INTERVIEW: Humble The Poet On Freeing Yourself From The Cages Of Anxiety, New Book + More

Summary

Podcast Title: The Breakfast Club
Host/Author: iHeartPodcasts
Episode: INTERVIEW: Humble The Poet On Freeing Yourself From The Cages Of Anxiety, New Book + More
Release Date: May 28, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Breakfast Club, hosts DJ Envy, Angela Yee, and Charlamagne Tha God engage in an in-depth conversation with renowned poet and activist, Humble The Poet. Centered around his latest book, "Unanxious: 50 Simple Truths to Help Overthinkers Feel Less Stressed and More Calm," the discussion delves into the intricacies of anxiety, personal sovereignty, and the societal mechanisms that exacerbate mental health challenges.

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Understanding Anxiety

Humble The Poet initiates the conversation by redefining anxiety, emphasizing its natural and biological underpinnings. He challenges the stigmatization of anxiety, urging listeners to perceive it not as an individual failing but as a societal issue.

• Quote:
  Charlamagne Tha God: "Stop talking about anxiety like it's herpes. Anxiety is a normal feeling. Anxiety is a signal."
  (Timestamp: 03:09)

Humble elaborates on anxiety as a physiological response involving adrenaline and cortisol, designed to protect us in perceived danger. He highlights the polyvagal system, explaining responses like freeze, fight or flight, and the newly recognized fawn response—where individuals attempt to please others to mitigate anxiety.

• Quote:
  Humble The Poet: "Anxiety is just adrenaline and cortisol. The body thinks there's danger."
  (Timestamp: 07:26)

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The Need for a System Reboot

Humble shares his personal journey, detailing a period of complete sobriety and abstinence as a means to "reboot" his mental system. He draws parallels between outdated security systems and modern anxiety triggers, likening unnecessary external dependencies (like constant phone usage) to obsolete apps that clutter a device.

• Quote:
  Humble The Poet: "Our anxiety system is an outdated security system. It was there to protect us in a world that we don't live in no more."
  (Timestamp: 05:08)

He advocates for a comprehensive detox from multiple external stimuli simultaneously to effectively reset one's mental state, comparing it to avoiding hot sauce to reset one's palate.

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Redefining Mental Health Language

The conversation transitions into the evolution and misuse of mental health terminology. Humble criticizes the overuse and weaponization of the term "anxiety," drawing parallels to how "woke" has been co-opted.

• Quote:
  Humble The Poet: "Mental health is just like physical health. The word's been used up. It's been weaponized."
  (Timestamp: 10:00)

He proposes shifting the narrative from protection to resilience, suggesting terms like "mental fitness" to emphasize proactive engagement rather than passive avoidance.

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Practical Steps to Overcome Anxiety

Humble provides actionable strategies for managing anxiety, emphasizing the importance of facing discomfort rather than avoiding triggers. He encourages listeners to:

1. Identify Triggers: Understand the root causes of anxiety instead of masking symptoms.
2. Gradual Exposure: Slowly reintroduce controlled exposure to anxiety-inducing situations to build resilience.
3. Self-Awareness: Engage in practices like journaling to enhance self-understanding and emotional regulation.

• Quote:
  Humble The Poet: "Feel the feelings, and it's going to suck. Put the phone away. Eat the meal. Feel the burn that's about to come."
  (Timestamp: 25:01)

Angela Yee shares her personal experience with anxiety in professional settings, demonstrating the practical application of Humble's advice.

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Challenging Societal Norms and External Dependencies

The discussion broadens to critique societal norms that encourage constant external stimulation—particularly through technology and social media. Humble argues that modern conveniences are designed to hijack our dopamine responses, keeping us in a state of autopilot.

• Quote:
  Humble The Poet: "If you give a kid a full bag of candy every single day, and we say, well, they should just be able to make the decision not to eat all that candy."
  (Timestamp: 35:13)

He warns against outsourcing our emotional regulation to devices and advocates for reclaiming internal sovereignty by minimizing these external dependencies.

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Personal Anecdotes and Relatability

Humble interjects personal stories to illustrate his points, including a humorous yet revealing account of an unexpected experience in a German sauna. This anecdote serves to highlight the discomfort that comes with stepping out of one's comfort zone and the importance of vulnerability in building genuine relationships.

• Quote:
  Humble The Poet: "After the post nut clarity, you can live in that clarity. You can live in that clarity."
  (Timestamp: 38:56)

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the conversation wraps up, Humble underscores the essence of his book: it's not merely a guide to alleviating anxiety but a manifesto for cultivating resilience and self-sovereignty. He emphasizes that healing from anxiety is a gradual process that requires patience, self-compassion, and deliberate action.

• Quote:
  Humble The Poet: "Anxiety is not herpes. Anxiety is a signal. It's just as important as hunger."
  (Timestamp: 49:37)

He ends with a powerful call to action, encouraging listeners to embark on their own journeys of self-discovery and mental fortification.

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Key Takeaways

1. Reframe Anxiety: View anxiety as a natural, biological signal rather than a personal failing.
2. System Reboot: Undertake a holistic detox from multiple external stimuli to reset mental frameworks.
3. Shift Language: Move from protective to proactive terminology concerning mental health.
4. Build Resilience: Engage in gradual exposure to anxiety-inducing situations to strengthen mental fortitude.
5. Reclaim Sovereignty: Minimize reliance on external stimuli like social media to regain control over one's emotional state.

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Notable Quotes

• "Anxiety is just adrenaline and cortisol. The body doesn't know what's happening." — Humble The Poet (03:09)
• "Our anxiety system is an outdated security system. It was there to protect us in a world that we don't live in no more." — Humble The Poet (05:08)
• "Mental health is just like physical health. The word's been used up. It's been weaponized." — Humble The Poet (10:00)
• "Feel the feelings, and it's going to suck. Put the phone away. Eat the meal. Feel the burn that's about to come." — Humble The Poet (25:01)
• "Anxiety is not herpes. Anxiety is a signal. It's just as important as hunger." — Humble The Poet (49:37)

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Final Thoughts

This episode of The Breakfast Club offers a profound exploration of anxiety, blending personal anecdotes with actionable advice. Humble The Poet's insights challenge conventional perceptions of mental health, advocating for a transformative approach that prioritizes self-awareness, resilience, and internal sovereignty. Whether you're grappling with everyday anxiousness or seeking deeper understanding, this conversation provides valuable perspectives to foster a calmer, more controlled existence.

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Listen to this episode on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform.

Transcript

[Charlamagne Tha God]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[DJ Envy]

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[Charlamagne Tha God]

Panoramic moonroof, ambient lighting, bows and massaging leather. Appointed seats are optional features. This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and Talkspace, the leading virtual therapy provider, is telling everyone let's face it in therapy, by talking or texting with a supportive licensed therapist at Talkspace, you can face whatever is holding you back. Whether it's mental health symptoms, relationship drama, past trauma, bad habits or another challenge that you need support to work through, it's easy to sign up. Just go to talkspace.com and you'll be paired with a provider, typically within 48 hours. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule. Plus, Talkspace is in network with most major insurers and most insured members have a $0 copay. Make your mental health a priority and start today. If you're not covered by insurance, get $80 off your first month with Talkspace. When you go to talkspace.com and enter promo code SPACE80. That's S P A CE83. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to talkspace.com and Enter promo code SPACE80. What happens when we come face to face with death? My truck was blown up by a 20 pound anti tank mine. My parachute did not deploy. I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.

