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The Smoke Trail, hosted by Smoke Wallin, is a journey into awakening consciousness, weaving authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests to unlock high performance and perfect health. Each episode delves into spirituality, leadership, and transformation, offering tools to transcend trauma and find your bliss along the way. It’s a reflective space for achieving peak potential and inner peace in a distraction-filled world.
Man, the background is your background is perfect for it.
Smoke:Being based in Sedona doesn't suck. Like, people are like, well, are you gonna, like, start doing it in a studio? I'm like, no. I have the greatest studio in the world.
Kamal:Okay. You're making me wanna move there, actually.
Smoke:It's awesome. My next guest, Kamal Ravakant, has meditated with Tibetan monks in the Dalai Lama's monastery, served in the US army infantry, walked 550 miles across Spain, and published a best selling self help book. Kamal has also worked with some of the most influential people in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and investor. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It is a powerful story of Kamal's radical self growth journey and his specific practice for readers. Dynamic, vulnerable, page turning, and ultimately life changing, these pages hold a universal appeal for anyone who has ever struggled to get out of bed in the morning or smile through profound sadness.
Smoke:Welcome to the Smoke Trail, Kamal. I'm super excited to have you here. And, you know, we got to meet at the Genius Network when you did a a chat about your your book with with Joe. And I just loved I loved your message. I loved everything about it.
Smoke:And then I read the book, and I'm just super excited to have a conversation with you about what you've learned along the way and and things that can be maybe helpful to other people who are on their own journey.
Kamal:Sure. Thanks for having me and happy to share.
Smoke:In the intro, I talked about your background, but obviously had an illustrious career as a venture capitalist. You've been super involved in startups and funding other people's startups. But part of the journey in the book, you talk about you were the entrepreneur. You were starting the business and you raised a lot of capital. You had a lot of responsibility.
Smoke:I think we shared at lunch, we have some parallel examples. I did a bunch of that over my career, and and there's nothing quite like, you know, having the weight of all your friends and other people that trusted you and respected you to put their money down. And then when things don't go right, which, as a VC, you know, I don't know what your ratio is, but, you know, it's I I you know, here, it's like one in 10, you know, is is gonna be a blowout, and then there's a several blow ups, and there's something in between of the of a of 10 deals. You know, as an entrepreneur, you only have that one deal. You are running that business.
Smoke:It is your dream. You are making it happen. You've got the investors, and it's a very different level of, I think, responsibility than a VC who's spreading their bets.
Kamal:Correct.
Smoke:Maybe we could just start a little bit about your journey back then and just some of the things you experienced and then how that kind of evolved into, you know, your new understanding and kind of your way of being.
Kamal:Yeah. I'll tell you something funny. I almost got thrown out of a very big VC's office in New York. I was meeting with them and the guy was more he was like, so why'd you become a VC? Because I was a founder.
Kamal:Right? He's like, oh, you know, because he was a professional VC. I always been a VC, and I said, no, because I don't wanna work anymore. Yeah. He got so upset.
Kamal:He got so upset. He's like, well, maybe you you know, some of us haven't made it yet. Trust me. He'd made it far more than I had at that time. Right?
Kamal:So it wasn't that. It was like, look, man. Like like, I as a VC, you never have, like, customers calling and yelling at you. Your servers are down. Your employees are this.
Kamal:You're you know, like like, all the baggage that comes with building of being a founder. As a VC, you have very little. What do I do? I raise money. I I smart to I talk to very smart people to raise money from.
Kamal:Then I talk to very smart people to put money into. And then I just watch it, I help them. So I get to be part of the process, and then I get to I get to enjoy the upside. I mean, like, it's it's meetings and fundraising. It's it's not that's not I don't consider that a real if you've been a founder, don't consider that real work.
Kamal:Yeah. A founder is you you're carrying the weight of the thing on your back twenty four seven. Like I said, it's one thing. Me, like my list you know, I've invested at least over a 100 companies. You know?
Kamal:And a bunch of those have become massive unicorns. Right? And that's all you care about because unicorn those unicorns make you such high returns, especially in tech, the returns are pretty insane. I haven't seen any other industry that can match it. So it all works out.
Kamal:When companies go under, you don't care. I've helped entrepreneurs wind their company now. I like, my job was to help you. I'll help you build it. I'll help you shut it down.
Kamal:And you don't sweat. Whereas if it's just one thing, you're one thing, like that's all you do is sweat. And no, it's a much harder journey. It requires a lot of you and it requires so much growth. At every point when you solve one part, if you take a business from, you know, making $0 revenues to a $100, okay, requires once part of you.
Kamal:If you go to a $100 to a thousand or 10,000 to a 100,000 to a million to 10,000,000, it requires you to step up. You can't the same guy with zero to a 100 is not the same guy as doing million to 10,000,000. Like, better be stepping up and growing and growing the team and becoming better and better. Otherwise, it's not gonna happen. Yeah.
Kamal:It's pretty it's a remarkable journey. It's a hard journey. A lot of people don't realize they all I wanna be a founder. I wanna be a founder. It's a you know, CEO, I think, is the worst job in the world.
Kamal:It is really bad.
Smoke:It it it's it's definitely got all aspects. And and, you know, I'm not proud to or I'm not afraid to share that, you know, I've had a number of my startups that I created. I, you know, wrote the plan. I got my team. I I raised capital, and I got it launched.
Smoke:I got revenue producing. I started scaling and then I got kicked out of my company by my board more than once. And I I, you know, and I think in at least one case, it was just justifiable. And in other cases, it was like, no. They they didn't understand that I was also someone who could take it to the next level.
Smoke:But, you know, I've lived through that, that transition, shall we say.
Kamal:Yeah. It's well, you know, it is a special journey because the rewards, you know, like, we you know, foreign I mean, capitalism is what drives the few drives us into the future. You know? Capitalism works every you know, results in creating new things that never existed before that drive us forward. And so the capitalist part, like, hey, you do this, but the rewards are gonna be great, so it's worth it.
Kamal:And also, yeah, it's a very special journey. I'm very grateful that I've got to do it in tech in Silicon Valley, which is such a great proving ground. You know? Such it's like the level experiments and everything being run there just in a month or a year, or you can't find out other industries. It's just it's it's very you know, it also draws a certain kind of entrepreneur or, you know, sharp kids who are just used to breaking the rules.
Kamal:Yeah. You know? To create the future, you can't just stick with what with the past. You gotta break the rules of the past to create the future. Yeah.
Kamal:It's great it's a it's a great journey.
Smoke:It's truly creative destruction. You know? It's it because, you know, you gotta you gotta see something and say, you know what? There it can be done better. It could be done differently.
