How I Built A $400 Million Company With Joe Rogan! (Incredible Story) Aubrey Marcus
Guests: Aubrey Marcus
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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With Joe Rogan as my partner, we sold out in 12 hours. Zero to 60 million. Step one: it was wild. Aubrey Marcus, the man who built and sold Onnit with Joe Rogan. One of the fastest-growing human performance companies in America. My mother was a professional tennis player, my father was a pioneer. And that was the driving desire. It’s like, my parents were big, I know I can be big. And I was frustrated because nothing was happening.
There were so many failures and I really thought like I’m just never going to succeed. But I think the key moment for me was when Joe Rogan said, “I can meet you 30 minutes for coffee.” I was starting a supplement company and I went to Joe. What supplement would you like the most? I'm going to make the best one that's ever been made. That was the pivotal moment that changed everything.
Alpha Brain. I really felt like I didn't want to do anything without it. We sold out of that product in 12 hours. We could barely keep it in stock. From zero to 60 million. We were an Inc. 500 fastest-growing company over the next four years. I mean, I couldn't have designed a fantasy better. But it comes with a cost, right? In that moment, I realized like I’m not going to fly into a fit of rage and hurt somebody. You can see how much it still affects me. What happened?
Aubrey, when I read through your story and a lot of people's stories, what I tend to see is a series of almost dominoes that have fallen to make the person who they are today that’s sat in front of me. Can you take me to the first domino that you think was significant in your life that fell to make the man that I see sitting in front of me today, that I've spent the last couple of days learning and researching about?
I mean, the first domino is my mother giving birth to me, of course, right? Like it starts from the drop. It starts and we can't ignore all of the things that happen at birth that have nothing to do with us. And I was super blessed. My mother was a professional tennis player, went to the semi-finals of Wimbledon, lost to Billie Jean King. Like, legit professional tennis player.
My father was a commodities trader and he was a pioneer in his field. So he was actually kind of stretching what the market and what the world understood about futures trading. He's written up in a book called *Market Wizards*. They split up really early and so I got two more parents. My stepmother was a naturopathic doctor who worked with a lot of the NBA basketball teams, the Lakers in the '80s, the Knicks in the '90s, the Heat in the 2000s, but from the naturopathic side, not within the team aspect of it.
And then my stepfather was a SWAT team squad officer. Just big, badass, burly man. And from all of those sources, I got models of greatness. I got models of really testing yourself to see what you're capable of. And I think that's like the foundation of what I was. And then there's my grandmother who inspired this like craving desire for knowledge, just to learn about the world.
And I think the key moment for me with all of that framework with my parents, that craving for knowledge instilled by my grandmother—my grandmother's tattooed on my arm actually—and then I go and do my first psychedelic medicine journey after high school when I’m 18 years old. And I really feel like I want to find knowledge and then be able to distribute that to the world in an interesting way.
I wanted to build my own legacy, so to speak. And in that first psychedelic medicine ceremony, I felt my body disappear and I felt what I could only call consciousness or maybe even use the word soul even though I wasn't religious at all. So I didn't believe in souls, but I felt something come online.
And that was kind of the genesis of me being where I am now, even though that doesn't have a lot to do with all my business accomplishments and anything else. It's this desire to be great because it was modeled for me in the parents that I had. This thirst and quest for knowledge, that quest for knowledge turned inward with the psychedelic medicine journey. So I was looking inside, that’s the field of psychonautics, which is really the field I’m the most passionate about. Psychonautics: the exploration of the inner aspects, the inner cosmos of who we are.
And then offering what I learn out to the world. And sometimes that comes out in the form of products and practices and workout equipment and supplements like with the company Onnit that I started. Sometimes it's with a podcast or a poem or a story. And yeah, that's probably one way to look at who is Aubrey Marcus.
If you were to draw a circle around all of those products, the content, the podcast, Onnit, and your current mission today through all of the work you're doing, what is the mission there? If I had asked you right now, what is your mission in life, what would it be?
If you were to ask me, I don't know, 15 years ago, it would have been just to make a big impact. I just want to be big. I want to be big. My parents were big, I know I can be big. I feel it in me, I feel like there's something big that's supposed to emerge, right? And I was frustrated because nothing was happening.
And so I found my company and I created Onnit and then things started to get big. I started my podcast, things started to get big. I wrote my book, things started to get bigger. And that was the driving desire, right? It was actually, and yes, I wanted it to be for the good of all. I've always felt very connected to everybody else and recognized that you, sitting across from me right here, you're just me living a different life, right? Like we're all part of the same source of life itself.
So I did always have this belief like I want to contribute to the greater good of all. As one of my teachers Don Howard said, *para el bien de todos*, for the good of all. So that was always there, but it was a lot more about me. It was a lot more about me being big, if I’m being honest. And now right now, some of that's removed. It's like I've accomplished that thing where it's like Aubrey has made his mark, but that doesn't even matter anymore.
Now I look out at the whole world and I say, "Alright world, what do you need? And what do you need from Aubrey? Like what can Aubrey do to help you the most? Like I hear you, like I know that you're hurting and I know that you're beautiful. You're beautiful in every way. And what can I do to actually serve the world in the best way possible?" And that's the mission, man.
Do you have an answer to that?
I do, to the best of my knowledge now. It's a working plan, a working hypothesis. And obviously one, it starts with the self. You know, you have to start with yourself. So we need to recognize how unbelievably powerful we are, how our thoughts can actually impact our reality.
Now we know this with thousands of placebo studies showing that the mind can influence what happens in the body depending on what it thinks, but we kind of discard that. But like what Joe Dispenza's talking about, like why not use that? Why not actually understand that our beliefs can create our reality? Why not take the position of sovereignty and use some of the Stoic philosophy and say, well, I don't know if everything happens for a reason, but I’m going to make sure it happened for a reason because I’m going to learn from anything that happened.
Any challenge, any trial, anything, any way in which I may have been a victim, I’m going to use that as something to bring out something even greater within myself, right? No matter which way I've acted out, you know, maybe there's things that you need to apologize for, maybe there's things you regret, that's fine. But that doesn't mean that you aren't worthy of love. And your love shouldn't be conditional on how successful you are, how beautiful you are, any of that.
So when you bring in that self-love, you understand the power of belief and you really start to—and then you shift the mindset out of victim consciousness into "I’m a sovereign being and yes, there's some gnarly shit that happens, but I’m going to use that gnarly shit as the diamond grindstone for the sword of my soul and it's going to make me stronger and it's going to make me sharper." So step one starts with the self.
And step two?
Let's go. Step two: Community. I think that we all, you know, have a deep invitation to reimagine what community looks like. Everybody right now is living individual lives, getting individual amounts of resources and then holding onto those tight. And everything gets really awkward when you loan a friend some money or you loan this and then they have to go out and do their own job and make their own little bit of money.
But we've lost this sense that we used to have of tribe, where the whole tribe, you know, which was typically somewhere under 150 people according to Dunbar's number, and I think that's kind of accurate. You have your people, your tribe, your community that you're really working together with. And I think one of the things that really needs to happen for both our mental health and also for the organization is we gotta get back in touch with community and make it more of a "we" thing.
So if I happen to be quite good at making money and my sister over here is really good at singing medicine songs inside the deep, hot, black of a sweat lodge, well, she could charge a bunch of money for that, but that's not right. You want everybody to be able to get the medicine of an *Inipi* or a *Temazcal*.
So instead of her having to go out and then get another job doing some other gig and then make her own money, what if I just shared my money with my sister and understood that she was offering medicine to the tribe in a different way? I was offering the medicine of money in a different way. And so we get this more holistic group kind of consciousness where not only—and this is just talking about resources. Resources is only one level. So resources start to be shared, mission starts to be shared. We start to understand what we're doing, healing together in a group, mirroring things for each other.
So this feeling that we're all in this together, I think that's the second step out of—and there's four. There's four steps.
What’s step three?
Well, step three moves from worrying about just your tribe to worrying about all mankind. Like the—it opens the field up a lot bigger. And when you talk about that, you have to start talking about how can we actually use our voices, use our influence, use our ideas, use our stories. Stories are really powerful to actually reshape the narrative of what culture is right now and tell a different story.
Tell a story that isn't "me versus you," it's "me and me" and what are we actually trying to do? You know, like there's a whole different type of story that can be told. And it's not what the media—it's not the story the media likes because of course when you're afraid and when you're in this agitated state, you're going to get glued to the news.
And I think people need to understand that there's a lot of money driving a lot of decisions that are very manipulative to try and keep you in a place where you're disconnected, disempowered, divided. And so there needs to be another story that gets us connected, together, unafraid. We gotta really deal with this collective fear, this fear that's just whipped around the world and deal with this collective fear and then say, "Alright, we are one people, we are one people and these one people need to come together for the future of our planet."
Like we have to. And I think there's a lot of fear about the top-down dystopian control version of that, where it's like some banker or some elite, you know, group of people somewhere saying "I know what's best for everybody and I’ll just lie to everyone and I’ll control them all and we'll figure it out." That's not the way.
Everybody—it has to come from the ground up where people are really communicating with each other, people are really understanding what's going on on a larger scale and what are the things that you can do to really make a difference. And to me, I mean, one of those things is just live a new story. So start living the new story of the self, live the new story of the community, and live a new story of your relationship to all humankind.
And by living that new story, that story becomes more real and it becomes attractive to people not living that story. So instead of trying to attack people from the other paradigm, just make your story so vibrant, so full of love, so full of laughter, so full of erotic charge that everybody is like, "I want to be in that story, like write me into that—write me into that movie. That movie looks great. Like, I’m done with this shit." And and to do that together, I think is the next like kind of most important mission.
And step four?
Step four goes all the way to your relationship to God and the cosmos. Now, God is a difficult word because there's a lot of different ways that people have used God and oftentimes violent ways. But that's not the God I’m talking about. I’m talking about the "all that is," the source, the infinity of intimacy and love as one of my teachers Rabbi Marc Gafni would say, like the infinity of intimacy, love, eros, life, capital L, life itself.
