Episode 208: Own the Day, Own Your Life – with Aubrey Marcus

[INTERVIEW]

Hal: Miracle Morning Community, welcome. This is your friend, Hal Elrod. How are you doing? I’m here with my new friend, Aubrey Marcus. Aubrey, how are you doing today?

Aubrey: I’m good. Nice little rolling start on this live call.

Hal: Yeah. That’s how we start. We start every live video with, “Is this working? Can you hear me?” That’s how every single – yeah.

Aubrey: That’s how I know.

Hal: I’m a solopreneur at home by myself. I need you guys. Hey, give me your card after the interview.

Aubrey: No. You can’t approach people already.

Hal: All right. You, guys, have you seen this book, Own the Day, Own your Life? This has become one of, if not my new favorite book, for sure, the new favorite book but it’s becoming one of my favorite books and I’m only 100 pages in of this 432-page bible on how to own the day and really own your life. Aubrey, so I’ll say this right to you. It’s a confession to you and it’s a confession to the Miracle Morning Community which is I am relatively new to you and your work and it’s weird to say that because I reached out to you over two years ago and you might think, “Well, did you just stop listening to me? What happened?” Right. So, for Miracle Morning Community, here’s how this happened. My good friend, Matt Recor, said, “Do you listen to Aubrey Marcus podcast?” I said, “No.” I said, “I am aware. I know who Aubrey is, kind of, but I don’t listen to it.” And he just raved on it. He said, “You got to listen to it.”

And so, I listened to an episode and then another and then I googled you and then I went to YouTube and then I spent like an hour or two kind of stalking you online and you know how it is with some people.  You just have that instant alignment like, “Wow. They see the world the way that I see the world.” They’re up to something similar that I’m up to. There’s some shared value. They’re trying to make a contribution and help people and that I connect with you instantly. So, my love language is gifts, you know, five love languages so I sent Aubrey. I called our good friend, John Ruhlin who is like the gift specialist. I was like, “Hey, what’s a gift that I could send to this guy I’ve never met before?” I was like, “I know I’m risking like this is kind of a weird stalker-ish thing to do.” I was like, but I feel connected in a way. So, I sent Aubrey this big set of knives engraved with his quotes on it and then on it a company logo on the sig knives.

Aubrey: Incredible. Still use them every day.

Hal: You do? Awesome. That’s awesome.

Aubrey: That’s f***ing awesome.

Hal: That’s awesome. Right? And so, again, I literally fingers-crossed, is Aubrey going to be like what a weirdo or is he going to be like, “That’s cool?” So, Aubrey emails me like two days later and just said, “Wow. Amazing gift. Over the top. Thank you so much.” And then a month later I got that cancer. I got cancer and that was a year where I wasn’t listening to podcasts unless they were about healing cancer. I was laser focused on, this is what I need to focus on. And then just the other day, you had the maps event at your house and a couple of my buddies went to your house and they mentioned, and I was like, “Aubrey,” and I searched my email. I was like, “Whatever happened with our email connection?” and I looked at the last email that was sent was you saying, “Hey, cool gift. Thanks.”

Aubrey: Yeah.

Hal: And so, I just reached out after a year-and-a-half and here we are, man. So, thanks for being on the show.

Aubrey: Of course, man.

Hal: This is going to be great. So, the Miracle Morning, if you’re not familiar with Aubrey Marcus, Aubrey is the CEO and Founder of Onnit which is a leading supplement company for human optimization and I don’t know if you can see the shelf back there, but they’ve got a lot of great stuff. I take most of it. I’m a believer because you care. That’s where when you get to know somebody’s values then you can go, “Hey, whatever they’re doing because I feel like I know who they are, I trust who they say they are and how they show up in the world, I’m going to buy their stuff.” I’m going to trust that this book has as you said your blood, sweat, tears and I can feel that, man. I mean, it’s such a great manual on doing exactly what it says that it’s going to do.

So, I want to start with a question and this book is about owning the day and owning your life. Before we get into that, first thing I want to ask you is, being vulnerable is something that I think most people have a lot of trouble with. They have a lot of fear with being vulnerable or being authentic and to me, it’s one of the most important values or qualities in a person. And I feel like you shine there. It’s like if you listen to the Aubrey Marcus podcast, you’re an open book. You don’t hide anything to a fault probably, but I mean, just completely open, completely vulnerable. You share everything about you, your life, your world, your fears, and I just want to know, was there a moment in time where you became comfortable being that vulnerable, being that authentic?

Aubrey: I think as you go over time and you really understand who you are and you realize that vulnerability isn’t actually vulnerability, it’s just being human. And I think like our ego wants to project this idea of perfection, this kind of bulletproof exterior, “I got it all figured out,” but nobody has it all figured out. Like, right now in the gym we have Earl Thomas and Tim Kennedy like some of the greatest athletes in the world has ever known, highest performers. They don’t have it all figured out. Nobody has it all figured out, but the ego wants to project this idea of perfection but it’s not true.

So, sharing what’s going on is just forming that human connection and also allowing, if my mission and my purpose really is to help lead people and join people on this path to human optimization of not only the body but the mind and the spirit as well, then I got to open up everything that’s going on with me because that’s another healing tool. That’s something that somebody else is going through. That’s something that they can identify with and say, “Oh man, Aubrey is super successful, and he still gets depressed sometimes and he’s still anxious sometimes and he still can’t sleep, and he still gets triggered by when someone says this or that.” And if I can bring that out, it almost alchemizes it and takes my own suffering and turns it into somebody else’s value in which case then it’s supporting the mission, so it creates this virtuous cycle.

Hal: Beautifully said. And I think that you’re right. That’s how I view it is that for me to truly lead other people by you sharing your faults and your fears and insecurities and whatever else that is imperfect, you’re giving them permission, “Oh you can be f***ed up and still succeed at a high level or get through it to get to it.” You know what I mean, right? “Oh, okay. Right,” versus when you see who the perfect image like, “Gosh, if only I were like them.”

Aubrey: Yeah. Well, they seem like aliens or robots or like how does that even make sense? Like, they’re super humans so you can idolize them but they’re almost separate, so they don’t really bring you along with them whereas when you tell the truth about everything’s going on and I certainly have plenty of s*** going on so it really makes a big impact.

Hal: Sure. Absolutely. So, again, the book is Own the Day, Own Your Life. However, this is really curiosity for me. What’s a week look like for you? How often are you in the office? I’d love to know what does a week look like, Monday through Sunday.

Aubrey: If I’m here I’m in the office 9, 10 hours a day usually showing up 9:30-ish leaving around 6:37-ish and then back home.

Hal: How many days a week are you usually in the office? Does it vary?

Aubrey: I’m probably here maybe two-thirds of the year and then if I’m traveling, it just depends on what I’m traveling for like I was just in LA to record the audiobook for this. Just a grueling process.

Hal: Yeah. We talked about.