Smoke:The all the existing players aren't doing it right, and they're not gonna innovate to do it. Right? And you're you gotta be and you're and you also have to have, like, a certain level of, I don't know, I don't know, kahunas or whatever you wanna say, but, like, your willingness to challenge the established players.
Kamal:Yeah. Yeah. You have to have gumption. You know? You have to
Smoke:have Gumption. That's a better word.
Kamal:You know? Like, I invest in this company called Etched. Their website's etched.com. So they're building chips, you know, actual silicon chips, like real Silicon Valley stuff. Right?
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:Building chips for AI that were when I invested, this was a couple of years ago, they were saying this is gonna be 14 times faster than NVIDIA. Like, okay. You have my attention. Right? That's so what they were being very smart about was the fact that they were only doing it for AI.
Kamal:They were like, AI is gonna take off. They're gonna need a ton of chips. We're gonna make it only for that, optimize for that. And and the process like, these were young kids. The day I invested, I think the day after I invested, all three of the young founders got picked as Thiel fellows.
Kamal:I all of a sudden, round price went up, and I looked like a genius. I had nothing to do with it. It was just timing. I just really and so when I was doing my diligence call with them, they were so sharp, and they were so like, I come out all this because I know nothing about chips. Even though I've been in tech, how how many of us actually know about build you know, chips?
Kamal:Nothing. So I'd done some diligence. I talked to friends who'd know, and, you I'd come with my set of questions, and every one of the answers was like bang, bang, bang. But what really sold me was, they said that they have TSMC fabbing their, production. Now TSMC is the one who makes the makes the actual chips for everyone.
Kamal:And to get them to, like, make your chips, I mean, you better be like a multibillion dollar at the minimum corporation, have a multibillion dollar contract if there's a long line. Like, I mean, there's a waiting list. Right? Yeah. And I'm like, how in the world did you get to do that?
Kamal:How did you get them as a to to do that? Because that's like a that's incredible. Because, you know, it's one thing to design it, but get them made. Yeah. And and the young one of the young kids, and I think he was 17, 18, I think, he said, I was at this conference for for the for the industry conference, and there was a dinner afterwards, and I end up sitting next to this senior VP from TSMC.
Kamal:And for two hours in a napkin, I showed him everything they're doing wrong. And that's how they told him everything they're doing wrong. Right? And he said next week next week, the guy's office called and called him in for a meeting, said whatever you're building, make it we wanna build it. We wanna fab it.
Kamal:That's awesome. It was like, you know, that kind of gumption.
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:Literally, you're sitting with, you know, the company that could make your future. Right? And all you do is tell them I mean, I love that.
Smoke:That's awesome. Yeah. So they're I I take it they're doing well now in this environment.
Kamal:Yeah. They're already worth like they've they've raised a lot of money since then because everyone's like they've they've built incredible team. They've stolen a lot of engineers from Facebook and Apple and, you know, like chip engineers and
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:And I think they're already worth like close to 4,000,000,000.
Smoke:Nice. Yeah.
Kamal:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the other part of the game. Right?
Kamal:When you get to see these things. Now do I have anything to do with do with their success? Absolutely not. Right? As a VC, like, they're already far ahead.
Kamal:They don't need my help. Like, the little help I've, you know, I've sent them some recruiting candidates and things like that, but they're already far ahead. Yeah. But it's amazing that you get to, you know, invest in these young kids and these great founders, and they go off and build game game game changing stuff, and you get to participate in the upside.
Smoke:Yeah. It's pretty cool. It's a it's a it's a really cool thing, and I I do I think that's one of the things that, you know, founders fund and certain other VCs like yourself who have built companies and then they bring that lens to the VC world. Not all founders are going be good VCs, but the ones that do and bring that lens to the table, I think, really bring a richness that is value add. Right?
Smoke:I think, you know, that's why they're sought after. Right? You're sought after. People who have built and are then are, you know, capital to invest, I think, are preference to, you know, most entrepreneurs who are starting out.
Kamal:Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I'm sought after. I'm known I'm known. I'm known in the sense that if I go to a company, like, they'll take that meeting that invest in me. Yeah.
Kamal:Know?
Smoke:So that's It's it's like me in the in the beverage world. Like, if they if anybody is coming up with any harebrained idea for a new beverage, I get the call.
Kamal:Got it.
Smoke:Like like, doesn't mean I I know. I'm also the guy that turned down Red Bull when I was I had the I could have gotten the distribution rights for certain markets, and and I didn't like it. I thought it was a bad product. It it wouldn't sell. I didn't the the people were arrogant.
Smoke:I'm like, that's not gonna work. No. So I I take great humility when I take these meetings because I don't know which one's gonna work. I've also had brands that I thought, that's a winner. It's gonna it tastes great.
Smoke:It's perfect packaging. It's got a great story. They got a great team. And I bet on them, and it didn't work at all. Right?
Smoke:So
Kamal:You find that in tech as well. So it's some some you know, it's markets, some you can't predict markets four years from now. You're investing in startups. You're investing like super early, right? Who knows what's going to be happening four years from now?
Kamal:And sometimes you get these surprises, which are pretty crazy. Yeah. But you know you know what the what I found the the common thread seems to be? It's just it's just you bet on a great founder. Yeah.
Kamal:Like, every time I've, like, fallen in love with the founder, and I mean I don't mean, like like you know what mean? Like, falling in love is like, oh my god. This person was born to do this. That's if I get that sense that we're born to do this, like, every time I've done that, it's it's always just looking back, I've always been some of my biggest hits.
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:Yeah. Then also, if you if it doesn't work out, you don't regret it because you back someone great to try and pull off something great. Yeah. Right? And then you back them again the next time.
Kamal:That's a great thing about Silicon Valley. One thing that, you know, why hasn't Europe been able to replicate Silicon Valley? Because they've tried. Right?
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:It is very simple. You get punished there for failing. Here, realize that failing, you know, like succeeding is so hard, especially on large scale. It's so hard. So many things have to go right.
Kamal:You could be the most brilliant person on the planet, but so many things have to go right. And so many the team you gotta build and blah blah blah, that as long as you, like, you learn from it, did your best, the next thing you're doing, I wanna be part of it, you know? And I think that's what makes the funding in tech very, very special. You don't get punished for failing.
Smoke:Yeah. Well,
Kamal:in The United States.
Smoke:That's awesome. I I I totally agree with you. Let's pivot to your your time. When you were you were the entrepreneur, you had raised all this capital, you were out there trying to go for the go for the the dream. And at some point along the way, things didn't go unfold the way you thought.
