Humble The Poet - Things No-One Else Can Teach Us: How To Learn From Losses

Full transcript: Humble The Poet on London Real

2:32 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today’s Humble the Poet is a spoken word artist, rapper and author, but he wasn’t always this successful or famous. He used to be a high school teacher in Canada ten years ago, and decided to quit and go all in on the music business and the performance business, and he struggled. He got ripped off.

3:02 He lost all his money. He had to move back in with his parents and really try to discover who he was. He started writing. He started blogging. Those turned into a book, that turned into a commercial with Apple, and he slowly started figuring out how he had to show up every day in order to be successful.

3:20 And this man, even though he’s still fairly young, has so many philosophical ideas that we all can learn from, and it’s gonna be great to watch his career go up and up and up. He’s got his second book out. He’s creating more music, more music videos. He’s touring with his spoken word, and I think we can expect great things from this young man. So sit back and be amazed and surprised with Humble the Poet.

3:45 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Humble the Poet, the Canadian author, rapper and spoken word artist. In 2010 you left your job as an elementary school teacher to pursue poetry and music full-time, and today your videos have millions of views, and you are touring the world. You’ve written two books, Unlearn, 101 Simple Truths for a Better Life, and your latest, Things No One Else Can Teach Us, which shares raw and honest stories about how to change a mindset can radically alter one’s outlook.

4:15 Humble, welcome to London Real. Thank you for being here, man. I first wanted to kick off, what’s it like coming to London? What does this city remind you of? How is it different from Toronto, or maybe other places you’ve traveled?

4:29 What does this say? What does it feel like? London is intense. I think that’s the best word. It’s just intense.

4:35 People love what they love out here. So, you know, when I first started performing out here, like in 2011, 2012, everyone that showed up knew all the lyrics, and they were there. It was kind of an obligation, or just a passive thing they could do on a Friday night. They really cared, and you see that, you know, with all the soccer riots, and you see that with just the passion, with everything that they care about. So I think that intensity really shines in a positive and a negative light, but it’s an intensity nonetheless.

5:03 Okay. And how does it compare to New York City as far as a big city? I think New York is just a wave. I think New York is, you have to kind of catch the wave that’s already happening, open your sails and join wherever the flow is going, whatever street you’re walking on, whatever trend you’re on, or whatever space that you’re trying to exist in. And I think it’s, it’s, it’s challenging.

5:26 Exciting to think, you know, especially with New York as of recently, you know, there’s not a lot of brand-new things being credited coming out of that city. But it’s, you know, one of the biggest, most intricate bird’s nests we’ve ever created, and you know, just the scale of it. But I think we’re over here, you have a little bit more critical thinking, but at the same time it’s just an enthusiasm that I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed anywhere else, and I think that just kind of has to do with maybe the cheeky sense of humor people have out here.

6:00 I think there’s a little bit of a fascination with what’s happening across the pond. I think you don’t know what’s America still kind of sets the standard for what content can be. And I think, you know, people embrace that, would open them. So every time I come out here, you know, I’m embraced with open arms, and I’m treated like much more of a celebrity than I ever feel like I am. But I mean, but with all the bells and whistles, ’cause London’s a world-class city, that’s nice.

6:26 And while we’re on cities, then how does that compare with LA, which might be a future home of yours? Yeah, I mean, while LA is you know the breeding ground for all of this. LA teaches you how to make it all happen. Late to me is where creativity and commerce hold hands, and you find all the different options in terms of how you can make a living off your ideas. And the challenge with that lay is, you know, it’s a planet in itself, you know, and it’s the place where people didn’t get enough attention at home, and didn’t get enough attention in their small towns.

6:59 It felt too big for their places, so they moved too. So it’s the, it’s the big leagues for creativity, and people sometimes mistake the laid-back West Coast vibe, and they think that it’s not going to be as intense, or people aren’t working as hard as they are, compared to somewhere like New York. But it is just as intense just beyond the facade. And that’s part of it, you know. The, the palm trees are in the great neighborhoods, and the palm trees are in the ghettos, and they exist two blocks away from each other, so it’s as real as it gets.

7:31 And coming from a hip-hop space, you know, the big thing they always said was New York is a lot of rappers acting like gangsters, but LA is a lot of gangsters trying to be rappers, and you can really see the difference, and it’s very visceral in terms of how things work, and the, the spectrum, you know. You got people living in tents on the streets, people living in their cars, people living in motor homes, and people live in small apartments, all the way up to these mega mansions in the hills, and I think that spectrum allows people to think they’re always one step away from having their dream come true. And so for me, I try to look at it from an outsider’s perspective, and be mindful that the longer I spend there, the longer is gonna have an influence on me.

8:11 So go home often. I’ve been doing for years, on and off, ensuring I go home and kind of hitting that reset button, detox a little bit. You talked a little bit, but also tap into what LA is good at, which is kind of mixing commerce and creativity and the building of stars and building things. Right? Yeah, ’cause when I was in Toronto, and especially making music, the idea, you know, every artist’s idea was just get really good, and then you’ll get discovered, you know, maybe a drink will find you, you know, throw a bag of money at you, or Puff Daddy or somebody will give you a shot, and I think, you know, it was necessary for me to go to LA to realize that, no, you know, you’re a nob, you have to create your own opportunities.

8:49 One of the biggest lessons I learned in LA was, don’t be proactive when it comes to your creative career. You have to be reactive. So don’t be chasing the managers, don’t be chasing the agents, don’t be chasing another talent. By doing that, you’ve already taken away your leverage and made yourself replaceable. And if anything, you focus on your craft, do it very well, and then the people that need you will find you interesting.

9:12 So do your craft well, but don’t necessarily go out and try to meet everybody or bag them on your next track. Well, yeah, so I have a chapter about that in the book, and it happened because I developed a relationship with a big music manager, and they told me to come out to LA and for us to have a meeting, and I thought that was gonna be our opportunity to solidify the relationship, and I went out there, and I rented a car and got a hotel room and did everything I had to do, and got a very rude awakening that in LA, meetings are flaky. Yes, doesn’t ever mean yes.

9:44 It means maybe, or most likely no. And you know, three hours before the meeting supposed to happen, I got, oh, something came up, let’s try again in a couple of weeks. And I’m like, I flew here just for the meeting, and I was very upset, and I called a friend, and you know Dominik, he’s a, he’s popular on YouTube as D-Trix, and he’s like, why are you having meetings? Why are you networking? He’s like, as long as you are replaceable, that’s why they can cancel meetings on you.

10:13 Mean egos. Focus on your craft. Do what you do and start doing it better than anyone else can do it, and then they won’t cancel meetings on you, because there’s nobody, there won’t be any other options. And I really changed my perspective, and I started approaching this like an athlete, which is simple. Just get better every single day, and the better you get and the longer you stick with it, the pool of competition shrinks.

10:36 You know, your first day you’re at the bottom with everybody else, and then slowly, the longer you stick with it and the longer you refine and polish your talents, you start to climb until you get to the bigger leagues, where there’s only a handful of you that can do what you do. Mmm, that’s super good advice. Hmm. Already. And what about Toronto?

10:54 What’s that vibe like? I’ve actually never been to Toronto. The greatest city in the world. It really is to me. It’s the world’s biggest small town.

11:02 It’s figuring out its identity. You know, it’s a very big city. It covers a lot of land. It’s called the six, because it’s a mega city now, with six different municipalities. So much like New York, we have boroughs, and we have different areas, and it’s the most multicultural place in the world.

11:22 In the context of it’s not just a place where everybody from around the world comes. It’s now you have a lot of kids like me that may look like they’re not from Toronto, but you know, we’re all, plus one of those, born and raised in Canada, and you’re gonna see a lot of ethnic diversity and all the kids that you’re seeing, we’re all born in Canada. We’re all children of immigrants, and not only from an ethnic perspective are we extremely diverse. From an economic perspective we’re very diverse.

11:46 So when I went to high school in the neighborhood I grew up in, in Rexdale, which is in the northwest corner of the city, I had a friend whose parents were lawyers, and they got to choose which car they drove to school every day. And then in the same circle of friends, my buddy worked at KFC, and all the money went to the mortgage. You know, he was contributing to the household at 15, and so that economic spectrum and that diversity really had an impact on me as well.

12:11 It allowed me to feel grateful for where I was. I had friends I used to study with in high school that were beating me at the math test, but they knew at the end of high school where I was gonna end, because they didn’t have the economic means to go to university, and that really stuck with me, in addition to just being exposed to all these different cultures. You know, my best friend growing up was from Trinidad, and the first birthday party everyone’s here was the Trinidad birthday party, and now every year I go to Trinidad, just ’cause it feels like home.

12:38 It feels like nostalgia. And sometimes when I, women in the States, they don’t get that. You know, they use terms like cultural appropriation, when there’s like, well, you’re a brown guy and you’re rapping, that’s black people’s culture, or, you know, if somebody uses a different hairstyle, if we use different languages. And I think what Toronto is, is really the future of what a multicultural society looks like. And London is very multicultural, but London is still intense, and I think there’s some divides in there, but sometimes London does give me that hand.

13:06 Once I was here at a McDonald’s just using the bathroom, and the Jamaican dude walked up to me and said, “Get down,” and “get down,” slang, fairly. “Hey, how you doing?” You know, it was not a formal greeting. It’s the type of slang you say to your homies, and in Punjabi. So you knew he grew up with a lot of Kentucky’s, and it’s more of an integrated were in, in society type situation, and Toronto has a lot of that.

13:28 So in my high school we had about 80 different languages represented, and you know there’s only a handful of white folks at my high school. And then when I taught in the same neighborhood, when I was an elementary school teacher, I never had a white student for the seven years that I taught. It was all new immigrants coming into the country, and it, really in Canada, doesn’t look at itself as a melting pot. It’s more like a salad bowl. Everyone comes, can stay who they are, and just makes a mix amongst everybody else, and everybody makes space for everybody.

13:58 You start to see the commonalities of people in the diaspora, in terms of, you know, my mom treats me the same way as my friend’s mom. It was from Somalia. His mom treats him, you know, like immigrant moms are very the same. Immigrant dads are the same, and we started to see those, that lineage and those connections, and that made us have a lot in common, and in addition to that, Toronto being one of the only major cities in Canada gives us our own little issues.

14:22 We think we’re the center of the universe. I recently had a meeting in LA with somebody who was also Canadian, from a small town, a smaller town, smaller city, Edmonton, and half an hour into the meeting she’s like, you’re such a Toronto boy, and I was like, that’s a stereotype. I probably live up to it, and it just comes from us being that one big city, and, you know, we think we’re like the best. Yeah, we’re like the only thing that matters sometimes. And, you know, we got them, and now with the, you know, world champion basketball…

14:48 I’m sorry, the world championship basketball team with the Raptors, and, you know, us doing super well in the music space with Drake, The Weeknd, Tory Lanez, Jessie Reyez, Shawn Mendes. We just have, we’re a creative hub. Great things are happening. Google is building a little society, Sidewalk Labs, out there. We have a growing tech space, and it’s a place where a guy like me can get a seat at the biggest tables.

15:10 And so when I think of, you know, having to do work in LA, that’s like a super small fish in a very crowded, muddy pond, and in Toronto it’s, they gave me a shovel and said, dig the pond. Let’s figure it out. So you mentioned Drake there, but you’ve also mentioned that Drake’s the kind of guy that doesn’t take you know, take all the air out of the city, doesn’t necessarily dominate, and allows room for the artists. Yeah, you explain that? Yeah, I mean, you know, oftentimes when, you know, especially him being the first artist to really penetrate internationally and put on for the city, he really had an opportunity to be the gatekeeper, and to be like, if you want this international status, and if you want to be a mainstream success, it’s got to be through me.

15:54 And he didn’t do that. You know, when other artists were finding their own lanes and coming up, he made space for them. Either he supported them and shared his platform with them, or he just completely stayed out of their way, and I think what that allowed was for us to build multiple pillars. And now, you know, in the hip-hop space, for example, Alanna is very popular, but the challenge there is like, all the artists have a very similar sound, and they all have a very similar lineage, but in Toronto, all the artists that are doing very well, none of them sound the same, and many of them haven’t even collaborated with each other.

16:30 So it’s this opportunity where you have, we have all these individual pillars holding up the city, so if tomorrow Drake decides to retire, we still have The Weeknd, who is one of the biggest R&B artists, or we still have Tory Lanez, who’s another hip-hop artist who’s been, you know, he’s just finished his own world tour recently. I’m in the pop space. We have Shawn Mendes, and, you know, we have Alessia Cara, who’s, you know, singing Disney soundtracks now, and if everyone has the space, and I think that way we’re not just a wave.

16:58 There’s not a certain sound that’s gonna be popular for a few years and it’s gonna fizzle out, and people can look for the next sound. It’s gonna be the city has had so much, and it’s been over-prepared for so long. In the moment, one of ours figured out a trampoline to bounce off of. He made space for other people to do the same over from there, because there was so much talent, and it was just waiting to kind of pop, and then Drake showed everyone whoa, wait a second, there’s gonna be great artists here.

17:22 And there was a whole deep talent pool there. There was, yeah, I think there’s a deep talent pool, but, but what, you know, Canada specifically doesn’t necessarily have, in comparison to the States, is the entrepreneurial spirit. You know, everyone’s working hard and trying to get hired. You know, everyone’s not, I know we don’t really, we don’t have too many Bill Gateses and too many Steve Jobses. Or, you know, we usually have our top minds get headhunted and work for these top companies.

17:46 And I think people didn’t know how to break through. We’ve had artists before. You know, we had Kardinal Offishall, he’s signed to a con. He had a couple of hits. We had K’naan, who you know, from my neighborhood, Rex toe, who ended up singing Waving Flag, which was the World Cup anthem for that season.

18:03 Might refresh west. He had a, yet, an international hit, Let Your Backbone Slide, in the 80s, but it was still requiring some level of mainstream American validation, or what have you. And I think when Drake made it, and when Drake took it to a whole new level and became the biggest artist in the world, and he left. He had them, you know, he moved to LA, and he did that. I think what he realized very quickly was how do I create a situation where people don’t have to leave?