Right? So getting that relationship with that and understanding that it matters. It matters for the trajectory of our own soul's existence from this life to every other life. I think one important thing to think about is that our lives must include our death in our life story because our life story is just one part of a larger cosmic story.
And so it's seeing it from this real cosmic perspective, like what is possible that the earth can contribute to the understanding of "all that is"? What is possible that that we can create that uniquely as an individual and as a tribe and as a people and as a planet, what's the unique gifts that we can offer the cosmos?
So it's just realigning that relationship, what you might call the superstructure, which is the ideas, the religions, the articles of faith that people have and really kind of clarifying those so that people can feel the truth of them. It's not "believe this because I said so and you're wrong," it's like "feel this energy, you may call it this name, I may call it this name, but let's see if we can feel the same thing together." And know that it's true and then actually abide in kind of a cosmic understanding.
You've been on an incredible journey to get to these sort of four core tenets of your mission today. I want to jump back into that story because I think it's, you know, as we—as I said at the start, this a series of dominoes that have had to fall for you to get to this perspective today. And going right back to something you said earlier: your parents breaking up at two years old. Was that significant for you in hindsight as you look back as an adult? Is that a significant moment?
The ramifications of that were incredibly significant because it brought in my stepmother and my stepfather into the constellation of my family. So there could be very few things that were more significant than that. As I had four models of parent rather than two. And with four, I was able to get a much more well-rounded approach. Like the difference between my father and my stepfather were immense.
What were those differences?
Well, my father was an incredibly acute and attuned intellectual. A philosopher, a thinker, you know, he was able to actually analyze—a logician. He was able to analyze the world in this very kind of philosophical way and it helped shape my mind in that way.
My stepfather brought that "bear energy" of what it is to be a man. The physicality. He was always the best to play with as a kid too because, of course, you want to play with the bear. They know how to roll around and laugh and tell stories and you sit on their shoulders and you go climbing around and it's not that either both parent didn't have a little bit of that, but they were very different archetypes.
And so my understanding about what it means to be a man included so many different things. It included the eloquence of being able to write poetry and solve problems and play Scrabble and play chess. And it involved also brute force wrestling and playing and telling stories and standing, you know, standing as a hero against that which didn't serve, you know. And so with two models of father, I got to actually have a much more well-rounded kind of idea of what it meant to be a man.
Was there lessons that you had to unlearn from that?
Of course. Yeah. I mean, you don't learn just the positive aspects of your parents, you learn the negative aspects of your parents too. Those are learned in in ways that your mind can't even comprehend. So things that my dad was stressed about, I find myself being stressed about because I transmitted this kind of general sense of worry about things.
So I've had to unlearn those aspects of worry. My father also, you know, was want to fly into fits of rage at a certain point. I remember one time, this is a very like very important story in my own trajectory, cause my father when he would get angry he would start—he would just yell, you know, just like he would erupt.
And it was early in—early after I started Onnit. It was probably 2013, 2014 and we had a smaller office then, not the smallest office, it was the second biggest office that we had. And I had my own office and I was in there and I was filming a video and it was an important video for me to film. And we had a kind of front desk customer service person also in the office who was handling emails, customer service things, and also handling anybody coming in the door.
Something came up where she started knocking on the door. Well, I didn't know it was her that was knocking on the door. I didn't really know who was knocking on the door. I was just trying to film a video. And back then we didn't have a bunch of video editors so it wasn't like we weren't able to just stop. I had to kind of hit it in one take, you know, we didn't have the tech resources then. So I’m like five minutes into this take, I’m killing it and the knock comes. And then a second knock and then a third knock.
And finally by the third knock, I couldn't ignore it anymore, it was throwing me off my mental track and I just started yelling like, "What? What is it you want? What the fuck do you want?" You know, like one of those moments where I just got really angry. And then I hear like "I’m sorry." And I was like, oh man, that was our front desk girl. She was just a sweetheart. Like absolute sweetheart. Like the sweetest. And and I like take a deep breath and I like open the door and I walk out there and she's crying at her desk.
In that moment, I realized like I’m not going to do that ever again. Like I’m not going to do that shit. I’m not going to fly into a fit of rage and hurt somebody. You know, I won't. And you can see how much it still affects me, you know, because that was the point that that pattern broke for me.
And it's not that—it's not that I haven't gotten mad since then or whatever, but never like that, you know? And there's something else in me. It's like no, never again because I saw her and I saw what I did and of course I apologized and—but that's where I stopped that lineage transmission and said it stops with me.
Where did that lineal transmission start in your father? Did you ever figure that out?
Yeah, with his—with his father. You know, I mean, I don't know how far it went back. I mean, I don't have a strong genealogical tree. I didn't even get to meet either of my grandfathers actually. But I’ve heard the stories, you know, I heard the stories of that and my dad did the best to kind of shed as much of the trauma that he could shed so he would pass on as little as possible to me. And he did his best.
And and he was actually the one that encouraged me to go on my own psychedelic medicine journey because that was one of the tools that he used to try and actually change who he is so that he could be better for me and be better for the world. And he did—he did a great job. You know, compared to the stories of my grandfather to him, he did a amazing job and it was my job to clean up the rest. And that's what I’m in the process of doing: is cleaning up the rest so that when I have my son, Huxley is going to be his name, you know, of course, source willing that that we have a—we have a child.
I don't want to pass any of that on. I just want to pass the legacy, a new fresh, fresh legacy like fresh powder on a—on a mountain, you know, like fresh tracks. A legacy of love, a legacy of support, a legacy of like "I’m here, son." And also you're so much more powerful than you think you are and let me show you. And bring him through all of the initiations—the sweat lodges, the cold mountains like I've climbed with Wim Hof, the—when he's old enough—the medicine journeys. Bring him through this path of initiation, but the whole way, just love, love, love the whole way where that never wavers. So he's not trying to prove something to me so that he can get me to love him. He knows that I love him.
Are you speaking about a younger version of yourself and your father when you say that about that proof, that approval?
Of course. Of course.
Have you got an example of when you realized that you were—you were following that pattern?
I mean, the example is most of my whole life, right? Like "Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right, Dad? You know, am I doing it good enough, Dad?" was the subconscious dialogue that I've been in for a long time. Now it's—it was my father first, you know, so that my father was Dad, so my Michael Marcus represented that image of Dad. But it would transfer to other people. It could transfer to a mentor, it could transfer to a partner, it could transfer to a boss. And I would put this kind of approval-seeking desire on them.
They would be the surrogate father and I would be trying to show them how good I am and and then then they would love me. Just like when I scored 25 points in a basketball game, my dad was all fucking love and happy. And when I scored, you know, seven points and had a bad shooting night, it's not that he didn't love me, but it felt like he didn't love me because he was just quiet and sullen. And I was quiet and sullen and all of the—all of the love felt like it had been sucked out of the room like a vacuum, right? So I learned—and that's just one example of many different ways that I learned—that if you perform well, you're loved, and if you don't, you're not loved.
What’s this ping pong story?
Well, that was—that was just one of the moments that my father just flew into rage, you know. So I was four years old and my father was playing ping pong and he hit—mishit a ball, it hit off the corner of the paddle, flew up into—into the stratosphere basically, because he was trying to hit a smash. And I go "Home run!"
I’m just a kid, I was like—I thought that was a funny thing to say. But for my father, you were so locked in this intense competition, which of course didn't matter—he's not like in the ping pong world championships, it was in his house—and later he started yelling at me from like—for saying that during his ping pong match because it threw him off his game or whatever, whatever it was.
So moments like that really made me kind of aware to the point of being scared about what I was saying. And so it gave me—and as I said before, like one of the Stoic mindsets is everything that happens to you happens for you. Why did it happen for you? I look at that story now and say okay, at that moment I realized that I have to be very mindful of everything I say when I say it because there's drastic consequences if I don't.
What does that make me do? It makes me a very good listener, it makes me a very good communicator, it allows me to understand how my words could be perceived. What a—what a gift. That's my superpower. Thanks, Dad!
But it comes with a cost. All superpowers, right?
Of course. And the cost was, and sometimes still is—less now, I have to be—have to be honest and not claim a false humility, but sometimes still is—but the cost is like you're not present. You're not really present if you're thinking all the time about every different way that what you say could be perceived by somebody else.
And you're going through these hypothetical scenarios in your brain about the hypothetical conversations about if they took that the wrong way, how you would respond and what you'd explain. It's mentally exhausting and anxious, you know. And and it—I lived so much of my life playing out a million different scenarios about every single thing that I said and how that could be interpreted.
And as I said, like I’m mostly free of that, but every once in a while for a text that matters, I’ll look at it and I’ll see like—boom—like nine different ways that that thing could be interpreted the wrong way and then I have to manual—like with manual override of my own consciousness—be like: "It's all good, they know you, they love you, they're not going to take any of these different interpretations and then abandon you or get mad." ---
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This process you describe starts—according to all of the therapists and child trauma experts I've spoken to—with something called awareness. And that kind of allows you to take on the challenge, but there's a lot of people that are living unaware of the puppet master in the back room that's pulling the strings. What has made you aware?
I mean, everybody has their own path. And so I don't want to sound like my path is my recommendation, my prescription for everybody, but for me, it's been the psychedelic medicine path. And psychedelic medicine doesn't have to involve taking anything. I think you mentioned that your partner is a breathwork practitioner. Breathwork at the highest level is as psychedelic as anything. It's incredibly cathartic and magical and visionary even.
I mean, you're actually—there's been some studies showing that actually in that deep breathing process you're producing endogenous levels of DMT. DMT, which is called the "spirit molecule," which is also the active psychedelic compound in ayahuasca. It's happening when you breathe. So there's a lot of different psycho—like psychonautic technologies that can get you there. From sensory deprivation tanks to sweat lodges to lots of things.
But I have done many if not most of the plant medicines of the world—most—and really experienced a lot of the great lineages that have had that wisdom. And then also started to look to see how those lineages can evolve. How we can use this unique time where we have access to many different medicines and access to many different ways of thinking and psychological technologies like Internal Family Systems, for example, which has been paired with psychedelic medicine therapy.
