Modern Wisdom - #117 - Aubrey Marcus - What Makes A Good Life?

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

Aubrey Marcus is a podcaster, author and CEO. I wanted to find out how Aubrey defines living a good life, and how he structures his world to ensure that he's pointing in the right direction... As you might be able to guess, this episode is jam packed with amazing stuff. Aubrey is someone who contemplates the finer elements of exactly how to make his mind and body a little better every day. Enjoy this insight into the life of someone who is unashamedly working to uncover all his weaknesses and turn them into strengths. This episode is brought to you by The Protein Works. Head to https://bit.ly/TPWChrisWillx to check out their awesome range. Extra Stuff: Follow Aubrey on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/aubreymarcus Buy Own The Day - https://amzn.to/326Ijmq Check out Onnit - https://www.onnit.com/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back to Mon and Wisdom. Today's a big one. Aubrey Marcus, CEO of on it, New York Times best selling author, and one of the biggest podcasters on the planet joins me today. When someone's got a lot of programming time out there, like Aubrey does, it can be a little bit difficult to think of what to ask him that he hasn't been asked before. So today, I wanted to find out what he thinks makes a good life. Or Bruce spends a lot of his time both working on his inner and out of self and then

trying to reach the world through his companies and his content. And I wanted to kind of try and get him to compile that together into some guiding principles that he abides by in an effort to make sure he's pointing in the right direction. Unsurprisingly, there is absolutely loads to take away from today's episode. Aubrey really is the real deal. Also, today's episode is brought to you by the protein works. They're giving away a full year's supply of loaded nuts that is one tub per month every month for the next year. All that you need to do is head to the Modern Wisdom YouTube channel, find this episode with Aubrey Marcus.

Make sure you're a subscriber and leave a comment. Just leave a comment on the video. If you're a subscriber, I will choose one of you to win a full year supply of loaded nut's courtesy of the protein works. But for now, it's Aubrey Marcus time. I'm joined by Aubrey Marcus founder and CEO of Onit, fellow podcaster and all around fascinating human Aubrey, welcome to the show. and CEO of Onit, fellow podcaster and all-round fascinating human. Aubrey, welcome to the show.

Thanks, brother. Happy to be here. Very, very happy to have you on. I'm sure there will be a lot of people that are familiar with what it is that you do. But how do you describe what it is that you do on a daily basis and your life to someone who's never met you before? Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I mean, obviously you can describe the things that I've done in my personal history

that I've accomplished, founded the company on it, wrote the book on the day, done the Aubrey Marcus podcast. I mean, there's these things that I've done, but really if you're talking about me as a person, I'm just someone who's trying to learn a little bit more today, that'll make me a little bit better tomorrow than I am today. Just someone who's on the path of learning and the path of exploring and the path of asking questions and trying to figure out the small questions and the big questions.

Isn't that interesting that when asked that one of the first things that we default to is our achievements are quantifiable metrics of status. Yeah, I mean, that's what the typical response to that question is. What is it? What's your job? What have you done? What are your validations? It's reinforcing your somebody-ness as some of the spiritual teachers say, this is what makes you somebody. You founded a company, you wrote a book, you have a podcast, you have this wife,

you have this thing, you have these kids, you have this is your somebody-ness. And that's one level of expression, of course, and that's all fine, but the really interesting thing is like, who are you and how close are you becoming to the truth of who and what you are and how you serve? That's a really much more interesting question for me at least. But the other stuff is fine, too.

I think it's interesting for me as well, but it's a little bit less sexy and easy to get out in a cocktail party or like when you sat around with a dinner table. Yeah, it's, you have to suss out the audience. You got to figure out who's going to care about those more interesting issues and who's just going to want to talk about the same old stuff. And that's kind of the people I like to surround myself with, people that we can immediately bypass past the spinole recounting of the personal history,

you know, like that, all right, that happened, I can tell you what happened, but that's not what's interesting, what's more interesting is what's happening, You know, like how is not who Aubrey was, but what is the Aubrey in that's going on right now? I understand. The verb to Aubrey. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Again, it's so interesting because it's easy for people

to have a conversation. Let's say someone maybe has quite subtle or country views or they fall on the ends of the distribution for whatever normality is, they have things in common in the way that they think or the way that they speak about everything with other people. And they have to choose whether they want to be honest or they want to be acceptable. And that game of how much should I open up and as you've alluded to one of the key words is truth. Speaking your truth forward being as virtuous as you can living with integrity and acting the logos if you're going Jordan Peterson with it and it's easy to see why people start to take on these

personas right they start to get addicted to the acceptability and they forget the honesty until they don't know what honesty looks like anymore. It's a bad trap because the persona is incapable of actually receiving love. It can receive praise, but you're not going to feel it because it's not you. You know what I mean? It's like when people, I think it's one of the reasons that like actors have a problem right like People may love the character that they played and that may make them love That that person when they see them, but the actor is just playing a character So you know, you can be appreciated for your craft as an actor, but that person is not actually gonna feel love You know because they know they're being loved for being gladiator

you know they're not having love for being like yeah for the whole yeah it's not that people are loving Russell Crowe they're loving fucking maximus you know what i mean and so we're all playing our own version of maximus and then showing people this thing and people are loving that thing but it's not actually landing so we're actually denying our self the ability to have that genuine human connection that we really crave and really being seen unless we lead with our vulnerability. You know, I mean, that's the key thing that's going to allow us to really feel all the good stuff. Hmm. Do you find yourself, obviously, as you've mentioned, the requantifiable metrics of success that can be ascribed to you to define you?

