, shall we? All right, I got Jason Garner on the show today. Super interesting cat. And this is sort of a

continuation of my series of conversations with people who are experts and practitioners in the meditation and mindfulness space. And typically, when I talk to these individuals, they're people who have sort of been reared in this world. It's part of the kind of fabric of their DNA, But not the case with Jason. He comes from a very different background and his sort of unique origin story is what originally drew me to him and got me interested in his message because it's unlike any that I've ever heard before. So what is that story? Well, Jason was a guy who was raised by a single mom in kind of an unstable family environment that involved trailer parks and a lot of moving around. And as a result of this upbringing, he was forced at a very early age to learn how to fend for himself. He became a very street smart, scrappy kid who began working and hustling at a very early age, initially as a parking lot attendant at a local flea market.

very early age, initially as a parking lot attendant at a local flea market, and then slowly but surely, year after year, working his way up until one day, at age 37, he's named to become CEO of Global Music at Live Nation. Live Nation. For those that don't know, Live Nation is the world's largest concert promotion and ticketing company on the planet. It is the company that is at the epicenter and is arguably the most essential large corporate interest in the entire music business. So basically, before he's 40, this is a guy who becomes the number two guy in the whole enterprise, serving underneath CEO Michael Rapinoe, who is a much respected and renowned executive.

Jason was twice named to Fortune Magazine's list of the top 20 highest paid executives under 40. So what am I saying? Well, this guy had a huge job at the very top of an industry that many would kill to be part of. But here's the thing. Along the way, he never learned to take a breath. He never paused for even a second,

operating on the idea that in order to be loved, you have to be the best. So it's not surprising that over the tenure of what is a very sexy career on its face, I mean, it literally involves making boatloads of money while hanging out with rock stars and sports legends. Jason was married twice and divorced twice. And his second divorce, which came on the heels of the sudden death of his mother from stomach cancer, rattled him so severely that it forced him for the first time in his entire life to really take a look at and reevaluate what mattered, what's important. And in the wake of his mother's passing, Jason did what in the entertainment business would be unthinkable. He took a break. He just opted out. He began to study health and spirituality he got to know

himself in the inner workings of his mind he met the woman of his dreams and for the first time in his life he actually breathed and jason ended up ultimately walking out on that career a career again that so many would kill for but you know know what? He's never been happier. He's never been more personally fulfilled. So today he's a spiritual student, a meditation and mindfulness teacher who's spent literally thousands of hours sitting cross-legged with masters of body, mind, and spirit. And he shares his insightful thought-provoking musings on his website at jasongardner.com. And he's the author of a great book that I enjoyed very much called And Then I Breathe. So I met Jason at his friend and mentor's

house, Guru Singh. Guru Singh is a Sikh. He's an amazing Sikh spiritual teacher and yoga master who's very well known in Los Angeles, particularly amongst the spiritual circles. He's been around for a long time. And we actually conducted the interview in Guru Singh's meditation room. So my hope is that all of the Shakti from that environment, from that room, penetrates you through the airwaves. So this is a very cool conversation with Jason about his life arc and, of course, about all things meditation and mindfulness and particularly how we can express and exude and manifest these practices and these qualities in the midst and in the context of our busy modern lives. So I really enjoyed this conversation. I really think you will too. It was my pleasure and honor to talk to Jason.

And so without further ado, let's enter Guru Singh's meditation room, take a seat on a pillow, and enjoy the life story of Jason Garner. I feel like to open this up or to set the stage, we should at least do some form of brief meditation or perhaps a breathing exercise. Maybe you could guide us through that. Not too long.

It doesn't make for good podcasting. I don't want anyone to fall asleep behind the wheel. I actually just wrote a blog. And I think it's a really short meditation, an interesting way to look at meditation and perhaps life. And it came from a conversation I had with a friend of mine who lifts a lot of weights. And he came to me, and he was having some and just the kind

of trouble that we all find ourselves in some time to time and he said um would you teach me to meditate i've been having trouble and i don't know why but it just dawned on me i said would you walk me through verbally how to do one rep on the bench press. And so he said, lie down, position your hands, focus your eyes, take a deep breath, pick the bar up, drop the bar to your chest, breathe out as you push the bar back, and replace the bar. And I said, beautiful. Okay, then do me a a favor sit down with me put your hands in your lap take a deep breath focus on the breath let the breath dance for a

moment exhale and i said that's one rep of meditation i think like you know i think like we can get really caught up in making some of this stuff really difficult. A teacher of mine, Bruce Lipton, says we can make it woo-woo, right? Or we can make these things just really part of our real life, just a step in life or a rep in exercise. And I think that really, for me, is what meditation consists of. Because if we're in the gym and I'm working out and you walked up and I got distracted, quote unquote, from my workout, I would just have a conversation. And then I wouldn't beat myself up.

I would just lie back down. I would keep going with my workout. And I think the same is true in meditation. I would get distracted. with my workout. And I think the same is true in meditation, right? We get distracted. And that moment of distraction for so many of us becomes this moment that we beat the crap out of ourselves, right? Like, oh, I suck at meditation. I can't do this. When in reality, it's just the same thing. Okay, you got distracted. And one of my teachers, Sharon Salzberg, taught me this beautiful thing. That moment of distraction is the whole purpose of meditation

because it's a process of beginning a new relationship with ourselves. And so in that moment, we get to choose between being really hard on ourselves or she taught me to say, welcome back, Jason. I love you. And then you come back to the meditation and then you go where do i start again and the answer is you just do another rep right take a deep breath in you stay present to the breath you let the breath dance on the exhale and that's another rep you know uh-huh yeah i like that i like that uh the the bench press analogy so to continue on that thought, like me walking up to you while you're bench pressing as an interloper, I'm the thought, right?

That's right. That would be interloping on your meditation practice. And I think we're so hardwired to judge, right? So, when that thought creeps up and appears, we immediately label it as a failure of our attempt to meditate. When in fact, that's just part and parcel of the process itself. It is the function of what you're doing, right? And it's our relationship to that thought and trying to refrain from judging it and saying this is the process that becomes freeing and allows you to maybe more deeply engage

in that practice. I think that's just beautifully said. Yeah, yeah. My friend, do you know Charlie Knowles? No. He's a meditation, he's a Vedic meditation teacher, a friend of mine, and he says, he always says, there is no failure in meditation, because it's true. Everyone says, I tried it, I can't do it, I keep thinking about things.

Well, it's like, yeah, you're a human being, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think, like, if we start to think of meditation i think one of the challenges that we compartmentalize so much right so we have like this idea of like work-life balance right as if work is not part of life right as if the the jason that does business is a different jason that comes home to his wife is a different Jason that goes to the ballgame with his friend. So then I then say, oh, well, meditation is this segmented part of my life, this box that I go into where I'm going to experience peace and bells and whistles or fairies and unicorns, like I like to say.

But if we look at meditation more as just practice of how do I want to show up in real life, then it kind of makes it a little difficult to be so hard on yourself because I'm going to get distracted in life. If there's even such thing as distraction, right? Like maybe better stated, life is going to occur while I'm in life. So when I sit down to meditate, life doesn't stop. Things are happening, right? And so if I'm in an argument with my wife and I sit down to meditate, life doesn't stop. Things are happening, right? And so if I'm in an argument

with my wife and I sit down to meditate, thoughts of that argument are going to occur. And I think for me, all meditation then is a practice of how do I want to engage with that thought? And how do I want to engage with myself? And so it really is my, it's like LeBron James shooting a thousand free throws before a game. Why? So when he gets into the game, he can make the free throw. So meditation just is that practice before I go out and march into the real world and have some driver on the 405 flip me off and tell me I'm an asshole, right? Now to if i can't engage with myself in a civil way in a loving way when i have a distracting thought and meditation how am i going to deal with that person right right right yeah that that reminds me of that famous quote uh from victor frankel he said between stillness and response there is a space in that space our

power is our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and our freedom yeah right so it's carrying that into the world and i think that brings up an interesting kind of discussion that maybe we could have around you know this idea of what is spirituality right because you're somebody who's very much in the world, maybe not so much as you were before. And we're going to get into that. But we live in Western culture. We're not in caves in the Himalayas. entrepreneurs or type A personalities or athletes or entertainers, because we're in Los Angeles, if you use the word spirituality or new age or something like that, there are associations that come up that I think create barriers to avenues of personal growth that are very useful in our daily lives. I think that's right.

And I've kind of tried to brand or set the tone for what I talk about as real-life spirituality. It's not dogmatic, not tied to any religion. In fact, I've just been blessed with teachers from every, from Christian teachers to Sikh teachers to Tibetan Buddhists, et cetera, Taoist. And really what I tried to draw from each of these teachers were things that actually work to make my life happier. You know, it's like so much of this stuff is, oh, I'm a whatever, and therefore I have to think a certain way. I have to believe certain things. And coming from an entrepreneurial background, where I wrote a blog the other day called

Spiritual Entrepreneurship. I know. I read it. I want to talk about that, too. Yeah, and it's like, I think we have this opportunity where I don't have to be anything. I can be a Jason, and then I can pick and choose things spiritually that make my life more full of spirit, right? That make my life happier and more joyful and more fulfilled or more loving or whatever metric I'm looking for to measure my life in. And I think these words

kind of take on these meanings. And I think about this a lot in terms of my diet, right? It's like, so what are you? If I tell you I'm vegan and then I order something with honey, you're going to give me a dirty look, right? It's like, I'm a Jason. I'm just making the best decisions I can in every moment. So I think I really try to stay away from the labels. And I think spirituality is important because I believe we have a spirit.

