I want to wake up more happy than depressed. I want to enjoy life. I'm not the final form of myself. I don't know what that's going to be.
It's one of the most influential voices in morning radio. The episode of the day just won't show the preface club. Charlemagne is like a god. I had no idea who I was.
There was this character that had been created named Charlemagne. I'm like, I don't know who this person is. At some point, I remember saying to myself, well, what's wrong with me? I thought it was OK.
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They set the station. Everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become the happier, healthier and more healed. I'm so grateful that you're lending me your eyes and your ears for this time investing in your growth. And today's guest is someone who I'm so grateful to because he came on the show back five years ago when we were just starting out, the platform was not established, and I'd reached out to him and I said, hey, I'd love to interview you.
He came on as one of our earliest guests, did me a massive favor. Over the last few years, I've been on his incredible show, The Breakfast Club. So many times now, some of my favorite conversations brings out a different side of me. I get to have a honest, vulnerable, truthful, reflective conversation.
And he's a New York Times bestseller, and his new book is out right now. It's called Get Honest or Dylying, Why Small Talk Sucks. I'm talking about the one at the only Charlemagne, the guy at Charlemagne. It is so great to have you back on purpose.
And honestly, man, the friendship and the genuine connection that we built over the last few years has been a real honor for me. And as I said, I'm very grateful to you because you believed me when I was just starting out and it really meant a lot to me and it still does today. Man, thank you for that. I received that.
And to see you grow into your purpose, and see you have this massive platform has been amazing to watch. I'm happy to be here. Happy to be here with one of my favorite people and all of my favorite podcast. Thank you, man.
Thank you. Well, let's dive straight into it because you put this book out. And I think it's really true to the times that we live in. I think we're living in times that are defined by quarrel, defined by hypocrisy, defined by lack of self-awareness, defined by gossip.
And here's a book talking about all of that. And I wanted to start off simply by asking you, why have you built up such an animosity towards small talk? Where does that come from? Well, number one, I hate small talk, just on the literal level, right?
When somebody sees you and they try to make conversation and they're not really talking about anything. And it's just like, you and this person are in this unique moment in time where y'all get to share space and nobody is saying anything. That is annoying to me. And it's annoying to the point where I'm like, I would rather just tell the person like, oh, we don't have to do this.
We can be on our phones, we can be reading the book, we can sit here in silence. Like you don't have to try to make conversation. But then on a more macro level, I feel like we're having too much small talk, we're having too many micro conversations. We're taking these micros and making them macros, like the things that people get online and discuss and debate about and argue about over and over and over and over in the biggest game of things mean nothing.
And that's why things just come and go in this era. Every day you get online and it looks like there's a conversation that's the biggest thing in the world. Wait three hours, wait four hours, wait 12 hours, it'll be completely gone and it'll be like, well damn, I thought everybody was so concerned about this two days ago. So I just have a problem with everything being sold, macro that shouldn't be now.
And the things that we should be discussing, like the big macro conversation, we have a way of making those so micro and that's the background noise. That's why even like on Breakfast Club or on my podcast, Brilliant idiots, when we do discuss things, right? That might be rooted in pop culture. I'm always trying to see like, what's the bigger conversation that we can be having behind this?
It can't just be that, y'all think this person is a terrible person. That was a bad tweet. Like what's the psychology or what's the thing that we can discuss that people can actually learn from? That's what I wanna do.
And how do you break that cycle? Let's say you bump into someone that you haven't seen for a bit and I think a lot of people struggle with this. She's met a party, an event in the corridor. And you go, hey, how's going?
Oh yeah, good, yeah, cool. And you know you're not listening. You know there's no real thing. How do you break that if you can?
So why not example is you say, look, we don't have to do this. How do you break it in a positive sense? Like how even people with their friends, with their family, you're at family dinner and everyone's talking about whatever. How do you actually break that and elevate that?
Like what's the healthy way? Tell them. Be honest about what you're feeling in that moment. Like yo, we ain't talking about nothing right now.
I'll be like yo, well, who's gonna start the conversation? Throw something on the table. Like literally, that's what this book is. You know, we're just gonna start the conversation with somebody and you wanna have a conversation, but you can't.
Like we make this a lot more difficult than we need to. And all it takes is for somebody to break the ice. That's all you're literally waiting for. You're sitting around with somebody, you're just like, I wanna talk, but I just don't know what to say.
And you're thinking should I bother this person? Should I not bother this person? Does this person wanna be bothered? Does this person wanna talk?
Maybe they do? Maybe they don't? Maybe that's the question, right? You can ask them like, you feel like having a conversation?
If that person says no, respect that. Don't ask them that hoping that they say yes, but if they say no, you're still gonna force them to have the conversation. Like sometimes you should just ask a person. Like, yo, you got time to talk?
Yeah, yeah. How often do you get that? Jay? Exactly.
You can just run up to you and they just throw their stuff on you all the time. And you have time to speak right now. And if you say not at the moment they're offended, you may not wanna offend them. So you take time to have this meaningless conversation, this small talk, you're just telling them, yeah, just because you don't wanna offend them, but then you're not even really paying attention.
You know, so nobody's doing it. We're not doing each other any favors by doing that. So just be honest about what you're feeling in that moment. Yeah, and I feel like the reason you pointed out there, the reason why so many of us are struggling to be honest with people is because people are offended by honesty, even if it's genuine and even if it's thoughtful.
Like you just said, like if I asked you, I was like, Hey, Shalom, can you talk about this? And you were like, yeah, I don't have time right now because of this and this or whatever. I'm in between something. As a respectful person back, I'm gonna understand that.
