What is the operating system that defines truly successful people? In interviewing dozens of the most successful people in the world, Alex Banayan distilled the essence down to a single thing. In addition to deeply discussing this concept, we discuss the importance of Sabbath, digital addiction, and he shares a powerful and emotional story about his interview with Jessica Alba. Alex is always one of my favorite people to talk to. 

AUBREY: Do you want to finish that thought? 

ALEX: I was just going to say, the past few years, a lot of it for me has been, you know when doctors want to find out what you're allergic to, they take everything away. And then they introduce them one at a time. 

AUBREY: Elimination diet.

ALEX: Elimination. I was on an elimination diet. They were like, here's your entire lifestyle. We're taking it all away. Your yoga class, your going to the gym, your in-person speaking, in-person podcast, taking it all away. And then one by one, we're going to reintroduce. And I've been seeing the past six months, what I'm allergic to and what is fuel for my soul. 

AUBREY: And what is it? 

ALEX: The fuel for the soul? 

AUBREY: What are you allergic to and what's your fuel for the soul? 

ALEX: Allergic to. I have this weird term, I call it. Suppressive energy. You know when you're at a dinner party with people and you just tell they all just suppress all of their emotions? I didn't even realize how much that affects me until recently. I can't even be in the room. Or I can't be in the room, it's just painful. 

AUBREY: And which emotions in particular that someone is suppressing? Can you tell? Or do you just feel like there's a flatness to their expression that's not getting into the deeper waters? 

ALEX: You know when you ask someone, how are you? Good, good, good, good. How are you? 

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah. 

ALEX: I can do that one time. But when I'm in a room where the whole thing is that, I love them. God bless them. I think I feel a little unsafe. Because I'm like the person, when I sit with you, I'm like, oh. Let's just talk about whatever. I know when I'm with you, I can say whatever and you can say whatever. And it just feels very open. 

AUBREY: It's an interesting topic because it is, I haven't really identified it and nor have I used, obviously, the language of suppressive energy. But it's also a projection energy as well, because they're not only suppressing the truth, but they're projecting an artificial reality. 

ALEX: What they want you to see. 

AUBREY: They're projecting some veneer of everything's fine, or I'm this persona. But it's not the real real. And some personas are actually quite, if someone is really skilled at it, a persona can actually be interesting. And usually they have to fuel it with something real if the persona is interesting. But a lot of people like, say, it's like a boring persona that's not true. But there's always something beautiful and interesting and intoxicating about truth. That's the thing. They're thinking they're doing something good, but really, they got the diamonds, man. They got the fucking diamonds right under the surface. And if they just peel off that gray, dull layer of suppression, they're going to be revealing an iced out fucking character. 

ALEX: And I love characters. Like give me a happy character, depressed character, a confused character. I would love to sit with someone, hearing that they are completely lost in their life. I'm fascinated. But hearing, I'm good. Things are great. Work is great. The family's great, thank God. How about you? I'm like, I hear someone's calling me in the other room. I don't know why. I think maybe in my childhood, I had a lot of that. So maybe it makes me feel unsafe. I don't know. But I like the messiness. 

AUBREY: Well, there is a psychological you know, I wouldn't say it's a truism because I don't always believe it. But people in psychology often say that those things that trigger you are things that have bothered you about yourself. So, do you feel that you have ever expressed that? 

ALEX: At my worst, yeah. At my worst, at my lowest. Even when "The Third Door" was coming out, there was a part of me that felt I had to do that. I know, we talked about it. The year before the book came out, my dad passed. My friend, who we've known each other since we were five years old, she passed away at age 25. Two days after the book came out, my grandpa died. 30 days later, my grandma died. There was a part of me that even when the book came out, had to be 90% real. It just wasn't appropriate to go on NBC News and cry. It just isn't appropriate. 

AUBREY: It would have been a gangster move, actually, though. 

ALEX: In a weird way, I get what you're saying. 

AUBREY: In a weird way, it would have been that disruptive thing. It may not have worked at all, but I'd always err on the side of, but maybe it would. But maybe fuck it. 

ALEX: I can see the headline, like, random 25-year-old sobs on NBC News about his grandmother. 

AUBREY: But it really if they aired that, though, the attention would be like, man, I put everything I could into "The Third Door" and it was fucking amazing. But right now, I'm just broken. Because my best friend died. I'm praying that this book reaches people and gives them inspiration because right now I'm broken and that's what I'm clinging to. And then the fucking newscasters are the worst at this shit. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Who the fuck are you? What do you really feel? What is this nonsense? They might have been like, oh, wow. And then some real shit might have happened. And then the diamonds, the iced out character of both of you might have started sparkling. And that's the interesting thing about vulnerability is even in the most inappropriate place, it still has this transformative power. It's magic. That realness is magic. And I think that's what you're saying. You want to be in a magical world, where magic is happening. 

ALEX: And cultivate it consciously, not just when I'm at my best. But how do I consciously cultivate the diamonds? I like calling it the diamonds. That's a good way to see it. Because even the sadness is a diamond, even the grief is a diamond, even the confusion is a diamond. How do you cultivate a life where you're just pulling diamonds every day? 

AUBREY: That's the enemy of the poet, it's the numbness. It's the dull, sticky film that covers all the gems that makes everything homogenous and gray. And then you can project with your little projector screen of your mind whatever you want on the gray film that's covering, you're actually, imperfect, flawed, but beautiful diamonds. That's the enemy. Because if you're feeling, it's just like a different chord on the piano of all of the possible energy that you could feel when you zoom out to the divine perspective. When it's that pure note, whatever it is, whether it's grief, or whether it's joy, or whether it's lust, or whatever, it's just, whatever. It's the church organ of the divine and it's playing. 

ALEX: You're so good. It's like you're speaking to my soul right now. And the craziest part is if I have to be very real and look at all the moments in my life where I have the film, I did it to myself. And I did it to myself out of fear of what would happen if I actually felt the full church organs. 

AUBREY: Right. Right. Yeah, it's scary. Those things are deep, man. When you really, really feel. That's one of the things that psychedelics can do, which I really love, particularly mushrooms. I had a mushroom. I did a three day fast and I did a mushroom ceremony at the end, just really to cleanse myself. Kind of like a purification ritual before our last Fit For Service event, which was stunning, by the way. But I would think about things that I was normally, a little bit excited about, like, that's cool. But I would think about them and I would feel the full force of it. Or look at something. Like I remember, there's a new movie coming out called "Cyrano" with Peter Dinklage. And "Cyrano's," my favorite player of all time, Cyrano de Bergerac. And they're remaking—

ALEX: That's the guy with the nose? 

AUBREY: Yeah. So in the play, he has the nose and that's what makes him unattractive. And that's what makes him feel like he's unworthy of having Roxanne love him. So He gives Christian, the beautiful cadet, all of his letters and words and so Roxanne falls in love with Christian because he's beautiful and it's Cyrano's words. But she's really falling in love with the soul of Cyrano. So, it's this beautiful tragic love story with my favorite hero of all time. But they recast it with Peter Dinklage's Cyrano. So it's not about his nose, but he's a little person. And that's way more interesting than just having a big nose. And it's beautiful. And so anyways. I'm really excited about this. I think it's a beautiful retelling of this. And I was thinking, and it just hit me, I was like, this is fucking great. This is great. This is a great thing. And I just kept saying, this is a great thing. I was just thinking about the societal implications and the message that the story brings. And how it's bringing in this awareness of loving someone despite being different. And it just fucking blew my mind. And I looked out at Bear Mountain at another time and I was just like, “wow! This is unbelievably beautiful. Wow!” And we get so few of these moments where we really feel that thing to the fullest. And whatever it is, you don't need medicine, psychedelics to do this. But somehow, some way, we got to tap into that awe again, where it's not that dull church organ from three doors away, where you're just casually passing by and like, what's that note? Oh, it's joy. But I'm not in the room. 

ALEX: You're banging the keys yourself. 

AUBREY: We want to be banging the keys. We want to be in the pipes. We want to be in the pipes of the organ just “Brr!”. There's a million different ways to get there. But one way or another, we got to find our way there. Could be tantra, could be breathwork, could be meditation, could be just choice, could be whatever. But we got to find a way to feel the fucking feels because that's what we're here for. 

ALEX: My biggest takeaway from studying success for 10 years is that people aren't looking for success. They're looking for that. Because I know people and I know you know people who have achieved societal success, got $100 million exit, got a billion on Bitcoin and still are miserable. And when they hear you talk about that, they say I want that, which is definitive proof that it's not the $100 mil. It's that. 

AUBREY: Yeah. People are chasing sensations, not things. What do we really want? 

ALEX: We were promised that things would give us a sensation. If you watch "Wolf of Wall Street," the movie, it tells you if you have the money, then you will feel this sensation. If your girl looks like this, if your guy looks like that, you will feel this. And then we get to the mountaintop and we say, this doesn't feel at all what they said it would feel like. And then you go back into the valley and start doing the work if you're lucky. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Or there's some kind of chain of causality that gets you something that will make you feel something. Go back to "Scarface." First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women. So the whole thing was just a play to get women. And women will make you feel something, or men, conversely. But eventually, it won't. You can get absolutely hedonic-tolerant to that expression as well. Because all of these things that we chase extrinsically will not satisfy our intrinsic desire, ultimately. I mean, we can use them, but we got to really find that shit internally. But yeah. So much of everything. We're promised all of these different extrinsic things, all of these achievements are told they're going to give us something and they will for a hot moment. But then we'll have the fear of losing them, the distress about what if it doesn't happen? And the endless quest to find the exponential next thing that's even bigger? Like if you make $10 million, it's not like making another $10 million is exciting. You got to go exponential. You got to make $100 million once you get to $10 to even give you—

ALEX: It starts evolving into an addiction in its own right. 

