"This Was A KEPT SECRET By Monks" - How To Achieve SELF-MASTERY in 2023 | Jay Shetty

Jay Shetty, welcome back to the show. Tom, it's good to be back. It is always good to have you, man. Tell me, what is the secret that you've learned from monks on how to master yourself? I think one of the first things that I'd suggest and explain to people is that when I lived as a monk, a lot of the wisdom that we studied and the Eastern literatures that we spent time excavating, those were not aimed at monks. Those were just aimed at humanity. When they were written? When they were written. They weren't Talking about the Vedas? Correct. What are the Vedas exactly? Vedas are 5,000-year-old texts that literally talk about everything from Ayurveda, which is the science of health. So, Veda means wisdom or science of. Mhm. And so, Ayurveda is the science of life, the science of health. Uh you have uh their own version of Vastu Veda, which is closest to Feng Shui. So, like how to design your home, how to set up different things around in your home for purposeful aesthetics. Uh you have the science of warfare in the Vedas. Yeah, so there's a whole text dedicated to that. How do you reconcile that? You reconcile that in the sense of there's knowledge and wisdom on how to properly do each aspect with integrity, with purpose, from a point of protection, recognizing I think me and you can probably vibe with this. The idea that we all want a world, I think we'd all like a world that has no war. Mhm. But, if we live in a world pretending that there is none of that, and then we're not prepared for it, that sets us up worse. And I think whether you look at that on the macro of war, or you look at on the micro of anxiety, or stress, or pressure, if we pretend that stress doesn't exist, it doesn't make it go away, it doesn't make it better, but being prepared for it actually allows us to potentially avoid it, potentially navigate it with more integrity and authenticity. And today I feel like when you don't have codes for difficult things in society, you see people make really bad mistakes. You see people not having a code book or a rule book on leadership, and that's what it leads to. You see people not having a code book or rule book on how to navigate war, and therefore people do what they feel like. And so I find that what the Vedas were trying to do was give you a set of code and a set of rules and a set of limits so that you would be more controlled, more more greedless, more negative desireless in those situations, so that you wouldn't be pulled into something by your ego, but you could actually go back to something that would help you get better to get the best result for people and humanity. And I think that's what's so special about the Vedas, that ultimately it's dedicated to uplifting humanity through each of these different things that we experience in life. It was really interesting to hear you talk about the part in I think it was in the Vedas about the guy who has to prepare for war, and you're talking about even good people have to learn how to fight. Found that really interesting. But the book starts with solitude. Yes. Why solitude? Cuz that was the part where I was like, okay, here's where the monk part is coming into this, and I think it's pretty important for people to be able to be alone before they try to get into a relationship. Yeah, I think we've created this feeling in society where loneliness is the enemy. Like being alone is seen as a weakness. So when someone goes to school and throws a birthday party and not many people show up, you're unpopular. Whereas if lots of people showed up, you were really important, you were significant. I can think of few things that would be more devastating to a kid than no one showing up to your birthday party. Exactly. And and that's how it's framed, that's how it's talked about. And then the next thing is like if Would you tell your kids if they if they went to have a birthday party and nobody showed up, Jay? Would you really be like, "Hey, solitude is a good thing." Like how would you I'm not a dad, so I I can't say, but but what I would say is that I would change it in the invite process. So I would ask them to only invite people that they felt really connected to or they felt they really vibed with them wanted to celebrate their birthday with. So I think the challenge is when you're a kid you also hand out way too many invites. So I think that's what ends up happening is that you think a good birthday party is a packed room. And even I mean people still feel that till they're 50, 60, 70. Like that doesn't go away. Until they're dead, right? Like you feel a good birthday party or a good event even when people say like when I die like if there's loads of people there that will be a thing. I think we've just programmed ourselves to believe that if we're not surrounded by people, we can't celebrate and we can't be celebrated. It has to be about scale of how many people are there. And I would say that's one measurement, but the other measurement is the depth of how well they know you. I know tons of people who threw a great birthday party at 50. 500 people showed up and they felt Actually I went I actually went to a birthday party this year. It was a big birthday party. And I was speaking to the person whose party it was and they were like, "So many people invited people I didn't know to my birthday party." And they felt lonely at their own birthday party. I don't want If I ever had kids, I wouldn't want them to feel that. And even for myself I don't want to be in that position. I'd rather have I saw this thing on um Instagram and it was someone who had posted like it was like a 10 This is in um British currency. It was like 10 p and then £1. And so 10 p is larger circumference than the pound, but the pound is greater in value. And so the the caption on Instagram said that my circle has shrunk in size, but has increased in value. Mhm. I was thinking that that to me resembles the kind of life I would want for myself and for my children if I had them. But if I could have both, that would be amazing, obviously. But I don't know how real it is to be able to say we can have both. So, I think what I'm trying to say with solitude is that if there isn't a sense that I am happy with myself, with my own company, with the thoughts that circle around in my mind, imagine how complex that is when you add another confused individual who's not happy with their thoughts, not happy with who they are, not happy with their mind. And now in a relationship, you're putting two confused people together. Why is there pain? Why is there fallout? Why is there so much disappointment in a relationship? In my opinion and and from the perspective of the Eastern studies is that because there's an internal dissatisfaction in both people that they're now bringing to each other. And so the strength of solitude is using that time I've still not found a better solution for self-awareness than solitude. Mhm. Because in solitude, it's the only place you get to hear your own voice and make sense of other people's opinions. If I'm standing in the middle of a group of a hundred people and they're all yelling their opinions at me, chances are some of them are going to rub off, some of them are going to be contagious, some of them I'm going to reject, and I don't get the space and time to make sense of what's my voice and what's noise. Whereas when I get time to myself, I get the opportunity to reflect on and introspect and go, "Do I want that thought to be mine? How does that fit into my life? How do I feel about this?" Right? You get to have that dialogue with yourself, and I feel we've lost the art of self-time self-talk and self-dialogue. Well, let's go into it. So, what what is that art? Like the if you put a human being in solitary confinement, you will break them in a deep and fundamental and scary way that I wouldn't have predicted. That seems very weird to me. I know it to be true not because I've experienced it, but because you just hear it over and over and over and over. Like if you really wanted to destroy the human spirit, isolate them. So, how is it that we take this thing that will on a long enough timeline absolutely decimate you and make it something that becomes the most profound setup for self-awareness? What do you have to do in that solitude? Yeah. So, the first thing I'd say is that it would decimate you if you go into it 24 hours a day. And that's not what we're recommending here. Right? I'm not telling someone to 24 hours be in solitude for a year. Like that's not my recommendation. My recommendation is in your week there has to be at least 1 hour that you spend by yourself. And in that hour, you're not watching a show, you're not reading a book, you're not uh on your phone scrolling. So, you're not distracting yourself with anything or stimulating yourself with anything external. And you're sitting there and just observing your thoughts. Now, 1 hour is going to seem like a long time in the beginning, but I'm saying 1 hour would be great in a week. If you're starting that at 10 minutes, that's brilliant. That that's enough. But, the goal is Is it enough? Like are you being kind? Are you trying to let people off the hook? Are you worried about people flaming you in the comments? Like you meditate 2 hours a day, if I'm not mistaken. So, what should people do for real? I do believe that 10 minutes is a good place to start because I do feel that But, you shouldn't stay there. You shouldn't stay at 10 minutes. It should grow. I think I look at it as like when you do a cold plunge, right, for the first time. So, the first time I did a cold plunge, I was doing it with a friend and they were they'd been already doing it for a long time, and I didn't want to walk out and look like I couldn't do it. And so I stayed in there Jason had hypothermia. Yeah, literally. So I stayed in there for longer than I wanted to the first time I did it. So if I did it myself the first time, I think I would have been there for 30 seconds. The first time I did it, I was in there for 5 minutes because I was in there with someone who was in there. So we were fully submerged for 5 minutes. It was great. Fully submerged up to here, right? I'm not not fully submerged. And so when I look at that and I look at something that I found challenging when I did it, I was like, if someone would have told me I had to be in there for 10 minutes the first time I did it, I potentially would never have got in, right? And the idea that I could have started with 30 seconds and built myself up to 3 minutes and then built myself up to 5 minutes, I really do like that process. And I think you have to And this is self-awareness again. You have to know whether you're someone who likes to be thrown in the deep end or whether you're someone who likes to build up incrementally. I'm generally someone who jumps into the deep end. So I was pushed in for 5 minutes, and that works for me. Because for me, I'm the kind of person who needs to be pushed off to break the mental barrier to then go back and build a habit. That's my self-awareness. I became a monk in order to learn these things. I'm an extreme person. That's how I learn and build habits. But someone else goes to me, "Actually, Jay, I like meditating for 5 minutes a day, and it works for me, and now I have confidence I can do 10 minutes a day. I can do 15." And I love that. So I don't think it's an either/or. I genuinely don't. That's