Aubrey Marcus Quotes

“A lack of sufficient or timely exposure to light will short-circuit every attempt you make to start your mornings off with the kind of energy necessary to own the day. This is a problem that everyone faces, from students to self-employed moms to workaholic dads to professional athletes.

Upon waking, either from sleep or a nap, blast yourself with five to ten minutes of direct blue-light exposure. Ideally, you’ll be able to do this by stepping outside and exposing as much of your skin as possible to that giant yellow orb in the sky, basking in its bright, warm blueness, like a cat with less body hair.”

“All around you right now you have people looking at you. Some are in your family. Maybe you have kids. You certainly have friends or coworkers, and perhaps even some strangers on social media. They are all looking for some sign that somebody knows what the hell is going on out there and that something better is possible. You can be that sign, that someone, that something better. You can be the one they point to.”

“All fear comes from scarcity.

Scarcity of pleasure = pain.
Scarcity of money = powerlessness.
Scarcity of love = loneliness.
Scarcity of time = death.”

“Before you get sick your body will whisper about its fatigue.
Before you break up, your lover will whisper her requests.
Before your business goes bankrupt, your customers will whisper their complaints.
If you don't listen to the whispers, you'll be forced to hear the screams.”

“Comfort, after all, is the antagonist of growth.”

“Depression is a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that the world, and yourself, as you understand them, is broken. But it isn’t the world or yourself that is broken, it is just your understanding that is deluded.”

“Depression is an important part of the resistance training of the psyche.”

“Depression is the exasperation that comes from believing in false premises.”

“Drinking, smoking, excessive masturbation, etc. All of these are attempts to cure your depression, but they are ultimately exacerbating the issue. Stop them. Look at your storm head on, and face it.”

“Here are the two most common beliefs that lead to my depression:

1) Something outside of myself is responsible for my happiness.
2) I am responsible for other’s happiness outside of myself.”

“I think there is a real crisis of masculinity in that men think to be a man you have to act a certain way, be strong. It’s not about cowering, but it's about not being threatened by a woman in her full power, or by anyone really. You can only be your authentic, true self and only by finding that can you be the type of person who isn't threatened, isn't afraid.”

“I’ve been in an open relationship with my fiancé Whitney Miller for over 4 years, and still, jealousy is a dragon that needs to be slain daily. When 'open' is simply an idea in your head, you think to yourself, “I’ve got this, no big deal.” Then when the person you love most – the person whose smile is precious to you, whose smells are like your private garden of blooming flowers – starts texting, dining, traveling, and fucking someone else, you realize... Maybe I don’t got this.”

“If people really understood self-improvement, there would be a lot fewer books and a lot more actual improvement.”

“If someone around you is depressed, know that it is not your responsibility to pull them out of it before they are ready. Do not rob them of their chance to face the storm and be a hero.”

“If you decide you want to be happy, here are a few steps to help you get there.

1. Stop destructive avoidance patterns.
2. Start positive patterns.
3. Give to others.”

“If you don’t handle the first twenty minutes after you get out of bed correctly, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle all day. Tough mornings aren’t tough because of insufficient willpower. They’re tough because no one teaches us how to make them easy, let alone perfect, even though the perfect start to your day is perfectly within reach.”

“Imagine one of those 3D metal puzzles where you have to unlock and disengage the pieces. If you don’t know what you are doing, those things can be incredibly hard. But when you learn the trick, the puzzle is easy.”

“It's not where you begin, it's where you end.”

“It’s important to understand that depression is a type of human experience, and all human experiences are made up of two parts:

1) The experience itself as created by your nervous system (hardware/biology)
2) The story your conscious mind creates about your experience (software/psychology)”

“Just because you haven’t succeeded yet, doesn’t mean that the thing is hard.”

“Living in a state of abundance is synonymous with fearlessness. It is the belief that you already have everything you need and anything that is in short supply will replenish itself.”

“Open relationship isn’t about having sex with a lot of people. If you get into it for that, you are going to fail. It’s about figuring out how to love yourself without condition, and how to love others without possession. If that is the goal, and you are prepared to meet your shadows with love and forgiveness, being open just might be for you.”

“People often assume that the concept of bettering yourself and the concept of being content with what you have, are contradictory. They aren’t. If you are living correctly, you are betterment in motion. The Japanese call this ‘Kaizen’, or change for the better. It is not about the destination of where you are going, some magical place you will arrive where all of the sudden you are ‘enlightened’ or ‘successful’. This idea that we will hit a certain point, and everything will be stable and we will be happy is a total fallacy. You can both be content with where you are, and continue to strive for more. Because being a human and living life is all about the striving. That’s all there is.