As those begin to mount up and continue to mount up, does it feel sometimes like baggage that you then need to release to not identify yourself with those things? You know, I think I do, I think I can get stuck in little sticky traps for sure, but I think my sticky traps are the traps of kind of binding myself to a certain expectation of progress and expectation of doing more. It's not that I'm like, it's not that I have to shed the baggage of the past

because I almost do that automatically. I did that yesterday, whatever, that was yesterday. I don't really celebrate the things that have happened in the past, I'm always looking towards a new thing. And so that's actually where I have more of a challenge. It's like, and I got the text and the call that owned the day on your life was a New York Times best seller, which is something that I really was. Congratulations.

What happened? Yeah, thank you. So, so when that happened, though, I took like one minute to be like, that's pretty cool. And then like immediately, like, I didn't give a shit and I was on to the next thing. You know what I mean? So it wasn't like, so for me, it's about slowing down a little bit and not trying to think about what the next thing is and just being able to like be at peace with where I'm at now, as well as have that ambition to continue to go and to continue to offer my, you know, what I have to give to the world. So yeah, for me, it's a little bit of a different challenge.

It's not so much that I'm, I need to let go of the past because I feel like I don't, I don't even take that in anyways. It's like, oh, that happened, whatever. But it's like, what am I doing now? Yeah. And that's where I get stuck. Baggage from the future, bizarrely. Yeah, exactly. Not baggage from the future bizarre. Yeah, exactly not baggage from the past. That's interesting. So I wonder whether or not the writing process of when you were writing your book of whether you were more consumed with the idea of writing a good book and of potentially becoming a New York Times bestseller. And then when it happened,

it was like, okay, like that's that's's done. That bizarre that our conscientiousness and our industriousness, our desire to continue to feel like we're moving forward, is almost, that is what we're working towards, rather than the achievement itself. The achievement comes and goes. Yeah, totally. You know, it's like, and that's why if you get stuck and that's the only thing that you're you think is gonna make you happy

If like you think that some external achievement is gonna make you happy You're gonna get it and you're gonna realize that it's not gonna make you happy and I think it's it's a it's one of those things that Until you actually start to get the things that you're that you're striving for You're not gonna realize that they aren't gonna make you happy So I almost feel like everybody needs to learn the tactics and the techniques and get the tools to actually get what they're aiming for. So like if you want to get some level of financial wealth and you think that's going to make you happy and you just want that, well, the best way to transcend that is to actually get it. You know, if you think that writing a best-selling book is going to make you happy, like the best

way to realize that it's not going to make you happy is to get it. You know, it's like, I don't know how you do it unless you actually get it. And then when you get it, then you're like, fuck. I got to like, I got to figure out some other things that will work. And that's the process of kind of like retraining yourself. And I think that's the process that I'm in now is I still enjoy the things I do. And that's great because I'm very fortunate

that I've chosen things that I love. I love podcasting, I love writing, I love running on it. But nonetheless, I recognize that no external validation, no external thing is actually going to make me happy. It's the internal work that's going to actually level me up into a place where I have a deeper satisfaction and a deeper engagement with the world. Isn't it interesting that we kind of need to close that loop? And that's a suggestion for myself because I think a lot of the time speaking to people

who are quite spiritually minded, there is a, there can be quite a aloofness or a, people on a high horse about the fact that you should just be able to let go of your attachments or let go of your desires to achieve certain things. Whereas you're coming out from an even more industrious perspective, which is okay, bring the thing that you think is going to make you happy and it was sharper contrast as you can. IE make it happen. Yep. And then go from there.

I think that's a really interesting way. And it's a much more final way. It's a proper full stop once you've done. I agree, man. And I just, I wish that I could believe that somebody could actually let this shit go without without doing it. I just, I don't think I've ever really seen it, you know, because like, I've seen people pretend, like I've seen a lot of spiritual people pretend like I don't care about money,

you know, like money doesn't matter. And then the minute we engage in some kind of business deal, you know, they get all squirrely and get all weird. And I'm like, whoa, like everything's cool. You're gonna get paid, like, relax. You know, so I've never actually seen, it's almost like they're spiritually bypassing, is, you know, the word. They're spiritually bypassing their egoic desires

for something and pretending that they don't want it or changing the game to change the rules, but I've never actually seen it work. The only time I've really seen it work is when someone actually gets that thing that they're aiming for, trains themselves, has the skills, learns a practice, gives the two 10,000 hours to actually get that, and then gets it and then realize like, okay, I got that. And it didn't quite work. So now what's the next thing?