not a cop-out. I think you have to know who you are. And so if I want to learn something, I'll schedule the whole weekend. If I wanted to learn archery, I would set up archery classes for 8 hours a day all weekend. I wouldn't learn it by doing archery once a week because I want to figure out whether I'm deeply interested and care about this enough to actually commit to it weekly. But that's my mindset. That's who I am. So I think the first thing I'd say is 10 minutes alone every week where you sit and you just observe your thoughts. And write down every thought that comes up. This is weird. I hate this. It's boring. I can't believe Jay and Tom told me to do this. Right? Like whatever else is coming up and write it down. And just become comfortable becoming aware of your thoughts. And what you'll find is that the first time you do this, it is just going to be random noise like that. What shall I eat tonight? What's going on? It's just going to be that stuff. It might even be I hate this. I'm uncomfortable. This is not fun. I'm I'm bored. Like it it will just be natural dialogue like that. What you'll find is the next time you do it or the next after a couple of times that you do it, you now might start asking interesting questions. You might now start noticing a pattern of thoughts that repeats itself. Like I've just been thinking for a week about what that person said to me about how I look. Or I've been thinking about what that person said to me about something I did online. Like and it's just been in my mind and it keeps repeating itself. Now you're going to start to find what you spend most of your time on. So studies show we have 60 to 80,000 thoughts per day and 80% of them are negative and 80% of them are repetitive. So if our life is not transforming our thoughts, now if I asked you what are you thinking about, you're a self-aware person. I'm pretty sure you could tell me on any given moment what you're thinking about. You ask most people what they're thinking about, the reaction will be an emotion. Like I'm just stressed about too much on at the moment, but we can't be really clear. So what this is giving you is a clarity of what are those repeating negative thoughts and how do we want to change them? So that's step one is a even becoming aware of the thoughts. So if I ask an average person, when you wake up in the morning, what's the first thought you have? Oh, I'm tired. That's the first thought for most people. You finally made it to coffee. You had your morning coffee and you're thinking, "God, I hope this coffee gets through it me through the day cuz I'm so tired." Second time you've had the thought. You get to lunchtime. You're like, "God, is it only lunchtime?" Like and I can't even eat lunch cuz I'm busy working. God, I'm so tired. You get to 6:00 p.m. Maybe you've got to work an extra hour cuz no one finishes work at 6:00 anymore. 7:00 p.m. you finish, you've got I'm exhausted. I can't wait to get home. You get home and somehow at 11:37 p.m. you get the courage to watch another episode and you repeat the cycle, right? That's a six thoughts in the same day. As people get that awareness though, what what do you want them to do with it? Or that's not the right What is the effective thing to do with it if you're trying to better yourself in whatever, whether it's love or something else. But if you're trying to make progress and not just document, like where do you go with that? Yeah, so we want to disrupt that algorithm, right? That pattern that's been developed. Just stop thinking negative [ __ ] No, so we're not going to do that. What we're going to do is we're going to say I am tired. We're going to take that thought, we're going to accept it. We're okay with that. We're good with that. And I'm going to sleep early tonight. So it's I'm accepting the thought that I'm feeling. I'm not going to wake up and never feel I'm tired. I mean, I wake up and feel I'm tired sometimes. But I'll literally go I'm tired. I'm going to cancel my plans for the weekend. I've done that so many times where I've had the busiest week at work. I'm tired. I can feel that I'm stressed. I'm even getting a bit snappy with my wife. Like I can feel all those things and I look at my weekend and my weekend is decked with social events and I go to Rodia, I'm like, I'm about to cancel everything this weekend because I don't think I have the resilience Mhm. to get through. But if I didn't give myself that and all I keep saying all week is I'm tired, then it gets to the weekend, my friends are coming in and I'm like, God, I wish they weren't coming today. Then they leave and I'm like, oh God, I'm so relieved that they left. I wish they would have left earlier, right? It's like all negativity just brewing. And so what I'm saying is accept the feeling and what are you going to do about it? Yeah, that's that's the question I was asking myself is and now what? And now what? This bad thing has happened and now what? And if this then that. Like if I get tired during the week, then I will cancel my plans on the weekend. If I have weekend plans that are really important, I'll sleep early on the weeknights so that I'm ready for it. So, like this week I'm with you. I've got something every night this week. Every night there's an event. So, I know that this weekend needs to be restful. I just gave myself permission to do nothing for 4 days. It's beautiful because my other days have been so busy. But, if I'm not having time to structure and think about these things, you're literally running from one thing to another. So, I feel like people are chasing peace. People are chasing peace not realizing that when they slow and still and make that space, they then learn how to find peace. So, people are looking for peace in the meditation. That's not how it works. The meditation creates the space for you to figure out how to create peace in your life. That's That's where the peace is. That's interesting. So, my experience with meditation is that is where I get literal peace. So, I started meditating because I was going through a really stressful period in my life. This is years ago. And it was just misery at a physical level. And so, I thought I've got to find some way to de-escalate my stress and anxiety. I've been told a thousand times by people to meditate. Let me actually try this. So, I try it and at a physiological level it just lowered my stress and my anxiety. And I was like, "This is amazing." I've since tried to get like my wife for instance to use it. It doesn't hit her in the same way that it hit me. But, the the peace came for me in breathing from my diaphragm. It was so physiological. And it's the older I get, the more content I create, the more I realize that I'm all tactics. Like, I just know how to translate the airy stuff into and go do this. Yes. And so, I'm curious, do you If you just sat and meditate, you're saying that's not going to bring you peace. You have to solve this riddle of all these pieces bouncing around in your mind. I'll I'll I'll take back the categoric way I said that. So, I guess what I was leaning towards is I'm not saying that meditating itself can't be a peaceful experience, but I feel a lot of people who have stressed out busy lives are just looking for a break from it. And it can provide that, but sometimes it can't because you're too stressed and busy. And a lot of the times a healthy way of using meditation is to make sense of stuff so that you can go back to your life and apply it. So, for some people it is peace and that's fair and I agree. I do find peace in meditation. But for some people it's giving them that break and that gap between experience and reaction. It's giving them that gap between stress and struggle that allows them to reorient themselves and say, "This is what I need to switch. This is what I need to move." And I feel maybe you're someone that does that anyway and does that naturally. And then meditation can become just what it is and give you that peace. But I feel that for a lot of people just sitting there with their thoughts is stressful. Just observing Is it because they don't know what to do with it? I think I think first of all there's a big fear around it, right? It's just we're scared. I don't understand that at all. What are people scared of? Well, I mean it's the same way saying like why people scared of sitting in cold water, right? Like it's That I get cuz it sucks. It does suck, but but that's So, what I'm saying is people that I've talked to who struggle with their thoughts make those things equal. Because they don't know what to do with them. Like the cold thing it's So, look, I'm going to have a massive physiological response. Not fun. I'm doing it for a reason, so I do it. I can stop doing it at any time. But a thought doesn't have to be painful in the way that cold exposure, like even Wim Hof says, "I don't like being cold. I do it because it serves a purpose." But even he says that the loss of love was more painful than any of the cold he's been through, right? Like that thought of losing someone you love is far greater than the pain of sitting in cold which he's worse. Do you think that's like the background thing that's really messing with people? Yeah, like I feel like I was even talking to I was even talking to Amar from Yes Theory. I don't know if you Have you ever had them I know Yes Theory, but I've never met them. Yeah, so they do loads of crazy stuff, too, right? And they've they've gone to And so I was talking to Amar, who's one of the Yes Theory guys. They're awesome guys. And he was saying to me that So this is really fascinating. I love where we're going with this, by the way. And And please keep going there cuz this I could only have this conversation with you. So I'm very happy right now. Uh the thing about what Amar was saying is that he said the whole point of Yes Theory was saying yes to crazy stuff that we wouldn't say yes to. And that's how it started. And he goes, we got to a point where saying yes to crazy stuff was not difficult anymore. Hmm. So now when we said yes to doing something crazy next year, we actually didn't find that uncomfortable. And Yes Theory was all about seeking discomfort. So he goes, we realized we were just seeking comfort. Doing something bigger every time was just more and more comfortable. And he goes, actually what's most uncomfortable for me right now is to sit alone with my thoughts every day for 15 minutes and meditate. And he said this to me and I was like, wow, like it was so profound. So yes, let's let's go down this Boil that down to one Like I'm I'm going to give you my hypothesis. People are afraid that they People don't respect themselves or their self-respect is fragile. And being alone with their thoughts is just going to be intrusive and they're going to lose more respect. I I I guess because that would be That was the thing that I struggled with in the beginning and I've spent my entire life making sure that I can be alone. Cuz I always tell people, the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. So the only thing I can think is when people are alone, they don't feel good about who they are and so they seek distraction. That's it. I I mean it's as simple as that. It literally is. Like I'll I'll give a study and then I'll I'll specifically speak to that point. Like Men and women were asked to be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes or give themselves an electric shock. I know where this is They did this experiment. 