Today is a particularly vulnerable podcast with my good friend Rob Dial. Rob is an author and master coach, and we dive deep into challenges we have both faced on our evolutionary journey to becoming more whole and healed. We talk about going for your win through the lens of the hero’s journey, making peace with childhood wounds, how to deal with the fear of sharing your art with the world, as well as the Resistance that stops us from attaining our full potential.

AUBREY: Today is a super vulnerable podcast with one of my good friends, Rob Dial, who's an author, and a coach. But we really dive into the things that despite all of the work, and all of the coaching, and all the amazing mentors that we have, that we still struggle with every day, day to day. And our own challenges and our own evolution of our journey to becoming more whole, to becoming more healed to becoming the best version of who we are. So, I'm excited to share this podcast with author, coach and friend, Rob dial.

Starts after intro at 2:24
AUBREY: Rob, it's good to see you, bro.
ROB: Yeah, you too, brother.
AUBREY: So, how many people have gone through your different programs to learn how to be coaches? To help guide other people through their process?
ROB: We're approaching 1,500.
AUBREY: 1,500 people?
ROB: Yeah.
AUBREY: That's a lot of people. You just wrote a book here called "Level Up". This book talks about one of the things that coaches can help people get over, which is, if you follow the hero's journey, which I think is a good model, because there's a particular step that this is addressing, right? So, it starts, the ordinary world. This is the pre-tragic, everything is what you think it is. Everything's really simple, clear. You're just going to get a job, you're going to do your thing. Then there's a moment where that shifts, and the call to adventure, like, oh, there's something more, there is an artistic endeavor, there's some way in which I could offer more to the world or switch something up. So, you probably get a lot of people who are like, okay, I'm getting the calling, I want to be of service. Would you say that's kind of where you find a lot of the people who are coming to you, or do you think they're already past that when they get to you, or a little bit of both?
ROB: So, we work with some people who are existing coaches, probably 20% are existing coaches. 80% are like, I have a calling, and I want to go into it, which is harder to deal with in a coach. The reason why is because, I always say there's a few things that in my opinion, from what I've seen working with people that are basically brought to you in life and are some of the biggest spiritual things you can go through. One of them, I think, is a fitness journey. When you start getting on a fitness journey and start working on your body, there's a whole spiritual connection, like, am I doing this because I hate my body? Or am I doing this because I love my body and I want to improve it? For me, for a long time, I was like, I hate it, I hate my body.
AUBREY: Fuck you, fat body.
ROB: For me, it was like, "Fuck you. You're so skinny, dude. You can't put any weight on." So it's like, you have this journey of, am I doing this from hate? Or am I doing this from love?
AUBREY: It can also be the same for just health, even if it's not even like physical performance, right? You could be like, I hate being sick all the time. And that's not as powerful a driver as I would love being healthy. Like I would love to go be able to play pickleball or basketball or shred it out on the wake surf board, or whatever it might be. Moving from love is always a lot more powerful than moving from hate.
ROB: Yeah. For people that think about it, it's like, how much have you put your body through? All of the alcohol I've drank, all of the stuff I've done in the past, the sleepless nights, the partying when I was younger, and all of that. So, it's like, that journey is one of the journeys. Another journey that people can go on is the journey of having children, where all of your stuff is going to come up. Being in a relationship, all of your stuff is going to come up. And building a business is just another one of those things where all of your stuff comes up. When we're in a relationship with somebody, and you're in a real deep, intimate relationship with someone. Like, I remember Lauren and I were having a conversation. We had a friend that was not going through, wasn't really working the way that she wanted to in her relationship. She really truly loves him, though. And I was like, yeah, I don't think she's in love with him. She said, "Well, what do you think being in love means?" First off, the first question she asked was, "Are you in love with me?" I was like, "Shit, it's like the perfect female question, right? I set myself up for this one." I was like, "Yeah." And she's like, "What do you think being in love means?". And I was like, "Man, I've never actually thought about that in a deep level." Because we think like Hollywood, Matthew McConaughey, romcom is what we think love is. I said, I think being in love with someone is recognizing this person that's in front of you, and saying, I've got a lot of shit from my childhood and trauma, and I feel safe enough with you to work through all of my things with you. I want to create a space that is safe for you to feel like you can work through all of your things with me. That's what I see as a relationship. That's really what I feel, like being in the state of love. When you're going through these things, I will be in a state of love to hold you, and hold space for what you're going through. Then the other one is building a business. I'm sure with you building Onnit, all of your fears and limiting beliefs and everything came up. And so, with helping people build businesses, it's literally just working through all of their mindset things of why they're not taking. Because everybody consciously wants to build a successful business. But your conscious is 5%. 95% is your subconscious. So all of your fears, your limiting beliefs, you're not good enough. For me, building businesses I want to be successful is me trying to prove my worth to my dad for a really long time. So, the main thing that really came up for me was, am I doing this for me? Am I doing this because I want to serve the world? Or am I doing this because I need to make money to create security, or to prove myself to my dad who passed away 22 years ago?
AUBREY: It's not a binary thing. It could be a little bit of both.
ROB: Of course. It can be many different things, and you can use it. The way I see it, for a long time, I was trying to push away the ego. Once you identify the ego that pops up, it's like this part of me, I want to get rid of it. But I know you've interviewed the guy who started internal family systems, and that's amazing. Because even with writing this book, I remember, it took three years to write it. I wrote an entire book and threw it away. Wrote another book, it was completely different. And I was like, this is what I want to talk about, this is what I feel called to talk about. I'm almost done with the book, and I'm editing it, editing it. You know the process, writing a book is hard. I'm editing and editing and editing. And then the part came up when I was like, "Do you want to do this? Are you doing this because you want to make money and have the sticker that says New York Times Bestselling Author? Or are you doing this because you actually fucking care about people?" It was like a moment where I really had to kind of catch myself. And I was like, could it be both? And can I use my ego to want to create the best book possible to help people? And so, it's not about getting rid of those parts of us. I think it's about integrating them and saying like a tool in the tool belt, like, I have a nail, I need a hammer. Okay, I need to do this thing, create a book. I can bring my ego in to try to create the best one that I can. But I don't want it to take over me.
AUBREY: Yeah, I mean, one of the analogies I use is, the ego motivation, it's like a coal engine. It can help get the train moving. It can help get the train moving, but eventually, the tracks are going to go uphill. You're not going to be able to use that. Or, maybe you have so much coal that you can just power through. But eventually, coal is a dirty fuel, and it leaves a residue. It leaves a residue in your own field, and it's not a clean fuel source. And when you're moving from love, and a true purified, clarified field of desire, what in the Hebrew lineage they would call Barer, the purification and clarification of your desire, then it's like nuclear fusion. It's like a fuel source of you merging with the field of love, merging with your purpose and it's an inexhaustible source of fuel. So, it's okay to use coal, and sometimes you might not feel, and you'll need to grind, and you'll need to shovel into the fire, and your knuckles are burning, and you're sweating and you're in a little fucking conductor hat or whatever you got on. You may need it. So, don't shut down the coal engine. Have a stash that's there, but really try to guide yourself towards that power source that's inexhaustible.
ROB: One of my first mentors used to always say, you're either doing something for yourself, or you're doing something for your purpose. So, with what we do in coaching coaches, where it's like, anything that you want to do could be either for yourself in your own personal desires, or it could be for purpose. I remember one of the biggest shifts that I had in my life was, he sat me down, I was probably 21\. And he's like, "Hey, man, do you want to go to Chipotle and get some food?" I was, like, yeah. We went and got Chipotle, and he's like, he was very short to the point. He's like, "I don't know how to tell you this. We're running the number one office in the entire company," he goes, "I don't know how to tell you this. But a lot of people don't like you." And I was, like, okay. And, he goes, "I know your heart. But it doesn't come through with other people. You're really rash. You try to cut people first, you have a sharp tongue." He goes, "It seems like what you're doing, you're trying to succeed, because you want to focus on yourself." He goes, "Well, your life will change when you focus on your purpose." And so, with a lot of people, any type of business, whether it's coaching or growing any business, if you're doing it just for yourself, eventually that coal is going to run out. It's not fulfilling to make money anymore. But when you attach a purpose to that is where you can really start to, it's like the difference between motivation and drive. Motivation is the spark you're talking about, where it can get you going. But drive is, I have a purpose, I want to do this for other people, I want to do this for the world. And if people can attach to their purpose more than anything else, and have that drive them, is when I think actually success starts to come. It's like a byproduct of it. Yeah, it's just an analogy I think that goes with the one you're talking about. It's like, it's either you're working for yourself, and you're trying to do it for yourself, or you're trying to do it from purpose. When it's hard to build a business, if people take a step back and be like, am I focusing on myself or am I focusing on a purpose that I'm actually trying to help the world? If they can switch to purpose, that's when you really get that nuclear fusion.
AUBREY: Yeah. I have to open up a bracket that has no point to this whole conversation.