18:31 And he started the OVO Fest, and the OVO Fest, the first year he had Eminem, Kanye West, Jay-Z as his headlining guests, and seven years later, his entire roster was Toronto artists. So he slowly, you know, he built credibility with this festival, and he, when he performed, he would always bring these top mainstream artists as a surprise guest, and the last year, most recently, his entire lineup was Toronto artists. So you can start to see when you zoom out the big blueprint, and what he’s been trying to do, and there’s been a couple other artists who have said it too, like, you know, we have to make sure that Toronto artists don’t have to leave and go out to LA to do it.

19:10 So I’m hoping I’m the last of the generations I have to do that. And we got plenty going on in the city where people can pay their bills with their creativity, being from Toronto, because we have a resilience, especially with the weather, especially with the challenges that we deal with, and we have a lot of additional assets with the multiculturalism. Being, you know, our progressiveness is 15-20 years ahead of the States. You know, we legalized gay marriage years and years and years ago.

19:35 You know, I recently did a commercial for Apple where I was told, don’t lean on multiculturalism, find something else to celebrate. And it helped me realize that, you know, everyone’s so comfortable being who they are, then now they can celebrate, bring who they want to be, you know? And if they want to be that, that, that, that posh dude, or that hipster, or that goth dude, or that skater boy, they can be whatever they want to be, and that’s how they’ll be seen more so than their ethnicity.

20:00 Yeah, that’s powerful. Talk to me if I, spoken word, because about six years ago on this show I had a guy in London named Sully Brakes. I don’t know if you ever heard of them, but he had a video that came out called “Why I Hate School But Loved It.” “You Owe Me Nothing, We’re Cool.” He was on a bunch of times early.

20:17 He’s interviewed me on the show. I just, his podcast a few weeks ago, but that was one of the first times I had heard a spoken word, maybe even in London, and slowly kept doing what he was doing. But I think a lot of people had hard time getting their head around what his spoken word is. Is it rap? No, it’s not.

20:33 It’s got music, and he also experimented with his own creative, and put some stuff to some beats and some didn’t. When people ask you, what’s spoken word? How do you explain it to them, and then, is that what you do, or do you do all sorts of other music as well? So how do you communicate it? Yeah, so I think from me, spoken word is a reaction to the fact that poetry is boring.

20:54 Yeah, you get a book of poetry and you read it, and you’re just like, why am I this is so boring? I have no idea why this person is writing these fragmented sentences, or I don’t know what’s happening, because if you can get a track, and then you realize, you know, poetry is like food, and if I show you a picture of a delicious pie, you know, you might be like, yeah, it looks delicious, but you’re not gonna know until you taste it. And poetry, 90% of the magic is from the poet, you know.

21:22 So hearing poetry as written, you know, by the poet and meant and performed the way it was meant to be performed, is what spoken word and slam poetry is. It’s that reaction to it, and that’s where you get all the emotion, you get all the color, you get all the vibrancy, you get the little, you know, informations at the right spots. So I think that for me is what really drew me to spoken word poetry. I was at a concert in a small town, the college town outside of Toronto called Hamilton, and it was a hip-hop concert, but the opening act was a spoken word poet, and to watch him perform, and he was completely free, because he wasn’t doing it on music, and you know, he was able to pronounce the words any way he wanted.

22:06 He was able to shout, scream, whisper, cry, and laugh and do all these things. Like, wow, there’s so much in these words that I would have never picked up on. And you know, most of our exposure to poetry is what we had. We were forced to read in high school and whether it was Shakespeare, and you don’t understand half the things he’s saying. So for me, spoken word was hear it from the horse’s mouth, and hear the magic that comes from it, and once you’ve heard it, then go ahead and read their book, and now you’ll have some more context.

22:39 Was Henry Rollins, one of the first guys that people knew, because he used to do that early on. He’s punk as well, and he’s a rock star. Yeah, energy and aggressive. Exactly. And I think definitely.

22:52 And I think what it also was, is, you know, for underrepresented communities, you know, it was a place to tell your stories. You know, I think people don’t even realize, especially even in the Black community. Like hip-hop in New York, you know, when it first came, it was shunned. It was such a small community. It wasn’t embraced as even Black culture at that time.

23:13 You know, they were listening to rhythm and blues and jazz and even rock. And, you know, what I think hip-hop and poetry was, is it was a reaction to also the lack of resources that you need to be creative. You know, if you want to start a rock band, you need resources. You need training and instruments and stuff. Or if you want to, you know, dance country music, you need space.

23:38 Just square dance and do it. Everything. And hip-hop culture was, you know, it’s kind of like the soccer of music. Soccer, all you need is something that looks like a ball, and just kick it around, and something that looks like a net. You don’t need any expensive equipment or training, ice skates and pads, or anything like that.

23:55 And hip-hop was like, you just need a story, you need a beat, and we all come, you know, pre-built with one, and share your story. You know, there is a close relationship between slam poetry and hip-hop, and I think hip-hop is a little bit more structured, and I mean it literally. You know, DJ Kool Herc in the ’70s was throwing parties, and while the people were dancing, he just kept bringing the record back so the music wouldn’t stop, and then he started chanting over the music, which became rap.

24:23 So I think from that perspective, you know, the poetry was sharing the important stories. The hip-hop was the fun escape. And you know, they didn’t have a lot of room in New York to have these parties, so they breakdanced, which was literally ten people standing around watching one person dance. You know, I’m on a piece of cardboard, you know, so you can see it. It was really a reaction to what they had around them.

24:48 And then during the break beats, yeah, exactly. So for me it was like, I started with spoken word always. No, agree. And I grew up as a fan of hip-hop, and then you know, my flavor of spoken word was literally rap without music. And then I got into writing spoken word with some music in the back, just kind of for some ambience and emotion, and instantly my work to snap on to the beat.

25:09 I had played percussion as a kid, to play the tabla, and I’d learn how to sing different religious hymns that my parents taught me in those classes, so I had some musical training that my parents didn’t realize was going to prep me for this world. And then, so hip-hop, which is a natural progression from there, but I started doing spoken word, and I was performing at the coffee shops and, you know, the open mics, and for me at that point I was working as a teacher. It was just something to do to impress girls.

25:33 Wow, there’s a, there’s a movie just came out of Netflix called Dolemite Is My Name. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s Eddie Murphy. You’re talking about this guy, which I had heard made references to before, but he kind of made these guys, kind of like, you might call them blaxploitation films back in the ’70s. But it was a guy who made his career in New York City, actually standing up and doing this kind of raw and raunchy spoken word stuff, and they were saying that it was kind of some of the building blocks for later rap and hip-hop, and they never knew his story, but it’s actually a really well-made movie, and, like, Wesley Snipes is in there, and Eddie Murphy, and Chris Rock.

26:05 And it’s just fascinating to realize that you know, it popped, like you said. It just started off with a break beat and some guy being an MC, and then it turned it to more, and then they learned how to loop those, be good, and then the breakdancing came out of it. And I’m a big fan of that. I’ve had a couple B-boys on here. Yeah.

26:22 And then all that culture, DJing into graffiti, and you know, just tenets of hip-hop. Yeah. And you think about, like, you know, these were underrepresented communities and underserved communities, and, you know, as a school teacher, I can tell you, you know, the only times the kids are fighting is ’cause they don’t have the words. You know, they get frustrated, and they need to get something out, and then they’ll throw a fist. And, you know, these guys live in challenging neighborhoods, and if there was somebody there that could articulate their struggle, you know, and that’s the thing you have to realize, you know, hip-hop isn’t telling somebody your story.

26:54 It’s helping them formulate their own story. You know, that’s why I liked Ice-T. Yeah, exactly. That’s why he left dance. All the white boys in the crowd at first didn’t make sense to him, but that’s what they were.

27:04 They were articulating the anger. He was telling him their story. Right? Yeah. It happens for anybody.

27:09 Exactly. And he’s puttin’ in and that was his gift, and he was helping them put their ideas and words. And I think that’s nothing new. That’s been happening since the beginning of time. And, you know, being able to do that, I think it became almost kind of like a valve, venting release for communities.

27:27 You know, that’s what art is. I think art, you know, art is taking your pain and creating something beautiful from it. And when people can express, or feel like someone else can express their feelings, you’re saying that that leads to just more harmony, at least some more harmony. But it also, I think it’ll, it’ll create a an exponential growth in storytelling as well. So it’s, is it, you know, walking through your office, you know, see a picture of Muhammad Ali.

27:56 You know, it’s you you hear his story and you see your story in you, or you gain the boldness to share your story from watching him do that, or you know, watching him reject a gold medal, you know, for a greater good that might be for you walking away from a paycheck, sort of greater good. And it’s, you know, we learn from each other. We know we’re tribal animals, where we, you know, we exist in relation to each other. So I think, you know, when it came to certain communities that didn’t have the education and all the art required, certain resources and education to create, you know, hip-hop was a saving grace for that, especially for all, you know, the vast majority of people are underrepresented, and and and not living in the best conditions.

28:39 So for me, and they, you know, the first time I ever put out was called voice for the voiceless, and it was telling stories that other people weren’t able to tell for whatever reasons, and I always viewed it that way. I viewed it kind of as the responsibility, whereas, like, I know how to put words together. I’m also working with young kids, so I know how to package information in a way that’s digestible. You know, let me tell stories that other people aren’t able to tell.

29:01 And you very, very, very quickly realize that we’re all in the same boat. We’re all dealing with the exact same things. It’s all our anxieties towards the future. It’s all our regrets towards the past. It’s all the fact that we’re not spending enough time in the present.

29:15 And you know, that story gets told in a million different ways, and if you’re able to articulate that, and sometimes you got to be the fun stuff. I always think about Black Eyed Peas. You know, “Tonight’s gonna be a good night.” They’re not telling you about their night. They’re giving you, you’re handsome, for your, what you need to be listening to while you’re pre-drinking with your friends or getting ready in front of the mirror.

29:38 You know, that’s what they’re giving you. Or when Jay-Z and Rihanna, “We’re gonna run this town tonight,” again. They’re not bragging to you. They’re giving you an anthem. They’re giving you some of the sing-along, and be a part of.

29:49 And it’s the same reason we go to sporting events. You want to be a part of something bigger than us, and these anthems and these songs, aloud, that when we go to concerts, when we sing them in a car, that we’re a part of them, that everybody’s connected to. And I think, you know, whatever the national anthem is, it’s the same thing. And there’s something to be said about using our voices. You know, I think that’s a direct line to our heart, and I think that’s why so few people are hesitant to do that.

30:15 So if you just, you know, if I start off the poem and that gets somebody else to start off their own poems, and you know, we’re in a good space. Yeah, there’s like these weird spiritual practices that we’ve put on the shelf, because, you know, religion has, it’s all connotations, but we used to gather and sing together, right? We do all of these things that we don’t do anymore, and then it comes out in football anthems, because we have a need to do it, right?

30:38 And connect. Never thought about that. Going through the heart. I want to hear your story about, like, quitting being a school teacher, but you mentioned your parents first. You can tell me about being first generation.

30:48 What’s it like, you know, wherever your parents are from, what are their thoughts? You said that your parents are kind of similar to the Smalley parents. What does it set you up for in your life? Yeah, and how does that make Toronto different? Yeah.

31:01 So my parents are both from Punjab, which is a northern state in India, but also a state in Pakistan. So when India and Pakistan broke up, the bigger chunk of Punjab ended up going to Pakistan. Actually, when India and Pakistan broke up, that was the largest human migration in human history, so 25 million people. You know, a lot of bloodshed, a lot of challenges that went with that. So my parents are from the India side, up and, uh, job, but they have some roots that would have gone over.

31:29 So the tattoo on my neck is the original, open job, before it broke up, and Bunge means five, Bob may never. So to be from Punjab is to be from the area of the five rivers. And they, my mom came to Canada in the ’70s. You got sponsored over by her brother, who, I guess, found some work in Canada, and he started bringing his family over, and then she she was told she was gonna marry my dad. That’s kind of how it worked, you know, arranged marriages, and that’s what got him into the country.

32:00 And my dad would say University in India. He went to Jabbar University, had a master’s degree in economics, but never had an opportunity to use it in Canada. He worked odd factory jobs until he got his taxi license, and he drove a cab until retirement, and always stressed education on me, and with the limited tools that both of them had, you know, their goals were simple: make money, bring more family over, and set your kids up for a quote-unquote better life.

32:32 And for them, better life just meant more money and hopefully something that has some safety and security. So the joke with all immigrant kids is all your parents want you to be, a doctor, lawyer, engineer, and that’s one job, you know. The Liebreich says the same thing. His parents are from Ghana, and like, this, if they want this, want you to be then that’s exactly why we connected. That’s what immigrant narrative is.

32:55 Come here, you know, we’ll scrub the toilets, we’ll work at the gas stations, we’ll drive the cabs, so you can be the doctor, lawyer, engineer, and then everything will be fine, you have to live for, after, happily ever after. And I, and I don’t hold it against him, within their limited scope of thinking, that’s the best thing you know. I’m the first entrepreneur in my family. We, you know, we never had that. And I think for me, I followed the narrative.

33:20 You know, my dad’s just like, stay in school, and I’ll always take care of you. That’s all you need to do. And you know, I have two older sisters, and they stuck to the script much better than I did. And, you know, they did really well academically, and thankfully we did well academically, just because we had learning styles where we’re auditory and visual learners. So when the teacher is just writing on the board and lecturing the class, we were able to learn.

33:46 Most kids that struggled in school were kinesthetic. They need to use their hands. You need to play with the Cheerios to do their math or figure things out that way, and that’s not always set up in school. So we were fortunate that this type of learners that we were. So I was a straight-A student without doing any homework or getting any help from my parents, but I had warm food waiting for me every day when I got home, and had two parents, and I had a strict bedtime, which is literally all you need as a child to, you know, have a little bit of structure.

34:17 And my sisters went to University of Toronto, and then they both got into commerce, and now they both are, I don’t know, what they do, like supply chain. They have corporate jobs, and I didn’t go to U of T. I went to York, which is a little bit more of a party school, and I was already kind of deviating from the script, and I originally was gonna you know, to keep my parents happy, get an MBA, ’cause I figured an MBA is the path to employability, and, you know, a family friend got an MBA and got a really cool job at Ford.

34:49 I was like, why don’t I just do that too? And it was my sister. She recommended, she said, you know, you work, I’ve worked with a lot of kids, and that growing up in a lot of youth camps, and she’s like, why don’t you explore being a teacher? I think you’d have a lot more fun. And they’re like, that sounds way more fun than you know, an MBA.