Smoke:And it was a tough time. Right? So I I've been there. So, you know, we we share that. But it's you know, tell me about that and and how it affected you.
Smoke:And then let's let's kind of, like, how did you uncover your hidden truth, which I also believe in. Right? So, like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Smoke:Let's go back to the dark the dark night of the soul of Kamal as an entrepreneur.
Kamal:Okay. That's a yeah. That's a good that's a great way to put it as an entrepreneur because we we all have multiple dark nights of the soul. Part of the human journey. Right?
Kamal:It's not just one and done. You know, so that company was very special to me because I self funded it, you know, for years and built it, and it was it was we were doing things that no one thought we could. We were the only one in that industry who was actually taking away real business from Google and Yahoo, who were the behemoths at the time in the industry. And then I raised money. It was two friends, and I raised money, then shortly after the whole thing blew up.
Kamal:We picked bad partners, and I was the CEO, so that's my responsibility. The partners, all of sudden, if partners just don't come through, no matter how wage attack is, no matter where you are, the whole thing falls apart. By So the process, I fell apart because so much of my identity was caught up in being that founder was pulling it off.
Smoke:Yeah, right.
Kamal:That I was gonna be that success. Was gonna And it was getting a bit public in the industry, and I hadn't taken a I don't think I would take a day off in three years. And then in the fourth year was when this happened. And, like, I'd I'd spent all my money. I'd, like, run out of money, like, and the thing blew up, and I was literally paying off my employees, like, paying them with my own personal credit cards, you know, which I couldn't pay anymore.
Kamal:You know, I'd spent all the money I'd saved up was gone in there, and I kind of fell apart with it, you know? It's not an uncommon story. So much of our ego is tied up in also my health. I just worked myself just dry. And I was just really miserable, and it was over.
Kamal:I was just like, just didn't wanna come out of my my my bedroom or apartment, and and I was just miserable. And then one night, I think I was thinking of a friend who passed away, and I was crying because I was missing her. And and I was just miserable. And I was like, I'm so sick of being miserable. I'm sick of being in my head.
Kamal:I need out. Otherwise, I'm gonna, like, go I can see the Bay Bridge. I'm just gonna go up on the Bay Bridge and just jump off. I need out. Yeah.
Kamal:And so I walked over to my desk and I had my journal there, and I wrote myself a vow in my journal. And and I the vow that came out was very interesting because it's not a vow I sit down to write. I'm a big believer in the power of personal commitment, especially a vow, because when you make a vow, it's a sacred act. And if you make a vow just to yourself, it's a sacred act between you and whatever you believe this whole show is. So it's special.
Kamal:And Yeah. I think we can should really truly transform our lives by just making a vow and then living it. And What came out was a vow to love myself, where I thought I going be like, I'm going get out of this or I'm going to be great or I'm going to start a great company, blah, blah, blah. It was a very simple vow, written in a powerful moment that came from somewhere deep within me that I just going to love myself truly, fully, truly, and deeply in every single way possible. When I had written the vow, I sat back and looked at it.
Kamal:I'm like, first, where the hell did this come from? And second, shit, I had written it. I knew it came from deeper, so I had to I had to. It was like a commandment. I had to live it.
Kamal:Yeah. I was not someone who ever loved ever said, oh, I love myself. I was not that guy. I just really was not that guy.
Smoke:Yeah. Well, we're we're we're usually the our own toughest critics. And so we have that inner voice, right, that's beating the hell out of us. Even if people around you were saying nice things, you're saying you're it could be better. It could be better.
Smoke:That was you. Right?
Kamal:Far worse, probably.
Smoke:Yeah. I
Kamal:mean, like, I was yeah. I was very hard on myself. And then
Smoke:yeah.
Kamal:Of course, now I was you know, I had felt like when this was happening, felt like complete failure, blah blah blah. You know? I'd throw all those words in there. Then I had to live this vow, and I didn't know how to because I've never how do you go about doing it? So I didn't go off and read any books.
Kamal:Looking back to my credit, I didn't read any books because I've come across later on after the success of my book, I've looked at other books in this in the in the genre. And just to be honest, I find them full of platitudes. You know? Like, yes, it makes you feel good, but a month later, a week later, are you loving yourself? Are you better?
Kamal:If you're not, the book's useless.
Smoke:Yeah. And
Kamal:so I didn't set out to write a book. I set out to just literally heal myself to save myself. And so I just started doing it. I was like, okay. I'm miserable.
Kamal:I need to get out of my mind, so the only place I can work on is my mind. So I started working on my mind. I would just try things and I would run little clinical trials in my head, sample a size of one. If I did something that made me feel better, I continued. If I didn't, I dropped it.
Kamal:And within, a week, I'd come up with, like, almost like an internal system of things I was doing internally. And they were very simple, and they were easy to do, and they were all that I had energy for. And they're simple enough, you know, that almost sound idiotic, but, you know, like, a wiring, an actual wiring is quite simple. The neocortex makes us think we're all so smart and everything, but most of our decisions are done from a very simple wiring, pain, fear, pleasure, just very basic stuff. So I'd stumble upon how to work on that myself using that.
Kamal:I did, and it started to work. And it started to change, shift my mind within a month. Like, I was in a completely different place mentally, like, completely the opposite. And and and also I noticed my life started to shift on its own. Like, things started to happen.
Kamal:Things just started to work. And I was like, started I I started calling and feeling like I was living like, I was experiencing magic. That was the only way to describe it. And so then I had friends, like, you know, I had a old cofounder burnt out, left after six months. The my company that company had finished it for four years of me grinding for four years.
Kamal:He'd gone for six months and burnt out and left. And and he told me he was going through a hard time. I was like, oh, dude. No big deal. I figured it out.
Kamal:So I wrote up, a little primer on what I've done and sent it to him. I really helped him. Then I, you know, I shared with a couple other people and they were all like, look, you gotta, like, start helping them and they're like, you gotta write this.
Smoke:Yeah. I
Kamal:had trained over the years to be a literary fiction writer. I thought I was gonna write the great American novel, so I never wanted to write the great American self help book. Was not was definitely not that guy. Just trust me on that. Know, I'm a do I like like I like doing things.
Kamal:You know? But this was like so I'd say, okay. Let me write this. So I wrote it I wrote it, and I because I know how to write, was able to write it very simply and just honest and true. And also because of my background in tech, I could almost write, I wrote it.
Kamal:I think I've written the only manual out there in How to Love Yourself from the inside. I literally there's a part of it that's literally a manual. You just have follow step by step. And it's not bubble baths and candlelight or all of that. It's all internal stuff.