So using all of this and create a new emergent lineage about how to hold these medicines in a way that is accretive and actually supportive to our life. Because for me, that's been the process. Again, psychonautics: the ability to look inside and see everything. As Rumi said, you know, "We're not a drop in the ocean, we're the ocean in a drop." So if you want to understand anything about the cosmos, you can look out at the cosmos or you can look inside into your inner cosmos with a K—and that's the way the Greeks spelled it—and say like "Okay, what's really on the inside? What's really on the inside?" And the medicines have helped me do that.
Your first experience with plant medicines was when you were 18 years old, is that correct?
That's right.
You went on a—you call it like a vision—I can't remember the word you used—after high school.
Yeah, that was it. A vision quest. I mean, there's a—it's a vision quest, but there's definitely many traditional ways to do a vision quest which involve fasting for four days with no food, no water, and that's more of the Lakota style of a vision quest or the North American First Nation kind of style. Um, this was more of a medicine vision quest, which is a little bit different in that I’m still going on a journey for a vision and going to a place, but the medicine was actually there instead of the fasting and the stillness and the silence. And it's not to say that the medicine is better or worse, it certainly worked out really well for me.
But that was the pivotal moment that changed everything. I actually had a vision of who I actually was. So that first step of four in my mission was illuminated where I started to understand the kind of limitlessness and the undying source of who I actually really am.
I read that in your story, but then the next sort of 10 years of your life didn't seem to manifest what I would have assumed a plant medicine journey would have manifested in the sense that you describe that from 20 onwards you were still relatively sort of lost and seeking approval and partying a lot and drinking a lot.
Yeah. So there's a—it was interesting because I had connected to my soul that was "all that is," but myself—the Aubrey—still wanted approval, still wanted to be loved, still wanted to make his mark, still wanted to be big. You know? So I was advancing rapidly in the internal kind of dynamics of understanding who I was, but externally I was not meeting that criteria and I couldn't see beyond a reason—you know, there was not a point where I thought, "Well, maybe I don't need this actually."
And actually even now, even after all this work, it's like I appreciate that I wanted to really go for it. I was audacious and I wanted to have a big company and I wanted to make a big mark. I wanted to have resources because resources are now opening up the possibility for me to really tell different stories, bring communities together, do the things that I really want to do. So I wouldn't have changed it.
But there was a focus on me from an kind of egoic identity construct perspective being successful. And that was like the guiding—that was like the guiding principle. And I was failing at it, really. Like I was failing at it. I had a marketing company and I kept getting fired by my different clients, even if I did a good job and I would start—I would start things.
Ha, it's funny actually, I smashed my—for those looking—I smashed my finger and it was all purple, so I painted it with my wife's nail polish which is gray. So I have one painted nail, but it's a funny example because that was one of my failed businesses: I was going to start a men's nail polish line because I saw like Chuck Liddell and my friend Roger Huerta, they were painting their nails. I was like, "Yeah, men can paint their nails!" and I started that, it bombed. There were so many failures and I really thought like I’m just never going to succeed. I mean, I made a—I made a decent living, you know, I always found a client or always found somebody that I could get a paycheck from. But it wasn't happening until it did.
Until it did.
Until it did.
When you think about that moment and the factors that aligned to make it happen until it did, what were those factors that aligned? Was it fate? Was it luck? Was it something that changed within you? Was it being more aligned with your own sort of authentic self?
All of the above. Looking back, I wasn't ready to hold the bigness yet. I had to—I had to—you know, kind of like sometimes if you have a young stallion and they're bucking around and they're—you gotta run them a little bit. You gotta run the stallion. I had to—I had to run a little bit.
And my partner at the time, Caitlin, we were running, you know, we were partying a lot, we were out—I was standing on the speakers and growling, I was training MMA with the homies, I was running, you know, I was running. And I think I needed to do that and at the same time I was also exploring, exploring in that path of psychonautics, building experience.
And I had this feeling, I just had this feeling when I watched Joe Rogan do comedy—and we're talking 2008, you know, this is not the Joe Rogan of now, right? Way different thing. He was the *Fear Factor* guy, the UFC commentator—but the UFC wasn't what it is now, not even close. But I saw him and I was like: "I’m that guy's friend. I know it. Like I know we're friends."
And I would come and I would meet him after a show or I’d run into him at a club and I’d be like: "Hey man, da-da-da," but nothing would ever stick, of course, because I was a fan and he was the guy and like that's very difficult to bridge that gap in that kind of social construct. So he started a podcast. And and I was following it and I was like "Oh wow," and that was old Joe Rogan days back with Brian Redban.
And there was no podcast advertising then. Again, podcasting was in its infancy. He had no podcast advertisers. So I had one of my clients and I was like: "Look, we should advertise on Joe Rogan's podcast. We gotta do this." And for those of you who know, it was—the client was Fleshlight, which is a whole other story. But I was like: "Joe, we want to advertise on your podcast."
And he's like, "Okay, cool." And it's like "It's Fleshlight." And then his management team was like "What the fuck are you doing, Joe? You can't—you can't advertise Fleshlight." He's like: "Damn right I can, I don't want anybody to take me so seriously that I can't, you know, advertise for this thing."
Which is a sex toy for anybody that doesn't know.
Yeah, it's a sex toy for men. But what I stipulated in that was like: "Alright, yeah, we're totally down, we'll be your podcast sponsor. I just want to meet you for 30 minutes for coffee and then we'll close the deal." And that was really honestly the play. It was a—it was a strategy.
Now I was tested, I was tested in that moment because at that point I was friends with Bode Miller, who is the best skier in the world arguably. At that point he'd won multiple world championships, he hadn't won the gold medal yet, which he eventually won in Vancouver, but he was the best skier in the world and he was going to the Kentucky Derby.
And Bode going to the Kentucky Derby is a big deal. He gets to go with all of the, you know, the big dogs and it's a huge party. And Bode was at that point my best friend. And the Kentucky Derby happened to be exactly at the time where Joe Rogan said: "I can meet you 30 minutes for coffee."
So I had a choice. I could either say, "Ah, fuck the coffee, we'll just advertise," and I’ll go to the Derby, which old me would have been like "Derby, Derby, let's go! Let's party!" you know, the stallion that wanted to run. But there was some knowledge inside me that "No, this coffee with Joe Rogan is important." And I’m going to skip the whole Derby party and I’m going to just meet this man for coffee.
And I met him for coffee, and the coffee turned into dinner, and then that dinner turned into a friendship, and that turned into him having me on his podcast, and then a friendship developed. And out of that friendship developed really—I was starting a supplement company—developed Onnit as we know it now, Joe Rogan as my partner.
And then the combination of—again, going back to my parents—my stepmother had a deep knowledge of nutraceuticals that actually could functionally impact performance. She worked with basketball teams. So she had athletic performance supplements, cognitive performance supplements, and I was used to that concept.
So with her help and with the—all of the scientific research—I could put together a formula. I knew how to market because I’d marketed things. And then Joe Rogan was my partner. And so we had a way to get that out. We had a way to let people know. So I raised $110,000. I got $50,000 from a kind of family friend that I’d worked with and with different clients and done some public relations work with. And I had Bode, my friend, who—so one gave $50,000, the other gave $60,000. And that was the start of Onnit, is that money right there.
And I basically blew through and wasted all of that. And then I went to Joe and I said: "Hey man, like what supplement would you like the most?" He's like: "Ah man, I’d like a all-natural nootropic that really worked." A nootropic being a cognitive enhancer. And I was like: "You know what, Joe? I’m going to make the best one that's ever been made." He's like: "Alright, man."
And I went to work and I did it. And I formulated with all of that help the supplement that was Alpha Brain. And with Alpha Brain, I sent it to Joe and Joe was like: "Man, this is amazing!" It was actually way too strong at that point. It was like—it was like—it was gnarly. But Joe's a beast, you know, he's like—he's a savage. So at that moment, then we kind of knew we had something. So I dialed down the formula, got it right.
And when all of that came together and we launched Alpha Brain, it just clicked. We sold out of that product in 12 hours. We had the next batch going. And the only reason I had the money to even buy the first batch was because there was Net 30 credit terms on my purchase order.
So actually we could receive the product and not have to pay for 30 days. So I didn't even have the money to pay in 30 days unless I sold it, right? But we sold it in 12 hours and then there was another order on the back of that. So I was actually sold through two orders before I even had to pay the first purchase order. So we grew Onnit from literally nothing at that point other than the resources that we'd, you know, applied to having a website and having a shopping cart, etc.
And that was it. It was a rocket ship from there. And also, you know, being on Joe Rogan's podcast, people started to be aware of my ideas and my philosophies and these other things that I’d been developing over all of these years in between all of the partying that I was doing and all of the other stuff. And at that moment, I started to have a stage and a platform and started to build a kingdom.
When you say it grew like a rocket ship, to close off that story, can you quantify that in some way for people that are listening from that first launch moment to where it ended up getting acquired by Unilever, I believe? When you say rocket ship, what do you mean?
So 2010, Onnit was founded by me and with the investment from those two individuals that I mentioned, Bode and Howard. And we sold a little bit, but we had a lot of inventory we couldn't sell and we were failing. It was another failed business, just like my men's nail polish company, it was going down into the dirt.
And then at that moment with the Alpha Brain product, we put that on sale and then from there we could barely keep it in stock. We were just selling through as much as we could have and then we developed other supplements that went. And we went from—I mean, we were an Inc. 500 fastest-growing company over the next, you know, four years because we actually went from, you know, zero to—I don't know what the first year was, I don't have all the numbers—but imagine like 12 million, 24 million, 34 million, you know, 35 million, 45 million.
And then we kind of leveled out around 60 million in annual revenue for a while and then we had some real trials and tribulations and a lot of deep tests at that point to get us to the level where eventually in 2021 we were able to sell the company to Unilever and have a huge exit, which has now given me, you know, an amazing blessing of abundance of resources.