AUBREY: Fuck yeah, it does. And if you get to $100 million, well, billions's the only thing that's going to make you happy. And guess what? Still not going to fucking make you happy. That's the challenge. 

ALEX: It is hard unless, like yourself, you devote your life to studying this. It is hard to wrap your mind around the idea that essentially is counter to everything we're sold in movies and TV, that a X amount of external success isn't going to make me feel good. It's just hard to wrap your mind around if you just grew up in America, watching movies and TV. When you're a kid, you see the cheerleader is the one that makes the guy, or whatever it is. It's literally taken me 10 years on this journey to come to these realizations. 

AUBREY: The thing that it will do is, there's a variety of different common challenges that people express. One of the challenges is a deeply ingrained belief that I'm here to do something big and important, and I'm here to accomplish something great. And it is fundamentally important to satisfy that urge, I think. In some ways, it's better to have that urge, and be very purpose-driven. I'm here to accomplish something great, not just for myself, but for the world. And hopefully, those things are woven together. So you can reach a point where you do get some satiation of that. That can alleviate a certain amount of depression. Like, for example, I was very depressed in my late 20s going into 30. I was running a marketing company, I was helping sell fucking Fleshlights, and oil and gas, whatever I could. I was so depressed. I was like, man, I made a left turn when I should have made a right turn. And here I am running this tiny marketing company boutique, selling stuff that is whatever. And I wasn't happy. I built Onnit up. And it did give me this sense of like, okay, now I'm doing something. I'm doing something. Doesn't mean that it ultimately fulfilled it, but it just shifted things to a slightly different type of problem. And it's almost like there's an evolution of problem solving. So I don't want to denigrate the idea that this doesn't solve any problems. It does solve some problems, it just won't solve all the problems. It'll just shift the problems. And maybe that lily pad strategy of, okay, solve this problem, then this problem, then this problem. Then finally, you can get to the universal problem, which is all about how much you fucking love yourself. 

ALEX: Dude, we can end the podcast right there? But that's essentially the conclusion, right? But that's the whole life. There's this great Paulo Coelho quote that says, life is a long march from fear to love. 

AUBREY: That's beautiful. 

ALEX: That's it. What else is there? Everything else is just an attempt to get close to that statement. But what else is there? 

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah. And it's almost like, love to fear to love. 

ALEX: You're born with it. 

AUBREY: You're born in this loving, and you're even in the womb, in this loving. You go from love then into separation. And then finding your way back from separation. Separation implies fear. Then back to love. So, it's a circle. 

ALEX: That's the circle. That's actually almost better. Sorry, Paulo. We just made it better. It's not a march—

AUBREY: Paulo, if you have a problem with this, please come on my podcast. I'd love to talk to you about it and everything else. I love Paulo Coelho. 

ALEX: I love him too. Well, that's "The Alchemist." Spoiler alert. The end of the book ends where he began. 

AUBREY: Yep. It's the classic hero's journey. You're back where you started, but not the same person. 

ALEX: But not the same person. At the same time, what I grapple with, and I'm very aware of, is everything you and I are saying makes perfect sense in the macro. But if you're in the trenches and you're actually struggling with what you want to do with your life, figuring out what's next, this stuff sort of can be even frustrating to hear. When you're in it. When you're in it and you don't know what to do. When you're at your big job at Google that you thought would bring you happiness and you actually hate your job. But you can't tell anyone because you don't want to sound ungrateful. This finding love and finding yourself and loving yourself stuff can actually make you want to pull your hair out. 

AUBREY: Sure. And also, you can be me now, with all of this awareness, my ability to eloquently go on an excited, passionate rant about this, and still not be abiding by it to a full degree. Still finding myself with that constricting kind of angst in my chest of like, I need to do more. I must do more. I'm not doing enough. What else can you do? That thing that wakes me up in the morning and puts me to sleep at night and has me still reaching for different things to help me fall asleep because I'm constantly racing about that next thing I can do, when I still simultaneously know, doesn't matter, man. But it's hard. It does matter. That's the thing. It does matter because it is affecting people. And that's the hard part that I can't seem to get around. It's less about how much I love myself, which was, I think, the first huge hurdle. Look, man, you can love yourself no matter what you do. I'm still working on that. I'm not saying I got that fucking nailed, even though psychologically, philosophically, I got it. But the hard part is what do you do when you know that every DM you respond to, every single one I respond to is a very meaningful experience for someone. And this is not like fluffing myself or patting myself on the back. But it really is. 

ALEX: You're reaching your hand back out. 

AUBREY: I'm reaching my hand back out and giving some private attention. But I can't do that. I get hundreds a day. I can't do that with everybody. Every post I make gets hundreds of comments and thousands of people read. Thank you for posting this. Every newsletter, every fucking thing I produce has an impact that's positive. So then this is where I find myself in a dilemma. You better not rest. You say you love people? Yeah, I fucking love people. Well, what are you doing, bitch? Get up. 

ALEX: That sounds like guilt. 

AUBREY: It's almost like this urgency. Yeah. It's like this urgency to, but it is driven by love, not shame or judgment. Yeah, I fucking love people. I love helping people. I really do. And there's some other shit mixed in. There's a little bit of ego mixed in. There's a little bit of guilt mixed in, a little bit of guilt for responsibility for all of the advantages that I've had in my life. There's different stuff in the cocktail. But the purest part of the cocktail is that I love people. And if I stop, I feel like I'm not loving them as much as I could. And that's what's the challenging thing. And I have to always tell myself. It's probably why I created Fit For Service, to remind myself and everybody that in order to be of service, you first must be fit for service, and I got to take this time for myself. But I have a hard ass time doing it. 

ALEX: This problem you're having didn't exist 200 years ago. If you were in your village and you were helping people, you were helping like 50 people. And they were like, thank you so much, Aubrey. Our life is so much better because you are the head of our clan. God bless you. And you're like, man, now, I'm going to go back to my family tonight. And you are good. And maybe you would go out to another village, help out, and then you would retreat back for like, millions, hundreds of thousands. It's never happened before. Alexander the Great didn't interact with millions of people a day with a single post. It just didn't happen. So there's a lot of problems that we're facing just in the past 10 to 20 years that have never happened in all of human history. That feeling you're describing is not written in Alexandria archives? The elements are real, the elements are human. But the exact experience is different. 

AUBREY: When you talk to people, and this has been a part of what you've been doing recently, you've been exploring this issue. What solutions are people having? What lessons are you distilling? What are these conversations that you're currently having? 

ALEX: It's all about, the evolution of really, "The Third Door," is this quest to help people find their next chapter. Because the biggest thing I've realized is when people actually get that sense of possibility, that yes, there's always a way, the question becomes for them, well, what's next? And I'll share an insight but I'll share a practical tool because at the end of the day, people want something to do. The insight—

AUBREY: Let's pause for one second, because there's some people who haven't watched our podcast about "The Third Door." Just explain, before you get into this, explain the premise and principle of "The Third Door." 

ALEX: So I love that you smile when you say, it makes me happy. 

AUBREY: Yeah, 'cause I fucking think back to the amazing stories you told on the last podcast of your examples of finding the third door. But I'll let you go ahead. 

ALEX: So pretty much for, as you know, for the past 10 years, I've just been obsessively studying success. So I've spent thousands of hours researching, going through hundreds of biographies, and most importantly, sitting down and one on one interviewing people I was dying to get answers from. So for business, Bill Gates, music, Lady Gaga, science, Jane Goodall, Maya Angelou, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Steve Wozniak, Quincy Jones. It's been this crazy journey. And essentially, it's all been focused on finding that mindset of success. What ended up happening is, after all these years of research, I realized every single one of these people treated life and business and success the exact same way. And the analogy that came to me is, it's sort of like getting into a nightclub. There's always three ways in. So there's the first door, the main entrance, where the line curves around the block, where 99% of people wait around, hoping to get in. That's the first door. We've all seen that line. And then there's the second door, the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities go through. 

AUBREY: Already established. 

ALEX: Already established. Kim Kardashian is going in, whatever. Sasha, Malia Obama are going in, whatever. That's the second door. And society has this way of making us feel like those are the only two ways in. You either wait your turn or you're born into it. But what I learned and what you've seen in your own career, is there's always, always the third door. And it's the entrance where you jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, crack open the window, go through the kitchen. There's always a way in. 

AUBREY: I had a beautiful story that I just heard from one of my best friends in the world, Mehcad Brooks, who's an actor. He was just in "Mortal Kombat." And we were talking, and I'd never heard the story of how he got his first acting job. And he had a part here in Austin and it was with, I think it was with the director from... What was Matthew McConaughey's all right, all right, all right movie? “Dazed and Confused.” That guy. Anyways. It was with Linklater. Linklater. So, is it with Linklater? What's his first name? Richard Linklater. He had an audition, and he didn't get callbacks. But he knew—

ALEX: This is your buddy. 

AUBREY: This is my buddy, Mehcad. He was just Jax in "Mortal Kombat." So, a successful actor. His first gig, he knew this was the right part for him. So he shows up at callbacks uninvited. They call somebody else's name and he just gets up and he goes through the door—

ALEX: This is the most third door thing I've ever heard. 

AUBREY: Closes the door and locks it. And he's like, hey. My name's Mehcad Brooks. I'm from Austin. I'm born and raised here. And, obviously, I know where the door is if you don't want me to go. But if you give me five minutes, I promise you won't regret it. And I think he also credits the way saying it. Obviously, I know where the door is, letting them know—

ALEX: That's true. He didn't lie. 

AUBREY: He didn't lie. And he's like, if you give me five minutes, you won't regret it. And he's like, all right, I'll give you 10. Give him that 10 minutes, he got the part. It's the classiest third door story of all time. 