Aubrey: We did some podcast out there and so then the schedule gets a little bit more flexible but, yeah, if I’m in Austin, I mean, look, I created the absolute ideal dream environment for myself like I don’t want to be elsewhere. When the office is closed on the weekend, I’ll come up here for a shake and a workout.

Hal: It feels like a cool house.

Aubrey: It is. Right. Yeah.

Hal: It feels like a cool house.

Aubrey: Exactly.

Hal: That’s great. So, well, I just want to say this, for the Miracle Morning Community and this is going to go out on the Achieve Your Goals podcast too. So, for those of you listening on the podcast, we are broadcasting live via video into the Miracle Morning Community on Facebook and you can go watch this video there if you want to see my mug and Aubrey’s beautiful face. But I wanted to just share that reading your book day one literally the first chapter I changed like four elements of my morning behavior and I wrote the book, The Miracle Morning, and that’s my focus is really optimizing the morning and I think that’s the biggest problem with most books is most books don’t change behavior.

They only shift your thinking and it’s a very temporary shift because as soon as you finish one chapter, go on to the next one, you start to pretty quickly forget any shifts in thinking you had in the previous chapter even when you’re on the new one and then especially when you go, “God, this is the best book I’ve ever read,” and then you finished it and you’re like, “All right. Badge of honor. I finished one book. What’s the next book?” You don’t even remember that book anymore. Your attention can only go so many places. So, what I love about your book is it is like by definition it is changing behavior every page, every chapter. And so, I can tell you the things that I change but I would love to hear you just kind of share what’s your morning ritual.

Aubrey: Yeah. I mean, what we really focused on in the book within the first 15 minutes of waking up is three things: hydration, light, and movement. And really that goes back to understanding the circadian rhythm by really getting back to who we are as a human organism like the human primate like what does this body really thrive with? So, hydration being first. We’ll lose up to a pound of water overnight just from the water vapors and then if we’re in really big blankets or something, we may sweat even up to another pound so we’re dropping like a lot of weight. That’s why we’re lighter in the morning because moist air goes out, less moist air comes in and then all of a sudden, we lose a lot of water. So, the first thing that’s really important to do is hydrate and like Shawn Stevenson, the health coach podcast. He calls it like a cool bath for your organs, right? But it’s not just the water that we’d lose. We lose the electrolytes too so a pinch of sea salt like 12 to 16 ounces of water, some lemon for the bioflavonoids to get the gastric juices flowing. That’s the first thing you’re going to want to do when you wake up which is just really rehydrate.

Hal: And I’ll just say, Miracle Morning Community, that was the first change I made. Every morning I drink a full glass of water and then pour my second one but there was no salt in it to replenish my electrolytes and there was no lemon in it. So, now every morning like day one while I was on vacation I was like, “Do we have lemons? Where’s the sea salt? Where’s the Himalayan sea salt?” So, I immediately made that change and so, yes, so thank you for that. Appreciate it.

Aubrey: Yeah. A lot of people they got worried about salt and I covered that in the book. It was really a misidentification of what salt is actually doing like people think, “Oh, salt is bad for the heart.” Well, salt may be bad for the heart if you have a really bad heart condition because what salt is going to do is just it’s going to make your blood a little thicker because you’re going to store more liquid because the sodium interaction with the liquid so you’re going to actually retain a little bit more water but really what that means is you’re more hydrated.

So, for anyone who’s actually healthy and not worried about squeezing blood through a clogged artery or something like that, salt is actually highly beneficial and one of the things that allow us to move and function and feed our adrenal system. And like, we’re basically a saltwater organism and too often we’re not supplying enough salt. We’re using distilled water. We’re using low-sodium foods and we’re running a major electrolyte deficit and that can show up as adrenal fatigue. It can show up in a lot of different ways. So, adding generous amounts of sea salt if you’re healthy is really one of the most important moves that we can start to make, just get that electrolyte balance back.

Hal: Talk about real quick the type of salt because that’s really important. Morton’s table salt, not what you want to add to your water.

Aubrey: No.

Hal: So, what are the different types of sea salt?

Aubrey: Salt typically is mined from ancient salt water deposits and when it’s done that way, it has at minimum 15 different trace minerals up to like 65 different trace minerals and you can think of the trace minerals like imagine your body is a house. The trace minerals are like all the hardware at Home Depot. It’s like these different screws, these different attachments, these different things. Your body uses them in a bunch of different construction projects. So, anytime your body breaks down it will go to the shelf with the minerals and say, “All right. What kind of enzyme reaction? What kind of cofactor am I trying to create?” And it will look for those minerals and if you’re in deficit and it doesn’t have them, then it’ll find a way. It will go to the duct tape section, duct tape stuff together and glue gun it together but supplying your body with those adequate minerals is huge.

So, table salt is basically artificially created salt. They artificially bind it and it’s only sodium, chloride, and iodine so it’s three versus 15 or 65 depending on that. So, if you’re getting like a good Himalayan salt or a really good quality sea salt, you’re getting like 65 trace minerals so you’re not only getting the sodium and the chloride which is necessary but you’re getting magnesium, potassium, calcium, molybdenum, selenium, all kinds of different other trace minerals that are super valuable for the body across the board.

Hal: Awesome. So, go spend the extra $2 and get the Himalayan sea salt, not the table salt.

Aubrey: Yeah. And it’s funny. You can see like kosher salt and you think that’s good but that’s really purely a religious distinction. That just means a rabbi just went, “Shalom!”

Hal: Sure. Got it. It doesn’t have the minerals necessary.

Aubrey: No, he didn’t put any minerals.

Hal: Unless it was a miraculously added minerals.

Aubrey: Which I’m open to! If a rabbi has got that in his bag of tricks like go for it.

Hal: Absolutely. Right. If Jesus turned water into wine, a rabbi can turn table salt into sea salt. Quote me, huh? So, all right. So, that’s hydration and we have light and movement. Talk about those.

Aubrey: So, those are really key for the circadian rhythm and that’s really this kind of night and day clock that regulate so many different things in our body, our appetite, our hormones, our energy, our wakefulness, our sleepiness. And so, really the body’s designed to wake up with the light and go to sleep with the dark. We’re not nocturnal animals by nature but we live inside houses which mimic like a cave-like environment and then we can go straight from our house to our car which is covered and straight from the car to the office which is covered. So, we might not actually be able to expose ourselves to the kind of light that’ll really make us feel awake and alert like our primitive man would’ve.

So, getting like 10 minutes of light in one way or another which is either like direct sunlight or really bright lights in your house or if you have those Valkee human chargers which put the light in your earbuds to the photoreceptors in your ears, that’s another great way to do it but that first thing light in the morning will help you give you more alertness, more energy during the day and also help you go to sleep at night because it will set like, “Oh, I woke up a long time ago.” It’ll set your wakeup point for when it actually is so then when it’s time to go to bed, your body is adequately producing melatonin and the hormones that actually make you go to sleep.