ROB: I love it, please do.
AUBREY: But you mentioned Chipotle. I've got a grievance with Chipotle.
ROB: Okay, please do.
AUBREY: I don't eat a lot of Chipotle. I'm stuck in New Jersey, and I'm fucking starving. The only thing around is that Chipotle. I'm like, fuck it, I'm going to get a Chipotle burrito. So, I haven't got a Chipotle burrito in a couple of years, but it's like, alright, whatever. It's not the worst thing I could do. Chicken burrito. So, I'm watching Homie make this burrito. And first of all, way too much rice. So much rice. Why? Why that much rice? First I was like, "Wow, it's a fucking lot of rice. It's more rice than if I just ordered rice." Fine. Then he puts the chicken in one corner. Then he puts the pico in one corner, and he puts the cheese on one spot, and then he puts the guacamole in one spot, and then he puts the sour cream in one spot. Then he rolls the burrito. And it was literally impossible for me to get all flavors at the same time. It was either I was eating just sour cream, or just guacamole, or just chicken, or just rice, or just pico. And I was like, what the fuck? That's not how you make a burrito.
ROB: Chipotle, George, that's in New Jersey. Make sure you guys fire him because he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.
AUBREY: Come on, guy. You line them all up together, and you roll them
ROB: Yeah, you mix them if you can, it’s even better.
AUBREY: So you get the whole burrito experience.
ROB: Yeah, you're going to get a guy fired.
AUBREY: I was disappointed. I was disappointed. Anyways, what you're saying is absolutely correct. And, okay, so here comes the next part, call to adventure. Sometimes the call is a little muddy. It's a call that's coming from your ego. Sometimes it's a call that's coming from your purpose, and your love for the world, and your desire to serve. Often it's a mix of both. Then there's the next step in the classic Campbellian hero's journey is the refusal of the call. The refusal of the call. This comes up because when you really try to do what, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, but when you really are going for what you really want to do... One of the first courses I came out was called "Go For Your Win". When you're really going for your win, and you fail, "fail" I think also there's a misnomer about failure. Because it's also just how you learn. But if you fail at doing what you really are called to do, it's devastating. So I think that's one of the reasons why people refuse the call. Because it's not safe. It's going for the partner that you really love the most, and laying it out there. If they reject you, you're devastated. But if--
ROB: It's not easier to do it.
AUBREY: It's easier not to do it. So, there's lots of places where there's this refusal of the call. Am I really going to put myself out there? Am I going to put my art out there? Am I going to release my songs that I've been working on for years? Am I going to release my poetry? Expose it to nature to see how nature responds to it? And that's a scary point for a lot of people.
ROB: Yeah, I mean, there's a Native American phrase that says the brightest light gets the arrows. And so, if you're going to put yourself out there, you're going to face some form of rejection or failure. Launching the book last night, we did a live, and had people on, and we were talking about the book. And I said, hey, in the chat, everybody put your number one fear. Not like spiders, not heights, what's your number one fear? I would say 90% of them was failures. And it really comes down to I think the way that we view failure, and if we actually think that it's a part of success, or if it's the opposite of success. In my personal opinion, I think that God, the universe, wants to challenge us to really see if it's something that we're going to go for. You can't build something amazing without falling a million times along the way. And I think that, that really what it comes down to is, and this is why a lot of people, I think, don't take action, is they don't actually know what their true purpose is of why they want to do it. They do know the self, and they want to make money and they want to be successful, and they want to have a million followers on Instagram, or whatever it is, but they don't actually know what it is that they want to do and create. So, there's a lot of times like when we teach people, it requires people to put stuff on Instagram. That's a bright light that's going to get arrows. And there's very few arrows, which is the interesting part about it. But we're always looking at those arrows way more than we're looking at the people who are praising us for what we're doing. I don't know about you, but for me, I would pay attention to those arrows all the time. Like I would see on my podcasts, and I would scroll through, and it's like five-star reviews. And then like 200 down, I see one one-star. I read that, and two hours later, I'm only thinking about what that person said. I'm not thinking about any of the good stuff, any people who said this saved my life, and any of that. All I'm thinking about is just that one thing. I think that it's just built into the human system where our brain wants to focus on the negative so that therefore we can avoid the negative in the future. Because our ancestors, that used to mean death in some sort of way, where if there was something negative unknown for us. And to not be accepted in the tribe meant certain death 100,000 years ago. So I think that for most people, when you're getting hit, you have to go back into yourself and be like, why is it that I actually want to continue to keep doing this.
AUBREY: Also, most of us have such a harsh inner critic, that the arrows resonate with the same things we tell ourselves all the time. See, you're a piece of shit, you're not any good. You always knew that. So, there's that part of us that's trying to, in a way, if you look at the internal family systems, it's kind of a protector. It's trying to protect us from the pain of the arrows that may come. And so it's always searching for them, and then focusing on them. It's trying to protect us from putting out our art, but it's actually not protecting anything. It's actually, what Steven Pressfield would call resistance. It's that force that is holding us back from really attaining our potential. And I think the people who really succeed, they find a way, I think in the highest way that I've seen this is somebody who, to use a warrior ethos metaphor, you think of Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great had a giant white stallion named Bucephalus, and he wore a giant, double plumed helmet. And he stood at the front of his army. He did that because he wanted all the arrows to come at him. He was the most well trained, he was the best warrior, he had the best armor. He was like, shoot your arrows at me. That inspired all of his men and all of his, regardless of what you think about the intentions of conquest, et cetera, it was a different time and a different era. I don't think putting our own morals on those things really absolutely makes sense. But nonetheless, as far as for a warrior culture, he exemplified a lot of beautiful things. And with that form of leadership, which is one category of what you might be called to do, you might be called to lead. There's a famous story, and in this story, he was deep going into India. His men, the horses are coming up against elephants, and it's fucking hot and muggy and sweaty, and they're getting cysts and rashes underneath their armor. It's just a fucking nightmare of a campaign, and they're so far from the breezy shores of Greece. I mean, you've spent time in Greece. It's fucking beautiful out there, right? They're in fucking the muck in India, wherever they are. And they're like, we want to fucking go home, man. It was like mutiny time. So, Alexander stepped forward, as the story goes, strips off all of his armor and reveals his body is just littered with scars. Scars from the arrows and spears and everything. And he strips down and he looks at his men and he says, you want to go home? Fine. Bring forth the man who has bled more than me, and we will go home. Everybody looks around and they look at his body littered with scars, and they just start pounding their chests, they're like with you. There's something really beautiful about that story, because if you are going to lead and you are going to put yourself out there, there's some shifts that you have to make where you go, "No, it's fine. Come here, arrows." Be like, I'll take the arrows so those can follow behind me and take less arrows for what they do. At my best, that's what keeps me going, because it's not that the arrows don't hurt. But there's a part of me that's like, no, I got to do this because I can take it. I can handle it, and I can deflect the arrows, I can receive the arrows, I can move to a different octave so the arrows just pass through me like it's the old movie "Ghost" and you're trying to punch a ghost, and there's nothing happening. I'm at a different octave. But that attitude of, yeah. Same in the story of Leonidas and the Spartans, when they said, "Our arrows will block out the sun," and they laugh and, "Okay, we'll fight in the shade." There's like a different mentality that I think you can click into where you're no longer afraid of failure, and you're no longer afraid of the arrows. You're just driven by your purpose and the gnosis of who you are.
ROB: Yeah, I think what you bring up is a good point, because your purpose has to be so strong that it doesn't fucking matter. For me, one of the fears that my wife has is as I gain popularity, my safety might come into issue. There are some people out there that have some, look at what happened with John Lennon and that type of stuff. I'm not saying that I'm on that level in any sort of way.
AUBREY: I mean, I've gotten half a dozen death threats, like serious death threats
ROB: But it doesn't stop you. There's that. But there's also a point where looking at you, you don't have to work. You have a life where you've exited, you're good. But if I were to take a guess, based off of how I know you, the way I feel too, is I'm either going to succeed at this, or I'm going to die trying. And the reason why I feel that way is because for me, we both try to help the world in some sort of way. We've both been at very dark moments in our lives many times, right? And we know what it feels like to be in that moment. That's the thing--
AUBREY: Maybe like yesterday.
ROB: Me yesterday too, bro. That's the thing is it doesn't go away, it doesn't stop. But you just get tools to become better. But for me, I trust that whatever God and I decided before we came here, what my life was going to look, I trust that whatever happens is going to happen perfectly, exactly as it's supposed to. But when you're in those dark moments, and you get yourself out of it, people don't have to become a coach, they don't have to start a podcast and do the type of stuff that we do. But what we're really trying to do is go, I know what that feels like, and I want to do everything that I can to try to help people get out of that place. If death comes because of that, or if I work myself too hard, whatever it might be, so be it. But it's kind of like the same thing where you hear about burning the ships where everyone wanted to leave once they got on the shore. And they said, hey, if you guys want to leave, what we're going to do is we're going to burn the ships. Either we succeed here or we die trying. And that's really what it comes down to purpose, where it's like, I remember hearing Will Smith, he's not the best person to talk about anymore, I guess. It's kind of tragic with people hating him after the whole thing with Chris Rock, but--
AUBREY: He slapped a guy
ROB: He slapped the guy, right? So, it's like, he says, if we get onto a treadmill
AUBREY: This may expose part of my own badness, it's fine.