I actually had someone who messaged this morning. I'd messaged someone inviting them to an event and they didn't get back to me. And they messaged me this morning and were just like, Jay, I'm so sorry, I was like getting ready for the Met and my outfit went wrong. And then like, I had to figure this out.
And it's been crazy and it all worked out. I wanted you to know, you know, I always respond to you. And I was like, yeah, I wasn't offended at all. I respect that and thank you for explaining.
And it turned out, but a lot of the times, I feel we're scared of being honest because we're scared the other person's gonna turn around and go, oh, you never get back to me. Oh, you think you're too important for me? We are scared of offending people. How can we all stop being so offended?
Because I feel like anything offends anyone these days. That's a multi-laying answer, right? And number one, I think we have to stop being people pleases. And I think that if you grew up in a certain environment, you've had certain things, you know, happening to you, like my therapist always told me, like I know exactly why I'm a people pleaser, right?
And I talk about it in the book, I'm a people pleaser because, you know, abuse it ourselves at the age of eight, right? So me and I wanting that young lady to touch me anymore turned into her calling me ugly and saying I had a big nose. So in order for her to stop doing that, I would continue to let her touch on me. So it's like, you don't realize how that carries on into adulthood, to where you just become this people pleaser.
You don't wanna let anybody down because if you feel like you let them down, then they're gonna start speaking ill about you and doing things that hurt your feelings. So you just continue to do what's best for them, sacrificing your own peace. And we can't do that. You just gotta set boundaries for yourself like, yo, I'm not gonna be a people pleaser in any way, shape or form.
And man, honestly, if my boundaries, you know, cause somebody to feel offended. And that's the whole point of having the boundary in the first place. I kinda have a boundary from this person to begin with. You're upset with me because I'm placing a boundary from my piece of mind.
No, I don't need you on my life to begin with. How early, well, when were you ready to revisit that eight year old self? And when did you feel comfortable to even reflect back on that in therapy? Because I imagine that, well, you can tell me, when you were eight, did you just block it out in the next few years and then when did you go back to it and say, oh, actually that's where a lot of it started.
I was watching an episode of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry was on it and Tyler Perry was crying about the abuse that he experienced from a woman in this family and I think I was in my 20s. And I remember saying to myself like, what's wrong with him? Like, why is he upset about that? And then when, at some point I remember saying to myself, well, what's wrong with me?
I thought it was okay. But then you kinda suppressed it again cause I wasn't going to therapy in my 20s. But when I started going to therapy in like my late 30s, that's when I started to unpack a whole lot of that stuff. Cause you know, you go to therapy for one thing, you go to therapy because you deal with, you think you deal with anxiety and depression and you start feeling back all these different layers and you start realizing all of this other trauma, you've experienced and you know, that was one of those things like, you know, being a people pleaser and not just setting proper boundaries because of that moment that happened to me, you know, when I was eight years old and carried on throughout my whole whole adult life until I finally realized like, oh, this is why I don't like letting people down.
This is why I do things, you know, for people even when I don't want to. This is why even if I'm not happy necessarily about doing something, I just go along and do it because I don't wanna upset or offend that person or call that person to be, you know, looking at me in a negative way. So I would say like mid 30s is when I really started unpacking. So it's probably been like the last 10 years of really unpacking it.
And when you ate, how long did that abuse lost? Like how recurring was it? And I don't know, man, because, and I even mentioned it in the book, it went, I suppressed so much abuse that I experienced when I was young that it wasn't even that one person, you know, but you just, you suppress it because in a while out of the way it becomes the norm. Like I remember being young, like nine, 10, 11 years old, having conversations with other young men I grew up around and we were all talking about older women, we was dealing with it and we thought we was lying to each other, but now when you look back on it, it was just all a bunch of young kids.
Getting abused, when you were a young man, you don't look at it like that. You're a young man, you just like, oh, I'm getting action early, you know, I'm getting action early and I'm getting action with older women early. So you don't look at it like that until you get older and realize how a man, how a lot of that impacts you, you know, like mentally animals. Yeah, what were some of the ways that you think that impacted you?
And it's interesting, I love what you said there. Like when you're young, you actually see that as like ego, bravado, arrogance, like it's cool. What were the things that you started to extrapolate through therapy and the work you did where you were like, oh, that's the kind of impact that it's had in my real life and my real adult life? The biggest one for me is the people pleasing aspect.
That's literally the biggest one, like not having no boundaries. And when I did try to set boundaries with one of the women in particular, her, you know, getting in my head, it's like logically calling me ugly and saying, I got a big nose and all this other stuff. For me, the biggest, you know, issue was the fact that I just did not know how to set proper boundaries. And when I did set up, it was like a, it wasn't the brick house, it was the straw house, no.
You could just blow it, you could just blow it away. So I never really set any proper boundaries. It wasn't until I started unpacking a lot of that stuff that I realized like, no, I'm gonna set my boundary and I'm not gonna be upset at, you know, any bad, big bad wolf that's mad that they can't blow my house down. Yeah, what I find interesting especially is I think we all developed a peacemaker, people please a personality type through different reasons.
How have you found yourself not being a people pleaser with your therapist? Because I find a lot of people end up playing that role where they can't be honest with their therapist because we want our therapist to like us and say, well done, like good work, you know, like, oh, you really? So how did you find yourself getting that ability? Cause I think a lot of people listening and watching maybe going to therapy, they may be trying to turn to help, but actually they find themselves playing that same role with their therapist.
Man, I got a new therapist, you know, just past year and my first therapist, I might have been lying to her probably 50, 60% of the time. Just because there was so many things that I thought I wanted to share, but I wasn't. And it wasn't until earlier this year, you know, having me and my wife and my wife on the way on this, nice little spiritual retreat for a weekend. And you know, we was in indulging in plant-based medicines, you know, I was in particular.