[Just hilarious]

When we step beyond the edge of.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

What we know, I clinically died.

[Just hilarious]

The heart stopped beating, which I was.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Dead for 11.5 minutes. In return, it's a miracle I was.

[Just hilarious]

Brought back Alive Again.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

A podcast about the strength of the human spirit. Listen to Alive Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I want you to ask yourself right now, how am I actually doing?

[DJ Envy]

Because it's a question that we rarely ask ourselves.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

All of May is actually Mental Health Awareness Month and on the psychology of your 20s, we are taking A vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about. Prepare for our conversations to go deep.

[Angela Yee]

I spent the majority of my teenage.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Years and my twenties just feeling absolutely terrified. So this mental health awareness month. Open the free iHeartra radio app. Search the psychology of your 20s and listen.

[Just hilarious]

Now wake that ass up early in the morning.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

The Breakfast Club.

[DJ Envy]

Morning, everybody. It's DJ Envy. Just hilarious. Charlemagne, the God we are. The Breakfast Club. We got a special guest in the building.

[Just hilarious]

Yes, indeed.

[DJ Envy]

Humble the poet. He's back. Ladies and gentlemen. New book, Unanxious 50 Simple Truths, to help overthinkers feel less stressed and more calm. Morning, dad.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Good morning.

[DJ Envy]

How you feeling?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Feeling fantastic.

[DJ Envy]

Good, good, good, good.

[Just hilarious]

Easier said than done, but it can be done. As somebody who deals with anxiety, you know what?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

It's. It gets harder and harder, but it gets more and more worth it.

[Just hilarious]

Yes, I agree.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

And we just got to change the conversation. And I'm realizing that, like, step one, stop talking about anxiety like it's herpes.

[DJ Envy]

Like it's herpes.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yeah, I have anxiety. She has anxiety. Anxiety is a normal feeling. Anxiety is a signal. It's like hunger. You don't say, I'm hungry. What's wrong with me? You say, I feel hungry because it's been, like, eight hours since I ate. It's the same thing. Mel Robbins said it. Instead of saying, I'm anxious, say, I feel anxious because I feel anxious because I got bills to pay. I feel anxious because somebody I like hasn't texted me back. I feel anxious because I drank too many coffees this morning. And it's like knowing the reason allows you to understand the first step. Instead of looking at ourselves like we're failing because we have this signal in this emotion. Because when we think we're feeling we have anxiety, what do we do? We try to distract. We try to medicate. We try to avoid.

[DJ Envy]

That is water, by the way.

[Just hilarious]

And then. And then the other crazy part is, I think once you recognize what's causing the anxiety, you get to determine whether or not you have any control over. And once you realize you have no control over it, you like, well, what.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I'm realizing in the last month. This book came out two months ago. I was supposed to be on the show a month ago, and everything worked out, where things got pushed. A month. And for this last month, I've been on a really intense journey to reboot my system. So complete sobriety, complete abstinence, complete celibacy. And then all of a sudden, I realized your relationship with things on the outside will let you know how much control you have. So really, what the issue is, our anxiety systems is an outdated security system. It was there to protect us in a world that we don't live in no more. So what happens? Like, think about your phone. Your phone comes with a bunch of apps on them that aren't useful. They're not useful no more. You may or may not use. You can't get rid of the calculator app on your phone. Whether you like it or not, all we can do with this, our operating system, is we can reboot and we can update. We can update our server, we can update our system. That requires getting it out of our system temporarily. If you eat hot sauce every single day, what happens? You need more and more and more just to taste it. You want to reboot your system? What do you got to do? You got to get hot sauce out of your life, and then maybe after a month, you taste it again. That's going to taste different.

[DJ Envy]

What got you to the point where you said you needed a reboot? What got you there? Where, like, this is time.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

My entire life, I've always just been focusing on freedom. I grew up in an activist space, but also, like, I want to be financially free. I don't want to have a day job. I don't want all these things. And then when you start jumping out of these cages, you start realizing the biggest cage you've ever built is the one that you built for yourself. And what we do is we decorate it by, you know, negotiating. We decorate it by using our intelligence. And we start saying, no, no, no, I'm not. I'm not a slave to my habits. I'm not a slave to my impulses. Like, I just want to enjoy life. I just want to experience the depths of life. But we're just intellectualizing our addiction. So I realized I've hit that point in my life where I was like, oh, the biggest cages, the biggest fences that I'm stuck behind are the ones that I built. And I realized, like, okay, the basic story is something on the outside needs to happen for me to feel calm and safe on the inside. That's the relationship. All of this anxiety talk is that simple idea. Something on the outside needs to happen for me to feel safe on the inside. Whether that's taking a vape, whether that's drinking alcohol, whether that's having sex, whether that's eating in front of the tv, whether that's taking your phone to the toilet. Because for people who take their phone to the toilet, Try not to take your phone to the toilet. You will have an anxiety attack for people. A friend of mine always eats in front of TikTok. And I said, try it one time. Try it one time not to eat with your screen on. They ate half the meal. Because we realize we live in a world, in a system that gets very powerful when we're on autopilot. And now autopilot is us outsourcing our stimulation, our outsourcing or outsourcing our regulation. We're like, yo, I can only feel safe from things on the outside. I need that just to get to zero. But when you let it all go and you go through this process and it sucks, it sucks, you know, I mean, the withdrawal sucks. Then all of a sudden you realize, oh, I can create this dopamine on the inside. Dopamine from the outside hijacks you. Dopamine from the inside builds you.

[Just hilarious]

What was the most.

[Angela Yee]

What does an anxiety attack look like?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

So anxiety just from a scientific. So I want people to understand this conversation is not philosophical, it's not spiritual, it's not moral. This conversation is just psychological and biological. So I'm not here to judge anybody's choices. Anxiety is just adrenaline and cortisol. So what happens is the body doesn't know what's happening. The body just knows things are changing. So when the body gets charged, it. It thinks there's danger. That's what we call it fight or flight. But there's more levels called the polyvagal system. You have freeze. So if something intense happens, we just freeze. Someone puts a gun to your face, you've never seen a gun before, you're just going to freeze. You don't get to choose that. Then there's fight or flight, which now has turned into fight or scroll. And then we also have safety. And then the new one that's being introduced right now is Fawn. Right? So freeze is play dead. Fight or flight is run away or fight. Fawn is I'm going to make you love me. So this is a big one, especially for men, because men aren't walking into romantic situations thinking about their safety the way women do. But men have to think about safety. And they don't realize when they feel unsafe, which is nervous, they fawn, they get extra charming. And now we're performing right, and we have to recognize that. So it took me 15 days of not doing all the big stuff to realize that there's a second layer to this, a third layer, fourth layer. You have to keep going down. So, yeah, cool. Performing for beautiful women. But also, like, my nephew was just here on the weekend visiting. I started performing for him because I want to be the cool uncle. That's also fawning. That's also an anxiety. That's me trying to avoid anxious feelings. Like, the moral of the story is feel your feelings, and it's going to suck. Put the phone away. Eat the meal. Feel the burn that's about to come. That burn is adrenaline and cortisol. That's what you need to protect your kids. That's what you need to get away from danger. But we're. We're getting triggered in moments that aren't physically dangerous anymore.

[DJ Envy]

Do you feel like we take the word anxiety and it's used too much already?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

For sure.

[DJ Envy]

It's.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

It's.