ALEX: I didn't go into the interviews with the thesis that I was trying to figure out. I was just doing these interviews, trying to just gather that information myself. And what's cool about "The Third Door," if I could say for myself, or why I was so excited about it, is there wasn't a single industry, I wasn't like, okay, let me go look at all the tech geniuses. No, I had poets, and scientists, and actors, and actresses, and billionaires. This was the one thing... Warren Buffett and Maya Angelou, not much in common. Except they both took the third door. Jessica Alba and Pitbull, not that much in common. Jane Goodall and Quincy Jones, not much in common. But they all, especially early on in their careers, all had... And I know your third door stories, too. It was the Kentucky Derby story? 

AUBREY: Yeah, that was one of them. 

ALEX: That's my favorite of yours, you've had a lot, but that's my favorite of your third door story. But it's unavoidable. You're not going to achieve your dreams waiting in line, hoping someone calls you forward. You're going to have to make it for the door and make your pitch. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah, that seems to be this universal defining theme. And it's so important for people to realize that because also you have to have a sense. It's almost like, for all of these people, there was a knowing that was beyond their thinking. It seems like if you're thinking, I'm going to make this third door happen, and you're thinking too much about it, the door's not even there. It's like the door is a magical Narnia type of door. And you have to be tapped into your soul, your daemon, or whatever that thing is. You have to be tapped in to see the actual Narnia door that you can walk through. And you have to really believe it. It's like a fairy that if you don't believe in fairies, they die. It's an interesting thing. 

ALEX: But it doesn't just come from sitting in a room and manifesting it. It comes from actually going... There's all these stories of, like Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks. When he was raising the money for Starbucks, I think he got rejected from, the number's insane, like 214 investors. And makes you go, how did the 215th say yes. Or Tim Ferriss, "4-Hour Workweek." I think 26 publishers said no. 27th said yes. You actually have to go get punched in the face over and over and over again, until you finally ah. And then you get up one more time and then the Narnia door opens. For some people, it might come on... 

AUBREY: You could also say that the Narnia door is the door that they walk through that gives them the persistence to keep going. Like Howard Schultz already walked through the door. And from there, it was just obstacle after obstacle, but he was through the door. And the door was, I'm never stopping. I believe in this so much. It's an interesting way to look at where you place the door. I think for some people, it's different. Sometimes it's that one time thing. It's like you standing up at "The Price is Right" and going, it's like that one moment where you're like, fuck, yeah. I'm doing this. And it was like that one instant where you did it just at the right time and just the right way. And Mehcad, the same thing. Just the right time, just the right way. And then there's the other door, which is I'm going to walk through this door, and beyond this door is a never-quitting pathway to success. And I'm going to find which way it is. It's just where the door is placed and where the window of opportunity is. It is literally everybody. Everybody has this story. 

ALEX: In their own way. 

AUBREY: Yeah. And it's very good to point out that people like, I'm doing sex magic and manifestation every day and it's going to happen. Alright, well, what else are you doing? Who are you sharing your poems with? Where are you putting your videos? How many people are you calling? I'm just manifesting and it's going to happen? No. No. It's not going to happen. You got to combine it. It's good. Do all that. 

ALEX: And it does work, but you got to combine it. 

AUBREY: You got to combine it. Do the sex magic, do the laughter manifestation, do the Joe Dispenza, do the Jesus, pray as if it has already been done. I fucking believe in all that. But it also requires the effort too and the courage to have just moxie to go out there and get it. 

ALEX: There's a great quote. I think it was from a golfer. The harder I work, the luckier I get. The harder I work, the luckier I get. And by the way, I can resonate with that. I know you resonate with that, too. You and I are both the same kind of guys who in the public, we're like, we're so lucky. Behind the scenes, we're just pounding the pavement and banging our head against the... As writers too. I write my best lines after banging my head against the wall for a week. And then I sort of give up. Albert Einstein has this great story. I don't know what he was studying at the time, but he was studying something for just months, banging his head against the wall. He couldn't come up with it. Couldn't come up with it. Couldn't come up with it. And then he gave up and was like, screw it. I'm done. And just went to go play backgammon with his friends. Was rolling the dice and it came to him. And again, was he just like, that's the Narnia door? But part of it was two months of banging his head against the wall. And I think you got to do both. 

AUBREY: It's a necessity. It's a necessity to do both. Alright, we've explained "The Third Door". Now you can go back to the current conversations that you're having and what people are drawing? 

ALEX: Now the question is, if you want to take the third door, and especially after the past couple years that people have had. What I've seen is there's more people wondering what they want to do in the next chapter of their life now than ever before. At least that I've been alive. To the point where it's, without naming, I was at a party a couple months ago, at 2 o'clock in the morning on the dance floor. A Google exec comes up to me at 2am saying, I need your help. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I'd gotten that out of business conference and in a DM. But it's getting to the point now it's almost like its own epidemic. People have either spent the past two years without stable work and they've been staring at a wall into the abyss. Or they've been lucky that they've been able to work and things have been good. But it just hasn't felt right. I just read something crazy. The Bureau of Labor just put out a number that said more people have quit their jobs in a single month than ever in American history—

AUBREY: Like over 4%, I think was the number. 

ALEX: Ever. Most amount of people quitting. And those are the people who have already quit. Still, currently, half the people who have stayed at their jobs are considering quitting. 

AUBREY: And in response to that, they expanded the amount of hours that children could work. Russell Brand was like, oh, this is good. This is very Dickensian. Fucking finding chimney sweeps to go out there. 

ALEX: That's what it sounds like. 

AUBREY: It was really interesting. This is an issue and it's because of the vapid, meaningless, obsolescence of these different positions that we have, especially as it appears that the world is in the early stage of existential crisis. The world's trying to figure out, who are we? What are we doing? Why are we here? What is this old game that we've been playing, which is all zero sum? Which is all me versus you. I'm fucking tired of this. This doesn't seem to be working. And it feels like if we continue down this path, it's only going to get worse. So I think it's like this collective awakening that's happening, which is a good thing. 

ALEX: And most people that I've spoken to feel what you just said, but don't have the words for it. Yeah, but they feel it in the pit of their stomach when they're waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning, staring at the ceiling. They feel it when they're on their 10th Zoom of the day, and they want to throw the computer against the wall. They feel it, but they don't have the words for it. And one of the big insights I had is Viktor Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning" describes it in the best way I've ever seen. He said, inside of every human being is an inherent tension between who they are now and who they know they can be. Between who they are now and who they can be. What they've already accomplished and what they know they can. And that tension, if you think of a clothesline. And you, if I may say so, are someone who I just see in your eyes, that tension is deep in your DNA. 

AUBREY: That's still strong. 

ALEX: And it doesn't matter how much you accomplish. That tension won't go away. 

AUBREY: Because every place that I arrive at, I see the place that I can arrive at from this place. It's like the lamp that illuminates the darkness and exposes more shore of your ignorance. Like the higher the light goes, the more you see is possible for you. 

ALEX: Mandela says, when you climb a mountain, the first thing you notice is how many more peaks are ahead of you. And I see that in you. I see that in you. And what Viktor Frankl, the famed psychiatrist says is that, that inner tension, that thing that so many people right now are feeling, that inner dread, that they're shitting on themselves, why can't I just be happy? What Viktor Frankl says is that inner tension is actually essential to mental health. Because what that inner tension is, is your soul telling you there is a life of deeper meaning waiting for you. What that inner tension is telling you is essentially, it's a seed that's causing you to think of how you're going to grow next. So that tension is inherent to growth, and it's essential to mental wellbeing. 

AUBREY: Because if you think you're capped out, if you really think you're capped out, you're fucked. You lose all meaning, you lose all purpose. And with that, comes all of the depression, every downstream mental health effect of not having meaning or purpose. There's plenty of studies that show all of that. Your relationships suffer, everything suffers. But if you feel like you're capped out and you have nothing to drive for, that's a problem. It's also a challenge that I know a lot of really successful athletes have. Because that is a path that has an expiry based upon your date. In some ways, the tragedy of the amazing Michael Jordan documentary, the tragedy was that you can see that there's some part of him that really feels like the best is behind him. 

ALEX: And if you don't find that sense of meaning, and that sense of purpose off the court or off the field somehow, life is really tough. 

AUBREY: Yeah, you got to chase cheap, existential thrills. Like the buzz of alcohol, the thrill of a gambling, win or loss. And I don't mean to pick on Michael. I think everybody does this. But you got to find that next thing. Well, now I'm fucking Michael Jordan, and everybody knows me. And I'm going to change the world in a different way. Not just inspire people. In order for him to have that fire again, he'd have to have the same fire he had when he was playing for the Bulls. 

ALEX: Jimmy Carter, when he left the presidency, started Habitat for Humanity, building houses with his bare hands and became a Sunday school teacher. You think about how does someone goes from president of the United States to teach Sunday school? The answer is he actually found his sense of, he found a continued sense of purpose. So the big thing, the big insight I've had. When people are searching for their next chapter in life, the first thing I tell them is, congratulations. If you actually feel the tension inside of you, you are a mentally healthy human being. Because the problem most people have is they feel the tension and they shit on themselves, saying, why aren't I grateful? Why aren't I content? Similar to what you were sharing. Why do I have this angst of I should be doing more? Why can't I just be content with where I'm at? So the first thing I've realized is that inner tension is healthy. And it's the seed for change. Now, what ends up happening is when I share that with people, the question is okay, so what do I actually do? If I acknowledge that it's healthy, what's something I can actually do if I don't have my path, if I don't have my calling? How do I figure that out? So, it's pretty cool, can I share the extra side exercise with people? 

AUBREY: Absolutely, please? 