Kamal:And it turns out, you know, it worked for me and everyone who started to apply it, it worked for them. And then the book just kinda took off. And it's gone. I think it's published like something like 16 different countries. I get emails from all over the world.
Kamal:I'll send you there two things. Sorry again.
Smoke:Yeah, no, I loved it. It was very I did the Audible Okay. And you did a nice job reading it, which I I always I I take exception. I like the audibles that are read by the author. I think there's Correct.
Smoke:Yeah. With something important with the transmission. It's more than just the words. It's it's your because you lived it, and it's it's your teaching that's coming through. I think you did a great job with it.
Kamal:Yeah. I would not have let anyone else read that book. Yeah. The novel that I published, Rebirth, which is beautiful, I we actually decided together that, no. It's gotta be a Broadway actor because there's characters that are from Spain and Italy, and I can't do accents.
Kamal:It'd just be me. But that book, which is such a personal story Love Yourself is such a personal story yeah, there was no way Harper Collins, they knew it, I knew it, I was going to read that. And hopefully in part also because you can, as human beings, we feel each other in ways that we can't even describe, right?
Smoke:And Yeah.
Kamal:You can hear my feelings when I'm Mhmm. Like like, the feeling I know where the feeling needs to go and what part what part of the page or what part of the sentence, and so I did my best to do that.
Smoke:So Yeah. No. I think think you yeah. I think you did a really good job with it. It is a transmission.
Smoke:Underestimate how much of our communication is actually energetic transmission. Words are what our mental thinking understand, but your our energy my energetic body understands your energetic bodies we're communicating. And only a portion portion of it is actually the words we're saying. It's actually there's a there's a higher level communication that's happening, whether we know it or not. Right?
Smoke:It's happening. And I think it comes through when you have an author like yourself who lived it, breathed it, wrote it for with the right intentions, and then you read it with the right intentions and that comes through.
Kamal:Thank you. Thank you. And it's been amazing to me the caliber of people who read it. People I respect and admire come up to me and told me how much that book helped them. Yeah.
Kamal:The one I used to really admire, He passed away a few years ago, but I met him because he found out that we had a mutual friend. He told her he wanted to talk to me. And this is someone who had listened to a podcaster who's really renowned in his field. And I was a fan, and he's like, look, you know, when I read your book, I was reading a book with a pistol on my hand because I was about to shoot myself, and I had someone give me a book, and I was like, fuck it, I'll go and read this and then shoot myself, and I didn't.
Smoke:Yeah. You know? Amazing. Awesome. Amazing.
Kamal:Right? It's it's good. Like and this is someone I was blown I was like, man, I look up to you. Like, this is incredible. This blow you know?
Smoke:Well, it goes to show you never know what's going on in the inside. Right? Like, some someone can be the most successful and, know, they on the outside, it seems like everything's going right. I mean, you know, in all walks of life. Right?
Smoke:Business and other other areas. And you don't know what's going on in someone's head. You don't know if they're actually beating themselves up for unknown reasons and they haven't gotten out of that loop. You talk about that mental loop in the book and how you break it, How you change it. You change it to a positive loop basically.
Kamal:Yeah, was actually I was talking to my cousin today. He's here visiting and he was talking about all these things he needs to work on mentally. He needs to work on those first. And I was like, look, you could spend your entire life trying to fix the loops in your head. Yeah.
Kamal:Or you could just work in a new loop that's so pure, that's so primal, and just make that deeper so your thoughts flow down that loop, which is what I did basically. Cleared just a deeper groove in my brain, in my neurons for love. And look, it's classic. It's like in neurology, you heard neurons that fire together, wire together. So I was literally doing what's been well documented, but I was doing it in a very focused way for just love for myself.
Kamal:And I think often we get too caught up in, oh, I gotta fix this. I gotta fix that in my head. No. No. No.
Kamal:Sometimes, you know, just just just focus on the focus on the solution and making the solution and just making, you know, making that run the show. And then the other ones become less and less anyway. Yeah. Because also, think if you're trying to fix, fix, fix, you're giving attention to the problem. You're just reinforcing it again and again and again.
Kamal:You know, I'd rather just focus on the focus on the solution.
Smoke:Yeah. Mean, what we hold in mind, Tim, manifests and what we energize manifests. And I think that I'm putting it in my words, when we hold in mind loving ourselves, that manifests like the things that come out of that are incredible and powerful. If you focus on the problem, which many of us in our rational logical mind think, oh, I can figure this out. And you spend all your time on the problem.
Smoke:Albeit you're coming up with solutions, you're still focused on the negative. And so it's really jumping to a different loop, I think, is what you're saying.
Kamal:Jumping is something that's so powerful, so primal, so wired in us. Look at any baby, wired for love. Right? Yeah. So something so primal that it's going to be easy to make that groove anyway and just make that one just your thoughts float on that one.
Kamal:And in the beginning, you kind of have to do it as it's like when you're working out, can't even do the bar, right? Like when you're bench pressing, but then eventually the bar is nothing and you start flapping weights on and then that's harder than that. Nothing is left over. Same thing with the brain. The thing is, it's also malleable in the other direction.
Kamal:Like if we're always thinking negative, stuck in negative thoughts or thinking negative thoughts, we're just deepening that group. So it's a conscious thing. I think one thing unfortunately we haven't been taught in life that look, you can actually control your mind or you can be in charge of your mind. Your mind runs and your mind runs the show. You could be sitting in Sedona, you could sitting on a billion dollar yacht, you could be sitting in a prison cell, it doesn't matter.
Kamal:It's still in your mind. Your mind determines the quality of whatever you're experiencing. So if you can work, you know, I wish we'd been taught that someone at a class at school, like how to work on your mind. Yeah. You do that.
Kamal:It makes your life better.
Smoke:It's a huge gap and I think, well, you know, let's see some of the audience might be like I was where I had a lot of trauma as a child and part of my entrepreneurial journey was escaping that. It was actually like running from that that past and trying to break free and I did largely. But those memories sometimes cycle and and and they keep coming back. And what you're saying is what I've learned too from a different I came from a different angle. You know, I had to surface my traumas.
Smoke:I had a lot of blocked memories. I had to, like I had to go through, like, this dark period of, like, recognizing them, getting sitting with them, and then and then transcending them is what I didn't realize it was they call it alchemy in the spiritual world. I didn't know that's what it was. I was just doing it. But as I did it, I I basically neutralized those so I could just replace them with the positive thoughts that I wanted.
Smoke:And you go right to that, which is which is amazing. And it's actually it's actually telling that you don't even have to do all the stuff necessarily that I did, all the digging, all trauma digging. I mean, some people may need to. I for me, it was, like, But, part of my it doesn't matter where you start. It doesn't matter what past you had.