35:05 I was doing my degree in IT, so it was a lot of math-heavy coding, and, you know, it wasn’t the most fun, but I was doing well at it. And yeah, I went to apply for Teachers College and faked a lot of hours in the classroom. We got fake reference letters and just applied and got in. Probably benefited from a little bit of reverse racism, and I was a diversity entry, probably. And I went to Teachers College, and it was cool.

35:35 My parents weren’t happy. My dad was like, you’re gonna tie shoelaces and wipe white kids’ noses for a living. He wasn’t happy that I didn’t go to U of T either. Right? But again, it’s within their scope.

35:46 You know, they don’t, at least you’re a professional, but you’re not the highest of the professionals. Yeah. If I’m allocated less, the pays less, and there’s a little bit more labor than they wanted me to do. They, they, they wanted me to be a just a straight, neck-up, white-collar exec with a cubicle. Is something, I don’t know what they wanted, but the pay is definitely less, but they looked at it like, well, it’s a government job.

36:07 Government jobs are pretty secure. And then we know, once you get into it, you realize, oh, this isn’t just inspiring kids and lighting a fire in them. It’s, you know, it’s got, with any job, it’s got its politics there. There’s got a lot of BS before work, a lot of BS after work, you know, a lot of things stacked up against you, a lot of government funding cuts, you know, new politicians come in and make your life more difficult, and expectations increase, the PR battle between, you know, when teachers go on strike and what the government’s able to do, and be like, they’re spoiled, they’re already overpaid, and you know, you end up becoming these full-time babysitters and an integral part of the economy, because if teachers go on strike, we’re parents, gonna put their kids for parents to go to work, and you, you realize, ah, the amount of pressure and what comes with that.

36:57 So it lost its fun very quickly, and at the same time I discovered spoken word poetry and just viewed it as something fun to do. Again, excuse to meet girls and perform after, after work, you know, ways to spend my weekend, and it took a life of its own. I think when I realized that there, it was a powerful tool to share stories that were being shared. I think up until then everybody complained about representation, you know, we don’t see enough people that look like us on TV, we don’t you know, hear these voices.

37:24 We don’t hear these stories. Why is everything based around white folks? And I think for me this is the first time I was empowered to not complain, and just do something, and be a voice, and share a story. And I would share the most interesting things that I, uh, discovered, you know, when I learned about the relationships between Somali pirates and the toxic waste that came ashore, that came from the tsunami that happened in Indonesia. You know, realizing, and I’m like, this is a story that needs to be told, so I wrote a song about it.

37:53 Or, you know, if I took a deep dive in the Israel-Palestine conflict, it’d be like, whoa, this is not black and white. Let’s write a song about it. Or if I learned about Punjabi truck drivers in my community going down south, having unprotected sex with sex workers and infecting their unborn children with HIV. So these kids are doomed before they’re born. Like, this needs to be talked about.

38:12 And I really looked at it from that lens. And at the same time, I had a job, so I was like, I’m good, and every struggling artist I knew, and full-time artist I knew, which was a struggling artist, I’m like, I don’t want that life. You know, I was, I didn’t have grit back then. I didn’t have a work ethic. Guys, no, no, not at all.

38:28 Okay, not at all. Maybe my last year at university, when I knew I was getting into Teachers College, I was able to turn it up a little bit. That I had a why, but before that, I was just cutting corners. I was smart enough not to work hard, and this was something that was exciting me to do, so I’d work hard at it, but I was working hard at it still with an ego. Like, I’m not a sellout.

38:51 I don’t need no money for this, you know. I can fund it myself, and all these artists I’m watching them struggle, and I don’t want to live like them, so I’m good. That’s an ego, not principles. There you go. Definitely.

39:03 Explain that. Yeah, it’s, you know, very often what I realized is when I started, needed to get paid, you know, it was making a choice between you feed your wallet or you feed your ego, and the ego’s insatiable, you know, in many ways. And what I realized as an artist was, you know, to say you’re not a sellout, it’s just, you know, trying to appease some invisible audience of people who haven’t even noticed you yet, let alone are judging you, and also just running away from challenges, seeing these full-time artists, and mainly who I don’t want to live like them.

39:37 It seems hard, not realizing that the universe was gonna make it all happen that way anyway. Frame. I spent a summer in the Bay, were living and working with a full-time rapper, and again I was faking it. I had, I had a salary coming in, so I was, I was okay financially, but I was sleeping on this floor because he was, he was, he was roughing it, and even he came from a well-to-do family, and he had kind of rejected their support to rough it. So reverse, these two boys, just for roughing it, knowing at any moment, if we need to, I can pull out some money from the ATM, you get a hotel if I needed to.

40:10 So you’re laughing at yourself to a certain extent. Kind of at that point, I was, I thought I was roughing it, but I really wasn’t. It was, I was just testing my limits, but he was working really hard, and he was paying his rent through his music. And every day he’d wake up and just, you know, rap outside the BART station, or he’d go to a concert and negotiate with the promoter, and really, hey, let me be the opener to your opener, give me 50 bucks, you know, something small.

40:35 And always made him a deal they couldn’t refuse, and the money would add up, and then he’d make enough money to pay his rent, which was 200 bucks a month, ’cause he just rented a room. And then after that, just made more money to party. And I was like, wow, like, what a life this was. Supercool, and the freedom of it. He woke up every day and decided his day, and for somebody who was plugged into the nine-to-five, that just felt like the most liberating thing ever, and I wanted it.

41:01 I wanted that freedom, and you know, the summer came, came and went, and September hit, and I couldn’t get back into the Mojo. Normally, you know, your summers reset you, re-energize you. You’re excited for September’s first day of school, just like the kids, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t get back into it. And I was working with a bunch of different people in music, and one producer came up to me and said, I can get us a deal. You know, we could write some music for some of these new artists, and it’ll pay like 120 grand.

41:29 That’s more money than you make in two years. And you know, I was also, I was living at home at this point, so I was very irresponsible with my money. I had, you know, I was investing in penny stocks. 2008 came, wiped that all the way. You know, was buying things that didn’t need, but it didn’t matter, ’cause I was living at home, and in our culture you don’t leave home.

41:48 You just get married and take over the house. So I was living in the mortgage-free household, and just literally my entire salary was allocated to paying off debt and buying things I didn’t need, and the debt got unmanageable, and I was like, I need one miracle swoop to get rid of it, and this record deal sounds like it’s going to be the thing. So I did what any, you know, quote-unquote responsible adult would do. I quit my job and jumped headfirst into this record deal situation.

42:20 You’re like, mid-20s, mid-twenties, yeah. Okay. If you ever advise people to quit their jobs and go for something else, ’cause like, we both have experience of doing that. Um, yeah. Definitely, but don’t, I quit my job thinking I was making more money, and that was a promise that I kind of made myself, was like, I’m never gonna leave my job until the art would pay me more.

42:40 And I think what I probably did, that I put that out into the universe, but I also probably said that around these people, and what happened was this deal turned out to be fraudulent. It didn’t exist. It took me a year of denial to figure that out. So what ended up happening was, and I had moved out and lived I was living on my own at that point in the condo that I originally had as an investment property, my rainy-day investment property. And I moved in, kicked out the tenant, so that was no longer a source of income for me anymore.

43:12 Now I was just burning money out of my bank account, living off credit cards and line of credit. Those all ran out. Sort of borrowing money from people, because in my head, at any moment, the cheque from the deal, the first half, 50% signing bonus, was coming, not realizing that it wasn’t coming. The deal was never there. This producer was trying to run some sort of Ponzi scheme.

43:34 I’m not sure what he was trying to do. This is standard in the business. Now that I’m in the business, no, no, no, not at all. It’s so weird, like the amount, some of the biggest deals I’ve done, a bit, based on handshakes, and it’s been okay. I think no, this was somebody.

43:57 I think the thought that saw the potential in me and thought that he could accelerate things if he borrowed from this person, gave it to me, and then we would have earned some more than he would have paid. This first one with that person, and I think they just came from a place where their parents probably didn’t do things aboveboard, and they were just continuing that lineage. And I view them with compassion now. I don’t, I don’t hold any resentment towards them, because what they did do was they pushed me off the cliff, right?

44:24 They got you into the biz. So yeah, I mean, for the business, which I wouldn’t have never done. I was too hesitant, and they pushed me off the cliff, and I had to find my wings before I hit the ground. And they always say, like, if you knew what was involved in doing X, Y, Zed, you would never start. If I knew it was to be involved, for doing a show like this, I’d, just kidding.

44:40 Me, it’s like a hundred X harder, longer than I ever thought it would be. Exactly. But my naivete, thank God, pushed me into it, because that’s the thing, right? Journey. And they’ve got it.

44:49 You got a view. You got to be a little foolish to do it. And, and that’s when. Yeah, so pretty much into 2011, I was a $80,000 in debt, no sources of income, mortgage payment due, and he’s a career not advanced. I mean, the music career was advancing.

45:07 Humble the Poet was making strides. He wasn’t making pay your mortgage strides. He was making, let’s take my homeboys out to dinner after the gig strides. Like, you know, I get 200 bucks after a show or something, you know, and I get a show once a month like this, and when I was a teacher, I didn’t care. Like, it was bonus money, and literally, I make all my friends come with me, and then I’d pay for the night.

45:32 But when that became my only source of income, it was not, it’s clearly not enough. And at this point, you know, this producer, I considered him a brother. I never, you know, I probably leaned into that too much, because never having a brother with my own, and I was heartbroken off of that. I just had ended a relationship, as well as heartbroken off of that, so it was just I felt like I was just completely in the dumps, and how do you come back from that, and are some of those lessons in these books?

45:58 Yeah, definitely. This book’s ended up being written because you’re picking up all these life lessons along the way. Yeah, I mean, so what ended up happening was, you know, I’m, I’m $80,000 in debt. I have no idea how to earn any money, and my ego’s still super prominent. So the first thing I’m doing is I’m not telling anybody, and I’m hiding from the world, and I’m drinking NyQuil every night and every day, and it’s laying in bed, and legitimately hoping when I wake up in the morning the cavalry would have saved the day.

46:35 I don’t. And at this point, you know, at least for the previous year, I believed it was gonna be the check from the deal. Then when I realized that there is no deal, like, there legitimately is no deal, so that check’s not coming. Now I’m just wishful thinking, somebody and I’m not even telling anybody where I’m at. It’s gonna come save the day.

46:53 Some email pops up that says, hey, yeah, hey, love what you do, here’s a big check, and that was my life for about three weeks. And I lost a bunch of weight. I wasn’t picking up anybody’s phone calls, and I was feeling, and there were people that were very close to me that were like, hey, like, you know, when they find out about it, they’d be like, you got to sell your place, man. Like, you got a, you might have to move home, or, you know, maybe you can get your job back.

47:23 And I just pushed them all the way. Like, you don’t believe in me, you don’t think I can do this. Like, off, you know, I mean, I pushed them away. And I think that three weeks was necessary in terms of healing. I needed to heal, because a lot did happen in a short period of time, as well as all the answers had already been presented to me.

47:46 You know, the truth is, you’ve got three choices when it hits the fan. Choice number one, do nothing, things get worse, which I hadn’t been doing. And then choice number two is pray for a miracle and watch things get worse, which I had also been doing. And then step three is recognize that you’re in trouble, and get uncomfortable, and make necessary changes to slowly improve your situation. And I think that’s where I had finally got to, and I was like, okay, this isn’t my fault necessarily, but many, many elements of this are my fault.

48:23 I need to take responsibility. In the moment I take responsibility, I’ll have some control over this, and that’s when I began to take personal responsibility. I stopped looking at who betrayed me, who lied to me. They started paying attention to what were my expectations. Why, why was I able to, why was I believing all this stuff?

48:43 And then realizing very simple things, like, wow, that you watched that person run scams on other people, you just literally thought you were the exception to the rule. You thought that he viewed you as a better you. He viewed you as a brother, so you weren’t gonna get scammed by him, even though you saw him running scams for other people. And realizing that actions scream, words whisper, and I was paying attention to words over actions, because the word sounded nicer and it fit my narrative of cutting corners and taking the easy route.

49:15 And the actions and the truth that was always written on the wall was, this is completely possible, but it’s gonna be very hard. And what made you flip that switch? Because a lot of people would just keep on with the NyQuil, or they would have never had that realization for 10 years, or they would need a mentor or a book or a movie. Or I think it was, I think it was the rest, also a Jay Cole song I started playing. I always had music playing, and it’s in it.

49:44 The song is called “Dollar in a Dream,” and it just said, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna let this make you turn bitter and cold? And now the only groan you’re gonna do is “Oh, aw,” you’re gonna flip that last dollar and turn into a dream, you know, watch a pawn become a king. And I think that just kind of made me just be like, what am I going to do now? Am I going to, because I was bitter and cold, and I think he just kind of called me out.

50:13 Am I gonna stay bitter and cold, or am I gonna flip this? Can I flip this? And I got real aggressive. I remember I got in the sink-or-swim mode, like, you’re here to survive, do what you have to do. And the biggest thing right now is you’re not gonna go broke and die.

50:30 You’re not gonna starve to death right now. Your biggest fears embarrass me. You just don’t want to tell everybody, oh, smart Humble the Poet, who writes all these deep lyrics, made all these horrible, basic, day-one mistakes. Because the first person I told, that I told the story to, it was like, you didn’t see that coming? I could have told you that guy was a crook from day one.

50:48 You’re like, yeah, you know, hindsight’s 20/20, but nobody was saying that to me while that was happening. You know, or the guys that I knew from the streets were like, that’s an everyday occurrence out here, because I didn’t have the street smarts that these guys had. And then I started to realize what gaps I had, and it got to the point where I was like, okay. There had been these brief moments when I was trying to get into Teachers College, when I was trying to get hired, a future where I stepped it up, where I believed in my head, when someone said to me, while only 2% of graduates from Teachers College get hired in their first year, and my mindset was, well, 2% have a name, and one of those names can be me.

51:25 I’d like, this has existed for me, but only in these minor pockets, that intense. And once I got in, future college, I went back to coasting. I was like, I need to reconnect with that side of me, you know, what exists past the 40%? You know, like, words. David Goggins.

51:41 And I printed out all these. They were not positive affirmations. They were just straight-talk advice, and I posted them all over my apartment. Example of one of them, or two of them: you want a vacation, go back to your day job. Sink or swim.