And movement goes along with that. First of all, the joints are stiff and tired. It’s nice to warm them up but movement is also one of those what they call zeitgebers for setting the circadian rhythm in motion and you can do that in a variety of different ways. You can do like a little light yoga that I have in the book like this five-minute little yoga flow or you can do a couple of burpees or you can do depending on how aggressive you want to be, just kind of move around.

Hal: The rebounder?

Aubrey: The rebounder. Yeah. I have that here in the office. I have an outdoor trampoline at the house, so I can go out in the sun and jump on that and then after that, you don’t feel like, “Ohh,” just dragging through the morning. By the time the 15 minutes are done, you’re hydrated, you’ve moved, and you’ve gotten light you’re like, “Oh I’m awake now like let’s go.”

Hal: Yeah. Absolutely. And I’ll share again what I did in terms of sunlight because you talked about that that ideally, it’s you’re going to bed when the sun is going down, you’re waking up, but our lifestyle doesn’t necessarily adhere to that for either the environmental reasons if you’re in a house or because I’m up at 4:30 at the latest every day so it’s way before the sun is up. And so, the Valkee human charger so for you listening or watching, the Valkee human charger is this device that is really designed to minimize jet lag. Someone sent it to me as a podcast where they’re like, “Hey, promote this. Try it. Promote it.” And first of all, I didn’t do a lot of international travel back when I got it, so I put it in the desk and I’m like, “I’m not going to use that because I don’t really think that works. That was kind of gimmicky.”

And then I was at a conference and a gentleman was charging, he had earbuds in his ear and I went, “I have one of those. Does that work?” He said, “It’s amazing. It minimizes jet lag.” So, I used it on a trip to the Philippines and everybody was a wreck when they got there, and I felt a tiny bit of jetlagged, almost fine. But so immediately, I started using that a week ago when I started reading your book. And for anyone that’s listening, if you go to Amazon.com and just type in human charger or the company, Valkee, you can check that out but again, if you’re waking up really early before the sunrise, it’s a great way to set your circadian rhythms for the time being, the wake-up time so your body is being told of this is when I’m supposed to wake up and then, therefore, you’re more tired at night like you said.

Aubrey: Or just one of those cloudy dark mornings and like anytime that’s really when I use it. If I look outside, first option is right outside and the sun but there’s no sun. I’m going straight for the human charger.

Hal: Yeah. And I think because one of the human chargers is about $200, I think there are less expensive options that I’ve found that are just like a big plate that you plug in and then it just puts that blue light on your face which kind of mimics the sun. And then movement, yeah, that’s something that I started doing. I would save my movement until a little bit later but now just because after reading your book, it’s part of the Miracle Morning where I go through like I do the Miracle Morning cocktail and then I go put on the Valkee and I go straight to my rebounder and start jumping. That’s how I start the day now so yeah.

Aubrey: F***ing perfect.

Hal: And I’ll tell you. My plan was eventually to write a book called Miracle Morning Mastery. I literally don’t feel like I need to write that book anymore. I mean, really, I’m like this is what I would’ve done. Because that book I wrote was much surface-level experience to get people to do it. I didn’t get real scientific. I didn’t go real deep and that’s one thing I thought someday I want to do but literally, I’m like I’m just going to recommend this book. I don’t need to write.

Aubrey: Thanks, brother.

Hal: Yeah. Absolutely. So, chapter 2 of the book, we won’t go through every chapter, but we’ll go through at least the ones that I’ve read, deep breath, deep freeze. So, Wim Hof breathing, you referenced in the book and I started doing that in the morning and then taking cold showers. So, can you talk about breathing and getting your body cold and you talk about the acute stress versus the chronic stress and the benefits of acute to offset chronic. So, I’d love to hear about that.

Aubrey: Yeah. We as humans, again, this is going back to like what our blueprint is like what condition do we thrive under? And we thrive under conditions of acute stress so stress that happens relatively fast and relatively temporarily and that can be imagined like training in the gym, a good, hard 30 minute of training like that is acute stress. The body will go through that and then it’ll take some time to recover and then it will adapt, and it will be better. Hormonally, it’ll be better. Musculoskeletally, it will be better, endorphinally, emotionally, there’s great science on the emotion of exercise and the psychological experiences you get as well as the physiological, that is like an ideal form of hormetic stress is called which is like a positive acute stress for the body working out. And there are other forms of that that are available and two of those are using temperature so either like extreme cold or extreme heat for short periods of time.

Hal: So, like sauna would be the heat.

Aubrey: Sauna would be the heat side of it and that creates a bunch of great adaptations and then the cold is another one which creates a bunch of great adaptations. But one of the unique things that Wim Hof did was he tied the breath into the cold because if anybody can think of what happens when you jump in a really cold pool a person goes *gasping noise* like he starts breathing fast. The body knows what it needs to do and what it needs to do is it needs to hyper oxygenate, create that kind of inner heat as Wim Hof would call it or in the ancient form they call it Tummo breathing or pranayama, fire-breathing. It’s just creating this inner heat which actually kind of regulates the body, hyper oxygenate which has its own variety of benefits.

So, what I’m recommending is in the shower while it’s warm, you do all your things because it’s really hard to go shockingly into the cold shower, but the breathing is the bridge and it’s the absolute crucial bridge like even for me, I’ve done a lot of these cold exposure things. I’ve plunged in the water. I’ve been with Wim Hof. I’ve done the super cold thing but even for me like that shower nozzle will taunt me and it’ll look at me and I’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t know,” but once you start doing the breaths which is like 30 to 50 deep breaths until you really start to get tingly, you might get mildly light headed but don’t worry. That’s absolutely what’s supposed to be happening. Just don’t push it too hard. You don’t want to fall down. And then as soon as you start feeling it, stop. Then by the time you push the cold then your body is already pre-adapted so instead of having to do those starting those fast breaths which ultimately climatize you to the water like after you’ve been in cold water for a while and you get those breaths out of your system, it’s kind of nice like you’re used to it. But if you do the breaths before then it’ll be far less shocking.

And then benefits of the cold can really start to kick in and what that particular form of acute stress is great at is reducing the chronic stress which is really just literally killing us. That’s prolonged periods of high cortisol and prolonged periods of high inflammation throughout the body. So, by pushing yourself with the breath and with the cold, you’re going to actually start reducing inflammation which creates all forms of different fatigue, lack of energy, lack of mental clarity and stress as well which completely wears down your immune system over time and creates all sorts of chronic conditions as well as temporary conditions like colds and flus and everything.

This is going to really dramatically help reduce chronic stress like drop stress levels by like 300% in some studies and also help your body form adaptations that are great for weight loss, great for I think there are some studies like again a lot of immune studies, reducing incidences of the common cold by 42% like a bunch of studies that I referenced throughout the book but dramatic impact on immune function, reduction of inflammation and then adaptations hormonally and physiologically to the body. And as long as you do the breath with the cold, it’s really not as bad as you think.

Hal: Yeah. When it’s like anything, at first, it’s bad like your first time is like, “Oh, oh, oh,” but your 15th time you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even know that I used to not like it,” right?