And one of the things that came forth for me was literally stop lying to yourself and stop volunteering those lies to other people. And so much came up in that moment. You know, so much, you know, like I said, abuse the experience of the child, all that type of stuff. And that's when I was like, oh, I've been telling half-truths, I haven't been being completely honest.
Like I've been telling, you know, just enough of a story to get just enough back. But that's not how you, you know, properly heal anything. Like you got to deal with it all, you know, don't even, don't even try. And so for me, I feel like, you know, I probably was lying to like my first therapist for like, I would literally probably stay half of the time.
Do you think we do that because we're actually scared of having a dress? Is that the reason? 100%. Like it's still fear, it's still insecurity that we're not willing to share with anyone.
Like even at night that I was, you know, that first, when I was the second night of the journey on Iowa, I was like, me and my wife been together 26 years. And I was sharing things with her that I never had shared with anybody. And that felt so, so, so, so freeing. And even in that moment, I'm like, I don't think there's anybody else I trust to share these things with.
Not even a therapist. No matter how good the therapist is, no matter how, you know, great the therapist is, like this individual that I shared the majority of my life with is the only person I feel comfortable, you know, putting all that on the table for. Yeah. I think that's a really interesting point because I think the words honesty and vulnerability have somewhat been exploited in and of themselves in this idea that if you're honest, everyone has to know everything.
Like you have to just put it all out there. What you just said is actually, even with my therapist, they're not going to get the 100% version of me because my wife, my partner, who's been with me for over 20 years now, it's like that person not only deserves it, but we've built up enough trust and there's earned respect where we both can share that. What's been your take on the internet, like over sharing, under sharing, over telling, under telling because I feel like there was a point in time where it's like, if you're vulnerable, you better say everything to everyone, right? Like that's what vulnerability is.
And I think there was like this false pressure that you had to share all your business with everyone. Yeah, I think on the internet, a lot of people crying out for help who probably not probably who need to be in therapy, actually talking to somebody and it's a whole lot of people just lying. But that's what I mean when I say, you know, stop lying to yourself and stop volunteering those lives to other people every single day. People wake up and just volunteer lives for no reason.
And I'm not saying lives have to be negative. Like they just lie about their life, they lie about who they lie about what they do. And it's like, nobody asked you for that. Like nobody.
So you're inviting all of this negative energy into your life. You're inviting all of this opinion and all of this critique. That's literally going to have real world consequences. That's the stuff that's going to give you anxiety.
That's the stuff that's going to cause you to have bouts of depression. And you're going to be sitting there dealing with all of this stuff for a farce you created. Like what is the point of that? So it's like for me, man, we really all just have to stop volunteering, you know, the lives we tell ourselves to others.
Yeah. What led you towards plant medicine is a method of healing as a method of reflection. Like what made you go down that route? Because you've done therapy for years, you've talked about it.
You're a big ambassador for mental health. What was the opening there? I mean, it was just something I wanted to try. And then they always say, you know, you don't do it unless it's calling you.
And so, you know, just reading about it and, you know, seeing, you know, what other people's take on it was like two things that really attracted me was everybody that did it was telling me like I saw God. Like I knew people who were atheists. Like Neil Brennan was an atheist. And he did it.
And now he's like a believer. And you know, and I was like, whoa, I've always had faith and I've always been a believer. And I want to see like, I want to see, you know, see more of that. And I think people saying how it detaches you from your ego.
Like I thought that was very powerful because that's something that we all try to do every day. But they was like, no, it feels like somebody literally takes your ego and just whips it away from you. And I wanted to know what that felt like, man, I absolutely, overstand what it felt like, especially that that second night. Yeah.
Where did you go for it? Where did you try it out? I think I was fine. Okay.
Okay. So you didn't go too far. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because I've had anything you and local. So yeah, I mean, I talked to it like, why even I think it was peru, of course, really with some way, I forgot what it was, but he was just like, I said jungle.
He was like, you don't want to have that kind of experience in the jungle. I mean, you wasn't knocking anybody. He just like, for you, on your first time, I just don't, you know, recommend that. So it was just kind of like divine alignment.
Like it was one of those things like it had been called me for the past, I would say five or six years. And then like the opportunity just presented itself, you know, with some people with some really great energy. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, why not?
And it just all lined up with one of those things like, oh, I'm actually treated this weekend. Yeah. The wife wanted to do it. We want to do it.
That's beautiful. What have you found has been the hardest thing for you to be honest with yourself about everything? Everything. You know, it's so easy for us to get caught up in line ourselves.
Because we do it to protect ourselves in a lot of ways, right? So like it might be a person that you genuinely have love for, like genuinely just on a human level, like you love this person and like, you know, this person might have a talent or a skill set that you know, you want to help amplify, like provide opportunity for, but you know, as well as I do that, you know, character talent sometimes will take people with character, can sustain them. So even though you see this person's talent, you know, once they get in a certain position, you realize their character isn't going to be able, you know, to keep them there, but you will constantly lie to yourself about this person's character over and over and over and over. And then you wonder why things aren't working out.
And literally it will affect everything that you're doing. Like let's just say it's a team and you put this person as part of the team. This person is causing problems with the rest of the team and you see it, which you make excuses for it, you know, and it's like even a friend that you might have been friends with a person for a long, long, long time and you know, you all have very deep intimate conversations. So you know this person differently than a lot of other people know them.