It can't be more the same. It's almost like Buddha, right? Like would Buddha have been able to be Buddha if he didn't grow up in the palace? If he didn't grow up in the palace of luxury and feasts and sex and orgies and if he was outside the palace walls, he might have been like, man, if I could just get in that palace

and have a couple feasts and a couple of threesomes, man, I'll be happy as shit. And then Buddha never would have existed. But because he grew up with that and realized that that didn't make him happy, then he went outside the palace walls and was like, no, no, no, no, that didn't work. I did that thing. I was not happy. Now I'm doing this thing, sitting under the bodhi tree, and I'm happy as shit. It's interesting, and I'm definitely open to other ways for people to engage in the

path. I think the most reliable thing is to just work to get those things that you want. When you get those things that you want, you'll be ready to take the next step of the journey, which is to realize that there's more to life than getting these external achievements. Yeah, it's a very, very interesting way to look at it. So one of the things that I wanted to discuss today was what you think a good life looks like. And we've already touched on that, not necessarily doing things for their sake, doing them because they feel like something that's valuable to you, not doing them for external validation. But how do you define a good life? What does a good life look like to you? life that leaves, it's a life that the signature of that life is something that you've experienced. You've really lived. You really, first of all, you have to really live life.

You know, I think the aesthetics, the people who've like denied the pleasures of the body and been in a path of renunciation where they're just kind of isolating themselves or going to a monastery. I respect that path, but I don't think that to me is the path that most of us should take. I think we're here to live on the earth to really experience all the things, to eat the food, to try the drinks, to try the drugs, not all the drugs, but some of them at least. So like drugs, yeah, like do the things, don't of them at least. So like drugs, yeah. Select drugs, yeah. Like do the things. Don't abuse them.

You know, like don't go, you don't go wild, but like experience all the things. Like go visit the beautiful places. Like dip in a cold waterfall and feel rainfall on your face and, you know, go to a hot desert and climb a snowy mountain and do all of these things. Surf and ski and play and dance and make love and do all the things that we're here to do. I think that's a big part of it. It's just to open yourself up to that. I think another part is to feel our connection spiritually to everything around us, to that source energy, the universe, God, if your language permits it, whatever your

language permits, you do to feel as far as a spiritual experience. I think that's a unique expression of what we're able to do here. So it's both the carnal and the spiritual. It's the physical and the astral kind of dancing together. And then the other thing is to just make sure that you've left the world and everybody you've touched a little better for you having been here. And I think that's the commitment to service. So experience everything, but also leave everybody that you touch and every place that you go, a little more enriched and a little more colorful and vibrant than when you found it. And if you do that, that's a good life to me. It's really nice guiding principles, I think.

An interesting thing there, again, one thing that appears to be a defining characteristic of what you're talking about here, is agency and not inertia, not necessarily being in a set, as you suggested. Not the relinquishing of things, but the movement, the direction towards those things. A body at motion stays at motion and it continues to collect and move through these experiences and these adventures. I wonder how many people that lean toward a spiritual life and say that they are satisfied with simple things, that they only need some people take pride in how little stimulus they need to be happy. And again, as you've suggested, there's some spiritual leaders and some master meditators

for whom that's amazing. But I wonder how many other people are kidding themselves into believing that because it is a very easy way to not have to push for many things in life and to allow yourself to settle at a much lower set point of experience and adventure. I'd say most of them, you know, I'd say, I mean, if you're asking me like, what's the ratio? I'd say that's most people.

You know, I think we, it's, we're afraid. We're afraid to acknowledge what we want. We're afraid to acknowledge what's possible because then we're afraid we might fail. We're afraid we might not get it. So it's easier to just pretend like, oh, I don't care about any of that. You know, like, yeah, it doesn't matter to me because that's just changing the value structure so that you're, the ego can win at a certain level that the ego doesn't feel like it can win at the other level. But it's really, it's ultimately the pursuit of the thing that's always the most enjoyable anyways. And I think there's a great satisfaction in getting yourself better at whatever it is that you can do. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's most people who are kidding themselves when they're

saying that they don't want these things. They don't want. I think we do want these things. It's part of life, and it doesn't have to be fancy. I mean, you don't have to have a Ferrari. That's not necessary. But a nice car, there's lots of nice cars. It might be nice to have a nice car,

like a vehicle, a mechanical vehicle that like you're like, yeah, I fucking like this thing. You know, like you don't have to set your sights on some super fancy, you know, Bentley ghost or whatever the fuck. Some rocket to Mars, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Just like, it's just like, but, but no, that like, no, I want a nice car, and I want like a comfortable house that has like, I want to own my own place. And I want to like, but no, that like, no, I want a nice car. And I want like a comfortable house that has like, I want to own my own place. And I want to like, you know, one day I want to have