Aubrey: Yeah.

Hal: That’s why I tell anyone who’s like, “How do you eat that healthy food? I’m so used to this.” I go, “If you do anything like I used to hate running but then I started running and eventually you stop hating anything that you do every single day.” You eventually you acclimate to it, right? And that’s what the cold shower thing. Although, my wife I did I’m reading your book and I’m going, “Sweetie, hey, we’re going to start doing cold showers,” and she’s like, “Aaahh,” so, I haven’t got her to do it yet but…

Aubrey: You got to do the breath. Even my fiancée like I was in the shower with her it was yesterday. I’m in the shower. We have two dual shower heads pretty far apart and separate and I’m like, “Let’s see the Wim Hof.” She’s like, “No, no, no.” I go, “Look, you just got to do the breathing first and then you won’t mind.” And she’s like, “All right. All right.” So, we just do the breathing and by the time she’s at that 35-breath mark then it’s like there’s no resistance to the cold then she just turns it cold and gets in and has a few more breaths like, “Hoo, hoo,” but then normalizes and then she feels great and we go on to have a great rest of the morning.

Hal: Sure. Well, just like whether it was a kid or as an adult, going swimming and colder than is comfortable water at first you’re, “Aha,” and then you’re like, “Okay, I’m kind of used to it now.”

Aubrey: Yeah.

Hal: Right? You’re used to it. I’ll put up on the spot. Can you do the breathing, do a few of the breaths. This is for me and our community, but I want to see the pace and kind of the depth in how you breathe.

Aubrey: So, Wim Hof is famous for one of his lines and he says, “It doesn’t matter which hole you get it in as long as you get it in.” So, he doesn’t care if you breathe through your nose or breathe through your mouth but one of the key things is he doesn’t want you to push on the expelling of the air, so you want to breathe then, and then just let your chest fall. So, don’t like, “Whoo.” don’t make a big deal out of the exhale. So, *breathing noises* and really focus on breathing all the way into your stomach because that’s going to expand your lung fast. So, you want to feel both like from deep in your belly from the back to the front *breathing noises*.

And actually, after six breaths, there’s a Japanese study that shows that actually, your blood pressure starts to drop. So, if you’re anxious, if you’re getting aggravated, just six of those breaths alone will start to change your physiology and that’s something else I recommend in the commuting section when you’re driving your car to do those six breaths because if you get anxious or aggravated in the car, just hit six breaths. It’s physiologically going to drop your blood pressure and create a stage shift. Six breaths like we’re so close to these little modulations that can make a huge difference like maybe you don’t need to have beer to relax. Maybe you just need six breaths that it’s like…

Hal: It’s probably healthier for you than for your liver.

Aubrey: But in the book, I talk about the right time. You drink a glass of wine. You haven’t got there yet but there’s a right time to drink a glass of wine or if you’re in a cannabis legal state, the right time to indulge in that or whatever. There are ways to do things that are going to maximize the benefits and minimize the cost too.

Hal: Yeah. Absolutely. And if you’re watching, well, if you’re watching I guess in the Miracle Morning Community, can we do Q&A at the end here?

Aubrey: Oh yeah.

Hal: All right. So, we’ll just do some Q&A so type your questions for Aubrey in the comments and you can start typing them now and, yeah, we’ll get some Q&A and if you listen to the podcast, join the Miracle Morning Community so you can watch this stuff live. I guess that’s my best advice. Do you and I don’t think I’m here in the book yet but meditation, what’s your stand on meditation? There are so many different types. Generally, I say there are two types, there’s guided or every other type which is just by yourself doing your own thing. So, yeah, what’s your take on meditation, how do you do it?

Aubrey: Finding a way to get still is one of the most essential things that we can do as humans. I mean, we create so much chaos and momentum and all of these thought patterns and cycles that until we get still, we can’t ever see clearly outside of the noise. It’s like we’re trying to listen to a whisper of our higher self or a whisper of opportunity of what we can do and what we could do and what our potential is, what our body is telling us. But until we get still and quiet, we won’t hear the whisper over the den, of the loud parts of ourselves, the emotions, the struggles, the different drama.

Hal: The radio.

Aubrey: The radio, right. So, we gotta turn that all down and meditation is a great way to do that. One of the ways I talk about doing it is really a lot of us have time in the car and I wanted to figure out ways to use that time in a really productive way because a lot of times that’s what Robert Greene called dead time, just time that’s really wasted. So, well, you can either fill your mind during that time and listen to podcasts or audiobooks which is great which makes that time valuable.

Hal: Will you call that fillness?

Aubrey: Mindfulness.

Hal: Mindfulness. That’s it. I love it.

Aubrey: Yeah. Or mindfulness which is an opportunity to expand the mind, get still while still in the car. And one of the techniques I use is from Native American trained tracker Tom Brown and he calls it the wide peripheral gaze. So, I combine those six breaths that I mentioned with a practice with the eyes where you really relax your vision and I’ll do this right in the camera. So, you’re looking straight ahead and I would practice this when you’re stopped or when you’re parked somewhere first and you relax your eyes and you try to see everything as wide as you possibly can without focusing on anything. So, you don’t track anything with your eyeballs. You don’t track anything with your pupils. So, like right now I can almost see Ian and Eric back here to my left and they’re typing on the computer and I could see Ryan, the tech, writing things down and fiddling with his pen and nodding his head and I just saw you laugh, nod, and I saw your left elbow move up a little bit as you did that and I see the leaves blowing out there but I’m not focusing on anything. I’m just allowing everything to soften and quiet.

And what you’re really doing here is you’re overloading the amount of visual information that’s coming into your mind so that you can’t think about anything anymore like you’re just getting still and just focusing everything on the maximum amount of pixels you can be aware of in your visual field. And it’s a really effective tool to get your mind still using something that we all have available. So, instead of like going in a floatation or sensory deprivation tank where you’re shutting off all the senses, this in a way is maximizing all the senses and it’s a technique that Native Americans would use when they would go to like a forest setting, they’re looking for subtle movements of animals or something like that and they would drop into this would deeply meditative state. If you’re like looking one at the time, you’ll miss the macro picture so it’s just absorbing everything at the same time, combining that with the breath and that’s really honestly one of the more effective meditation techniques and I’ve tried them all from transcendental to open focus to guided meditations are great. Those are really good.

Hal: It’s great to start. You don’t have the pressure of trying to be a meditator on day one.

Aubrey: Yeah. That’s something that you can do in the car, maybe not when you’re driving in a busy section but even in any defensive driving they say focus on your peripheral vision which is basically what you’re doing to the extreme, so it almost creates this flow state that can be really, really valuable.

Hal: Do you ever read Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle?

Aubrey: I’ve read a lot of Eckhart, but I never finished Power of Now but I think A New Earth is one of the best books ever written.