Smoke:You can do this. You can actually just change your loop.
Kamal:Yeah. Because, I mean, it's that's the thing. It's it's an inner thing. It's very human, and we all want it for love. You know, I I just stumbled upon the most powerful thing to to work on for myself.
Kamal:You know, I could have I could have written that I'm gonna be anything else. I could have written that any other emotion or anything else or feel away, but, like, love. Love, like, you know, love trumps all. Yeah. And I think and honestly, like, look.
Kamal:I've been through my own stuff. And, you know, as you said, the memories and so forth, right? Yes, those are hard and those need to be dealt with. But like also when you're working on love for yourself, you can do you naturally start to deal with that from a loving place that changes your relationship with it. Yes.
Kamal:Self is powerful. Right? Yeah. Like, I've been able to work with child my own inner childhood stuff by just, like, loving the child
Smoke:Yep.
Kamal:From this man who loves himself, you know, who was Yeah. Who is, you know, the child became. Right? Yeah. It's all in my head.
Kamal:The whole show, everything that's, you know, that the reinforcing, whatever, it's all happening in the head. So might as well, like, use this. So that's actually been very powerful. Like, lot of stuff I used to deal with the child and stuff, I just start giving, like, love for myself and then to the child, and it kinda, like, settled everything down.
Smoke:Yeah. No. I I I I think that's really powerful and works. I I know it works because I I did the same thing. And but, again, it's like acknowledging that child and saying, we're gonna have fun now.
Smoke:The trauma's not coming back. Let's have fun together. You didn't do anything wrong. You were right. And now let's have fun.
Smoke:And it's just acknowledging it and it's like, oh, okay. We're we're in this together. And Yeah.
Kamal:It's very it's I I know I would say even if one hasn't been through trauma, right, but who hasn't? But, like, we all carry something from our childhood. Sure. Like, to the child and just like give the child love and make them like, hey, look how I, you know, I I got you.
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:Like like, I whatever you need, I got you. And, you know, like, trust yourself. It is something special in doing that.
Smoke:Yeah. It
Kamal:settles things some some, you know, squirrelly things inside.
Smoke:Yeah. No. It it's well, I mean, there you know, Richard Schwartz has the whole, you know, the family dynamic thing where you talk he's got a whole system for this. It's it doesn't even need need that. I think that's cool.
Smoke:But, like, it's simple. It's just go back, talk to that child at different stages and love it. And they come back together. They integrate with the being that you are.
Kamal:I think a lot of the basic things for us are actually very simple. Yeah. We complicate them as human beings because we like stories. We like to get the brain likes to gnaw at problems. But gnawing at a problem doesn't necessarily solve it.
Kamal:It's versus if you have the solution and you're applying it. Yeah. I think so much of the inner work is actually just simple. Like people say, meditate. Meditation in itself is the simplest thing you can do.
Kamal:Just sit there and you breathe. That's literally it's the simplest you know, like and yet if you do consistently, it will have a very interesting effect on your mind. Tremendous. Positive. Right?
Kamal:You don't need some complicated system of medicate meditation. I mean, if you're okay. Now if you're trying to explore consciousness or whatever, wanna go to a different whatever, yes. That's or, you know, it's harder to get there on your own. Right?
Kamal:Yeah. But for for meditation, no. Just sit there, close your eyes, and breathe. You got it. Right?
Smoke:So what are some of the I know you talk about it in the book, but what are some of those basic practices? It's really like building a daily routine, which for you is just nature. It's just it is what you do now. But for someone who's maybe starting out, they're listening to this, they're maybe they're very successful or maybe they're having challenges either way, they're not where they want to be from an inner loving inner inner self. What are some of the basic practices that meditation is one?
Kamal:Well, so what I did in the book, what I get in the book was exactly what I did. And there everything was focused, very focused and built upon each other. It was always focused on love for self. There was nothing else. Right?
Kamal:Like, one of the on top of it, there was also, like, some others there was one or two external stuff. Like, so when I was when when I was doing this and I was interacting with people, and let's say I was having a hard interaction, and my mind was getting pissy, I would ask myself, or if I had to make choices and I wasn't sure about what was the right choice, or I knew I was making a poor choice, I asked myself if and it's very important to start with if because if I because your mind can't argue against if. It's just an if question. And it was if I love myself truly and deeply, what would I do? Yep.
Kamal:And that right there answers pretty much 99% of the questions you got about should I do this, should I not? Because we know inside. We know.
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:If I love myself truly and deeply, what would I do? And then it's up to us to make that choice or not. And honestly, sometimes I didn't, but at least I was doing it consciously. So then when that choice came up again and I did it again, now I felt kinda like an idiot. Hey.
Kamal:You asked this question. You knew it. You're asking it again. Okay. Maybe this time I'll listen to the You know, it's it's really it's it's that question.
Kamal:I find a lot of people just love that question, just making a habit of, you know, when you sit down to eat at a restaurant and they they bring the dessert tray. If I loved myself truly and deeply, would I eat this? Yeah. Your choice. Right?
Kamal:I've used it for things like that or, like, when I don't feel like working out. Know? And it just, like, kinda wakes you up, and it's a very simple one. But so that was more for the external world, but the rest was all inner work. Like, so it was all based on a concept of light, feeling light from above coming in into the body and just doing what light does, which is just light just gets rid of darkness.
Kamal:Very wise.
Smoke:By the way, there's light. There's light coming in through your window right to your shoulder like it looks like it's awesome, but it looks like it's coming right to you.
Kamal:We're both in the desert. Yeah. A very wise friend of mine, years before I wrote the book, he told me something. He said, you know, darkness is the absence of light. So what do you do when you're in dark room?
Kamal:Do you fight against the darkness? Do you yell at it? Do you scream at it? Does that make the darkness go away? Do you get angry at it?
Kamal:You know, what do you do? He said, you find the nearest switch and turn on the light. Or if there's no switch, you find the nearest window and you start cleaning it, and the light naturally comes in. That's all you gotta You gotta clean it. The light naturally comes in.
Kamal:That's that's the function of light, and the darkness naturally goes away because that's what light does. Right?
Smoke:Yeah. So it it applies to, you know, the idea of, like, you know, good and evil. You know, the the reality is there is definitely good, which is love, and evil is just the lack of love. So when there's evil in the world, you know, I used to fight, you know, wanna fight and wanna, like, challenge people that I thought were doing wrong things. The reality is that they're expressing lack of love.
Kamal:Yeah. A good way to look at it.
