The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - How I Built A $400 Million Company With Joe Rogan! (Incredible Story) Aubrey Marcus

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

In this new episode Steven sits down with the American entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author Aubrey Marcus. Aubrey founded Onnit in 2010, the company was built upon the philosophy of providing it’s customers with the supplements and equipment necessary to achieve ‘Total Human Optimisation’. It was the release of the nootropic Alpha BRAIN in 2011 and partnership with Joe Rogan that Onnit began to achieve rapid success. Aubrey stepped down as Onnit’s CEO in 2020 and since then founded the coaching platform ‘Fit For Service’, as well as hosts the ’Aubrey Marcus Podcast’. In this conversation Aubrey and Steven discuss topics, such as: His friendship and partnership with Joe Rogan The power of psychedelic medicine and how it changed his life His journey with polyamory and why he will never be in a open relationship again The role that his family played in his later success Why the modern world desperately needs connection and community Aubrey is the author of ‘Own the Day, Own Your Life’, which you can purchase here: https://bit.ly/41QJXYw Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. With Joe Rogan as my partner, we sold out in 12 hours. Zero to 60 million. How? Step one. It was f***ing wild. Aubrey Marcus. The man who built and sold on it 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 was so many failures and I really thought like, I'm just never gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 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? you can see how much it still affects me what happened aubrey when i read through your story and a lot of people's story, what I tend to see is a series of almost dominoes that have fallen to make the person who they are today that 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 sat 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 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 and 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 the 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 just 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 that 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 on it, and your current mission today through all of the work you're doing, what is the mission there? If I asked you right now, what is your mission in life?

What would it be? If you were to ask me, I don't know 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 in my company and i created on it 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, all right, 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 that's the mission man do you have an answer to that i do to the best of my knowledge now it's a 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 is 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 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 on to those tight and everything gets really awkward when you go 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 got to 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 Temescal. 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. 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 got to really deal with this collective fear, this fear that's just whipped around the world and deal with this collective fear and then say, all right, we are one. 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 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 the things is just live a new story. So start living the new story of the self, live the new story of the things is to 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 uh 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 in oftentimes violent ways. 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 Mark Gaffney, would say, 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 souls 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 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 I said at the start, there's 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 if you look back as an adult is that a significant moment the ramifications of that were incredibly significant because it brought in my stepmother 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. The difference between my father and my stepfather were immense. What were those differences well my father was an incredibly acute and attuned intellectual 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 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 as a hero against that which didn't serve. 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 ways that your mind can't even comprehend. So things that my dad was stressed about, I find myself being stressed about because it transmitted this kind of general sense of worry about things. So I've had to unlearn those aspects of worry.

My father also was wanting to fly into fits of rage at a certain point i remember one time um this is a very like very important story in my own trajectory uh because my father when he would get angry he would start he would just yell you know just like he would just erupt and um it was early and early after i started on it 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 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. And 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 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 that was our front desk girl it 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 in her desk in that moment i realized like i'm not gonna do that ever again like i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna fly into a fit of rage and hurt somebody you know i like 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 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 apologize 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 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 grand he did his best. 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 a great job. Compared to the stories of my grandfather, to him, he did an 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,

of course, source willing that 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 mountain, 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, 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 approval that of course of course have you got an example of when you realized that you would you were following that pattern? I mean, the examples 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? It was the subconscious dialogue

that I've been in for a long time. Now, it was my father first, you 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'd 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 yeah 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 mis-hit a ball hit off the corner of the paddle flew up into the into the stratosphere basically because he was trying to hit a smash and i go home run i'm just a kid and i was like i thought that was a funny thing to say but for my father he was 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 for saying that during his ping pong match because it threw him off his game or 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 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 you know 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 would explain it's mentally exhausting and anxious you know and it's i live 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 of that, but every once in a while for a text that matters, I'll look at it and I'll see 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 gonna take any of these different interpretations and then abandon you or get mad at you or anything like that 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 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 psychic like psychonautic technologies that can get you there from sensory deprivation tanks to sweat lodges to lots of things.