a threesome, you know, and like whatever the, whatever your thing is. And you know what it is, you've just taken the words out of my mouth, not threesome, but one of the fans of the show, Jordan, I know he's also a fan of yours. He wants to tell me the story about why he, I don't know whether he's got a written list, but I know that he has a bunch of

desires that he wants to fulfill sexually, like to have sex with a Brazilian girl and to have sex with a this girl and to have sex with a that girl. And it comes back to the open loops we were talking about earlier on. And he said that he wants, once he's settled down with his wife to be and he's starting to build a family, he wants to be able to walk past a Brazilian girl in a street and not think I wonder what it's like to fuck a Brazilian girl. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's like if you don't, if you don't do that, I mean, it would be like imagining, imagining like a certain type of fruit is forbidden. Like watermelon is forbidden, right?

And then you can, because you've made an agreement with somebody that you can no longer ever have watermelon. Well, that might be fine if you've had a lot of watermelon in your life, you're like, I know watermelon. It's pretty good, but I'm good. Now, I can remember what that's like, but can you imagine, can you imagine walking by a watermelon, everybody's on a hot summer day,

just pouring salt on it and like, oh, just juice dripping down their mouth, and you're like, God, I can't even fucking try that thing. That really is bugging me. You know what I mean? And that's, I God, I can't even fucking try that thing. That really is bugging me. You know what I mean? And that's, I think, I think that's the thing. Get out there and live, like really live, especially before you get in a situation

that's going to restrict your ability to do that. And I think there's lots of benefits. People think I'm like this open relationship champion. I'm not. It has tons of perils and tons of challenges. And it's a very hard path. But I think it's, it is important to like have a lot of experiences like your friend says

so that if you do get in a situation where you are restricting some of the options that you might have, that you understand like that you've gone out there and you've lived. And that you know largely what the landscape of everything looks like. Do you think you'll be non-monogamous for the rest of your life or have you not got an agenda at the moment? You know that's a really interesting question. I mean right now, sorry about that, that's a, the dog gets really excited when somebody comes you to do it.

Is it not when someone talks about non-menogamy? Is that what it is? Someone mentions the word nonmenogamy in the dog nose. Crazy. Yeah. You know, it's a really interesting question. I mean, right now, I'm not in any labeled relationship. But, and so we're exploring like what this framework of not having any particular relationship structure looks like.

And even with Whitney, who I've gone from anogamous to open to then we separated to now we're in this kind of unlabeled experience where we're enjoying each other and just experiencing what it's like to have a relationship beyond expectation and beyond labels. And it's really interesting, but the experiment is just continuing. And there's opportunities to explore and learn, and expectations do creep up, and challenges still do creep up. But it seems like we're able to move through them faster now than we were when we had a structure. And it was like, the structure was almost like a velcro wall.

And all of our insecurities were like tennis balls. And every time we lob something up, they'd get stuck. But now we're still lobbing our own insecurities and our own stuff up and our own aversion and our own stuff. But it's not really sticking to anything. So we're able to kind of move through things a little bit faster. But I don't know what the next phase is beyond this, because I'm still just right in this one right now where this is another interesting structure. So from single, there's monogamy,

there's open relationship, then there's no relationship. And then perhaps there's even celibacy. That's something that I'm contemplating as well, like a elongated period of celibacy to see what that's like. What is it like when you remove that sexual expression from your life and explore that? And then I don't know what the next phase beyond that would be.

But I'm definitely hoping. I'm really open. Yeah. Yeah, I'm definitely hoping. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really, I'm really open. And that's, I think, the thing that's, the only message that I would give is to just not feel like there's only one way.

Just be curious, be open, do explore, always be looking and asking the questions, like, is this serving me in the best way possible? And what am I learning from this? And that's what I'm gonna continue to do. And where that takes me? You know, who knows? I have to say, I did a conversation on non-monogamy

not long ago. And as a part of that, I couldn't help but be visibly, I have visceral, relaxed reactions as someone explained to me the real finer workings of how different types of non-monogamous relationships occur and I could feel my I don't know whether you want to call it programming does a debate here about whether it's programming or whether it's in built right but whatever that is that response to thinking about what would

happen if you allowed someone that you cared for to at your own, not request, but you're on allowance to be physical with somebody else or to have feelings for some etc, etc, all of these different ways that it pieces together. And I honestly think that that sounds more difficult than celibacy, but I haven't tried either, so I can't speak just yet. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing. I mean, I've done every different psychedelic, every different sweat lodge and a lot of

different initiation rituals and different grueling workouts and different types of things found and come, but all the different things, there's nothing that's come even close to an approximation of the challenge of being in an open relationship. I mean, if you're saying you had a visceral reaction to the description of the types of things. Someone else doing it. Like, if I really, if I really decided to break the break open, the walls of privacy and share the details. I mean, the people get viscerally effect, like really viscerally effect because I was. I mean, I've been in places where I've been crawling around on the ground, I know I'm going to flush a vomit or cry or run or punch

a wall or like, there's so much feeling. And yeah, like you said, some of it I think is conditioning and some of it is perhaps in a program. I think largely if I had to put the scale, I'd say it's largely conditioning just based upon some of the ancestral and tribal kind of arrangements that we can find in different groups around the world. But regardless, it's a brutal, brutal path. And it's way, way, way harder than you might think.