Smoke:And love changes everything. There's certainly a lot of lack of love out there in the world, but it it really help helps me contextualize it that way, and understand that, like, well, people do bad things because they are are not operating from love.
Kamal:Yeah. Yeah. Very true. Most often fear. Yeah.
Kamal:But, yeah, so that concept that he gave me, you know, he's like that that really applied to how I said about to love myself. Like, I wasn't gonna try to fight the thoughts in my mind because they were all very highly negative. Right? Very destructive and negative. So I wasn't going to fight them.
Kamal:I was just going to work. I was going to get out my rag and clean the window. And I was going to do that with love and light. So it was all about the exercise I have about bringing light in and then with each breath feeling love for yourself come in. And here's the funny thing.
Kamal:We think that we have to experience love from someone to feel love. No. No. No. We meant you can manufacture any feeling you want.
Kamal:I've you know, gun to head, anyone could. It's something we manufacture our feelings. It's very interesting to realize that we have the power of feelings rather than feelings have a power over us. So I'm taking those focused moments to consciously create light and love for myself. That's it.
Kamal:I think you're coming in and coming in with the out breath going out, Coming in, going out. You know, do that for five minutes. Right? It shifts you. And the first maybe the first four or five days, it's gonna feel really weird and awkward.
Kamal:Your mind's gonna tell you an idiot and all what is, you know, what is this stuff you're doing? But that's just the old grooves. You just your job is just, I don't care. I'm just laying in the groove, laying in groove. And after about a week or so, it's gonna start flowing naturally.
Kamal:Watch after a couple of weeks, you're gonna walk around feeling like that. Yeah. Now what's life like when you feel like that? And that's just one of the exercises. Right?
Kamal:But what's life like when you feel like that versus the normal garb I mean, and trust me, I deal with enough garbage in my head all day. Right? Yeah. But I have these moments where that's all I'm feeling. And the more I do this, the more my the less garbage moments I have.
Kamal:You
Smoke:know? Yeah.
Kamal:And that's amazing. Mhmm. And now imagine making choices in life from that place. You know, imagine just yeah. Because you make better choices for yourself.
Kamal:And now I've learned the more I love myself because I thought one thing I also learned is there's layers to this. You don't just hit love for yourself and, you know, it's like you go deeper and deeper, there's, like, con there's patterns that we live in our life and relationships and so forth. And I learned that the deeper I go into this, the more I have love for myself, the less I have tolerance for poor behavior from others. Yeah. I used to be a very tolerant person.
Kamal:I'm not anymore. I'm more I'm just I'm just firm.
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:Loving myself. Yeah. You know, I'm like, you're not disturbing my peace of mind. Sorry. Like, this this is the rules.
Kamal:If you wanna have me in your life on a track when this is this is how it's gonna be, and if not, then no. Yeah. God, I wish I'd done this decades ago, man. My life would have been like the bad business partners, bad this, whatever. Like, you would just literally from that alone.
Smoke:Oh, yeah.
Kamal:And that's loving yourself. Yeah. You you know, if you don't also, like, in life, you know, people it's like like my dog. Right? She's so smart, but she will push boundaries always to check.
Kamal:So whatever boundary I allow, she'll go to there. Human behavior is very much like that. Yeah. Especially with people who have, like, poor ethics. Right?
Kamal:They will go as far as you let them. So if your boundaries are strong and strict, that's as far as they're gonna go.
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:You know? It it try that alone, Trent. There's so many things about this that practically change your life, practically transform your life. You know? I've gone down this rabbit hole, and this had made me think about what is the nature of reality, because what is consciousness itself?
Kamal:And then that's a whole different thing that's let me down. Right? But in the end, this basic what what I care about, and I wrote in the book, is I just care when I was coming up with this, I was doing it to save myself. I wasn't doing it to write a book. I wasn't doing it.
Kamal:You know? I was gonna go build another tech company or something like that. You know, I was kinda working on owl. Like, I was doing purely to save myself. And so I don't give a damn how stupid it sounds, how silly it sounds, or whatever.
Kamal:All I care is that it works. That's it. That should be the only metric for when for self help. Am I better after I've read this book? Am I better a month later?
Kamal:If I'm not, throw that book away.
Smoke:Yep.
Kamal:Like, that's that should be like, it has to be practical. And so I'm very, very proud of the fact because I've seen now over the years, all the people who reached out to me that I pulled it off, that I was able to write, you know, and and and this in a practical way. It's very interesting because a lot of stuff you know, lot obviously, a lot of women read my book because women are more in self help than men are, but I have a healthy chunk of men who read this book. Yeah. Because it's written by a man, and, also, it's written by a man who's, like, been in the military, has built companies and stuff.
Kamal:So it's not like, hey. I you know, like, I'm just writing this book to write a to write a self help book. I've, like, I've done things in the world. So I'm a doer, and I'm proud of that. You know?
Kamal:I'm takes work to be a doer. It takes a lot you know, you have to I have the lashes on my back. You know what I mean? As you know. Right?
Kamal:So Yes. Right. So I'm very proud of that, I'm proud of the fact that I was able to take that also part of my life. And that made you know, honestly, without being in tech and that part of life, I couldn't have written this book. Yeah.
Kamal:You know? Because I couldn't have written the practical manual. When for years I was writing manuals for engineers, you know, it's a line by line instruction, so I know how to write manuals.
Smoke:Yeah. No. And what what I you know, again, it's the simplicity is part of the beauty. It's it's a very basic premise. You know, I I got there in a more roundabout way, and I I did a lot of reading and a lot of work and all kinds of things, but I ended up in the same place.
Smoke:Like like, what that's what Yeah. Yeah. You're up there. Was like, wait a minute. That's he's saying what I what I believe.
Smoke:But you got there in a I I don't know. Maybe a a more direct path from your higher self, was delivered to you.
Kamal:But that's a great thing. It's you know, we've we're not the only ones. This is such a human thing. Yeah. You know, this is such a human thing.
Kamal:Our grandmothers, you know, said love yourself, you know, but tell us to love ourselves, whatever. It's like, it's such a human thing. It's just that I wish we'd been taught how to. Yeah. Because the world teaches us how to feel poorly.
Kamal:I was talking to a friend of mine today about, I'm sure it was my cousin. I was like, you know, AI actually does kind of control us anyway because AI is doing the algorithms and the algorithms are telling us on TikTok, on Instagram, on X, what to consume and what we consume, it was what goes in our mind and what we think and believe and what creates our emotions. We're already being controlled.
Smoke:Absolutely. And
Kamal:we have to, and it's so hard to break away from that. I take these hard breaks on social media sometimes. I'll go weeks without touching it, and then I just realized how addicted I was. And we have to take, in this day and age when we have less and less control of our mind, we literally, every time we look at anything that's generated online, we're being basically shown how to feel because these things create an emotion in us. Mhmm.