But I have done many and 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 you can look inside into your inner cosmos with a k and that's the way the greeks spelled it and and say like okay like what's 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 yeah that's right you went on a um you call it like a vision is it like a vision mission i can't remember the word you used yeah um after high school yeah that was it a vision

mission yeah it's 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 Nations, you know, kind of style. 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 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 described that from 20 onwards, you were still relatively sort of lost and seeking approval and partying a lot oh yeah drinking a lot so there's a it was interesting because i'd 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 i there was not a point where i 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 the things that I really want to do. So I wouldn't have changed it, but there was a focus on me, you know, from a 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 really like I was failing at it I had a marketing company and I kept getting fired by my different clients and even if I did a good job and I would start I would start things I it's funny actually I smashed my uh for those looking I smashed my finger and it was all purple so I painted 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 was so many failures and I really thought like I'm just never

going to succeed I mean I made it I made a decent living you know I always always found a client or always found somebody that I 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? Or 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 a young stallion and they're bucking around in their heart you got to run them a little bit you got to 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, 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, feeling when I watched Joe Rogan do comedy. And we're talking 2008. 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. I know we're friends. And I would meet him after a show or I'd run into him at a club and I'd be like, hey, man. But nothing would ever stick, of course, because I was a fan and he was the guy. And it's very difficult to bridge that gap in that kind of social construct. So he started a podcast. And I was following what it was like oh wow and that was old joe rogan days back with brian redband and there was no podcast advertising then again podcast was in its infancy he had no podcast advertisers so i had one of my

clients and i was like look we should advertise should advertise on Joe Rogan's podcast. We got to 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 advertise Fleshlight. He's like, damn right, I can't. I don't want anybody to take me so seriously that i can't you know advertise for this thing and so which is a sex toy for anybody that doesn't yeah it's a sex toy for men but what i stipulated in that was like all right yeah we're we're totally down we'll be

your 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 Bodie 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, yeah, 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 is some knowledge inside me that no, this coffee with Joee 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 on it 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 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 Bodhi, my friend, who, so one gave 50,000, the other gave 60,000 that was the start of on it 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 oh man I'd like a all-natural nootropic that really worked a nootropic being a cognitive handsome and i was like you know what joe i'm gonna make the best one that's ever been made he's like all right 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 and send 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 on it from literally nothing at that point, other than the resources that we'd applied to having a website and having a shopping cart, et cetera. 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? Yeah. 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 uh we sold a little bit but we had a lot of inventory we couldn't sell it and we were failing it was another failed business just like my men's nail polish company 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 Inc 500 fastest growing company over the next four years because we actually went from 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, you know, 35 million, 45 million. You know, then we 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 an amazing blessing of abundance of resources. And one of the coolest parts about that is so many people in my life, talking about community again, so many people in my life got little pieces of the company. Like my friend, Makad 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 for so many people. 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 hundred 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'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. Yeah. What would you say to those people?

Because I mean, a lot of our listenership are exactly that person they have an idea that they're pursuing a dream they may be for the wrong or the right reasons i mean who am i to say how to to define what either of those um are but what would you say to them in order to prepare them for that roller coaster you have to see. You have to see it. You have to see, really see it. Like see it with clear eyes, not with the diluted 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 happen, it wouldn't have happened. You know, it's the funniest thing. 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 happen, 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 like yeah i'm gonna 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 it'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 site 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 i a few thoughts sprung to mind when you said it talked about seeing it so the first one is what role does seeing it play? Because you talked about the adversity. You kind of like glossed over the adversity of that journey. And I think part of the reason I started this podcast in the first place was because I think the adversity matters just as much as the eventual achievement. For sure.