51:57 Whatever you think comes to life. You want it, work for it. Your thoughts, your thoughts dictate your actions. Motivation is not lead to action. Action leads to motivation.

52:11 You only make the shots you take. So it was, you know, nothing was cuddly, nothing was comfortable, everything was just straight. So I would just be, work, work, work, work, work, effort, effort, effort, effort. That’s it. That’s the only thing that’s gonna get you out of this.

52:26 And remembering, years ago, meeting this real estate mogul, who, you know, who owned a bunch of property in Canada, and you know, probably one of the few billionaires that exists in the country, and running into him in a restaurant once, and being like, how did you do it? How did you get rich? And he said it doesn’t come from making money. It comes from not spending money. And just remembering that thing, that he was an old Italian man, and you guys, I saved money.

52:56 I didn’t spend money. That’s how I got rich. And a thing to myself, okay, I don’t know how to make money right now, but I definitely know where I’m spending it. So, you know, cut up all the credit cards. Like, all my equipment, sold it all on Craigslist.

53:10 Look at the apartment, be like, crap, like, this is an artist’s apartment. I had to pay a thousand bucks to get it painted to make it look neutral again, and then sell it. You know, it took a big loss on it, but I had to sell it, paid back, and called everybody I owed money to. I have made, of friends and family, called them, “Levin, Billy, look, I owe you money. I don’t have your money.

53:30 I don’t know how to get you your money, but I’m not gonna avoid you.” Then you’re not gonna see me taking any vacations. I will figure it out. I promise I’m not gonna be that guy who dodges his responsibilities. I’m not that guy anymore.

53:42 And sold my place, paid back my people first, and I’m proud to say I paid back everybody, every single dime. Then started focusing on chipping away at that credit-card debt and that line of credit debt, and baby steps, baby steps. Took four years, and I got my bank account to zero. End of 2014. That’s powerful, man, and this action is giving you motivation, is giving you confidence.

54:04 Confidence. I think also, there was a lot of, there’s still a lot of insecurity, feeling like a failure, a lot of regret, a lot of, like, you bonehead, this is so avoidable, why did you do this? A lot of maybe we should go back to work. You know, a few years into it, I, I did go back to my principal and said, hey, and even then my ego allowed me to be like, I need, definitely, hey, I missed the kids. I missed, I missed the environment.

54:32 I want to come back, and this was probably again August, so, like, I don’t want to go back in September, start getting paid, and what she said to me was, we would love to have you back, and your spot’s available, but it’ll be very challenging for me to put you in a room in September. Can you wait till January? Nothing, yeah, yeah, no problem. And then I walked out over there being like, you’re not going back now. And I got, you, that intentionally, or nothing?

54:57 Did she do that intentionally? No, she didn’t. She wanted, well, I think what it was is she probably, because what I did was I took a leave of absence. I didn’t officially quit. I didn’t officially resign, so what they do is they take a temporary teacher.

55:10 So very similar to when a teacher gets pregnant, don’t put a temporary teacher in their spot, even if it’s a nine-month thing. So these people are called long-term occasional teachers. So what it is, is you know, her jobs, the principals to shuffle around all these teachers, and she just set it all up. Words like, “Alright, this here’s an LTO that’s there for Mr. Singh right now, and I can’t move the balance, but I can change things up in January.” Like, that’ll give her more time to kind of look at the whole thing.

55:37 And I worked at a very big school with 70 teachers, so I can understand it wasn’t easy for her. And I came to her with a “no,” but I told myself, when I walked out of that room, like, you’re not going back. And that’s when things kind of ramped up. And I said, “It’s Humble the Poet. Tell death,” and like, so you know, you’re gonna die in three months.

55:54 Are you gonna do this forever? But you will die. Humble the Poet, you will do nothing else for the rest of your life. But we don’t know how long are you gonna be alive. Powerful statement.

56:04 It was been ended, but I meant it. That’s the thing, I meant it. At this point, at this point, it was, you know, ribs were touching back against the wall, and I started looking like, all right, cool. I sold all my stuff. I moved back home.

56:15 You know, my parents obviously were happy to have me back, because they never wanted me to leave in the first place. But you know, I still had to deal with a little bit of shame and guilt that they were putting on me, because it’s like, you had a great job, you threw it all away for this. And I did. And at this point, normally I would have fought back, but I realized, I deserve it. I made this mess.

56:34 I have to own it, and had to own the consequences of this mess. That’s your tough lesson. Managed, very tough lesson. Yeah. And I promised myself no more complaining, that nothing good was coming from it.

56:44 Just quit complaining completely. And what ended up happening was, shirt, dev, about complaining there. Yeah, over, overachieve, under complaint. What does that mean? Or another Breakfast Club.

56:54 Yeah, when you, when you, when you don’t complain, good things happen. Good things have, you know, I challenge people to go 24 hours without complaining, and they will see an instant improvement in their quality of life. And that sounds like an infomercial, but I’m not selling you anything. Why does that work? Our thoughts are the paintbrush that paints our lives, and we don’t realize that, and we don’t realize that how we see life is what impacts our emotions, because there’s more than one way to see life, and we’ve been trained to see everything so binary.

57:30 Good, bad, wonderful, evil, you know, beneficial, burdensome. And it’s not, this is a spectrum. There’s so much that exists in between, and you know, for me, I realized that after reading The 50th Law by 50 Cent, which, you know, showed that, you know, the this man had mastered the art of opportunism. This guy got shot nine times, and then, you know, he used the fact that he had to hide from his would-be killers to come out, yeah, to create an album and to market it, yeah, and create a mystique, you know.

58:08 So even in a hospital bed, he was seeing, how can I flip this? You know, how can I flip this to a dollar? And you realize, that was the hustler mindset. How can I profit off this? And it was a healthy opportunism that I realized from this.

58:21 And you know, now that I was, you know, now that I was resetting myself, I was like, okay, well, how do I earn money? So I started reaching out to artists, and, well, how do you pay your bills? And you’re rapping full-time, what are you doing? And then, you know, some would not share game, others would. Others were open books, and one artist in LA was like, I sell t-shirts out of my shows.

58:44 He goes, say yes to every show, don’t even get paid to perform, because go onstage and win the crowd, and then sell out your t-shirts. Sell out your merch. They want something to take home with them. And I was like, that’s really cool. And then I tried to start designing some t-shirts and selling them online, because I wasn’t getting a lot of shows at that point.

59:03 At the same time, we’re trying to create more music, so that opportunities to perform, the studio engineer I was working with, he had other jobs and other responsibilities, so he couldn’t do what I needed on a full-time basis. I didn’t have money to hire anybody else. My video guy, he was having marriage troubles at that time. He stopped picking up his calls, so I didn’t have any reliable team to create content, and I didn’t have money to hire people. And then, um, that’s when I was also, I began working with Lilly Singh.

59:31 She’s trying to, she’s Toronto-based. How’d you hook up with her? She reached out to me. She’s like, hey, I’m starting to make stuff on YouTube. At that point, I had, like, four videos on YouTube, my music videos.

59:42 I was dropping something like once every six months, and in the Punjabi community, that put me on there. Made me one of the top dogs there. There’s only four or five people doing it at the time, and she’s like, hey, I want to make some music with you, and she went to a song about something, and actually I said no, because she’s talking about some local thing that was happening in her dance world, and I didn’t know anything about it, but, uh, which starting comedy videos.

1:00:05 We kind of became friends, and she had asked me to be in some of her videos, and I did. I asked you to be in one of my music videos, and she did it. So we developed a friendship from that, and we were both full-time, were the only two people who weren’t viewing this as a hobby. Nice, and that makes a big difference, right? It’s a huge difference.

1:00:21 You need to, you need to be around people who are taking it as serious as you. You know, there’s a lot of people, it would be nice to be a full-time artist. They want to be full-time artists. You need to be around people who need it. You know, it’s a millennial dream, that we should, we should be able to, the entitlement that we should be able to live our passion.

1:00:40 But what you’ll realize very quickly, as you get into it, is it’s only the people who survive are the obsessed. You know, they’re not passionate, they’re obsessed. They don’t have a choice. But we’ve been taught, “subsection is unhealthy.” Humble, right?

1:00:52 It is unhealthy. That doesn’t, that doesn’t make it any less existence. You know, hey, if I’m obsessed with something, I can’t flip the switch off. I’m obsessed, and she is an obsessed person, and she brought it to my attention. She’s like, figure out what you can do by yourself.

1:01:08 And I was reading David Thoreau’s “Self-Reliance” at this point, because I spent all my time leaning on other people, leaning on that producer to be my way out with this record deal, leaning on my employers to give me paychecks. And now I had left the zoo, in the safety of it, and the constraints of it, and I was in the jungle, and yeah, I was free, like my buddy in the Bay, but I was, you know, I was open to predators. I had to hunt my own food, had to figure it out.

1:01:35 And she was doing the same, and she’s like, figure out what you can do by yourself. And she’s like, I got my one tripod, I got my camera, I shoot my own videos, I edit them, and put them out. I’m not waiting on anybody. The work gets done. It’s not all on me.

1:01:49 The work doesn’t get done. It’s all on me. She’s like, what can you do now that I can write? And she was so right. I think I don’t know what to write about.

1:01:56 She, like, you’re making excuses, just right. And, you know, if you’re right, I’ve been writing rhymes, and I’m an intricate lyricist, and to be like, okay, now, and poetry is the same thing. This little flow and a rhythm to it. Now, just, just write. Just write a paragraph about anything.

1:02:13 And, you know, for an MC, that’s, that’s, that’s easy. You know, you know, like, you know, as I said, you ran a half marathon. If someone’s like, run down the block and grab a coffee, it is light working comparison. So I started writing about what I’ve been thinking about all this time, all these lessons I have been learning, because I was seeking advice from everybody and being very critical of the advice they were giving me. You know, first I’d be like, well, who are you to tell me anything?

1:02:42 B, that doesn’t sound pragmatic. Of people, you know, the Tumblr quotes. You know, God doesn’t close the door without leaving a window open, or there’s there’s always something better waiting for you, or even like J.K. Rowling’s, you know, rock bottom was the foundation that I built myself up on. And that would be like, how do I even know I’ve hit rock bottom?

1:03:02 Yesterday felt, you know, bad. Today feels worse than tomorrow. And it’s like, I don’t think this stuff is too fluffy. And so that will feel that way. That’s where you felt then.

1:03:11 Well, now, now I’m the guy who’s providing the content that’s not fluffy. Right? You read my books, there’s no fluff, you know? I, and there’s no positivity. There’s pragmatism.

1:03:22 I exist in practicality, because I needed that. We’re gonna need to be inspired. I need to get paid. I needed to pay off my debt, and, you know, I, my self-esteem was in the gutter. I didn’t want to speak to women.

1:03:35 I didn’t want to date. I didn’t want to have a social life. My friends were getting married. I didn’t want to go to the weddings. They couldn’t afford to put money in the card.

1:03:42 My nephews were born and having birthday parties. They couldn’t afford to buy him gifts. bachelor parties. They couldn’t go on trips. I couldn’t go, and then sometimes friends would book the tickets for me, and I didn’t want their charity, and I just felt like trash.

1:03:57 And I wanted to get out of this place. I desperately needed to get out of this place, and I only was able to take pragmatic advice from people. You don’t like positivity, pot, this is fluff. Didn’t see much of it these days. It just doesn’t do anything for anybody.

1:04:11 I don’t see them. I don’t see the necessity. I think, if anything, it goes back to this binary view of life, this positivity, negative. You know, like, life is what it is, and how you choose to look at it is what it’s going to be, and I think probably the first person that gave me some advice that wasn’t it wasn’t immediately useful to me, but it was dead-on. It was Ryan Blair, who’s a very successful entrepreneur out of LA, and he’s like, imagine turning a giant wheel made out of stone, and he goes, the first time you turn the wheel, it’s so hard.

1:04:46 He goes, when you make your second turn, it’ll be a little bit easier. You see, if you keep doing it, eventually that wheel will turn by itself, and all you got to do is supervise the wheel. He goes, that’s how your business is gonna grow. He goes, it gets hard, and he gets a little bit easier, a little bit easier, and then eventually it’ll almost be on autopilot. And everyone’s gonna think you’re an overnight success, but they weren’t there to see you start that wheel.

1:05:11 And I think what that allowed me to realize is, it’s like, this is, in a sense, I cannot skip steps. In this, this is essential. I have to earn every penny, crawl and dig to find the light at the end of the tunnel. When did you first look back and say, I’m making it? When was the first, you know, concrete example where even you couldn’t deny, wait a second, I got something here?

1:05:36 I got critical mass. Probably when I walked away from the first set of book deals. I was able to walk, I was able to walk away from a record deal. Later on, the feature, like a real record deal, came from the real big company, and I was able to not be starry-eyed and be like, this is, I’m, you know, because record deals, even the good ones, are bad, right? So there wasn’t a yes to that.

1:06:04 Later on, I had a book deal that came my way, and I was able to say no to that. You self-publish your first book, and then it got picked up later? Yeah, so Unlearn. So what I was doing was, I was writing every day on Facebook, light lessons that I was learning. A lot of style blogs, done like a few hundred words or more, a few hundred words.

1:06:21 Okay, which was easy for you after you write complex lyrics? You felt that e2e, easier? It was, it was very, and I, and I didn’t, I wouldn’t proofread. I literally would type and hit send, and I didn’t care. Comments would tell me, all, you misspelled.

1:06:33 I didn’t, didn’t care. I’ve had best-selling authors in here who said, yeah, my first book had a bunch of typos, who cares? No, it turns them out later. My first book that still has typos, even in the best-selling copies, especially in Canada. If the still is that a lesson in itself?

1:06:49 Yeah, it doesn’t matter. Perfect is the enemy. Have done okay. That’s not a big deal. And also, I mean, it’s, but, and I know now that people like Humble the Poet because I sound like I’m speaking to them, and I might be discussing complex ideas and making them sound light.

1:07:04 But the big thing is, I don’t try to act smarter than people, so maybe there’s a charm to my spelling mistakes, because they realize I’m just like them. But I wrote blog style, and the goal was to write every day. That’s it. And I had read an FAQ from somebody who had written a daily blog, and question number one was, what if you run out of things to write about? And their answer was, just start, and let’s see if you find other things to write about, and he was absolutely correct.