So you get a soft spot, you know, in your heart for said individuals. So when you're hearing everybody else talk about how terrible this person is, you're lying to yourself about it. Like, no, y'all just want to understand this person. Like it's like, no, the reality is they are a terrible person.
And they need to do more work and they need to really, you know, figure themselves out. So, you know, the biggest thing, um, yeah, just we constantly, a lot of stuff about everything. You might, you might look in the mirror and know you need to lose 20 pounds. Like you might put a shirt on and know it don't quite fit right and you'll pull on it and tug it and you know, how did this look?
And you know, like, it looks like, it looks good. And you're like, hey, it does. And then you get on Instagram and then you get humbled. Because it's the bunch of people that don't know you at all who are willing to tell you the truth about how you look.
And then you add yourself again. And you say, oh, they're just hating. You knew that was wack when you put it on. You knew you had no right putting that shirt on before you put it on.
But you decided to do it anyway. So I just feel like we, I think every single moment of our lives is an exercise in being honest with ourselves, first and foremost, and then, then the rest of the world. And then choosing who to share that honesty with. Because sometimes people are lying.
It's just none of your business. Yeah. And I think that's something that people forget too, especially in this world of over sharing. I have to constantly remind people that, especially in this era of the internet.
I'm like, when you talk about celebrities, you don't know any of these people. I don't care what they post on social. I don't care what you hear in their music. You genuinely do not know any of these individuals.
Stop lying yourself like you do. In what sense? Because I'm thinking of something, but in what sense do you mean, like we don't know them or how that applies to us? You think we're commentating on a life that we don't know about?
Yeah, yeah, people pass these judgments. Like you'll see whole cycle analysts about people, right? And it's like, how do you come to that conclusion? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like literally you're breaking down a person's whole panel. There are narcissists in there, egotistical in there out for this. And I'm like, how do you know based off a tweet? Yeah.
How do you know based off one conversation that they had? You don't know this person. This person has lived 30 plus years, 40 plus years, whatever it is. You do not spend every waking moment with this individual.
How do we come to these full blown conclusions about people that we don't know? I had somebody get mad at me and they got told them, I don't know this person personally. Yeah. We were talking about an artist.
And I was like, I don't know that person personally. Now, that person I was talking to did. Yeah. But I understand how they felt.
Yeah. But I don't have that same personal connection, our feelings toward this individual because I don't have a personal connection with them. And when it comes to public figures, a lot of times it makes you more objective. Because you don't have any bias because anybody that you actually have a connection with, you're going to have a natural bias.
I'm going to say that's another thing we lie to each other about. We lie to each other like we're so honest and so objective when we all have our biases for people, we all have our biases for places, we all have our biases for things. And that's okay. Yeah.
And if you can address that and say, yeah, I know I got a bias, then you could actually have honest conversation about whatever you're talking about. Our look at things, you know, from an honest perspective, you can't even be honest about your biases and you start know from from from a lie. Yeah, I often find it's this observer mindset that we're missing where it's like, okay, we have a conversation right now. But can I actually allow myself to look at it from this perspective?
If I can't do that, like if I can't see, oh, I'm currently displaying ego and the other person is currently displaying defensiveness. If I can't see what I'm displaying and what someone else is and I'm only seeing what they're displaying, then I'm not really observing. I can't be objective. Absolutely.
And I find that that's exactly what's missing where, and I can testify to what you just said, whether it's inaccurate guests lists at people's wedding that are printed in the papers or whether it's inaccurate. Oh, I know the new thing. Oh, they're going to get a divorce or their kids hate them or whatever else it is. I can testify to having known, knowing people going, none of that's true.
And it's and it goes back to the point you started with, which is this idea of we get so lost, commentating on everything and everyone else that we know nothing about, that we don't have time and energy to work on what's going on inside here. Absolutely. And I find it remarkable that we spend our lives trying to solve, psychoanalyze, entertain ourselves by someone else's problems rather than fixing our own. We do that on purpose because if we can talk about everybody else and we can avoid that hard, painful, excruciating work it takes to deal with our own be as if I can look at everyone else, I can avoid looking at that mirror all day long.
I'm too busy sightseeing other people and commenting on other people. So I never have to look in the mirror at what it is that I need to fix. Yeah. Yeah.
And you said something that's interesting too many. That's why that's why this era where in is so difficult. And I think even our position is media personalities because, you know, I remember when I used to work for Wendy Williams, she used to always say to me, you're going to be up to people or up to industry. But it's almost impossible when you're in the business because you're going to actually meet people and you're going to develop relationships.
And I think a lot of times we have a different perspective of things because we're kind of in it. Like I've literally been with individuals, couples watching them level on each other, watching them kiss on each other. And then it'll be like breaking news. They're getting a divorce to each other.
They're apart. And I'm like, this is a mind fucker. Because I'm like, whoa, like, and it puts so much in perspective and not even just that, like us as individuals, you'll see things about yourself. And you're like, that's not remotely true.
Like that's not even accurate at all. And everybody around you will be mad and everybody around you will be upset. And you'll be pissed off too. But then you have to really say to yourself, what are you going to do?
Yeah, I'm not going to. I refuse to go on the defensive and start explaining to myself to a bunch of people who never even took the time to learn the truth anyway. Yeah, if you didn't, you never took the time to learn the truth. So you would rather just put this out there, you know, print this, say these things, not share if you're accurate, you know, not, not share if there's any fault.
So that you just whatever. So why would I take the time to explain the truth to you? Yeah, now I'm not, now, not only am I validating what you said to a certain extent, well, not what you said, but validating you and your platform. Now I'm actually giving you more content.
Yeah. I'm not doing it at all. Yeah, for sure. For sure.