You know, because I... In your book, you say about it, right? Dry wretching on the floor for however many, like half an hour or longer or however long it was. Like, and the modest thing was, it doesn't surprise me at all. Incredibly challenging. Incredibly challenging.

Yeah, that's the say the least, but incredibly beautiful too. And that's the thing because through all those challenges, that's parts of yourself that you're breaking open so that you can reheal. It's like if a bone forms wrong, you have to actually re-break it for it to form correctly so that you're anatomically correct. Some parts of our ego have been formed wrong.

You have to re-break the bone of the ego to then allow it to heal in its proper way, but the re-breaking of the ego over and over and over again and the smashing of all of that, it's a hell of a process, man. But you start to get the hang of it. You start to get the hang of it. You start to realize like, okay, here it comes. Here comes the fucking gigantic nut kick from the universe.

Like, let me just fucking, let me hold my breath. You know, here's my testicles are going to be about throat high here in a few minutes. And then just this is the way it's going to go. And you start to, you start to just be ready to learn the lessons and know that the growth is going to come on the other side of that. But I mean, it's been probably my greatest teacher of all the things. It's what's allowed me to learn the most about myself and heal the most of my own needs for validation and my own insecurities. And I'm not like, hallelujah, I'm healed, but I'm a hell of a lot closer than when I started.

In that interesting that one of the greatest teachers of all of the different things that you've done, all of the different experiences that you've had, hasn't been something that you've done in solitude. Right. Yeah, it's been done in conjunction with, you know, with the partner, with Whitney in particular. And you know, the other relationships have taught me different things and some of those things have been valuable, but it's the deep emotional investment that I've had in Whitney and the challenges that have come from that deep emotional investment that have really brought the greatest

level of growth. I mean, stress, any type of stress creates adaptation and too much stress can create trauma that you don't adapt from. So like if you over-train in the gym, you'll actually get hurt and not get stronger. And I think we've definitely put ourselves in positions where we fucked it up and like over-stressed ourselves and like created traumatic patterns. But nonetheless, you can learn to unwind those and learn to take the space and time to heal those. But I think a well-executed open relationship would have the pacing and calibration, or two of the words that they use a lot. The pacing and calibration to know that you're opening up to challenge at a rate that

you know is actually just gonna allow you to move through pretty consistently without having to go backtrack and then unpacks a lot of trauma. But we were doing this kind of blind. We were just figuring that out as we go and doing our very best. No fault on either side. It's just that's the way it unfolded. But if we were going to do it again, we'd do it a hell of a lot better than the first time.

Have you ever thought about doing a course or contributing to a body of knowledge somehow? There's going to be, that's going to be my third book for sure. And it's going to be about what love in relationship can look like and how to reimagine love and relationship. can look like and like how to reimagine love and relationship. And so, you know, I'm kind of holding off on that right now. Whitney is completely holding that down. She's offering coaching. She's got a great platform right now. So anybody interested, you can follow it.

At wit and love, W-H-I-T-N-L-O-V-E. And she's sharing all the wisdom from our relationship and offering coaching. And she has a podcast called True Sex and Wild Love with Wednesday Martin. So she's really kind of diving into that right now and I'm focused more on mindset and the hero's journey for now because quite frankly, you know, my own journey in learning about love is still, I'm still writing. I'm still writing my understanding.

I'm still understanding what it looks like to be in this no relationship relationship. And then ultimately, like I said, I'm pretty sure that I'm gonna be engaging in a period of celibacy and learning like, okay, what's that? What's that path look like? And then ultimately trying to put it all together,

but I'm not in any position right now to say anything with any kind of definitive wisdom or authority on that because I haven't really allowed all of this to set in and explore it. I can certainly offer a lot of advice from where I've been so far, so people who are interested in opening their relationship, but Whitney's been there right along with me for this whole journey and she's got a great perspective. So kind of allowing her to take that thrust of information as it is now and as mine continues to mature,

that'll be a big focus for me in the next five years or so. That's cool. So getting back to our discussion on the good life, we've talked about some guiding principles and some things that people can cerebral keep to give them a North Star they're aiming toward. But anyone who's read James Clears book this year, anyone who hasn't please go and read Atomic Habits because it's fantastic. But he has this wonderful quote in there which says, we do not rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.

And I think that we need structures and habits and routines to instantiate the things that we want to do. So how do you instantiate the things that make a life good to you? What are the structures that you lay your life upon or some habits and some routines that assist you to ensure are the structures that you lay your life upon or some habits and some routines that assist you to ensure you're doing that? Well, I think you got to take care of the body.