30% of women chose an electric shock. Wow. And 60% of men chose an electric shock. Oh, wow. I had that backwards. I would have guessed the other way. when asked why, they said because they didn't want to be alone with their thoughts because we're scared of our thoughts. Now, your hypothesis is accurate. I would agree with it. I think the biggest thing is that when we're left alone to ourselves, we hear things that we may not be comfortable with. I don't like where my life is going. Mhm. I'm not happy with how I look. Everyone else is doing better than me. Oh, they just got proposed to and I'm still alone. All those thoughts get space to actually be heard, whereas when you're scrolling, it's like, "Oh, they got proposed. Oh, cute bunny. Oh, like you just you're you're not even listening. You're scrolling a thought." That's literally we're scrolling away thoughts. And that gives us a sense of comfort that we don't spend longer than 3 seconds on a thought. But then when you're asked to spend 3 minutes or more on a thought, that thought gets to like grow and build and become scarier and bigger, almost like a monster. Mhm. That unknown of it, right? It's like I I think that what what people are most scared of is they've been trained to numb themselves. We live in a society that knows how to numb emotions and numb feelings, right? I don't I'm so upset about something. I'm going to go and drink alcohol to numb that feeling, to not experience that feeling. I um I I messed up at something. I'm going to go and gamble away my money to numb the feeling that I felt. I'm going to go and watch something on TV because I just want to numb how I feel right now. Now, I'm not saying that I don't do any of those things to to numb a feeling when it's really painful or that we shouldn't ever numb a feeling at all, but our goal is we just want to numb things away. Mhm. And I don't think that that's why you're sitting with your thoughts for 15 is really hard because there's nothing to numb it. There's nothing that will numb it. And even sitting in the cold, nothing numbs that apart from your own centeredness and breathing. You have to go to that. And I think that's why sitting alone with your thoughts is such a powerful practice because what you're saying, if you want to be happy when you're with yourself, uh sorry, uh being happy about yourself when you're by yourself. Yeah, being happy about yourself when you're by yourself, that requires you to not numb anything about yourself. Because that's the full acceptance. So interesting. So, I've been thinking a lot recently about distraction, why distraction exists because I think it actually serves a pretty powerful purpose. If we didn't have the ability, so there's a part of the brain called the basal ganglia which is known as the gear shift in the brain. And for people that have obsessive thinking, they get stuck and the basal ganglia is not able to let them pass that thought into another thought. Now, I think one of my superpowers is my gearbox is amazing. And to the point where it almost becomes problematic because I can I'll forget about something that I was obsessed with thinking about uh cuz my gearbox is like goes into the next thing. And so, that has shown me that I can very easily get myself out of uh a loop if I'm, you know, on something that's super negative, I can get out of that. But for somebody who can't, you need that external distraction and doom scrolling. Like there was one period of my life where I was so I had so much going on that even the thought of meditating was just like, well, then everything is going to come crashing down. And I was like, but I know better than to not meditate. So, I need some sort of primer to soothe me enough to get me into meditation. And it was actually doom scrolling cats. Yeah. Not just cats, but like things like that where it's like cute, funny, 15 seconds to digest the idea and then you move on to the next. Yeah. And I trained my YouTube algorithm to on shorts to only show me like cute fun things. And I would do that for like 7 minutes, and then I would go meditate. I was like, "Wow, that is freakishly effective." The truth is, hitting your career goals is not easy. You have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else. But, there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency, so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day. You'll not only get control of your time, you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal. To help you do this, I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any high achiever needs to dominate. And, you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description. All right, my friend, back to today's episode. So, you have to wall things off, because if you doom scroll for 7 hours, you now never get anywhere. But, if you don't understand how powerful distraction can be enough to get you to the point where now you can take advantage of something like meditation, which is going to leave you alone with your thoughts. Yeah. It's really, really fascinating. Yeah, I love what you just said about distraction. I've always allowed myself 5 minutes an hour to be random. And, I often have I would either do a timer on my phone, or at one point I was really into like hour glasses or minute glasses, and I would just turn it over. What do you do in that time? So, I would allow myself to scroll, I would allow myself to search random stuff on YouTube, I'd allow myself So, it's giving myself the capacity to be random. And, what I find in randomness is that you connect really interesting dots. Yeah, that's why I like meditating. Yeah, exactly. And, so I find like in space where I don't know what I'm going to type in, or I'd pick up a random book from my shelf, or I would find a random thing that I'm scrolling through. But, allowing myself to do that for 5 minutes every hour allowed my mind to have that space, to have that gap to connect dots, but then return back. And, but that's us using distraction rather than just letting it be there, right? And, I think when distraction controls you and drives you, and everyone knows what it feels like to be on a rabbit hole where you end up on some random website or some random YouTube channel. Everyone's been there. That's not a good feeling. Like I don't think I want that feeling where I end up somewhere 7 hours later where 7 minutes of randomness is really healthy and beautiful and can be amazing. And so why can't 7 minutes of stillness, why can't 7 minutes of listening to sounds or ambient noises or nature sounds, right? I think there's also a sense of I think it's reconnecting with our breath. There was there's an amazing study I talk about in the book about how when we spend time with people that we're close to or caregivers or people that love us, our breath and even our heartbeat can synchronize with them. is so weird to me. It's so strange, right? Dude, humans sync up to each other. The The one that freaks me out the most is that women will sync their periods and they all sync to the dominant female. That stuff gets super crazy. yeah. Super crazy. to my wife and her sister all the time, but yeah, I did I don't know which way around it is, but Yeah, yeah. So that's the the next question. but So fascinating. Yeah. So walk me through Okay, so we get self-awareness. So we're I love that you started the book with solitude. So we stop being afraid of our thoughts because we're doing the And now what? So we have the saying it's overwhelming, it's freaking us out. We're going to deal with it, which I love that. And now in the context of becoming In fact, here's a thing that either you're going to be like 100% or this will be where we debate. Uh I think if you want to be in a relationship, you must be worthy of a relationship. Now, I'm going to push it even farther and make Jay Shetty the monk a little uncomfortable, maybe. Uh the ultimate way to think about it is you are asking somebody to have sex with you, and that's crazy. It is the weirdest sort of energetic thing that we do. Like I think about this a lot. love this. With Lisa, I went from "Hi, my name is Tom." to exposing my genitals and doing what one does. It's like that's a big chasm to cross. And if you're going to ask somebody to go on that journey in a way where they're as excited as you are and you don't end up in jail, you have to be somebody that's worthy of that. And that's a big ask. Yeah. So, one does that resonate or do you think I'm out of my mind? And if it resonates, how do people become worthy? Well, that's very monkish of you. I mean, that I mean, you've put you've put sex on a very sacred high value. Facts. Right? Right? So when you said it earlier about loneliness, I was like, I've actually been the loneliest I've ever been was in the middle of intercourse. Yeah. Which is a crazy thought. Like, I couldn't be any more with the person and because there was no emotional connection, I felt so alone. Yeah. It's crazy. I'm so glad you brought that up though, right? Like, that's what we understand about loneliness now that loneliness isn't about the number of people around you. It isn't about how popular you are. It doesn't matter how many people are surrounded by you. If you don't feel understood, if you don't feel seen, if you don't feel heard, you're lonely, right? Like, that's what it is. And so, when you're saying I'm having sex with someone and I still feel lonely, that's real. But you, from your definition of just how you broke that down, you're placing sex as a supremely sacred, as a high value. There could be lots of people listening or watching and or maybe people that we don't even that aren't in this community that would actually disagree and they'd just be like, "Well, sex is just sex." Like, what? They don't see it that way, right? The way you see it is probably more aligned with the Vedas than than the other perspective, for sure. The idea that if you're about to do anything intimate with anyone, physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, the amount of like exchange of We just talked about exchanging heartbeats and breathing. I mean, if you think about how biologically affected you are by a relationship, let alone how emotionally and then spiritually affected you are by a relationship and how much karma you share from a spiritual level, how much energy and vibration you share on a spiritual level. You're talking about like completely syncing up or destroying your synergy with someone. And so, I would say I agree with you. I don't think you're crazy at all. I think you're spot on. So, how do you become worthy? So, I think that is I mean, I don't think you have to complete solitude in order to move on. And so, in the book I I break down the four things that the Vedas break down, which is preparing for love, which is solitude. Practicing love, which is in a relationship. Right? The third is like preserving love because or protecting love because there's a part of us when we're burnt through love that loses the belief in love. Or or changes. So, there's a protection of love that comes at phase three. And phase four is what I call perfecting love. And so, if those are the four phases, solitude is the one preparing for love. And you have to do a lot of that becoming worthy in solitude because what I mean, we're we're we're saying something here that I we're on the I think we're on the same page. The idea that if you walk into a relationship and you don't know