So I think not saying spirituality kind of is a way that we can sometimes shut down the fact that we have a spirit in addition to a brain. But I don't think spirituality necessarily has to be quite as out there as we talk about. I think spirituality is this conversation. Spirituality is how I show up on the freeway. Spirituality is an ingrained part of all of us. And it goes with us to work and it goes with us to the ballgame. And then it comes with us to the meditation cushion as well, just like life comes with us to the meditation cushion. cushion yeah so sort of uh you know dismissing dogmatic labels and approaches and just trying to be more experiential in it i suppose is kind of what you're saying and present to ourselves i mean i think the challenge is that if we come from a life where we have beat the crap out of

ourselves right and so many of us have we. We were raised in a society and by parents who, whether they meant to or not, often taught us that we were loved and we did something good. Hey, you took your first step. Oh, mommy loves you, right? You broke the dish. That's a naughty boy.

Go sit in the corner. And these things feel innocent, except for after 1,000 and then 10,000 and then a million and then however many gazillions of repetitions, we learn we are good when we do something. So then we come to spirituality and we apply that same rule, right? And so now I've come to meditate or I've come to do yoga or I've come to pray or I've come to whatever. And I'm looking for a little bit of peace I'm looking for a little bit of from the world right and what do I do I start right in on well I'm good at this if I can sit for five minutes without distraction I'm good

at this if I can do downward dog without getting dizzy I'm good with this. And here we started it again, right? And I think for me, this has been an exercise of really learning to love myself with a big period at the end of that sentence, not an if. And so for me, I don't care what my meditative experience is as long as it includes some love for myself. So if at the end of sitting for 20 minutes I was distracted and I just couldn't focus on my breath and my mind kept going to meeting with Rich Roll, as long as in that process I'm gentle with myself, as long as that process was a process of understanding myself

and being okay with that, for me that was all the success in the world. Right, interesting. Yeah, I mean, a couple observations on that i mean the first one is and you kind of alluded to it at the beginning at the top of the conversation which is uh you know we get caught up in in in uh over analyzing or over complicating the practical aspects of just doing right so as somebody who's in you know multi-sport it's all about like well what kind of watch are you you know what's your garment gps watch and what kind of shoes and are these the right kind of socks and it's like these are all barriers to you just

going outside and and and moving your feet right and in the same way i think people get caught up in in in these techniques of meditation and there are barriers to actually just sitting down and doing it like it can't be as simple as just your breath right like give me the vip i want to go behind the velvet rope you know i'm a type a guy tell me the secret and just over analyzing and over analyzing meanwhile days and days are going by we're actually not doing anything. It's a barrier. It's preventing you from actually just accessing it. So I think it is important to just simplify it and not get caught up in those labels, those dogmatic kind of ideas about it.

And the other thing that you kind of brought up is this idea of self-acceptance and self-love. And I think that if I had to kind of identify an overarching theme in everything that you express in your book and your blog and your speaking, etc., it is this idea of self-love, right? So, you know, where does that come from in your own experience? And we're going to go back and get into all of that. But, like, clearly that seems to be the predominant kind of message that you're trying to express. Yeah, I mean, I really don't, in my own life, there's just not much more than that. It's like if, you've achieved so much, right?

And so if at the end of competing in five straight decathlons, marathons, these massive events, right? Or in my case, at the end of reaching a really high place in business, right? And then you sit down with yourself. And if you just don't have that self-love, if there's still a hole, if there's still a, I've got to go do make my mom proud. And at 37, I'm holding her in my arms and she takes her last breath, right? And it's like there's no one left to be proud of you, right? It's like, there it is. Yeah, so that suddenly you're facing the mirror and having to look at yourself in a more objective light. And then you look at yourself and you say well who cares what job you have you

know who cares what event you just competed in right it's like does that mean are you content are you happy are you are you loved and for me the answer was no for me the answer was i had so closely tied love with work that the answer the answer to I need to feel love came from work more and do more. And then as I got to that new pinnacle, it was like, do more, and then do more, and then do more. And that's a guaranteed recipe to work yourself to death. And for me, out of that really deep heartache of being with my mom as she died, it just kind of snapped me out of it. And I became aware. I didn't know at the time what, but I knew I had to start doing something different. And as I have engaged in something perhaps a bit more connected to my heart,

what I've become really passionate about is talking to people who have lived the life that i've lived anybody who has been really driven by achieving just to share this message of self-love and that we're loved for who we are not what we do and we all intellectually know that but we don't actually really intuit that into our daily experience yeah man the first time I heard that, I was with my therapist here in Beverly Hills, and I sat down and she said that, and I was, same thing, I was like intellectually, like, yeah, yeah, I get it. And she said, let's take some deep breaths, you know,

and she said, why don't you just say that? I am love for who I am, not what I do. I am love for who, and then I just broke down. And I literally, like, one of those lie down in the fetal position, just crying and crying and crying, because intellectually I understood it, but it wasn't true. It just, it wasn't, or as one of my teachers says, it was real, but it wasn't true.

It wasn't my truth. And I just thought, I mean, it really was heartbreaking for me. I'd worked so hard my entire life, and I had overcome so many obstacles from a trailer in the desert in Arizona to sitting next to Michael Rapinoe and doing my part of running the largest concert company in the world. And I didn't love myself. And I didn't feel like the world loved me.

And so that path from there six years ago to today has been all about self-love. And so for me, I mean, I love talking about all of it. But self-love, that's just the juicy, meaty part of all of this that I feel is the thing that can really change our lives. Right. And this idea of you're loved for who you are and not what you do. I mean, when you are somebody who is so successful and whose life really revolves around career, parsing out the difference between who you are and what you do is a very difficult archaeological dig, right? Because those are one and the same. So, you were finally in a place where you were ready to kind of have a funeral ceremony over what you do as being

so innately identified with who you are. So, I think it was a timing thing as well, of course, because you wouldn't have been even at a therapist unless you wanted to start grappling with these ideas. But to put all of this into context, this is a good moment to kind of go back and go through the chronology a little bit from the trailer park in Arizona and being raised by a single mom and kind of being a scrappy go-getter as a kid. Yeah, so my sister and I were raised almost exclusively by my mom. My dad, who I knew in just glimpses of life, wasn't around much. In my book, I described it as he was there just enough to kind of rub salt in the wound of the kids. Perfect. Yeah. Just when I would get used to I don't have a dad, he'd show up and make me miss having a dad again. And my mom was just this big heart. I mean, she was a daycare

teacher. She took care of children with autism and with severe physical handicaps. She worked at my school as an aide. Most of my life, she was working two to three jobs a day, trying to make ends meet. And so I grew up with this really strong theme that money was lacking and that money wasn't was important my mom wouldn't have ever said to me money was important but I saw I heard her crying at night in the room next door because she couldn't pay the bills right and when it was tax season and she had to come up with you know whatever her tax bill was it was drama and when Christmas came around she instead of taking a vacation she'd

have her work just she'd work that week get paid for it so she could buy us christmas gifts and i think somewhere really young i decided i knew how to fix this and i was going to make money and so as a little kid i mean i remember washing dishes at i must have been five or six, to get a couple extra bucks. And when I was in grade school, I'd have my mom drop me off at the corner, and I would take 50 cents or a quarter. And I'd go to 7-Eleven, I'd buy a pack of gum, and I'd go to the schoolyard, I'd sell each piece for a quarter. You were just like a hustler from the get-go. And I just started figuring out, wow, this is a story I can change. We're not locked into poverty.

And so once that clicked and it clicked really young for me, I started working. And that's kind of all I remember. All that was important to me was I was going to work. I was going to make money. And I couldn't say it at the time, now I can't, and I was going to save my mommy, right? I was going to rescue the family.

And so there was this heroic piece to it as well. So I worked. That's a lot of pressure to put on yourself as a little kid. Yeah, yeah. And that's that pressure. That's why when I had to say those words, I'm loved for who I am, not what I do, it just broke me down. Those years of pressure, all that pressure sitting on my back, it just flooded, it just came pouring out of me. moment arose where a you no longer had to take care of your mom and you were relieved of the duty of trying to be the hero that was gonna save her and give her a better life that's right right that's right and i was faced with having to

i look at myself i talk about in my book you know the that first day after after I didn't have the big job, you said I was ready for the funeral for that part of me. I thought I was until I had to answer the question, like, what do you do? You know, who are you? And so I had moved to Manhattan Beach and I was lying on the beach and didn't have an answer for the question. Like, I did not know who Jason because jason had been the scrappy entrepreneur the concert guy the guy who can get his good tickets that you know the guy with the sexy job he that's who i had been for my entire life and now it was just some dude lying on the beach right right and and what is that and that was scary as hell that's terrifying yeah yeah

that was scariest probably scariest moment of my life was, am I going to be okay? You know, what is this? Not financially, but am I going to be okay as a human being? Because I'm not, I don't know who I am. I don't have that comfort blanket anymore. Right. And so then you had to go on this postmodern Siddhartha journey. Exactly.