And one of the coolest parts about that is so many people in my life, you know, talking about community again, so many people in my life got little pieces of the company, you know? Like my friend Mecad, Mecad Brooks, who's now an actor on *Law & Order*, he was an actor in *True Blood* back then. I was like: "Yeah, man, you can have 10,000 shares! Come on, just talk about this!" I was giving out equity like candy. I was like: "I love you, man! Here's some shares!"
And then all of a sudden all of those shares turned into huge amounts of wealth, you know, for so many people. And and that was such a beautiful thing not only for me, not only for Joe, but for everybody that was everybody that was around me that I was giving a little piece of this equity to for Onnit to build that energy. Everybody, everybody won.
It was like being on this gigantic 100-person craps table of everybody you love and everybody wins and the casino just empties out the bank and we all go home and we're like: "Wow, we did it!" And in the meantime, we made great products, we inspired people, we got people to, you know—our concept was Total Human Optimization—we got people to actually get back in touch with this idea that you can be a little bit better tomorrow than you are today.
And so every step of the way it was something beautiful. And then the payoff was beautiful. It was—it's just an absolute dream, man. And doesn't mean that I didn't live my own little nightmares of fear and anxiety and worry and stress and mistakes all through the process. But looking back now, holy shit, what an unbelievable—I mean, I couldn't have designed a fantasy better.
There’s going to be people listening to this who are the version of you at the start of that rollercoaster. What would you say to those people? Cause, I mean, a lot of our listenership are exactly that person: they have an idea, they're pursuing a dream, they maybe for the wrong or the right reasons—I mean, who am I to say how to define what either of those are—but what would you say to them in order to prepare them for that rollercoaster?
You have to see it. You have to see it, really see it. Like see it with clear eyes, not with the deluded eyes of hope and not with the shrouded eyes of fear, but really see what's possible. I think people always ask me the question like: "Can you believe what happened with Onnit?" and I was like: "Of course I can believe what happened with Onnit. If I didn't believe that it could have happened, it wouldn't have happened."
You know, it's the funniest thing. "Can you believe it?" I was like: "Yeah, I can believe it! Of course I can believe it. If I didn't believe it, it wouldn't have happened." So the first most important step is you really have to see it and you have to see it realistically. And to see it realistically, you have to look at how difficult it is out there.
You know, I mean, I meet so many people are like: "Yeah, I’m going to start this clothing brand." I’m like, and I’ve been, you know, done a few things with different clothes and that's a hard business. That's a hard—it's a grind. That's difficult. But you can do it. But you have to see it and you have to see the field correctly. You have to see the competition. You have to see how challenging the market is and actually see how you're going to elevate above that.
And when you can really see it, then you can make it happen. But it depends on how accurate your sight is. So you have to see accurately, have the discretion, and then once that's there, you have to go all in. Like push all your chips in. When you see it, push all your chips in, focus and turn all of that energy into a single point and push forward with everything you got.
"Okay, so see it." A few thoughts sprang to mind when you said that, talked about seeing it. So the first one is: what role does seeing it play—cause you talked about the adversity, you kind of glossed over the adversity of that journey. And I think part of the reason I start this podcast in the first place was because I think the adversity matters just as much as the eventual achievement. And obviously because of the way that the media works and the way we tell our stories, we focus a bit more on the achievement. But what role does seeing it play in being able to grace those hurdles as and when they inevitably come?
Well, the first one is to see it actually being successful, right? And I saw—I could see that vision and even even as it was happening, it was still—you know, there was still some part of me that was like: "Wow, it's really actually coming true." Cause I’d seen it before. I saw the nail polish company successful too, I just didn't see it accurately. I didn't see the market. I didn't see the idea that this was going to be a very difficult thing to actually convince people was cool and that people would be like "Why buy your nail polish when I can just get any nail polish?" I didn't really see it right.
And with Onnit I saw it right, you know, and I had the right people and with the right team. So—so seeing it into success is important. And then what you're going to encounter is a lot of things that you didn't see. And that's where the adversity comes. I didn't see that coming. I didn't see that coming.
We had a security breach at Onnit, you know, was one of the early days, 2013, 2014 when that was happening to a lot of different companies. I think I remember Target had a big one and it was found out and then Target was like: "Oh yeah, yeah, this happened and you know, sorry about that." You know, people got access to credit cards.
That happened to us. And there was a choice point. And it felt like everything was going to be ruined because we got hacked, somebody got access to our customer data. We didn't have the right firewalls and all the right cybersecurity. I mean, I thought we did, but we didn't obviously.
And there was a choice point. You know, nobody—nobody else externally discovered it, we discovered it internally. We fixed it. And we could have just kind of crossed our fingers and hoped that nothing happened. But I made a different choice. And in that choice, I just said I gotta tell everybody. So I just sent out an email. I was like: "Look, y’all, I’m so sorry. Like this is on us. We didn't have the right security. We got hacked and your information was compromised. And we're so sorry and here's, you know, a discount code for any Onnit product that you want and like our deepest apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused if you have to cancel your card or whatever I understand."
And I just came out really authentically and honestly and that ended up being one of like these powerful moments where instead of the whole customer base turning against our company—being like: "These losers can't even secure our credit cards" or whatever—they actually trusted—trusted our company and trusted me more because of just how authentically I shared about that story.
So that's one version of an of adversity that comes from those things that those monsters that come from the grass that were slithering around or hiding in the in the tall grass that you don't see and then all of a sudden you have to confront them and it's going to be about how you deal with those things that you didn't see. And are you guided by that, again, that superstructure I talked about, those principles of "If you were me living a different life, what would I want me to receive?" I would want honesty. Just somebody to be honest and be like: "Yeah, we fucked up and we're sorry and and this is the best we can do."
You know, and that was—that was kind of the guiding principle as I was bound by this value structure. And the value structure was the kind of the guiding light through all of it and it—it worked.
When you said about about seeing it, one of the things that came to mind as well is when you can see the competitive landscape, often that's incredibly intimidating. There's—you know, entrepreneurs often talk about how being a little bit delusional and naive is actually a driving force and were they to know how difficult it actually was—like were entrepreneurs to—to have seen your hardest, darkest days, they might not have bothered.
So my my second question here is about seeing it is: what would you say to an entrepreneur that's starting a business—maybe in the same, you know, in the same field as Onnit was—that's looking out and thinking: "Oh my God, but there's already loads of competitors and Aubrey did this and Joe did that, like I've got this idea but there's so many competitors, I just won't bother." Cause I’m sure when you started there was a big competitive landscape.
Sure. It gets more and more difficult, you know, all the time. And it's about: can you get the right pieces of the puzzle together? The right product, the right energy behind it, the right ethos, the right experience? Something that's actually better than the field. I mean, when you're talking about this landscape, you're talking about one of the beauties of this capitalist model is you're open to radical competition and that's what drives the evolution.
So you have to know that you're a little bit better. You're a little bit better than everybody else. And if you're able to show that in all of the ways that you're a little bit better, you'll be able to make it through. And yes, you're still going to receive immense challenges. You know, there's going to be times—that security breach was just one of many.
We had another moment where we made a huge mistake: we thought we were getting an investment, we distributed all of our cash, we had zero money in the bank, the investment didn't happen and then so we had all of these accounts payable, no money in the bank. And we called it "Cashpocalypse" at that point. Our CFO just looked at us, said: "We're bankrupt in 30 days. I’m leaving."
What?
Walked out of the room. Walked out of the room. I was like: "Alright." And then our COO, who ended up becoming the CEO when I stepped down in 2020—right before, like a year before the sale—he guided us through. And we made it. And it—we made it because of the relationships that we'd, you know, held with honesty and with with good faith with everybody. We weren't—we weren't playing games with anybody. So they trusted us. We're like: "Hey, we're in a really tight spot. But if you—if you trust us and you allow us to pay late, you extend our terms from Net 30 to Net 60 to Net 90, maybe Net 120, you know, like we're going to pay you in four months for the products that you're delivering." And they believed in us, they backed us, and and that was what able that got us through that moment.
That CFO that walked out.
Yeah.
He made a big mistake in hindsight.
He made a big mistake. He had also, he had—he had an equity position, he had options that he, you know, forfeited. Whoops! You know, the—our current CEO—I mean, not current CEO, the CEO that emerged, Jason Havey, he—he couldn't—he's such a sweet—such a sweet guy—but he couldn't help but send on the anniversary of that day where the—where the CFO walked out and and just told us straight up that we were going to be out of business for the next couple of years on that anniversary he would be like: "Hey, how's it going? We're still here."
Just send him a text. Oh wow. Wow. I mean, some people—that's natural selection of life though. Some people in the hardest times they bail, right? And therefore they aren't deserving of those kind of good—good moments.
Exactly. Per se.
You left in 2020.
Mm-hmm.
I don't see a huge desire from you from looking at what you're doing now to get in—get back in bed in that same kind of industry, doing the same kind of thing. Is that accurate? And if so, why?
The—my desire to be a CEO is not really there. My desire to be this kind of visionary founder is there. So you imagine someone like Richard Branson: at a certain point, he's really not actually running any of the companies that he's running—owning. He's just kind of guiding them.
And I am very interested in continuing to guide different projects and different brands, but I want really competent operators to really start to navigate. Now I may end up actually working with the CEO that Jason Havey, who was with Onnit for 10 years, he transitioned out, so he's now no longer there. And so we may team back up, get the Avengers back together and put, you know, a few other brands back on the table.
And the reason for that is because they're great products, again, that are doing really important things. Like I want to do important things and the resources that that will allow us to, you know, kind of accumulate can then be applied to really great projects that can benefit again *para el bien de todos*, for the good of all.
So yeah, I mean, I’m still—I’m still in the game, but I’m just doing it at a different level. I’m not going to be the guy who's pouring over the P&Ls, who's chasing down purchase orders. But I am the guy who can go out and meet the key allies, put the pieces of the puzzle together, share the voice and the kind of idea of why these products are important. And so that's going to be—there's going to be another kind of reload and birth of a new kind of wave of things um that'll come out.