There is a journey, from one point to another. Throughout that journey you will wander, get lost, become found, improve, forget, and hopefully grow a little wiser the whole way through. Enjoy the process, appreciate where you are and the moments you are living right now. But reach for more. Reach for your potential- that blueprint of what you could be if you made it beyond fear and judgment and shame and self doubt.”

“Reading is one of the fastest ways to level up your life.”

“Sixty percent of the average adult human body is made up of water. About the same percentage of Earth’s surface is covered by water. The world is water, we are water, yet here we are, every morning, essentially starving for it. And we wonder why we wake up feeling miserable so often.

A glass of water from the bathroom faucet or tipping your head back in the shower is not going to cut it, however. This isn’t just about curing cottonmouth. Health coach and sleep expert Shawn Stevenson calls that first glass of water in the morning 'a cool bath for your organs'. Another way of putting it: it’s priming your internal fluids before hitting the road.”

“Take a look at something like the placebo effect. It is literally the mind’s ability to change the body. We have to account for it in every clinical trial because it is so strong that to ignore it would invalidate every single statistical result. When you think a stressful thought, your body produces cortisol. When you think of a sexual thought, your body releases sex hormones. When you laugh, your body produces more nitric oxide. Everything is absolutely connected. To improve the mind, improve the body. To improve the body, improve the mind. To improve your life? Improve them both at the same time.”

“The glass partition between mind and body needs to be shattered. It’s not real. The mind is an embodied process. It is the supercomputer that synthesizes the billions of impulses from the human cellular ecosystem. This includes what our nerves, cells, skin, instincts, gut biome, ego is saying, and it translates that into a (hopefully) coherent thought so that we can take action. While it is helpful to create some form or separation for us to discuss, effectively the mind is part of the body, and the body is part of the mind, and they affect each other bilaterally.”

“The trick with self improvement is simple — Focus on the process. Each single decision is not hard, and if you focus on each decision, rather than on changing your entire life in one fell swoop, then transformation becomes the inevitable result of very small choices.”

“There are thirty million of our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, held captive as slaves in the world right now. Two million of them are children. They are raped and used for forced labor. Women. Children. I want you to take a moment to see them in your mind. See a little boy, and a little girl, held captive in an abandoned warehouse. Chained up to a wall behind a red door. Sodomized, subjected to the violence of a new stranger every week – their violations filmed and sold as pornography on the dark web.

This is evil. Real evil. And this isn’t in some faraway country. The United States has the highest demand for child pornography and human slaves out of any nation in the world. These faces you imagined could be you. Could be your children.

Former CIA operator Tim Ballard doesn’t have to imagine their faces. He sees them. He tells the story of a five year old boy that he rescued from one of these warehouses in California, who told him 'I don’t belong here.' Since that moment, Tim and his organization Operation Underground Railroad have rescued over 4,000 victims of human trafficking.”

“There are three critical habits we all can optimize that will improve our hardware. They are sleep, diet, and exercise.”

“There are three ways to achieve gratitude – perhaps the most beautiful of all emotions.

1) Scarcity and Expiration.
When you know you have a limited amount of time, with a person, with a place, with your life it’s easier to be grateful and present for those moments.
2) Novelty and Surprise.
When something is new and different, or exceeds your expectations in any way, it is easier to be grateful and present. I think the psychedelic state is so contextually rich that it creates novelty even in the mundane of a quiet room.
3) Choice.
Gratitude and presence can be a practice. It can be something you decide to do, with your whole heart, your emotions, and your imagination. Like working out, meditating, or discipline, it’s something you train. And I have a lot of training to do because I’ve been relying heavily on 1) and 2).”

“Trying to capture life with your phone is like filling up a cup in the river, showing it to your friend, and saying 'See, here is the river'.”

“When you are improving yourself, you are not just doing it for you, you are doing it so that you can be the living proof to others of what is possible. You can lead by example. Why is it that when someone first does a new trick on a skateboard or a motocross bike that was previously believed to ‘never be possible’, then suddenly a year later three more people can do the same trick? It’s because when you do it, other people believe they can do it too.”

“Who is in control of your mind? You are.”

“Why do we wait until New Years for a resolution? Why do we start fresh on Monday with a new set of goals? Why are we either binging or dieting? We have in our mind this idea that we are like computer code: number 1, or a zero. That’s all nonsense. It’s good to pour out half your beer when you know you’ve had enough. It’s good when you leave half of the chocolate cake on the plate. It’s good when you do 20 pushups and 20 air squats on a day that you didn’t make it to the gym. We do not live in a world of absolutes, and trying to hold ourselves to absolute standards just patterns us for inevitable failure.”