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 because 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 just get any nail polish there i didn't really see it right and with on it 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 and on it you know it 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 cyber security i mean i thought we did but we didn't obviously and there was a choice point. You know, 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 got to 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'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 on it products 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 and 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 adversity that comes from those things that those monsters that come from the grass that were slithering around or hiding 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 that 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, and that was, that was kind of the guiding principle is 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 seeing it, one of the things that came to mind as well was 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 second question here is about seeing it is, what would you say to an entrepreneur that's starting a business, maybe 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 because 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 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. 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 all right and then our coo

who ended up becoming the ceo when i stepped down in 2020 right before like a year before the sale uh he guided us through and we made it and And we made it because of the relationships that we'd held with honesty and with good faith with everybody. We weren't playing games with anybody. So they trusted us. We were like, hey, we're in a really tight spot. But if you trust us and you allow us to pay late, you extend our terms from 30 net 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 they what got us through that moment so that cfo that walked down yeah he made a big mistake he made a big mistake he had also he had you know he had an

equity position he had options that he that he you know forfeited whoops whoops you know our current ceo our current ceo i mean not current ceo the ceo that emerged jason havey he he couldn't he's such a such a sweet guy, but he couldn't help but send on the anniversary of that day where the CFO walked out and just told us straight up that we were going to be out of business. For the next couple of years on that anniversary, we'd 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 that's natural selection of life there's some people in the hardest times they bail right and right there therefore they aren't deserving of those of good good moments exactly per se you left in 2020 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? 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 and it's certain he's really not actually running any of the companies that he's running 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 on it for 10 years he transitioned out so he's now no longer there and so we make 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 pnls 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 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 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 um how I learned my model of love the good and the bad the ugly of it and relationships very early and i've talked a lot about um how i learned my model of love the good and 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 learned that relationships mean you're in prison basically the like 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 a lot 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 in your

story, which you know, I'm going to talk about. Yeah. Cause 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. 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 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 fiance 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 our 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 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 time 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 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, and 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 was,

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. 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's 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's 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 on it to what it's going to become. And I step forward in the world. 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 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, 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 man 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 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 all right let's be polyamorous. And I thought that I would be okay with Whitney seeing other people. I thought I was going to, 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, all right, 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 had 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. And I was like, how stupid? Like, she doesn't love me because I'm a fighter. 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's 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 primary partners this had so many challenges and moments where every different boundary that we thought we had well all right 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 that 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 you the person can feel that you'd rather be with somebody else and it was just 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's so much pressure in the system because of the natural emotions of jealousy and 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 was 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 Vailana and Vailana 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 Vailana 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 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 ups and downs, the brisk wind, the floating into the twilight sunsets of just glorious, beautiful experiences. And then the card crashes into the rocky crags where it's all blood and broken glass everywhere, 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 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 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 again. We're going upstream against the 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. I've often pondered if there's some kind of like evolutionary Darwinistic reason why it doesn't work. And it would make sense from a Darwinistic perspective that I want my seed to pass on and I want my genes to survive. So 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 impulse is to reproduce right like 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?

But really to make it work, we got to 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, 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 was reflecting as you were saying that about the tribe on various cult documentaries i've watched where there's still jealousy you know um even though they're a unit they're one big family of course you still see that jealousy throughout yeah i think that jealousy is less like about a evolutionary biology and more about the ego the The ego knows itself in relative position. It's a construct that we create to help navigate our life 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. Violana, is that the name? Oh yeah.

Violana? Violana. Your face lights up when you say her name. Yeah. Why is that? What does 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 i thought it would be like a i thought that i'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 violana 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 sounds unbelievable. It doesn't sound like it's believable. 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 violana.

I wish I could go with a straight face and say like, there's your violana out there. And for violanas 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 see this possibility. And when we got together, I mean 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 and but really but really though like i just i just knew i could feel it and i knew it and i knew she was i knew she was my queen i just knew I could feel it. And I knew it. And I knew she was my queen.