[DJ Envy]

It's a. It's a. From what you're saying, it's a natural feeling.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Right.

[DJ Envy]

I'm about to go on stage. There's thousands of people out there. You get a little anxious, but it's not like a lot of us. I'm sure some people do, but we don't get that anxious where it's like, I can't go on stage. It's like you get that little feeling, and then it's like, all right, I gotta go. And then you just go and do it. But I feel like a lot of times people use the word anxious and anxiety as a such a negative tool. It's like a nasty, naughty word when you talk about it sometimes.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely. As I said, we treat it like it's herpes. We treat it like it's a condition, and only some people have it, some people don't. We give it, like, my anxiety, like it's an individual problem. Anxiety is a society problem.

[Just hilarious]

Some people do have anxiety disorders where they actually have to take medication.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely, people have anxiety disorders, but the situation with that is if you have an anxiety disorder, if you're bipolar, if you have any mental health, there are still things that we can all do to improve how we feel. I'm not saying we're going to cure it. I'm not even saying we can reboot and delete our old system. But we can make choices, simple choices. Get more sleep than you need, drink more water than you need, get more sunlight than you need, and stay away from.

[Just hilarious]

Which is why knowing the word anxiety is good. Like, I think. I think knowing the language and knowing what it is you're going through is good because now you can identify it and then you can find cures for it.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

So the issue with that is and it's kind of like the word woke, right? Yeah. That came from Erykah Badu, right? Stay woke. And then childish Campino made it more popular. And it meant something. It meant be aware. It meant be self aware. I mean, know what's going on. And now it's been weaponized and changed the other way. It's almost an insult now, right? Oh, the woke mob. The woke language changes. That's what happened with mental health. You know, we're all millennials. We remember back. Back in the days when you talked about mental health, people thought that meant, like, insane asylums and straight jackets. Then we got to like, okay, things have been normalized. You don't have to be embarrassed to say that you saw a therapist or something. Now it's gone too far the other way, where we treat mental health and we use that language completely incorrectly. We think we have to protect our mental health. Like, it's some, like, crystal flower that, like, if somebody come near us, we have to protect our peace. We have to protect our mental health. Mental health is just like physical health. So what I'm going to say is the word's been used up. It's been weaponized. Just like, well, let's use mental fitness. Because you don't say, when it comes to your physical health, well, I'm not going to climb these stairs because gravity is going to make it harder. It's like, no, the only way that you can climb stairs is to keep climbing it. We have machines in the gym just for you to climb stairs when you don't even need to climb stairs. Why? To prepare you for the times that you have to. We out here deadlifting, lifting heavy weights. The heavier the weight, the more we know the workout mattered. So then when our friends asked us to move a couch. And again, if you're over 30, stop asking your friends to help you move a couch. But when you're ready to do it because you were voluntarily putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, we don't have that for our mental health. We don't have mental fitness training. We're not voluntarily putting ourselves in uncomfortable mental situations. So we get stronger. Instead we're like, I got to protect my peace. No, your peace protects you. You don't protect your mental health. Your mental health protects you, just like your physical health protects you. You want to be able to pick up your kids, so you go to the gym. You don't say, my kids are heavy. Gravity keeps holding them down. I wish we lived on the moon. It would be lighter. No, you're like, I got to go to the gym. So the longer. For longer and longer I can hold my kids up to the point where I'm going to the gym just so I can open a jar when I'm 80.

[Just hilarious]

That's an interesting point. But there's other things that go into, you know, keeping your. Your physical health.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Right.

[Just hilarious]

Right. It's not just working out.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yep.

[Just hilarious]

It's diet.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yep.

[Just hilarious]

So you refrain from certain things.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yes.

[Just hilarious]

Therefore, you are protecting your physical. You're not going to eat so much processed foods. You're not going to eat so much sugar.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely. So what are we doing for mental health?

[Just hilarious]

The same thing. I think you should refrain from certain things. Like, if, you know, certain things trigger you, you should refrain from not.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I completely disagree. I completely disagree.

[DJ Envy]

If there's something I know that I'm not gonna like and I don't have to be around it and it doesn't affect my daily life.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yeah.

[Just hilarious]

Like, why would you want to dive into it?

[DJ Envy]

If I know I'm not gonna like it, I know it's gonna make me feel a certain way, and I don't need it in my life.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely. So let's. So, for example, if it was an easy day at the gym, it wasn't a good day. Gym. Right. Had to. Had to kind of suck. It had to be a struggle. Right. Your triggers aren't what you're supposed to avoid. Your triggers are the roadmap. Your triggers are showing you where all the work is. But what we've done now is we've created mental health to the point where it's like, I'm just gonna sidestep everything that makes me feel gross. That gross feeling, that adrenaline and cortisol, that's the body being like, I'm in danger. When you're not, you know, I'm coming doing this interview. It's a big deal. I get a little bit nervous. The mantra has to be, okay, this feels uncomfortable, but I'm not in danger. Our body thinks we're in danger. Right. Instead, what needs to happen is our triggers are what's revealing to us where the work is when we always talk about being healed. So think about it. Physically. If you were 8 years old and you fell off your bike and broke your arm, you didn't just experience physical trauma and keep it moving. You went to the hospital, you got your arm fixed up. But as children, we experienced mental trauma and kept it moving. As adults, we feel the same way. So it's like we have to address that, and that's the way it Gets stronger. For example. Simple example. I walk by somebody. Let's say, you know, I walk by somebody and they got a perfume on. And all of a sudden I get triggered. And first things first. I just want to get away from them. I want to soothe. I want to look at my phone. I want to do something to feel better. Cool. Maybe the next day, after, I'm well rested, I'm well hydrated, I get some sleep, whatever. I'm like, yo, what was that? Let me reflect on that. Oh, snap. That was my ex's. That was her smell. That was her fragrance. That's why I got triggered by that. Then the next step is to go to the store, find that fragrance, and voluntarily smell it. Put yourself back into that. Instead, we're like, well, that person is a narcissist. That person's toxic. I got to stay away from this. This. I got to stay away from all these things. What that's doing is that's at the expense of our resilience.

[Angela Yee]

I think it's situational, right? Because I get what you saying. I understand it, and I understand what they're saying too. For instance, this is a real example. I work here, right? All right? Interviews give me anxiety like, they used to give me. Like, I love meeting people and all that, but I never know what I want to ask, you know what I'm saying? So. But I can't just not do it. This is my job. Like, I can't just not do it. So I have to face it head on. And both of them give me tips. They, you know, mentor me with it as well.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

And.

[Angela Yee]

And I'm getting better at it. I'm not as good as I feel like I wanna be or I should be, but I still get anxiety doing interviews, you know, just being as transparent as I can be. But it doesn't bother me as much as it used to. But sometimes, depending on the person or whatever, I'm like, yo. I be like, no, yo, I ain't trying to do this. Lauren. Step in or whatever. You know what I mean? She's our other co host. But, like, how would you treat that? Or how would you give me advice?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

You're illustrating the point. You're illustrating the point perfectly in the beginning because you're new to this, you know, especially in comparison to folks that have been doing it for, like, over a decade. Yeah, your body's like, this is new. This is uncomfortable. I don't want to do it. That's generally what the body's saying. The body, the amygdala the little tiny almond sized part of our brain is just like, I don't know what this is. It's got to be danger, right? So that's what your body's saying to you. And the only way, and this is the reason that this, this has to go beyond this book. We can hear these ideas, but the only way the body can actually believe this is through practice. And the only reason you're getting less and less anxious feelings around the interviews is by doing more and more interviews.