You went on. I mean, I relate to that completely. I mean, my scenario was not nearly as acute, but, you know, I walked out on a, you know, I was on the partnership track at a big law firm in Century City, and I just couldn't do it anymore. And the most terrifying thing was walking out on that, just quitting without any other job or any idea what I was going to do next. And my whole life had been premised upon, you know, being on that habit trail. And I can remember, like, I loved to swim. And I went to the Culver City Plunge, the outdoor pool there.

And I swam and I was laying on the deck, just laying in the sun. And I had a similar experience of, like, I have no idea, like, what I'm going to do tomorrow. And what does that mean? And my whole identity had been, you you know pulled out from underneath me and that's a it's scary but it's also this beautiful moment of opportunity to not only wrestle with that but to you know redefine it for yourself yeah and that's that part that from and I know that in in the amazing things that you've accomplished, you've had to dig really deep. So what I'm going to say is not anything new to you,

but it's like from those deep moments, right, where we're just like in the bottom of a pit, I think a lot of beauty comes from that. You can't realize it at the time because you're in the pit, right? Or you're on mile whatever of some impossible run that you're doing or you're at the office and you're you know drowning in in work but i think from these moments can come such beauty because it takes something like that to snap us out of this conditioning that we're conditioned in that all that matters is our job and And it's not, I'm not saying that jobs don't matter

because I'm a huge believer that in the society that we live now, money is really important. In fact, we can't even get clean air and clean water anymore without money. So money is right up there as one of those real important things. And so when people say, oh, money doesn't matter, I say like, yeah, tell the single mom who's trying to pay the rent. That's bullshit, right? Yeah, that's not living in our 3D reality.

That's right. But we also have to say, love matters. And I think we've so kind of confused love and money that we've crowded out all the kind of real fulfilling love and we've replaced it with these efforts to make money and make money and make money and this is why we wake up at 50 and have a midlife crisis or you know in my case at 37 right or like my mom at at 59 you work yourself into the grave you know and and and i just there is not there's nothing i wouldn't do to be able to be spending these years with my mom you know it's like it didn't none of it mattered and there was i had this conversation with my mom as she was dying and

and i just said that to her i said you know i've accomplished so much and i would just trade it all i mean it makes me cry right now right it's like like I'd give anything just to be able to spend a little bit more time with you. And I think this is this place that we all kind of find ourselves coming to. I think more and more we're reading about it. We have friends who are going through this where you've worked your entire life and then you just have this hole in your heart. And so the answer is not you don't have to run away to the mountains of China like I did, but you can breathe, you know, you can sit for a moment,

you can enjoy a nutritious meal, you can care for yourself and realize that your feelings matter as much as the health of your business and as much as your career, you know? That's not exactly a message that, you know, penetrates the, you know, the masculine, you know, identity, right, in our culture. It's like, you know, the sort of preeminence of embracing love and understanding what's truly important. These are, you know, these are values that are sort of deeply ingrained in us

as young men as being at odds with, you know, sort of deeply ingrained in us as young men as being at odds with you know the success equation of what it means to uh be somebody uh of value yeah right and so you had to have your your as my wife would call your divine moment you know in order to recognize this and and you know to kind of again set it in context i mean let's go back so you're you're in high school you're you're you're scrapping that you're hustling at some point music enters the equation like how did that occur so i was working at a flea market and um it was like the premier weekend job because they paid like two dollars more than minimum wage and you could get in a whole bunch of hours over the weekend you're like a parking lot i was a parking lot attendant i was literally like wearing the orange

hat and orange shirt parking cars in the dirt for you know 10 hours a day on saturday and sunday and i had the opportunity to get a promotion and i was promoted to kind of be in charge of the the food and beverage patio operation where like you know in between buying fruits and vegetables people would come and sit down have a hot dog and a beer or a soda. And so I came up with the idea to build a stage. So I built the stage, and then I got my boss to give me a $500 budget, and I would hire local country western bands, local Mexican mariachi bands. And all of a sudden, the beer sales start going up and the food starts

going up and so I at that moment I just I realized oh there's this connection right between people like music in it and so that kind of piqued this little interest in me there was there was a business there and at some point along along the way after you know the flea market ended and um i met a man in san jose california named ruben alvarez and we formed a business called alvarez and garner and we became mexican music concert promoters and that was the beginning of the whole concert thing and literally i was promoting like mexican rodeos with singers on horses in in ranches out in the outskirts of San Jose, California. And that was the beginning. Yeah, that's a very unusual path towards becoming a CEO, right? It wasn't the Wharton School of

Business path. This is the school of life. I remember when I got my big break and I was invited to move down to Los Angeles and join what was at the time called Clear Channel Entertainment. And one of my buddies, who was a music writer up in San Jose, he said, you're going to run that place soon. And I was like, no, dude. I'm like the Spanish language concert guy. You have no idea.

So it wasn't as if I was. You had some plan. No, wasn't as if I was. You had some plan. No, it's just beautiful things happen. And in that story, another beautiful thing that happens is a beautiful friendship ensues with Michael Rapinoe, who just mentored and guided me along the way and really took that scrappy. I mean, I always had scrappiness and passion. Michael taught me how to turn that into a leader and into a real businessman.

And when I meet him, that's when my career really takes off. And I really kind of find a sense of where I'm going in business versus as the scrapper, who's, I was just always scrapping for the next deal, right? I didn't really think four steps down the road. Yeah, long play in mind. Well, it's interesting. In a little small worldism, I'm friends with Michael. I don't know.

That's actually overstating it. I don't know. I mean, we're acquainted. It's interesting. He read my book, Finding Ultra, and he reached out to me and I had lunch with him and gotten to know him a little bit. That was beautiful. It was pretty cool. Yeah.

to me and i've had lunch with him and gotten to know him a little bit which is pretty cool yeah i mean and and he struck me as i want to get him on the podcast because he's such an amazing guy but he wasn't what i expected in a ceo like if you just saw him you know sitting outside somewhere you wouldn't say oh he's a big mocker you know like he's a he was really grounded and a really sweet guy. Yeah. I mean, he does not accept what I'm about to say, but he was my first guru. And to this day, I'll be sitting in a situation, and I'll hear his voice telling me what to do. and it's like the business advice that he was giving me six seven eight nine ten years ago comes up for me all the time and sorting through spirituality and sorting through the right thing to do and and and yeah i mean for me just one of those epic mentors and epic changes in my life is

when i meet michael and and then to be able to kind of be post working for him and to enjoy a continued friendship and a continued sharing is just a really cool so you guys are still yeah doing stuff together oh that's great yeah that's awesome it's really nice um yeah that's great that's cool and and just for people that are listening it's not like michael rapinoe is 65 years old like he's like is he younger than you like he's around he's about your age right i think michael's um i think he's 50 is he 50 now i'm 42 youthful 50 but when i'm when i'm i'll tell you the story when i first met him i had been sent to see him by my boss's boss and at this point michael was running europe and was it still clear channel or had it become live nation it was still clear Channel. And so I go to take this meeting and I, at this point, run Spanish language music

and I kind of think I've made it in life, right? Kind of like I run a language and it's, this is pretty cool. So I sit down and when I walk in his office, he's on the phone. And so I kind of start looking around. He's got clocks of all the different time zones, really simple office. Michael's always had this, doesn't want a looking around. He's got clocks of all the different time zones. Really simple office. Michael's always had this, doesn't want a flashy office. That's not his thing. And all of a sudden, it dawns on me, like, this guy's a couple years older than me. He runs a continent.

And it was this really beautiful moment because it was like, oh, wow, there's a lot more for me to do. I haven't capped out because i run spanish music you know and it was like that for me it was the beginning of your ceiling that relationship just more than anything i would describe it as just expansive i mean he stretched me as like i was silly putty and and i had to keep stepping into this this expansive role that i never would have thought that I had that in me had it not been for his leadership. And you're right. You meet him and it's like you're just talking to a really smart but a normal guy. Right.

Yeah, for sure. And not only like your first mentor, but I suppose on some level a little bit of a father figure, I would imagine, even though he of your contemporary in terms of age uh you know as someone who kind of lacked that growing up yeah i mean i think throughout my life i had to look for that kind of leadership and so definitely older brother and um i mean i i really i really felt like i would go to work every day looking to make Michael proud. That was really one of my core things. I wanted this person who I looked up to so much to look at me and say, hey, good job, in which he would do a lot, but good job, you nailed it.

And I think now watching him, I think he, along with, you know, people like Mark Benioff and, and, and, and others, but in this case, Michael, I'm just so proud of watching what has now become this really compassionate leader who all these things that we're talking about from, from beautiful, compassionate diet, caring about animals to caring about workers, to helping his, his employees with, there was a great article the other day about how they're they're helping children with autism have great concert experiences and he gets on conference calls and tells people if you're having trouble and the company can't solve it call me personally and i'll help you and he pays for people's cancer therapy i mean just this idea right that we can sit in our desks and we don't have to leave.