That's what owned the day on your life. My first book was about, like, you got to take care of the body. It's the low hanging fruit. If the body's out of alignment, the whole mindset's going to be out of alignment, everything's going to be out of alignment. You're going to be fighting an uphill battle. So handle that shit. You know, it's, it's, there's a lot of intricacies,

but it's largely, it's largely a solved problem. You know, like, stop fucking eating sugar, like, get some sleep, move, you know, move throughout the day, you know, get some sunlight, like, drink some salt water. Yeah, hydrate, there you go. You know, like, you're doing it, sunlight, like drink some salt water. Yeah, hydrate. There you go. You know, like you're doing it. Like, take care of your shit. You know, and like, get the basics, get the basics down. And it doesn't mean you don't need fancy supplements and things like that. You can add those if you want to improve performance and all that. But it's just about like handling the

basics. And then from there, I think it's about a personal ethos and that ethos is, if I see something that I'm afraid of, or that something that I know that there's work that I could do, I head towards it, not away from it. And that's just a personal ethos. So that doesn't mean like actual danger. It doesn't mean if there's like a black widow spider in my shed, I'm going to go try and touch it. You know, that's actual danger that could hurt me.

You know, like I'm talking about emotional fears or these things that are that I'm gonna go try and touch it. You know, that's actual danger that could hurt me You know like I'm talking about emotional fears are these things that are that I'm afraid of exposing some insecurities that I have The ethos that I have my own warrior ethos is like oh I'm scared of that That'll be hard. Okay. I gotta go do it. And that's again. Why I'm doing why I'm doing this I'm probably gonna do this. I'm not gonna wanna commit 100% but I'm likely going to do this celibacy thing, is just because I know it's gonna be fucking hard for me. The people on the internet,

the people on the internet now will have thought there'll be something clipped out of this that's just you saying the word celibacy five times. Right, I know. The people in the internet will believe that it's that, to interject there, there's this quote that I really love and you might have heard it on, might not before. And it it's from Captain David Stott who's a CrossFit Games athlete and the way that she talks about discomfort is similar to yourself and she refers to it as she says lean

into discomfort as if you'd invited it through the door. I really like that analogy, the fact that as discomfort comes towards you, you lean into it. You don't shy away, you don't stand your ground, you lean into it. I really love that visual. It's the only way. You know, it's like if you run away from your discomfort and you, it's that thing is going to chase you down like a grizzly bear. And you know what a grizzly bear does when it catches you? It starts to eat you while you're alive, asshole first. That's what a grizzly bear does.

So go ahead, run away from your fears and run away from those things you're scared of, but that grizzly bear is coming. And when it gets you, it's going to eat you asshole first. So figure it out. Whatever you want to do. Keep running, keep running, keep running, or stand your ground and face it. Okay, so we've got, look after the body,

we've got this ethos of facing up to things that you're scared of. What else? I would say community is another huge, huge piece, you know, like cultivating, cultivating and maintaining a healthy community. And that's people that you're comfortable being revulnerable around and people who you can share everything and people who see you. I don't think we're able or capable of doing this thing alone. It's too hard.

Life is just too hard to do it all by yourself. And I think people put so much emphasis on your partner or like your lover or this one person. But really, I think that emphasis needs to be spread much, much wider out to your entire community. It's your community that supports you because relationships come and go. And that's why I think people are so devastated.

It's like She was my everything. Well, you fucked up. If she was your everything you fucked up Because that's like not a good strategy. It's your trading portfolio entirely 100% in one stock all that 90% stock Right, but that's the fantasy in the fairy tale that we're taught You're my everything, you complete me. Okay, good luck. Good luck with that.

Hope it goes perfect for you. Don't look at the statistics because it's a really risky pet you're making. You know what I'm saying? But if you have it diversified to a wide group of people that are all share and love and vulnerability and things will get fucked up with them too. Like stuff will happen with your friends.

It's not like they're infallible. Even friendships sometimes go through periods of fluctuation. Less commonly so, but it happens. So, but if you have a genuine community and many points of people who you can talk to about anything, it's going to help so, so much. And I think so that to me, and it's actually, you know, for talking, it's kind of interesting because you know, book one is about the body. Book two is about the mind and the journey of awakening

your consciousness and mapping that to the hero's journey. Book three is going to be about love and relationship. And book four is going to be about community. Because I think those are the four pillars of a good life. Take care of the body, understand the mind and how to open it up and look into your shadow, find the way that you can align yourself to love and relationship that's in best accord with yourself and then cultivate and build the community.

And I think those are the really the those are really the principles and then you know book five is actually going to be about all right now how do we apply this everything that we've just talked about so far how do we apply this globally to the whole world. You know like how what would a world look like if we embraced all of these principles? And that's kind of, I imagine that being more of a utopian fiction, I'm gonna have to really sharpen my pencil to get my fiction game, right? But I think you're going to, yeah. Yeah. But that's really a really clear plan for me, and it really exemplifies those things that are the most important to me in my life.