Hal: Yeah. The first one as I read The Power of Now in 2005 I think those are probably one of my first books into spirituality that sent me down that path. But I remember, that’s actually how when I read it in your book, it didn’t click for me until you just kind of walk us through it, the peripheral. But for me, that’s how so I would be in the car on the freeway, I could literally picture the first time I did it in Sacramento in the freeway and I would try to access the now as you would talk about it and that’s actually how I would do it is I would just see everything in my peripheral and that would be like this is the now.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Hal: This is the now. It’s everything at least visually, this is the now. Just on a side note, do you know who Michael Ellsberg is? He wrote The Education of Millionaires.

Aubrey: No.

Hal: But he has a meditation and I’m blanking on what it’s called. If you’re watching, google “Michael Ellsberg meditation” but it’s interesting. It’s instead of trying to clear everything out, he has you bringing all of your senses at once so like you meditate on what you’re feeling simultaneously what you’re seeing, simultaneously everything, you’re hearing, simultaneously anything you feel. That’s a really cool way of meditating.

Aubrey: Yeah. I also have a guided meditation out for people. It’s free. It’s just AubreyMarcus.com/meditation and it’s a different technique and it focuses more breathing and visualization but pretty cool there.

Hal: I’m feeling like two years ago or a year-and-a-half ago when I might have done that but I’m going to find it again.

Aubrey: I’m going to have to do one with the less relaxing voice because I put on my relaxing voice and people are falling asleep after. “Oh man I love your meditation but then I fell asleep.” I was like, you know.

Hal: Is the relaxing voice and the sexy voice, are those the same or different?

Aubrey: No, different.

Hal: It’s different?

Aubrey: Yeah. You got to put a little crackle in the sexy voice. You got to get the little electricity. You don’t want people falling asleep on you.

Hal: Yeah.

Aubrey: That’s not good.

Hal: That’s a good point. Let’s talk about and this may be where we wrap up for today and I’d love to have you back on once I read the second half of the book. I haven’t gone to the second half yet.

Aubrey: Yeah. I love to talk.

Hal: Yeah. But you talk a lot about diet and that’s one of the topics that I am most passionate about. In fact, I read the book, China Study, 15 years ago or something and at that time I’ve been hit on by a drunk driver so like my impact on the world is speaking to students not to drink and drive so that’s what I was doing in high schools and colleges and then I read China Study and I realized, “Wait, like 130,000 people a year get in car accidents of all car accidents, not just drinking and driving, but 700,000 something die of heart disease and like 680,000 dies of cancer which are essentially diet related diseases.” And at that moment I’m like, “Wait a minute, I’m using my voice to impact a really small segment of people,” and I was just questioning, “Maybe I should be like going in and whether it’s in high school talking about diet and really educating people.”

And what I love when I was reading that chapter of your book, literally I told people whoever is in the room that I was in and on vacation I said, “Every person in America let alone in the world needs to read this book, this chapter at the very least because you break through all these myths that we’ve been bought into the by the media and who’s trying to sell us their food and all this crap.” So, I love for you to talk about your take on diet and maybe start with like how important it is and why it’s important in terms of not just being free from disease but having energy, optimizing your health and your focus, all of those things. So, I would just love your take on diet and then a few implementable tips for our audience, some shifts they can make quickly.

Aubrey: Yeah. Energy is like we are energetic beings. We require fuel and that fuel allows us to do absolutely everything and the input that we take in is like the gasoline for the car but a lot of times we’re taking in the wrong really s***ty type of gasoline that ultimately creates different buildups, it creates different adaptations that are disadvantageous. So, what’s the absolute best fuel source for a human being? And that’s what I really wanted to look at. And I can tell you, it’s not a bunch of f***ing sugar. Like that is not the fuel source that this human organism thrives on. Now…

Hal: When you say sugar, by the way, that’s bleached flour. That’s white bread. That’s pastries. That’s doughnuts. That’s what I love your full take on what we call breakfast food.  

Aubrey: Right. Like a pie. I used to eat Pop-Tarts and I go through that and I’m like, “All right. Let’s look at the Pop-Tart.” Well, you got frosting on the top, a sugar, and then you have some refined white carbohydrate starchy bread thing which basically immediately drops into sugar.” Those bonds that make it starch, basically, sugar bonded together so it doesn’t be crystal and like the way that the carbohydrates actually metabolize and break down in the body, it goes to simple carbohydrates which is sugar-based almost instantly. And then in the middle, you have another form of frosting or jelly or whatever. I like the cinnamon ones so whatever that cinnamon paste was.

Hal: Sure.

Aubrey: And like it was basically a triple sugar snack. And so, you feel like weird buzz for like 15 minutes but then as that blood sugar rises then your body is going to dump a bunch of insulin to try and scuttle that into the cells and into the liver and into your muscles to use as a type of fuel source but it’s way more sugar fuel and carbohydrates fuel than we possibly need. So, the excess it starts converting into fat and also creating inflammation and also creating all different forms of disease conditions that ultimately are deleterious to your health. So, once the body stores all of the – it’s called glycogen. It takes that blood sugar and stores it as glycogen. Once that glycogen battery is full, everything else that it stores is going to have to convert to fat. So, it’s the sugar that’s making us fat like this no mystery, everybody, like everybody has been, “Oh, it’s this calories in, calories that.” No, it’s sugar. It’s sugar.

Hal: And you talk about that sugar is hidden in all sorts because it’s called different things.

Aubrey: All kinds of things. So, anyways, not only is it scuttling way more sugar into the body than we can possibly use which is creating excess fat stores. The other problem is when you have a big rush of sugar when it comes fast, the body doesn’t know how much more is coming so it overcompensates with insulin because really high blood sugar is toxic to all the cells. So, it overcompensates and dumps so much like, “Oh, I don’t know what this monkey is doing but he’s found himself some sugar. We got to regulate this.”

Hal: I don’t know if it’s one Pop-Tart or two.

Aubrey: Yeah. Exactly. So, it will dump a bunch of insulin and this will over correct. It always over corrects because that’s the safest thing the body can do. And so, it over corrects. And then at that point, you get the blood sugar drop and that’s where you’re cranky, you’re irritable, exhausted like you’re tired which makes you then, again, want to reach for more sugar and ping-pongs the thing back up. So, you’re going in this metabolic ping-pong where you’re up for a second and then down and up for a second and then down and you find these people who like feel like they have to eat some form of snack at all different points is because they’re trying to level out the ping-pong of the blood sugar. But nonetheless everything they’re storing because their glycogen is full. It’s just getting fatter and fatter.

So, they’re trying to regulate their blood sugar by continually eating but what they’re doing is they’re just jacking their body into high states of inflammation and weight gain and all kinds of things. Now, what’s the opposite of that? Well, actually, the opposite of that is to eat healthy fats and healthy fats, proteins, fibers, macronutrient, micronutrient-rich things but particularly fats. And all of the science has come full circle and shown that eating fat does not make you fat. It does not make you tired. It’s absolutely essential for hormone production, for health, for energy and even different forms of cholesterol like cholesterol is actually healthy for the body when ingested in eggs so these egg white omelets it’s all nonsense. Our body needs the egg yolks. Our body needs that healthy source of fat and we’ve just been sold a big fat sack of lies.