And we don't have to run a charity either. We can run a business and we can show up as heart-filled human beings and really run our businesses with compassion. And I think that just gives me so much hope because when we can see leaders with the type of responsibility that Michael Rapinoe has bringing their heart to work with them and that's really special and so like more than anything now I just look at him and just go like I'm just so proud of how he's running that company you know it's it's amazing I mean and the company is enormous right I mean how many employees does Live Nation have well my division so I ran the global concert division for him, and I had like 10,000. So I think he's got 25,000 or 30,000 employees. They promote 25,000 concerts a year.

I mean, basically, if you've seen a concert, it was theirs. And it's just like they have this global footprint, and that's for anyone around the world that has seen a concert. And then you think about, in that job, the pressure of dealing with rock stars and their agents and managers and fans and venue owners. I mean, it's a really pressure field where you're kind of getting it from every angle. The amount of moving parts is just unbelievable, right? And really, concerts have become the lifeblood of the entire industry in a much bigger way than I think people would have imagined 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And he saw that. I mean, that I was talking to some investors the other day, occasionally I'll get a phone call and someone will, Hey, can you, we want, we're looking at

live nation. Can we talk to you? And they said, so did, did he like luck out or, and I said, no, he, he knew exactly where this whole thing was going. And they said, how do you know? And I said, no, he knew exactly where this whole thing was going. And they said, how do you know? And I said, well, because I was in the room when he drew it out on the chalkboard. It was really one of these things where he really had this forward vision of where the music industry was going. And he understood that as the value of recorded music was shifting, that live was going to be the place that artists made money

and that live was also unbootleggable, right? It's like you still want to go to see U2 live. Yeah, this cannot be distilled down into an app on your phone. It's the one indispensable aspect of music that can't be digitized. That's right. It's an in-person. It is the live nation, right? That's right.

And I think, and just from him choosing that name, right? I mean, he really set the tone for what this was going to be. And I think a business that's been so known for being run by ruthless cold cats with big cigars, right? run by ruthless cold cats with big cigars right like to then have it being run by that guy you know my friend my mentor and a guy who just really cares about people and cares about igniting passion not just in fans through a u2 concert but in his employees and in the people that he comes in contact with it's just it's just amazing to think what that what they can accomplish all that together with Michael kind of leading the way with his open heart. I think it's really beautiful.

Right. If you had to distill down the core lessons of what Michael taught you in this mentor relationship, I mean, how would you articulate that? The number one thing that I think about all the time is he always taught me to take a left turn and look and kind of look out from a perspective that I wasn't looking at so he might not have met as big a left turn as you took though right I didn't mean go that far left exactly I still need you to work for me that's right I didn't mean turn into a hippie, but come on, man. But it was like we would be in meetings, and you think about this as the concert business

is an old historic business that was run by Bill Graham in San Francisco. So there's a lot of stuff that was just done before, done away. Oh, why? Because it's always been done that way. Oh, why? Because Bill did it that way, or Bobby did it that way. And Michael would always go, OK okay let's blow that up now let's take a left turn and we'll look over here and then you'd model that out and then he'd go let's take a right turn and look over here and this whole kind of spiritual entrepreneurship that that i have that's my the michael rapino

voice in me saying okay cool let's look at it a different way. Let's look at it this way. What are you really getting from this? And there was always this theme in what he was teaching me of a lot of people have vested interest to keep things the way they are. And that doesn't usually turn out well for all of us young guys coming up, right? It's like the status quo benefits the people who are in charge of the status quo. And that doesn't usually turn out well for all of us young guys coming up, right? It's like the status quo benefits the people who are in charge of the status quo. And so he shattered any fear I had of blowing things up.

Yeah, because to make that left turn, you're going to face a tremendous amount of resistance from the status quo, right? That's right. And so I just feel like I do it every day in my spiritual practice. And I'm usually the lone guy in the baseball cap in the back of the Tibetan Buddhist meditation hall. And it's okay, right? It doesn't make me fearful because I know that that's how innovation happens, whether that's in business. As I talked about in that article about the iPhone, the iPhone covers everything from a 1970s Radio Shack ad, and yet our spirituality doesn't ever change because we think we're bad

if we don't follow the rule from 2,000 years ago. And yet when you study all of these spiritual masters, every single one of them, these guys were shit disturbers, man. You talk about scrappy. These guys were scrappy. They were making it up. They were figuring out how to live a life

that made them feel happy and fulfilled. And then they were sharing that. Not a dogma. They were just sharing, hey, this is what I figured out that made me feel really good. And now you flash forward, however know hundreds or thousands of years forward and we got a list of rules that we got to follow to be like them and every time i read one of those rules i just

hear michael like let's make a left turn yeah right interesting yeah that's a that's amazing how that voice is so present in you but at at the same time, inherent in that is also this drive to please him, right? Which relates it back to your relationship with your mom. And that becomes part of the problem for you and the obstacle that you ultimately have to overcome. But, you know, back to this moment, at some point, I mean, he basically anoints you as essentially his number two, right? And you get this huge job uh what is it glow head of ceo of global music yeah and maybe it sounds like sounds incredible right and in that capacity your job is basically to oversee these gigantic concerts with the biggest

acts in music jay-z beyonce coldplay like basically you name it right like any huge musical act like this becomes your bailey wick yeah yeah and so the little boy made it right i mean there's just now there's no way of looking at my life and at this point i'm you know in mid-30s and there's no way of looking at my life and not going he made it and and yet there's just this nagging kind of i described in my book as this ever-growing monkey on my back every promotion i got it's like i would think well the monkey's gonna go away now and the monkey would just get bigger and bigger and bigger with all your insecurities your sense of self is still based on externalities right

there's always another dude you know what i mean, you know, Steve Jobs is looking at Bill Gates and who knows who Bill Gates is looking at, but probably somebody, you know? Like, there's no end to that. You could just chase that like a heroin addict, you know, all the way to the grave. And you can't stop because my story was the only thing that made any sense

for why I'd made it was because I worked harder. It was like the only thing I could kind of like, why did I make it? I didn't have a special education. As I told you, I was raised very humbly. I didn't think I had anything special that artists would like about me. I was just some guy. And so you kind of gel around this idea, I think a lot of us do, that my secret sauce is that i outwork everybody yeah i think that and i think that's fine except for it comes with a with

a with a um aftertaste right it comes with with this other part that said that then says well then if i ever rest i'm screwed right the guy the guy coming up behind me is going to catch me he's probably better than me and they're going to figure out that I'm just not you know I remember going into board meetings just scared to death that all these powerful people on the board were going to figure out this is the guy from the flea market man like where's your orange hat get out of here you know and that And that sense of insecurity was haunting me because I just didn't have that core grounding within myself that said, at its core, without a strong sense of self-love, you're just never okay.

And that's why I think this message of self-love, as hard as it is for men to hear, as hard as it is especially for accomplished men to hear, we know it's true because we've listened to the voice inside us for our entire life saying, you're not good enough. And the voice inside us questioning if we take a vacation, if something bad's going to happen. And the voice inside of us worrying every night that our company is going to fall apart while we sleep and so without that sense of self-love you just can never stop you can never feel safe and that's why i think this message is so important for for people who are starting to hear this voice and have these questions that this this is that part that then doesn't mean we have to leave what we're doing, but when we add self-love to the mix of what we're doing,

we just become so much more powerful, you know, because we don't have to overcome that hurdle. It's like without the self-love, it's like we've just climbed the mountain our whole life, you know, and like you never can kind of stake the flag. Right, when you think you're at the top, you can, peeking above over the horizon is a higher peak. Yeah, and I mean, I share that sensibility completely. Like, I know what that feels like.

And in recovery, they call it self-will run riot, right? Like, this idea that you are the architect of your success, and it drills down to this character trait that – this incessant propulsion machine that won't let you sleep. And so, the prospect of letting go of that, of surrendering that and trying to find a more sustainable way to be is terrifying, right? And I think that's another, you know, huge barrier. It's just, how could I possibly continue if I let go of that definition of what has allowed me to get to this place? Everything that is quote-unquote good in my life or that I can feel proud of is a direct result of that character trait that ultimately is responsible for my own undoing. That's right. I remember, it's so perfectly said, I remember sitting in therapy and there was this moment where I had that realization.

And I said to my therapist, oh shit. And he said, I get it. And I think at the end of this, I'm not going to like what I do very much. You know, I think I'm not going to be able to keep this up and that. And she said, okay. And I said, that scares the hell out of me. I'm all wrapped up in that. I've kind of put all my chips into the pot of being that.

Right. But at the same time, how's that working out for you? That's the question, right? My wife always says to me, she's a brilliant natural doctor, and her question that she always asks people is, what are you building with that? And after writing the book i started talking to a lot of young people at major universities and you can imagine this

message that i'm sharing is not quite what they hoped when they talked you know they're looking for the secret of getting where you were and you're telling them that's the wrong path yeah and i and i would say to them and and so I would say, you know, I just think we can start with simple things like a deep breath. In fact, we can start with some meditation, and we can start with some nutrition, and we can start with yoga. And they would say to me, and these are like 18-year-old young people, well, I don't have time for that.