And and there's also—but there's so many other things. Now I’m going in many different directions. Of course, there's the podcast, there's the book that I’m working on and other books that are planned after that, there's media and documentaries that I’m making and there's stories I want to tell and there's a lot of different things that I’m doing, but I’m just at a level and a purview where I have a lot of competent operators that are helping execute on all of these different visions.
Love. Let's talk about love then. I often wonder, you know, we—we learn our models of love and relationships very early and I've talked a lot about how I learned my model of love—the good, the bad, the ugly of it—and how I was very much an avoidant in terms of my attachment style. I would run from everyone that had any interest in me. I’d pursue someone and then when they showed interest in me, I’d run.
And I was like mimicking some like deep model that I’d learned that relationships mean you're in prison. Basically the—the narrative I’d learned because my father—I was I think subconsciously convinced he was in prison in his relationship. So um it took me a lot of awareness and unpacking to like realize that to the point where as I sit here today, I’m in a great relationship. Obviously it has all of the same, you know, natural imperfection as any relationship, but one that I think is the most special thing I've ever experienced in my life.
What’s your journey been like with love? You have a unique point to your story which you know I’m going to talk about.
Yeah.
Because I know a lot of people ask you about it, which is—I don't even know what the correct term is. Polyamory?
Polyamory.
I always say polygamy. I don't know why I say that.
Well, that would be multiple wives.
Okay. Polyamory is multiple loves.
So yeah, my journey with love was—was interesting because, you know, again I had my first major partnership was with who someone who's now my best friend and also the best man, quote, of my—of my wedding with my wife is—was my former fiancé, Caitlin. And we had a relationship where she—it was not—it was not polyamory, but however we could bring other female lovers into into our equation, right?
Into female lovers?
Right. So other girls could—we could have sexual experiences with other women. And so that gave me kind of this release valve to my desires because I simply, again, I was bound by these kind of feelings of value and this feeling of anybody who I’m with is me living a different life, so I can't cheat.
You know, there—there was one moment where I did—I did actually cheat one time in my life and it was so miserable, the feeling that I felt when I cheated on my partner, like that one—I was like: "I just cannot do this." And I see and again, no judgment, you know, but I see so many successful and powerful men who are unfaithful to their partners.
And to me, that's like going and skirting around the problem and just creating a whole bunch more problems and it's also it's actually legitimately unethical, right? Like you're—you're manipulating somebody, you're lying to them, you're not telling the truth. And so after that one experience of feeling how just awful I felt when I actually cheated—it was a story I was in Moscow, blah blah blah, it doesn't fucking matter—like fundamentally I was like this—I will not do this. Like this cannot be the way.
And so in that relationship, the ability for us to have other lovers that were female, then it kind of satisfied that desire, although the problem was is that I was still always kind of searching for that and it—it wasn't quite right at that point for me at that stage of my young stallion life, right? Wasn't quite right, but it was beautiful and we had a beautiful relationship and I love Caitlin and I love that relationship so much.
But ultimately I was, you know, that wasn't working out. She didn't feel like she was going to be the queen that was going to help me build my empire. You know, she is a wild and magical woman, but she wasn't kind of that warrior queen focused energy that I was really looking for. And then Whitney came along, who was my next most significant partner, and I saw that in her. And I was like: "Aha, I think this is the one that can be with me, be by my side as I build Onnit to what it's going to become and I step forward in the world. She's got the—she's got the right stuff for that."
So we started a relationship just purely monogamous, no other partners, nothing else. That lasted about 18 months and I still felt this strong desire to be with other women, to experience the goddess in many different faces. And I've never been any—been the type that just wants to have sex with somebody because that makes me feel good about myself. No, I legitimately love women. Like I love them. I’m like: "It's the greatest delight for me to be with a woman."
You know, and so I had that natural desire. I wasn't willing to be unfaithful and cheat. So I went to Whitney and I said: "Hey, I have this idea. What about I still want to be with you, but I think I need to be polyamorous. And I know that for this to be fair, then that means that you get to see anybody you want to."
So if I get to do it, you get to do it. Unlike, you know, in the former relationship with Caitlin, I would have been so jealous and be like: "No men ever, never under any circumstances, I’m the lion!" you know, like I had these old old other kind of constructs and ideas. Thanks to, you know, it was really the book *Sex at Dawn* by, you know, by Chris Ryan that actually opened my mind to this idea that there is a different concept that different tribes have utilized throughout throughout history where we didn't have this possessive kind of jealous idea about what it means to have a partner, that we were open to having, you know, having your partner have multiple loves.
And I understood philosophically that our love is like the sun, like it's shining on all of these different places and to have somebody be like "Your sunlight—your—your erotic sunlight can only shine on me," I was like: "This is absurd! Doesn't make any sense to me."
So philosophically it didn't make sense and I had my own desires. So I said, "Alright, let's be polyamorous." And I thought that I would be okay with Whitney seeing other people. I thought I was—I thought I was going to breeze through because I had a girlfriend first. So Whitney, after a period of three months, she first she was like, you know, "You're out of your mind, go fuck yourself, I’m out." I was like "That—that sucks, but I understand your decision, I’m not going to change my decision, it's the way forward."
A few months later she came back, she's like: "Alright, let's try this." And I was already involved with somebody else, so I had a girlfriend. And then Whitney was still my primary partner. So that was the constellation: primary partner is Whitney, she lived with me, and then girlfriend who I would go meet at a different—meet at her house or meet at a different place and then have my own experiences with that partner.
And then when Whitney—you know, and I really didn't have the understanding of how hard this would be on the other side. I thought like, "Yeah, it'll be easy," like I philosophically understood it. Then Whitney got her first partner. And I cannot describe to you the feeling that I felt when Whitney had her first lover. It was—it broke me. It absolutely broke me.
Even though I’d agreed to it, even though I’d acted on it on my end, when she was with somebody else, I felt like I was going to vomit, cry, I wanted to punch a wall, I wanted to just—I couldn't—I couldn't even handle it. And I and I also felt so ashamed for the fact that I had no—like very little compassion for her having gone through this, because I hadn't gone through it yet. And it was a really challenging kind of moment.
And of course, what did I do? You know, whoever her partner was, I tried to like be better than them at whatever they were good at. And at one point, you know, Whitney was with a professional fighter and I was like: "I’ll be a good fighter." I was like "How stupid!" Like she doesn't love me because I’m a fighter, she loves me because I’m me.
And that was one of the really powerful lessons that polyamory taught me is: you can't try to compete in somebody else's strength. You just have to compete to be the best version of you. And every time I would try to be like somebody else, I would become less attractive in her eyes. And and that—that was really a deep lesson.
But for eight years we did the polyamory thing, you know. We had our moments where we were off and on and we'd have little breakups and little issues that would come up, but we both were free to see who we wanted to see and be with whoever we wanted to be with with the understanding that we were primary partners.
This had so many challenges. And moments where every different boundary that we thought we had, "Well, alright, you can be with them but you can't be in love with them." Whoops, I fell in love with somebody. And then whoops, Whitney fell in love with somebody. And so that didn't work, so we're like: "Okay, I guess we're able to really be in love with somebody."
But then if you're in love with somebody, then you want to spend, you know—and that energy is so strong, the technical term is *limerence*. It's that new relationship energy where you're just intoxicated with somebody. Well, you want to be with them more and then the primary partnership doesn't make any sense because the person can feel that you'd rather be with somebody else and it was—it was very, very challenging and also very, very beautiful.
You know, the—the paramours that I had—and a paramour is the term for the the other partners you have outside of your primary partner—I had unbelievably beautiful relationships with them and magical amazing moments. And magical moments with Whitney. You know, there was so much energy and passion and drama in that—in that period.
But it was honest. You know, the thing about it was is that it was honest. We told each other everything, you know, everything that happened, we told each other the truth. There was little pockets of withholding where we didn't express exactly how we felt and but every little minute dishonesty would get exacerbated into a massive, massive issue because there was so much pressure in the system because of the natural emotions of jealousy and, you know, worrying about whether our my partner really loved me the most.
And and that was a really beautiful and and deeply challenging experience. And finally, you know, at the end I—I kind of—I kind of was like: "I can do this, but I—I didn't master it." It was always—it always got the best of me. I was never really fully ever okay with her seeing other people. I was okay with me seeing other people and loving her, but I could never quite do it. I wasn't up to the task.
And that doesn't mean that somebody else can't be, I just—I gave it my best and with all of my tools, all of my consciousness, all of my love, I couldn't do it. And so with that knowledge then, you know, I met of course I met Vylana and Vylana like, you know, immediately I’d been in love with her for a little while and and we could tell that story if we like. But I’d been through the polyamory journey, so when I met Vylana, I was like: "I’m not doing that again. You know, I’m not doing that again."
Do you know anybody that's made that work?
For a time. And and the thing is is that I think it's a—it's a journey of growth and it's a journey of transformation and evolution. Um, when things are stagnant or stuck, it may be an opportunity to get things moving. I think I would rather have the the ups and downs, the brisk wind of floating into the—into the twilight sunsets of just glorious, beautiful experiences and then the car crashes into the rocky crags where it's all blood and broken glass everywhere, you know, metaphorically of course.
I kind of—my poet's heart kind of likes that more than just kind of steady, bored, diminishment of life force, there's no energy, there's no charge there. That never—that doesn't really appeal to me. So polyamory is one of the ways that you can really drive a lot of energy and a lot of growth and a lot of introspection and a lot of a lot of evolution of your own character uh through that process.
So has anybody made it work long-term? It's rare. And I don't think I have a good model for it because I think part of the problem is is that the—the culture doesn't really support that yet. And I don't think our consciousness has evolved to a level where we can handle it. We don't have models for it. We have models of jealousy. It's in all of our songs, it's in all of our—it's everywhere. It's like we're flying against—we're going upstream against a cultural zeitgeist.
So if culture changes, if society changes, I think that will become more possible. It's of course some people are doing it and they're making it work. I haven't seen it personally really work on like a long-term level, but I think it's just because the culture hasn't blossomed for that to really be possible.