ROB: Please, please.
AUBREY: Get your wife's name out my mouth and slap somebody in the face, I'm good with it. I'm fucking good with it.
ROB: That's a protector right there, right?
AUBREY: I'm good with it. He didn't close his fists. Chris Rock didn't have to spend the night in the hospital. How come it's cool if hockey players drop the gloves and bash each other in the face for fucking nothing? But he goes... Fine, fucking slap somebody. Whatever.
ROB: But one of the things he says, if we get onto a treadmill, you're either getting off first or I'm going to die on that treadmill. And that's really the way that I feel about it, where it's like, I don't want to do all of this anymore just for fame and notoriety. I did for a while. That's really what I was going for a while. That's a hollow existence, and it just got to the point of, I've seen people's lives change from putting this stuff out there. I know you've gotten death threats, but you've also probably gotten a thousand times more. Like, you saved my life, this helped me out so much. So, we all kind of find our place in the world. I always say, it's funny, because I've had people come up to me and they're like, You the very first podcast I listened to. I started getting into personal development. Now I listen to Aubrey Marcus. I'm into spiritual development." I'm like, I'm kind of like the gateway drug for Aubrey. I'm kind of the gateway drug where I want mine to go out to the masses, and go from zero to 100. And then there's also people that are at 100 to 200 that help people get, once you're deep into it, now we can go deeper in another different way. But the reason why it's important to you is because you've been at the point where it's hard, life is hard. But you've also been able to get the tools to get yourself out of it, and it's important that we teach those tools. And that's what a coach does in general, is I have the tools in my tool belt, I know what you've been through, take this journey with me, let me try to help you out of it.
AUBREY: Yeah. So many things to offer there. I think one of the things that people try to do that keeps them, it's part of their refusal of the call, is they paint a picture that the ones who succeed had it easy.
ROB: Oh, yeah.
AUBREY: So, they find out that my dad was a successful commodities trader. He was. And by the time I started Onnit, he had lost his mind. He did not give me a penny to start Onnit. I got that from my friend, Bodie and my friend, Howard. And we grinded out this nine-figure business from $110,000 investment without ever doing a series A, without getting anything else. We fucking made it work. But so many people, it doesn't matter how many times I tell that story. So many people are like, "Must be easy, bro." "Easy for you to say." And I'm like, well, I did have a lot of blessings. Blessings in that my father also came up from nothing, started with $30,000 and turned it into 30 million, being a beautifully talented commodities trader. He believed in himself, and he imparted that belief in myself. So yes, I did get something that a lot of people don't have. And mad blessings to that. My mom grew up in Seal Beach, and grinded it out on the tennis court, made it to the semifinals of Wimbledon. So, I was given a gift that is irreplaceable, which is belief in myself. So, I'm not discounting that I had gifts. But people always want to say, oh, it's just easy for the people who win. But that's just resistance keeping them from having the belief in themselves, and the motivation to actually be successful on their own. So, I think that's one factor, is you've got to watch the stories that you're telling, and watch, especially if you're being critical of somebody else. Is that because you're really jealous, and critical of yourself and wish that you would put your art out there? If you're just typing cringe on somebody, being emotional or whatever, are you afraid of being emotional? So there's lots of things that are revealed, actually, by the person slinging the arrow. I've also had many situations where sometimes I'll feel like, if actually a mirror held up, they'll be able to see something, and they'll be able to grow from this. But obviously, you can't respond to every arrow that way, because sometimes people are just fucking like, "Oh, great. We're in a firefight now. I got nothing but fucking bullshit arrows." And then the last thing to touch on about what you said is, yes, there are things worse than death. There are things worse than death. I remember, during the pandemic, I had strong beliefs about it. I didn't mean to believe that I knew for sure, but I had strong beliefs, particularly about certain ways that we were allocating resources and the lockdowns, and etc. And I had my beliefs about the whole immunology thing, but that really wasn't where I was focused. I was like, what are we doing as a culture here? Are we really looking at the whole picture? But it was so venomous out there to post anything. And so I was being quieter than I normally would have at the start. And it felt like I was just suffocating. I just started to suffocate. I was dying a slow death. And then from that came this poem, that came out of spoken word, a revolution of solidarity. And finally, when I released that poem, I could breathe again. So yeah, I mean, I got a bunch of shit from that and I got attacked all over the place. There's people making whole cottage industries about attacking me, and the people who spoke out during those times. But if I didn't, I was already dead. I was dead anyways. So, going out and doing that was actually the only way that I could live. I truly believe that we're not trying to get through this life not dying. We're trying to get through this life living. And I'd rather spend a few years truly Living than 50 years avoiding "death". Because death is just a fucking illusion anyways. We're here to live. If we're not going to live, fuck it. Doesn't even matter.
ROB: Yeah. Krishnamurti talk, have you ever read Krishnamurti?
AUBREY: Little bit.
ROB: Yeah, I got into him because Peter Crone has been on your podcast, and I think we actually talked about, last podcast I was on, who's just a wizard. He talks about Krishnamurti a lot, so I was like, I'm going to start reading this guy. And I've read a lot of his stuff. One of the things that he says deals exactly with what you're talking about, which is we're so afraid of death. But then if you actually take a step back, and you look at how you're living your life, he goes, you should be more afraid of living, because are you truly living? If you're living through fear to not be injured, if you're living and restricting your joy, if you're restricting your happiness, if you're restricting the sadness, the vulnerability, all of the aspects of what a human is, which is the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows, which, you and I in the past few months have gone through all of those, the highest of highs and lows of lows, which is, are you really living if you're trying to avoid all of that stuff? Many people are afraid of death. I personally am afraid of not living, that's my biggest fear. So, one of the things you said that was great is that you had gifts from your dad. But I also think some of the greatest gifts that you got from your dad as well was the things that you had to go through, and the traumas that came from the stuff later on down the road. I had sent you a video with your father's passing and I reframed my, for the longest time, I thought, my dad because he was an alcoholic. So, my dad's story was, when he was 12, he heard a gunshot go off in his parents room. He went in, and his dad was leaning over the side of the bed and shot himself in the mouth with a shotgun. That's what my dad had to see, and he had to walk into that at 12 years old, and he never really overcame it. And I used to think that my dad was like this lower level being, not as evolved as me. Why couldn't he figure it out? Why couldn't he just figure it out? And then I realized, through all of the stuff that I went through, it was able to take that and turn it into some good in some sort of way. I looked at it and I started thinking about it, I said, okay, if we're a soul before we come into this world, and we decide that's the life that I want, and if my dad's up there, his soul's looking and he's saying, Steve Dial, okay, he's going to see his father kill himself, he's going to walk in, see that happen. He's going to be an alcoholic, he's going to go through this, his children are going to go through this, and this is what he's going to have to go through. But through that, his son is going to do this with his life. His daughter is going to go and become, you know my sister's in school to be a psychologist to help battered women. That's her calling. And he looks at it, and he goes, "Yeah, I'm going to take that Steve Dial one." That reframed my mind of maybe he wasn't a lower level being. As Ram Dass says, some people come in here and they choose the hard route, because they're a higher frequency of being. And they came here to serve the world. Sometimes that serving of the world is the hardest path that they have to actually go through for them to change people's lives around them. I think that we can look at it like, the gifts that we had that we think are good and bad, but really what it comes down to is all of that is a gift. Every aspect of it is a gift.
AUBREY: That's a choice that we make. I mean, I have a slightly different view cosmologically than you. I mean, I really believe in freewill. I believe that we have choices, every person has choices. I believe that because I believe that there's varying degrees of freewill, depending on our access to spirit. But actually, the choice happens at a dimensional octave that's higher than the materialist reductionist that are measuring brain neurons firing. It's happening at a different level. And if you don't have access to that level of consciousness, you have very little freewill. So I get that. It's just that from many of my countless psychonautic journeys, I feel the place of choice, and I feel the accessibility to choice comes in. So, I recognize that a lot of people have limited choices, but I also believe that everybody does have some choice and some free will that decides which way it goes. But what I do know is that no matter what happens, we have, so, I don't believe that everything happens for a reason, right? And I actually hate it when people say that. Like my best friend, Aaron Rodgers just tore his Achilles in this fucking heroic moment coming out to play for the Jets, the whole city is on fire. It was one of the most tragic things ever. And the last motherfucking thing I was going to tell him is, "Everything happens for a reason." He'd have been like, "Fuck you, bro. Fuck you." And I actually don't believe that's true. But what I did tell him is, "I don't know why this happened, man. I don't know if this was God's will. I don't know if this was a pure chance. I don't know if this was the dark forces, like a snake came and beat you in the heel. I don't know. I don't know why it happened. But what I do know is that you get the choice to define whether this is a blessing or a curse. You are going to decide the meaning that this has in your life. And you have that power." And that's really, I think, the choice that we have to make. Is it a blessing or a curse? I don't know. It depends on what you do with it. Depends on the choices that you make. And if you make consistent choices that bring you closer to love and strength and courage and truth and beauty and purpose and service, you make all of those choices, then, yeah, everything happens for a reason. That's your choice.