ALEX: I call it the 30-day challenge. And essentially, the way the 30-day challenge works, is I tell people, your inner child desires to have a perfect map placed out in front of you. We're in the Google Maps generation. We want to put it in a destination, tell us exactly how to get there. That desire is not possible for a career. It's a natural desire, but it's not possible. What is possible is for me to give people a way to hone their compass. To essentially tell them, wherever you are, I can give you an exercise that can hone the compass and help you pick the right next path, the right next move. And that can change people's lives. So this is the way the 30-day challenge works. And it's really simple. It's like a recipe. I've tested it with thousands of people over the past few years. 

AUBREY: The next best step. 

ALEX: The next best step. So, this is what it does. So the first step for the 30-day challenge is I tell people to go to CVS or a pharmacy and get like a $1 notebook. But it's important to get a brand new notebook that they've never written in before. And then on the cover, write a 30-day challenge and sort of make it sacred. That's the first step. The next step is to open up your calendar and find a 15-minute window that you can devote the next 29 days to. Normally, I tell people if they like to go to the gym after work, couple it with something. You'll do it right after the gym. You'll do it right before dinner. You'll do it right before bed. First thing in the morning. So, devote 15 minutes a day to the same thing. Set a reminder and then this is what you're going to do in that 15-minute window. You're going to answer the same three questions. And these are the three questions. Question number one is, what filled me with enthusiasm today? What filled me with enthusiasm today? The question is not, what made me happy? What made me excited? It's what filled me with enthusiasm. 

AUBREY: And the etymology of enthusiasm is to awaken the divine within. So, what awakened that divine fire in you? 

ALEX: We're talking about the organ horns, right? 

AUBREY: That's it. 

ALEX: And that's why that question, it's not what was my favorite part of the day? It's enthusiasm. And again, it could be for a second. Sometimes people are waiting for eureka moments and they don't have an answer to number one. I tell them, lower the bar. It could be like, you saw a butterfly go by and your eyes lit up. It could be you heard a quote on a podcast, and you thought. So, question one is what filled me with enthusiasm today? Question two, what drained me of energy today? That one is very easy. People are normally very good at that. Question three is what did I learn about myself today? And that's it. 15 minutes. Spend about five minutes on each question. And your only goal, sort of like going to the gym, is just stick around. Some days, you might do it really well, some days, you might not do it well. And if you think of this like daily cardio, it all of a sudden makes sense. Because some days will feel repetitive. And if you look in the mirror after five days of doing it and you don't see results, congratulations. It's called the 30-day challenge, not that 5-day challenge. Keep going. So that's for 29 days. 

AUBREY: Go over that one more time for people. 

ALEX: What filled me with enthusiasm today? What drained me of energy today? What I learned about myself today. Those three questions for 29 days. The 30th day is your graduation ceremony. What I tell people is carve out an hour for day 30 and go somewhere festive. Your favorite Mexican restaurant, your favorite café, your favorite park. Do not sit where you've done your other 29 sessions. Don't do it in your house. Don't do it at your office. Go somewhere that's a graduation ceremony level of festivity. And what you're going to do in that hour is you're finally going to read through your entries. And you're going to study it the way you study other poets, from a distance. You're going to look at yourself almost like an anthropologist and be like, this guy Aubrey really keeps complaining about the same person, the same member on his team. Or this guy Aubrey doesn't stop talking about how much he loves poetry. You're going to look at yourself from a distance. And what you're going to do at the end of the hour is you're going to ask yourself three similar questions, except with a twist. What filled me with enthusiasm this month? What drained me of energy this month? What did I learn about myself this month? And in the first 29 days, you're going to answer the questions like three writes in paragraph form. On the 30th day, I want you to write it like a headline, a one sentence bold summary. And the look on people's face at the 30th day when they get, Ram Dass talks about, what is it called? Cleaning the mirror. 

AUBREY: Polishing the mirror. 

ALEX: Polishing the mirror. Pretty much what happens to people is at the end of the 30th day, it's not that you get an exact map for your life. But instead, you get a very clear needle pointing you in the right direction. And that sense of relief and that sense of clarity changes people forever. 

AUBREY: The repetition of this is very important, because we're not necessarily good at connecting the dots, unless we intentionally do it. We'll make a story but it becomes so apparent that we can no longer ignore it. It's like the same thing. You can no longer ignore this thing because it's documented for 30 days. 

ALEX: For 30 days. People who have done it for 10 days and have walked away, I've tested this thousands, it doesn't work. 30 days, I would say, even the minimum. I know some people have gone 50 or 100. 30 is the minimum that you can actually feel it's unavoidable. 

AUBREY: So, you get this. Then what do you do from the point that you got this? Let me just hypothesize. I'll just take myself and I know I didn't do the 30 days too. But let's say, what fills me with enthusiasm? Well, today I was very enthusiastic about this conversation, this podcast. Speaking with somebody who I can share ideas with and also sharing this on the podcast. That's something that fills me with enthusiasm. There were moments in our meeting earlier talking about. So, I get enthusiastic when I create something in my mindscape and I know that I can share it. It makes me excited. Lots of things in a relationship. There's going to be a couple tangential. It might be hard to do a headline. Because I can also, in the same regard, be like, being there with my wife and laughing in the pantry about the same joke, or a new joke, or making love. You might have a couple things that it's hard to decide and condense. So what do you do when there's like bullet points? Is the first question as we go through this. Because I really like this exercise. And the same with draining me. What makes me drained? Well, some of these are going to be very intrinsic bad software, where basically, I'm carrying this anxiety because I feel like I need to do more. And this anxiety is like a candle that's burning me from the inside of the candle. And all of a sudden, the wax is melting, not only from both ends, but from the inside itself. That's just fucking it. And sometimes, it's complicated, because sometimes the same things that excite me, also in high quantities, can exhaust me. So, it's a quantity issue. Social engagements, generally, I get a lot out of those. But when I do too many, then all of a sudden, it starts to be deleterious. So that one can be complicated. And then learning, learning is probably going to be one of the most difficult to condense. Because there's going to be a lot of different things that you learn, unless you're really learning the same thing over and over, which can certainly happen. So talk about the condensation at the end of the 30 days, how you reconcile that. And then talk about what you do when you get that somewhere loose condensation. So, two parts to the question. 

ALEX: The structure of this is very important. What I've learned is in the micro, so right now you just described the micro, your day today. It's actually very easy and it's very natural to really describe something.  So let's say you wrote, you were doing your 30-day challenge, today, you'd be like, man, there were actually a few things. The conversation with Alex, the meeting with the team, and the joke in the pantry with my wife, all felt good. And you can just rewrite. That's good. Flesh it out. That's why it's 15 minutes. People's instincts for the 30-day challenge is they want to cut corners. They'll just like bullet-point three things and finish in five minutes. And then 30 days from now, they're like, I don't see a huge epiphany. It's really important to sit there. And let's say you write something out. I tell people, you're going to sit there for 15 minutes, whether you like it or not. So even if you're staring at the paper, you're not getting up for 15 minutes. And what ends up happening is like four minutes in, something comes up that wasn't on the top. You talked about it. Sometimes you have to pull back the veneer for the diamonds to start coming up. And I notice that actually happens a lot on number two. The draining of energy, there's the first thing you write and then you wait a couple of minutes. And then there's like, ah. Seeing that Instagram post of the guy who works in that other company with his six pack. I'm embarrassed to even write it, but that just put me in a funk. That wasn't the first thing you admitted but it took you a couple of minutes and be like, yeah, that made me feel like I'm a little fat right now. Whatever. So, there's something powerful about that being 15 minutes. Again, I'm very adamant. You don't judge, analyze, overthink any of this until day 30. When people give up, and I'm sure it's the same with fitness, they start judging the progress too intensely in the beginning. If they're doing kettlebell swings and within the first week, they're not seeing results, it's very easy to say kettlebells don't work. 

AUBREY: We're in this instant gratification world. We love something that we can feel immediately. 

ALEX: So, I'm very adamant that this happens. And again, just like going to the gym, it's very doable and very effective if you do it on your own. It is even more powerful if you have a gym buddy. So for the 30-day challenge, I tell people, look, if you want to do it alone, it works. I've done it alone many times myself. When you do it with someone else, though, that camaraderie really helps. So if anyone listening to this wants to do it and you have a friend who's also in a similar place in life, doing it with them really feels good. 

AUBREY: That makes sense. All right. You get this list. You still may have a couple things in each of these. You may have to condense them to a couple different themes. What's next? 

ALEX: So with the 30-day challenge, my biggest recommendation for people is just take those clues. So, take your graduation diploma and let it do its work. I'll tell you the spectrum of results I get, just so people have a realistic understanding. My biggest thing I tell people is abandon the hope that this will solve all your problems. Just abandon that hope. There is a deep desire, and it comes from all of our inner fears of not being safe. That we just want this masterful knockout punch to solve all of our anxieties and fears of the future. What I tell people is to think of the 30-day challenge as a judo flip. It just takes your problem, flips it on its back and gives you some relief and helps you move forward. There'll be other times in your life, and I've done the 30-day challenge with people who work at Disney, MasterCard, Merrill Lynch. I did it with Google executives around the world. It works. But what I tell them is it, again, it's a judo flip for right now at this stage in your career. A year from now, you might want to do it again when you're in a different place and you're stuck somewhere else. So once you abandon hope that this will solve all your problems and instead, it's just going to give you some much needed relief and clarity on where to step next, the anxiety lowers. And that's probably one of the biggest gifts you can give yourself. 

AUBREY: And then from there, ultimately, again, it's going to be the chop wood, carry water type of thing. You're going to have to start doing some things, really putting into practice some of this shit that you figure out. And that in and of itself is a challenge, because a lot of us have, this is another interesting phenomenon. Most of us know what we would like to be doing. And I'm reticent to always use the word should because I don't believe that we should be ourselves under any circumstance. But the things that we want, we know what we would like. But do we do them? And so, for me, a big practice that I use is trying to really get clear with what I really want. Man, talk about these things that you think are going to be the thing and then are not the thing. I've gotten to 60,000 words on my next book twice and just scrapped them both. And I was like, fucking hell. 