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, attributesities energies emotionalities sexualities but we merge together and together we're just so much more and life is so much more beautiful uh 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 that you know you go to a wedding

and you know all the old timers would be like yeah you gotta learn to compromise and you're gonna have to pick your battles and 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 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 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 the cleaning the connection and the intimacy between us all the time when you look back in in hindsight, because 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. So like, had you met Violana 10 years earlier, one would assume maybe... Yeah, no, it wouldn't have worked. What was, when you reflect in hindsight, what was the work that you kind of needed to do to be ready to receive a violana?

Well, the stallion had to run. The stallion had to run, step one. I needed to run. 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 and who fucking cares well 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 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 are not mentioned in that you're in there too right because there was moments that elicited some aspect of me, some quality that came online, came alive, and I was able to help something come alive in them.

It was so beautiful. And I think 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, Philana, 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, 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 would 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 that the moment of trigger where you get hooked, they call it Shempa. 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 and so but you can with awareness you can feel it coming and then you can start to develop your you know the right react the processes

and practices about what to do my I have two really dear friends, Christine Hassler and Stefano Sofandos, 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 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 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. So they developed this method that they literally use and there's some of the most conscious people there you know there but they have as they have a strategy they have a practice and so vailana 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 all right 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 parlay it's like the pirates when they're all shooting each other they're like parlay and then they go and they're like all right let's talk this out a little bit okay so you like stepping outside right so we'll have like we'll have a construct we'll be like basically called parlay 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 anytime we're in like the deepest state of love,

we'll be like, this is the bedrock. This is where 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, 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's 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 violana 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 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. There's like,

you want to take more? You're like, no, hold, I'm holding a 10. Like, that's all I can take. You got to come 90. Otherwise like this is an impasse. And, and I, and 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 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 study of why couples end up in divorce, it wasn't arguing or anything else.

It was a buildup 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 you got the example i gave on stage when i did the diversity of love tour was your partner going babe come look at this and you go that yeah 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 an everyday battle underneath that and i know because my partner sat over there we do this we we have the same everyday battle because some days i don't want to talk yeah 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 and leave, run away, you know, whatever. And being able to continually confront that I think is a 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 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 know, carry your bullshit story of it's all their fault and you're a victim, and then go drink a couple cups of and see if ayahuasca agrees with you you know like it like it's uh there's a i'm 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 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 then 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 Vailana 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, all right, man, we split up. I think she appreciated it. And I think she's still working through her own process with that. And it's our own process of feeling any grievances we've had. But I just try to do my best to own my fault and mistakes in it.

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 and sometimes just have the humility to be like yeah i was an idiot or i was i made a mistake or all of these things and not 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'm

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 and then the other voice somehow wins out and says, you fucked up. You know you reacted badly there. You should just go and apologize. And I did this the other day with her where we'd had a bit of a disagreement about something. And, you know, a couple of hours passes,

maybe 12 hours or something passes, I realize I fucked up. So I pick myself up. And I walk over to her and I just say, you know you know what from yesterday i just want to say i'm really sorry because in reflection my reaction was not good there and it didn't make sense and i realized it hurt you etc etc and i'm really sorry about that i wish i'd reacted differently in hindsight and upon looking at my behavior i realized 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 i just lifted yeah it was like my ego had been fired i felt great yeah 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 but yeah it's great 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 into hours yeah 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 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 mean i remember the last little conflict violana and i had actually involved this painted fingernail i'll tell i'll tell this story so uh 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 i'm 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 that bother you and as i went to this