Kamal:In the old days, I mean, look, I grew up when the news came out at 05:30, and you watched the news, and that was that for a half hour, right, or 06:30, whatever. That was it. Now it's on twenty four seven, and we're hearing about everything that's had bad that's happening on the planet.
Smoke:Yeah. I mean, it's it's so important. And I actually have, daily hygiene practice, which is Mhmm.
Kamal:What's up?
Smoke:When you're in a place where, you know, you're you're in a state of love and you're you you've got great thoughts. But, know, you we're still living in the world. If you're if you're active, you're doing stuff, you're looking at social media, you're interacting with people, you're going if you go to the airport, you're looking at you're absorbing Mhmm. Pharmaceutical ads.
Kamal:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Smoke:Tell you to be sick so that, you know, they can help you. And so I literally do a cleanse. I say, you know, I'm a infinite being. I'm subject only what I hold in mind. I hold in mind love, light, and my infinite beingness.
Smoke:I go through a little mantra of my own. And then I say and I negate any and all false beliefs that have come to me today from any source, whether I know or or don't know it. I drop them, and they are not part of me. I send them back to sender, with love and light. And it cleanses my mind and my higher self from anything that's coming in.
Smoke:I just do it every day as like a practice. It's a hygiene. It's like taking a shower.
Kamal:That's a that's great. You're conscious. You're being conscious here. Yeah. Because because if we spend so much of our, days autopilot anyway, and now when you're consuming stuff, you know, it's like a friend of mine made a video about this.
Kamal:He was like he found himself scrolling reels, right, for an hour or two hours, but he said he stopped once after, like, an hour. And he asked him, do I remember what I consumed? And he didn't.
Smoke:Yeah. Yeah. Saying So that does.
Kamal:You do because it's literally you're doing these flashes of images. I mean, I mean, no one could have come up with better hypnosis mechanisms. Right? You're doing that. Yeah.
Kamal:So And like, if we can take breaks to be conscious in our mind, Yeah. We're gonna be better for it. I think what taking control of our mind and we can't, I mean, I haven't been able to take 100% control maybe in moments, But not throughout the day, But just we pause and do that. It makes our experience Page, plots, please. Sorry.
Kamal:Someone rang the bell. Page plots. Thank you. Please. Thank you.
Kamal:I have a Belgian Malinois, so she's, you know, doing her guard dog, Judy.
Smoke:Yeah. My my puppy's out in the other room, but she's she's a she's a a loving handful.
Kamal:They're great. I love her to pieces. Hi, Peggy. But yeah, so the whole thing about just I think if we can just commit to working on our mind or making our mind a better place, you'll see the results in your life. So it's actually like a very selfish statement that you want to make your life better, make your mind better.
Smoke:Yeah. Yeah, control what you consume. And so there's all these things that inadvertently we're consuming, whether it's just glancing at your phone or you're walking through the airport and you're looking at ads and you see you're watching TV at the end of the day for whatever reason and you just let it you're letting it come in. So to to be conscious of it, to cleanse it, to just be aware and say, you know, whatever's come in, you know, I'm dropping. I mean, our subconscious doesn't know the difference between a murder on TV and a live murder.
Smoke:It doesn't. And so when you watch violence, when you watch, you know, whatever it is, like all the different things, the subconscious doesn't differentiate between what is real and what is coming in. So it's really important just to cleanse it. Just cleanse it. And it works.
Kamal:Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there's many different ways to do it. You and I have our own processes and whatever someone's got, you know, do it. Yeah.
Kamal:Do it consistently. Greatness comes from consistency.
Smoke:You want a
Kamal:great body. You've got to go to the gym and eat a certain way over time, not just one day. Same thing here.
Smoke:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that's you know, it's the discipline to create a new routine. If you if you've got a routine that's not working for you, that's not what if you ask yourself the question, if I love myself, would I do this?
Smoke:If the answer is no, no, no, no on your routine, then you have to change your routine. And if
Kamal:you That's a change great routine. Yeah.
Smoke:Right? And then change it to where you could say yes, yes, yes, yes. Look. There's always gonna be yeah. Am I going to eat an ice cream once in a while because I love ice cream?
Smoke:Yeah, I am. If you
Kamal:love yourself, eat the ice cream. Right. That one time. Right?
Smoke:Do I love myself and eat the ice cream every night? No. You have to be nice to yours, to be kind in doing it, but having the discipline to change the routine and set yourself up for success, right? Like it's, you know, make it easy. It's like, you know, whether it's working out or, you know, whatever it is eating right.
Smoke:Do you have good food available in the house? Is your gym clothes like kind of ready and easy to grab? Do you have a gym inside or can you walk out like I can to my hill and do a hike? There's no excuse. I can do a hike every day almost no matter what, Right?
Smoke:And so making it removing barriers to answering yes to do if I love myself, I would do this is a nice way to kind of build it into your system. You're not just betting on, am I going to be disciplined at every moment in time? You're like, oh, I'm making it easy for myself to answer yes.
Kamal:Yeah, that's a great way to do it. Yeah, but we have to do this. Think it's just as important as a physical unit because the mental affects everything. It's the one we're taught to pay attention to or to work on. Yet it's the one that drives the entire show.
Kamal:Yeah. That's Your background. I'm gonna come visit you. Your background is
Smoke:just I can't hear I'm I'm sitting in your guest room, so you got a spot. Awesome. Whenever you want it, seriously. And all we do here is hike and, you know, meditate and, you know
Kamal:Sounds awful. Eat
Smoke:eat organic food and whatever.
Kamal:Oh my god. This is great.
Smoke:Yeah, I do do some work in between, but that's what I try to do most of the time.
Kamal:I mean, look, the goal is to get to a point in life when you work, you live where you want to live, you have beauty, and you work in the times you want to work and on things you want to work. That's what we should all start and strive for.
Smoke:Absolutely.
Kamal:And then the great thing is living in America, it is very possible. There are parts of the world where it's not. But you know, people talk about loss of opportunity. There's still so much opportunity in this country. I mean, I see these young kids.
Kamal:Young kids are dropping out of college and starting, because they're becoming a multibillion dollar company. So maybe it's my sample size, but I'm very biased because I'm so excited by the youth.
Smoke:I am too. No, I'm much more optimistic than not. I have four grown kids who are all now good humans living their lives, doing their own things. But you know, even just my sample of their friend group and all the things that those kids are doing is, like, it's inspiring. I I love it.