ROB: It goes back to the basic thing that they say a lot in spirituality, which is just everything is either for your love. And I think that whatever his choice is, as long as he feels it's through love. I think that's the important thing. And we all have so many choices. I've made many choices out of fear in my entire life, and very rarely does it come back and I'm like, "Man, that was a great choice," right? But if I come in, I look at it through the lens of what do I love? What would bring more love to the world? How can I serve people at a higher level? I think that the most important decision we can make is either I'm going to operate through this world in a frequency of fear, or I'm going to operate in this world through a frequency of love. It's so much harder to go through the frequency of love. It's easy, but it's also harder. It's easier in a lot of ways, but it's also harder in a lot of ways.
AUBREY: Well, fear has its boot on our throat, and love is a subtle field. And sometimes it's harder to access, for sure. But once you do access it, then it's way easier. One of the things that, it was my brother Ted Decker, who's been on my mind a lot lately. He's a real Christian mystic. He studies the work of Paul Selig and the guides. One of the teachings that comes through is any action taken in fear is bound with fear. So, no matter even if it's the right action but it's taken from a place of fear, it's going to be bound in fear, and you're going to have to deal with the fear that's bound in the action that you take. And I think also what we're talking about is not the awareness of danger. Awareness of danger and fear is not the same thing. Yes, if you could call it the same, but there's lowercase fear and big Fear. And when we're talking about is Fear. I've always tried to think about that as yes, it matters that you take the right action, but it matters just as much how you take the right action. And, sometimes moving from fear to love will change the action. Sometimes it won't change the action, the action might be the same. I got to leave my job, I got to do this. But it could be the right action. But are you taking it for the right reasons with the right energy? Are you binding this choice in love? And if you bind the choice in love, I think you will have less, call it karma, if you will, that you're going to have to deal with. A fear karma that you're going to have to deal with. You'll have a reservoir of love. It's very rare that you regret those choices that are truly made from a place of love.
ROB: I'm curious of that, because that's really interesting. Does he say if it's bound in fear, can you eventually become aware of that and then switch it to--
AUBREY: Sure, you can transmute it, you can alchemize it. But you have to deal with it. You're setting yourself up with something else that's, it's like bringing an apple with you on a long trip, but coating it in poison. All right, well, you're going to have to find some soap and water at some point. You can't just bite into the apple, you're going to have to clean it. But it was the right choice to bring the apple. Good choice. So, in this case, a simple, silly example to offer. But did you bring the apple because you love apples? And then there's no poison in the apple. Or did you bring the apple because you were terrified that you might be hungry? You know what I mean? And so, that's kind of the metaphor that's used. And I think it's helpful, because it's not only the right action, but it's the right process to make the right action.
ROB: Yeah. I'm curious with you, I'm not trying to interview you, but now I'm really curious--
AUBREY: Well, we're both fucking podcasters so this is inevitable. This is inevitable.
ROB: Do you think that you started Onnit from a place of fear or love? And was there a moment that you kind of awoken to--
AUBREY: It was both. I mean, it was a lot of love at the start. And then a lot of fear came in, especially when I started to be successful. Because everything that I tried before that, I'd failed. And it was like, wait, you're saying that this is working? No way. No way. I was looking around so vigilant, just eyes peeled at every, and I think part of being a CEO and part of leading a startup or an idea is vigilance is important. But I was taking it way too far. One of my big regrets is, I rarely regret what I've done, but I've regretted how I've gone about it. I didn't have to be so scared for the first, from 2011 to 2019, I was fucking, pretty terrified the whole way.
ROB: Of what?
AUBREY: Of somehow, some way this whole thing was going to slip away and fall apart. And all of this success was going to be some cruel joke from the universe, like, haha, Aubrey, you thought you were going to be successful, and you thought you were going to be able to build something great, but we were just setting you up for an even bigger fall. Really, I think the last few years have, I've started to be able to operate from a greater place of faith, where I just have a greater faith in myself, my ability to withstand the difficult situations that I'll go in. And my greater faith in the universe, God, the cosmos. I believe we're constantly in conversation with the divine, that's part of my Hebrew lineage. Part of the lineage is the one who wrestles with God, wrestles with God. What does that mean? It means that God's asking you, what do you want? And you're asking God, what do you want? And you're working it out together, because there's a dimensional reality where God doesn't understand what we're going through. So God's asking us, what do you want? What should we do? And you're asking God, God, I can't see the whole landscape, what should we do? I've been in those conversations, where it's like, we're both looking at each other, like, what do you think? What do you think? And I'll be like, I trust you, God. And God's like, I trust you. It's this cool moment, and that's really come with my understanding of the Hebrew lineage. I'm not just making this up, this is my lineage. And this is the way that we understand the way that we interact with the divine. And it makes a lot of sense to me based on my own plant medicine journeys, etc. So with that, there's come a greater faith. Now, let me give you the counter of that. I also know that there are dark forces out there, that are beyond just the fear that I hold in my own body. There's fear in the aggregate, there's forces that are trying to undermine us at all times. What their motivation is, we could go into the whole dark trinity, I've done that before on a podcast. I did that on a podcast with Blu. You want to hear me break down the dark trinity? Listen to my podcast with Blu. But fundamentally, there are also dark forces at play. So that's why when Aaron had his injury, I was saying, "Look, bro, I don't know if this is God, I don't know if this is the dark forces. I don't know if there's just chaos in the universe." And this was neither, just a random chance. "I'm not sure. But I do know what you can do from here." So, it's interesting, I have a great amount of faith, but when I lose faith, is when I'm like, fuck, the dark forces are too strong. Then I find an even greater strength, like, no, they're not. The God forces, the forces of the helpers, the star nations, the angels, the divine, the Shekinah in my lineage, they're stronger, and we're stronger, and we're going to make it. And I find myself able to move back to a place of faith. So sometimes I can catch myself almost giving too much respect to the dark forces. I think it's important to have some respect. And that's why you encounter the saying, not today Satan. Like in a plant medicine journey, you may encounter a devil or a demon, and you have a choice. It's lots of ways you can deal with demons. But a lot of times, it's like, respect not today. I'm not going to contest with this. I respect your power, and we'll pick another day to lock horns.
ROB: Yeah, I think it goes back to the important part of it when you're talking about talking with God. A lot of people are like, I remember growing up and being a Catholic. God was always this supreme being that was above you, he was like a king, and you were just like the subordinates. You were kind of like the peons. Yeah, you can't really talk to God. If you do want to talk to God, you can, but you have to go through another person that's like a higher being who happens--
AUBREY: Translator.
ROB: Yeah, through a translator, right? And I think a lot of people, they always ask, with intuition, with gut feeling, and all of that, how do you connect to that? And I think that one of the struggles I think people are dealing with right now, they've probably dealt with forever is that we're also cerebral, and we always are on our phones, and we're always, I deleted Instagram about 40 days ago. It was the best thing that I've ever done. Because I'm not getting pulled to it anymore. My screen time was cut in half on my iPhone. And it was because of the fact that I felt like I was too in my head all the time, and I feel like a lot of people are as well. So, I've tried to get more still moments. And it's like, God speaks in the silence. But a lot of times it's not always, it can be a voice that's in your head, it can be somebody that comes to you and says something to you, and it's like, that's almost like God or the universe speaking through this human. But a lot of times, it's just a feeling. And I think that for me, the way that I try to connect with God is when we're having that conversation that you're talking about is, what do we feel is right? I can go into fear, and I can feel fear, and a lot of times I notice it's coming from my head. But if I try to actually connect my heart, and this was hard for me specifically as a guy who just was taught to throw his emotions away, taught to not pay attention to him, boys don't cry, playing all these sports, where you're not taught to really feel into yourself. But what I've come to find is that if I make a decision off of what feels right to my core, I still to this day haven't found a decision that hasn't worked out that way. But it's really hard to take a step back, to say, I'm going to disconnect from the world, from Netflix, from YouTube, from the iPhone, TikTok, all those things. I'm going to disconnect from this, and I'm going to actually go to the silence and just ask the silence, what should I do right now? And that's what I've been trying to practice as much as possible right now with challenges in life and having a business and putting out a book. I was one of the people, I don't know if you saw the whole thing with Theo Von and all the people who are screwed out of a lot of money with Kast Media, I was in that.