It is, when you break life down into its component parts like that, it can seem so simple. It typically is. That's the thing. It's just simple, but it's simple, but hard. You know, that's like that, that's the truth. Like even the, even like the deepest spirituality is so simple but so hard. Like you listen to Ramdha's, Ramdha's teacher, he had his Maharaj, he said one thing, he said, love everyone, tell the truth. All right, that's simple. Love everyone, tell the truth. Well, that's fucking hard. Love everyone, tell for real. Like if you're gonna do that, that's hard, you know, and then like Ramdas says, love everything, not every being, but everything. I love my pain, I love my wheelchair. I love like it's the eradication of preference, even because you're loving everything. Well, it's simple, but fucking good luck.

Good luck. Pack a lunch. Because that shit's not going to be easy to get to. You know what I mean? So I think a lot of the deep wisdom is very simple, but it doesn't mean that it's easy to execute. Something that people probably get quite confused by, the fact that a lot of simple things are seen as easy day-to-day life. Doing something simple should be easy, but as you've said there, because simplicity has no room for, or limited room for nuance, there's limited room for you to allow that ego to come in and for it to change the rules. If you had love everything, but it was written out and every individual thing you had to love was stated and the document was like the size of a law book, do it be slippage

in between each of those things. But it's not the simplicity is where the difficulties derived from. You said that beautifully, man. I was very, very well articulated. And I think it's absolutely right. Like there's no, it doesn't leave you every any room. Tell the truth. Love everyone. Fuck. Well, what does tell the truth even mean? Is that I'm like, what how truthful is the truth? Well, it's the truth is the truth. I mean, we're talking capital T or right? Like we're not we're're not making exceptions with lowercase T, which is tell the convenient version of it. No, tell the truth. Love everyone. Love everything. There's not a lot of room. There's not a lot of room to wiggle around. And that's why they're so powerful. Talking about the truth, it's something which comes up all the time.

I was doing a political podcast. I was in London on a political podcast and ended up talking about the truth. And why it's so important for us. People layer a lot of, they layer a lot of personas and they're able to hide their truth very successfully. I know I've done it incredibly well, very skillfully at some points in my life and it's taken a lot of work to unpack what that truth is. I wondered whether you had any advice for someone who was potentially layered on top of their truth, so many personas

that they're struggling to find it anymore. Well, you got to catch on to yourself. And like, I'm not much different than you. I recognize how fucking slippery I am because the ability to justify and rationalize and create a story to make this truth, this truth, quotation mark, truth. Low, low case. Low, low case. Yeah, low case, T quotation mark, asterisk, italic truth, that you're expressing. Like, my ability to do that is really, it's really quite remarkable.

Like, I can be really like, really slippery with how I can massage things and how I can project things. And, and you know, there's some studies done that show that like 55% of what you're communicating is received by a body language, 35% is received by tonality, and like less than 10% is received by the actual words that you say. So you could even be saying the words,

but expressing them in an untrue way, you know, that's being manipulative. And so it's like, you have to catch on to yourself. You have to like beyond your like, like realize, like, okay, I see, I see you there, Aubrey being slippery and fucking doing that thing. You know, I see projecting this air of confidence, even though your words are, you know, quite vulnerable or vice versa, you know, like, it's, you just have to kind of catch onto yourself and realize what you're doing.

And that takes the eradication, first of all, of shame. Like I think, I think that's a big thing that limits us from seeing our truth and being on to ourselves as being ashamed of the truth. And then also, we have to let go of our desire to manipulate, selfishly manipulate reality for our own interest.

You know, like truth is love. Tell the truth and love everyone is actually the same thing, you know, because you can't love someone without telling them the truth. It's not, it's a temporary, it's a temporary ameliorant. It's like giving them, it's like the loving thing to do is not to give somebody, you know, a candy bar. It's to give somebody like a healthy meal. Do you know how many times I use that exact analogy when I'm talking to people? And I relate it back to Jordan Peterson's Be Friends with People Who Want The Best View.

Be Friends with People Who Want The Best View is not tell people what they want to hear. It's very often tell people what they don't want to hear. And some of my best friends, I can identify the people who have my best interests at heart, because they don't swallow my bullshit, wholesale or part sale of fucking like micron scale. They do not, they don't let me get away with it. And yeah, the analogy is like a child wants ice cream every night. Like, that's not what's good for it, but that is what it wants. But that doesn't mean that's not what's good for it, but that is what it wants, but it doesn't mean that's what it should get. Right, exactly.

Exactly, and it's just having the patience, even if there's a little tantrum. You know, it's like, I'm on ice cream for dinner. You know, and you're like, I'm sorry, sweetie, we're gonna have fucking chicken for dinner. You know, and it's like, no! Like, you have to just it's like, no, like you have to just hold the whole that space and say, um, chicken is best. You know what I mean? Tonight.