who you are, you don't know what you need or what you want and what you're building and what you're creating, you're basically going to hope that the other person's going to answer all those questions for you. Or you're going to outsource that inadequacy to them to make you feel worthy. So, that's why we walk into a relationship and we accept the currency of attention as love. We accept the currency of validation as love. Dude, that's big in a social media culture. Right? We accept the currency of attention, validation, compliments, comfort, random niceness. We accept all of that as love, because we ourselves haven't defined and experienced what love looks like on our own. So, how you become worthy of another person is first becoming worthy for yourself. And what does it mean to be worthy for yourself? To me, it's doing hard things alone. When you've done hard things alone and you've grown through them, and when I say alone, I don't mean without your family or without friends. I just mean when you've broken through some of your own barriers, that gives you a healthier sense of self-esteem and self-worth. I think self-worth doesn't come from saying affirmations in a mirror. It doesn't come from just like pretending to be happy. It doesn't come from being positive. Your greatest self-worth is going to come from breaking through stuff that you didn't think you could break through. Do people expect you to say just like yourself in the mirror and say, "I love myself"? Yeah, I think I think people ex- I think people sometimes project their own belief of like the word self-love, right? So, there's There is a form of self-love. Like, I love going to spas. I love getting massages. So, I'm into that form of self-love. But, I see that as more self-care. I see that as like caring for myself and things like that. Uh when I think of self-love as just telling myself I love myself, I've tried all of those things and I've seen how they are not possible when I haven't done some other work. Right? Like, me looking in the mirror and just saying, "I'm amazing. I'm wonderful." If I haven't done something amazing that day or done something wonderful that day, I don't believe myself. Right? And that's the problem people have. They're like, "I I don't believe it." Now, there's two sides to it. I actually believe a lot of people have done hard things, but they don't give themselves credit for it. Very possible. So, there's there's a big group of people, my mom included. I interviewed my mom recently, not on the podcast. I want to, but I I did what I I'm happy I did. I interviewed her at a dinner, just me and her, because I really wanted to get to know her story better. I realized I didn't feel like Did you record it? I'm guessing not if it was a dinner. because I did that with my father-in-law recorded it. It was awesome. shared that? No, and I I would love to knowing the background of your father-in-law. I would Dude, that's interesting. We should ask Lisa because it was dope. Like that guy's story is [ __ ] crazy. Yeah. It's unbelievable. And that's what I'm saying that we don't even know the people closest to us, right? So love again anyway, but that's that's a whole 'nother thing, but I sat down with my mom. I asked her questions like I would ask on the podcast. And I was talking to her and she was telling me that it's at like 15 years old I think 15 16 years old, she she was born and raised in Yemen. Oh, wow. And so yeah, so she's living in Yemen. Yemen are trying and it was called Aden at the time. They're trying to the Brits who have colonized the country are fighting against the Yemeni soldiers and she's studying for her exams while there's gunmen on her rooftop. Wow. Like that's her her story and I'm like Mom, like you've never told me how bad this was. You just told me you left Yemen because of the war and moved to England. Like that's the story I know. And all of a sudden I'm discovering that you were actually studying for an exam while there's people with guns on your roof defending and you're in the middle of all of that. And you're 15 years old. And she never told me that and I was thinking she's done hard things. Like and she doesn't she doesn't even see it that way cuz to her it's normal. I you know It's interesting. Do you think she thinks it's normal or or do people confuse enduring which is extraordinary Yeah. with oh, but I didn't actively choose it and therefore I completely discount it. Totally. Totally. Well, I mean at least for my mom I can say that she just sees it as her life. She doesn't see it as like hard or easy or that that's her kind of way she she sees stuff. Uh it's kind of how I feel sometimes so well when I talk about my monk experience, it's very normal to me. Like there's a part and I chose to do it. There's a part of me that's just like it's normal. And people are like, that's crazy. Like why would you ever become a monk after school? It's so bizarre. But to me, it's not that bizarre. And so, it takes me a minute to be like, oh wait a minute, it is pretty crazy, right? Like not many people do that. But I don't I don't sit in that thought that often. And so, I think there's I think what I'm saying is that this becoming worthy is breaking through some of your own barriers and limits, whatever they may may be, which is what you discover in the solitude. And the more you break through those, the more you feel worthy for anything and everything, because you go, wow, I've done some really tough stuff on my own. I've like really pushed myself in this way. I've really tried something new. And now, you're not looking for that person to fill your worthiness. You're not looking for that person to say, you're amazing, and you're the best, and you're incredible, because you've experienced your strength. Right? When you've experienced your strength, no one can make you feel weak. The right person will only make you feel stronger. Mhm. Right? And that's the key. When you've already done hard things, the people around you will only make you feel stronger. That's why you know they're great to be in your life. Because they're not making you feel strong, they're making you feel stronger. Whereas, what we often find is that whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You went they're not making you feel strong, they're making you feel stronger. Correct. So, I'm saying like when I'm So, even even in a positive relationship with us, like when I'm around you, right? And we have a healthy relationship, we know each other a fair bit. It's like I'm I consider myself to be self-aware and self-confident and and have a high degree of self-worth. Mhm. Totally open about it. I have no issues. No issues with it at all. person will push back on that. Yeah, no issues with it whatsoever. And um And I feel that the people I like to be in my life are not people who I'm looking to support that or or do that, but they're able to help me discover more about myself. So, that's a sign of strength. So, I had a client I was working that was coaching with last year. And he did this for me, and it was really powerful. And I was like, I I only like working with clients who also I learn from. So, I have a I have a selfish motive there, but it's it's special. And he said to me, he goes, "Jay, I've never met someone who could He said, "I never met someone who ties up spirituality, business, and practicality in one person like you do." And I'm not saying that to self-promote. I'm saying that because he gave me permission to be all three. And that made me stronger. that. And it was just really powerful. I felt so like freed by that statement to be all three because it made me stronger. I know I am in those things, but that person made me stronger. That's what I'm saying that you gravitate towards when you already have a sense of self-worth. Whereas when you don't have a sense of self-worth, you look for the person who's saying, "Oh, you're really good at that." Oh, like maybe you should work on like you're looking for someone to like make you feel better about yourself from zero. Whereas you're already at a 10 and someone's like finding new ways of showing you more of yourself. That's There's something beautiful about that. Agreed. even know if I'm articulating clearly, but Very clearly from my perspective. So, I think that there is a biological imperative hardwired into the brain that you must do hard things in order to feel good about yourself. And when I think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, and this is why I think rich kids implode. They just never had to do hard things. From an evolutionary perspective, I think it was just so hard to stay alive like for millions of years. It really was red in tooth and claw. Like to stay alive, you were kill or be killed. You were hunting gathering, fighting other tribes. I mean, it's just crazy. And the people that were going to survive were going to be the ones that that got an emotional a self uh applied emotional reward for doing something hard. And when you do something hard and you recognize it, it needs to feel good. And if it does, then you will keep doing hard things and you're the far more likely to survive than the person who's like, "That sucked. There was no redeeming qualities." And so, it's just like when I think about that because if I were to create a recipe for fulfillment, it's very simple. It's working really hard, doing hard things to gain a set of skills that allow you to serve not only yourself, but others. That's it. That's the whole recipe. But it really has to be that you had to do something hard. If it came easily to you, it won't give you the sense of respect that you want. Like the stuff that I've gotten more easily in my life, I don't take a lot of pride in. It's always the stuff that I grind out like through pain and suffering and I endure. In fact, I want to read you a quote. This is one of my all-time favorite quotes. So, here it is. I [ __ ] love this, man. To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities. I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished. I have no pity for them because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not. That one endures. Ah! I had the chills. That was Nietzsche. Like and subscribe. I think it I I I get the sentiment. I would not wish it on anyone. That's amazing. So, push back as hard as you can cuz I I love this. So, if you agree, in fact, where where does it break down? What is up, my friend? Tom Bilyeu here and I have a big question to ask you. How would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10? If your answer is anything less than a 10, I've got something cool for you. And let me tell you right now, discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful, boring, which is what kills most people, or possibly scary or even painful. Now, here is the thing, achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging, stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring, and it will get boring. Building your levels of personal discipline is not easy, but let me tell you it pays off. In fact, I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline. All right, I've just released a class from Impact Theory University called how to build ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you. All right, click the link on the screen, register for this class right now, and let's get to work. I will see you inside this workshop from Impact Theory University. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Peace out. Because this is why I don't have kids. That is what people need, in my opinion. Yeah. And I I can't I can't do it. Yeah, yeah. I can't Well, that's Well, that's where we where we disagree, right? Like as in like in I get the intention and the spirit of it. But do you think they'll be a better person if they avoid it? I don't I don't think you have to I feel like for most people for most people life is already hard in some area. I don't think there's many people I know, at least where I grew up as well. make them better or worse? Well, I don't think they have the tools, which is why we've tended to get what we're doing to that, right? Like I don't think that when I look at the people I grew up around or the areas I grew up in, and it wasn't the worst of the worst, it wasn't the best of the best. I've been to Wood Green. Yeah, it's not lovely. It's not lovely, right? It's not Yeah, you've been there, of course. Yeah, it's not nice. And people made bad choices because they didn't have good role models, right? Like people made bad choices because they didn't have good tools. They didn't make bad choices because of just where they were. It's because they didn't have access. Today we have access, and that's what we're trying to do, I feel, with our work. Because I look at myself, and I could clearly, if I What's that called? Sliding Doors? If I envision like where my life could have been if I didn't take a few steps, I could easily have been today addicted to some drug, getting involved in things that were highly violent, and finding myself validation through gang culture. Like I could have so ended up there. Like I literally could pinpoint three decisions that could have totally took my life in that direction, and and none would know who I am today, and I'd be a very different person. Not because I'm a bad person, or because I'm attracted to any of those things, just because I didn't have access. I got lucky, and I see that. I The access that I got to the monks at an early age just transformed the trajectory of my life. But most people don't meet someone random. We follow the same people on Instagram. We follow the same people on YouTube. We all watch the same stuff. We listen to the same stuff. How many people in the last 7 days could be honest and say they heard from a random voice that was unexpected? Or they saw a random person that they didn't know that sparked a new journey in their life. Like that's how random it was for me to meet a monk. I didn't grow up religious. I wasn't around monks. I didn't go religiously to meet monks. Like I met someone who completely sparked a different thought. When you're sitting down with trauma experts, when I'm sitting down with neuroscientists, like I didn't grow up with neuroscientists. Like who was speaking to those people? So I feel I Yeah, I just feel like with that's going back to that statement, I wouldn't wish pain on anyone because I feel that life is already hard. I would just wish that people opened up their hearts and minds to the tools that would help them deal with that hardship better, and not try and rely on what they currently have in their toolkit. That would be my wish. If you ask me what my wish is for people, I The only way I can like and subscribe to that statement is if we modify it slightly and say, I wish that people could develop a profound sense of self-worth. Yeah. And avoid all of that, but I don't think they can. I don't think they can And so this may be a cruel twist of evolution. Like I want to be very clear. I'm not saying I'm glad it is this way. I'm just saying I think it is this way. Now my beef with the the idea of I wish that, you know, these horrible things upon people is that it breaks most of the people that it touches. Right. But I don't think people can become a version of themselves that they'll be proud of unless they go through that stuff. Yeah. So it's monk in me can't wish that on someone in that way. And and you could argue that real compassion is letting the right thing happen to someone that they need to go through. I just don't think and and that is what real compassion Ooh, that's interesting. So here here was my catch with the one of the reasons I didn't have kids. I knew I would intervene if something bad was happening. Now as I get older, I feel like I might be more capable of letting it happen, but at the time when I was sort of peak like should we should we not? I was like I know I will intervene. Would you intervene? Ah, it's it's always Are you going to have kids? I don't know. Is is the answer yeah. We don't know. We've been We've talked about it. We're very like We're probably at that stage you were at years ago. And so we've been very open about it. We're like we don't know. And partly it's these kind of things, partly it's how it affects service and impact, how it There's so many There's so many things, right? There's so many facets to that question of So let's say Dar, who has two children, your co-host on your show, Dar and Jay for those that aren't liking and subscribing yet. Uh would you want them to intervene? When I saw So I saw a couple of parents that I was friends with a few years back and I remember that their two-year-old was like putting her hands through a candle like on the other side of the room. So we were all hanging here. The 2-year-old is running around and the 2-year-old is on the other side of the counter and they're doing that and then and my natural instinct at the time, this is probably like maybe like 8 years ago. My natural instinct was to go and be like help that kid and I'm always mindful of other people's kids, too, because I just feel like something you know and and I was about to jump up and help her and they were like, "No, no, leave it. She's fine. She'll if it hurts her, she'll know next time not to touch that and let her learn by herself." And I was like, "Wow, that's really impressive. Like I'm scared your kid's going to burn their hand and you're really" Now, I'm not recommending either or. My friends are great parents and they're very loving and and that's the challenge today, right? Like a lot of people would be like, "Oh my god, they don't care about their kids." Like I think they do care about their kids. I think they're really great parents, but them allowing them their child to do this. I would then see pictures of them. They they moved into the countryside and stuff and their kid would just be like out like swinging on trees and like climbing stuff and falling over and and they were so comfortable with that because they had that mindset that there should be an openness. Now, I think there's that openness, but then there's intervening when it gets really painful. Like what if your child gets involved in drugs? Are you not going to intervene? Like are you not going to educate? Are you not going to And obviously in all the right ways you'd hope would be the healthy ways of intervening. I don't think ever walking in and telling a kid to stop or don't do that is ever going to work. But to me, intervening is important at certain points where you think it's like really going off the edge of the cliff versus when you feel like it's healthy experimentation and you don't, but I'm saying this obviously in theory because I don't have to, but when I look at it with my The closest person I can compare it to is my sister. So, my sister's 5 years younger than me. When she was born, I held her in my hands and I felt like I've parented her in many ways. She's I call her kid. Like that's my nickname for my younger sister. And if I look at my sister, I made mistakes by intervening too much sometimes. So, I didn't really want her to have a job growing up cuz I worked a job growing up when I was 14 and I didn't really think that that was healthy for her. And now I look back and I was like realized that was a mistake. Like I should have let her work. Mhm. And I I don't think that that was a good decision. And so, that's me going, "Okay, well, that was a bad intervention." And then there's other things where like we have a really open relationship. She tells me all her challenges. We're really good friends. She's not scared to tell me something. Like, that's the healthy part of it. And so, I look at like how parenting is so tough cuz you look back and you're like, "Ah, I'm wiser now." Then you look back and go, "Oh, I got that right." So, I I think whether it's kids or not, I guess my point is I wouldn't wish pain on someone cuz I think they're going through some sort of pain anyway. That's my point. I can't wish pain on someone. Yeah, no, I get it. my beliefs. I hear it. Yeah. Um What is the formula? Like, if you want to be in a healthy relationship, what what's the number one things the number one thing people get wrong and what is the fix? so I'm going to give you three. I I break them each down in this book. So, the three are and the first one's simple and basic and then it and then it gets more complex and interesting. So, the first one is you have to like their personality. You have to like their company. You enjoy being around them. You enjoy being around them for longer periods of time, which is an important experiment. Like, I read a study that showed to make someone a casual connection, you have to spend 40 hours with them. For a casual connection. Woah. If you want someone to be considered a friend, it's 100 hours of time with that person. Mhm. And if you consider someone a good friend, if you consider someone a good friend, a great friend, it's 200 hours plus. Wow. If you can't like someone's company for 200 hours of undistracted time, chances are you don't really like their personality. We both know people that we would love to spend a weekend with, but we wouldn't want to see them every weekend. That's okay. Those can be great casual friendships. We both know people that we wish we could spend more time with, but we don't prioritize. They're good friends, but they're not going to be the best friends. And then we know people like our wives, who we spend a considerable amount of time with, disproportionately more with them than we do with any other human on the planet. And you know, hopefully we made good decisions and we're happy about those decisions. So, when I look at it that liking, that's what I mean by liking that person's company and personality to give it some tangibility of what that means. The second thing you need, and this is where I want to be really clear about my language, because this word gets thrown a lot in relationship talk, but it I don't mean it in the same way. So, the thing is you have to respect their values. And what I mean by this is, 99% of us in relationships are trying to make our partner respect our values. We want them to like what we like. We want them to love what we love. If I'm going to watch football on the weekend, I'd love for you to come with me. If I think that going to watch this is really important, you should be there. So, we demand that our partner respects our value rather than respecting theirs. And I'll I'll give a tangible example. So, for example, Rothy's number one, and I ask a lot of couples to do this exercise if I'm working with someone. I'll ask couples to rank their top three priorities, including themselves, in order. And most of the time one partner will say, "You." Are you the partner? So, you would say, "Lisa." If you had the kids, you'd say the kids. And then third, they'd put themselves. That's that's a general