ALEX: The amount of courage it takes to scrap it. It would be easier to just ship it.

AUBREY: So I started writing this "Master Your Mind, Master Your Life" and I'm like, how do I make the mind inexorable from the body, and from the spirit, and from the field in which the mind exists? This isn't possible. So I could write this thing, but this seems reductive. And the whole thing just didn't really work. And then where I'm really at now is my own struggle. And this is something that I can really talk to. How do I master my mind? To me, it's to understand what I really want. What do you really want? Because we think we want these things. And this goes back to what we were earlier talking about. What do we really want? Well, we want to be seen. We want somebody to see us, to know us. We want to be known and seen. We don't want to be lonely. And that requires vulnerability. It requires us stripping all of the layers of projection off. Like, here I am. We want to be seen. We want to be loved. And we want to matter. As we're saying, we want to have purpose, and meaning, we want to matter. We want to be here, we want to be present, we want to find awe. So, I got really clear. Alright, what do I really want? And part of mattering is being of service in this way. So reducing it to these core things, to say, what do I really want? What do I really want? And are these things that I'm doing actually getting me what I really want? Or can I restructure everything based upon actually doing the things that are going to get me what I want? And do I have the courage to do that? And you'll uncover a lot of things. So many things that we do, are not what we really want. But it's based on fear, not desire. We're being fear-motivated. I'm going to this party that I don't want to go to, or this wedding or this, whatever. Weddings are a big one. Birthdays are another big one. I'm going to this wedding, birthday thing, because I don't want the person who's throwing this wedding, birthday thing to be pissed. So do you have the courage to be strong enough in yourself, and trust that you can say, hey, I love you. But ultimately, I can't show up to this thing and still live my life of purpose in the way that I want to. And this is a hard thing to do. We have to have the courage to trust that we'll be loved, not the fear that we won't be loved. And that's hard. And actually, I had a conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger which really helped. Because he's an amazing thinker. It's like talking to fucking Cerebral when you talk to him. And we did one podcast, we're going to do another. He's been a great ally. And he was talking to me about how every request in his life, because he's curated a beautiful life with a beautiful community of people and a lot of things that he could do. Every request in isolation is a yes. Do you want to go to this party? Yes. Do you want to hang out? Yes. Do you want to have coffee? Yes. 

ALEX: In isolation. 

AUBREY: In isolation. But looking at it in the global sense, do I want to say all of these yeses? Well, if I say all of these yeses, the yeses imply a lot of noes. With every yes, it implies a no to 12 possibilities of things that I could do. I could be meditating and ice bathing, I could be writing poems, I could be working on my book, I could be just relaxing, I could be whatever, or going to something else. So you have to look at it in the field of possibilities. And then use your structure of what you really want to decide what the yeses and noes are. Because in isolation, we can get fucked. And this is again, taking that macro perspective, which is really necessary. So even has his executive assistant who must know him really well and know his plan really well. And he says, every time he gets a request, he says, I would love to. Sounds amazing. Let me get back to you. And I'll see if it works for me. And then he takes all of these different things and then he looks at them in a scope. And then he adjusts them to his priorities. And then he decides later. Because he knows. Because he knows that the answer is yes, if he just says yes right away. And I thought that was really clever and interesting. And we're not really aware of that even when people are texting us. If we look at the screen time that we spend on our phone, it's horrifying. It's horrifying. 

ALEX: It's a digital addiction at its core. 

AUBREY: It's horrifying. I'm 5 hours, 20 minutes a day on my fucking phone. That's horrifying. But how do I get out? How do I get out? And that takes some work and that takes some space. And so to take some space, I got to take the phone away. And I got to say no to a lot of things. It takes some space for like, how do I deal with this fucking phone thing? All of the messages, all of the things, all of the calls, all of the shit that I'm doing. This is a deep and very important process. 

ALEX: And are you willing to have the trade off with someone who has a profession like yours, where so much of your career is tied to the phone? Are you willing to really separate that and maybe your social growth won't be as big if you scale back a little, where you hand all the platform passwords over to someone on your team. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah. These are the questions. Interestingly, speaking of this phone thing, yesterday, I won't get into the details of how I lost my phone because it was a fucking unbelievable thing. But my phone ultimately slid down the side of a plane and I thought there was no way in hell that I was ever going to get this—

ALEX: Slid down the side? 

AUBREY: I was flying in a jet. And I went to put my phone where I thought was on the armrest. But I actually put it on the window because I had my blindfold on because I was taking a nap. I put it so that it slid down where the window was meeting the haul of the jet. So it slid down that and then I go, oh my god, they're going to have to demo this jet in order for me to get this fucking phone out. It's done. My phone is done. And then I had to deeply reconcile. Wow. Okay. Well, what if I am Aubrey without a phone? Can I live with that? Maybe I won't get a new phone. And I went through this whole process about how I could live my life without a phone. It was exciting and terrifying at the same time because I was convinced that there's no fucking chance. Interestingly, I was still listening to the music on my phone which was—

ALEX: So, the Bluetooth. 

AUBREY: The Bluetooth. Exactly. These are the last sounds my phone will ever make because it was like this romantic, poetic moment. Like enjoy this because your phone's never coming back. Ultimately, they were able to actually get through and undo this little panel and I fucking got my phone back. But I didn't think I was. But it was like this interesting meditation of, what happens? And some parts, I got really excited about. And some parts are like, fuck. What sacrifices must I make in order to do that? So the idea of ultimately getting rid of my phone entirely was unacceptable but it was a good thought experiment. And it was really productive for me to think about what happens if you just stop? 

ALEX: This is a whole topic that, on one hand, I'm very passionate about. Very separate from everything we talked about. But actually, in a weird way, it threads exactly back. I just have become very obsessed this past year the way I see it. I just started calling it digital addiction. And I can speak to myself. An addiction, depending on which definition you use, is an external substance that's filling an internal void. I know, Aubrey, I have zero, I mean this genuinely. Right now, looking in your eyes, I have zero desire to reach for my phone. It hasn't even crossed my mind once. Bro, when I am alone in my apartment—

AUBREY: When you're taking a shit. 

ALEX: When I am alone. Sometimes, actually weirdly enough, after something like this is when I need it the most because I'm actually on the come down from this connection. That's when I reach for my phone. I don't reach for Twitter when I'm happy. I don't reach for Twitter when I feel connected. 

AUBREY: In those moments of enthusiasm that you've tracked for 30 days. No. It's never like, man, I grab my phone. Rarely is it going to be that—

ALEX: And when I do my 30-day challenge sometimes, and often my number two, what's draining me of energy, is something digital related. Twitter, Instagram. It comes up a lot. So the question is, why do I keep doing, and I still do it. I did it this morning. Why do I still keep doing something that I know, clearly, drains me of energy? Makes it feel like a cloud is above my head. So that's a whole ‘nother thing. And by the way, I meditate. I pray, I do all that. And still, I can't kick it. I think and I feel very confident on this, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we will be talking about digital addiction with the same kind of gravitas we talk about the opioid addiction. We're on the precipice of it. We've seen the numbers. That there's been higher numbers of teenage suicide in the past few years than ever in history. 

AUBREY: And loneliness. Loneliness in younger generations is what's surprising. Everybody thinks, oh, the loneliness epidemic. It's a bunch of elderly people who have lost their connections. No, it's not. We're seeing the fastest increase in the youngest generations. 

ALEX: The first party I went to, that was sort of like post-vaccine, LA, I'm not kidding, I was there and about 75% of the people were on their phones. And I was thinking, this would be like a euphoric party where people are looking at each other's eyes. You don't just undo an addiction. So that's a whole nother thing. But what I've realized is that, and Alcoholics Anonymous, they have a very famous quote that says, in order to really unravel an addiction, you have to ask not only what it does to you, you have to ask what it does for you. So, alcohol is an easy example. What does it do to you? It makes you drunk, it makes you miss your priorities, ruins your relationships, blah, blah, blah. What does it do for you? Take the edge off. I can connect with the guy sitting in the barstool next to me. I'm a lot more confident. I can go ask her out when I'm a little drunk. What does it do for you? You're never going to kick the bottle until you realize what it's doing for you and find other ways to do that. And the same is true with the phone. I know for me, what does Twitter do for me? It distracts me from uncomfortable thoughts. I'm feeling insecure. Sadly, I go to the thing that makes the thoughts worse. But what does it do for me? It takes away thoughts that make me distracted. Many times, like a slot machine, dude, I feel great about myself. You talk about going into the DMs, I'll sometimes fish in those DMs for senses of significance and meaning. Now God forbid, sometimes there's bombs there of people just cussing you out. And thank God, knock on wood, I'm not famous enough to get that. I'm sure you got much more. There are things it's doing for me. 

AUBREY: But even those things, even those things that we think we don't like, they're still triggering some neurological, neuro-hormonal response that some part of us is probably addicted to as well. That sense of shock and outrage, and how dare they. 

ALEX: It's a key on the organ. 

AUBREY: It's another fucking key on the organ that when we've play that key enough, and Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about this a bunch, the placebo, we become addicted to the things, to the tunes on the organ that we're most comfortable playing. It's an upregulation of different receptor sites for these hormones and for these neurotransmitters and all of these things that are associated—

ALEX: If you've been in your childhood, you like that chord. 