[Angela Yee]

Yeah.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Now if you're just like this, don't feel good, I'm never going to do it. Let me go find a different job. Let me go, you know, do something else. So I don't want to feel this. Now you're robbing yourself of resilience, right? Who you're going to be a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. By doing more and more interviews, you're getting your reps in. This is, this is part of your mental fitness that you're doing. This exactly illustrates the point. And I'm not saying take on too much weight. Just like when you go to the gym, don't take on too much weight. Start light, focus on your form. It's the same thing. Ease yourself in, get into it. But it gets to the point where you realize all of these things that we've been avoiding, we've been outsourcing our safety through our phones, through everything.

[DJ Envy]

You know, because it's like, if you follow, let's say a site, right? A social media site and all the social media site does nothing but post negativity. And if you say, you know what, I'm gonna leave that alone because it F's up my energy.

[Just hilarious]

Yeah, but unfollow it. I'm a block.

[DJ Envy]

I don't see a problem with that. That's your energy.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

That's diet. That's diet, that's sugar. You're realizing I'm outsourcing my dopamine and that's hijacking me.

[DJ Envy]

That's not a bad thing to.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

That's not, that's not a bad thing. And here's the thing, because I was thinking about that, because I know there was a J. Cole interview where he did two years off social media and then he came back and he was like, oh, it was like I never left. Right, right. It's kind of like eating a salty potato chip. You're like, I ain't had one, two years all of a sudden. Perfect example. I haven't been on social media for a month. Obviously I went on the Breakfast Club yesterday to look stuff up, and then all of a sudden, I went. I fell down the rabbit hole. I found, you know, the job is mine video. I saw then. I wasn't even on the site anymore. Now I'm watching. You know, 10 times people tried to check charlamagne. I'm watching this stuff that's not even on the Breakfast Club. Correct. And I got lost in it. I got into autopilot, right? So it's understanding that this stuff was still created by the smartest people in the world who were paid by the richest people in the world for the explicit goal of hijacking us and keeping us in autopilot. Now, what I realized was, like, well, if J. Cole can't do it, I can't do it. And I realized what J. Cole didn't do. J. Cole took one specific thing and addressed it. We got to do all the things, all the outside things. We have to abstain from all of them until we reboot our system. So it's not like, oh, I'm gonna stop eating this hot sauce, but I'm gonna eat all this hot sauce, and my tongue will reset. No, we gotta get rid of all the hot sauce. So it's gotta be the phone, it's gotta be the porn, it's gotta be the vape, it's gotta be the hookah, it's gotta be the alcohol, it's gotta be the foods, it's gotta be the people. It's gotta be all of it until the system reboots. This isn't Monk Life forever. This is doing a reset, max 90 days. And then you get to this point where you can go back. Like, right where I'm at right now. One of my reps every day is go back on social media and just try to find the prettiest girl and look at her and pay attention to see what it does to my body. One of my boys, Chris, and the story about him in the book. But he. You know, he had to. He had to go through. He had a lot of issues initially with substances, and he got sober. And this was happening during, like, the BlackBerry phase, before smartphones was a thing. So he never got on smartphones. And I Remember in, like, 2018, showing him Instagram for the first time. And him seeing a girl on Instagram was like giving a baby a potato chip. Like, his eyes lit. He has never seen it before. And then you realize that. But if we go in with that awareness, it's like, all right, listen, I'm not gonna avoid this stuff forever. But I'm gonna first retrain and rewire my system. Now I can go in. And now I'm going in Sovereign.

[Just hilarious]

You know, it's interesting what you're talking about. I remember having a conversation one time in therapy, and I was complaining about some stuff that was happening on social media, and my therapist was like, can't you just turn your phone off? And I was. In my mind, I was a little pissed off. I'm like, I'm paying you $150 an hour to hear this type of language. But she's right in a lot of ways. I don't feel like I have to subject myself to abuse or pain just to try to get over something when I could just walk away from it.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

That's right. Yeah. Because we're outsourcing our dopamine. And the most potent dopamine is chaos. Right? It's chaos that social media is chaos. It's the reason the biggest video on the Breakfast Club platform right now is the Birdman. It's chaos. Right. It's not gonna be a meaningful conversation. It's just we all look at car crashes. We all look at that stuff. It catches our attention.

[Just hilarious]

So if we're in verbally abusive relationships with our smartphones, why would we stay there? Because I'm just gonna use an extreme example. If you were in an actual physical abusive relationship, you wouldn't tell that person, just stay there and take the hits. Eventually you'll get over it.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I feel like that is the one positive thing about our phones. It'll help people understand why people stay in abusive relationships.

[Angela Yee]

Hell, no. Really?

[Just hilarious]

Talk to me.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Because we're in an abusive relationship with our phone, and we can't let it go. And the reason why. It's a slot machine. Right. It's not always good, but we have unanticipated rewards. It's bad, but when it's good, it feels so good. It's like, see trash? I see trash. Oh, a cute puppy. Oh, it was all worth it. That half an hour of doom scrolling was worth it, right? Same thing being in any abusive relationship. Addiction is wanting more of the thing that almost works. Craving is just a memory of comfort, and that's all we're chasing. All we're chasing is trying to get back down to zero. We're just heightened. Even after this conversation, Some of us might instantly just pick up our phones because we don't want to hear the silence, because this is where our system has been. Our nervous system has been dysregulated. For so long. And it's not our faults. This world is a dumpster fire. This system was not designed for this world. We were designed to live in communities of like, 200, 300 people max. We should know the faces of every single person in our lives, right?

[Just hilarious]

So it sounds like you're saying we should disconnect.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Not just disconnect from your phone. Your phone is one of the bosses. We got to disconnect from every everything. And if we do it from everything long enough, then we can go back, and we'll go back. Sovereign, this is the thing, and this is where you start to realize, like, Kendrick Lamar energy. Because what I realized where I'm at right now is I'm past the substances now. I've discovered the enemies. Now I'm looking for the spies. And my big spy right now is I chase being chosen by anybody who has power over my value. So in the beginning, it's like, all right, yeah, cool. I want validation for pretty girls. Oh. I want people who are in positions of power to make me feel like I matter. But then it became like, okay, my parents came to visit me here, and, you know, they were clowning you and taking your kids to Wicked. I took my parents to see the Lion King. My parents have never seen a live play. And I'm sitting there. Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? They've never seen a play before. This whole experience is brand new for them. Well, what I clocked was I just want their validation. Then I want to go into my siblings chat group and see if they said anything to my sisters so I can get more validation. Right now I have to figure out, well, where are those leaks? The leaks aren't just, I want people to validate me. It's also, I fear, being misunderstood. I want people to understand me. And then you realize, like, oh, snap. That's like, the one thing a guy like Kendrick Lamar doesn't. The one thing we can say he doesn't care about being understood. He never clarifies anything.