1:07:30 You never ran out of things to write about. I never found, images, had daily experiences, and I was just, right, and a lot of it was based off of my anxieties, my regrets, my downfalls, and I was writing to myself. I was just literally writing letters to myself, and in the comments, people were saying you should write a book. And I self-published and self-funded through crowdfunding the first book. I just took those blog entries.

1:07:54 I had 300 of them, 350 for the year, and then printed them all out like A Beautiful Mind, and I was like, okay, well, this one’s about regret. Let’s put all the regrets in a pile, all the anxieties, expectation, heartbreak, spirituality, funny stories, and I’m just, all right, well, these two were too similar, this one’s better, and just whittled away until I got to 101, and then I literally didn’t even have them in order, and just printed the book. And that’s what the first book is.

1:08:25 Here’s 101 Simple Truths for a Better Life, and that’s what it is. They’re just simple truths to make life better, and I’m not promising anybody anything. I’m not promising them the moon. All I’m doing is I’m using my skills as a lyricist and as an elementary school teacher to package the things that we’re all dealing with and make them a little bit simpler. Some of the big lessons in that book, you talk about learning and unlearning.

1:08:46 Just a few things you could share? Well, yeah, so, yeah, if you have Unlearn, it’s that you know we gain more from letting go, and oftentimes who we think we are is really things that were programmed into us from society, from our heritage, our religions, our parents, and just to ask the question, like, how much of this makes sense for me? You know, I grew up in a challenging neighborhood, so there’s certain tools and certain strategies that you have to deal with living in that neighborhood.

1:09:15 But then I went to university, and I didn’t have to have that anymore, but you don’t know that, right? And then that level of aggression does no longer help me or protect me in university, or working in a job environment, where, you know, now I’m no longer in the hood. I’m working with six-year-old ladies, and now when making eye contact was an invitation for a fight in my neighborhood, now he’s supposed to make eye contact and smile with everybody every day, and it’s not a sign of intimidation.

1:09:43 So I had to unlearn certain things, to unlearn certain habits. And the book is to get people thinking about what do they have to unlearn in their own specific lives, and whether it’s being, how to be, you know, an alpha male, and the idea that you can’t be vulnerable, that means you’re weak. You know, and that can hold people back in the future, especially when it comes to their mental health. Really challenging people to pay attention to the expectations.

1:10:07 As I said, nobody betrayed me. I had unrealistic expectations of people, and I used the analogy of the lion. You know, I’m like, I would not eat a lion. Does that mean I’m free to stick my hand in a lion’s cage and expect them not to bite me? You know, it’s about understanding your nature, understanding your nature as a person, understanding the nature of your world.

1:10:31 You know, crime has always existed. People have lied. That’s always existed. This, for me, the entertainment industry being exploited, that’s how it’s always been. And for me, I came in with these rosy-colored glasses and this idealistic view of life, which was, people are gonna recognize my talent, and they’re gonna just help me go straight to the top, you know?

1:10:51 And that’s not how it works. How it works is people are gonna look at you in terms of what can you do for me. And I didn’t know any of this. Unlearn the idea that, you know, words have value. Actions mean everything.

1:11:06 Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. So these are all the things that I never had to deal with in my incubated world of working in elementary school, where nobody was my competition, and I had an idealistic view. And one of my other favorite quotes, I love, is, you know, people can only be idealistic until they have to pay attention, and when you pay attention, you realize the world’s much more complex. So Unlearn, I think the, the, the, the spirit of Unlearn is its 101 chapters.

1:11:38 Every chapter is only two pages, super easy to read. You don’t have to read it in order. You can open up to any page and you’ll find something that gives you value, whether it’s a quote or a chapter, and it’s very Lama, huh? Just like the Dalai Lama, or Steven Pressfield, or Steve Pressfield. Exactly.

1:11:53 And it’s not written by somebody who figured it all out. It’s written by somebody who knows how to ask the right questions, and it’ll ask you the right questions to get you on your journey. And to me, the questions are more important than the answers. And it’s written by somebody who wouldn’t have missed that he did a lot of dumb things, and he did the work to think about the dumb. He did.

1:12:12 He’s the one. Do that again. And what did your friends make of you when Humble the Poet, spoken word rapper, is now an author? And what did you make of it? It was interesting.

1:12:24 One of my friends, I remember, and I asked, he, I wrote a verse about it, because it was, it was kind of bothersome. He said, I’m glad you’re doing this, because that rap shit was stupid, and, you know, this is a, this is, you know, this is a better look for you. And I was like, no man, like, hip-hop to me is the most evolved form of literary art. Like, any writing, a book, is easy compared to writing a verse, and but you start to think about how society views hip-hop and urban culture.

1:12:54 And, you know, he’s like, there’s a lot more class associated with writing a book in comparison to making music. And for me, I always, what it was, empty at the end of the day was, once the book was created, I was like, I’m selling this at my shows, right? Yes, that’s the new t-shirt. This is the new t-shirt. It’s a much better investment of your twenty dollars.

1:13:13 And why ended up happening was, very slowly, as I, to make money, I’ll be throwing shows in different cities, and I would pre-sell the tickets. So I’d be like, London, I want to perform in London, but I’m not gonna even start organizing the show until I sell 50 tickets. So here’s the link. Once we sell 50 tickets, I’ll get to work. Also, if you want to sponsor my show, 500 pounds, your company presents Humble the Poet live in London.

1:13:43 And if you want to be on the posters, you want me to make it a promotional video, thousand pounds. So certain people, and then at this point, I had a strong social media following. That 500, that 1000 pounds that came in before I sold 50 tickets, so now I had this upfront money. Some good hustle. It wasn’t, I learned all this the hard way.

1:14:01 I learned it all the hard way. I spent years doing it, and what ended up happening was I’d be making the flyers, you know, handling all the logistics, negotiating with the venues, renting the equipment, doing everything. It’s tricky, especially when you’re remote. Right? Yeah, and I would do everything except working on my performance, and then that would be the afterthought.

1:14:20 And then I’d put it, and I mean, for my audience seeing me live made them happy, but I knew I could do better. So eventually I had to, you know, it was in 2015. I got invited. Lilly Singh went on a world tour, she invited me to be a part of it, and then I got to see what a professional tour looks like, where there was a sound guy, and there was a lighting guy, and there was a tour manager, somebody making sure that everybody got their hotel rooms and had their boarding passes, and all that type of stuff.

1:14:47 And I was like, crap, this is much better. An in-ear monitor, you know. There’s small things that I never had access to. And I was like, I’m not gonna perform until I get to this stage now. And that tour paid me enough, and the tour also had a documentary associated with it, and the documentary team paid me to get behind-the-scenes footage, when their cameras weren’t allowed to be in certain situations, because me and Lilly were close friends, and she wanted the documentary to be good, but she was having a bad day.

1:15:15 She wouldn’t let them in the room, but she let me in the room with the camera, so I got an extra paycheck from that. So the end of 2015, so 2014 got me out of debt. 2015 made my minimalistic life. I was of the minimalist at this point, by involuntarily, and I got used to it. I was okay with it.

1:15:31 I was okay, and I had, in the car, I was okay not wearing fancy clothes. I was, I was okay with all of it. 2015 was all right. All that money that you were making to get out of debt and starting to add up, you know, you’re making, you were making, you were selling two or three books independently a day, and those hundreds of dollars were adding up. You were getting gigs, a thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there, and that was adding up.

1:15:51 You just went on this tour, and that added up, and then 2015 came, and you had to pay tax. It was like, wow, like, I made money, and then I told myself, 2016, you will not do anything for the paycheck. If you don’t want to do the gig, triple your quote, and if they bite, do it, and otherwise, they don’t bite, just walk away. And that was the first time I was able to do it. I ended up making three times the money with that philosophy.

1:16:15 Why do you think that happened? People respected me more. I realized, I think, for the longest time, you know, if you do things for free, people value you accordingly. Also, I think I hit a certain stress threshold where I wasn’t talking to the people I was speaking to. It wasn’t their money.

1:16:35 They represented a company, or they worked for somebody, so there wasn’t that personal element, you know? In the beginning, it was a local promoter, and it was his money, and we had to negotiate back and forth. Now it was the promoter’s company, or it was the ad agency, or it was the agent, or it was the product, the client, you know, who wanted me to post something on social media, and all, just like, oh, okay, I’ll do that. Normally I charge two thousand bucks for that.

1:17:02 I’ll do it for eight. Yeah, I don’t want it. Then that’s cool. I don’t want to look. I don’t want my social media looking like a billboard anyways.

1:17:09 Like, no, no, it’s fine. They’re like, really? And then, so and that helped a lot. And that was 2016, and then 2017. I did an Apple commercial, which, again, I remember very, very vividly.

1:17:24 How did that happen? Serendipity. Serendipity. They seemed to have their eyes out for new talent. They have their eyes out for new talent, but what ended up happening was, so what happened was, in 2016, the summertime, a TV show in Canada, we have a CBC in Canada, called Canada Reads.

1:17:45 And it’s a show about books. They take public figures, and each of them picks a book that they love, and they think the rest of the country should read, and they fill out a round table, and they debate the books, and, like, survivor-style, at the end of every episode, one book gets voted off, just the book, not even the public figure. They’re still gonna be there for the whole week. It’s an everyday show for one week. So they call me, and they’re like, hey, we would love for you to be on this show.

1:18:10 You know, they will give you ten grand to be on the show, and all you had to do is read five books and debate your favorite book. Now, like, you’re gonna pay me ten grand to read books? I can, like, sit down and read a book casually and get paid for it? Like, this is amazing. And they’re like, yeah, and so I said yes for the show, and I picked the book called 15 Dogs, which was about two Greek gods in a bar in Toronto talking about why humans are miserable.

1:18:40 One of the Greek gods, like, it’s because they’re too smart. If they weren’t so smart, they wouldn’t be so miserable. And the other Greek gods, they’re like, alright, let’s have a bet. Let’s give another animal human intelligence. Let’s see if they can die happy.

1:18:52 So they go to a dog pound, give 15 dogs human intelligence, and then the whole story is just following 15 dogs around Toronto their entire lives, to see if any of them can die happy. And I won’t give it away if any of them do, but that’s the premise of the story. I love dogs. I love Toronto. That’s why I picked the book.

1:19:11 I was the only person on that show who picked a book that had nothing to do with him, and they tried to send me books about racism, the immigrant experience, and all that type of stuff. And most of the other public figures picked books that resembled them. The environmentalists picked a book about the environment, the Native American picked a book about Native American issues, and they are all very impassioned in their debates, whereas I just kind of like, well, your book is important to talk about, the environment, but it’s boring.

1:19:36 You know, your book is a very predictable ending. You know, your book, you know, your book nobody relates to, for whatever reasons. And I ended up winning the show. Why didn’t you pick the book that everyone thought you would pick, or wanted you to pick? That’s just stupid.

1:19:50 I want to take a book that would be interesting to me. And I think that’s the thing where people don’t realize this, and then this is kind of what my mission is now. We got to let people be the people that they are, you know, and beyond a turban and a beard. Be on, being a child of an immigrant. I’m a, I’m a, sometimes I’m a jerk, sometimes I’m funny, sometimes I’m nice, sometimes I’m creative, sometimes I’m completely basic, sometimes I’m full of anxiety.

1:20:18 You know, I’m a human being, and I have interests. I grew up, and I had a dog, and he was my best friend, and I, I fed him. In the eyes of other dogs, whenever I walked down the street, and I loved dogs in my city. I love my city, and some was like, here’s the story about dogs in your city, that to me will be more, that’s, that’s something that we’ll enjoy, instead of reading somebody else’s experience about coming to a new country and dealing with racism, because my parents dealt with it, but they viewed it as a natural part of their journey.

1:20:52 You know, like, we’re gonna move to Canada, this is somebody else’s country, they’re not gonna want us to be there, they’re gonna be mean to us, we’ll deal with that. They also have something called smoke, we’re gonna have to deal with that as well, and my parents dealt with racism like they dealt with snow. Just prepare accordingly. You know, and if part of that new environment that you’re in, and so I had that mindset. You know, I grew up, you know, not really getting offended and bothered by the racism that I encountered.

1:21:21 It built a resiliency in me, and at this point there’s no self-pity in me, so I’m not gonna rehash these stories. So I ended up winning the show, as a, and in that, that, well, that put me on the map in the literary world when they looked me up and realized that I’d independently published a book, and at the same time that, that show’s one of the most popular shows in Canada, and I wasn’t even aware of it. And they also played it on the radio, and a lot of Canadian households, you know, the way people listen to the BBC out here, I, listening to CBC out there all the time.

1:21:53 So what ended up happening was, I was in Los Angeles, and I was having a meeting with some music folks, and they said, you’ve got to meet this guy in Toronto named Saw. A guy, and Saw, a guy, as a musical institution in Toronto. And when I was younger, in my early days, all I was always trying to do was get a meeting with this guy, because he managed some of the biggest local rappers at the time, and I was never successful. I got a rejection email from him, one that said, “Hey, I’m not looking for anybody else, but good luck on your adventures.”

1:22:23 Fast forward five years later, I’m in LA, and one of these managers says, you need to meet him. I’m gonna connect you guys. And then I get connected with them, and he had built a studio that he was fostering young talent in, and he was giving me a tour and pretty much saying, hey, you ever want to work on a project together? Let’s do it. I got a simple one-page contract.

1:22:44 I’m just here to foster people. I’m getting funding from this corporation, so this is great. And just showed me the facilities, and he’s in LA, listen, Toronto, Toronto. Okay. So I had gone by when I was back in Toronto.

1:22:57 I was doing back and forth, so I got a tour of it, and he’s like, I’ve been following your work. I think it’s really good. So he has no idea that years ago he rejected me, so there was some beauty to that. He was following, Rick, really, I think, his dope, and at this point we had mutual friends. He goes, whenever you’re ready to do some work, definitely, and I was like, yeah, this is cool.

1:23:15 Definitely, come here when I’m ready for my next project. Also, if y’all got some young uns out here, they need some help. I’m down to help. And then the next day, somebody from that agency had came up to him and said, I’m looking for a poet, and he’s like, a dude named Humble the Poet came here yesterday. And then that guy at the Atticus, he was like, man, I just listened to this guy all week on Canada Reads, and it never clicked in my head that Humble’s a poet.