And I would say, you know 18 year old young people well i don't have time for that and i would say you know what just right here just the question you got to ask yourself is what am i building you're fucking 18 and you don't have time to breathe and i'll just tell you i'm double your age now you know more and and it doesn't get easier it's not like after university then in comes that breathing space that we've always wanted. It's like we have to carve that into our, you know, what I call daily practice. And in between, you know, getting up and checking your Facebook and running off to class and doing the homework and running to the football game and doing all these things that we do, we've got to build in some time for ourselves and some breathing room.

that we do we've got to build in some time for ourselves and some breathing room and one of the beautiful things that i found in my life is that it's not a time allocation issue so it's not like work-life balance is like well i went four hours at work and now i gotta do four hours of meditation it's like we've so neglected ourselves that's really similar to any relationship that we've neglected you know if you don't talk to your wife for a week, the first time you walk into the room and say, Honey, I'm sorry. I love you. That has a huge value. That counts for a whole bunch of talking that you didn't do.

And so that first time that we walk in, sit down on a meditation cushion, take a deep breath, and connect with our heart and maybe that lasts one minute right but that minute's worth a whole whole bunch and so for me that's really what i've learned is like we're just creatures of habit and before i used to have a habit called work myself to death and now i have a habit called just love myself to life, right? You know, it's like that's, and in there, it kind of becomes inconsequential what you do with the rest of the time.

It's okay, then you go to work or you flip the guy off on the road. You know, all this stuff that happens in our life keeps happening, but we have these moments where we can come back to our heart and we can remember that we're human beings and not robots. You know, what you're talking about reminds me of something that occurred at the beginning of my kind of arc into this world. I was going to a yoga class and Russell Simmons used to come to this class, right? And he's, you know, he's so charismatic. He's just like, he walks in the room and it's all, you know, it's like, he's just like magnetizing everybody.

But I remember one day he walked out of the class and he goes, man, I just, I love this yoga. I love it. Getting so much out of it. But if I keep doing this, I'm going to lose all my money. And I think the reason I point that out is I think that in the work that I'm sure you do with entrepreneurs and successful people, that's got to be a common refrain, right? Like, I get it. I understand it. I know that I need this.

I'm happier when I'm doing it. But they're holding on to that identity. And they're still like, yes, but I still need to be successful and I want this. And I'm afraid of going in too deep, of taking as deep a left turn as you did because I don't know that I want to be like you and running off to China. I still want to be CEO of my company or whatnot. So it's about carrying these practices in the world. I mean, how do you kind of communicate with people that are coming from that perspective? I think one of the things is that we tend to be so extremist

in the way that we view things. So the first thing that I like to say is, hey, there's a long way from here to there. You can't breathe, and you're worried that someday you might turn into a hippie like Jason who goes off to China. So it's like, let's just start with step one, you know, and let's just take a deep breath. And just, you know, sometimes it's like it's not so much about transformation,

but it's like we're gripping so hard onto this reality that we perceive to be us, right? And so, you know, the fear comes from if like you could just picture like if you're just gripping on to you know you're in the water right and you're gripping on to a life raft and the fear comes from if i say i'm take let go of the life raft right now that's like too big of a step i think you know it's like that that like that's really hard for us as human beings. But if we said, hey, from here to three years or from here to five years, we're going to just slowly let go. And so today, today's part of that plan is just to loosen our grip a little bit. And then we don't have to think so far, you know, down.

It's like, you know, in health, it's like most a lot of us who are taking care of ourselves have an idea that we'd like to have a long life. We'd like to live, you know. I always say I want to live to be 140 years old. And I have friends who go like, that's crazy. But understand that my body rebuilds its cells every seven years. So I don't have a 140-year plan. I have a seven year plan and i think the same thing can be true in caring for ourselves and in and in kind of like refiguring our lives a little bit is we don't have to have the what am i going to do in 10 year plan we can

just have right now i'm just going to loosen up a little bit and see how that feels and or i'm going to sit and breathe for a little bit and see how that feels right or i'm going to sit and breathe for a little bit and see how that feels right and then don't jump 12 steps down the road because the whole point of mindfulness is being here and being mindful so we just we're here there's a lot of stress let's let go of whatever piece of it we can and you you're welcome to cling to all the parts that you don't want to let go but is there just like one or two things't want to let go, but is there just one or two things that we can let go of right now? And I think that's how I try to approach my own life, because there's really scary things

that we've been carrying since we were kids. And for someone to come along and go, hey, let's just jump in the pool, that's tough stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think another interesting thing, you brought this up in the pool right that's that's tough stuff yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well i think you know another interesting thing that you brought this up in that in the blog post about spiritual entrepreneurism um which is this idea of you know measurable metrics right and it brings it back to michael rapinoe again this idea that you know in business there are metrics you can measure progress

and there are ways of kind of you know setting up what you're doing so that you can identify what's going wrong and what's going right. And when we start talking about spirituality, that begins to break down very quickly. It becomes this kind of ephemeral thing. And, you know, how do I measure this intellectually? I know there are studies out there that when you're meditating, you know, it translates into X, Y, and Z that improves your life. that when you're meditating, you know, it translates into X, Y, and Z that improves your life. But I'm not, I don't know that I can sort of witness that or be the observer of that in my own experience. And I would imagine that's also a common refrain of, you know, sort of a type A personality that's coming to you. Yeah. And I think, you know, you're right. Michael taught me

in business that, you know, you could just take the complex and you break it into steps and then you figure out what metric you're going to measure to make sure that you're taking the right steps right and then you don't have to talk about 99 things you only talk about that metric you know and so i really decided in my own spirituality that the metric was personal joy and not like one of my teachers challenges me on this all the time, but I'm not talking about like I had some Haagen-Dazs ice cream and I felt some joy. I'm talking about like this deep, innate, Guru Singh calls it unreasonable joy. Just that sense that when I walk out into the world, I just feel okay.

I feel generally good. That sense of joy. Then you start to think about how does that occur for me? What are some metrics? I think I often measure the tension in my shoulders. Or you'll hear even as we're talking, I'll catch myself running a little bit and I'll just take a deep breath.

These little things that we learn to measure by checking in with ourself and making sure that we're okay. Because if not, we often just jump into some dogmatic thing that maybe doesn't fit into our life or bring us any joy. you know, but it just, oh yeah, I'm spiritual. I, you know, I'm, I'm a Yogi. Okay, cool. So how's that, you know,

how's that working out for you? You know, I went to the class on Saturday and, you know, I mean, it's like, okay, I went to yoga class this morning and I felt great, you know, and, and I felt the tension, you know, So I just think we come up with, what are we really looking to experience in life? And in looking for that metric, it starts to kind of highlight some of the areas that we want to shift. Or what am I building with this? And so when we look at our life and we say,

hey, I work 14 hours a day. I come home in a shitty mood. My wife doesn't really like me. My kids don't know me. And I'm stressed out all the time. Okay, look, so what am I building with this? Probably early death, right? I mean, that dramatic is like I'm marching myself to a life where I never live.

And at some point, I'll die. a life where I never live, and at some point I'll die, and guaranteed every person I've ever met who's dying says the same thing. God, I wish I just would have lived a little more. I just wish I would have spent more time with my kids. But finding that trap door is very difficult. And so I think, for me, I called my book And I Breathe because I think it begins with the breath. I think everything, every day, every moment starts with, I'm going to take this breath.

And can I just be here in this breath? And it's like life starts to kind of guide you a little bit. You know, it's like if we can slow down, again, not a lot. We don't have to like stop the race. You just slow down, again, not a lot. We don't have to stop the race. You just slow down a little bit and breathe. Slow down a little bit and be present to yourself. And then your own heart starts to show you the parts that are missing. And then there's a lot of great tools to help with that.