Well, I've often pondered if there's some kind of like evolutionary Darwinist reason why it doesn't work. And it would make sense from a Darwinist perspective that I want my seed to pass on and I want I want my genes to survive. So if I—if there's another man with my partner, for example, then that's going to evolve me out of the gene pool. So there's got to be some kind of, you know, one would assume there's some kind of inbuilt innate mechanism called jealousy to prevent that happening.
Yeah. And there's also the genetic impulse to actually—I mean, again, we're—we're having sex, but the impulse is to—the impulse is to reproduce, right? That's where it's coming from. So yes, there's somebody actually sleeping with your partner, but you're sleeping with many other people too. So you're still genetically, you know, giving the opportunity to actually fertilize, you know, many different people. So there's a—there is genetic support, I think, from like an evolutionary biology perspective to this concept, right?
§02Transcript — part 2
But really to make it work, we gotta go back to that level two that we talked about earlier, which is community, which is tribe. Because if it's for the good of the tribe, then it doesn't matter if it's your genetic, you know, your genetic DNA. It's like: will this be the best—will this be the best situation for the tribe? And if the tribe is in love, the tribe is thriving, the tribe has energy, the tribe has that life force, that that then that's accretive to the overall mission. But without that kind of tribe level understanding and perhaps even that humankind level understanding, you can't actually—I don't think you can make it work.
I—I was reflecting as you're saying that about the tribe on various cult documentaries I've watched, where there's still jealousy, you know, um even though they—they are a unit, they're one big family, you still see that jealousy throughout.
Yeah. I think that jealousy is less like about an evolutionary biology and more about the ego. The ego knows itself in relative position. It's a construct that we create to help navigate our life and our—and our body and our soul. And so it's this idea, it's a story about who we are.
And that story about who we are, we only know how good we are compared to somebody else. It's like: are you a good ping pong player? Well, that depends. Who am I playing? You know, like if I’m out with my mates, yeah, I’m a fucking good ping pong player. If I’m going to a tournament, I’m the worst. So you know yourself in relative position to—to the context.
And that's the problem. In this kind of polyamorous dynamic, there's always this thing of this person's getting loved more or there's more attention here or you're comparing all of these different aspects and attributes. And so until you can actually observe that ego identity construct from a—from a witness perspective, then you really can't escape the trappings of comparing yourself and comparing your situation to somebody else's situation.
Vylana. That’s her name?
Oh yeah.
Vylana?
Vylana.
Your face lights up when you say her name.
Yeah.
Why is that? What she mean to you?
I didn't know that I could love somebody like this. I didn't—I didn't think it was really possible. I thought it would be—I thought there'd always be kind of like, "Yeah, this is good enough, this will work. You know, like we'll make this work and we'll find the situation that'll make it work." But with Vylana it's like, "No, no, like I love you so much. I wouldn't change a thing about you."
Like and it's this—it's this crazy thing that sounds like it's sound unbelievable. It doesn't even sound credible. And I don't even know if it's reproducible. I can't say that everybody out there, you got your Vylana. I wish I could go with a straight face and say like: "There's your Vylana out there and for Vylanas out there there's your Aubrey out there and I know it." I don't know! I think maybe I’m really lucky. I don't know.
But it's like we met, you know, and I could feel it and I could feel it and she couldn't see it for a long time but I could always see it. I didn't know, but I could—I could see this possibility. And when we got together, I mean, I had bought the—I bought the wedding ring before we actually even had sex. You know, I mean, if you follow the story closely there was a—there was a kind of experience at Burning Man, etc. but really but really though, like I just—I just knew. I could feel it. And I knew and I knew she was—I knew she was my queen.
I—I just knew it. And she is, in every way. She's the perfect complement to me. And it's not that, you know, the Jerry Maguire "you complete me." No, we're two complete beings of different skills, attributes, polarities, energies, emotionalities, sexualities, but we merge together and together we're just so much more and life is so much more beautiful. Um, it's a—it's a dream, man. It's a dream and it's there's no—there's no compromise.
There's no compromise at all. And and that's what all the, you know, you go to a wedding and you know all the old-timers be like: "You gotta learn compromise and you're going to have to pick your battles and blah blah blah." It's like: "No! No! What about no? What about no? What about just it's fucking incredible and you're in it together?"
And I think one of the reasons why we're able to be that is because we're willing to go into the deep together. If there's something that's that that we can't resolve, then we have tools and again, the plant medicine journey. Like we'll go deep, we'll go, you know, multiple times we've drank ayahuasca together and big things that were brewing come to the surface and erupt, you know, like a giant volcano and then we have to sort out all the magma and all the pieces that'll come up, but we'll keep going back in, going into the deep, not looking away from everything. And with that attitude, we're just cleaning—cleaning—cleaning the connection and the intimacy between us all the time.
When you look back in hindsight—cause I’m thinking for myself but I’m also thinking for the person that's listening to this—timing plays a role and when I say timing, I actually mean the timing of your growth journey kind of crossing theirs?
Yeah.
So like had you met Vylana 10 years earlier?
Yeah. No. It wouldn't have worked.
When you reflect in hindsight, what was the work that you kind of needed to do to be ready to receive a Vylana?
Well, the stallion had to run. Step one. I needed to run. I needed to be—I needed to experience myself and have myself reflected in the hearts of other people who I really loved. And I think people think of the stallion running, you think of just having a bunch of one-night stands—who fucking cares? Like what—like you really care that much about that particular type of pleasure you get in your genitals? No, you're caring about it because it's your ego because somehow that makes—you're like collecting trophies. That's all bullshit.
But what I really—what I needed was to see myself reflected in other people and to know like what my impact could be on someone's heart and what their impact could be on my heart, you know. And that's why I—I have so much love for all of my paramours and for Whitney for allowing that journey particularly in that period. You know, Stephanie and Savannah and Lorena, all of the different people that I was with. And and all of the other names that that are not mentioned in that, you're in there too, right?
Because there were moments that elicited some aspect of me, some quality that came online, came alive, and and I was able to help something come alive in them. It was so beautiful and I think that—that chapter of my life needed to happen. It needed to happen so I could say, "I've done this. I've seen myself reflected in all of these different partnerships and now I’m ready to devote that energy to you, Vylana, because I’ve really—I've felt what this is really like." So that's I think step one of, you know, a many-step journey.
Is there—is there a piece of work as well around—I guess that's maybe adjacent or attached to what you've just said—but learning how to control one's emotions? You talked earlier on about anger and snapping. And the thing in relationships is: if you haven't got control of that, the relationship's not going to last.
And especially in, you know, I think of myself, you know, the ego I had in my younger years and—I still have an ego now of course, I’m not going to pretend I don't—but I was a—I was the type of person that would just get up and go. So if there was any conflict, again going back to what I said about my father feeling like he was in prison, I would be out of there. And that was my response to conflict, it was just let's get up and go. So was there a piece of work that had to be done to learn how to become a master of like—or to get better at conflict resolution from an emotional standpoint?
The emotions will come like a wave. And the Buddhists they call it the "moment of trigger" where you get hooked, they call it *shenpa*. And this desire to actually take that energy and then, you know, flood it onto another person. And it's very difficult—it's very difficult to stop that from happening.
So—but you can with awareness. You can feel it coming and then you can start to develop your, you know, the right reality—the processes and practices about what to do. My—I have two really dear friends: Christine Hassler and Stefano Sifandos and they just led a workshop at our Fit For Service summit.
And they talked about one of their conflict resolution techniques because he had that type of anger that would come up and that would be—and she would then withdraw and get small and they had this dynamic. What they developed was he actually goes into the "plow stretch position" where he puts his legs over his head when he's in that—when he's in that angry state.
And they actually—as soon as he gets angry, that's their agreement: that he's going to go into that position and if he's going to yell at her, he's going to have to yell at her from between his own legs through his own ass, basically. You know? So they developed this method that they literally use and they're some of the most conscious people they're, you know, they're—but they have a—they have a strategy, they have a practice.
And so Vylana and I have developed our own practices, but I would say the most important thing beyond the practices that you can do like that—some of the practices we have is like there's, you know, we can say like a "magic word" that'll be like, "Alright, when you say this word, this level of conversation is like—is the pure level. Like we can't—we can't fuck around anymore, like this word now—now we enter a new parley."
It's like the pirates when they're all shooting each other, they're like "Parley!" and then they go and they're like "Alright, let's talk this out a little bit."
Okay, so you're like stepping outside.
Right. So we'll have like—we'll have a construct where we'll be like "Basically call parley" and then we'll be able to negotiate. So we have some moves like that we can make. We have for smaller things, we have this—this construct we call "bedrock" where anytime we're in like the deepest state of love, we'll be like "This is the bedrock, this is what we'll always return to, this is the nature of our love." And so either one of us can go "bedrock" and we go in and no matter if we don't want to, if even if every part of us is fighting, we go feel the truth of how much we love each other.
So those are some of mine—and I don't go into plow position, but those are some of our own strategies. But the most important thing of all of the things is full radical ownership of every aspect in which you may have overstepped, where you may have made an assumption, where you may have made a projection, to really be completely honest with your own culpability in the situation.
Because without that step, there the—there is going to be a kind of accumulating resentment. And that accumulating resentment for that ownership which was not taken will then become the monster that eats love. So, you know, Vylana and I we've had a couple fights that lasted, you know, a day, two days because we weren't able to get to the point of radical ownership.
We were still kind of pointing a finger and not able to meet in the middle of like actually owning. And it's not always the middle, sometimes it's 90/10. And sometimes like "I’m—I’m sticking at 10," it's like "Hold!" You're like "You want to take more?" You're like "No, hold! I’m holding at 10. Like that's all I can take. You gotta come 90. Otherwise like this is an impasse."
And and I think and I—I will—I can't—I can't move forward if there's fragments of that resentment that are there, so we just keep talking, keep figuring it out until we actually get to the truth. And the beautiful part about that is there's no fragments of resentment. There's no marbles that are being added to the marble mountain of resentment that's going to ultimately destroy our love. There's nothing there because we've taken ownership for it, we've apologized for everything we need to apologize for, and then we've evolved in our own understanding and taken the onus and the sovereignty and the responsibility um to learn and to be better the next time.