1:23:38 Dead poetry, right? And they were looking for a poet to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, to write a poem about Canada to celebrate that. No pressure. Yeah, and it was a shot on iPhone commercial. One of those, like, you know, I was a David Cronenberg’s daughter, and she’s, she’s famous in Toronto.

1:23:55 She shot that Drake album cover where he’s sitting on the CN Tower. Okay, she’s famous for that too. She was gonna shoot the commercial. So that agency was like, hey, Apple doesn’t use ad agencies. They have their own, called Media Arts Lab, but they let Brazil do their own commercial, and they knocked it out of the park, and then Turkey tried, and Turkey knocked it out of the park.

1:24:16 So this is one of the big ad agencies in Canada at the time, they probably still are, and they’re like, we’re gonna pitch to Apple to let us do our own Apple commercial, and we want you to be a part of it. And then, uh, wrote a poem, your pitch, that got greenlit, and then, yeah, pretty much the rest was history. But then, and that, and I remember when we’re supposed to negotiate, my, daddy, say, well, so what are you looking for? And then I didn’t say anything, and I had a number in my head.

1:24:47 I’m like, I should ask for like 20 grand. I don’t know, I don’t know how it’s, this, whatever. I didn’t say anything. She’s like, so we’re thinking like 40, is that okay? And I was like, I don’t know, I talked to my agent.

1:24:58 I didn’t have an agent. Lily had an agent, so I called Millie’s agent, because, can you pretend to be my agent for this? And if she got me 90, she moved it all the way up to 90. You know, I’m just like, damn, that’s more money than I have in my bank account. And then, a week later, the book, the, the publishers had reached out to me, saying, hey, we want to publish your next book, you know, the Canadian publishers.

1:25:21 And I was like, well, my first book is doing well independently. I would love to bounce it off the trampolines and, and republish it and take it to a new height. And they’re like, no, no, we don’t traditionally publish books that are already out. And at this point, my rule is, when I hear the word traditional, go the other way. Just, “I’m from YouTube, we don’t do traditional,” right?

1:25:46 So I’m like, hey, I just got this, this Apple paycheck, and I think I’ll be okay for at least a year. I’m gonna say no to this deal, and I’m gonna go start focusing on music. I deprived myself for music, right? So I’m like, you don’t deserve to make it. Music ain’t making you any money.

1:26:01 You got to figure out how to make money. And I was in make-money mode for the longest time, and I was like, you can afford to be an artist again. So I started working on music, and knowing that this Apple commercial was gonna come out, I wanted to release something around the energy. Yeah. So I started working on an album, and then while I was working on the album, the biggest bookstore in Canada, called, and they said, hey, we want to republish your first book.

1:26:22 And I was like, I didn’t know you guys published. Like, we don’t, we’re just starting now. And we found out about your book from watching the show, and we bought a copy on Amazon. We love it, and it’s so easy to read. And we’re starting, as we’re starting, a section of the bookstore called No Filter, and your book is No Filter.

1:26:42 You know, it’s complete, just straight talk, and we think people will dig it. So they took it, and they published a 2017 edition of it, around Halloween 2017, and it instantly became a best-seller in Canada. Wow. And then I was able to leverage that and get a proper literary agent in the States, who started shopping me around to the American publishers, understanding that they had to republish Unlearn first. Right?

1:27:08 And then this was in the works at the time. Not in the works. This, this idea was conceived because in my head I had written the book, and that was the book, and I didn’t know how to write other books ever again. Okay. And I wasn’t gonna do it, but then when I spoke to the literary agent, he said, do you have any other books in your head?

1:27:27 And I’m like, why do I have this idea about the fact that everybody is my teacher? That everybody, you know, one another. A quote: “No man is my friend, no man is my enemy, every man is my teacher.” And I was like, I learn. I try to learn from everybody.

1:27:42 I try to see the lessons and the opportunities in everything and everybody. And you know, at this point I’d been on adventures for five, six years, you know, in this jungle, and I had been beat up, robbed, ripped off, all of these different things, and I had learned from all of them. I had been at this point, I’d gotten to an emotional state where I found value in them. I think I’d love to share these. And I’ve also added magical moments, where I got to sit down, like this, with George Lucas for an hour, you know, and pick his brain on being an independent artist, and experiences with Pharrell, experiences with other, you know, world-impacting minds.

1:28:22 And I was like, yeah, I would love to share some of these stories, and, you know, the magic moments that kind of came from them. And that’s what the original title for the book was: Magic Moments. Do you think? All right, write it down on a piece of paper, you know, write me a one-pager, and I’m gonna pitch this, because no one’s gonna sign you just for that book. You know, they’ll republish that book, but they’re gonna want a second one.

1:28:43 Okay. And, but not at this point. You’re still thinking, I’m working on my music, but still now you’re working on everything. Now I’m working on everything. Now you realize, look at spoken word.

1:28:52 I hadn’t done it for so long, and then Apple just came and paid me a bunch of money, reduced, with poetry. So I was like, don’t abandon any. You add to your tool belt. Don’t pick one or the other. And then I got to the point where everything was becoming a fruitful opportunity, because even my music, I was getting millions of streams.

1:29:09 So it was becoming, it was generating me income and giving me opportunities. Well, let you explain all this. Let me just stop you, because you’re having success with music, success with the book, success with publishing. Like, what’s going on here? There’s an energy going on.

1:29:23 You know what’s happening? I realized I planted a bunch of seeds, and they all grew when they needed to grow. And I planted the seeds back in 2010, when I first started. But there’s more than that, because if you had kept that same NyQuil attitude, none of them would have grown. Oh yeah, completely, completely.

1:29:39 Nobody’s, and also not just the vibe. You can’t just be wishful and be a great person and have great vibrations. You need that, and the, the speeds. Well, yeah, and I think for me, I don’t even look at it on a magical tip. I look at it as, as well as, like, momentum, you know, and as well as when you’re successful but so the biggest, the other, my mindset, I really got out of was support.

1:29:59 I know I never sought support from anybody. Yeah, so people would be like, I’m gonna buy your book to support you. I mean, no, no, no, don’t buy my book to support me. Buy my book if you’re gonna read it. Because when Apple drops the new iPhone, they don’t say, hey everybody, new iPhone’s out, support.

1:30:15 If anything, they don’t say anything. They just show you a picture of the phone, and you already know the narrative is, don’t get left out, get this phone. Yeah, the new phone’s got a third camera. People are gonna judge you for having two cameras. Don’t get left out, you need this phone.

1:30:29 And all successful businesses, because Apple adds a level of value to people’s lives, whether they make the technology super easy to use, whether they’re a status symbol, whatever it may be, they add value. All successful businesses add value. All successful businesses serve. And I think what I realized was, when I stopped looking at people to serve me, and looked at myself to serve other people, whether I was helping to tell their stories, whether I was making the t-shirts that put messages in their heads, and I’ve been doing that at this point.

1:30:54 I’ve been doing it for 10 years. I’ve been designing my own shirts for 10 years. I’ve been shooting my own videos for 10 years. Doing anything for 10 years, you’re gonna get good at it. And when people pay attention to you for one thing, then they start to see that, oh, he’s really good at a handful of other things.

1:31:09 No, no, this is why Steph Curry has a mini TV show now, because you’ve probably been doing that, and the basketball got the attention, and you can translate a car, a brand, across multimedia. We know that you have seen that. Yeah. And so that’s what, and you’re doing that easily. Well, they, they read the book, and then they’re like, oh, there’s music, and then there’s spoken word.

1:31:29 Is that true? Yeah, well, and that’s the thing I thought was getting conflicting information. So I had a manager who manages a very successful author saying, you’ve got to stop working on the music, stop working on your clothes, stop working on your music videos, focus on the book. Do the book, knock it out of the park, then you can do whatever you want. So that’s what I was told.

1:31:51 And they referenced Kanye West, like, Kanye West killed the music game, then came out with a shoe, then came out with a live experience. They said, do that. And then somebody else, I read How to Steal Like an Artist, and that one said, if you do multiple media and multiple genres, and none of them seem related, realize you are the common thread. So just do them all. And then that felt more natural, that advice.

1:32:15 So for me at this point, every time I thought, oh, maybe I should just, you know, hold off on the spoken word, I got a level of validation, superficial, financial, what have you. Do you like, no, no, you’re doing it at a level high enough for people to respect, at the same time. My social media was growing, so the worst case, you know, I was still, so I can always amplify my own messages out there. And companies were partnering with me, knowing that I had a built-in marketing plan involved, where I had direct communication with my community.

1:32:44 But I really looked at it as the seeds, because what happened for me was, when I realized it, I didn’t realize it as a positive. I realized that as, oh crap, the only person getting in the way of Humble the Poet is Humble the Poet, because you know, I want to finish this album, but I have a deadline for the book, or I want to shoot this video, but I have to get this song done, or I’m trying to, you know, set up a way to, I don’t want to spend half a day packaging t-shirts and mailing them out. So just finding different ways to streamline it, and then learning about investing, because my dad was a cab driver.

1:33:22 An investment for him was a GIC at the bank. And then people be like, invest in yourself. You know, stop investing in stocks that you’ve done no due diligence for, and, you know, you know your business inside out. You know what you’re capable of. You know how to 10x.

1:33:37 Stop buying a condo that’ll get you six percent over 20 years. Put it in yourself, where you can get six hundred percent of it. Exactly. And it’s not a scary investment. It seems, because you know what you can do, and you can be accountable to the shareholder, which is you.

1:33:51 And it, everything started to, definitely, I think the moment I realized I am adding value, and people are seeing the value that I’m adding, and I continue focusing on adding value, and then money, fame are consequential of that. It’s, and I always liken it to going to the gym. If you go to the gym to feel good, good health, a sexy body, those are consequential. They come from it. They’ll follow you.

1:34:22 You know, but you’re focusing on just feeling good in the gym. You know, it’s the same thing. I focused on being of value with the talents that I had, and things found me because of that. And as I said, the longer you do it, the smaller the pool of people that can do what you do. You know, one of my buddies here in London, he’s a fundamental turntablist.

1:34:44 He’s a scratcher DJ, and now he’s a full-time DJ, and he’s touring the world, and it’s because he’s not a press-play, press-pause DJ. He’s a scratcher, he’s a turntablist. There’s only a handful of humans left that can do that, and that’s why he’s being hired. He has a skill that other people don’t have. And I think for me, at 27, when I realized, like, okay, you got to start thinking long term, now you’re no longer first.

1:35:12 It was saying no to any paycheck. Now it’s play the long game. You know, they want to pay you X amount of dollars to do a speaking gig. Say no to the money, and tell them to buy books, and I’ll hand out books to everybody in the audience, because a book, that book will live on their bookshelf forever. Right?

1:35:29 That’s a long-term, forever, there’ll be a fan for everything they can hold. That’ll be a long-term investment. So you need things. I’m learning is picking brains. I’m, you know, now that I have access to you, you’ll be getting text messages from me, right?

1:35:39 And how important is that? I mean, like I said, just seeing that world tour with Lily, you know, seeing a little slice can change everything completely, and it’s, it’s again, it can go either way. It can make you super jealous and insecure, or it can make you super inspired and motivated, and that’s just checking your cell phone, checking yourself. I can check myself on a regular basis. Um, I think I remind myself, if you want better, if you want more, do more.

1:36:06 And I’ve seen that straight line so many times, you know, and I’m a big fan of the meritocracy, being like, you know, there’s definitely inequities in the world, and there’s definitely people getting the short end of the stick, but that’s been a consistent thing in human history. And you know, the invention of the ship was the invention of the shipwreck, and you fix one problem, you’re gonna cause another. So at the end of the day, you know, your effort, your energy, your grit, your persistence, your consistency will really determine a lot.

1:36:39 And I was able to show my parents as well, like, being an entrepreneur is a much more secure life than having a day job, because you know, the government changed, and X amount of teachers got laid off, you know, certain entitlements the teachers had. We used to be able to keep our sick days, to be able to carry over, your twenty a year. If you don’t use your 20, you’re 40 in the next year. That entitlement disappeared. You know, that used to be people used to save their sick days, because they could cash out when they retire.

1:37:09 People did that for 20 years, and then the government changed the policy. There was, you know, they just lost half a year’s pay. They were saving up for, realizing that nothing’s promised, everything other than the promises you make yourself. You know, and being able to show them that, being able to say, hey, you know, it was hard in the beginning, but now there’s no earning ceiling. I can earn directly in proportion to my efforts.

1:37:34 And you know, to go back to the original question about how do you know you hit critical mass, how you know you made it, is when my fears were no longer, you know, will I receive. The fear started to be, will I get complacent? Will I be lazy and become entitled? Am I asking for too much? Am I getting lazy?

1:37:52 Am I thinking about that hungrier version of me coming from my spot, and now? But I think what I realized was, you know, step one is feed yourself. Take care of yourself. Step two is take care of the people you care about, whether that’s your family, whether it’s your friends, and then once that’s taken care of, then think about your community, whatever you identify as your community. You know, I view the hip-hop community as my community.

1:38:17 Every city, Toronto is my community. The South Asian population is my community. The world of artists, my community, and how I can support, whether it’s telling my story for artists to understand the game, because point zero one percent of all creatives will ever be able to make a full-time living off of it. And it makes sense. It makes sense when you think about it.

1:38:38 To be a creative means to be open to everything. When you’re open to everything, you get nothing done, you know, and that’s why we needed some conservative mindsets, which are like let’s focus on tunnel vision. One thing, this is the way, and that’s the reason the bills get paid and the trains run on time. That’s because we have these conservative mindsets that run down, and we need both for the grand scheme of things. And I have, I have two assistants, and they’re both artists.

1:39:02 And I’m just showing them the wall here, how I set up a Shopify page, and here’s the printer. You know, my book used to be print to order. Now my t-shirts are print to order, so now I’m not spending hours packaging slips and sending these out and getting lost in the mail. Now that’s somebody else’s responsibility. And I have to share the pie, but now, learning, sharing the pie is how you grow the pie.

1:39:22 That’s something that my father, who grew up in a village and then drove a cab, was never able to teach me. You know, I had to unlearn scarcity mindset, because I grew up in an immigrant household where there was real scarcity, and now being like, you know, but there was an abundance of love and support that was always there. My parents always taught me, somebody comes over, you don’t ask him what they want to eat. You just feed them. You don’t ask him what they want to drink.

1:39:48 You just put it in front of them. You know, they want to stay? We give them the nicest room in the house. Open-door policy, always. And growing up, didn’t think anything special of it.