Yeah, and I think you're signing up for a long journey. And I think you're signing up for a long journey, you know? Yeah. And I think you have to understand that, you know, the way out isn't going to immediately present itself. And, again, it goes back to us wanting to know, like, where is all of this heading? And, you know, you can't know and you shouldn't know, and it's about getting comfortable with the not knowing so that you can allow, you know, what perhaps is in your best interest to ultimately show up at the right time when you're ready to redirect. Yeah, I think that's part of this obsessive working is that we believe that we can define life and take out the variables, right? So if we just work and control enough moving pieces,

we can make sure that none of those scary things are ever going to happen right but what we actually find is we invite a bunch of scary stuff yeah and you can't i have a friend who's a brilliant writer and he he sent me a note the other day and it said um for sure scheming is part of our life but it can't keep us safe you know and so it's like we have all of our plans and thoughts and five-year plans and goals and action plans and that's beautiful it's part of life but that's doesn't make us safe you know and i think that's the scary part and i think that happens for so many of us who are driven is we think that we've got it all figured out and we've kind of like hacked life you know and then something really shitty

happens which happens in life right like we get fired from our job or our mom dies or we get cancer or a friend a friend dies and in that moment we see our own mortality and then we go well i can't work anymore I thought I had this all figured out. I can't add anything else to this. And now what? And I think, you know, for me, that answer came from now what is let's connect to the heart and let's do a different kind of work and see if we can round this out a little bit. Right. So let's get to that moment. uh you got this baller job you know you're just living large you know it's the envy of of everybody like super sexy job getting to meet rock stars and hang i mean it's like anybody in business school would just absolutely you know orgasm over the prospect

of having the job that you had and then your mother gets sick. Yeah. Right? And you make this decision that you're going to stop out from your career and you're going to spend time with her. Yeah. Yeah, so I was in the middle of my second divorce and I got a call that my mom had stage four cancer. And in the beginning, I just kind of did what I did. I just kept working, right? It's just like, oh, you know, it's going to be okay,

and then it became clear it wasn't, you know, just it wasn't going to be okay, and so I took a little bit of time off, and it was really the first time in probably my life that I'd taken some time off, and I just went and spent time with my mom. I really dedicated myself to kind of being there present to her and I'm not even saying I took months off you know I was taking weeks off here and there and in the end it was you know a few weeks and just through that process I realized like there was so much of life that I wasn't present to you you know, like things like I didn't know a lot of things about my mom,

you know, and there were feelings that she had that I had kind of gone off and just only cared about work and wasn't, wasn't present. And it was also for me, this sense of like, Hey, this is where we're all headed. You know, like one, of course we're all going to die, but I mean, in a deeper sense, like if we don't care for course, we're all going to die. But I mean, in a deeper sense, like, if we don't care for ourselves, we're all headed to some kind of early death from some kind of disease because life is going to figure out a way to make us listen, right? And make us slow down. And I was watching, you know, my kids and my nephews just heartbroken about their grandma dying. And it was just, you you know it's one of those aha moments and literally when my mom took her last breath I looked around the room and and I've now I've sat in the room as a you know as a couple people have died and this

experience has happened each time it's almost like the air gets sucked out of the room like the life just leaves and so it's like you're holding someone who's alive and there's so much there you know even if they're sick and then there's just a departure and then there's like this empty body in your arms and it's just it's like a very real visual that you're not taking any of this shit with you. All you're doing is you're leaving behind your imprint on the world. And I realized that I didn't particularly like parts of it. I was proud of what I had achieved, but I didn't like some of the imprints that I was leaving. And I didn't want my kids to be holding me at 59 and I just said

it's time for a new story for this family and I looked at my kids and realized and my nephews this story of work, work, work, work, work, work to be good was continuing into them and that like that freaked me out because now it's not just history it's legacy right like shit what i'm leaving behind is this and so i i tried to go back to work after that and michael was

was the best putting up with me i was distracted i mean just didn't care anymore if the food in the dressing room was right for some rock band you know i was like you know i'm like telling me like people are dying for god's sake i don't care if you got your sushi or not and and it also became very evident for me the normity of the job that i had taken on. And I just couldn't do it anymore. And so Michael and I went back and forth. And we, as I laughed, it was like what Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow said. It was like a conscious uncoupling. It was really hard because we'd been together for so long.

And then there was the personal aspect tied. But we were really great and he was wonderful and um you know it was about five years ago now it was just like this is it and you know he he allowed me the financial freedom to be able to explore a little bit without having to go out and get a job tomorrow right and um And he allowed me the uncoupling from the mentorship that made it feel okay to me. And then I just set out on this journey. I didn't know where I was going after that.

And as I said, I found myself on the beach going, who the hell am I now? And this process has been understanding that. I think it brings up a bigger conversation about death and our perception of death in our culture. And I think that in the history of humankind, we've never been more divorced from our present consciousness of death because it's separate. It's always removed. our present consciousness of death, because it's separate. It's always removed. It's something that we, of course, know of and know people have died and all that kind of thing,

but we don't really see it in the way that our predecessors kind of lived with it all around them all the time. I mean, in harder times when humans were just trying to survive, there's people dying all the time and animals dying in front of them and things like that that they're just it's just not part of our experience right and so we don't have that truly you know tactile relationship with what that means in a way that i think is healthy and i was joking with my wife on the podcast the other day and she was saying that she wanted to write a children's book called uh let's talk about death or something like that you know and she's like we need to you know we need to understand what this is it allows us to be so much more appreciative of our lives and to be present for what's important yeah you know but we all walk around intellectually

knowing we're going to die but on some level, kind of believing that somehow we're going to be the exception and we're going to dodge this thing. I think that's right. And I think it's partly why we spend so much time distracting ourselves and numbing ourselves because that fear is, that's probably everyone's number one fear, right? Is I'm going to die. And the answer is, you are. And it doesn't have to be ugly.

It doesn't have to be traumatic. It doesn't have to come as a result of horrible disease if we take some time and care for ourselves. And if we're present, I think you hear these stories of these spiritual masters who like they've lived just this beautiful life and then they go like okay today's the day and they say goodbye to their yeah their followers and they and they ascend and we go like that's ridiculous i actually don't think it is like i think there's a healthy relationship with the

inevitable that's right and with and with a process, right, of like, I was watching Jimmy Kimmel the other day, and he was talking about this uproar that's happened about Cecil the lion that was senselessly killed. And he started crying on air. I saw that. And I thought, see, that's what happens, right? It's like we're divorced from death we it's out there it happens to other people and then we have to watch or read a graphic account

of an animal suffering for 20 hours with a arrow stuck in it and it hits us right like it hits us doesn't make any sense why we cry about a lion, except for in the lion we find ourselves, right? Or when we have a friend who has cancer, we find ourselves. Or when we go to a funeral and the whole church is crying, we find ourselves, right? We find our own mortality. And I think it scares us because there's all these unanswered questions about

what's my legacy am i fulfilled what does this mean if i die tomorrow what happens to my kids we often don't know our kids the way that we wish that we would so i found that death is a spotlight and if we can be there and be present you know's like someone's dying. Go. Be there. Oh, I think they probably don't know. No, no. Go there. They want you there. Hold their hand.

Be there. Because one, that connection is beautiful. But second, that spotlight on ourselves becomes this really great guidepost for where we need to go in our lives. Yeah, it's like pulling focus on a telephoto lens. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. I think that's right.

I've always said that, you know, like the sort of changes that I've undergone in my own life are really kind of, you know, I've been motivated by just being in enough pain, you know, that like pain is the ultimate motivator. And it's really been the only thing that's ever gotten me to kind of truly you know mend any errant you know kind of character defect you know behavior patterns that i have and and in pondering your you know your path um i mean do you think that that you could have gotten to the place where you're at without having the experience with your mom i mean would you do you think that you would still be at live nation yeah if your mom was healthy today yeah

i do and i you know that's why i have kind of two belief systems one i think there is a destiny or karmatic aspect to our lives so i'm not saying that this was my karma this this i am saying this is my karma and some way or another this was my path but in this purely physical sense of my life my mom was that door she opened like as you called it a trap door my mom was a trap door and i fell through it and if it hadn't been for that there was nothing derailing this this programming in this freight train and you know i would i would still be doing exactly what yeah and it's timing too i mean it had it happened 10 years earlier or 10 years later who knows what that impact would have had yeah you know it's interesting to think about that it really is and i think it's the beautiful part

of you know the concept of karma or or destiny you know it's like my mom gave me a real gift because you're right my mom could have died at 80 and i would have been 60 you know nearing retirement freaked out because how could i ever retire you know 20 more years of work you know and but she didn't you know and so in in my own experience my mom's death was her gift of a new life for for me and for our family and it's just started this beautiful path of self-discovery and of learning and as you said but it's not devoid of pain because pain is that part that causes us to look, to make the left turn, as Michael would always say.

It's like we don't just hop off a happy track. Things are going good. We don't usually go like, oh, let me just jump over here and see if I can stir up some shit and make my life horrible. Right, right, right. Yeah, and I think, and it also doesn't mean that by making this decision and this choice that suddenly,

you know, to use your phraseology, it's all, you know, rainbows and unicorns. Like it's a hard path. There's a reason why we don't look in the mirror. And I'll just,

just so you can take it from, and I didn't do like the, let me look, do it little by little. Like I just kind of jumped off and was looking in the mirror scared to death and it's because it's hard you know it's like i had a young person say well like well yeah but wasn't it easy because you'd made a bunch of money yeah and i said like no that makes it harder that questions the problem but not you asking the

question but the thought process behind that money solves everything is part of my problem that I was experiencing at the time. But it actually makes it harder because I was even more invested. I was like, the reason why we don't see a lot of people giving up their costume is because it's really hard. And the more successful we get the more like it starts to kind of weave into us and before long there's like nothing but i am the you know fill in the blank yeah yeah there is no other outside of that yeah yeah you become a prisoner of that identity so although you have the financial means to you, make another choice, it's almost more difficult to make that other choice.

Yeah, I think easy in on the sense of I can pay the rent. So I never, I never want to downplay that because I lived through times in my life where my mom couldn't. And so I just, I know that's like a very real pressure. So I had the, I had solved that part. But what I learned was, you know, it's like money balances the bank account,

but like love balances our lives, right? And so I had a full bank account and a really empty heart. In fact, a broken heart, you know, I was in just divorced. Mom just died.