AUBREY: You were in that too.
ROB: I was in that for a very significant amount, more than my house is worth. It was really hard. My immediate feeling of it was, and we're talking close to seven figures, right? My immediate feeling of it was, I'm going to go and aggressively fight this and sue and sue and sue and sue. And then I took a step back, and I was like, okay, I'm going to switch to another, I switched over to Sirius XM, and they were great, and they've been amazing. And I was like, sometimes you just need to leave that behind you. I could fight and I could try to sue, and that could be a long process. But what's my energy going to? That energy isn't going to what I love and to actually create. So, I could sue and try to get whatever amount I could. But in reality, man, it's like, for me personally, with podcasts, it's never actually been about money. Money's been a byproduct, which I've been super fucking blessed. I never thought I'd be in the position that I'm in. I always wanted to be in this position. But I'm not doing it for that. You had your podcast before I did. I started in 2015. Nobody was making money off of podcasts when we started, it wasn't a way to make money, right? It was a way for me to be like, I know what people are going through, I want to help people as much as I possibly can. And, I felt obligated to teach it. So I had this moment of, do I go after it? And I go after it and try to fight with tooth and nail? Or do I say that chapter of my life is done, I'm just going to turn the page, and I'm going to focus on how I can grow this show and try to help people and try to make it better. Because the energy that was inside of me, when I saw Theo's video, it came back. He was there. And I was like, oh, I'm feeling that stress, that anxiousness. And what I've found is that my creativity is just destroyed when I feel that. I'd rather just let it go and say, I was talking with Lewis Howes when it was all going on. And he's like, "Man, I'm so sorry you have to go through this." And I said, "I trust that this is coming up because there's a lesson I'm supposed to learn from it, so that if this happens in the future, or something starts to look like this could happen in the future, I'm going to be protected in a way that I wasn't protected then. And it's just another life lesson. It was a hard decision. But it's just like, I'm just going to switch, I'm going to be done with this, I'm going to wash my hands off it. Everyone's like, "You should put out a video, you should tell all the details."
AUBREY: "Go to war."
ROB: Go to war, put it all out there.
AUBREY: Load the war wagons, Mad Max style. Everything's going to be shiny. Spray the chrome in your mouth.
ROB: I've got emails, and I've got text messages. I could absolutely, 100%, go and fight. But some fighting can be from a place of love, that fighting is from a place of love. And I'd rather just not spend my energy on that. Because that energy of that gets in the way of creativity, and that's getting in the way of my mission. And I trust that if I just follow what feels right in my heart, my head said, fight. My heart said, let it go, man. Just turn the page. There's greater things for you in the future.
AUBREY: Yeah, that's always a tough choice. So, during my tenure at Onnit, there was a couple of decisions we had to make about whether to engage in legal battles. What I really felt was a very thin patent claim on the combination of two different ingredients. So, we got with our attorneys, and they were like, you got a really good chance to fight this. Because this patent should have never been granted. It's the combination of two natural ingredients. So, there's no novelty to this compound. And it was granted, but you could fight it. But this is a multi-year, multi-million dollar process. And if you lose, you're going to have to pay everything, plus all the legal fees. And if you win, you maybe get your legal fees covered, and you don't have to pay but it's still, but I could feel the energy, like, I'm getting taken advantage of here.
ROB: Of course.
AUBREY: Somebody's trying to go steal some of the food off my table that we earned fairly. And it was a difficult deep decision. Same thing. Do we circle the wagon or do we just say, okay, this energy. And I had a lot of wise people, entrepreneurs and founders and CEOs, and almost all of them said, "Don't fight it."
ROB: Really? I thought it was going to be the opposite.
AUBREY: They're like, "Don't fight it. It's not worth your energy. It's not worth your time. You may win, but you're going to lose. Even if you win, you're going to lose." So, I took their advice. When we got to the point of payout, there was something about it that was really hard. It was really hard. And I don't know if it was the right choice, because I didn't walk the other path. I don't know what that other path would have been. But these are difficult decisions that we'll all have to make at certain times. Do you fight? Or do you accept? Do you turn the other cheek? This is where you really have to go deep and see, there's certain things that you need to stand for on principle, and that you do need to fight. And, there's certain ways that you need to stand up, and there's certain times where it's like, this is not my battle. The thing that kind of guides me is determining whether I want to fight, I don't want to get drawn into a fight that I don't want to fight, and I didn't intend to fight. You know what I mean? There's some fights that I want to fight. Like, I want to fight as hard as I can for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I want that fight, bring it on. Whatever fight, bring on that fight. I choose that fight. But some other tangential woke culture concept where I'm like, this seems a little silly, but do I really want to fucking fight that? That's not my battle. I'm battling to try and get the President of the United States elected. Whatever small or moderate amount that I can help, I'm going to do it. For me, it's about choosing the battles and being wary not to open up too many fronts. If you read Robert Greene's "Strategies of War" even back all the way to "The Art of War" Sun Tzu, like all the way, all of the major failures is when people get too aggressive, push too hard, open up too many fronts. There will be times to fight, but try to keep that focused and directed on the things that you really care about fighting for. I try to guide that every day. Okay, there's another interesting thing, though. There's a lot of energy that's created in fighting. And if you pick battles that you care about, and you actually pick battles, you will draw a lot of attention to yourself. And it could be helpful, but it’s like, so it's an interesting strategy that I think about, and the rule for that is, never pick a fight with somebody who's smaller than you. Period. In any situation, don't pick physical fistfights with anybody. Defend yourself if you have to. But in all of these other battles, don't pick somebody who's smaller than you to fight with. If you're a rapper, don't start beef with Lil Homie or whatever fucking tiny rapper there is, if you're fucking Jay Z. Don't start that beef, because that's just going to raise that person up to your level the moment you engage in conflict. So, if you're going to take a swing, make sure it's somebody, or some concept that's bigger than you are. And then you can kind of jack some of that energy from that. That's one of the strategies that I think has been successful for some people, but you have to have the constitution of a fighter to do that. Same in UFC. Don't call out somebody if you're the fifth ranked fighter. Call out the champ, or call out the number one or number two contender. Call out somebody who's up. Don't call out like, hey, there's that motherfucker who beat me in amateurs, who's ranked number 30. I'm ranked number five, I'm going to talk shit about that guy. All right, well, you're going to get that fight. But what good does that do you? Doesn't do you any good.
ROB: Especially if you lose that fight.
AUBREY: Of course, it's all loss. It's all ego, it's all loss, and it's only going to help the one you're fighting. So, I really try to keep that in mind. And my proclivity is not to pick fights in general, but I sometimes think about it. I'm like, maybe I should take a swing. You know what I mean? If it's something I really believe in.
ROB: It's interesting because if you look back to what you were talking about with Onnit and lawsuits and stuff, where you had to pay out, and I had to sign a contract saying that if I can get out of this agreement that we have, and I won't go for any of that money, because I'm out of this and I can sign a new contract with a company that actually cares about me. But we don't know what it could have been had you taken that fight. But if you look at what the path ended up being of Onnit--
AUBREY: It ended up good enough. No regrets.
ROB: The mental energy and the physical toll that it could have taken on your body to go that route could have been immense, and it might have not turned out to you getting the exit out of Onnit like you did. It could have. I don't know, we don't really know what it is. But it really comes back to trusting yourself I think is an important thing, right? Like you checking in and saying, is this fight that I want, or is this just a fight that I'm going into based out of ego? Is this a fight that I truly believe in? And sometimes that's yes, and sometimes, I had a call with the guy who just put out the video yesterday, Coffeezilla who put out the whole thing. I don't know if you've seen the documentary on the whole thing that just happened with Bryan Callen and with Theo and everybody. I saw it and I had spoken to him and he's like, you should sue. There's this, there's this, he's getting behind the scenes on stuff. And I called up my lawyer, and I was like, I felt the feeling again of hey, let's fucking fight. Because we're guys too. Fighting does become fun sometimes. But then I was like, I've got so much on my plate right now that feels like a place of love, labors of love. And that fight just doesn't feel like a labor of love. Now, if somebody wants to come at my wife on something, I'll fuck you up.
AUBREY: Of course.
ROB: But that's from a place of love and protection and what I feel is right. I think a lot of people just need to get better at trusting themselves based off of the, okay, I'm going to make this like I always talk about decisions is a really important thing that people need to pay more attention to. A lot of people have resistance towards decisions. They'll have resistance for a decision and then they make the decision, and go, "Fuck, was that the right decision? I don't know if that's the right decision. Should I go back? Should I change it?" When you look at the root word of decision, it's Decaedera which means to cut off. Which means you literally cut off all other options. And so, going back to what you were talking about with Alexander the Great, he had to get his team and everybody that was there to make a decision, like, we're going to do this. When you burn the ships, it is a decision of I'm going to do this. When you start a business, whatever it is, this is a decision, I'm going to do this. And I'm going to cut off all the other options.