1:39:58 That’s how everybody treated, this was their house, until I started meeting people from broken homes and seeing how they, you know, the people that hurt me came from hurt situations, and realizing that resenting them gave no value to anything. And I’m able to forgive them from a distance and be like, I I see that you came from a challenging place and a broken place, and you’re continuing that cycle. Good luck to you. You know, in my family there were certain challenges in a cycle, but I had to break that.

1:40:26 My parents had limited tools to deal with the challenges, and many of those tools were guilt and shame, and when I’m incoming immigrant, company, immigrant tools, and that’s all they had. And it’s not nothing to resent them for. I view it with compassion. But great survival tools, aren’t they? Great survival tools.

1:40:43 I’m great expansion tools. Yes, exactly. And my parents were in survival mode, and now they’re both retired, and you know, I’m the baby, and I don’t need their money, and my sisters are doing very well, and nobody needs them for anything. And it’s very interesting to watch how they retire. My dad has three jobs now.

1:41:02 You know, he volunteers at the hospital, he delivers meals to the elderly, and he just got hired as a volunteer at the airports, where we’d be pushing people’s wheelchairs, because he understands that retirement doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore. Retirement just means you choose your jobs, and you know, you don’t have the pressures anymore, but you got to keep it moving. It’s move it or lose it. And, you know, teaching them to have fun. You know, I took him to Kenya and showed them a whole different world, because they had never, you know, they had never seen free Black folks.

1:41:37 You know, all my dad drove a cab in the hood. He only met Black folks who were trapped in the cycle. And showing him, like, look, this is, you know, my parents didn’t know about Aboriginals. They came to Canada not knowing there was a native population there. You know, and being able to, at this age, show them new things and say, look, this is what life can be, because their spectrum of experiences is gonna be far greater.

1:41:57 I was, I’m the youngest. My parents, I wasn’t alive when it was 15 people in the apartment. You know, by the time I was born, my parents had their house, you know, so me going from lower middle class to wherever I get to go is not the same as my parents going from huts without electricity to the first-class seat in the plane. Like, for me, that’s much more exciting, and definitely having to build upon that, and no longer having that chip on my shoulder. I need to prove to them that I’m doing something.

1:42:30 Yeah. And now thinking about my nieces and my nephews, what did they need to see? They don’t need to see me be the first to do anything. They just need to know what’s all possible. So now my nephew knows he can be a professional soccer player, and he’s gonna have to work at it, and I tell him all the time, you work your best, your uncle will save up a little bit of FIFA bribe money, and we’re gonna get you in, you know, your dad’s British, you’ve got the passport, we’ll make it happen.

1:42:55 But as well as just focusing on the pragmatism of it all, and, and saying, look, it’s your work ethic. It’s what you need. And even if you have all these natural gifts, and you’ve got the cognitive ability, and all these things that are gonna help you, add work ethic. And for me, what I realized was, oh shoot, if I work as hard as my parents did, then I’m gonna conquer. Yeah, because they had to do to keep the lifts above water.

1:43:21 I’m doing it too, for, you know, as you said, to grow and thrive and expand. And in this book, what can people expect in this book that’s different from the last book, or is it still very similar? No, no, they’re, they’re very completely different. So where I learn is the things that I was figuring out, I was sharing, and then I collected those ideas, and what I did was I took complicated ideas and I simplified them, and I made them about just a human experience, as I said: regret, anxiety, expectations, heartbreak, love, being present, you know, what I consider meditation, dealing with challenges with society in our culture, or what have you, and really getting people to ask questions.

1:44:09 Who am I, who do I want to be? And that’s what Unlearn is. Things no one else can teach us is the idea that nobody can tell you what values come from your unique experiences. That’s the thing that no one else can teach you. And the challenge right now is when we have an unpleasant experience, our gut instinct is to not do anything about it, and to suppress the memory, and to just keep moving, yet disconnect as quick as possible, distract, bond to something, find new stimulants, but just avoid it at all costs, not realizing that it’s there, and it’s gonna bubble up at the most inconvenient time, and it’s chipping away at you.

1:44:50 And it’s a great teacher, and it’s a great teacher. Embrace it, if you can. And that’s the overall premise of this book, which is, stop judging, start understanding, and start with your own previous experiences of trauma and unpleasantness. So what I did was, whereas the first book I shared what I learned, this book is I wrote to learn. So I took unpleasant memories that I had, and I took impactful experiences that I had, and I wrote the narrative.

1:45:19 I wrote the beginning, middle, and end of the story. I wrote the characters. I wrote about the problems, and I wrote about the resolutions. And then I took it to the next step, where I wrote my feelings associated with the stories, what I was feeling at the time. And then the most important step is my thoughts towards those feelings.

1:45:38 And when we think about those feelings, and we ask important questions, like, there’s this, the only way to look at this, and then you open yourself up to a whole new world of things, and you realize that things aren’t simply good or bad. There’s magic, and there’s a silver lining in everything. So the goal from this book is I’m sharing stories that I feel everybody can connect with. I’m sharing about getting in a car accident, where I completely got ripped off by the people who faked their injuries, they faked their damages, and I was seventeen thousand bucks in my bank account.

1:46:09 I had to give them all my money, so I lost my life savings. Now I look at that as tuition in the school of life. You know, I should have handled myself differently. I paid a thousand dollars to learn that lesson. Since then, I paid a lot more money to learn a lot more lessons.

1:46:23 I’m sure in your entrepreneurial journey you paid boatloads of money to learn very important lessons that you wouldn’t have learned, because nothing’s for free. But they’re cheap, because later in life they would have cost you more, later, and led to, what it cost you, more than a thousand bucks. It was, I got that life lesson at a discount. And I got, and everybody reading can relate. They have their own version of that story.

1:46:44 I have stories about conflict, people having conflict with me, and I had to turn the other cheek and walk the other way, knowing that my ego was gonna be bruised from that. That happens more the bigger you get, as well. Yes, completely, because people are looking for excuses to really test you, and social media allows people to do it anonymously. And I actually have, in the book, a talking about experience, where, simply, you know, I, uh, funky, and I, when I took my parents to Kenya, you know, we had the nice seats on the plane, but we weren’t dressed very nicely, and while I was waiting to board the plane, a man in an expensive suit walked in front of me and said, get out of my way, I’m supposed to be here first, I paid more for my ticket than you.

1:47:25 And realizing this, if you, like, your first reaction would have been, like, well, my parents were there. The first reaction would have probably got me in a holding… hell, but, uh, you know, because my parents were there, it’s kind of like, hey, man, I, I know I look, you know, I might look homeless right now, but look, my, I have, I’m gold as well, and you know, I’m, she called me as well, and I’m supposed to be here, and I don’t know why you, why are you telling me how much you pay for, you, to, I don’t know why you’re, I can, like, this is just ridiculous. And you know, and in my head I’m feeling, I, this is so frustrating, that I have to be so civilized at this moment.

1:48:03 But again, this is a story that everyone has experienced in one way, shape or form in their life, and, and I share the story about how, you know, ten hours later that situation was still bothering my mother, and talking about the idea that, look, now we’re carrying it. You know, the experience is done. We’ll never run into this guy ever again. It’s over. Why are we still carrying it?

1:48:26 You have a choice to let it go, and, you know, here are some tools. Let it go. So what this book is, is tools to deal with our trauma beyond guilt and shame, and once we start by revisiting our old trauma, that will better equip us for the challenges that are gonna come tomorrow, because we look at everything through the lens of our old trauma. Don’t we? Exactly.

1:48:46 Don’t realize we are. We all have big chips on our shoulders. Yeah, we have massive chips on our shoulders, and some of the tools and strategies that we had as a kid, we never updated them, and we don’t realize that they’re all holding us back in our lives now. And the big thing is, I’m not promising people a happily ever after. What I’m promising them is more, is waiting, but here are some tools to deal with that.

1:49:07 Life will never get easier, but there are tools to make you stronger. And I think that’s how I differentiate myself from people in the personal growth space. I’m very cynical and critical of personal growth. I talk about that because I can, I understand the idea that people want to be lied to, ’cause I wanted to be lied to. So if you promise somebody a heaven, a happily ever after, one quick-fix solution to all their problems, they’re going to take it.

1:49:35 A lot of them are going to take it. They said, what is it, seven percent of people send money to these Nigerian scams? An email. You know, you don’t, that’s why they do it. It works.

1:49:46 And you realize this, you’re like, people want to be lied to. Lies are comforting. We want to hear them. And I don’t, because I couldn’t afford to live any more lives. So I came from a place where it has to have real-life applicable value.

1:50:01 And that’s what this is. This is me sharing stories. You’re hearing the unpleasantness of it, and you’re watching me, because I was writing in real time, sorting it out, ’cause I was avoiding these stories myself. And there’s stories about here, about, as well as how my ambition bit me in the ass. It’s a story about me no longer, you know, first I cut out the toxic people in my life.

1:50:20 Then I cut out the unproductive people in my life. Then I just started cutting out people who just weren’t entrepreneurs. I’m like, I can’t afford to be around people who aren’t helping me on my journey. But that’s, that’s too far gone now. Yet nobody left.

1:50:31 Now I got nobody left, but now people that really mattered, I just wanted my company for me, and didn’t care that I had any money or any fame. You know, I was cutting them out of my life, and I had a rude wake-up call. One of them passed away, and I realized that I didn’t even have a picture with them. Meanwhile, I have all these pictures with these celebrities who weren’t even my friends, on these red carpet events, but somebody who was real, who always showed up, who was always there, who the only thing he ever asked for, me, was, tell me a story, tell me about what your adventures are.

1:50:59 And being like, what am I doing this for, if I’m throwing away these real relationships? These relationships are worth more than anything else I have. And our lives are the sum of our relationships. They really are. And when I went to LA, I realized like, nobody here has as many real friends as I do.

1:51:14 I’m wealthier than I realize. You know, I might not have the bank accounts, but I have a wealth of relationships, and people who, when I was at my worst, I knew that these were couches I could have slept on, had I needed to get to that level. And I, I, I’m an open book in here, and again, the goal, either the goal here from me, personally, selfishly, was to find strength in my vulnerability and knowing that when I share these stories, it’s going to encourage people to revisit their own stories, because, and in this science that proves it, when you revisit your traumas, you will gain strength from that, and those traumas will no longer be trauma, you know, and our regrets only exist until we learn from our past.

1:51:54 And I’m encouraging people to read about how I’m learning from my past, and you’re gonna find we’re all in the same boat. We all have the same stories. And then once you found value in your past, you’ll be able to move forward with a lot less anxiety, knowing that the only person you have to trust is yourself to deal with whatever comes your way. Yeah, it’s a good book. There’s great stuff in here.

1:52:16 Tell me, what are you doing five years from now? What does this Humble the Poet look like? Are you in Fast & Furious movies? Are you two in the world singing? What are you doing?

1:52:26 Um, I’m gonna be making music, selfishly, and I’ll have, and again, even right now, the book is, the book is finding my music, so I’m shooting elaborate, expensive music videos and not really worrying about the business model of it, if that I’ll ever come back. So I’ll be fine. Accan liard first. I’ll probably get a lot weirder, and I’ll embrace that even more. I’ll discover more, I’ll discover more, that I’m wearing that I’m not aware that I’m wearing right now.

1:52:53 I will continue to perfect the art of being myself. From a creative standpoint, I’m diving into television and in film. I think television is probably the new film, and now you can stretch out a story even longer, with acting or producing or writing. I’m gonna prioritize behind the camera, but I see the importance of someone looking like me being in front of the camera, and when I look at the narrative of South Asian specifically, 20 years ago, you had a brown guy on camera, he was probably driving a cab, and it’s probably a white guy in makeup.

1:53:26 And then slowly they had a real brown guy on the camera, but he had to fake an accent and sound like, I pull from The Simpsons, to be a viable character. And now we’re getting to the Mindy Kalings and the Aziz Ansaris and Nicki Minajs and Lilly Singhs, where you just have a person of color who sounds like wherever they sound like. People need to hear my Canadian accent, and that’s who I am, and I want to devolve that, where I get to a point where I have a story which contains diverse characters, but their diversity isn’t the storyline.

1:53:55 Right? Yeah, the kid, you know, or the guy who has a chip on his shoulder and is addicted, is addicted to a substance, and doesn’t matter that he’s Chinese, or the person who is a serial monogamist who jumps from relationship to relationship because they got mommy issues. It doesn’t matter that they’re a homosexual. That is the next step in storytelling, where people can be represented as real people, not just shown as novelty characters. And I feel like I’m in a position to do that with the talents that I have, and putting words together.

1:54:29 So I’m looking to do that. I mean, I shot a, I’ve been shooting three-minute music videos, and I got really good at that. My next music video project is gonna be a short film, and so, uh, that’ll probably be a 20-minute music video, kind of like Kanye West’s “Runaway,” or Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” you know, cinematic, grand things that I grew up watching, those trailers, Thriller. Exactly. Michael Jackson, every single one.

1:54:51 He did all of his, they were just films. So I want to bring that back, and that’ll be the next step, and then hopefully the step after that will be a feature film, and working on things that make sense when I’m 70 and 80. You know, I mean, Mick Jagger’s rockin’ the stage at that point, but my knees give out. I can still write books, and I can still direct and shoot films, and I can still tell important stories. And the goal is the first line in my poem for the Apple commercial: “We see ourselves and the stories of others, and free ourselves writing our own.”

1:55:22 And I think that’s the philosophy that I really want to set up. And when I start to think about the highest-quality talents that we have, you know, let’s say like a Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s because he was acting since he was four. A lot of immigrant households are never gonna take a four-year-old and even put them in acting class, or provide an opportunity for them to discover their obsession. That’s what it really is. When we were teachers, we let the kids dip their toe in all these different subjects, to see what they fall in love with before they dive in themselves, whether it’s rocks, magnets, the, the, the, the plant life, you know, colonial history.

1:56:01 You know, we just expose them to a little bit of everything, and then the kids, when they fall in love with something, they just go for it. And I think it’s the same thing with art. It’s, you know, you find an eight-year-old kid who’s obsessed with taking pictures on an iPhone, let’s give him five hundred bucks for a camera and see what he can do. You know, let’s catch him young, you know, and if it took me ten years to get to this space, then what can I do to help someone figure it out.