I was going to go back to the personal again with you, because I feel like a big turning point in your book that you talk about that I can't wait for people to dive into is this moment where you realize that your father was cheating on your mom. Yeah. And like that is like a really big moment for you at that point, because you're like, I think 17 years old and you're learning about this. And naturally you feel like, tell me how you felt like in that moment, because it almost feels like the first time you discovered that something's a lie.
Like in a big way, I mean, yeah. That was a very macro conversation, you know, because I had made up my mind in that moment that me and my pops couldn't have no small talk about this situation, because you know, we live in a small town. So you're hearing it constantly, right? And you're driving by, you know, this house and you're seeing his, his truck out there and you know, you're fully aware of all the different lies that he's that he's that he's told my mom like, Oh, I'm over there doing work.
Oh, that's my secretary. All this other stuff, right? So finally, you know, just decided to have the macro conversation and say, yo, you got hit you know, mom, what you doing is fine. And my dad was like, yo, you only got one girlfriend?
You know, one day you understand. Like he that was his reply to me. And that messed me up for a while because that's my hero. Like I said, still to the day, I love my dad.
Like my dad, I fully understand, you know, the totality of my father is a man. And as I've become a man myself at 45 years old, I'll overstand, you know, everything that, you know, he went through. And so when he said that to me, I felt like I had to live up to his expectations. So that's when it became a thing of, Oh, let me show him that I can get a roster.
I don't have to be, you know, committed to to one person. And that lasted for a while. Not a while, but too long from my, my liking, right? And so I remember later on, years down the line, my dad saying to me, you know, the worst thing that he ever did was calling my mother to leave him and telling me that I always had it right.
Cause he, you know, I'm with the same woman, right? For 26 years. He was like telling me, I always had it right. And I'm like, damn, this is why you shouldn't always listen to adults, bro.
Like just because you love a person and they're older than you and they got more experiences than you don't mean that they're always right. But I give my father so much grace because, you know, one of the first break, the first break to I ever had in therapy. I mean, the thing that led me to tears was just realizing that my father used to discipline me for things that he never taught me. And now I even take it a step further and say, my father used to discipline me for things that he never taught me, but also for things that he never learned himself.
So a lot of his, his, his, his raising of me was raising me through fear and not love, right? So cause he just didn't want me to make the same mistakes that he made. He was terrified of me going down, you know, the same path that he went down. And I ended up going down that path anyway, like even down to, you know, the mental health journey.
Like when I wrote my second book, you know, shook on anxiety playing tricks on me. When I wrote that, I was all the way discombobulated. I had no idea whether I was coming or going. Cause I had just started going to therapy and I had just started peeling back a lot of those layers.
So I was just raw. Like I had, I had no idea who I was. There was this character that had been created named Charlemagne. I'm like, I don't know who this person is.
Then I'm dealing with LaNard, myself. I don't know who this person is. I was just all over the place. And I literally just put it all in that book and had a doctor.
It's major do clinical correlations to the things that I was talking about. But he, my father had read that book and I talked about this story in the book, but he had read that book. And then that same week I had a cousin who had completed suicide and he had attempted to complete suicide like four of the times and the fourth time he completed it. I think he was like 25 years old.
So my dad was triggered by a lot of that stuff. He was triggered by a lot of the stuff I wrote in my book and he was definitely triggered by my cousin completing suicide. So my father calls me and he tells me, you know, he read the book. He talked about my cousin a little bit and he goes, man, you know, I tried to commit suicide 30 plus years ago.
But I didn't because of your old assistant and you. And he was like, I was on two to three medications. No, he was actually on 10 to 12 medications and he was on therapy. Two and three times a week dealing with his own mental health issues and so much so that the status I can not have just started giving him a check.
And that's what he used to call it a crazy check. So I remember asking my mom like, yo, you know, you know, dad was going through all this. And she was like, I just thought you're playing crazy to get a check. So just think about that.
Like, think about if he was able to just express himself and have those conversations with us as a family back then, how that would have saved me, you know, so much grief when I was dealing with panic attacks and stuff as a child and thinking something was, you know, you know, wrong with me. And, um, that makes me give my father a whole lot of grace. He's just a man who was just trying to do his best, you know, with what he had and the knowledge he had at the time. So I don't, I don't, I held a lot of that against him for a long, long, long, long time.
But it was in that moment in 2018 when he told me everything he was dealing with. I don't know why I just clicked like, I just a man. Yeah. He just a man, just like I'm a man.
Like, who am I to not give him the same grace? I want totally what allowed you to have that show. I mean, to be able to zoom out and have that context and that grace, because I think when we're analyzing these things and you kind of connect the dots, you're like, Oh, yeah, my dad, treat me like that. That's what I became like that.
That's what I made that mistake. And you can spend so much time in this very linear back and forth journey of that was the past. That's how it connects to the present. That's how it impacted my life.
But you're almost looking at it from a bird's eye view looking down again. That makes sense. I'm a dad. And then you can give grace.
You can have what was the key in therapy and in your personal work that shifted it from being this linear thing to being a bird's eye view of this situation. I honestly think I've always had that as a child, like always, like I've always had a bird's eye view of things. Like I've always felt in tune to something to something else like that. There was always like this voice in my head or this spirit that was, you know, moving me in certain directions or causing me to see certain things.
Sometimes I was see things I wasn't supposed to see, you know, literally and figuratively, right? And I've always had these visions. I just I remember my dad always telling me when I was a child, if you don't change your ways, you end up in jail dead or broken into the tree. And a lot of people hear that, but don't actually learn that and apply that.