AUBREY: Yeah, Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon River with the army, which meant civil war. As he was crossing, the famous line that he said is ‘Alea icta est’ which is the die as in dice. The die is cast, there's no turning back, we've crossed the Rubicon. And this is the classic part of the hero's journey, where you cross the threshold. And if you're waffling back and forth, and straddling the line of the threshold, the chasm is just going to get greater, and your inaction and your wobbling is also a decision. There's that passive decision not to decide, which sometimes decides for you. And I see this in a lot of relationship dynamics as well. People are making a passive decision to break up with somebody by just not doing anything in the relationship until the other person has to do it, or it just falls apart. And it's like, that's not the way. Have the courage to make the decision. Make the fucking decision. That's the king energy. King energy is line energy, line is, this is discretion, this is my discretion. We're moving forward in this direction. I believe it was Castaneda who said, choose a path, any path, as long as it's a path with heart, and then don't look back. You've chosen that path with heart, and you fucking choose it. Doesn't mean you can't make another choice as the landscape evolves. But to really cross the threshold and make the decision and see it through. There's so many people who get so close, or to continue the hero's journey metaphor, they approach to the inmost cave, it starts to get really intense, and then there's the ordeal. And you have to have amazing courage and resilience to move through that point, that point where the resistance gets to be the maximum. That's where you ultimately seize the sword and get the reward. For Onnit, that was 2018. That was the ordeal. Everything fell apart.
ROB: When the lawsuit happened

AUBREY: No, the lawsuit was a minor blip. That would be in the tests, allies, enemies category. Not even the approach to the inmost cave. But there were major issues internally in the company. It's a whole story to tell. But basically, we created a situation we called cashpocalypse, and a lot of our allies dispersed. We had our CFO just walk out of the door saying, you guys will be bankrupt in three months, because this investment deal that we were working on pulled out at the last half yard line, and we'd already distributed all our cash. It was a nightmare situation. That was the moment where myself, and who became my CEO, Jason Havey. I was still the CEO then, we're like, alright, we go out with our shield or on it, like we're going to, Onnit. We're going to go out, one of these two ways, with our shield or on it. We got to take our shields home with us at the end of the day. We made it through.
ROB: I'm curious, because a lot of people talk about manifestation and stuff. But do you feel like looking at it is, it's interesting because one of the things that you said was you had this fear of getting so big, and then you just losing all of it and just disappearing. Do you feel like there might have been a part that you manifested a little bit, when it's like, it was kind of there. Because what I find with people, I'll give you a context of it is that, most people, when they operate from a place of fear, they usually, whatever they're focusing on, they're going to create that thing. They're going to
AUBREY: I know, it's so annoying.
ROB: Isn't it? I wonder if, and you might be able to tell me, if there was actually a switch when you were afraid that you were going to have the success, you got it and then it was going to crumble away. And there came a moment where you almost had it all crumble away. Like the CFO said, you're going to be bankrupt in three months. Was there a shift where you were like, okay, I need to actually change the way that I'm going about this. Or you think there was a chance to happen
AUBREY: Once the fear actually manifests, there's something else that actually comes through in me. There's like a higher level of courage and a higher level, my weak point is in the middle territory. When the crisis hits, when the shit hits the fan, I'm good.
ROB: You're probably better.
AUBREY: I'm better. I get better, the more pressure, the better I am. But in the mild pressure, I can give way to fears, and I can give way to, I'll tell you the one thing that I still haven't quite got over. And it's this fear of abandonment from the masculine.
ROB: Me too.
AUBREY: I had such a solid loving relationship with my grandma, she's tattooed on my arm right here, and my mom, and they were always there, unconditionally loving. So, it's been a real blessing in my relationships, not that I haven't had hardship that's happened in my relationships, but I have a deep trust in the feminine. I have faith in the feminine. Doesn't mean that I haven't had betrayals or been cheated on, or been, of course, all that. But it doesn't, it's not like, I'm afraid of that. It just happens. Then like, well, I didn't expect that. But whatever, so it's moved on. But with the masculine, anybody who has like a really significant energy in my life, so it's somebody who represents, like father represented power and represented a really important position in my life. So, with the masculine, when I have any of those relationships, even if they're brothers, whoever they are, I'm always like, you're going to bounce? There's some part of me. It's a weird thing, because you don't want to take full credit for responsibility, for the actions that other people take, right? It's their actions. But I can't escape my complicitness in this pattern, this repetition of this pattern happening multiple times for a variety of different reasons. But most every one of the key masculine figures in my life has abandoned me at some point. It's something that still fucking comes up. You know what I mean? It's like, goddamn, some of these trauma patterns, especially when they were early. And the way it was with my father is he would just get really angry about some inconsequential thing, completely withdraw his love. And I felt totally abandoned. Now, he'd come back, but he was always constantly abandoning, coming back. And then the final abandonment, of course, which, of course, he didn't try to lose his mind. But he was my best friend in many ways. And he fucking was gone. One day, he was just gone.
ROB: But still physically there.
AUBREY: Still physically there. And there was some part of me that couldn't escape the anger of, Dad, you're choosing this, even though you're not really but I know you can make a different choice. So, it's interesting, and it gives me compassion for people who still have those early traumas that they're still working through. Fuck, there's nobody who's done more work that I know than me, from 24 years in the plant medicine journey, having masters, like Dick Schwartz of internal family systems who gets to talk to me, and Peter Crone and Marc Gafni and all of these different people. But I still see it fucking sneak up. I'm like, goddamn, there you are again. It's interesting.
ROB: Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I'm the same way as you in that way, where obviously I felt abandoned by my father as well. As you're talking, I'm realizing awareness is with myself too. And one of those awareness, is that I'm noticing is that if I send a text message, I'm married now. But if I send a text message to any female, whether they're in my company, outside of my company, I know some females that are very powerful, very successful, who knows it's what. If I send them a text, and they don't text me for like a day, you already know what I'm going to say, because you're probably the same, right?
AUBREY: Totally.
ROB: If I send them a text, and they don't text you back in a couple of days, no big deal. But if I send a text message to a guy, who I look up to in some sort of way, and it takes them two days to send me a text message back, I'm immediately going, "Fuck, man. Of course, they wouldn't want me on. Of course, they wouldn't want to talk to me." I have a lot of friends that have had podcasts, and so I've been talking with them. Some of them have me on their podcast, and I'm grateful that you have me on your podcast as well to talk about the book and everything. But there's one of my friends that has a huge podcast as well that's a guy, and he didn't text back for like two days. I noticed the story coming up again of, he's probably gotten too big for me, I must not be successful enough, he must have moved on in some sort of way. That's been running through my head for two days, because I've got that father wound. And then he texts me back, and he's like, "I'd love to have you on. Sorry, I was out of the country." I was like, "Thank you, universe, for showing me that this shit still exists inside of me." Do you have that as well where it pops up, and you're of course, they don't want to hang out, of course they don't want to respond back to me.
AUBREY: I think for you the particular flavor of it is, I'm not good enough.
ROB: Of course, yeah.
AUBREY: For me, I think the flavor of it, because this is the way, the pattern was with my father is, they're going to have some story that's not true. It's just a not true story. And that's how it's always been. There's a story that's just fucking not true. I was coming from a place of love, doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. But there was no malintent. Whatever you think I was trying to do, I wasn't. You know what I mean? So, I then go to this whole landscape of okay, what is the reason, what is the way that they could have interpreted one of my actions, one of the things that I said, one of the things that I'm doing that they're going to judge me for, because they don't know where I'm coming from. So, that's what will come up in my head when I don't get those text responses for a couple of days. It's like, all right, what's this motherfucker's story now? Here it comes again. I'm going to have to deal with this fucking story. I have to say, it's probably, and that's the thing about the mind is, well, you've seen this before, bro. It's happened at least seven times. Name them up. Of course, it's going to happen again. And then it's just catching yourself and being like, "No, not going to happen again."
ROB: Yeah. It's interesting, because when you look at it with your, because I've heard you tell stories about your father before when I've listened to your podcast. I remember a story of you saying, I think there was something that happened in ping pong at one point in time, and then it didn't come for another couple of days. But that was like you're viewing, he had a story and then it's going to come back and hit me in some sort of way. It makes sense, because for me, it was, I always tell people growing up with an alcoholic father was hard, but I was blessed to have the best type of alcoholic father which was, he didn't beat me, he didn't touch me inappropriately, he didn't yell at me. He would just get drunk and fall asleep. And a lot of times what he would do is he would get drunk and forget about me. There's times, and I must have blocked them out of my head because I don't really necessarily remember them. But my mom would say, I grew up on Anna Maria Island in Florida. So I grew up on an island and fishing was like my favorite thing in the world. So my dad would call and say, "Hey, I'm going to take you fishing. I'll be there at four o'clock." And I was like, "Okay, cool." So I'd get all my stuff together, 10 years old, getting everything together, and I'd be out there four o'clock waiting on my fishing pole. I'd sit there for an hour, and he would just never show up. I'd be there for two hours and never show up. My mom would eventually come out and say, "Hey, he's not going to come." And so I think for us, it's very interesting, because our story of what we have with the masculine, we're still noticing that thing come up. It's really interesting, man, because what you're saying is you've done so much work on yourself over the past 24 years, but it's fucking still there. And it's really interesting, because I've tried to get on this journey of, maybe there is no destination. Maybe there is no moment in my life. My grandfather lived to 96 years old. He was a person that I looked up most to. He was the best example of what someone could become when they're a Christian. And sometimes it can go one way, it could go another. He went the best way. And if I can live to 96 years old, I've got 59 more years. What if I get to 96 years old, and I'm on my deathbed and I still have that father wound? And it's still there?