“You are going to die. No matter what you do, this fact is inevitable. But this thought doesn’t have to be negative. Death is the ultimate form of resistance in the human experience. And like all resistance, you have the choice as to whether it crushes your spirit or makes you stronger.”

“Your nervous system is your hardware, and your conscious mind is like software.”

“Your worth isn’t dependent on any of your attributes and that you don’t need anything external to validate you. You learn that you are worthy of love, just because you are alive.”

“Don’t feel like there’s only one way. Be open to explore. Always be looking and asking, ‘Is this serving me in the best way possible?’ and, ‘What am I learning from this?'”

“I’m just someone who’s trying to learn a little bit more today that will make me a little bit better tomorrow. I’m on the path of learning, exploring, and asking questions.”

“I’ve done every different psychedelic, every different sweat lodge, a ton of different initiation rituals and grueling workouts, and founded companies. There’s nothing that comes even close to the challenge of being in an open relationship.”

“If I see something that I’m afraid of I head towards it, not away from it.”

“If you have a genuine community and many people you can talk to about anything, it’s going to help so much.”

“If you run from your discomfort, it’s going to chase you down like a grizzly bear. You know what a grizzly bear does when it catches you? It starts to eat you while you’re alive, asshole first.”

“In a healthy relationship, instead of serving someone from your cup, you actually serve them from the overflow that fills the saucer around the cup. That way, no one else is ever drinking from your own cup of love, resources, or energy.”

“Isn’t it interesting that when asked who we are, we identify with our jobs and past accomplishments?”

“Life is too hard to do all by yourself.”

“Our purpose here is to wake up to the truth of who we are, and all of the truth around us. If we’re all here to wake up to that truth, and we’re shielding that truth from somebody, we’re doing them a great disservice.”

“Stop fucking eating sugar. Get some sleep. Move throughout the day. Get some sunlight. Drink some saltwater and hydrate. Take care of your shit. Get the basics down.”

“Take care of yourself. Be overflowing with your own abundance of energy, love, time, resources, and everything else to actually be of real service to anybody or the rest of the world. It begins with yourself.”

“The persona is inapplicable of receiving love. It can receive praise, but you’re not going to feel it because it’s not you.”

“The sooner you realize external achievements will never make you happy, the better.”

“These are the pillars of a good life. Take care of the body. Understand the mind, how to open it up, and look into your shadow. Align yourself to love in a relationship that’s in best accord with yourself. Then, cultivate and build a community.”

“Truth is love. Telling the truth and loving everyone is the same thing. You can’t love someone without telling them the truth.”

“We’re here on Earth to really experience everything – to eat the food, to try the drinks, to try the drugs. Not all the drugs, but some of them at least. Do the things; don’t abuse them or go wild, but experience all the things. Go visit the beautiful places. Go take a dip in a cold waterfall, feel rainfall on your face, head to a desert, climb a snowy mountain, surf, play, dance, and make love. Do all the things we were meant to do.”

“A healthy body can come in all shapes and sizes, but it does have a certain set of characteristics:
- the joints are mobile and fluid;
- the muscles are strong and flexible enough to perform a variety of tasks;
- the frame is capable of carrying weight, a little more, or a little less, without unnecessary strain;
- the tissue is healthy and supple.

If you meet all or most of those criteria, you are what is called, in evolutionary terms, 'fit', and in Aubrey Marcus terms, 'sexy AF'. I don't care about your BMI or whether you look like an Instagram model. Healthy is sexy.”

“As humans we desire to apply our force — our work — to the maximum effect possible. Our mission is what we want that force to accomplish. While the meaning of life might be complicated, your mission in life should not be complicated. What are you, in this lifetime, on this planet, in this body, here to do? What do you want more than anything else?”

“Before you eat, prepare the very best bite on your fork. Take a moment to look deeply at all the food on your plate. Think about where it came from (a reinforcement to eat food sourced in a healthy manner). Think about the energy required to grow that food – the nutrients, the sunlight, the other plants and animals ingested by your food. Take time to bring yourself to a state of mindfulness and reduced stress. Think about how that energy will translate to energy in your own body and what you are going to need that energy for (a reminder about portion control and that you're about to bone down!).

As you put the bite in your mouth, if the food is lacking in any of these categories, forgive it. You never want to think that what you're about to eat is poison, or bad for you, or will ruin your diet. Instead, tell your body that what it is about to eat is nourishment. Then look at the food, smell the food, and savor it. When you taste it, chew it until there is nothing left, and your tastebuds have flirted with every ingredient in this orgy of flavor. That should be your first bite, and how you say grace: it's a piece of mindfulness, a nutrition reinforcer, and a way through the placebo to ensure that your food will be digested and absorbed optimally.”