For some reason, I was able at a young age to actually start seeing people that I love go to jail, like for prison sentences and I was going to jail. And you know, I saw people around me that were actually getting killed. I saw older cousins who I used to look up to. They are sitting under the tree kind of like not doing much with themselves.
And I'm like, oh, that's not going to be me. And I literally could see everything I do today directly. It's going to impact what happens to me tomorrow. So I need to start doing what I need to do today.
It's like, yo, if I continue to eat like this, I'm going to be fat in the future, right? Like if I don't read this book, you know, my knowledge is going to be limited in the future. So I've always, you know, by the grace of God just tended to have like a bird's eye view of things. Like my third eye has been open for quite a long time.
Like to the point, even when I think about like me and my wife had a nonprofit back in the day, well, we thought it was a nonprofit when we set it up. It was a no we set it up as a nonprofit, but we never went to the proper channels to make it a nonprofit. It just sounds like, oh, we were going to set it like, you know, it was one of those things. And so we had a product was called third eye awareness.
Like literally, that's what it was called. Even when like the first tattoo I ever got was Wolverine from the X-Men, because I love Wolverine, right? Like I love the X-Men. I'm a big comic book guy.
But back then I got to tattoo when I was like 17 years old. This one tattoo was illegal in South Carolina. I got to tattoo because the thing that attracted me towards Wolverine was his healing powers. And so the tattoo I got on my arm is Wolverine holding a microphone in his hand because I thought rap was going to be what changed my life.
But lo and behold, it was these type of microphones that changed my life. And you know, now my I feel like my purpose in life is to not only continue to heal myself, but to continue to help as many other people, you know, you know, get on their healing journey. So I was 16, 17 years old thinking about stuff like this. Yeah.
And in 16, 17, you get attacked like that. And in your mind, you're explaining it perfectly. I'm like, I'm attracted to Wolverine because of his healing powers. And then rap saved.
And then you're out of the microphone. But now you I'm 45 by before the six. I'm looking at it like, Oh, I understand what that was now. And I was another revelation that came to me.
Um, you know, when I went on my I waske journey was like, you know, nothing had been wasted. Literally nothing. There is absolutely nothing that has happened to me in my life, whether you want to label it good, bad, you know, ugly, whatever it was. Nothing has gone to waste in my life.
Every single thing has a purpose and had a purpose and has gotten me to this point. And I think when you look at things through that lens, it just kind of like shapes, it shapes your understanding of trauma and, you know, why so called bad things happen in a different way. I don't look at it as good or bad. It was just like one process of life that gets you to this point.
I think you just nailed something so powerful that I want to emphasize it for people because I think we go through this loop where we say, Oh, now I get it. Everything else. I was wrong. I waste the time.
Now I get it. And then a few years later, we go. Oh, no, no, no. I just wasted the last few years.
Now I get it. And we constantly have this belief that we have to neglect and reject our past in order to establish our present. We feel like we have to constantly say our past was a waste of time in order to establish that our present is now us doing the right thing. And I actually fully agree with you and completely disagree with that because what you're doing is you're negating all of the lessons, all of the wisdom, all of the learning, all of the growth that actually got you to that point.
And then you're also getting the fact that all the skills you learned during that time, all the habits, they could still be useful. But because you're writing off that time, you're writing off all of that growth. And I've been saying that to so many people, even when people are like, do you think I'm wasting my time on trying to find a new job? I want to do something I'm passionate about.
Or Jay, like the last few years, I just wasted being anxious. Now I'm confident. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like you need to remember that because that's how you got here. And by the way, life is going to give you those scenarios again.
And you're going to need to remember this because next time it will be a familiar, right? It'll be like a familiar feeling of, oh, I've been there. I know how to deal with this. That's why when you're talking to young people in the field and they'll say things to you like, well, what if I, you know, leave New York and go to Atlanta and things don't work in Atlanta?
I'm like, okay. Like, and like, what do you mean if things don't work? Because what you're going to realize later on in life is regardless of what happened when you were there, it worked. I don't care if you went down there and you worked there for six months and got fired.
There's going to be something you pick up in those six months. There's going to be somebody you meet in those six months. It might just be a time of your life that you actually enjoy and you need that. You might just need to be in a different environment, you know, for a little while, but there's going to be something you pick up within those six months that's going to make you realize like it worked.
I think, you know, we have these extremes when it comes to where I could easily look back in my radio career and be like, I got fired four times. So those four times things didn't work. That is a complete lie. Every single one of those situations I got fired from, I had the time of my life and I learned so much from and I met people that are still, you know, my friends to this day.
So I wouldn't trade any of that for the world. Like, like, well, I know how we know what we're doing now is working. Yeah. No, this is just what we're doing in the moment.
I know it's working for now. But who does this? Who's to say this is what we're going to be doing when we're 50 years old? Who's to say this is what we're going to be doing?
We're 60. We might be still trying to hold on to breakfast club and on purpose. Yeah. God is like, I need you to move.
Yeah. He might even still let you keep it, but you'll be sitting here unhappy, depressed, angry, like, oh, why is it things moving away? I wanted to move. It's because God asked you to move a long time ago, but you didn't want to because you're still trying to make this work.
It's not working no more. Just because something is successful doesn't mean that it's working totally, totally. That's such a good point. That's such a good point.
And it reminds me there's this beautiful story that the Buddha used to tell about a person who's on a journey and they run this journey and they come across an obstacle. And the first obstacle is this fast flowing river. So they realize I need to build a raft. So they get the bamboo, they get the rope, they tie it up, they build themselves an ore and then they paddle with all their strength and they get to the other side.
And then they think, this raft saved my life. I'm going to take it wherever I go. So they strap it to their back and they carry on walking. And then the Buddha says that just like us, this person gets to another challenge.