AUBREY: Yeah, for sure.
ROB: Because all too often we say, I fucking thought I was over this. I've been on a personal growth journey and learning and grow myself
AUBREY: And then all the shame comes in, and all that.
ROB: Right. So then we have the actual, the thing of maybe I never get rid of it. And so I've had so many people that are, on two years, three years into a growth journey and working on themselves, and they're like, "I just can't wait till it's over." And I was like, "Me too, dude." I don't know if it's ever going to get there. And what's given me a lot of pieces, like maybe this is just a part of me. Like I have my right arm here. Maybe this is just a part of me and my father's wound is just a part of me, and maybe it'll never go away. But instead of trying to get rid of it, what if I could just try to become more at peace with it? And that's really what the journey of the past four years have been for me, which is, yeah, you're going to be triggered in many ways over and over and over again. You're going to lose yourself over and over again in your lifetime. But you just got to go back and find yourself again. And letting go of the feeling of a destination. I actually have probably listened to every single one of Ram Dass's podcasts. I was listening to him on the way here. I remember starting to think, I want to listen to this guy. And you had a podcast with East Force that came out, years ago when his album came out. And that's when I started listening to Ram Dass. So, I need to thank you for that. Because Ram Dass has been one of the guiding lights in my life. Huge, huge guiding light in my life. Even he got to a point where he said, I don't think I'm going to leave this life and be enlightened. And I was like, "If Ram Dass ain't going to get enlightened, you're fucked, bro. You're definitely not getting there, you know." So, for me, it's been a lot more like inside of my body, the feeling is, okay, it's not white knuckling my way through life trying to get past this thing. It's like, here it is, again, work with it, love it. And as you love it, which is what Krishnamurti talks about, which is loving that side of yourself, Internal family systems talks about it, which was a defense mechanism that came up. As you learn to love it, and care for it as Krishnamurti says, it stops having so much grip over you in your life, and you can be able to just use it for the good that you need when you need to use it.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's such a tricky beast, because I do believe that I want to transcend this. I want to be able to transmute it. In my Hebrew lineage, you call this like a hisauron. It's like one of your great challenges or one of your flaws and part of your gifts are overcoming these flaws. And part of the gift of having my words or actions misconstrued, and then losing love is that I'm a very good communicator. I'm very aware of all of the ways that my actions can be taken. So it's given me a superpower. So, grateful for that. And I still want to heal this. The problem is that every time it happens again, the thing goes deeper. I'm actually really at peace with my father, but am I at peace with the other times that has happened with other people that have not healed? Now, a lot of times people come back, but in most of the cases, people have come back. It's rare, in some cases not, and they're like, "Hey, man, sorry I was tripping." I'm like, it's all good, all love. But, you carved a groove deeper. It's funny. I really, one, I could do this work on my own. Or two, come on, somebody, just prove me wrong. Prove me wrong. Stick by me. And it's not that there haven't been people who were like that. So, I think there's still work to be done. So, how do you deal with those fears that come up? Fears that have been patterned? Well, you can be okay with the reality where it does happen. You could be at peace with that reality. But when you really care, that's your fucking boy. You see what you're going to do in the world together and you're bonded to them. There's a new movie out by Guy Ritchie called "The Covenant. Have you seen it?
ROB: Mm-mm.
AUBREY: Oh, fuck, it's one of my favorite movies of all time. In "The Covenant" I cried. I cried through like literally the last hour of that whole movie. Because "The Covenant" is a story about a bond, and it's a bond between brothers. It's a bond, that no matter what, no matter how difficult or deadly it might be, the bond is not broken. And it really touched that deep point, where I believe in a covenant. There is no way in hell I will abandon one of my friends. I just will not, I will not do that. So, I believe in that value, I believe in the value of the bond and the covenant. And so, just seeing it in the movie gave me faith. It was like, oh, fuck, this is real. The world is real. Because I think part of the challenge that I face is fuck, I kind of extrapolate universally and globally to the personal things that have happened to me and be like, the world's just a fucked up place. There's no honor, there's no code, there's no covenant, there's no bond that's sacred. People will double back on their bond. That movie was really powerful for me. So, I see a future where I can move beyond it. But then again, that happens one more time, and I'm like, back in. Maybe there'll be a point where it really liberates me and I just accept the world for what it is. But I just can't shake that there's a better world, there's a world where the bond is real, where the covenant is real, and that there's relationships on the masculine side where that bond is real. And it's not that on the feminine side, it hasn't come up and covenants haven't been broken. I've broken covenants on that side and had covenants broken. But it's interesting, man. It's something that's still alive in me now, and I would like to transmute it, because I want to believe that, I want to believe that this value really exists in the cosmos.
ROB: That's an important aspect where it doesn't have, what we want is not to have the power over us anymore, right? We don't want it to have power over us in any sort of way. The interesting thing is, this morning, my VP of Operations, she was staying in my house, and she's going to the Jets game on Sunday. I was telling you right before we started, her fiancé and her family, they're huge Jets fans. And this whole thing happened with Aaron Rodgers, they're so excited to go see him and stuff. And I was like, "Yeah, Aubrey is actually really good friends with Aaron Rodgers." And she's like, "Really?" I was like, "Yeah, let me just put something on." I put it on this morning. And what was really interesting man is, the beautiful thing. A lot of times, if it doesn't line up with our paradigm and our view of the world, we don't really see it. We tend to miss it. And one of the things that was really beautiful about what I put on was he was talking about his first ayahuasca experience. He was in the chair that you're in right now, and he was like, I saw this, and I said, is there anyone that can love me? The only person that popped in his head was you. You were the first person. And it's like, we can look at it and I feel like so many times the proof that our story isn't true is so right in front of our face, but it doesn't line up with our paradigm of ourselves, and the story that we tell ourselves of who we are in the world and how it's going to be, that we miss it. And I think as a reflection to you is, we can definitely be afraid of that. But when you look at, dude, before we became friends with Aaron, he's like a fucking god in football, right? I'm sure you looked up to him in any sort of way. And for him to think in his head, well, I know one person that's not going to leave my side, and that will love me through all of my shit, and he thought of you, that type of stuff we need to remind ourselves of. Because all too often we go, oh, yeah, but that was just based off the circumstance. He didn't actually mean that, or whatever it might be, versus trying to get that into all 40 trillion of our cells, which is there's a very powerful man, very successful, that went, you know what, there's one other guy that's not going to leave my side, and it's this guy. Those things are so present and in front of our faces, but a lot of times we just don't allow ourselves to see them.
AUBREY: I mean, as you're saying this, even in the stories that I'm telling on this podcast, I'm overlooking a lot of the other examples. Just again, it's like what you said, focusing on the arrows. I'm focusing on these other things that have happened, but not the things that are right in front of me, the friends that have never left my side. And, fuck, going through this with Aaron, I was in the box, and he texted me what had happened to him, nobody knew. Everybody thought it was an ankle injury, and he's like, "I tore my Achilles." I just started weeping in the box. We're with a lot of his other people there, and I'm uncontrollably crying, because I know what a serious injury that is. Then he facetimes me, and I see him in there, and we're just crying together. He sends a security guy up, because he needs a ride home in the third quarter. So, I say, I hurry, goodbye to everybody, go down to the locker room, and just there with him. And for the next two days, the love that we expressed for each other was a love that transcends time and space. So there's so many examples of this type of thing. This is what I really want. This is what I want. If I feel like that, if I feel the bond is real, and even if circumstances or situations change, but the bond is real, then I feel like that's what gives me the energy to really keep fighting. So this is maybe the part of where my own resistance is. That resistance, whether it's the dark force resistance or my own fear, evil always enters the wound. It tries to get me to be like, "Why are you fighting for this fucking world anyways? Because nobody's going to fight with you, when you really need it. People will just turn their back on you." And so, this is my own like deep hisauron my deep wound. And I think my full power is going to be accessed when I can actually really, really heal this hisauron and really trust the bond. And trust it so much that it actually creates a field of trust. Because I have to say, in at least one of these significant examples, and I apologize insincerely for not mentioning names here. It's private, I don't want to bring this and make this a fucking thing. But if I can really just believe that, then I have so much more strength to fight, because I know that I won't fight alone. I think my greatest fear is I charge and I've gone through this in the ayahuasca journeys, and different journeys I've been in. I look around, and I go, where are my brothers? Where are my brothers? Where are those people who I would die for? I would literally fight to the death for these people. Where are they? So, yeah, if I can step into that world where I just know that I can charge forward, and like the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, where he just, all you've got to do is walk out of hell and trust that your queen is going to follow you. Just don't look back, and you'll make it to paradise. And right at the end, he looks back. There's lots of ways you can tell this story. But the story is, ultimately one way you could tell it is that he had this Hisauron, this fatal flaw that the feminine was going to abandon him. And so that fear caused him to look, and then the gods, this was the deal. He couldn't move through, move forward without that fear. So this conversation has been super helpful, bro. So, it doesn't surprise me that you've coached 1,500 people to be coaches, because you're helping me here. That's just a deep bow to you, and just deep gratitude for sharing this, allowing me to go into my own bag of shit.