AUBREY: Yes. Yes. There's all of these things that we have to realize. We're constantly feeding the certain addictions, which is almost like praying to that God. Like that key on that organ. If you wanted to anthropomorphize it and make it, I'm praying now in my anger, I'm praying to Ares the god of war. In my sadness, I'm praying to, blah, blah, blah. I was really going down and understanding all of the ways that we are addicted to all of the aspects of being ourselves and certain tones that we play. And the phone provides certain tones, certain quick hits of dopamine, certain things. And it's designed for that. It's really designed. So, the solution, one solution which isn't a permanent solution but is necessary, is abstinence. We have to have scheduled intense abstinence. If you have issues with food, well, fast. That will teach you a lot about food. If you actually fast, if you go on a fast, like just a water fast and then you eat a cashew when you're coming out, you're like, “oh my god, a cashew. It's so sweet. It's so delicious.” Whereas if you get used to all kinds of different foods and tasty things—

ALEX: If you're eating a Hershey bar every day, you don't have to take a cashew. 

AUBREY: For sure, you're like, fucking cashew. Whatever. I guess I'll have a cashew. But I'd much rather have a Kind bar that's wrapped in chocolate. Way better. You know what I mean? So that's one thing. Fast. By the time this podcast is out, my documentary, "Awaken the Darkness," my six days in darkness, silence, isolation, it was the complete removal of all things, including the phone, including people, including music, including sight. Everything was removed. And at that point, you really learn some shit. And I'm called back to the darkness because I know that I've gotten re-addicted to all of the things that I became temporarily unaddicted to. And it broke the addiction. And it was like a fucking fever. It was like a fever that I had to break. So one thing is, these longer fasting periods, which I think are necessary. Same with the substance. No matter what it is. You got to take your break. You gotta take your time to make sure that they're not in control of you, rather than you being in control of them. Whether it's alcohol, or tobacco, or whatever the fuck. Then I also think we need to bring back the Sabbath. We need to bring back the Sabbath. 

ALEX: Have you read the book "The Sabbath?" 

AUBREY: No. 

ALEX: Bro, it's so good. 

AUBREY: Really? 

ALEX: Keep going? I just read it this year. Keep going. 

AUBREY: Awesome. And the Sabbath is an idea that there's one day a week, where you don't do the normal shit, mundane shit. It came from a time that didn't have phones. It was designed in a time that is not exactly relevant one for one to our time now. But if you just take a little bit of application and be like, what would the Sabbath mean now? It would mean, what do you want to create for your Sabbath? Well, I definitely want to take away my phone. And me and my wife have tried it. And it's always the best day. We'll have no phone Sundays. Cell-free Sunday. And it's just us connecting. Even if we want to go somewhere, we have to remember how to go there. And even if it's a restaurant and we want to make a reservation, we just show up and third door our way in that restaurant. 

ALEX: It always works. 

AUBREY: It always works. But there's just immense freedom that comes from that. And that's one of the most important things. But you could stack a variety of different things into your Sabbath and then do that every week. That's something I haven't fully implemented, but I think this is the key. 

ALEX: I did it every week for the whole year. 

AUBREY: Nice. So tell me about your Sabbath. And tell me about the book. 

ALEX: So the book, it's called "The Sabbath," by, I believe I'm saying his last name, right, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Someone can probably google that and figure it out. It's called "The Sabbath." Short book. What it talks about is essentially, the Sabbath comes from monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity. And the idea around Shabbat, the Sabbath, however you want to think of it, is it's an architecture of time. And pretty much the thesis of this book is that other cultures will build architecture in space. New York City is literally a cathedral to capitalism. I've never said those words aloud. I was like, I just came from New York yesterday. I'm like, oh shit. You look at these buildings, and first of all, it's awe-inspiring. As much as I want to say oh, no. No, you look at that New York skyline and you go, wow. But what is it praising? 

AUBREY: Vegas is a cathedral to hedonism. 

ALEX: Have you been to Yosemite recently? 

AUBREY: No. 

ALEX: I was just there a couple months ago. It is a cathedral in its own right. But it's a cathedral to God. 

AUBREY: Yeah, truly. 

ALEX: So the Sabbath talks about, the core thesis is other cultures will create buildings, even temples, things they build in space, physical cathedrals. A Sabbath, just the thought of it, is a cathedral in time. That you're saying from sunset on Friday until the next sunset, Aubrey is building his own cathedral for his beloved space. However, you want to build that beloved space. So, it's time with you and your wife, it's time with you and God, it's time with you and nature, it's time with you and your soul. But you're creating an architecture of time. And I think that is just the most... It's revolutionary to us. But to a lot of other people, it's called life. They've been living it. 

AUBREY: We've been doing this forever. 

ALEX: They've been doing it forever. I know my ancestors have been doing it forever. I just sort of got placed in America. My parents came as refugees and came into America and it sort of got lost in the mix. But this architecture of time is powerful. It's really powerful. So I did it for a year, and I still do it on and off. And it's just the best. 

AUBREY: What do you architect? What do you remove and what do you add from your normal—

ALEX: I'm Jewish, so there's a lot of conservative Jewish shoulds on a Shabbat. I read the book and sort of said something similar to you, and again, I'm not telling anyone what to do, I said, what worked for me. I said, what's the core premise? The core premise is you're going to create an architecture of time, where the point of a Shabbat is to reconnect with whatever your higher power is. That's God, nature, the universe, your soul, science, whatever your higher power is. And I'm going to rest. The great thing about the way this book describes Shabbat is it's not a dessert at the end of a meal. It's actually an essential part of the equation. Pretty much the idea of a Sabbath is that the six days of work is incomplete without the seventh day of rest. It's not a reward for six days of work. It's not an optional reward that you can take or not take. If you actually work all seven days straight, you had a bad incomplete week without the seventh day of rest. And if you actually think about it, back in the day, they were toiling in the farmlands. If anything, even harder than the lives we live. And if they didn't take that seventh day of rest. And there's a great anecdote in the book that said, there was once a man, an ancient biblical man, who, on his seventh day on a Sabbath, had an idea. Oh, I need to fix that fence on my farm. Because he had the idea on the day of rest, he didn't touch that fence for the whole year because he didn't even want ideas. He wanted to train his brain—

AUBREY: For sure. Because so much of our work happens in our mind. 

ALEX: Right? It's one thing to say I'm going to rest my hands, I'm going to put my phone down. But dude, is it really a Sabbath if you're thinking of your Instagram posts on your Sunday? 

AUBREY: No. 

ALEX: No, it's not a Sabbath. Right? His abstinence was if I have an idea on that day—

AUBREY: I got to burn it. 

ALEX: The idea gets burned. And if God wants me to have the idea, he'll plant it in me on Monday. Right? I'm not there. But that's a hardcore stuff. It's a devotion to saying there's more to life than just toiling. That without the rest, and it's not rest for pleasure sake, it's actually rest for rejuvenation sake. What are we here to do? 

AUBREY: Yeah. And the thing is, you'll always be able to bargain with yourself. This was the value of tying things to a higher power that could be upset. It was accountability. And I don't believe in the premise—

ALEX: I've never thought of it that way. 

AUBREY: My understanding of the divine is God's not going to be mad. It's love and we're a part of that love, and so, there's not going to be any judgment for this. So, we've removed the accountability. We're only accountable to ourselves, really, unless we have an accountability buddy, like you talked about in the 30-day challenge. But we really have to decide in a way that we don't negotiate. Because I am the fucking squirrel king of negotiation. I will wiggle and wiggle and wiggle. 

ALEX: We're too smart. You can convince yourself that anything's a good idea. 

AUBREY: No doubt. And this was another piece of this darkness documentary that I talked about in there. Because I have my tape recorder in there as I was recording my experience because there's no way to journal or anything. So, in some ways, I suppose this could be like cheating. But I also knew that I wanted to document this. So that was my only comfort in the thing, was that hopefully this tape recorder is working. I didn't even know it was working. In one section, it's like, I really hope this is working, because I had to memorize how to turn it on and off. And if I got it wrong, if up was on and down was off, but it was reversed and down was on and up was, I was fucked. But ultimately, I had that thing. And I recorded myself and it was the constant wrestling with the idea of, I could just leave the room. I could just open the fucking window. I could just do it. I could just do it. I could just do it. I can go outside. I go for a run in the tree. It's good to go for a run in the trees, isn't it? It's nice to be out in nature. Isn't it nice to be out in nature? I just won't leave my phone off. But I'll be out in the trees. I'll be out in nature. And that'll be good too. Right? It'll still be productive. I was negotiating every single fucking day, but somehow, I just had the sense like, I got to stick it out. I got to stick it out. I got to stick it out. And I'm so glad that I did. And that was, to be fair, one of those instances where I really did stick something out. I'm not good at these routines and I'm not good at even keeping my word to myself. I'll do what needs to be done, always, and I trust myself. But I'll do what needs to be done, ultimately, but I'm always negotiating constantly. So this is a great opportunity to create an ethos that's strong enough that you will not negotiate with yourself. And make that vow and somehow make it sacred. And you might not have that higher power that you think is going to judge you. But you got to figure out a way to link this practice to something so meaningful that you won't fucking squirrel your way out of it. 

ALEX: To your life. 

AUBREY: To your life. It's like a sacred vow, 

ALEX: While you were talking, I just had this flashback to an hour ago when we're talking about diamonds. Everything we've been talking about the past hour has been about bringing the diamonds forward. The Sabbath, the 30-day challenge, the darkness, it's all about bringing the diamonds forward. 

AUBREY: I haven't taken a Sabbath in a long time. Actually, that's not true. I do very aggressive, I do like the most aggressive Sabbath. 

ALEX: Aubrey's new book, "The Aggressive Sabbath," by Aubrey Marcus. 

AUBREY: Yeah, the aggressive, intensive Shabbat, which is like an Ayahuasca ceremony, which is so much work. I'm unplugged. I'm not doing my normal shit. My phone doesn't matter. But it's so aggressive and so much work. And then there's the integration it requires. So, is it Shabbat, is it a Sabbath? Or is it just work on a different aspect of myself? It feels more like work on a different aspect. 