Hal: I guess it was the 90s. I don’t know where but my parents I remember is always like low-fat like healthy choice, all these frozen dinners and stuff that everything was low fat, low fat and it still is. I mean, there’s a lot of low fat, low fat, low fat and, yeah, the brain also, I mean, the brain operates off of fat. That’s where and I think what you talked about like Pop-Tarts like parents are giving these to their kids and they’re wondering why their kids can’t pay attention in school. So, then they take them to the doctor and prescribe them with the Adderall and it’s like no, no, no you fed them Pop-Tarts and that’s why they can’t focus two hours later when Johnny is in class.

Aubrey: And it’s not only the sugar which is a huge problem but then there’s also like you think of kid-friendly foods. Let’s look at mac and cheese. So first of all, you got the macaroni which is highly processed flour which is basically going to turn into sugar anyway so don’t think that, “Oh, I get mac and cheese. That’s not sugar.” That’s f***ing sugar. And then on top of that, you got that yellow ass cheese. Well, yellow number six has been linked in multiple, multiple studies to hyperactivity in ADD and that’s the food coloring that’s in there along with sodium benzoate which is another preservative.

So, you’re basically giving them a sugar coated with chemicals that cause hyperactivity like, okay, what do you think? You think your kid’s broken. Your kid’s not broken. Your kid is great. He’s not getting the right fuel. And like, yeah, okay maybe in a rare case there are some conditions that are pre but a lot of times we just discredit how awesome the human being is and the ability for a human to thrive if given the right tools and the right pressures and the right stresses and removing the other stresses and the right fuel, we’re f***ing miraculous beings.

Hal: I agree with that. And I like the way you structured the book too is it starts out getting out right. So, you really talk about like here’s the problem or the problems in this area that you’re covering in the book and then it’s, “Okay, here’s how you own it. Here’s how to flip the script and then here’s the prescription,” and you break it down and you have the tips. I love you just covered it like this is really just a manual for living and that’s the essence of the whole thing is that if you own the day like your life is made up of days, period, and if you learn how to own each day and optimize yourself to maximize each day then your life is freaking amazing. You’re healthy, you’re happy, you’re wealthy, you have more friends to do it because you’re a great person because you take care of yourself throughout the day and then you can give the best to yourself to other people and that’s why this book is such a – there’s a lot of books that I read and I’m like, “It’s a great book if you want to ____.” It’s a great book if you want to improve your SEO or if you want to write a book or this is a great book if you are a human being.

Aubrey: Yeah. If you want a human.

Hal: Yeah.

Aubrey: You’re looking to human.

Hal: Yeah. That’s it. If you want to be a…

Aubrey: There’s got to be something helpful in there and like you said, I mean, there’s 397 references, over 300 academic and clinical references, really went back to the science and honestly, there are certain things where I really believe something and I look to the science and I poured through and I couldn’t find adequate support and I was like, “Well, I got to have an open mind about this. Maybe this worked for me, but it wasn’t fully supported,” so I hit stuff at the cutting room floor, but I really have tried and tested not only with myself but with everybody I’ve worked with here at on and off and this is some really valuable stuff and I did my best to try and curate a little bit of everything so that people get a full picture of what a really truly optimized day looks like.

Hal: Beautiful. Well, Miracle Morning Community, obviously, you all practice Miracle Morning so you know how to start your day right and Aubrey not only he, first of all, enhances your miracle morning as he’s done it for mine, but he tells you, “Okay. Well, great, you got the morning down. Here’s how you take care of the entire day,” and if you love the Miracle Morning and if you love the Miracle Morning and practicing it, well, then this book Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex by Mr. Aubrey Marcus, you’re going to love this just as much. It’s going to help you make sure that the Miracle Morning isn’t the only part of your day that’s rocking but that every part of your day is really optimized. So, we’re going to open up for Q&A.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Hal: Do we have some questions?

Aubrey: And if people want to check it out, it’s just at OwnTheDayBook.com

Hal: Oh yeah. Where you get it? OwnTheDayBook.com.

Aubrey: It’s also on audible too and I read it and I like gave some more of my life and my soul to reading the book. So, if you like audiobooks, that’s another good option.

Hal: Yeah. We were going to schedule this or last week and he goes, “I’m going to LA to record my audio book,” and I was like, “Oh, good luck.”

Aubrey: It’s actually probably a better experience to read it as it is because it has recipes and movement and we did like comic books, sketches in here of like some of them are actually me. Let’s see if I can find me.

Hal: Yeah. I will say this is a book that if you listen to it on audiobook, you’re going to buy the book anyway.

Aubrey: Yeah. You’re going to miss some of the different sketches.

Hal: Did you say that’s you?

Aubrey: I did a comic book version myself. Here I am.

Hal: Nice. You have to tap on there and everything?

Aubrey: Yeah.

Hal: Nice.

Aubrey: So, yeah. I mean, because some of the movements and we have some bodyweight movements and then some basic kettlebell movements and talk about different ways to train so it’s a good experience.  

Hal: Before we open up for Q&A, is there anything else that obviously, again, I’m only halfway through the book or a third the way through.

Aubrey: No. I really wanted to make this – there’s a section there called Now Do It and I think that’s one of the most important sections too and that’s just addressing the objections that we have. It’s hard to do something different. Nobody’s going to live every day like this, but this really addresses like what are the key motivating factors like what are the points of resistance like how do you overcome that? What’s a mental image that you can use? What’s the practice that you can use? What are the biggest obstacles? So, look, I’m not a perfect guy. I’m just figuring out how to do the best stuff I can every day and really going back to that and I try to keep this book like that like I’m not preaching at you from a pedestal. I’m like, “Now, look, here are our struggles. Here are our things that we’re going through. Here’s how we can all get through this together,” and I think that’s, I don’t know, something unique that you don’t always see in other books and I think kind of hopefully comes through in this one.

Hal: Yeah. Well, and the do it now part to me that’s you coaching someone through the psychology of implementing what you’re talking about because making changes are hard. It’s painful, it’s hard, it’s difficult, at least we tell ourselves.

Aubrey: Yeah. Like I said, like I wrote the chapter and I still look at that cold water nozzle and I’m like, “Ooh, yeah. I think I got to go. I got no time.” So, how do I even coach myself through that and make sure that I actually get it done? Because every time I do, at the backside of that, like no one’s ever finished a workout then like, “Oh, man, I really regret hitting the gym today,” or like finished having sex and like, “Yeah. Man, I wish I didn’t do that.”

Hal: There’s a quote that I came across when I was writing my book that said, “Nobody likes going into the gym, but everybody loves the feeling of having gone to the gym”

Aubrey: Yeah. Exactly. 100% of the time.