My identity's gone. And honestly, like I didn't look and go, well, I'm happy because I have the money. You know, I was pretty broken. I would imagine after, you know, you sort of exit Live Nation and you walk out the door, and maybe perhaps there's a momentary elation, and then you wake up the next morning. Oh, my God, what have I done? Did you have a freak out?

Yeah, I'll tell you the truth. I've been reliving it because I've been watching this beautiful story of Caitlyn Jenner. And I'm sitting bawling in front of the TV going, beautiful story of caitlin jenner and i'm like sitting bawling in front of the tv going like i think there's so much for all of us in this story of this olympic athlete who was hiding her true self inside and you know she was talking about when she had the final surgery i think i can't remember what it's called but it's like a facial transformation surgery and then she woke up and she was like oh fuck and they had to like call a therapist over it's like what do i do and i had that moment many times you know it's like oh my god like i had i had it it was all good it was all set and then i would remember you know

the pain i would remember the things that i had been feeling. And it's really what eventually brought me to start to develop a daily practice, because without the daily practice, it's impossible to not fall back into all the old patterns and the old voices that tell you, hey, maybe you better go back and say, oops, tell Michael you made a mistake. Yeah, unless you have a toolbox with some things that you can implement to combat that impulse that's so deeply ingrained from your entire life. That's right. And for me, that's what all this is.

I study with teachers to learn tools, and then I build a toolbox. And I think if we use that analogy we're going through life with a hammer and we're trying to build the whole house with the hammer you know it's like we have our job and that's it you know and then the problem comes when you got to put a window in you know and you start breaking shit with the hammer and so what I've realized is I want to have a really full toolbox and when something's not working for is I want to have a really full toolbox. And when something's not working for me, I want to have a different tool. The hammer is not the right one. I have a screwdriver.

I don't have a wrench or in the case of meditation, I want to have a few different techniques, you know, Hey, that one's not working very well right now. Great. I'll try this, you know? And so that's kind of been my impetus for, you know, continuing to seek out new teachers because I find each one has a special little gem. If you can just kind of get the intimate moment where you can spend some real time, you get a little gem, you know, you get another tool that you then throw in the toolbox because they're human

beings who have lived their own version of what we're living. And they had to figure out how to make it work for them. And they figured out little tricks, you know, little tools along the way. And I think you said it when you said they're human beings. Because that's what they are. And I think, you know, when you kind of enter into this world of New Age spirituality, you see a lot of things. A lot of interesting things, you know. you see a lot of uh we see a lot of things a lot of interesting things you know uh there's a lot of bullshit there's a lot of bullshit and there's a lot of uh i've joked about this before but like kind of you know staring a little bit too long into the other

person's eyes and and you know holding the hug a little bit a beat a beat too long for comfort you know and that kind of thing and a a lot of guru chasing, right? And then sort of propping up a guru. And then when that quote-unquote guru shows some level of humanity and a flaw, then it's tearing that person down and saying, well, they have nothing of value because they demonstrated that they're a human being through some foible, right? some foible, right? But in reality, they all have little truths that you can extract and kind of weave your own tapestry of what resonates for you and what works for you. I really feel that. And I think there's a lot of fantastic stories out there. And I actually tend to believe a lot of them. I tend to i tend to believe that you know a lot of these masters teachers who were living in a different time and place and who had a lot of time to focus

on their consciousness and focus on their own awakening and weren't distracted by honking cars in new york city that they that they very well may have achieved some things that we would look at today and go like, oh, that's bullshit. Yeah. Meaning like the guys that go into the caves and don't eat for years and stuff like that. Yeah, that's right. Their bodies don't decompose and things like that. Yeah. Or they see things or they know things that are coming, or they can look at you and tell you something and then it's actually happening in your life and but i never wanted my practice to be dependent on that so i made a conscious decision that i was looking for real life teachers and you know my first my first spiritual teacher was guru singh and you know a man who's married with children and who's a very real human being, right?

Who sometimes when we're sitting around, he uses the F word. It's like a very real human being who knows what it's like to have a marriage and to raise children in the world. Explain who he is. I mean, he's of the sikh tradition but for somebody who's listening who isn't familiar with guru singh he wasn't there was a very powerful um teacher in the 70s called yogi bhajan and um yogi bhajan was a teacher from from india who in many ways brought yoga to to the west and definitely here in los ang, like yoga began with Yogi Bhajan. And Guru Singh was his first student,

a Seattle-born rock and roll musician who shared stages with Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, and who figured out, hey, this isn't the life for me, and went on his own spiritual journey that eventually led him to Yogi Bhajan. went on his own spiritual journey that eventually led him to yogi bhajan and um you know he just he's become kind of this real life teacher in los angeles but a deeply spiritually connected man you know amazing at 70 years old just you know you you can't do the things in yoga that this man can do at 70 just It's just fascinating for me.

A very accomplished, skillful meditator. And then for me, my father. Just a beautiful human being who, like Michael Rapinoe, shares that spot in my heart where I often hear Guru Singh coaching me through the day. We're sitting in his meditation room right now right so exactly in the shakti exactly yeah i mean yeah just it's very funny that we're doing this here because this is where the whole spiritual journey began right i'm gonna i gotta take a picture on my iphone just so i have it documented and i don't forget you know uh anyway all right Yeah, a different kind of mentor, but a mentor nonetheless.

Yeah. And a real-life guy, and someone who believes strongly in daily, you know, it's like when I'm in Los Angeles, I stay with him, and at 5.30 I get a knock on my door, and we get up and we do yoga, and then we meditate.

Why? Because that's the practice right like the practice is before all the shit hits the fan in the day we're going to connect with ourselves we're going to stretch as he taught me because life's going to stretch you today and so we're going to get up we're going to practice what it feels like to stretch and be able to breathe and be able to stay present through the stretching and we're going to meditate why because there's going to be many moments where you're going to need to find your way back to your heart during the day and if you didn't practice you're going to get lost and it's not a one-time practice i mean this is a 70 year old man who in his 20s met yogi bhajan so make the math easy for 50 years this guy's

gotten up every day and done the same practice because he's practicing how he wants to show up in in the world and so he really he set this tone for me of what spirituality was and it was like and it was like no dogma i mean he he is a Sikh man but who doesn't teach Sikhism so it was never like okay Jason so now we're at month three and i want you to go put on a turban and yeah yeah i mean there is the thing of like you got to get past the costuming a little bit for an average person who kind of you know experiences him there's there's that right so you have to kind of reckon with that a little bit i think so and i think it's like twofold one the appearance of many of these teachers puts us in a place like immediately you kind of go like oh that's a teacher right so that part's kind of cool but then i think there's this other side that says i need to transcend that he's not

me you know like i i'm sitting here looking at him and because he looks different i assume i can't i can't access that that's right and i think we have to overcome that part because if not we have the tendency to do what you said which is we put him on an altar and then we're going to tear him down at some point and then our whole practice falls apart. And what I was intent on building was a practice that existed independent of who the teacher was. Like personality. Yeah. And,

and, and their, their humanity. It's like, I really believe like if you can't accept the humanity of your teacher, you're going to have a really hard time accepting your own humanity and i think the point of all this is self-acceptance so i start with i'm sitting in front of a human being who bleeds when he gets cut who has developed a set

of skills that i want to emulate and And so on my grid, this person possesses some skills that I want to learn. Will you teach me those skills? And then along the way, sometimes the teacher really enters your heart and you develop a beautiful friendship. The same way sometimes our bosses touch our heart, right? It's like I don't have some expectation

like Michael Rapinoe is not a human being. I don't have an expectation that Guru Singh is not a human being. Yeah, have an expectation that guru singh is not a human being yeah yeah what's interesting though is like how do you become the guy who stays with him which you know like it's that scrappy jason hustling you know it's like you're hustling to get you're like i'm gonna be around this guy you know right i always wanted to you know i was telling my wife the other day this story. When Ross Perot ran for president, I was very young. I can't remember how old. And his scrappiness appealed to me.

So I remember I went to a rally that he did. And the scrapper in me figured out how to get into the backstage. Like you were going to meet him. Yeah. And so there's this moment where I have a choice to make. I can either take a picture or I can shake his hand. a choice to make. I can either take a picture or I can shake his hand. And I told my wife, like that really has defined my, the way I've conducted my life with these teachers as well is I chose to shake the hand. And it's like, I want to have intimate moments with my teachers

because I want to understand how this stuff works in those intimate moments. Like I want to understand the things that they're afraid of, the things that keep them up at night, and then how do they apply the tools to use that. And so it's really, again, beginning with Guru Singh, but I've just been blessed with so many deep relationships with beautiful teachers. And I think I give them back the gift

of when they're with us they get to be human beings and we understand that just like me they want to be loved and they want to be cared for and they want to be valued in the world yeah interesting yeah that's a beautiful sentiment

very open and accepting as opposed to that pedestal aspect of it that I think, you know, most people kind of perceive that relationship to be. We have to close it down soon, but there's one thing that I really want to get into, which is this idea of being kind of the warrior monk, right? It goes back to that idea of, you know, when you leave your career and set out on this path, it's not unicorns and rainbows. It's going to bring you to your knees and it's going to force you to look at yourself in new ways that are quite uncomfortable.