Smoke:I I I was back at for the entrepreneur at Cornell board meeting, not that long ago, and, know, you you get a room full of 300 young, you know, undergrads who are all like they're there to, like, figure something out. I like, what it is, they may not know yet, but they're there to do something. And I love that energy. It's awesome.
Kamal:Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's it's possible for any of us. Like, I came from nothing, right? Like, we are single mom.
Kamal:We're like, we get nothing. Like, poor.
Smoke:Yeah.
Kamal:Uh-huh. And I and I know that, you know, that American dream is still very available. You just have to go at it and go at it and go at it, and then one day, instant success. The whole instant success, the modern I'm not a fan of the whole modern day old rah rah, do this, grind, you got success, but that's not usually how it works.
Smoke:Well, look, I think I agree with you. And just like what goes into your mind is important and cleansing it, where you spend your time, who you spend your time with, what groups you end up with does infect you. And so if you want to be successful and you want to break out, I grew up in very similar circumstances and no resources whatsoever. And if I hung out with some of the kids that I was around back as a kid, I might be in jail right now or I might be in a very different world, but I broke away from a lot of those groups. And I did it in sports.
Smoke:I did it in different ways. I, you know, I was really active in the Boy Scouts for a while, and that was a great thing for me. It was a great influence. It got me away from a lot of kids that were doing not so great things. I worked.
Smoke:I worked a lot. Well, when you work, you don't have time to get in trouble. Right? So it was actually really helpful for me to grind it out and have to do construction and do the things I was doing because I didn't have any time. And at that time of my life, the friend group I had were getting into trouble.
Smoke:And so it was actually one of the ways I broke away from that energetic field. So I think, anyone can be successful anywhere in the world, in this country. And if you take the advice of your book and you love yourself starting as early as you can.
Kamal:Oh, God. Yeah. I wish I had known that. Yeah.
Smoke:It will it will manifest much faster, but also be conscious of where you allow your energy field to be, who you allow to be around. And if they're not loving themselves by the behaviors they're doing or the things that they're involved with, then remove yourself from group. Don't be attached to it.
Kamal:Yeah, something as you get older, you know, like I wish we'd learn this younger as well. Like, know, we've been very younger. We just wanna conform. I always felt like an outsider, right? And I think a lot of us, you know, Well,
Smoke:with a name like Kamal and a name like Smoke, you know,
Kamal:The funny thing is, as an adult, you're celebrated as an outsider. Growing up as a kid, you're trying your best not to be an outsider, right?
Smoke:But
Kamal:if you learn that you don't need anybody else's approval, especially your peer group, you don't need the approval because they will not matter in your life five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from they'll be irrelevant even sooner than that. And I use that word on purpose. They will be irrelevant. So focus on yourself, your growth. And if you you know, it's like, if you wanna be great like, if you wanna lose weight, don't hang out with people who are working to lose weight.
Kamal:Hang out with people who are athletes. Yeah. You know? Because what'll happen is we we're we're tribal, so we will step up or step down to whatever the tribe around us. So, like, go to the ones who already succeeded that at the moment.
Kamal:They're already living the good habits.
Smoke:Yes.
Kamal:And you will start doing it. That's that is the greatest hack I know to get good at anything. Yeah. Find people who are already living it, the results, and just hang out with them.
Smoke:Yeah. It's an energetic field. It's, people that are if you wanna be an entrepreneur, hang out with other successful entrepreneurs. I tell the kids that, like, I'm ready to go start this venture and leave school. I'm like, great.
Smoke:If you really have that potential billion dollar idea, great. Do it. Otherwise, go work for a really successful entrepreneur in a company that's scaling so you can learn about what they did right and then go do your thing. Right? Like, there's there's something too.
Smoke:Like, remind yourself by success. If any if you went up, like, in my old business, in the the alcohol business, everyone got their training at Gallo or at Seagram. And and why? Because those were really successful companies that knew how to sell product. And if you learn their system, you could be successful in anything.
Smoke:And I think it applies to, you know, tech or anything else. If you can get around people who are already having some success, what better way that to learn is to be around it and absorb it and be in that energy.
Kamal:That's a great idea. That's a fantastic idea. You don't have to go out and start your own company. Yeah. Yeah.
Smoke:But you can, but maybe maybe it's after three years at, you know, Facebook or three years
Kamal:at But don't some sales yeah. But don't feel that pressure. I think I meet a lot of your kids. Like, I gotta start my own company. I just wanna figure out what it is.
Kamal:Yeah. Like, you know, to to build something, you have to truly care about solving a problem. That keeps you up at night. You're gonna do for yourself, and then you're gonna do for the next 10 people, then a 100 people, then a thousand, then whatever. You do that, you're a great entrepreneur.
Kamal:But if you don't have that, if there's not something you deeply care about, that this is a problem I wanna go help someone else solve a problem that's or that needs to be solved and, like, who's who's also a great founder. You that was great advice you gave. Yeah. And then go off and do your thing, and you wanna make all the stupid mistakes.
Smoke:Yeah. Because there is something too. And we get into this mind in the entrepreneur, you know, especially younger entrepreneurs that, you know, I'm gonna do it my way. I'm gonna be be able my own thing. That's yeah.
Smoke:That's great. But, you know, there have been problems that have been solved. There's other things like how do you run payroll? How do
Kamal:you Yeah.
Smoke:Yeah. Yeah. You know,
Kamal:how do you do this? How do
Smoke:you do that? Like, there's, like, learning that can happen at if go work at a Walmart. You know, go run a restaurant. If you ran a California Pizza Kitchen, you're running a business with more employees, more moving parts, more complications than most startups will get to for the first year or two. So like you learn a lot.
Smoke:Now, I'm not saying do that your whole life if you don't want to do that, but like there's a lot of learning in lots of established businesses that can be applied to your venture if you end up going there.
Kamal:Yeah, if you're a self starter and you have gumption, like the future is your oyster, especially AI is making everything so easy to build. It's really you just have to be a self starter and have gumption. Yeah, it's a great time to want to build things.
Smoke:I agree. It's awesome. And it's never a bad time to love yourself.
Kamal:Never a bad time. It never sucks to love yourself.
Smoke:Well, Kamal, thank you so much for taking some time. Really do believe in what you have put out, and I think everyone would benefit from reading this even wherever you are. If you're in a great place, you'll benefit. If you're in a not so great place, you'll benefit. Either way, if you can adopt what you have put out, you will be in a better place than you are today.
Smoke:That's a great thing.
Kamal:Thank you, man. I feel the same way and I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing my work with the audience and that view. Thank you.
Smoke:Absolutely. Well, I look forward to seeing you here.