[Angela Yee]

But what's wrong with you wanting that validation from your parents? Like, oh, yo, you really took us to this is dope. We never seen this in our lives.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I'll tell you exactly. Yeah, I mean, their comments were way more hilarious, which was like, this play's been on for 25 years. How come the kids are so young, right? Like, they. They've never seen a play, right? And they probably thought that I paid movie ticket prices to sit up front. Like, they had no concept of what was happening. It's the simple story. Something on the outside has to happen for me to feel good on the inside. And I know this because all of us do have relationships with things that we call vices that are not slavery. For me, it's pizza. I like pizza. I don't crave pizza. Me and you have plans to go eat pizza right now. And five minutes before the plan, we have to cancel. And you gotta be like, let's get tacos instead. We couldn't get pizza. I would not be emotionally impacted. Right? That's how all of this should be. Like, you forget your phone at home. It should feel like, all right, cool. No issues. Oh, hell, exactly. No, it's gonna take work. I'm not, I'm not. As I said, this is not a moral conversation. Not philosophical. This is biology.

[Angela Yee]

I got kids, though. I got kids. And then, you know, I'm not from it. I got a mom that I really. You know what I'm saying? I got businesses and stuff.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I understand, I understand.

[Angela Yee]

That's more so the part. Not even just social media or just. I don't know.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I understand. Listen, I don't know.

[Just hilarious]

I don't know if that can apply to everything. I think I. I think what you're saying can apply to some things because it's like, I feel like, it's like you say you're an alcohol abuser or a drug abuser, right? You know, you go to rehab, they tell you to stay away from those things, stay away from those environments. Don't walk into a bar because it may tempt you. I don't think. I think if you're a recovering alcoholic, you don't go sit in a bar and just hope. I don't. I don't want to drink anymore.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely. And I'm not advocating for that. As I said, I'm talking about the day to day everyday people and us exploring. Because the issue with us is we're living in autopilot. We don't even know what our addictions are, you know, and there are certain things. So for example, when this is all said and done, there are certain things that are never coming back. And I did this journaling through AI and everything to figure out so I can go back to weed. That's. That's not a. That's not something. That's something that I can have sovereignty over. I can never go back to porn. Porn rewires the brain. I can never go back. I can never go back to multitasking. Okay? So I can never eat in front of a screen ever again. That the non negotiable. I can have a shot of tequila, I can have sex again, right? But I can't. You know, I could do some hookah, I could, I could eat certain foods, but there's certain things that are never coming back. And that's, that's the interesting part about. As I said, it's not all right, you know, if you have a long standing relationship with alcohol, go back to the bar. No, not at all. However, you know, as I have a friend who's 10 years sober, he can, he figured it out. You know, he figured out a situation that works for him. But as I, as I said, the first goal is the awareness. Like, when I'm doing this, I'm not being like, oh, today I went completely sober. I won. No, today I had a league. You know, some pretty girl talked to me on the street, told me my puppy was cute. I got performative. That's data. It's not pass or fail. It's pass or collect data. And this is where being nice to yourself is essential. We have to be, we have to be vigilant, but we have to be nice to ourselves. We can't beat ourselves up over this. But the goal here is sovereignty. And sovereignty is different from freedom because freedom is I can do whatever I want. Sovereignty is I can control who I am. Right, because you can be free. You can be financially free and buy 7 iPhones and get pissed off when you see something on the Internet. You're not, you're not sovereign. Sovereigns would be unimpacted by that. It's just going to take work. It's just like, just like your physical fitness. You want to have the ability to pick up heavy things. Day one at the gym is going to suck, and in the morning after, it's going to suck even more. You take two weeks off and you go back again.

[DJ Envy]

Hey, what up, y' all? It's DJ Envy. The first few months of 2025 have been quite a year. Work deadlines, group chats you can't escape, and your weird cousin's latest overshare. It's a lot. But here's some good news. You don't have to bring that stress into your car. The all new Nissan Murano is your piece on wheels, thanks to its available features. Imagine sliding into the relaxing, massaging seats that feel like they were made to melt your tensions. Take in the skyline views that let sunlight pour in and watch as your day brightens. I have a special playlist that always gets me right. And with the Bose Premium sound system, you too can vibe like you're at your own private concert. Plus, with your 64 color personalized lighting option, you can set the mood any way you want, be it romantic, chill, or in a straight up do not disturb mode. Let the Nissan Murano be your oasis in a chaotic world because sometimes the greatest rush isn't rushing at all. Drive the all new Nissan Murano today.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Panoramic moonroof, ambient lighting, bows and massaging leather. Appointed seats are optional features hey fam, if you're like me, you're thinking about how to level up in your career. Maybe you're fresh out of college, just started in your field, or even looking to switch things up and find your true calling. Whatever stage you're in, remember that this is your time to grow, to learn, and to build something that lasts. State Farm understands that early career development is key to long term success. They've been a steady presence in our communities and they know that having the right support early on can make all the difference. State Farm is there to help you make smart moves and to help you get the coverage you need. We all know the journey to success is a marathon, not a sprint. It's about staying focused, staying grounded, and making sure you're protected every step of the way. Let's build our careers with confidence, knowing that State Farm is there to support us just like they've always been. Because, like a good neighbor, State Forum is there. Find out [e-mail] want to keep your personal number private but still stay connected? With line 2 you can get a second phone line right on your device with a super simple app and no need for another phone. Whether it's for online shopping, dating or shielding your main number from spam, Line two is an easy way to manage it all. Ready for peace of mind without breaking the bank call, text block and more for only $9.99. Get started with line2.com audio or download line 2 in any app store today. Line 2 your second line. Simplified Amy Robach and TJ Holmes here, Diddy's former protege, television personality, platinum selling artist and Danity King alum Aubrey o' Day joins us to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Aubrey O. Day is sitting next to us. Here you are. As we sit here right up the street from where the trial is taking place. Some people saw that you were going to be in New York and they immediately started jumping to conclusions. So can you clear that up? First of all, are you here to testify in the Diddy trial, Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise based on her firsthand knowledge from her days on making the band as she emerged as the breakout star. The truth of the situation would be opposite of the glitz and glamour. It wasn't all bad, but I don't.

[Just hilarious]

Know that any of the good was real.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I went through things there. Listen to Amy and TJ presents Aubrey O' Day covering the Diddy trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast fast. And what are we doing? We're, we're voluntarily tearing these muscles and letting them heal back. I'm voluntarily tearing up my mental health by doing this stuff. In the next month I have to do a 72 hour fast just to figure out what is left. What else am I hiding in here? Because as I said, the big stuff is easy to discover. It's the little things, the little validation, the little performance, figuring out what all of this is. And I think this is really important. Again, this isn't what you need to do on day one. On day one, it's just recognize anxiety isn't herpes, Anxiety isn't a condition. This book isn't going to solve anxiety. This book is going to solve your despair around anxiety. People feel helpless around anxiety. This book is actually 52 chapters, 52 different options when you're having anxious feelings. The big idea is feel the feelings when it sucks. Can you sit in a room by yourself quietly? They did that shock test, letting people sit in a room quietly and when they want either they could just sit in the room or shock themselves and leave. And most people pick the shock themselves. And this, if you want to deal with anxiety, create a life that allows you to sit in a room and do absolutely nothing. And remember that we're human beings, we're not human doings. And right now we're constantly medicating, avoiding and distracting ourselves by doing stuff.

[Just hilarious]

So this isn't for people who actually have anxiety disorders. It's people who just deal with everyday anxiousness.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Well, what I'm going to say is because as I said, the pendulum in the mental health conversation has gone so far, so many of us are self diagnosing. That's step number one. I agree with that. Step number two is if you have even a diagnosed anxiety disorder, let's just say your body produces extra cortisol and adrenaline, there are still choices and decisions that you can make that will improve how you feel in a day to day life.