ROB: I mean, we all have shit. I still have a whole lot of shit. And some triggers that have come up for me in the past few days. And we were talking about it in the hall, yeah, there's some really hard stuff going on right now. For you, for me, and for most people. A lot of hard stuff is going on as well. But I think that what I want people to get from that is we have this story that's in our head. Both of us have this story of being abandoned in some sort of way by a father. And all too often, we'll miss the thing that's right in front of us, which is, who the fuck did Aaron call right after it? Who? It was you, right? We don't look at those things, and we have this. I did an event a few weeks ago and everybody had these, like we ordered a bunch of different crazy, different colored glasses. I said, look at that wall, everybody was looking at it, it's all white. I said, put the glasses on and tell me what color it is. And one person's like, it's pink, it's red, it's blue, because they all have different colored glasses. I was like, that's the problem with our story that we tell ourselves is that we see the world through this lens. I see the world through this lens of, same thing. I'm going to be abandoned by some guy, my friends aren't texting me back, because there must be something wrong with me, because I'm fucked up, because I'm not big enough for them to bring me on to their podcasts or to give a shit about me. But all too often, it's, who did he call? He fucking called you because he felt out of everyone in the world, the person that he would trust the most was you. And it's all too often we miss those types of things. We don't look at them because they just don't line up with our view of the world. When you look at one of the biggest things that was really eye-opened me for writing this book is I was in Sedona, which I know you love. It's one of my favorite places in the entire world. When I was rewriting the book and doing a brand new version of it, I was like, I need a weekend on Sedona by myself. And it's going to be no connection to anybody except for those fucking beautiful mountains that I know there's some energy coming from. I was listening to Sadhguru because I was like, I wonder if he's ever talked about fear, because I'm writing this chapter about fear. The thing that I will remember till the day I die, we find our fears, and then once we identify it, the natural next thing is, how do I overcome it? And it was really interesting, because Sadhguru says, you don't. The reason why I don't is because you can't overcome something that doesn't exist. You can't overcome something that's not actually truly there. And so, we see the world through this lens and think that that's how it actually is, but we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. And it was this huge eye-opening moment of, yeah, if we look at fears, the way I break it down is, there's primal fears, which is like death or pain is attached to it. But there's also intellectual fears, and intellectual fears are like the fear of abandonment, the fear of not being accepted, the fear of success, the fear of failure. All of those. Those are all intellectual fields. None of them actually exist in reality. Failure doesn't exist in reality. It's basically whatever we decide that that thing actually is. I think we can all take a step back and be like, am I actually seeing this? Or am I just being triggered by this based off of my story of my dad, or my mom, or whatever
AUBREY: It's like a clouded part of the prism. One way to look at our perspective, it's kind of a fancy terminology, but it's the hermeneutic prism, and Hermes being the messenger of communication. We're all looking through a hermeneutic prism, and there's certain places that are occluded, certain places that are cloudy and distorted, like looking through a funhouse mirror. You're looking through a funhouse mirror and looking at the world and all of these things are appearing not as they are in reality. That's your Hisauron, that's the thing that, and I think there's a way to purify and clarify and clear the mirror, and so many other categories have been successful. And then this is the one that's still there. But it feels a little lighter, a little clearer today. So, thanks, bro. I'm leveling up. I'm fucking leveling up. Right in real time.
ROB: Yeah, well, you used a word that's really important, and this is what Krishnamurthi says. I feel like I'm talking about him a lot today, but it works perfectly. The thing I love about Krishnamurthi is he didn't want to be like a guru or act like a guru. He was just a guy who spoke really directly. And he says all of it is distortions to reality, and we're constantly distorting reality all of the time. So we can look at this, and what happens a lot of times with these distortions is when the proof comes back to us of you are enough, we distort reality and say, "Oh, maybe Aaron called me because I was the only one who had a car there." We could do that shit all of the time. "Well, maybe he called me because I was the last person he had called, and it was just simple or easy to do." Or because I'm the strongest guy that could take him out in case he fell, and I can make sure I hold him. We can distort that reality all of the time versus being, this person actually fucking loves me and trusts me. One of the things you said a few minutes ago, about 20 minutes ago, it's just a different flavor. I've worked with so many people and I've never found somebody to this day that I've ever spoken with that doesn't have the feeling of I'm not enough built into them in some sort of way. And I always say it's like ice cream, but it's all different flavors. So, like the ice cream, like mine might be Rocky Road, yours might be vanilla, his might be chocolate. It's all just
AUBREY: Pistachio guy over there.
ROB: Pistachio over there. But it all comes back to the same feeling of I'm not enough. So many people are like, I'm not good enough, I'm not pretty enough, smart enough, I'll never be a good parent, I'll fail my entire life, I'm not worthy of love. We have all those. And all of those are just a different flavor of I'm not enough. And the greatest fear that we have is that if I'm not enough, I won't be loved. I think that we can look at the world, I see the same world the same way that you do where it's like, there's so many fucked up things that are out there and I really want to change it. That's what I'm trying to do with every ounce of my energy. But the world when I look at it, and I can look at it and say, "Man, I hate this." It's just a reflection to me of human consciousness. It's just human consciousness in the physical form of people that are screwing each other over. It's just human consciousness. And the lack of love is the problem with everything. And the lack of self-awareness is the problem with everything. I think if a lot of people just take a step back and be like, what are my distortions? How am I distorting reality to see it the way that I've always seen it? We have this story that's going in our head all of the time. And at some point in time, we have to be like, is this the fucking story that I want to live my entire life with? Or do I want to try to actually change the story, and try to prove that story false? Because I'm sure there's many situations in your life where a guy called you up and needed you or he was there for you when he needed you. But we have these really strong connections to our story, and we want our story to be as true as possible. And at some point, we have to just be like, is this a story that I want to keep forever? Or do I just want to try to change the story in some sort of way?
AUBREY: That's cool. Leveling up, bro. It's good to talk to you, man. It's good to see you.
ROB: Yeah, you too. Thank you
AUBREY: And sorry if I've ever been one of those guys that didn't text you back. By the way, I'm real shit at it. As you're saying it, I'm like, "Fuck, I've fucked a lot of people up." In their own stories.
ROB: Dude, you're just the universe coming through to show me where I'm not free. That's all it is. I don't believe anything else except for the fact that where we're triggered is where we're not free. And so, I believe that the way that Hindus say it is that God is under and within all things. So, when I see the place where I'm triggered, where if I'm like, "Fuck, Aubrey didn't text me back," or this person didn't text me back, or whatever it might be, or they said they were going to be here and they canceled their appointment on me, whatever it is, I can look at it, and I can look at it through that viewpoint. Or I can take a step back and be like, fuck, God, thank you so much for coming back in to show me that this is just another thing that I'm working on. That's just a beautiful thing. So, I will not take any offense when you don't text me back. You always have texted me back, so it's not a big deal. But it's my shit that I'm working through, and I have come to terms that I am on this path with God that's trying to help me become better in some sort of way. And that's all I'm really trying to do.
AUBREY: Holy and broken Hallelujah. Let's go. Everybody, "Level Up" available, all places that books are sold. And if you really want to help Rob out, I'm an author, go buy it in a fucking bookstore. That really helps. Actually, it's annoying, because we don't go to bookstores but it does help. Get you on lists and things like that.
ROB: It helps make us feel better about getting a little badge of saying you're New York Times Bestseller, which is, I'm working for it. I'm trying to get it but--
AUBREY: Which does help you share more books, so it's not purely ego. So, it is an actual legitimate help.
ROB: Absolutely.
AUBREY: But yeah, it is just way easier on Amazon that shit.
ROB: Yeah, you don't have to go anywhere.
AUBREY: I love you, bro.
ROB: I love you too, man. This has been good.
AUBREY: Had a great conversation.
ROB: And I hope it helps a lot of people.
AUBREY: No doubt, bro. No doubt. Much love everybody. We'll see you next week.