order that people put. Now, sometimes you'll get a curveball where someone goes, "Me, you, the kids." And every time someone writes that, their partner goes, "How How How could you put the kids third? How can the kids be third? Like, how does that make any sense? And how can you be first?" And it's like, "Well, no, because I I know that I don't want to give you my leftovers. I want to give you the best of me." So, when you look at respecting someone's value, when I look at Roddy's values, Roddy's number one value is family, her family. My number one value is my purpose and my service to the world. Those are not the same values. So, a lot of people say you have to have the same values in a marriage. I I don't subscribe to that. I don't think you have to have the same values. I think you have to I think if you're looking for someone with exactly the same values, you're going to take a lot longer to find that person. I don't know anyone in the world that I know that's happily married, and I'd love to break it down with anyone who genuinely can say we have the same exact values. So, I respect Roddy's values, family, which means when family becomes a priority in decision-making, when family becomes a priority during the holiday season, when family becomes a topic of conversation, I'm zoned in. That's something she deeply values and cares about. If she's going to choose family over anything, I'm going to be okay with that, because she's made it very clear that's her number one value. Same back at me. If I choose purpose over anything, she knows that's going to happen. It's not a surprise. I know so many people who are trying to get their partners to change their value, and I just don't see that happening, or that person compromises their value and now feels less versions of themselves, like a a less uh adequate version of themselves. And now you're dating the second best version of the person you love. And so, that's respecting values. And the third thing is, and this is what differentiates it, is you are committed to helping them get to their goals. You're committed. I may like your goals, Tom, but we're not in love, and we're not in a relationship where I'm committed to you achieving your goals. I love you. I deeply appreciate you in the world. I think you have an amazing impact, but if someone asked me, Jay, you could feel this way about a friend, I'm not committed. I'm not actively doing something. I may support, I collaborate, I help, but I'm not committed. Whereas with my wife, I'm committed on a daily basis going, "Honey, what do you want in your life? Where are you going? What do you need? What support do you need? What can I do with do for you to help you get there?" It's not about her helping me get to my goals. She's thinking about that, but I'm thinking about how is that. So, those are my things for for a happy relationship, those are three key things. I mean, there's so many more things I could go into, but I have to give the overview formula as those three things. So, what trips people up? Are they I'm assuming selection? If that's such a big part, they just select the wrong person. Yeah. Why? I think people select the wrong person because they are looking for First of all, we select the wrong person because we make so many snap judgments off of a few basic inputs. So, one of the things that the Vedas talk about is something called the six opulences. And we've talked about this before. We talked about them in a different context, but the six opulences are fame, wealth, power, beauty, knowledge, and renunciation. Those are the six opulences. These are six things people pursue, people value, people admire. Right? We can all agree with that. that renunciation made the list. Like, that Talk about self-awareness. Yeah, it's a huge one. And so, those those six are the six opulences. And what we do in relationships, which is really interesting, is when we find someone has one opulence, we ascribe them other qualities. So, if someone is wealthy, we assume that they must be organized and that they'll be organized in the home. If someone is attractive, we assume that they'll be able to articulate themselves effectively. If someone is powerful at work, we assume that they're really good at organizing date night. Right? Like there's there's these qualities we start describing people. And so often what happens is one opulence does this halo effect into making you believe that this person has a lot more gifts and skills and qualities rather than through research and learning and experience, you're just giving them away to that person. And we do this in interviews, right? We all know how the halo effect works in interviews. If you're interviewing a more attractive candidate, you're more likely to hire them. More attractive hostesses and waiters and waitresses get bigger tips. Like this is just how human psychology works, but it's very risky when you choose a life partner based on how attractive someone was for 30 seconds. And so I find that selection goes wrong because of that, because we ascribe qualities because of one opulence rather than actually seeing those qualities. It's like me saying to you, "When did Lisa realize she could trust you?" I'm hoping it's not day one. Because trust is something that has to be proven time and time and time again. Trust is something that she has to see time and time again. He said he was going to be there at this time, he turned up. He said he was going to show up for this moment, he showed up. That's trust. Trust is not built because someone was really nice to you. And so trust is something we throw away. And I can dive into the levels of trust, too, but you know? Yeah, I mean, if those are the top-notch things, let's Yeah, so I talk about four levels of trust. This is actually in Think Like a Monk, but it it fully connects to this book. Um there are four levels of trust. My belief is that whenever you meet anyone, someone new, your relationship with them should start at zero trust. Now, what we do in life is we believe that there's only two things in everything. We think everything's binary, right? Black and white, left and right. Trust, don't trust. Now, is zero trust sitting at the zero point between trust and distrust? Zero is sitting at no trust beginning. Yes, because don't have an active like you're not looking at them suspiciously. Correct. So, I'm going to get Yeah, so I'm going to give you the level. So, the idea So, the first point being that we see trust as too binary. I have people I trust and there's people I don't trust. To me, that's too limited and it doesn't help. Because what that means is if I like someone, I automatically trust them, which is massively unhealthy. And so, what I'm saying is that zero trust is correct between distrust at the bottom and then trust higher, but there's three levels in between. So, when I meet someone, especially if you're dating them, you have zero trust in them. The next step is transactional trust. Transactional trust is I know when this person says they're going to do something, they do it. I know there's an equal exchange in the transaction. I like if I say I'm going to do this work and you're going to pay me this amount, I know you're going to pay me at that time. That's transactional trust. It's what you have with your employees. It's what you have with your teams. It's what you have with colleagues. We don't want this cuz it's not sexy. It's not It doesn't feel like love. It feels too professional. It feels too corporate. But really, every single person has to go through these levels with you. The next stage is reciprocal trust. Where you know someone loves you and appreciates you and will do good for you, but you're not counting. You're not checking. You know it reciprocates naturally. It cycles around. This is a healthy level of trust after some time where the transactions have been proven over and over again. Now, you don't need the contract. Right? Now, you don't Now, you don't always need to sign it. And then the fourth stage, which I believe is practically impossible, is unconditional trust, which is that god-like trust that we all want in the person we end up with. The problem is we give unconditional trust away early and then we fall down those levels to zero trust and why we feel so let down by people because it just felt like we fell down four flights of stairs. That's why breaking trust feels so deep because you gave someone level four trust when you should have started at zero and work their way up. So let people earn your trust. When you talked about being worthy, like let someone earn your trust. Let someone be worthy of your trust. Don't just give it because they're nice and kind and they bought you a gift. Right? So why do you think we have that instinct? Is it just the halo effect of you are kind to me and I'm letting that spill over into other areas? I think we just want to be loved so desperately. We're so desperate for it because it's been put on this pedestal that this is the defining factor of success in life. Is could you find someone to love you? Because then you'd be lovable. Then you'd be worthy. Then you'd have what it takes. If you were able to convince someone to spend their life with you, then you're worthy. And we're so desperate for that that we will happily speed through those instead of 200 hours, we'll tell someone we love them in two months. Because we'd rather have it and think we lost it than to have never found it at all. Because never having found it means we were never worthy. Whereas if we found it and lost it and even if it wasn't perfect, at least there was some part of us that was lovable. And that's why we'll stay in toxic relationships. That's why we'll settle for people who are not worthy for us because we'd rather feel like we're in love than actually build it. And I think that's the challenge is that we live in such a feeling world as opposed to a building creating world, which is a doing world, which is an action world. I start the book with this beautiful statement of this conversation between a student and a teacher, often attributed to the Buddha and so a student goes up to the Buddha and says, "What is the difference between I like you and I love you? And the Buddha replies, when you like a flower, you simply pluck it and throw it away. But when you love a flower, you water it daily. And to me, that is the difference because we're so desperate to dinner at Chelsea. Yeah, we're so desperate to just smell that flower, observe its beauty for a few moments, toss it away. But that person who turns up every day and waters that flower and gives it the sun and gives it the soil. No one wants to be that person, but that's love. Then you have a beautiful garden. Then you have this beautiful view every day of all these flowers that you grew. And so to me, it's the the desperation of the feeling of being loved is is making us settle for less than. It's really interesting. Now, you say that nobody wants to be that person because of the effort and energy. Like this is something that Lisa and I say a lot and I'd be curious to see if you agree with this. I think you will. That love love really isn't enough. Just to be super cliche for a second that really a relationship isn't just about love. That's one of the components, but it's going to take a lot of work. Yeah. But work of the kind that you describe, watering it, making sure it has enough sun, you know, wiping the leaves down, make sure there's no bugs on