ALEX: It's another form of work. 

AUBREY: It's another form of work. It's just work, spiritual work, emotional work. But I don't know when the last time I really took a Sabbath was. I think we've only done it twice with Vy, where we had no phone. And the higher power that we were worshiping was the divine in each other. It was our sacred union. So, it was about us enjoying each other and that is a doorway for me to see God. 

ALEX: I was going to say, there's God in that. 

AUBREY: There's God in that. Absolutely. And in a relationship like that, that is one of the beautiful aspects of it. Your partner is a doorway to God. Because you can find God in anything if you really look close enough. And if you really look close enough with your partner, you can find that. So maybe I've had two of those days in the last fucking year, year and a half. Probably a year. I had some more in other places. But I have this deep, deep calling. I wrote a newsletter about it and I was like, so I'm setting up this winter for like a long extended, all the Sabbaths linked together. 

ALEX: But once a week or back-to-back-to-back—

AUBREY: Back-to-back-to-back. 

ALEX: No! You're hardcoring it again. 

AUBREY: I know. Exactly. 

ALEX: I'm sorry, I love you but that's not it. 

AUBREY: I know. So, it's going to be this hardcore—

ALEX: The 10-day Sabbath by Aubrey Marcus. 

AUBREY: Meanwhile, I hope to write my whole book while I'm there. 

ALEX: Dude, you're just doing a writing retreat. Which by the way is awesome. But it's not the same. 

AUBREY: It's not the same. It's me tricking myself again. Again, tricking myself into this other thing where I can just work on something different. Like Ayahuasca, well, that's a break. No, it's not. It's just working on this. Oh, this writing retreat is my time to unplug. No, it's not. I'm going to be fucking 10 hours a day on a screen—

ALEX: Thinking, thinking, thinking. 

AUBREY: I got to do this for real, man. I really got to do this for real. And so I got to bind this thing with something that's more important. And I'm even thinking about this week and I'm like, fuck. This week, I got my documentary launching. I got Zach Bush and Charles Eisenstein, they're staying at my house. Well, fucking next week. But there's always going to be some, Oh! next week's Thanksgiving and then we got all this. That's why it has to be sacred. It has to be some sacred shit that is even in the planning. And it might take me a little while to get there because I've already planned enough shit that I may not be able to unwind like Zach flying in from here and Charles flying in from here and this thing. Alright, fair enough. Maybe this week is actually out. But if I don't start planning this now, it won't happen and I have to just make this fucking sacred. 

ALEX: Yeah, religions don't say choose a day of the week that's the Sabbath. Christianity, it's Sunday. Judaism, it's Saturday. Pick a day, Aubrey. By the way, with the writing retreat, how long did you map out? Two weeks, three weeks? 

AUBREY: No, longer? Six weeks. Again, I'll have time there. 

ALEX: Just one day a week. And by the way, your writing bro is going to be so much better because again, you're not sitting... I think what happens is the Sabbath conjures a thought of sitting and staring at a wall. No, dude, you're doing your favorite shit? You and your wife are going for walks in nature, you're slow cooking meals, whatever. 

AUBREY: Taking your time, making love, the whole thing. 

ALEX: By the way, in Judaism, that's a blessing. That's actually a double blessing if you do it on the Sabbath versus on a regular day, because you're more present. You're more present. Again, in Judaism, they say don't read. I actually love to read. It brings me relaxation. I just don't read for anything that can help my career. That was my rule. 

AUBREY: Reading a book like "Name of the Wind," which is this great fiction book that I read. 

ALEX: But if you're reading a book, for me, that helps me with my research, eh, not allowed. But if I'm reading "Man's Search for Meaning," great. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is important. 

ALEX: I think you're going to do it. I know you're going to do it. 

AUBREY: The energy is building and this is the moment where I'm like, okay, just no more bullshit, Aubrey. And this is where you have to be like the team captain of your mind, where you have all of these players like, no, we need to do this coach. No, we need to do this squad. No, we need to do this. And you're like, no, we're doing this. This point where you just lay down the logos, the word that comes from your higher authority that says, this is the word. And I don't care about the bullshit of all of these other voices. I love you all so much, but this is for you. Trust me. And just have that authority, have the voice of authority. Is also something I've been thinking about. We do have this, but we're scared of it. 

ALEX: It's buried. It's buried. 

AUBREY: We're scared of the voice of authority. Because we like to wiggle. So, we bury it ourselves. It's buried and we bury it. But when we can find that voice of authority that says, I will or I will not, and we know and we trust that, that's what we need. And I think we've externalized that to God. You shall or you shall not. 

ALEX: Or our bosses. 

AUBREY: Or our bosses. Or our partners or whatever. 

ALEX: People say, my wife doesn't let me. No, you allow her to not let you. You like it. You like it. You like her telling you you're not allowed to go to the gym today. You like it. Right? 

AUBREY: Yeah. That's 100% true. 

ALEX: Again, the reason I've noticed, going back to the 30-day challenge, the reason most people are not doing 30-day challenge, there's a subconscious part of them who doesn't want to hear their own voice of authority. Because what the 30-day challenge is, like you said, is it makes it undeniable anymore. Dude, imagine if for 30 days you're writing down over and over again and you're like, man, I really want to do that Sabbath. And on your 30th day you're reading it, you can't hide from yourself anymore. You're going to do the Sabbath now? 

AUBREY: Yeah. I'm going to do the Sabbath now as my voice of authority. I'm going to do it. 

ALEX: There's a part of me and I'm not going to do this because I want you, there's a part of me that's like, man, I want to come on one of your Sabbath days with you. But no, it's your thing with your wife. Do it. But it sounds fun to spend a day with you just chilling out on the ranch. 

AUBREY: Just fucking chilling. Just playing around. The interesting thing is that some part of me knows that it is part of heaven on earth. It's part of finding heaven on earth. And what am I doing all this work for? I'm doing this for everybody. For what? So that they can work really hard like me and do more? No, I want them to find heaven on earth. I want them to realize that we're all here in the kingdom. And if we can shift our mindset, we can get there. Oh, but are you doing it, bro? Well, no, not me. I'm here to help you find it. Oh, that's really going to work? You're going to be the one that can't do it yourself? 

ALEX: The dating coach who can't get a day. 

AUBREY: Exactly. Exactly. That doesn't work. I got to live the thing. And I do that in many ways. That was one of the reasons why Onnit was so successful. I was living the Onnit human optimization lifestyle in many ways. And when I talk about plant medicines or talk about these things, I can speak from a gnosis because I'm doing it. But ultimately, many of these things that I'm trying to impress upon others, there's another step that if I take it, it's going to be so much stronger. I suppose it is lovely for me to say how much I'm struggling with the same things because people can be like, yeah, me too. And maybe we can all do it together and I acknowledge that. But it's going to be so much more powerful if six months from now, I can say, you know what, I had this podcast with Alex Banayan. And after that, we talked about the Sabbath and the voice of authority. And I laid my voice of authority down and I declared a Sabbath. And ever since then, I haven't missed a week. It was every fucking Wednesday or Sunday. I don't know which day it's going to be, but I'm going to pick it because I think there is some real value to that. And every time, then that was the Sabbath. And my life has been blah, blah, blah since then. That's the story that's going to be told. 

ALEX: I love it. Remember what we talked about at the beginning about the circle of when you're a little kid, you're born with love, you go into fear, and back to love? Dude, when you're a little kid and you were two years old, you were not planning the rest of your week. 

AUBREY: Permanent Sabbath. 

ALEX: Permanent Sabbath. Right? By the way, too, I am sure you've done it too. When my dad, towards the end of his life, you go back to permanent Sabbath. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's this idea of even retirement, is toil, toil, toil toil, toil. And then at the end of your life, you get the opportunity to not toil. But you've never trained yourself how to not toil, so you're just like, well, I'm fucking bored. What are we doing? 

ALEX: You don't have hobbies. 

AUBREY: And then you reach the same distractions. More drinking, whatever sports you're addicted to. Fine, I love sports too. But all of the things that are not really, really that thing that lights you up. Really that thing that awakens the divine with an enthusiasm. 

ALEX: The people who I've met who go into depression, which is common in retirement, is retirement, just like we talked about the Sabbath, in their heads is doing nothing. Like sitting around, doing nothing. People I've met whose lives have gone through the roof, to them, retirement is actually stopping working for money and instead working for giving back. So I'll see a lot of people, they raise their grandkids, they will Habitat for Humanity, they will teach Sunday school, they will write, it might even be writing a book, or whatever. But it's something for a purpose as opposed to doing it for a salary. 

AUBREY: Yeah. One of the things that I love about you Alex is your ability to tell a great story. So as we wrap this up, I don't know what this story is going to be, but let's just pull up a seat at the Alex camp fire here. 

ALEX: 30 minutes later. 

AUBREY: Let's grab a proverbial nib of whiskey and let's settle into a moment of Shabbat, where all we have to do is listen to Alex tell us a story. 

ALEX: That's a nice compliment. 

AUBREY: It's really amazing to listen to you talk. I love a good storyteller. 

ALEX: Thank you. 

AUBREY: You and Boyd Varty are two of the storytellers that really bring out that kind of, elicit that response from like, man, these guys can tell a fucking story. Boyd Varty's "The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life." He's an actual lion tracker. 

ALEX: No way. Yeah, I need to meet this guy. 

AUBREY: You got to meet him. He's here in Austin. 

ALEX: Did I tell you about the Africa trip I did? 

AUBREY: No. 

ALEX: Spent 30 days in the savanna in Africa this summer. 

AUBREY: Amazing. 