And the challenge is not fast flowing river this time. It's a tall wooded forest with trees dotted every other step. So now the person is trying to walk through and the raft keeps getting stuck. And they're trying to maneuver and they're trying to get through and the raft is getting shipped to the raft is blocking them from walking through.
And the Buddha says, the person has two choices. They either hold on to the raft and they struggle to get through or they put it down and they walk on freely. And it's the same thing that you're making right now. This idea of like, what are you holding on to that you believe made you successful, but is actually stopping you from breaking through the next challenge.
And if you keep holding on to it, you're just going to hurt your hands, you're going to hurt your back, you're never going to walk through. And I agree, success is probably the greatest prison because the feeling of success is so intoxicating that you think I'm just going to keep doing this like a drug because it makes me feel good. But actually, I may not be actually feeling healthy, well, feeling like I'm moving in my best self. And I've seen that even in my, in my career, I remember when I first started my work, we grew based on videos I made on Facebook.
And today eight years on, I don't make those videos anymore. Facebook is not our core platform anymore. We had to move on and evolve. And I've seen that time and time again, whether it's been a YouTube platform or whatever it is.
And I think we get tied to platforms, we get tied to algorithms, we get tied to patterns, we get tied to all these things. And then eventually we become a prisoner of the pattern and get a become a prisoner of the algorithm. And letting it go is hard. And what you're saying right now, like recognizing that what you're doing right now, maybe something you have to let go of is a healthy thought.
Man, I'm living proof. I talk about that in the book, you know, getting honest at that line, my small talk sucks, shameless plug. But I talk about that in the book because 2016, that's why was that? You know, I'm six years in on the breakfast club.
I'm having more success than I ever imagined. I'm making more money than I ever imagined. Like, you know, I put out my first book, Black Privilege, it's an instant New York Times bestseller. Like we moving like things are great, things are fantastic, but I'm not happy.
And the reason I'm not happy because I'm still dealing with this anxiety. I'm still dealing with, you know, this depression and I'm starting to feel like, you know, I'm becoming a caricature of myself to a certain extent. And it was like when I made the decision to start going to therapy, number one, but then you start going to therapy and you start saying to yourself like, all right, this has gotten me to this point. What is going to get me to that next level of life?
I wasn't thinking about career or anything like that. I said, what's going to get me to that next level of life? Because I want to enjoy life. I want to wake up more happy than depressed, you know, I want to, you know, wake up feeling, you know, more secure about myself than imposter syndrome.
Like what's going to get me to that? And what got me to that was letting go of just what I felt like people wanted from me. And that's another reason the comments and stuff was so dangerous. Because you can put things out there and immediately get real time feedback.
And you know, this is, this is 2018, right? Or 2016, 2017, you know, well, prior to that, it was 2010, 2016 things weren't that toxic on social media. So you could kind of get like some real world criticism. You would see these things that, you know, I guess people like about you.
So you would constantly feed them more of that or you got publication saying, Oh, Charlemagne is the hip hop, how would Stern? You're like, well, what does that mean? So you start giving them more of the wild, you know, crazy antics before all I know, they could have meant that because of, you know, the introspective interviews. Yeah, that get done on purpose club as well.
But I wasn't seeing that aspect of it. I was just seeing the raw, raw, the wildness. And so for me, just personally and professionally, I just was not happy and I had to, you know, let that go. So that was the most freeing thing for me.
Because when I did that, I experienced way more. I wouldn't be here sitting with you, you know, having the success that I've had. If I hadn't let that raffle go. Oh, yeah.
And there was also a period where, you know, because it is cancel culture era you live in, you'd be definitely ashamed to see some of the stuff that you, you know, used to do. You're not necessarily ashamed of it. You're more so afraid of, Oh, they're going to use this against me, whatever, whatever. But that's what you can't care about that.
Yeah. And the reason you can't care about that, because if you really have faith in a higher power, if you really trust, you know, God, the God, you have to know that every single moment that you were in, you were the person you needed to be for that moment. Because it's just a journey and it's a process. And eventually you become who you're supposed to be.
And even the version you're looking at me right now, the final form of myself. I don't know what that's going to be. Nobody does. But I know that I'm on the journey and I'm going to keep walking.
Yeah. One thing I wanted to pick up right about was this idea. You're kind of alluded to it there. It's this we have this rhetoric on social media, which is like, we want people to be more empathetic and compassionate and kind.
We want people to, when they share their vulnerable mental health journey, that we all've got to listen and be attentive. But then when sometimes we see someone with a mental health challenge, make them act different. We're the first ones to point out that they're an idiot. They're a loser.
They're something wrong with them. There's, I'll give an example of what I mean by this. Like Tom Holland talked about this when he came on the show. He was talking about how, you know, he's always been seen as Spider-Man and this cool kid and all the rest of it.
And then when he started talking about his mental health, or actually, you know, when he just announced that he'd given up alcohol and he was sober. All the news was like he was saying this, he was like, Oh, Tom Holland, the happy little kid wasn't actually he was depressed. And it was like, and they made it a whole thing. And he was like, no, I just gave up alcohol.
I wasn't like an alcoholic. I just didn't want to drink anymore. And so all of a sudden it was like twisted the other way where it was like, Oh, the kid that you think is happy isn't, he's depressed or the kid that he's got mental health or whatever it may be. And it wasn't in the kind of compassionate way.
It was more like, Well, look, you didn't see this. So I find it like the way we react to send things, it's almost like we're being hypocrites in and of ourselves. Cause at one point we're saying we should care for people to have this, but then we're willing to point it out. How have you kind of seen that navigate when you see the worst forms of what mental health can do to people versus someone maybe not displaying the worst mental illness externally, but it's just talking about it.