it. It's an attentiveness. Yeah. Investment maybe. And it's unsexy, right? I keep using that word, too, because it's not what's been portrayed. It's not what it's meant to feel like. It doesn't look like that Pinterest board. It doesn't feel like the wedding day every day, right? Like the the challenge is that I think I mean, I was looking at the studies. The amount of money that gets spent on weddings. It says the more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you are to divorce earlier. Like the Yeah, that's the trend. Like you have a shorter wedding, the more you spend on your You have a shorter marriage, the more you spend on your wedding is what the studies show. And so when I saw that, I was just like, wow. Like I I didn't spend that much on my wedding, thankfully. Now, looking at the studies, but I was looking at that and again, I'm not again, I'm not saying that having a big wedding, have a big wedding. I'm I love big weddings, I love attending. I'm just saying that it's interesting how much if you think about it, when you're planning a wedding, you organize a priest. The priest is there to remind you of your commitments. When you get married, who's your priest? Who's reminding you of your commitments every day? We never think about that. When you get married, you have a guest list. The guest list is made up of people who love you and support your marriage. When you're married, how deeply do you think about the people you're surrounded by and how much they build the community of helping you flourish in your marriage? At your wedding day, you think about what you wear, what you say to that person from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. You're conscious of each and every one of your words, maybe hopefully trying to be at least. In your marriage, that that goes out the window. So, you think about the amount of Forget the money, the amount of effort that goes into planning one day. Imagine if you took all that effort and used it to plan a marriage, how successful would every marriage be, right? It's a shift of energy and it's a shift of mindset and saying, we spend so much time, money, energy, resources, attentiveness, your word, to plan a wedding, but there's no attentiveness to plan a marriage or a long-term relationship if you don't want to be married. Why do you think it is that if you're spending a lot of money on the wedding, that that's inversely correlated to the length of time that you stay married? Is it just messed up um priorities? What What is that? I think it's hard to I I'd have to look deeply into it. I mean, it's hard to stereotype because I guess there's so many of both, right? I'm sure there's other things that buck the trend. I think there's a part of it that you could say that the bigger the wedding or any gesture, not even wedding, any gesture, you're trying to overcompensate Mhm. for trying to make this feel like it's special and important. I think sometimes people can throw their partners amazing birthday parties in order to make up for the whole year. What do you think about now? It seems like the trend, and I don't have the data, but I'm almost certain this is accurate, that people are getting married less and less and less and less. Yeah, I've seen it. less sex, less kids, like it's a trend that freaks me out. Uh are you at all concerned? That's a great question. I I'm not concerned about people not getting officially married if they're in committed long-term relationships that are healthy. I think it's a catastrophic error. Interesting. Why? Why Why do you think the certificate and the commitment is so important? Abstracted from the certificate, you need to do something. There is a lack of ritual in our lives now. So, I read the Power of Myth when I was, I think maybe even before I met Lisa, but certainly before we got married. And the book was talking about how, hey, the big problem with society today is there's no coming of age ritual. Part of the reason the divorce rate is so high, he speculated, was because uh there was no like real ceremony that meant something that reminded people you're a different person on the other side of this. And so, for me, I read that and was like, okay, when I get married, that's going to be it, one and done, never again, barring death. And or I mean, look, you make this point in the book several times. If you're in an abusive relationship, get out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I 100% agree with that. Assuming I'm not. Um that I wanted something that would really remind me that I was a different person. So, I wanted it to be painful, and I wanted it to be permanent. Yeah. And so, I as an act of a ritualistic scarification, I got a tattoo. And got married and had the priest and the waving of the smoke and all that and even though they it was all in not only Greek which I didn't speak at the time, it was in ancient Greek so whatever few words I did know I really couldn't hang on to but there was something about the the sense of ritual and importance of people in fancy dress and like all of that that it really did allow me because I was willing to say this is a big moment I'm never going to be the same again and then reinforce that by getting the tattoo and the whole time I was getting the tattoo I was focusing on the pain and saying this is forever. This is a way of permanently altering my body so that I never forget that I've made a commitment and I think people if you're not even willing to go through a typical marriage ceremony like bruh, your chances of going through dude, look first of all, I've been married for 20 years. I know what the [ __ ] I'm talking about and this went from I was going to be the breadwinner, wife stay at home, take care of the kids to not having kids and my wife becoming an entrepreneur. If you don't think that was like some radical change and through all of that I just knew divorce isn't an option. So since I'm completely unwilling to be in a loveless marriage how do we grow together? And because it was like well, I'm not going to be in an unhappy marriage and I'm not exiting the marriage that only leaves making the marriage awesome. And so all of the sudden it's like okay, well clarity of thought I need to focus on making this awesome. And when people don't have that there's just an attitude of like disposability from sex to marriage and look, I am not opposed to uh casual sex. I've had my share. It was mostly fun. There were a couple times we talked about one earlier where it was like okay, well, even if it's a one night stand I need to be interested in the person. That's my own personal realization. So, I think people need to take that not more seriously, like terrifyingly seriously, because that person is going to shape you in ways you can't imagine. And if you go into that like, "Nah, whatever." Like, you're living your life by the law of accident. And I see that echoed through society. So, I love the idea of what you said about ritual. Like, I think rituals are powerful, they're important. I mean, they're they're totally part of Vedic culture. Like, rituals are everything. Like, rituals are those Indian weddings are like days. Seven days. Jesus. To make you realize how important this commitment is. Like, you get married to someone over 7 days and you meet all their family and they meet all of yours. Like, there's there's an imprint, right? And that's what it the word is samskara. Like, samskara means impression or imprint. These rituals leave imprints or impressions that are powerful to help you become new or to become more. And so, I agree with that. And the only thing that I think I'm open to is that people take a little bit longer to decide before they commit. And that if you are in a marriage that I think there are just so many people today that are married that aren't using your mindset of I don't want to be in a loveless marriage. What do we do? Like, I literally will And and by the way, I see you and Lisa as just like I Talking to you about this stuff is so exciting for me because I love how you and Lisa love each other. I love how you talk about your rules. I love how you talk about your principles. I love how you talk about the lessons and I agree with them. Like, I I think we're very aligned and I'm very much earlier. This book isn't about my relationship. This book isn't about look at how successful my marriage is. I've not been married for that long. This book is about studies in the Vedas and science and the research and the tools. But, the one thing I will say is that I check in with Radhi regularly. And I'll often do an alternative and I'll say, "Is this relationship going in the direction you want?" And I'll check in with her and say, "Is this relationship actually going in the direction you want?" If it is, great. What are we doing right? And if it isn't, what direction do you want to go in? And what does that require of you? And what does that require of me? And I'll be ready to commit to that. And that has been one of the healthiest questions for me to ask because I'm like you, I don't want to live longer than a couple of hours in a in a loveless relationships when it's something within my control. Like I don't want something within my control to be painful for longer than it needs to be. I don't want to be in a relationship where I don't talk to you for a week. I don't want to be in a relationship where we argue for a month about the same thing. I didn't subscribe to that. Like that's not what I committed to. Like I didn't set my life up in a way to live with pain for years and years and years. And I saw that in my family and I was like, no way do I want to create that in my life. So I'm going to do everything possible. But what I find is that a lot of people are in relationships where there isn't a collaborative approach. Alyssa and you are collaborators in this. Me and Radhi are growing into collaborators in this. It's like if if you're not with someone who's collaborative, it's really tough. I meet a lot of people who like, "I'm ready to do the work. I want to do the work." But then their partner doesn't reciprocate with any energy or any enthusiasm because they think, "We already did it. We got married. We have the kids. We both have a job. We have a house. What are you worried about?" Right? Like that's the response people hear. And I'm speaking to that person and saying, "Well, if you need to slow down getting married, it's okay. And if you are married and it's not going in the right direction, that's okay." But because I don't want to put I don't want to put pressure on people to think that marriage is the achievement and I know you're not doing that either, but I think a lot of people see marriage as the end and the achievement as opposed to the beginning. It's the container. It's the container, but it's not seen that way. Yeah, it's interesting. So Lisa and I got married at the time it it's it did feel like we were young, but by today's standards we were infants. It's really crazy. Yeah. But when I think about how much if if you can construct the right container, it it will improve your life vastly. The reason I'm so celebratory of marriage is that nothing and I mean nothing, not business, ambition, self-improvement, nothing has given me as much as my marriage. Now, because I treat it like the flower that I water and keep the bugs off and make sure it gets sunlight and all that stuff. I mean it's a massive amount of time and attention. But when I think about what