Hal: So, put your mind there, visualize the end result why you’re doing it and what you’re going to get out of it so awesome, man. There are some questions that have come in?

Male: Yes. Relating to the six-breath method, how many times should we do the breath work every day? Is it better in the morning or before you go to bed?

Aubrey: So, relating to the six-breath method, is it better to do that in the morning or in the night and what’s the frequency on that? Honestly, there is no overdose.

Hal: You can’t take deep breaths too much.

Aubrey: Well, you can go into a state called shamanic or holotropic breathing which is a state where you get into very kind of it’s almost like a spiritual practice but that really, really have to push like we’re talking about hundreds of deep breaths but as far as like the six deep breaths and you really want to be lying down if you’re going to do that like you can crank that out as often as you like.

Hal: Anytime you need to get in a fixed state.

Aubrey: Right. Just you’re feeling a little anxious, feeling a little frantic like everybody knows, “Oh, take a deep breath.” Well, we shouldn’t be saying, “Take a deep breath.” We should be saying, “Take six deep breaths,” because that’s the move. That’s what the science shows. It’s six. It’s not one. So, and tell that to your friends too like, “Take six deep breaths.” They might be, “I think you’re being condescending or whatever.” No. Actually, the Japanese study it showed that six was the…

Hal: That part of your book could change that part of our lexicon. That’ll become a household and people start saying it.

Aubrey: I hope so because one isn’t going to cut it. I mean, one helps maybe a little bit mentally but like six and all of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh okay.”

Hal: And six is kind of a starting place but you said 30. That’s where you go in the morning.

Aubrey: Yeah. Thirty is for the shower so that’s for that purpose. So, the six is for drop in blood pressure and the subtle state shift. Thirty is going to build that inner fire so that you can withstand the cold a little better and take you through that process.

Hal: Got it. Okay. Got it. Awesome. Next question?

Male: Of the changes in the book, which one was the hardest for you to make personally?

Aubrey: Of the changes in the book, which one was the hardest for me to make personally? It’s interesting. I think it’s the discipline of doing the same thing every day. I’m kind of very loose.

Hal: You like variety?

Aubrey: I like variety and like I kind of I’m one of those people that abhor doing the same thing all the time but these practices are so universally good that it’s really forced me to have the discipline to really repeat the same action over and over again and that I think has been one of the most valuable and also most challenging things for me because I can get myself to do most everything here in the book but it’s can I get myself to do it consistently? Can I get myself to follow through in every way that I can? One area that I fully admit that I’ve just totally failed, I’ve just duff every time is all sleep experts really agree, you don’t really want to sleep with pets if you’re really trying to optimize your sleep and maximize that, but we have a little Alaskan Klee Kai and there’s no way I’m getting that thing out of bed.

Hal: You can’t kick it out of bed.

Aubrey: There’s no way I’m getting that thing out of bed so I’m just taking an L like knowing that I’m taking an L in the sleep category.

Hal: I’m sure all of our pet lovers watching and listening are like, “Oh, thank God.  Yeah. I don’t want to get rid of my puppy.”

Aubrey: Some sacrifices need to be made.

Hal: Awesome. All right. More questions?

Male: What inspired you to write the book?

Aubrey: What inspired me to write the book? I think for me there’s a lot of great resources but they’re all scattered into a bunch of different another thing so if you can read Shawn Stevenson’s book Sleep Smarter or Nick Littlehales’ book Sleep and those are two different books on sleep alone that to me you really have to combine those to get the full kind of master class. Nick Littlehales covers the science of napping which is something I really brought in how important nap and controlled recovery periods are.

Hal: Talk about that real quick and you can come on in the tail end, but I love to know your napping strategies, schedule.

Aubrey: Well, they did the science and they basically compared more overnight sleep with more caffeine or a nap to see about mental alertness, focus, mental performance, health markers. Universally, the nap won. The nap is better for you than more overnight sleep, better for you than caffeine and it wins in all the different categories. Somehow, we got this idea that naps are for lazy people but they’re not. It’s like an essential way to pick up additional sleep and rest.

Hal: How long do you nap and what time of the day?

Aubrey: Yeah. So, there’s going to be a natural lull in circadian rhythm that comes sometime after lunch. We always kind of normally feel this. It can get exacerbated by a high carbohydrate or high sugar lunch which will then drop your blood sugar and make you even more sleepy.

Hal: A turkey sandwich with the bleached flour or the three times more flour than the turkey.

Aubrey: Yeah. Exactly. Ciabatta roll but yeah. So, you’re going to feel that regardless. And so, just going with the flow of when the Spanish would take a siesta, when other cultures in Egypt they take the [inaudible]. In different places, they take these naps scheduled in the afternoon. That’s a great place to do it and you can do it in a 30-minute controlled recovery period as Nick Littlehales would say sometimes aided with some music technology called binaural beats which can help kind of relax and then train the brain. That’s one option or just kind of zone out. Even if you don’t go fully asleep, by dropping your brainwave state to those kinds of more restful things, you’ll start that parasympathetic cycle and then you’ll be able to come out of that more alert.

Hal: Interesting. Well, something I started doing a while back is I use white noise at night. We started that when we had I think we had kids that make noise, so we could drown with the background noise. What we found is it’s an anchor for me to rest. So, I use white noise at bed. I’ve got an app on my phone for white noise but then for naps, what’s beautiful is as soon as I play that white noise it tells my body, “Oh, it’s time to sleep,” and it helps me get into the nap a lot quicker.

Aubrey: Yeah. So, circling back to the original question, sleep is one chapter of my book. It’s one important part of the day but it’s lots of other important parts of the day. If I had to read two books and study 15 studies to actually put that together to give a comprehensive thing on sleep, then you can’t expect people to do that. The average person is not going to read two books on sleep. They’re not going to read 10 books on nutrition. There are so many good books in nutrition. There are great ones by Mark Sisson, there are great ones by Ben Greenfield, there are great ones by Robb Wolf but they go far deeper than the average person would ever need. They need as like a clear summary like what are the action steps? What’s the important thing to do? And so, I really just try to harness and harvest all of the best information and put it together in one manual that covered the whole day.

So, if someone doesn’t want to read a billion books on this thing for minds and this thing for nutrition, this thing for sex, this thing for sleep, blah, blah, blah, but just have one aggregation of it combined with my own lessons, my own experiences, all the elite performers that  I’ve worked with, my own perspective and kind of the emotional management and some of the things that my specialty is imbuing it all with that and hopefully making it an entertaining process. Like that was one of the key contributions I felt like I could make to the world. It’s just to put all these together in one place, cover those bases, and then from there have a couple of other books in mind that will tackle issues surrounding love and issues surrounding community and different things and I’ll certainly be doing the same kind of idea, taking the best information that exists in my own personal experiences and experiments and kind of putting those altogether.