Does that make sense? Yeah, I don't know how anybody can diagnose someone just by watching them through the media. Like, you know, if that's the case, we're all dealing with mental health issue, 100 people just shitty people. And that's the other thing.
Like, in a matter of what we say, two things can be true. No, multiple things can be true at one time. Like you use the example of Tom Holland. Why can't he be the happy gold lucky kid?
Who said he's not? But that's the only version of him you had in your mind. So now when you see another version that doesn't fit your expectation, you're upset with him. The happy gold lucky kid is not so happy anymore.
That's life. You show me a human that's one emotion all the time. It's just that when you're a public figure, we get these like these freeze frames. So Tom Holland happy, you know, this person crazy.
Like it's just free, like literally freeze for this person. Always mad angry. It's these freeze frames of people. That's not the whole totality of a person.
Like, that's actually kind of insane for us to even think about it like that. Like, like, like, even if you watch Jay Shady on purpose, you have a thought, a perception of Jay Shady in your head. You got a perception of Shaal, me in your head based off something you may have seen. That's your fault.
Yeah. That's the one thing you saw and you came to a whole diagnosis about an individual. So, you know, even when you talk about people having empathy that goes, you know what I'm saying now, we might want to every all, everybody, all these humans might wake up every day saying to themselves, we're going to be empathetic today and we're going to be caring and all that stuff until something happens to somebody that you don't like and then that all that goes out the window. I tend to see that people have more empathy and sympathy and they're more caring towards people they actually like.
It's really a popularity contest, but nobody wants to admit that. We're not looking at, we're not being consistent about any of these things. They're not being consistent with how we deal with people. There can be two people that come out in the news today with the same situation.
And based off if we like the individual or not, we'll give that person a whole lot of grace and come to that person's defense. But if it's somebody that we don't like or somebody social media tells us, we shouldn't like, oh, we're going to bury them. We want them out of here. We want them gone.
That's not consistent. And that means you're lying to yourself and that means that you're not the person you say that you are because you should be giving both those individuals the same amount of grace, which you're not because we're all hypocrites. And that's fine. We're all we're everything.
Like everything that we pin on other people, we are all those things in more. We just got to make sure that we're not projecting. Yeah. Yeah.
Wow. That's powerful, man. Yeah. That's and it's true.
All of us are right. We all have bias. Absolutely. We all have the natural human tendency to be empathetic to people we like and we're all that way.
And but we've got to be able to see that because if we can see that, then it's something that we can like you said, we don't project. Otherwise we live in our tiny, we're talking about this earlier, like we live in this righteous mind as Jonathan Hight calls it like this idea of like, my way is righteous. And I believe the way I live and the way I think is the only way in the right way. And that's where it goes wrong because the truth is if everyone thinks like that, now you've just got to, you know, eight billion righteous ways.
We even have to watch how we express that language, right? Because we all do it. We'll say things like, man, the way you're seeing that is strange. Like, are the way that I can't believe you're seeing things that way.
Why? Did they not see it the way you are? Like that doesn't, there's probably nothing wrong with the way that individual is seeing it. But because you think they should see it the way you are seeing it, you're upset with that person are you might have had expectation.
I know I can call this person because we love, we love confirmation by this, right? So I know that I can call this person because this person is going to agree with me. And then when you pick up the phone and call that person and text that person and realize that person has a different opinion. Now you argue back and forth with that person trying to get them to see things the way you see things.
It's like, no, let them see it the way they want to see it. Like one of the hardest things to do is to get, is to step into somebody else's shoes. One of the hardest things to do is to see things from the perspective of other people. I literally fight myself to do that.
And some people might say, oh, he's being a contrarian. No, I'm just literally, I've literally taken the time to step out of myself, stepping that person's shoes, see how they see it. And I can understand what they're coming from. What's wrong with that?
Yeah. I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm not saying that person is right, that person's wrong. I'm just simply saying, I can see what that person is coming from.
Like I say, multiple things to be true. I want I can think of persons wrong and still see where they're coming from. I can think of persons right, but still see where they're wrong at in their argument as well. I think that's very hard for humans to do it.
I don't know why. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, talking about calls you talk about in the book, the call that you get from Kanye.
Yeah. Yeah. And that call like walk us through how that applies to what you're saying here, where you're trying to see things through his perspective, but then you're also like, but I know Pete and we're friends. Yeah.
His perspective was I'm black. He's black. We both from hip hop culture. He's from hip hop culture.
Pete Davidson is this white kid from Staten Island who does comedy. He's younger than us because we are wearing our forties. He's younger than us. You know, his ex wife is now out here dating Pete.
I'm going to call Charlotte man because I need Charlotte man to start, you know, siding with me against Pete Davidson. And he should because he's black and off the culture, as as Kanye says, it's like no, Pete Davidson is my friend. I can't if he's black. I can't be white.
I can't what race is. I don't care what age he is. That's somebody that I met when he was 16 years old and we were all doing, you know, a guy called together and we developed a real friendship and a real mom. I know his mother.
Like, I mean, I mean his mom talk. We check on each other. I've been his mom's house. You don't sit in somebody's mom's house and eat food with eat food with them and call that person a friend and then turn around and do snakes.
Like that Pete's been to my house. He's been around my kids. He's been around my wife. I know him.
You're not going to call me and get me to turn on my friend and try to, you know, say because we're black and we're up to coaches like no, right? It's right. Wrong is wrong. And as I told him, you know, and I had to quote Snoop Dogg from the 1990s.