[Just hilarious]

I agree.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

And, and that's the Important part. It's like we, we. We're not, we're not standing in one spot. We're either heading in one. We're either strengthening our sovereignty or strengthening our slavery every single day with the choices that we make, irrespective of what our mental health diagnosis is. And the other thing too, with mental health conversations and cultures, we use those words as the end of the story.

[Just hilarious]

That's. I agree with that. And see, as a person who's been clinically diagnosed with anxiety disorder, one of my things that helped me with that is staying away from the. But I agree with what you're saying because we, we talk about it, but then we don't do the, the healing work. You don't talk about the actual healing of it.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yeah. Like if you've been diagnosed with a broken arm and then you out there walking and lifting heavy things, that's gonna make, you know, nobody's arguing that your arm isn't broken. But the choices that you make moving forward are either going to speed up the healing. You can't speed up the healing. Sorry. It's either going to slow down the healing or destroy the healing.

[Just hilarious]

That's right.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Right. We can't really speed up healing. We just have. Healing just takes time. You have to respect the time for it. It's the same thing with these mental health diagnosis that we have.

[Just hilarious]

And we don't talk about the healing part of it enough.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

We don't.

[Just hilarious]

I think that there's a lot of conversation about, you know, what it is people are dealing with, but not how to actually get through it.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely. So when we have. So you got to think about anxiety, like, like an iceberg. You can only see the tip. And there's like 90% underneath. We have no idea what's happening because we haven't done the work to just revisit it. And that work can easily just be journaling and being like, why did this thing make me feel that way versus that stuff makes me feel gross. I don't want. Because even going to social media. Why is social media triggering me? Well, it's letting me know, you know, other people are doing things. I'm seeing other people's highlight reels. I'm comparing it to my behind the scenes and that's making me feel less valuable, that's making me feel less seen, that's making me feel all these things. It's just the awareness. The goal here is self awareness and being able to sit and do absolutely nothing. If we want to improve how we.

[Angela Yee]

Feel, well, it's Just always negative. Social media used to be fun all the time. I used to love to be on it. It's just always negative now. And people talk about like, oh, the algorithm. Algorithm. Algorithm. Nah, it's literally people now that people feel like they have a voice and everybody can be heard. And everybody. They attack. They attack it even when it's not warranted. You know what I mean? So it's just. I don't even think it's like, us, what we're seeing, how we're programming. I think you see it and you put it in our face. You know, pause. You see it, and they put it in our face a certain amount of times, like a number of times, we can actually make that decision to be like, yo, I don't. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not subscribing to this.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

But let's look at it this way. If you give a kid a full bag of candy every single day, and we say, well, they should just be able to make the decision not to eat all that candy. Right. When they're really young. How long has social media existed? We are children when it comes to social media. This is the candy. This is like the ultimate candy. This is the new epidemic. We're in a dopamine epidemic. They flooded the streets with dopamine. We are not designed to know as many people as we know. We're not designed to know about all the news happening everywhere all the time. Right? And then this is a system that encourages negativity. It incur. It rewards negativity.

[Just hilarious]

If you would buy the seven deadly.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Sins, it's fueled by those. And think about, if you post a picture tomorrow and everyone's just like, oh, you look great, you look great, you look great. And then I just comment, well, you don't look all that today. A. That comment will pop up straight to the top. It's gonna get the most replies, and.

[Angela Yee]

That'Ll be the one that make me mad. Because, like, how you don't see what everybody else saying.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

That's the one. Yeah. But you probably will notice that comment more than the other ones will blend in. We have a negative bias that's just in us. Why do we have a negative bias? Because we used to live in the wild. We had to assume the worst. You're walking through the forest and you hear a sound. You have to assume it's something that's going to kill you. Because if you're wrong, cool. If you're right, you're in danger. We have to assume the worst Smart people, really smart people who were paid by very rich people understand this, and they've used it to hijack our attention. Our attention and our focus is the most important thing that we have.

[Angela Yee]

And this is my last question about what you said going back. You said porn. You can never go back to it, right?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yeah.

[Angela Yee]

But do you still ever desire or crave it?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yes.

[Angela Yee]

Okay, so you do.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

As I said, craving is a memory of comfort.

[Angela Yee]

Right?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Right. So that's not gonna go. As I said. This is not a moral conversation. This is not. Porn is right. Porn is wrong. This is just. It's a product. It's like sugar. I'm not here to judge sugar, but we know what sugar does, right? Porn is like sugar for your brain. It rewires your brain. There's science behind this. I'm not making this stuff up. I was on the pornhub podcast. You know, I had a podcast. Yeah, they have a podcast I was on there, and I had a great conversation with them. That's not the. It's just. It's the product, right? It's an addictive product. Just like coffee, just like alcohol. These are physically addictive things. The goal is.

[Just hilarious]

Mouth started watering thinking about it.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

No, but let's do it. I'm not. Not. I'm not. I'm not here on some, like, holier than elf stuff. Like. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I'm not. You start, remember, you start reminiscing. Right? But at the same time, it's like, listen, at the end of the day, the goal here, we're not going to be able to totally overhaul our system.

[Angela Yee]

Yeah.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

We've had this software for 50, 60, 70 generations as humans, right? This world we live in, two, three generations. We're not used to living in cities with millions of people. So this is. This is a situation. So when it comes to stuff like porn, it's like, the goal is, as I said, the same thing with pizza. It's like, yeah, I like pizza. It's cool. When I walk by a pizza spot right now, I don't completely jones for the pizza, but if someone invites me out, I can enjoy it and I can understand its value, but I don't have to look to it to just get me back to calm this whole idea. You know? What we're chasing, even with the porn, is the post nut clarity. That's what we're chasing. We're chasing post. And what is that? We. We have just dysregulated our system so much that we finally, through that release get a little bit of clarity.

[Just hilarious]

But what if you look at porn as something that leads to the nut, and then once you get to the nut.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely.

[Just hilarious]

You have the clarity.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Well, that's. You have the clarity or you spend enough time away from all this stuff, you can live in the clarity. You can live in that clarity.

[Angela Yee]

Like you saying, like, not living?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

No, because we don't call it nut clarity. We call it post nut clarity.

[Angela Yee]

So after you.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

After the clarity, you can live in that. That could be your default. Because think about, especially for guys, that post nut clarity is the moment you're like, I had just been operating on autopilot. I just spent a bunch of money. I said, did this, I did that. I said all the things I didn't mean. What is it? Or after the post nut, I like this. I want to be around this person. I found wifey.

[Just hilarious]

This is so interesting. So what if you take the nut and then rub it on your nipples?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

You know what? You know what? Let's let. No, we could talk about that. That's an example of somebody who is continually outsourcing dopamine to the point where it just. They have unlimited resources. They have unlimited power. So it just got wilder and wilder and wilder and wilder.

[DJ Envy]

But I also feel like if he would have been into porn and porn. Pornhub like that and got his. His nut off watching that, he wouldn't have to do it in person, and there's nobody to tell on him.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

So Chris Rock said it in tambourine, and I remember this. And he's like, you know, porn is an issue because your porn searches evolve. But you was, look, you know, it's just like Fat Joe said, today's price ain't yesterday's price. What you was looking at five years ago ain't what you're looking up now because it's not enough. More choices. But also, you need. You needed to elevate. You need more hot sauce. It's not one drop anymore.