ALEX: We got to talk about it. I want to meet him. 

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. 

ALEX: What are you in the mood for? This is your Sabbath, Aubrey. I'm just here. 

AUBREY: Whatever is percolating. I trust that the thing that percolates to your mind. You may want to discard it but maybe it's there for a reason. 

ALEX: I'll tell you the story of the hardest interview I ever did for "The Third Door." And I couldn't have known it going into it. So this takes place very much toward the end of this journey of interviews. And I was going in to interview Jessica Alba. This is a new story for you? 

AUBREY: Uh-huh. New story. 

ALEX: We've spent time together so I want to make sure. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Little Nancy Callahan. I was in love. When she came out in "Sin City," I was like, I'm in love. Carry on. 

ALEX: Again, most people know Jessica Alba as this world-renowned actress, award-winning, known around the world as a movie star and TV star. And many people also know her as the founder of a billion dollar company. The Honest Company recently went IPO. Most people don't know. Jessica Alba isn't the face of The Honest Company. She's literally the founder. She had the idea, she hired the executives, and raised the money. She's the founder of the company as well. So what's wild about her, and I think about it a lot, is she didn't climb one mountain, at another point in her life, climb a second mountain, she sort of climbed two mountains at the same time. I was once at an airport and I saw her on the cover of "Forbes" magazine, in a suit and on the cover of "Shape" magazine in a bikini in the same month. Two mountains, very different, but two mountains at the top of both. So it makes you wonder, how did she find the fuel to climb a second mountain when I know myself, I'm struggling to climb one. I was going into that interview particularly with that focus. How did she climb the second mountain when she was still at the top of another one? Now, what I couldn't have known going into that interview, as I was sitting there in the lobby of The Honest Company, I was maybe 10 minutes early to the interview. I was sitting there in the lobby waiting for it to begin. What I couldn't have known and what Jessica's team couldn't have known either is that I had just come back from the hospital where I had taken my dad for his first round of chemo. And right around that time, my dad had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And I remember very vividly, the feeling of seeing someone you love clearly drowning in front of you. No matter how much you reach out your hand from the raft, you can't pull them back. It's one thing to see someone you love die. It's another to try everything you can to help and it does nothing. And I remember sitting there in the lobby of The Honest Company, essentially yelling at myself in my own head. Telling myself you cannot think about these things when you go into this interview. This interview was months in the making. I'd already been working on "The Third Door" for six, seven years at this point. This was not a therapy session. I wasn't sitting with a friend. This was my mission. I was telling myself, you need to learn to compartmentalize. And as I looked around The Honest Company, I was like, this is a positive place. This is not a place that talks about death. So I just told myself, whatever it takes, just do not think about death or cancer. You have to keep this positive. So sure enough, it's time, I get escorted down a hallway. And everything in this office is just bright and positive. There's butterflies on the wall. Sunlight is shining in. The word honesty is spread out and ceramic cups on another wall. There's a vibe there. And I got taken into Jessica Alba's office, she's sitting on a couch. I sat down next to her. She couldn't be nicer. And I just knew I needed to start the interview in a positive place. And I'd done my research. And I knew that any time she speaks about her mother in an interview, she always just says these like beautiful, loving things. So, I said, great, I'm going to just throw her a softball. So, I say, Jessica, what's the best lesson your mother ever taught you? She looks down. I remember very vividly. She looked down at her jeans. She was wearing ripped jeans. And she started playing with the strands on her jeans. And she takes a while. I'm getting a little worried. And then she looks at me and says, well, my mother taught me to cherish every moment you have with your parents because you never know when it will be the last. And I just want to kneel over in pain. And I'm thinking maybe she's misspeaking but she keeps going on. She goes, my mother also told me, be careful of every word you say to your parents, because you never know when it's the last thing they'll hear from you. And I am now feeling like I'm being electrocuted. The worst possible answer. Like physical pain. You know that feeling when your insides are on fire. So, I just knew I needed to grab the steering wheel and take a sharp left. So, I also knew, I had done a lot of research on her. I knew that whenever someone asked her, how did you start The Honest Company? I could recite the answer for her. I'd heard so many of her interviews. She always talks about kids being happy and healthy and babies not being around toxic things and living healthy lives. So, I ask her, how did you start The Honest Company? I know how she's going to answer. I can't tell you why, but for some reason, she looks at me and goes, I was thinking about death. And she goes on to explain that when she was pregnant with her first child, it was the first time she ever realized how close life and death really are. Because you have this thing growing inside of you that can go any minute. And it was taking her to a place of fear that she hadn't felt in a long time. And she essentially starts to explain to me that in her childhood, she was in and out of the hospital all the time. She had an inhaler on the side of the soccer field. She would go into the hospital. Her mom would go into the hospital, her aunt had cancer, her grandpa had cancer, her grandma had cancer. And she keeps talking about death and cancer, death and cancer till I literally am about to explode. And I essentially just broke. I just blurted. I said, we have to stop. My dad just got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And normally at that time when you tell that to someone, they lower their voice and they say I'm so sorry. For some reason, she just got her hand and slapped down on the table and just yelled, fuck. And it felt like someone had just splashed me with ice water and lifted a weight off my shoulders. I didn't exist. And in that moment, it no longer became an interview. It became a conversation. And we started talking for the rest of the conversation about her family's history of death and cancer and my family's history. We started bonding about how sometimes it's crazy when you have a parent who's sick, and drinking diet coke in front you. You want to pull your hair out. We were just sort of like trauma-bonding over this. Talk about keys on the organ like, we just both started coming alive talking about this really painful thing. We're talking about it, we're talking about it, we're talking about it. And I started telling her, when my dad got sick, I started getting rid of all the cleaning supplies in the house and just replacing them with Honest products. And now she looked like she had just been splashed with ice water and a weight was lifted off her shoulders. So, we're going back and forth. And then she's telling me more and more about her childhood, about her biggest childhood fears, essentially getting sick and dying. She was surrounded by going into the hospital as a kid. I'll always remember this, about 45 minutes into the conversation, and I wonder if you have these sensations, there's like a random thought that comes into my head in an interview sometimes. Sort of like swinging from a vine. Am I going to reach for that vine? Because it's sort of a risky one. And I remember this thought entered my head. And the conversation was going great so I didn't want to mess it up. But something just told me, take the leap and see what happens. And I just looked at her and I said, I might be completely wrong. And she's like, okay. She had an office where it's like a glass wall, a glass door. And I point out to all of her, she had like 500 employees at that time, I said, I might be completely wrong, but are you telling me that the reason all of these people have jobs is because you, at one point in your life, finally had the courage to look your biggest fear in the eyes and ask, what am I going to do about you? And then her eyes pretty much popped out of her face. Like she'd never seen in that way. And I started just sort of saying this theory that was coming to me in real time. And I said, I'd pretty much told her all the other celebrities I've ever studied, built businesses around their mountain tops. Perfume lines, clothing, merchandise, essentially things to reflect, SKIMS underwear, whatever, to reflect their mountaintops. And I looked at her and I said, you are the first person I've met who's built an entire business by retreating to your deepest valley and creating around that. And essentially, my realization is, the reason Jessica was able to climb that second mountain top while she was still on the mountaintop of the first is because she had the courage to go into her deepest valley, her deepest fear. And pretty much grab her fear by the collar, slam it down and say, what am I going to do about you? And the realization and what's changed within me, moving forward, for anyone listening to this whose also in a period of transition, is it's so easy for us when we're wondering what we want to do with our lives or do in our next chapter or do next, it's so easy to look from the perch of our mountaintops of wherever we are in our careers. But the reality is, the thing that's actually going to fuel you to climb a mountain, and push through all of the hardships, is actually to go and have the courage to go into your deepest valley. And it sounds like that is a big theme of the documentary that's coming out. You sort of are an embodiment of someone who's constantly going into valleys and finding the fuel there. And what I like to tell people, and what I try to remind myself is if you're struggling to feel motivated, if you're struggling to find your path in life, the answer is actually in that deepest valley and asking yourself where you struggled most when you were the most vulnerable. And using that fuel to help you, moving forward. 

AUBREY: Out of the shadow of the valley of death. 

ALEX: That's exactly it. There are diamonds in that valley. 

AUBREY: And you did not disappoint with your ability to tell a great fucking story, my friend. That's a beautiful lesson and a beautiful story that we can all carry. Another thing that really stood out to me is the ability to have that kind of compassion to not respond in the conditioned way, I'm so sorry for your loss, which is removed, displaced by her slamming her hand down and saying, fuck. That's a level of almost like what you would want from a human, a friend, an authentic person, like to be able to access instant vulnerability , instant compassion with somebody you hardly know. That's like instant real compassion. You don't practice that. It's not like that was the 100th time she's done. 

ALEX: I was surprised. I was shocked. 

AUBREY: That instinct is so beautiful. And to me, elevates her in my mind, to a person who is able to do something that's really a superpower. Compassion is a superpower. The ability to feel, to really feel what someone is feeling and to be able to do that instantly and express that in that way, without playing the role of someone who cares, but to really fucking care, man, that's dope. And that's another superpower that she has. That's why she's a real-life superhero. She's got superpowers. 

ALEX: It takes one to know one, man. 

AUBREY: I love you, brother. Thank you for coming again, man. 

ALEX: This is always so fun. 

AUBREY: Absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, "The Third Door", the book. Still a classic. Still get that. But there's some new things that you got going on, including this 30-day challenge. People who want more, where do they go? 

ALEX: My favorite thing is if anyone ends up doing the 30-day challenge or reading "The Third Door" from this, let me know because it's what brings me joy. So Instagram, Twitter, whatever is easiest for people to, @AlexBanayan. And I'm just very, very grateful for you, man. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Likewise. And grateful for all of you. Thank you, everybody. Goodbye.