1:56:22 Five, and the lineages are important, especially when, now that I’m taken care of, in the grander scheme, we need that. So in the South Asian community we don’t have the lineage. It’s the way Jay-Z gave us J. Cole, or Dr. Dre gave us Eminem, who gave us 50 Cent, who gave us The Game, or who gave us Kendrick Lamar. You know, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize.

1:56:42 You know that only happened because Dr. Dre was making booty shake videos and was able to fund Kendrick Lamar to spend all those years in the studio to get his pen perfect. So I think about all the artists whose parents don’t see this. You know, they don’t see that this gonna get fostered. I have a friend in the NHL. He plays for the Edmonton Oilers, and he lived in Vancouver and got no attention from the scouts, and then his father drove him eight hours north to a smaller town, Prince George, to one tournament where he just knocked it out of the park, scored a bunch of goals, got everyone’s attention, got a full scholarship to Michigan University, drafted by the Oilers.

1:57:20 And it was that eight-hour drive that was the difference. You know, it was the parents being willing to do something for that kid, and seeing that. And I see right now, immigrant parents, they don’t understand, they don’t see it. They don’t understand it. But now, this, this thing, Lilly on the Forbes list, and they’re seeing me become an independent artist and earning, and I’m making more money than a doctor, lawyer, engineer, so now they’ll be open to it.

1:57:43 And if we’re like, hey, if you see your kid loves performing, not the family parties, maybe invest a hundred bucks a month in acting class. Who knows what’ll happen? Yeah, you know, and in doing it, and again, from a pragmatic standpoint, and if I had to do it by starting a non-profit, I’ll do it by starting a non-profit. And again, I don’t, we don’t need a lot, especially if you catch me young. You know, and I have a friend who’s a savant on the piano, and I’m like, how’d it happen?

1:58:09 He was, his parents bought him a stupid little keyboard when he was five. Never told him to practice, never told him to play, but also never told him to shut up when he did. And he goes, that’s it. He never took a class in his life, and he’s a savant, and he just makes, he makes a lot of money just being a session player for everybody. And that’s all it is, is just creating these opportunities, getting people in front of new things.

1:58:30 And then in the next five years, I want to make that common for all, all communities, and let them know that it doesn’t require a big investment. It doesn’t require, you, it may not require you to drive to Katy, hours, or wake up in the morning and take him to hockey practice. It might just require staying out of their way. Yeah, just an open mind. Me, yeah.

1:58:49 Give him a room to make noise. Yeah. And I, I wasn’t allowed to listen to music as a kid, you know, and had I been able to read, maybe I would have been able to do this ten years before. Yeah, you know. So creating environments, and realizing how important our environments are, and making these little mini shifts to make it easier.

1:59:07 And I think the more art that we have, the better relationship we’ll have with our pain, because I think over the art and pain go hand in hand. Things that confuse us and frustrate us, if we create art from it, and then maybe we won’t turn to other things that are less sustainable to deal with the pain that we’re dealing with. I never thought about that. Violence being a result of a lack of a means to express. You saw that as a schoolteacher, and you can see it firsthand.

1:59:31 Man, that’s powerful. Um, tell me what scares you. When you think about your life or your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Rejection still scares me. I hate asking for favors.

1:59:47 Selling myself short, knowing I could have worked harder. It definitely scares me. Okay, let’s follow you. Okay, boy. Um, what keeps you awake at night?

2:00:03 Everything. Everything. Like, why everything I do? So, you know, got the book out. All night, I’m thinking about new ways to present the book to the world.

2:00:15 They have music videos being created in my head. I have pitch ideas that I’m writing down. I’m applying for my visa, my old O-1 visa, in the States right now, and I have a big to-do list from the lawyer, and that keeps me up at night. So, just hate the work. Just like, collect all your press clippings.

2:00:37 Write a resume. List every gig you’ve ever performed, that they’re trying to keep track of, all that. So I got a busy mind. Okay. When you look at the world in this current state, and all the stuff we see on the news and social media and politics, and all that, does it concern you?

2:00:55 Do you think we’re gonna make it? Does it mean we need to be proactive, especially with our minds, with, you know, books like this? So, a strategy in the book, there’s two strategies that give and counter, they’re kind of, I guess, intuitive to each other. One strategy is zoom in. When you encounter a challenge, zoom in and look deeper.

2:01:13 Look at the details of it. So for me, looking at the person who betrayed me, I look deeper at the situation and realized that they came from a broken place, and that’s why they ended up, you know, continuing that cycle and making poor choices. And when it came to me, that allowed me to have compassion towards them. And then the next chapter is called “Zoom Out.” Sometimes it’s the opposite.

2:01:35 Sometimes when you look at a challenging situation, you have to zoom out and look at it from the grand scheme of things, and realize how important it actually is. Because I think when we look at our current political situation, we always, understandably but selfishly, look at it in terms of our lives. And if we zoom out, we’ll start to see that, no, this is very predictable, and part of a pendulum swinging from one side to the other. And again, the farther we zoom out, if we look at our history, of our countries, of our societies, if we go 100 years, we’ll start to see patterns.

2:02:11 Zoom out 500 years, a bigger pattern. So I think for me, I look at it that way. Things suck, but things aren’t surprising. And I think that’s a really important thing to look at. I’ve had a really interesting article just two nights ago, from The Economist, saying an increase in democracy leads to a decrease of enthusiasm towards democracy.

2:02:37 So, you know, they’ve cited a lot of history, like, the more democracy is given to a society, the assumption is, you know, the democracy will strengthen. But if anything goes the other way, and people get too free, and they start to crave something else, whether it’s authoritarianism, fascism, communism, or something, and that’s why we constantly need somebody super left and super right, and everybody in between, to have these important dialogues. I think the challenge now is in a very valid argument for the idea that we might be at the decline of our society, in social media, because social media allows hyper echo chambers to form, where now you can curate, because social media just wants to keep you on their platforms.

2:03:30 It will only show you the news and the information that you want to see, not the news and information you need to see. And I feel like that is extremely detrimental to any free society, because I’ve taken away free thought, and information is becoming weaponized on a hyper level. And it doesn’t matter who’s in power now. It doesn’t matter who’s abusing their power now. These practices aren’t going to go away.

2:03:58 Best practices never go away. And if you’re a politically ambitious person, you know you’re gonna pick up on some of this stuff, and you can be like, wait a minute, I can, you know, 20 years ago, if somebody accused me of sexual assault, I just had to instantly resign and disappear, even if it wasn’t true. That was the assassin’s bullet. Now I just have to say “fake news,” and people forget in a day, you know. That practice is going to continue, and I think that’s very dangerous, and that’s scary.

2:04:32 I think social media is gonna have to make an adjustment. I mean, I know Twitter is making a good first step by, uh, putting little ads. Yeah, they can, they try. I mean, Jack Dorsey was on Rogan saying how they tried to disturb the echo chamber. He was like, you said, you, it’s, it’s the, it’s freedom, but you choose what you want to see in here, then that’s all you hear.

2:04:55 Right? But if your feed needs to be like my feed right now, your feed is so, even if you’re following the same people I’m following, your feed’s still different than mine. It’s so curated, and I think there’s a danger to that, and just such a danger to that. And I feel like, that, in my opinion, because 200 years ago the average human being didn’t have a platform to share their opinion, let alone had an opinion, you know, or didn’t know they had anything.

2:05:25 I didn’t know they had an opinion, or didn’t know they were allowed to have. In the pan, now we’re given, you know, carte blanche and freedom to share our opinion all the time, and we’re so, and we’re adolescents in that space. And you know, it used to be, think before you speak, and that was literally, Google before you tweet. You know, people think they’re entitled to an opinion, which you’re not. You’re entitled to an informed opinion, and an informed opinion requires a couple of calories and some effort and some time, which people don’t want to do.

2:05:58 But we’re giving these platforms where, you know, opinions are manipulated. You know, your feed is curated for you, and fear is a powerful weapon, so people can, you know, you’re not happy with the way your life is, people can inundate your feed with information, blaming immigrants for why your job sucks, blaming women for why you don’t have the freedoms you used to have as a male 20 years ago. Blaming, always blaming the other. You know, and it’s very convenient, and self-pity touches on, and I talk about in the book, a need to feel connected.

2:06:36 And it’s the easiest, cheapest, most convenient way to feel connected. And I liken it to fast food, where it’s easy, cheap, and convenient, but too much of it’s gonna kill you. And are those in power and those who control the information understand that, right? And they’re really creating content to really tickle our self-pity, and that’s really gonna divide us, and our divisions only benefit those in power. And I think trying to educate people and getting them more self-aware on that, that’s a tall task.

2:07:07 It’s a very tall task. And I, you know, on a micro level, like when I’m given hate or aggressive energy from the internet, I try to respond to it with some form of love. You know, some form of, you know, what you’re saying is not constructive or beneficial. But I used to be like you. I used to be jealous, or I used to be hateful.

2:07:37 Hopefully you grow out of it, like I grew out of it, and just feeling, I’m acknowledging you, because that’s probably why you’re putting this stuff out there. It’s graffiti. You want to get acknowledged. You want to be noticed. So I think from that standpoint, we’re in a little bit of trouble.

2:07:52 But I think everything else politically, I don’t think there’s anything new that we’re really dealing with. Yeah, that’s the cycle. It’s part of a cycle. The only challenges are, you know, I think we’re currently dealing with some very extreme cases in the cycle, and I’m just very afraid that even if somebody was a little bit more tactful, and I think that’s the big difference. That’s just tact, you know?

2:08:19 It’s somebody with somebody, but with more dignity intact, approaches these positions of leadership, and they’re still gonna continue some of these damaging practices because they’re gonna see how useful they work. And I think that’s where it’s gonna be challenging. And meanwhile, societies that aren’t free are really doing it, pumping up their PR, and being, they look, you know, maybe it’s better to do it the way we do it. You know, whether that’s China, whether that’s Russia, and we’re gonna have a bunch of fake democracies around the world, where people are gonna think they’re free as long as they don’t walk too far out to see the cage.

2:08:56 So, but at the end of the day, the revolutions always have to start from within. You know, what’s your freedom? You’re free the moment you, I have it tattooed on my neck: freedom is having nothing to lose. And the idea is, the second you decide you’re free is the moment you’re free, just like the moment you start writing, you’re a writer. You know, you decide who you are, and we’re only constrained by external constraints, only so much.

2:09:22 And revolutions can form when people take personal responsibility and unite. You know, unity is immunity. And I don’t care what you believe. If you’re contributing to the divide and you’re part of the problem, we need more unity. We need more brick-building.

2:09:39 Everybody cares about their kids. Everybody cares about their families. Everybody’s worried about the future. Everybody’s just trying to pay their bills. Doesn’t matter who they voted for, doesn’t matter what color hat they’re wearing, doesn’t matter what team they root for.

2:09:51 We’re all in the same boat, and we need to find more things that we have in common. And maybe it’s gonna be an alien invasion that gets us to do it all together. But if you spend time arguing with people who believe differently than you, then we’re just contributing to the divide, and that divide only benefits those in power. Yeah, very well said. You know, I always ask a few questions at the end.

2:10:13 I’m gonna ask you, if you could pick up a magic phone and call up the 20-year- old Humble, I don’t even know if you were Humble then, and give that young man some advice, what would you tell him? Solid advice. The book has Things No One Else Can Teach Us, right? It comes in a bunch of different cool-looking colors, like green, a lot, some nice ones they can find.

2:10:57 You’ve got YouTube channels, websites, all that stuff, right? Yeah, I’m everywhere. So, Humble the Poet, Instagram, Twitter, youtube.com/humbletothepoet. I have a website as well, where you can find all my work, including the clothes I design, my tour dates, my music videos, my books. You know, they’re available in a whole bunch of different covers, depending on what country you’re watching this in.

2:11:22 So Humble the Poet, Calm, and yeah, maybe where I started posting on Medium recently. Some on all the social media, posting my work in one way, shape or the other. You know, I’m on a gang of, I’ve done a gang of podcasts and interviews and having conversations with great minds like you. So I’ll leave you to find. Well, thank you so much, man.

2:11:42 I don’t meet many people that you know are undefined in their vertical, you know, and I think it’s really refreshing. You know, well, you don’t have to be a musician or a writer, well, they’re trying, or a poet. I’m sure they’re trying. My agent has recently referred to me as a hyphenated talent. Oh, really?

2:11:58 That is again, some people are called slashes, slashes, because you’ve got so many things. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think it’s really nice that if you are, if you are you, that can be expressed through so many different media, and I also like the fact that you’re like, well, right now this media form is funding the other media form, and then later that might fund that one, and you’re just expressing. Yeah. And I think for me, what it, the, the joy that comes is, one day you had a spark in your head, a simple, ass idea, and then, you know, after some time and a lot of work, it comes to life, whether that’s a music video, and you watched my music videos, very intricate, they’re very cinematic, and you realize, like, wow, like, I sat there and just like, okay, I want flowers growing out of my beard.

2:12:42 Okay. Oh, I want a scene where everybody is in Technicolor, and looks like it’s Tron. And I just make stuff up, and I’m just writing stuff down and finding pictures on the internet, sending it to my team. Or I want to write a book where I talk about horrible stories and how I found value in it. And then the next thing you know, the book’s in my hand.

2:13:00 That journey from spark to something tangible, this is probably why we give birth. And I think, you know, that’s what it is. I like bringing ideas to life, and that’s it. And any way I can bring ideas to life, I will. And I encourage people: tell your story in any way you can, and it doesn’t have to be in the written form.

2:13:20 It can be in terms of designing clothing. It can be in terms of designing a building, it could be in terms of designing an interior, designing a set. It could be in terms of an interpretive dance. It could be a painting, anything creative. I think creativity is how we can deal with the challenges that life gives us, and put out something that the world’s never seen.

2:13:40 That’s art. And your biggest enemy, the biggest enemy to art, is people who think yesterday was more valuable than tomorrow. You know, the fundamentalist, and, you know, a Steven Pressfield idea, and I hold that near and dear. And don’t look at them as your enemy. They’re scared, and they want to hold on to yesterday, but there’s so much more promise in prospects and opportunities in the future.

2:14:04 So create new things, show the world what the world needs. I love it, man. Amazing ideas, man. Thank you for the knowledge. It’s like, almost like street knowledge meets real-life knowledge meets all that stuff.

2:14:15 So, and I love Steven Pressfield, man. He said, I’m a big fan. So thanks so much.