Have you heard of Professor John Gottman? His study about couples? And they found that in his—his study of why couples end up in divorce, it wasn't arguing or anything else, it was a build-up of contempt, which is exactly what you've described there as the monster that eats love. So he said they could be laughing in the studies, they could be arguing in the studies, it didn't matter. It was any sign of contempt which is basically he defined as like unaddressed issues building up.
So when—the example I gave on stage when I did the *Diary of a CEO* Live tour was your—your partner going "Babe, come look at this," and you go "[Sighs]." That. That's five years of being sick of their shit, not talking about it and unaddressed bullshit. Just in that little micro-expression. That's like an unaddressed recurring conversation of you being sick of, you know, whatever. So I think that's um a really central idea to what you're saying there, this idea of constant work and constant communication and constant conflict resolution. Can you imagine the world if if all couples could replicate that?
Yeah. Like when you say it, it sounds easy, but there's an everyday battle underneath that. And I know because my partner sat over there and we do this. We have the same everyday battle because some days I don't want to talk. And some days I think you're wrong and you think I’m wrong. And some days my ego gets in the way and some days the thoughts come in "Just do this, just leave, run away," you know, whatever. And being able to continually confront that, I think is an important—very, very difficult challenge that I've only seen in a couple—you know, I’m talking here about men in particular—I’ve only seen it in a couple of men. You know?
Yeah, the the advantage that I have, again, is—and this is my path and I’m not saying that this is the formula—but the plants keep me honest. You try to—you try to, you know, carry your bullshit story of it's all their fault and you're a victim and then go drink a couple cups of *El Dragón de la Selva’s* Ayahuasca and see if Ayahuasca agrees with you. You know, like like it's a—there's a—I’m held accountable to the truth.
And it's not just the medicine now, the medicine lives in me, right? I've consumed it and it and that consciousness is within me. So I can't allow anything that that I—that I need to take ownership for to exist. And and sometimes that'll come up in the past. I mean, I think as my consciousness evolves, different levels of "I’m sorry" are elicited from me.
I mean, I think over the past three years, you know, being with Vylana and having separated from Whitney, there was probably a dozen or two dozen times where there was a new "I’m sorry" that came out because I actually could see it from a different level of consciousness now. And I mean, she's like, "Alright, man, like we split up," like you know, like I think she appreciated it and I think she's still working through her own, you know, her own process with that and it's our own process of of feeling any grievances we've had and but you know, I just try to do my best to to own—to own my fault and mistakes in it and um and that's an evolving process.
But I am held accountable to this idea of: no, no, I like I have to—I have to be honest and I have to be real and I have to own it. And it doesn't make me less than to admit any of these things, that's—that's the way. That actually makes you more than to be able to be that in some ways just the have the humility to be like, "Yeah, I was an idiot or I was—I made a mistake or all of these things" and then not pile on a bunch of shame on yourself either, to just know that you're in an evolutionary process and through that evolutionary process, when you evolve, you're going to be able to look back at your old self and be like "Damn, you could have been a lot better."
It's amazing how there's almost this mental conversation I have sometimes when I—when I’m in that state of conflict with my partner and my ego's there and my ego's saying "Oh you're right," da-da-da-da-da-da. And then the other voice somehow wins out and says, "No, you fucked up. You—you know you reacted badly there. You should just go and apologize."
And I did this the other day with her where we had had a bit of a disagreement about something and, you know, a couple of hours pass, maybe 12 hours or something, I realized I fucked up. So I picked myself up. I walk over to her and I just say: "You know what, from yesterday I just want to say I’m really sorry cause in reflection my reaction was not good there and it didn't make sense and I realize it hurt you etc. And I’m really sorry about that, I wish I had reacted differently. In hindsight and upon looking at my behavior, I realize why I reacted in that way and like it's not good enough."
The minute the words came out of my mouth, it was like a weight had just lifted. It was like my ego had been fired. I felt great. The pressure I had on me up until that point just evaporated. And it's funny that I don't—I don't get there quicker. I’m getting—I think I’m getting there quicker though, if I zoom out on myself I go "Okay, look at yourself over the last 10 years, give yourself some credit." But um yeah, it's crazy. It's it's—all the work you've done, do you still struggle with these things?
Yes, but they get smaller and smaller. So at—like you're talking about, like the—the time it takes you to go over there. So maybe there was a time in your life where it wouldn't have been 12 hours, maybe it'd have been 12 days, maybe it'd have been 12 months, maybe actually never. You know, right? But now the time is shortening. Now you're in hours. Then eventually you're going to get into minutes. And then from minutes you're going to get almost to real time. Almost to real time and then maybe one point you'll touch real-time, where you're really actually seeing.
I don't know, I’m—I’m not in real-time, you know, but I’m definitely in the minutes category. You know, I remember the last little conflict Vylana and I had actually involved this painted fingernail. I’ll tell—I’ll tell this story. So um I was really—we're in Miami, I’m really hot. We have these big kind of wooden-backed lounge chairs. And I’m ready to go upstairs. and I’m like, "Babe, I’m super hot, like thirsty, I’m ready to go up."
She's like: "Uh, you sure you don't want to tan your back a little bit?" And I’m like: "My back? Are you trying to say my tan is uneven? Is like—does that bother you?" And so I went through this whole thing and I was like: "Alright, fine. I’ll tan my back for you, I guess, if that's important to you." Well, so that's what was going through my head. So I flip the latch on the thing so I can lay flat down cause I was laying with my back up.
The thing comes and smashes my finger, just like smashes like crushes my fingernail right between the way that the back of the chair was falling. And it's just searing pain. And I like get up and I want to like scream and hit something cause it hurts so bad. And I couldn't disambiguate the feeling of pain with my frustration that she was the one who wanted me to stay there and if she didn't want me to stay there, I wouldn't have smashed my fucking finger!
And so and then—so I’m in there and I’m like kind of fuming and she's like: "Are you mad at me?" I’m like: "No, I’m not mad at you!" cause I knew logically that I wasn't mad at her, right? But like my whole energy was like: "Yeah, I’m fucking mad at you!" And I was like: "Why did you ask me to tan my back?"
She was like, oh actually she just wanted—it took her a moment, but eventually it was like: "Actually she just wanted to stay herself." And that came out of her mouth in that way and then I took it as like some kind of slight—critique of my tan gradient, you know. And um and ultimately, but we got in this little conflict and and the conflict escalated because we're in the—in the heat of this kind of emotion.
And she kind of—she kind of walked, she was like: "I’m going to the gym." was like "Alright." And like I took like three minutes, four minutes, I don't know, maybe five minutes, whatever, and then I just sent her a long text. And I went through every different situation, every different aspect of it, from the first moment, acknowledging I wasn't able to disambiguate the pain from my anger to her, that I misunderstood what she was saying about my back and that was actually just her way of saying "I want to stay longer," and I projected that she was critiquing me, but that wasn't actually the case and I didn't, you know, like all of this thing and then I responded poorly in this comment and this and then I said, "However, how you responded here, here, here, here, you know, does not feel in alignment with the ethos of our relationship."
So it was like this whole bulleted long, long message. And I sent that to her and I was like: "Alright, that's the truth of it." And then she receives that, she comes back, she's like: "Alright, you know, like I acknowledge these different things," you know, and "now here's how we can get better from this."
And then pretty soon, you know, within about 15 minutes after that, we're just we looked at each other and was like: "We're kind of dramatic, aren't we?" And we just started laughing. And it was over, you know. And so that process just gets quicker and quicker and quicker and quicker. And that's the—that's the—that's the way of it. It's just to shorten the amount of time that you stay out of consciousness.
All of that requires a level of vulnerability that a lot of people um still find very uncomfortable, especially men in my in my in my—in my experience. We um we actually made something to help our listeners become a little bit more vulnerable. And they're these question cards. They're actually taken from this diary. So every time we have a guest here, they write a question for the next guest. There's been one left for you in there as well.
So we took all of the questions, as you can see here, we put them on these playing cards so people can play at home. There's about 70 of them. I've just selected a bunch of random ones for you here. And I’m going to just lay them out in front of you. And if you could just pick one and then answer the question, whichever one you feel called to.
This is like an oracle deck.
Yeah. On the back it has a QR code where you can see—you can scan it to see the person that answered the question as well.
[Reads card] "Is there something right now that you know you're doing wrong but you haven't fixed yet? If so, how will you get unstuck?" Well, I don't like the word "wrong" because the way that I look at my trajectory is a trajectory of evolution. So if I’m doing it, it must mean that I needed to do that in order to learn how to evolve from it.
However, I understand the point of the question outside of the semantics, which are important, you know, because I think we can put ourselves in wrong-right, good-bad in this very polarized idea. So in the evolution of Aubrey, where am I still stuck? Where have I not actually gotten to the place where I want to be as who I know I can be?
And it's the reliance on stimulants to keep me alert. And it's okay that I like my coffee and I like my nicotine and I like, you know, kratom sometimes or whatever, but there's a kind of reliance to go up, you know. And then there's a reliance to go down. And I still have, you know, sleep medication that I take. And I know it's not good for me.
Like particularly the sleep medication. Like I’m kind of okay with the caffeine and the nicotine, I could probably like maybe fast from it for a little while um I don't smoke cigarettes or anything, but whether it's a cigar or whether it's a, you know, a nicotine pouch or something like that. So that one feels like: "Yeah, there's a little cleaning up to do," but—but it's not—it's not really like damaging me in a fundamental way.
But the sleep meds I think are. and they're very sticky because I get in this loop where—let's take today, for example. Last night I fly into the hotel, I’m kind of juiced, you know, I’m here in Hollywood, there's lots of sounds and lots of noises and I’m in a new hotel, it's pretty dope and I’m just not sleepy. You know, watch a cool movie and I got a big podcast today and I got some other stuff I need to do during the day.