the human animal is wired for, it actually isn't necessarily just a monogamous marriage, but you've you can go in different paths. Actually something I wasn't sure if it would come up today. I think that there's there is a a buffet of offerings that are available to work with human wiring. And depending on the circumstance and into which you are born, you will either be in um polyamorous, uh polyandrous where there's multiple males, which is to one female, which is very unusual, uh and then monogamous. And it's utterly I'm so aware that those are real that I make sure that I take more time and attention to grow the one that I'm in in the right way, if that makes sense. So but knowing that I do have the wiring to thrive within this, but I have to be very thoughtful about how we mix that cocktail. Uh in the book you talk about like defining love and making sure that you understand each other's fighting styles and all of that gets really wonderfully practical. Yeah. You've got the fighting quiz. yeah. Where people can go figure out like what's my fighting style. Do you put the same kind of attention on understanding whether the words you use are masculine energy or feminine energy? spend a lot of time in the book on masculine and feminine energy only because I think that it's not in our current vocabulary and it's not really how the the Vedas ultimately treat everyone as a soul. And so that's already beyond gender. Mhm. Uh and beyond energy in the sense that we are all equal energy. So the Vedas come at it from a standpoint of you and me are made of the same stuff consciousness-wise. There is no difference in the consciousness that you are and that I am or anyone in this room or anyone in the world. And therefore I am not superior or inferior to any other individual. Hence we can only ever be a team. So when you're really going to the core of the teachings that I kind of live my life by I can't start to see better or worse or bigger or or not. So I don't just look at Radha as a team member on the fact that she's my wife. I see her as a team member because I see her as consciousness and divine energy which is the same as the energy that's within me cuz I'm not this body. Right? Like I genuinely believe that the core of my being is that I'm not a physical body. And so it's very hard for me to get lost in conversations around physical body and gender-based or or masculine feminine energy because at at the core of it that's not how I'm structuring my life. How does that influence the way that you think about it? Cuz I'm the exact opposite. I am I am of this body, nothing else. When I die it's a light switch, I'm gone. If you take a needle and jab a part of my brain it's going to impact how I'm able to process the world. Yeah, yeah. Um so it's very direct how I which is probably a big part of the reason I'm so tactical. I just view the world through that lens. It is my temperament. Yeah. Um, so if you don't have that, would you call yourself a dualist like where spirit and body are completely separate? No, so it's like well So yeah, it's a in in our philosophy it's called simultaneous one and difference. So it's both. It's like you have the I'm I'm living in this body, but I am not this body. So the idea separated from like do you believe in an immortal soul that will outlive your body? yes. And sorry to be so grounded in the physical, does that continue to exist in a physical place or there is another realm that we don't have access to when we're in this body? My Yeah, so the philosophical understanding that I have is that this the consciousness continues to seek physical form to experience physical pleasure and physical experiences until the point that it is materially exhausted and is able to truly live in its full consciousness not needing a physical form to exercise physical needs and desires. And how does that consciousness manifest itself once it's transcended the pursuit of physical pleasure? It's described in quality not in Obviously I've not experienced that. Sure, sure. Um, my only experience of it is through meditation and practice and it's Is it an intuitive understanding that you would be hard pressed to put into language? No, it's a state Well, the state is described as full of knowledge, eternal and full of bliss. That's the state in which we're living. And so what I'm explaining is that through what we call purification of consciousness, once the material body is no longer useful you're then living in that full spiritual consciousness. Would be a spiritual form, a form that is not doesn't bleed when you cut it. It doesn't get damaged. It doesn't get hurt. It is an eternal form that doesn't have those needs or um fallibilities, I guess, is the right word. So, if in the Christian tradition, there is this place called heaven, which at least is sort of like a physical place that the spirit goes and lives out its days, and you will be reunited. Yeah. Admittedly, I'm not a Christian uh theologian, so I'm sure I'm getting some of this wrong. Um but there's at least in popular culture, there's the idea of you transcend into heaven. It's a place. Yeah. There are people that you know and love, you're reunited. So, there's a sense of recreating still the physical world, just in a non-physical form. It's what at least in um design circles you call skeuomorphic. Yes. So, you're taking what you know, and even though you're trying to imagine something completely different, you tend to cram it in to the same thing, right? So, we imagine it in clouds and stuff like that. Yeah. What's that version in the Vedic tradition? Yeah. So, the Vedic tradition is there is a eternal divine relationship with the supreme being. And that in this space, everyone has that unique experience and unique relationship with each other and divinity personified. you meet Radhi again in that space? Uh hopefully we both make it back. Um I Yeah, and Radhi's definitely good baggage. Yeah, I'll take that back. Yeah, Radhi Radhi's good. Um but uh not necessarily as my partner. Not as the way I've seen her here. Mhm. As as a completely different version to what I see here. Because this is just simply one lifetime on a notch of lifetimes. And does that at all inform your marriage? That informs our marriage in the beautiful sense of the detachment with the love in the sense of there's a feeling of I love this person. So glad I found them in this lifetime to do this life with, to serve in this way, to have this impact, to choose to want to better humanity, to leave it a better, happier, healthier place, to leave it a more healed place. That unites us in a in a profound way that I couldn't have have with anyone else who didn't feel that way about it. And at the same time, it detaches me from recognizing, you know, this isn't everything, either. And that's okay. Like, it's, you know, let's not make this the be-all and end-all of everything, either. Like, this is just one experience. It's one aspect. And so, I think there's this beautiful connection, but then healthy detachment that comes from both. And the ultimate understanding that she's not my property. She does not belong to me. I don't own her. And that she's on her own journey, too. And that that journey is the most important journey that I'm supporting her on. And this journey is the most important journey she's supporting me on, beyond all the other stuff that we're doing together. Like, that's the journey we've committed to. So, I think it has a profound impact on on how we conduct our lives. It stops you from sniffing the flower. Absolutely. And even though me and you have very different overall And that's why I've always found fascinating to sit down with you. Even though me and you have very different systems of overall belief or philosophy of like, what our container is of how we view life, we approach life far more similarly uh than than many people I know. Like, I consider myself to be highly And And like you said in the book, we have fight styles. We have the relationship rules. Like, there's so much tactical, practical stuff in the book, because that's how I view life, too. I view life as highly strategic, uh but with a spiritual lens. Mhm. And And I think that it's I find that really interesting how we're both trying to approach life through strategy, through systems, through processes, despite having, you know, me having much more of a philosophical and I guess a intangible view of reality. Do you know Donald Hoffman? I don't. As in from the Hoffman process? No. No, I don't I don't know what that is. So, uh this may be why, although you'll probably push back on this. So, as somebody who's agnostic, meaning I I literally just don't know. I've no idea what the the truth is. Why don't I think anyone does? And and I I kind of live with that. Like I People always ask me like where do you see yourself? And I'm like, I don't know either. Mhm. But I'm having read the theology and spirituality in the modern-day new age everything that I have, I'm betting on this. And so it's simply a hypothesis, and I'm very open about that. I'm very cool with that because I just think life is a hypothesis. Pretty much everything I do every day is a hypothesis. There's no genuine truth that I can say that I know for a fact that this is what happens when this happens. Mhm. Including doing this interview, including whatever I write this book. Like what comes from it is so different and so diverse than you can expect. So, I live my life in a hypothesis. So, I've studied plenty of books and researched and spoken to people and sat with teachers and sat with masters, and I've come up with what I believe is my hypothesis based on that experience. And I think everyone's entitled to their hypothesis, and I that's why I don't consider myself With you, I always end up talking about some of my own beliefs or values or philosophies that I identify with, but why I don't preach them or why I don't impart them on others is because that's not my goal. Mhm. Right? Like my goal is to help people navigate reality in what we can see, feel, and hear. And then I have my own set of beliefs and values that guide my moral compass, but those are not the ones I'm imparting. Those are not what people are being exposed to because I see them as two separate things. My compass on a deeper level is different to the work I'm doing in the world to help people navigate this. This is all based on fact and truth and experience and you know, reality. The book is based on that. Think Like a Monk is based on that. But the beliefs that I have are hypotheses. Those are not the ones I'm sharing. I love that. Yeah. Where can people follow you as you explore your hypotheses? Uh the best place right now is um 8 rules of love.com. That is the place to find uh my new book, 8 Rules of Love, uh which will guide you through everything from finding love, keeping love, dealing with heartbreak, and then finding love again. Uh that would be the best place to find me right now. I love it. Yeah. Thank you. Boys and girls, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Thank you, Tom. If you're feeling lost and lazy, be sure to check out this next episode for the keys to getting your life on track. What What is it that I plan to do with the money? The money in and of itself, it's inert. It just sits there. I'm sure you guys have a bunch of it in your pocket right now, and it doesn't do anything, but it has latent potential. But the question is, what are you going to do with that potential?