whole thing and i was like all right 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 flipped the latch on the thing so I could lay flat down because 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'm like, get up. And I want to like scream and hit something because 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 I'm like 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 because 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 when i was like why did you ask me to tan my back she was like oh actually i just wanted to stay you know it took her a moment but eventually it was like actually i just wanted to stay you know 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 critique of my tan gradient you know and uh 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 it's like all right and like i took like three you know 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 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's like this whole bullet pointed long long message and i sent that to her and i was like all right that's the truth of it and then she receives that she comes back and she's like all right 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 i 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 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 still find very uncomfortable, especially men in my experience. We actually made something to help our listeners become a little bit more vulnerable. And these are 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 all right 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 here we go 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 it's not really 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. I'm here in Hollywood. There's lots of sounds, lots of noises 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 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 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 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 a 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 flush 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, all right, 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 because 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 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, et cetera. Like 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 though of awareness is you've clearly you're clearly very aware and that's what you know when i think about helping my friends or i look at my friend's situations when they're struggling with something that first step of really being aware of it like you even know that it's a voice that calls you to the draw um which means you know from my observation that I also fully feel like you've done much of the hard work already by just admitting it to yourself. Yeah. 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 confronted that.

Yeah. And it's funny because you've confronted it, even 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. For anybody that isn't aware of what you're working on with Fit for Service, what is it? And 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 explorative practices now we don't do psychedelic medicine as far as the things you take but we do do all the psychedelic practices from, you know, shamanic breath work, which is incredibly powerful. You know, many facilitators, deep, deep breathing, huge emotional catharsis, ecstatic dance, you know, vision quests out on the land or, you know, wanders out on the land, vision quests are, again, longer sometimes. You know, Temescal, Inipi sweat lodges, you know wanders out on the land vision quests are again longer sometimes um you know temescal inipi sweat lodges you know by the first nations 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 somebody in fit for service that you know will be a friend for the rest of your life 100 say% say yes. And so we're building, yes, there's the greater Fit for Service tribe where there's a lot of, there'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

because you could see yourself in that other person or you were there with them in that one breath work that was so intense and the wind was whipping and everybody was screaming and there was 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 some ways as we were talking about nobody wants

to mind in some ways you do expose yourself to your own darkness willingly by going into a breath work or going into an eye 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 to illuminate the light and uh and just doing that together and it's been it's been really incredible it doesn't feel it doesn't feel at all like like work it feels like i would do this and 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 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 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 a little moment where we get to be in our own little jedi school and just evolving our our own internal psychic and an emotional and a physical technology i watched the um video on your website fit for service.com and it looked um i don't know so sometimes just observing a clip or a trailer can make you feel a certain sense of warmth and connectedness and that's what I got I felt like a big group of friends that were 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 I think everybody should go check it out. Just go watch the video and go see if it's calling you. Because I think there'll be a lot of people out there that will realize just from watching that video that it's right for them. We do have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest.

See what has been left for you. Oh, okay. Oh, interesting. I actually don't get to see the question before we open the book, but 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 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 on are you saying the words and are you there true forgiveness is the place of love that sees no that sees no wrong right 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 this 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. When I get to that place where I've seen 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 as 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's 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 has done something and I haven't quite, I haven't quite worked that into my, into the way that I can say like, all right, this was for the best. If I had to say, I would have to say the governments of the world right now. I don't think I've fully forgiven them in 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 all right the two like if we take the lord of 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 and the wizards and the humans and everybody comes together and it's necessary for the two towers to be to be built 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 forgiving empire. And I use empire to be that whole construct of that kind of top-down, manipulative, dystopian control that 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 not quite yet not quite yet

but maybe when the full fellowship comes together and we have all of the out because i start i'm starting to see that happen like all of the allies are forming this lattice work, this network that's now becoming more available because of the pressure of the force of empire. But until that fully actually crystallizes it and it works, I don't think 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 the most difficult questions but also you 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'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 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 it's 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 any more 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's been an honor to meet you and spend time with you. I feel freer. I feel inspired. I feel more powerful for it.

And I hope we can have it again once the goblins and the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, let's get all the characters together. I've never seen Lord of the Rings. This is happening. Here we are. Here we are. Another ladder, another connection,

another node in Indra's net was formed. Sorry, empire. It's happening. Aubrey, thank you. You're welcome, brother. Thank you.