[Just hilarious]

I get it. I understand what you say.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

We're outsourcing. That's all it is. And every time we outsource, right, we are. We're getting sedated, right? So going back to the activism, going back to the freedom, we got to realize we don't live in this dystopian 1984 world with authoritarian government governments. We live in the brave new world where they're controlling us through comfort. That's the tool every single. If you want to get rich fast.

[Just hilarious]

About the authoritarian government, either we're on track.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

We're on track. But we got to realize if we don't have internal sovereignty, it doesn't matter.

[Angela Yee]

But like you said, everything is through comfort. Even like things like this may sound crazy, but like Instacart, we ain't got to go outside to the grocery store.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely. Part of my work is I have to pick up all my food. I can't do delivery no more. I have to at least earn the meal on some level. I think Naval Rubikon said any vice, vice plus convenience equals a weapon. If you got to climb the top of a mountain to get drunk, you got to earn it. Fine, we're not doing it. It's been, it's been weaponized against us becoming more and more convenient. Right. Especially with this VC model where it's like they make it convenient and cheap because someone else gave them the money to do it. They get us hooked and then we start paying these crazy prices. These new prices keep coming in, and that's. That's nothing new. Back in the days when cell phones first came out, they used to give us 2, 3 months unlimited. Get us used to texting, get us used to everything. So then when texting was free after 6pm we were still texting before 6pm because they created our behaviors. They put a leash on us. They molded our behaviors. This is that lack of sovereignty that I'm talking about. This is why this conversation is so important to me. I'm not here to sell a book. I'm here to at least ring a bell in some people's ears that can't get unrung. People who care about being sovereign and care that realize that, hey, I'm either feeding my slavery or I'm feeding my sovereignty.

[Just hilarious]

I love the sovereignty angle. I think that makes a lot of sense, you know, because I think that a lot of people don't have. They don't. They don't. They don't have. I don't think people know what that is.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Absolutely. You know, it's not freedom. It's inner. It's inner control. It's inner command. It's the ability to own your decision. Right now we're reacting. That's. That's what a lot of anxious feelings do. Someone cuts us off, we smash on the horn, someone. You know that whole Dave Chappelle skit when keeping it real goes wrong. That's people reacting, going into autopilot. A lot of that autopilot came from how you grew up when you were a kid, right? You didn't. You created software, you created mechanisms. You Created your own algorithm, and we never updated it. So maybe you grew up in a neighborhood where you had to. You had a hairpin trigger. You had to. The second someone stepped on your toes, you had to defend yourself. And then you grow up and you're in a situation where those dangers, physical dangers, aren't there, but the body still gets triggered the same way. And maybe now it's disrespect or what have you. All I'm saying is. And that's the amygdala. You got to realize the. We have a prefrontal cortex, which is your logical brain. You have the amygdala, which is your survival brain. The amygdala is 11 times faster, which means we will always. We will always react. I'm not advocating and promoting some. I'm Zen. I meditate on top of a mountain. I don't get mad. No, I just clock it quicker.

[Angela Yee]

Were you sovereign when you were naked and anxious in Germany?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

No. No. That's the perfect example. My homeboy lives in Germany. He's my oldest friend. I've known him since we were four years old. And I hurt my. This is right after 2019. It's right after doing the Breakfast Club for the first time. And I'm doing a tour in England and I took my parents cheap luggage. You know, they. They pay 60 bucks for like 11 pieces. I didn't know back then. So I just grabbed this cheap luggage. Go. And one of the wheels breaks. So now I'm going to the London tube with a broken wheel and I injure my shoulder. After the tour, I visit my friend in Berlin, and I haven't seen him in a while. He grew up in Canada with me. And he's like, yo, I'm gonna take you to the spa. And I'm like, candles, massage. That sounds perfect. We're on the bus because you don't drive, and we're headed to the spa. And I'm like, you know what's gonna be really good for this spa? I'm gonna take an edible. So I eat an edible and it's gonna feel perfect. And then he goes, man, I'm so proud of you. You're so open minded. None of the other guys in our crew would ever do this. And I was like, what are you. What are you talking about? Do what? He's like, you know, the naked part. And I was like, yeah, you're naked in a massage, but they put a blanket over you or something. He's like, no, no, we're in the steam room together. I'M like, that's not a spa, that's a sauna. He's like, oh, man, I mixed up the words. So at this point, we're going to all new sauna in Germany, and I already popped the edible.

[Angela Yee]

You didn't know? You didn't even expect this?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

No, I was expecting a massage. I just. I thought I hurt my shoulder. So then it was obviously the anxiety jumps up. I'm gonna be naked in Europe. It's probably normal for them. It's not normal for me. I'm gonna be naked in front of my friend. I ain't never done this before. And then you start to realize when you. So now you're in reaction mode and now you're scared. And plus the edibles kitten, which makes it even worse. First thing that I did was I expressed it. I just used word. I'm like, look, man, I'm. I didn't realize what this was. And. And you kind of. You could have put me in a cage by complimenting me and saying, I'm open minded and I want to live up to that, but I'm scared. And he's like, you're scared? I'm scared too. And then we realized we're not even scared about being naked. We're scared about being judged. Right? And then when we get there, you realize, oh, I thought it's gonna be like, everyone's normal. Everybody thinks this is normal. I'm the only person feeling awkward. I could tell everybody, like, there's a lot of this. Everybody was feeling awkward. And that collective vulnerability made it a little bit easier. But just like your interviews, the longer I stayed, the more comfortable I got. Listen, I'm ready for a Charlemagne. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready.

[Just hilarious]

It sounds like he was trying to take the friendship to another level.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Flirting.

[Angela Yee]

No, they flirting.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

No, it did, though. But it did. I've known. I've known him since we were four and it did. Being naked with your friend will do that. Being vulnerable. Vulnerable. We measure friendships in terms of length. You got to measure relationships.

[Just hilarious]

God damn. Jesus Christ. Humble. What the. So y' all had to sit naked in the sauna to be like, that's my friend. That's not. That's my friend right there. That's not really my. See how long it is? He's not really my friend.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I was ready for it. I was ready for it. It's okay. I was ready for it. And look, you're not wrong. At the end of the day, you're not wrong. At the end of the day, it's still about being vulnerable. Relationships only grow through being vulnerable. And being vulnerable is being naked. Either being naked with your body, or you're being naked with your feelings.

[Just hilarious]

The honest. Honest question. All questions are honest. But when you were in the sauna.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Oh, boy.

[Just hilarious]

And you looked around and you realized, like, oh, I'm bigger than a lot of guys in here. Did that make you feel more comfortable?

[DJ Envy]

But how do you know he was bigger? He could have been smaller because you.

[Just hilarious]

Can see he got eyes. Well, he could have been smaller, too, but.

[Angela Yee]

Well, he could, because obviously he just said he wasn't scared about being naked. He was scared about being judged. So we know he got.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Listen, I could have been. No. Your boy's shoe size. Eleven and a half. I'm okay.

[Just hilarious]

Okay.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Okay.

[Angela Yee]

What were you.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

We're fine. Look. Like that. You know, what it is with insecurities is like. Like, for example, if somebody's has a certain height, they don't think about their height. People. People who lack something, have an insecurity. Not judge. And again, I can't judge somebody for the genetic lottery they won. So, like, that's not much of an issue. But I think for me, it was more along the lines of, like, I didn't want to get caught staring by somebody. You know, if you see a woman or whatever.

[Just hilarious]

And then also, it's men and women in the sauna.

[Angela Yee]

Now it's just men.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

No. Oh, men, women. And then once I got comfortable, then they just threw in the next mix. Kids.