So could I have fallen asleep without the sleep meds? Yes, eventually I could have. But that would have come at a cost to this podcast and then that would have come at a cost to the listeners. And then so I get in this trap of: "Well, I can't do it today. I got this thing to do." So then I’ll reach for the sleep meds and I’ll take them.
And I know that those are deleterious to my health. So I’m kind of stuck in this position where I’m not giving myself the time where I don't have any obligations or any—anything that I want to offer the world where I can really phase out of all of this. And even when I do, because I have phased out of it for all of my ayahuasca journeys I have to get off everything, and I’m able to do it and I’m like: "This time it's going to stick."
And then I’ll get that one night, the night before a podcast or the night before I have a bunch of things to do and I just can't sleep and that old—the old sleep med in the drawer—I’ve flushed them down the toilet whatever, but then I’ll find another one or whatever, I’ll figure it out. It starts calling and it's like: "Listen, like you know the solution. Just pop this bottle and you'll go to sleep and you'll be able to do what you need to do tomorrow."
And that voice keeps me stuck. I’m like stuck in this limbo. And I can't stay stuck there forever. So what I need to do—so part of that question is like "Alright, what do I need to do to get unstuck?" I’m going to need to give myself the space to really allow my neurochemistry to reset. And also probably have to holistically change my mindset to say I have to look at the whole arc of my life and all of the conversations I have and everything that I’m going to do as more important than any individual thing and say for the whole arc of my whole life I have to get my neurochemistry and everything back in alignment so that I don't rely on these other chemicals to help me fall asleep.
And so it's a—it's a holistic mindset shift and also a period—cause it's going to be rocky in that period—where I just push out all of my obligations, everything that I need to do. And I keep threatening to do it and I just haven't made the space to do it. I haven't prioritized it enough. But that must happen. It must happen and it's just a matter of me doing it and and I pray and I believe and I trust that I’ll do it before the universe makes me do it by having some accumulation of the, you know, negative effects of the medication I’m taking etc. Like there—if you don't listen when it's time, you'll have to listen. Like the universe will make you listen. So I’m going to listen before the universe makes me listen.
That key step of awareness is you've clearly—you're clearly very aware. And that's what, you know, from my observation that um I also fully feel like you've done much of the hard—hard work already by just admitting it to yourself. You know? Because of the cognitive dissonance, so many people would justify it away or you know make other excuses to make it okay, but you've—you've confronted that. Yeah.
And it's funny cause you've—you've confronted it even in the—at the expense of how it might make you look. And you're willing to say it out loud as well. That's amazing. In that story I also saw a through-line to what you're doing with Fit For Service. Mm-hmm. For anybody that doesn't—isn't aware of what your work now with Fit For Service, what is it and um how can one get involved and if they are to get involved, what do you hope they take from it?
It's really the technology of healing and transforming through community. You know, so that's really what we're doing is—yeah, there's a lot of—there's coaching and there's teaching of different things, but we're going through initiatory, exploratory practices. Now we don't do psychedelic medicine as far as the things you take, but we do do all the psychedelic practices from shamanic breathwork, which is incredibly powerful, you know, many facilitators deep, deep breathing, huge emotional catharsis. Ecstatic dance, vision quests out on the land or, you know, wanders out on the land, vision quests are again longer sometimes. Um, *Temazcal*, *Inipi* sweat lodges, you know, by the First Nation people, all of these different initiations.
And then communication technology initiations from circling techniques, which teach you how to communicate with each other to helping to collectively process archetypal grief, you know, masculine grief and feminine grief and using those dynamics to help elicit the strongest healing. But in the process of doing that all together, deep bonds are formed. And we have a survey that goes out to anybody who's been to, you know, at least two of our events and we say, "Did you meet someone in Fit For Service that you know will be a friend for the rest of your life?" 100% say yes.
And so we're building—yes, there's the greater Fit For Service tribe where there's a lot of—it's a beautiful, rich community—but the bonds that are formed with those people that maybe you did that one eye-gazing exercise with and you started crying cause you could see yourself in that other person or you were there with them in that one breathwork that was so intense and the wind was whipping and everybody was screaming and there were three exorcisms happening simultaneously and it was fucking wild!
Like those experiences then bring a bond together and you start to learn that actually going through these—these difficult things together will actually, you know, form relationships and help you heal and help you grow. And it's such a beautiful process to continue to watch this happen, you know, with so many different people from so many different places, you know. and um it's really inspiring to see people willing to—because in some ways as we were talking about nobody wants to mine, in some ways you do expose yourself to your own darkness willingly by going into a breathwork or going into an ayahuasca or going into these things, but you know that you're fully supported and it's and it's with full intention.
So in that way we are actually going into the darkness to illuminate the light and and doing that together. And it's been it's been really incredible. It doesn't feel it doesn't feel at all like work. It feels like what I would do if and actually last year we switched to a donation model because we thought like this is the way to do it. We lost so much money that we can't do that anymore! But nonetheless, like so I basically worked all last year at a huge financial loss and and offered all of these different summits and festival, all of this stuff.
And it was still worth it. I wouldn't have changed it now. Of course, it's fundamentally unsustainable to do it that way, but nonetheless, like it's what I love—it's one of the things I really love to do. and all of our coaches feel that way and it also draws in some incredible people that we get to learn from: other master coaches and other, you know, inspiring medicine people who kind of carry a transmission that we learn from. So it's—it's kind of like a little moment where we get to be in our own little Jedi school and just evolving our our own internal psychic and and emotional and and a physical technology.
I watched the um video on your website fitforservice.com. Mm-hmm. And it looked um I don't know. Sometimes just observing a a clip or a trailer can make you feel a certain sense of warmth and connectedness, and that's what I got. It felt like a big group of friends that had gone out to like the desert somewhere and were connecting at a much deeper level than you ordinarily see in that kind of like retreat or event or whatever. So I felt really compelled to to be involved, I guess. So um I think everybody should go check it out, just go watch the video and go go see see if it—if it's calling you because I think um there will be a lot of people out there that will realize just from watching that video that it's right for them.
Yeah.
We do have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. Let's see what has been left for you. Oh, okay. Interesting. I actually don't get to see the question before we open the book but um this is a good one. "Who is someone you need to forgive?" And then there's another line, which is "Who is someone you need to forgive and have not?" Which I guess is the same thing, but mm-hmm.
You know, forgiveness is an interesting thing because it's a—it's a spectrum. There's "Yeah, I forgive you," but do you? But do you really, though? Are you still kind of holding it on? Are you still saying the words? And are you there? True forgiveness is the place of love that sees no—that sees no wrong, right? It like—it doesn't even actually register that there was a wrong there.
Like that's the zero state of absolute forgiveness: is to get to a place of "What grievance? What did you do? What—remind me again? Because I don't see it." Because kind of how I told the story about my dad, you know, the way he yelled at me—like I've seen so clearly—I've seen so clearly that it gave me a superpower that I’m able to be in absolute forgiveness of that. Absolute forgiveness of that.
In my—when I get to that place where I've seen and and would never have traded it for anything, I wouldn't have changed it one bit, right? When I can get to that place where I wouldn't have changed a thing, that's where real forgiveness is. Because it's like if they're like "I’m sorry," I’d be like: "For what? Thank you. I mean, like I see how this benefited my life."
So that level of forgiveness, it takes a time to get there. So there are actually many places where I am in the evolutionary process of getting to that. But maybe I don't quite fully understand what that has given me yet. So somebody's done something and I haven't quite I haven't quite worked that into my into the way that I can say like: "Alright, this was for the best."
If I had to say, I would have to say the the governments of the world right now. I don't think I’ve fully forgiven them. And the collusion what I've seen between the collusion between media and politics and, you know, big pharma and big big war and this whole construct of empire. Some part of me says like, "Alright, the two—like if we take the *Lord of the Rings* analogy—the two towers need to rise so that the Fellowship of the Ring comes together." And that's what gets the elves and the dwarves to get along with the with the hobbits and the and all the wizards and the humans and everybody comes together and it's necessary for the two towers to be to be built and to and to try and push their darkness on the world so that the fellowship will come.
But there's been so much pain and so much loss and so much unnecessary suffering and so much unnecessary fear and it's hard to get to the point where I can say like "Yeah, I wouldn't change a thing with that." Because so I guess it's, you know, forgiving empire. And I use empire to be that whole construct of that kind of top-down manipulative dystopian control that we've, you know, everybody has their own little oculus to whatever part of that they see and I’m not trying to push my own view of that. But I think we can all feel that there's a force out there that's not in our best interest as sovereign beings. Have I forgiven that force? Hmm. Not quite yet. Not quite yet. But maybe when the full fellowship comes together and we have all of the allies because I start—I’m starting to see that happen, like all of the allies are forming this latticework, this network that's now becoming more available because because of the pressure of the force of empire. But until that fully actually crystallizes and it works, I don't think I’ll—I’m not able to forgive empire yet.
Aubrey, thank you. You're the type of person that I love to speak to because there's—I feel like there's no question you wouldn't answer. And you take a pause to answer the questions head-on. And um your story of of personal transformation and transition through various chapters in your life and ego, death, and all you've been through you speak to it with such vulnerability and openness and honesty.
So anybody that's in a different phase or chapter of their journey to where, you know, you've found yourself today, I think they have the honest roadmap on how to progress forward and that's the most inspiring powerful thing. And, you know, it's not often you get to sit with someone who's had such tremendous business success that can also analyze that from sort of a meta-perspective and is now doing work that's tremendously spiritually aligned um with a new refreshing take on um what their mission should be. And in your case it's, as you've said, not just anymore about you, it's much more about um the broader global community and your tribe. So thank you so much for this conversation today, it's been an honor to meet you and spend time with you. I feel freer, I feel inspired, I feel I feel more powerful for it um and I hope we can have it again once the goblins and the *Lord of the Rings*...
[Laughter] Yeah, let's get all the characters together.
I've never seen *Lord of the Rings*! So I can't...
[Laughter] Here we are! Here we are, another ladder, another—another connection, another node in Indra's net was formed. Sorry, Empire, it's happening!
Aubrey, thank you.
You're welcome, brother. Thank you. ---
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