Hal: Awesome. And if you don’t listen to the Aubrey Marcus podcast, highly, highly, highly recommend it. And one thing that with this book that you did really well is just your writing style. In fact, and I was in Utah which is we’re always vacationing with like a few families when we’re reading it, everybody’s picking up because that’s on the coffee table on purpose for everyone to see it and my buddy, Jon Vroman, who is the founder of the Front Row Foundation. He wrote a book called The Front Row Factor. He was reading it and so what do you think? He goes, “I love it,” and he goes, “I love his writing style.” He said, “I wish I could write like this.” He said, “I feel like I talk like this, but I can’t translate it into my writing.” So, I want to mention that the writing style it’s very easy to read and enjoyable to read and you drop in humor kind of unexpectedly and the occasional F-bomb that keeps you in your toes.

Aubrey: I try to keep it as close to my actual voice as possible and not try to project anything, not try to be cool. Yeah. Exactly. It’s just me. Then wanting to keep it that way.

Hal: Awesome. We have time for another question?

Aubrey: Yeah.

Male: What are some tips for managing time at work to be more productive?

Aubrey: What are some tips for managing time at work to be more productive? So, there’s a lot of good books on like email batching strategies and things like that and I really didn’t want to cover that because I think the most important thing at work is you have to know why you’re at work like you really have to know like what your mission is because like if you really know that, you’ll be f***ing fired up. That’ll be that internal fire and that internal fuel and you’ll forge the solutions and things necessary like when you’re passionate about something and you love what you’re working for, I mean, you can produce an incredible amount of work and I think that’s…

Hal: And that’s work, right?

Aubrey: It doesn’t even feel like work. And I tell the story in the book about when I was working I had a marketing company. I worked in-house for another client and I was totally miserable and there was a big turning point for me where I realize like, “All right. Instead of just being miserable and counting the hours so I can go home, I really want to focus on how can I use this experience to set me up for the next experience?” So, I became very clear like I’m going to start my own brand and I’m not going to be working for anybody else and I’m going to build something that’s going to be amazing. What do I need? I need more time because I got to figure out what that thing is going to look like. I got to figure out how to do it and I need to save money. And so, my job then afforded me time and I started saving money.

Hal: What were you doing at the time if you don’t mind sharing?

Aubrey: Yeah. I was just doing online marketing and a variety of different clients. That subtle shift to be in like, “Oh no, no, no, I’m not here working for that client. I’m here working while I’m doing good work for them, I’m here working for my future and my future requires time and it requires the money that this thing is going to provide me.” And so, because of that, I was able to actually be incredibly efficient at doing the jobs that I needed for that client but then also start working on my own stuff, start brainstorming, start thinking. So, instead of spreading four hours of real work over eight hours and just kind of call it a day, I would really focus and crush and compress and deliver on my daily job for that client and then I would spend the rest of the time really focusing on what I was going to build in the future and that’s because I have very clear picture of like what my mission was. And I think that’s probably the most important thing I can do. I can tell everybody for that is just know what your mission is, know what you’re working for, and you’ll find that natural passion. And there are other tips about how to use essential oils to enhance productivity and how lemon scent reduces typewriting errors. I have other tips in there but like the big thing is you got to find your mission.  

Hal: It’s the mission. Right. Everything revolves around that. Let’s do one more. We have time for one more question.

Male: If you have to pick just one chapter that everyone in the world would have to read, what would it be?

Aubrey: If I had to pick just one chapter for everyone to read, which one would that be? Well, everyone in the world I think probably one of the biggest world epidemics is the one on nutrition and I spread that out over breakfast, lunch, and dinner but the most important of those three chapters is going to be chapter 3 which covers breakfast and that talks about basically the substitution of healthy fats for sugar and I think if we’re really going that universal and everybody reading that, I mean, you go through the grocery store and it’s just sad especially like a conventional grocery store, everything is bright shiny colors and cartoon characters for kids and all it is, is high fructose corn syrup and like refined starch and just people don’t have a chance. When you get locked into that kind of really poor fuel source, you really don’t have a lot of opportunities to move beyond that.  

And then as far as other chapters that I think are really, really essential, I think the last chapter is pretty important and that it’s kind of the one that ties it all together. Chapter 16, I think that’s the guy who’s asking the question over there, he told me that was his favorite chapter. That’s purely me, it’s from my own wisdom in life and it really talks about forgiveness. And because for anybody to make any meaningful change like most of us know, most of us actually if we did all of the things that we know we should, we would be a superhero already like we have a lot of the information. It’s just the action for that.

And what I’ve really found in myself and working with people is one of the things preventing people from making these big changes is they haven’t fully forgiven themselves. They haven’t come to that state where they feel like they deserve to change. They’re still kind of punishing themselves for past choices they’ve made or past things or past belief systems. So, taking them through some practices that I borrowed from some Hawaiian kahunas which is a Hawaiian spiritual system, taking them through some practices of radical forgiveness and then the positive self-talk and the mantras and the ethos building, I think that’s really, really valuable to actually get people to start making the changes that they know they already should. So, Chapter 3 on food and chapter 16 on nutrition and how to build a positive relationship with the self.

Hal: It’s a beautiful way to wrap up today, man, and I can’t wait to get to that. I think I’m going to skip ahead and read the chapter on forgiveness. But for me like I said Chapter 3 was on nutrition, was the one that as I’m reading I’m like, “Everyone in the world needs to read this,” because it’s just the way, again, your writing style is getting to someone’s psychology of like, “Hey, here’s how you’re living now and why you’ve been living this way and in some ways it’s not your fault.” It’s the media’s fault or whatever and you’ve been lied to, etcetera, etcetera and then you just really got to hold people’s hand, “Hey, come on,” and it’s like you just take them through this journey through having extraordinary days every day of their lives. So, appreciate you, man. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Aubrey: Thanks, Hal, and thanks everybody for dropping in and I’ll try and jump online and answer some more questions for you, guys.

Hal: Cool. And the book, everybody, is Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex, all important things for us to optimize and OwnTheDayBook.com, best place to get it.

Aubrey: And preorders are super huge for any author who’s going to conventional publishing route. Helps tell the bookstores which books to order and it’s huge and it’s like Christmas when it arrives because you already got a preorder. It would just pop right into your Kindle or show up at your door so just deeply appreciate anybody who’s interested and thanks for listening.

Hal: Yeah. And that’s what I would say is I’m big on reciprocity. If I get value from somebody on the podcast, I’ll go buy their book, even if I don’t feel like I need it like I’ll buy it for somebody else just like, “Hey, you gave me your time. You gave me a lot of value. This, of course, is a book that I really feel everybody needs to read.” In fact, I text my business partner I said, “Hey, do we have enough budget to buy these for everybody at our 400-person business here?” He’s like, “Let’s talk about it.” I’m like, “All right.” But, I mean, yeah. I’m a huge, huge believer. Own the Day, Own Your Life, Aubrey Marcus. Everybody, get the book at OwnTheDayBook.com. Miracle Morning Community, I love you. Achieve Your Goals Podcast listeners, I love you. I appreciate you. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll catch you next week. Take care, everybody.

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