[Just hilarious]

Oh, hell, no.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

There were full nuclear families there. I didn't know any of this. Is.

[Angela Yee]

Is this cultural like this?

[Charlamagne Tha God]

I don't know how they do it in Germany. At the end of the day, I thought I was getting a massage. Instead, it was just a bunch of sauna rooms and cold plunges. And I don't know why people couldn't wear clothes in the beginning. I was just like, all right, I'm in a different country. This is their stuff. But as I said, I did not feel like most of the people in that room were comfortable either. It didn't feel normalized. Right. So it wasn't like if somebody lived in a culture where, like, you know, men walk around topless, and then all of a sudden they come to the beach and they feel weird. No, this. I felt like everybody felt kind of.

[Angela Yee]

Yeah.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

But, yeah, once I got comfortable with all the adult stuff, then I remember going outside where there's, like, a pool area, and then just seeing kids running around. I was like, oh, no, this is. This is a whole different level. I'm not even trying to get used to this. And it was. But as he said, like, it's incrementally making yourself uncomfortable and to sing and then being like, all right, the longer I'm in it, the more my body realizes. And this has been my mantra for this whole last 30 days, which is, this sucks, but I'm not in danger.

[Angela Yee]

Yeah.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

If you don't take your phone to the toilet after this conversation and you start to feel the adrenaline and cortisol rise, just say that this sucks, but I'm not in danger. Because we get antsy. We grab our phones, we do all this stuff because our bodies don't know. Our bodies think we're in danger. And again, this is a prehistoric software, prehistoric security system that's not designed for the world that we're in. And that's why we can't rely on it, because our body's also gonna be like, well, if it's familiar, it's safe. That's why it keeps bringing in certain people that we shouldn't be seeing anymore, because they're familiar.

[Just hilarious]

Yeah. You know, one thing that's worked for me and Sarah Jakes Roberts said this a while ago. I think she actually said it here on the Breakfast Club. She said, you know, anxiety can be a good thing because whenever you're doing something new, you're going to feel a certain level of anxiety. But to your point you made earlier, you have to tell yourself, oh, I've never done this before. This is a new space. This is a new place. These are new people, you know, so of course you're going to feel some level of anxiousness.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Exactly. Anxiety is not. It's not herpes. It's not the enemy. It's a signal. It's just as important as hunger. If we didn't have hunger, we would starve to death. We need to know when it's time to put some calories into us Anxiety, when it's correct. And this is where we got to start doing some of the rebooting. It'll let you know. Okay, well, think about it. To be courageous means you have to feel fear. If you're not feeling fear while you're doing it, you're not being brave. Right. To be resilience means doing it despite the anxiety. Resilience is going to feel like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to be here. I don't want to do this. Right. It's that nervousness Right. That's the only way you know you're hitting the edge, and that's how you know what your growth is. Because our growth is only outside of our comfort zone. Our comfort zones are prisons. The way we look at it right now is that we go to our comfort zone to stay safe from all the scary things outside. At best, our comfort zone should just be a recharge station. It's not where we should be living. It should be where we go to recharge. If we got too much injured, too many injuries from an experience like, all right, let me go back to my comfort zone. Let me recharge. Let me get right back out there. And we know especially all y' all are parents, that's what you do with your kids. Come back. Let me make you feel safe, push you right back out. You know, do it. And then when you get overwhelmed again, come back. And now we'll go even further. Now we go in further. It's the same thing with life. It's the exact same thing. That's how we build our resilience. That's our mental fitness. And our mental fitness improves our mental health, and our mental health protects us. We don't need to protect our mental health.

[DJ Envy]

Well, unanxious is out, right? Humble A poet. Make sure you pick it up. 50 Simple Truths to help overthinkers feel less stressed and more calm. And thank you for joining us, brother. We appreciate you.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

And thank you so much for having me. As always.

[Just hilarious]

Thank you, Humble.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

So someone. Someone's posting for me on social media right now. So it's at humblethepoet. But for real, start, please, just start your journey. For me. This is really important because as I said, like, what I realized is I've been improving in this space, is that it doesn't matter if I'm just doing it. We need. If everybody improved their relationship with their emotions, this world would get so much better. Yeah, this world will get safer. This will get less divided. And then you realize all of this is what people are exploiting to control us. This is really what people are exploiting to control us. Can I just tell a real quick story, because I think this is really important, please. So what inspired this was for two years, I was receiving random text messages and emails, death threats. And in these death threats, I was getting, like, they were naming my exes. They were putting up my address. They were saying they'd kill my dog. They were naming other friends of mine super racist, super. All of this stuff. And in the beginning, freeze. I avoided it. I Just didn't look at it. And I was just like, all right, cool. You know, I'll figure out who this is and punch him in the face or whatever. And then it kept escalating, and I was like, all right, cool. I'm gonna give these screenshots to the police. And within a month, they found out who did it. And then you realize, like, not addressing it made it worse than actually addressing it. And I think that's the important part. And then the part with that is when. When an announcement was made on the news about it, they didn't use my name. They didn't use that person's name. They just said, you know, hate crime against somebody in the South Asian community. All the comments. Because I'm Canadian, right? So this is Canadian news. All the comments were like, what's wrong with hating on these Indians? They're taking over our country. What's wrong with that? Canada first. And you're like, this is where we're at, where everybody looks at this because they're telling their story when they see that. And then for me, it was less about the experience that happened to me and more about seeing how the world reacts to this, right? And I'm like, okay, So I got to be on this mission to help people improve how they feel. That's the only way this world's gonna get better. Because this world is not designed for the way that we're built. So we gotta redesign ourselves to deal with this world.

[DJ Envy]

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Humble the Poet.

[Just hilarious]

Yes, sir.

[DJ Envy]

We appreciate you for joining us.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Appreciate y' all for having me.

[DJ Envy]

Charlamagne, me and you. Spock Naked.

[Angela Yee]

Germany. Dang. I ain't gotta go to Germany tonight.

[Just hilarious]

No, no, you.

[DJ Envy]

Don't be vulnerable with me.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

That's it. That'll solidify. No.

[DJ Envy]

It'S double the poet. It's the Breakfast Club. Good morning.

[Just hilarious]

Wake that ass up early in the morning.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

The Breakfast Club. You know that feeling when you're about to score 30% off, but they want your number? Ugh. Give them your line 2 number instead. It's a second line on your phone, Perfect for nabbing promo codes without inviting spam to your party. Sign up for every discount under the sun, then block the junk texts that follow. You get all the perks, but none of the spammy baggage. More codes, less chaos. Visit line2.com audio or download line2 in the app Store and get your shopping sidekick today, because the only thing blowing up your phone should be good deals. What happens when we come face to face with death. My truck was blown up by a 20 pound anti tank mine. My parachute did not deploy. I was kidnapped by a drug cartel. When we step beyond the edge of what we know, I clinically died.

[Just hilarious]

The heart stopped beating which I was.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Dead for 11.5 minutes. In return, it's a miracle I was.

[Just hilarious]

Brought back Alive Again.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

A podcast about the strength of the human spirit. Listen to Alive again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[DJ Envy]

Why is a soap opera Western like.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Yellowstone so wildly successful?

[DJ Envy]

The American west with Dan Flores is.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

The latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network.

[DJ Envy]

So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th where we'll delve into stories of the west and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we.

[Charlamagne Tha God]

Experience the region today. Listen to the American west with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season one, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.