And maybe someday there'll be ice cream, you know, for sure. But like, that is, it is having that the ability to just share that with somebody and have them receive it and to be able to withstand those temporary reactions that people might have because you know that it's the most loving thing that you can do because it's not enabling them to continue on their own path of delusion. We have to understand that our purpose here is to wake up to the truth of who we are and that all of the truth, it's all around us because that's all the love that's all around us too. And so if we're all here to wake up to that truth and we're shielding that truth from somebody, we're doing them a great disservice. It's a lot easier to be a good friend to someone else than it is to yourself though.

Like the perspective, the perspective that we have when talking to someone else, I recently wrote an Instagram post about this, about the fact that the likelihood of you ensuring that your dog completes its course of antibiotics is over 90%. The likelihood of you ensuring that you complete your course of antibiotics is under 50%. And it tells us something very interesting about how easy it is to care for others and how difficult it is to care for ourselves. But this analogy that a friend told me that stuck with me is when you're in an airplane, why are you told to put your oxygen mask on first? Because if you're suffocating, you're a very little use to everybody else around you. You're a very little use to everybody else around you.

That's true. Yeah, to be of service, you have to be fit for service. That's what my late spiritual teacher Don Howard used to always say. And that's the mastermind group that I formed to. The fit for service mastermind based on long that principle. Like you have to take care of yourself and you have to be overflowing with your own abundance of energy, love, time, resources, everything in order to actually be of certain true real service to anybody or the world. And it begins with yourself. I once had someone said, I forget where it came from, but someone says that in a healthy relationship instead of serving someone from your cup, you actually

serve them from the overflow that fills the saucer around the cup, so that no one's actually ever drinking from your own cup of your own love and your own resource and energy, but you have so much that it's always overflowing like a fountain and filling the saucer, and there's plenty to drink from the saucer. And then that's like a really good metaphor, I think, for how we have to take care of ourselves, because the moment our cup's empty, well, we're not going to be of any use to anybody. We're first of all going to be miserable, but second of all, we're not going to be helpful to anybody else either.

It's a Jordan Petersonism as well, isn't it, to pick up the heaviest weight that you can and bear it and then continue to do that. And you may be able to, at first, off carry your own weight and then carry the weight of the people around you and then carry the weight of your community. It's this hilarious idea that I think progressive overload is king in every domain from strength training to mind training. Yeah, yeah, no doubt, man. Yeah, another great way to put it. So before we go, Aubrey, obviously, we've got your books out at the moment. I want to know, and I'm sure a lot of people that are listening and want to know, what are you working on right now? Like, what's a day in terms of project look like for you?

What a day in terms of project look like for you. I mean, I think the podcast is something that I really love. So that's the Aubrey Marks podcast. And then the fit for service mastermind I just recently mentioned that's been just blown away all the expectations of like forming a real community around the ideas. On and of course continues to grow and beat its drum and its message about being a little bit better tomorrow than you are today and helping the body. And then I'm going to start writing my book, my next book coming up pretty soon here as well. And so that all starts to take up a lot of time. So there's always a lot of things

in the works, but nothing too well, and then there's the daily Instagram posts and everything that I put out on that channel as well. So just kind of doing all the things, man. Just doing all the things and just trying to learn, learn and grow, in fact, what I said at the start. Very interestingly, we actually, I think, have been linked in. The reason that we've got this podcast happening

is because of Ross, one of the guys who's in your group. And... Beautiful. And episode 12 on this podcast was with Mutual Friend and Beautiful Voice, Mr. Corrie Allen. Oh, no. So Corrie's been on. And yeah, I think one of the things that does strike me is very

interesting is when someone is working incredibly hard and incredibly ruthlessly to try and sort out their own shit. And you have a very single sort of linear focus in terms of how all of these products align. You know, you see some entrepreneurs or professionals or personalities, however you want to name it, and you look at the portfolio of things that contribute to make up their life in terms of where they invest their time. And you think these are quite piecemeal here. Yeah, something from over there and something from over there. And I don't really see how this is one cohesive unit, but I can't I can't really say that for yourself and as well, you know, this episode is not brought to you by on it. However, the only nitropic that I've ever

used, which I bet is is alpha brain. And that's that's honestly, man, it is when I need I haven't used it tonight because when my house, my house, my house says my house, my house, I was like, what do you have a coffee now for breakfast? I was like, it's 8 p.m. I'm not psychopath. Like, I'm not gonna have a coffee at 8 p.m. But yeah, when I need that extra little kick, it really does help.

And, you know, I think that having someone who is in your position who is pushing a more holistic view of the mind, a more complete view of how we should progress as ourselves, I think it's something that's very worthwhile and I'm looking forward to seeing what you achieve over the coming years. Thank you, brother. I appreciate that, man. And I always appreciate someone who has an introspection and insight and surprises me with their own mental machinations. So keep doing what you're doing man. Doing good work. Everything that we've spoken about today from Orbrae's book to his Instagram and his fantastic

podcast will be linked in the show notes below. Of course, Orbrae, it's been awesome man. Yeah, likewise brother.