And there's going to be moments that are going to be extremely uncomfortable for you. But it's about developing this skill set to navigate through the world in a new and kind of, you know, self-sustaining and powerful way that combines like those, you know, tools of the warrior as well as, you know, the tools of the monk. Yeah. So can you speak to that a little bit? spiritual journeys out you know so i met guru singh and then through a series of events i ended up at the shaolin temple in in china and when i was when i got to the temple i kind of got to this point where it was like i've been a warrior my whole life and my heart was empty and i wasn't feeling good so i'm going to be a monk and not literally be feeling good. So I'm going to be a monk. And not literally be a monk, but I'm just going to be this meditative guy. Like I'm opting out.

I'm opting out. I'm done with this and I'm just going to be this peaceful monk. And so I figured, great. I got invited to Shaolin Temple and I figured, great. They're going to teach me how to be a monk. And I didn't really understand where i was going and when i got there what i learned was not only is it the birth of zen buddhism it's the birth of kung fu they were both born in this in this place and so i meet these monks who are just like

adorable i mean it's like a cartoon right they're just the most beautiful loving people and then you see them practice and they beat the shit out of each other and you go like where did that come from you know and so it was really perfect for me because i was having this internal battle with the scrapper you know and i like wanted to go like okay you go away now scrapper we need this need this new, just, only, heartfelt, peaceful Jason. But that's not authentic, right? It was no more authentic to believe that than to believe that the Jason who only worked all the time was the whole me. And so through the time at the Shaolin Temple and then subsequently a lot of work, I just have come to this realization that that's what we all are.

We're a warrior and a monk in one body. And it's the toolbox that you talked about earlier. I want to be able, I call it open your heart while sharpening your sword. I need a sword sometimes in this world. We can't deny that. Sometimes in business, we're going into battle. But sometimes we go into battle because all we know how to do is go into battle. And that's where this monk comes into play, right? And it's like, sometimes you and I can just sit across a table

as two human beings and make a deal. We don't have to battle. There's no winner or loser. We can both win. It can all turn out okay. It's not life or death. And so when it is life or death, I can be a warrior. But when it's not, I can come into a situation with some serenity, with some care, with an open heart. And I think it takes away some of the fear because knowing that the warrior is still here, I'm not quite as scared to be the monk, right?

Yeah. It's not like we were talking about earlier. It's not let go of the life raft. It's just, hey, there's another one floating by. Let's have two. And actually, I think the toolbox is let's have 100 because all these little facets of ourselves can come into play and we can use them as tools. And so I think for business people, this idea of warrior monk, someone who's very sharp, very tuned, very fierce when necessary, but also serene and has a wider vision, can take those left turns, knows how to care for themselves. I think that starts to give us the, the balance that magic word balance that everybody talks about. Yeah. It's really powerful too, to be able to like

stand in your strength and make decisions, uh, in a, in a kind of dispassionate way where you're not being kind of, you know, pushed and pulled by, uh, you know, the emotional rollercoaster of, let's say you're in a negotiation and the guy you're negotiating with, he knows exactly what button to push to get you to react and, and to be able to not react and go into that warrior mode and just be like in your strength yeah you know it's super cool and i i think you know when we talk about spirituality and new age stuff and gurus and all of that you know there's this idea you know you hear like oh it's all bliss and, you know, everything is beautiful. And it's like, no, there's darkness in the world, you know, like you need tools to be able to identify that and strategies for, you know, how to avoid taking that into your own life and how to take, you know,

the turn around it and how to confront it when appropriate. Yeah, I think, you know, I like to say that it's not about finding peace. It's about being at peace with what we find, you know, and I think that that it's not about finding peace it's about being at peace with what we find you know and i think that that and that comes from security right the security that i'm okay because i'm complete and i'm whole and now i come into a situation and it's just okay however however this situation plays out it's not necessarily a reflection of how good i am or how lovable i am and when the fear's gone what you actually find is that you don't need the warrior quite as much as you thought you did but when you're operating from this deep place of fear i'm going to get

discovered or i'm not good enough or if i don't get this done i'm not lovable i'm a failure you just you need to go to battle all the time right It's like we didn't set out to become assholes in business, and yet so many of us are because we get deeper and deeper and deeper into the fear. And by embracing some of these qualities of the monk, it gives us that deep sense of well-being that then we can just kind of walk into a situation and we'll figure it out. It's going to be okay.

I like that, man. That's powerful. Well, I think that's a good place to end it, although I would like to ask you one final question, which is, you know, for that person that does feel stuck, you know, maybe they're in that 80-hour work week, you know, trap, or they're just, you know, in a job where they've got to pay the bills and they're just, you know, it's real they got to pay the bills and they're just you know

it's real life stuff man and life is hard and they're lacking that serenity but they're struggling with that idea of like well how is this going to solve my problem or you know why should i carve out time for this i mean is there any kind of wisdom or tools that you could you know sort of concisely impart yeah i mean I mean, I, I think the first thing is the acceptance that it's okay. You know, like that we're, we're just all kind of living the life that we're, that we're living and we find ourselves in some of these really tough things. And it's not that there's like a better, different life. There's just this life that we're, you know, we're playing the cards that we're cards that we're dealt.

And so I always think that you start with a deep breath, and you just, and a message that we're okay, and that we're loved. And sometimes that's not, you just can't grab onto the whole thing, but you can find a little piece. One of my teachers says, get a piece of chocolate, and put the chocolate on your tongue and just stay present as you savor the taste of the chocolate. It's like, wow, there's always a little bit of happiness. There's always a little bit of joy that we can find,

but it takes really coming back and being present. And then I think the second piece is that we just have to give ourselves enough space to move around, to go, hey, I'm 40 years old, I'm 50 years old. It took me 50 years to get here. Now I want to make some changes. So first, I honor where I'm at. And then second, I need to be realistic about, I'm going to sit down and meditation today, and probably nothing's going to happen. Probably not going to feel any different. In fact, I'm going to feel more frustrated

because I don't quite know how to do this thing called meditation, right? It's like, we go, so let's think a year down the road. I'm going to give five minutes a day to meditation for a year. And I think when we start to open up the timeline a little bit, it takes off some of that urgency. And in the crisis of the moment, what we have is the breath. And what we have is the ability to find little ways that we can show ourselves that we're loved and little ways that we can care for ourselves.

And then we just do the best we can. Mm-hmm. ourselves, that we're loved in little ways that we can care for ourselves. And then we just do the best we can. If you could go back to yourself as a 20 year old with the knowledge that you have now and the experience that you have now, I mean, what do you think your, your life would have looked like? I think, you know, I can't imagine a life much better than this. You know, it's like, I think, as you said, you know, know, through all the pain, you just, you find the beauty, right? It's like, there's just these beautiful moments that happen in life. I have a 17-year-old son who I, you know, I realized the other day, like, if I've done

nothing over the last five years, I spent every day with my son, you know? And it's like, I talked to him a lot about these things and I think his life will be different but I learned through him that even though he possesses all the tools and meets with all the same teachers he still has to go through the growth process of going of being him in life right so I think I think we can't go back and I think we're all just living this life that we're living, and we get the tools when we get them. And I think the beautiful part is just learning to be at peace and to be loving with ourselves no matter where we find ourselves on that path.

Beautiful, man. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was great. That was amazing. Thank you. How do you feel? You feel all right?

I feel great. You feel good? Yeah, it's good uh crushing on jason the best way to uh connect with him is go to his website jasongarner.com the blog is amazing it's full of all kinds of pearls of wisdom and will keep you busy for quite some time you got a lot of stuff up there and you're at the jason garner on twitter yeah uh the book is called and i breathe yeah find that on amazon perfect and uh do you go out and give talks and speak and stuff like that are you more like one-on-one kind of teacher yeah that's kind of been more of the more than the thing but you know like who knows we're like yeah man right never say never right exactly cool well uh

thanks for uh spending the sunday afternoon with me i'm glad this worked out thanks thanks all right peace plants that was a gift that's what that was thank you jason that was amazing and for everybody out there i hope you enjoyed uh enjoyed hearing Jason's message as much as I enjoyed spending time with him in person. Definitely check out his site and blog at jasongarner.com. And please pick up his book, And I Breathe. It's a great read. You will not regret it. Really enjoyed that book.

For all your plant power needs, go to richroll.com. We got signed copies of Finding Ultra. We've got our cookbook, Lifestyle Guide, The Plant Power Way. We've got Julie's Guided Meditation Program, Nutrition Products, 100% Organic Cotton Garments, Plant Power Tech Teas, lots of cool stuff. Basically, all kinds of goodies to take your health and your life to the next level at richroll.com. Keep sending in your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com. If you like online courses, I got two of those at mindbodygreen.com, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition and The Art of Living with Purpose.

Just go to mindbodygreen.com, click on video courses. You can learn all about those. Thank you guys for supporting the show, for telling your friends, for sharing it on social media, for always using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com. I love you guys. I would be nowhere without you. I really appreciate it and I will see you back here in a couple days. Make it great, everybody.

Peace. Plants. Thanks.