“Breakfast is not mandatory, and in fact you might just be better off without it altogether.”

“Breath is the rudder of life. We have the choice to either take over conscious control or let ourselves wander aimlessly. If you are going to own the day, you must own your breath.”

“Build upon your successes rather than complain about your failures.”

“Chronic stress is literally killing us, and the traditional medical model offers us very little help to deal with it. Counterintuitively, one of the best ways to deal with chronic stress is to seek certain forms of acute stress. Through a process called hormesis, acute stress will help you adapt and become stronger.”

“Dinner should be a celebration of a day fully owned.”

“Do it well, or not at all.”

“Don't confuse owning the day with figuring out ways to squeeze out more and more productivity in less and less time. Owning is not about working more. It's about living a full and fulfilled life – one that speaks to what our bodies need most, which, yes, includes meaningful bursts of productivity, but also includes the rich and joyful connection that other people give us. If you don't connect with others, then you can't own the day. Plain and simple.”

“Flexibility of thought is one of the greatest attributes any human being can have, scientist or otherwise. It's the ability to take those deeply engraved opinions, and overwrite them with new and better information. Our brains are malleable enough for that task; you just have to bring the goal into awareness.”

“Focus on the micro and the macro takes care of itself.”

“For overall health and optimal mood and physical performance, you need to pair any sugar you consume with something that slows its absorption into the body – and the two things that do that are fat and fiber.”

“Fuck exercise. Exercise is for puppies and babies. We need to train.”

“Ginger has the ability to speed up the time it takes your stomach to pass food to your digestive tract by up to 50%.”

“Have you ever gotten up from the toilet after a bowel movement and inspected your work? Have you ever been able to tell, by its contents, exactly what you ate a few hours earlier? Maybe some corn kernels. Some threads of spinach. Some almond slivers or carrot chunks. If you can see it, it means you didn't digest it, which usually means you ate too fast.”

“Here are some foods with high dietary nitrate levels that are easily converted into the biological signal of nitric oxide: beets, pumpkin seeds, Swiss chard, arugula, watermelon, red wine, and dark chocolate.”

“If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.”

“If we allow the inner critic to punish us every time we fail to meet the standards of perfection, we'll stop trying altogether. We'll decide that it is better to pretend that it's someone else's fault, hiding behind excuses and rationalizations.

If we know that when we fail, we will forgive ourselves, then we get to play from inspiration rather than fear. We'll be able to look our mistakes in the eye, take the medicine, and move on.”

“If we tell our body something is poison, it becomes more poisonous. If we convince ourselves that it is healthy, it becomes more healthy. This is not to say that the reality of a food or situation doesn't matter. Molecular biology still exists – it's a real thing – but the mind isn't a passive bystander.”

“If you are into alcohol and marijuana, you aren't breaking the law, and you still want to own your day, after your workout is the perfect time to have a drink or smoke a little of the sticky icky... The key is: a little.”

“If you don’t eat fat, you’re probably fat.”

“If you start a book, and you don't like it, do not continue to read it just because you bought it.”

“In 1822, according to Dr. Stephan Guyenet, people consumed on average the amount of sugar currently found in a single can of Coke or Sprite every five days. Today, we consume that amount every seven hours.”

“Know the plants, know yourself, be honest, and decide the terms of your relationship with them. If it can be healthy, it will enhance more than just your performance, and you'll have an advantage in everything you do for as long as you live.”

“Morning Mineral Cocktail:
- 12 ounces filtered water
- 3 grams sea salt
- 1/4 lemon, squeezed”

“My favorite study is a 2008 British experiment in which they compared a nap, a cup of coffee, and more nighttime sleep, to see what would happen to people's afternoon energy levels and concentration. The nap – yes, the nap! – won.”

“No sugary stuff for breakfast. Period. Instead, we need to add fats back into our diet in sugar's place. Yep, you heard me, fats. Fats fats fats fats. Get used to the word, because you are going to hear it a lot.

Make this simple substitution – fat for sugar – and you will have the sustained, balanced energy to power you all the way up to lunch. And if you can't find a way to make this happen, then skip breakfast entirely.”

“Once you embrace the grind, whatever your grind may be, all of the sudden it isn't so bad. It is never pain that is the problem; it is the suffering caused by the resistance to that pain.”

“Our entire culture is built on the elimination of the difficult and the pursuit of the comfortable.”

“Play. If you believe you are too old to play, you will become too old to play. If you stay young in heart, spirit, and belief, you will stay young in body and mind as well.”

“Psychologists agree that there are four keys to compelling positive action:
1) know what to do and how to do it;
2) believe it will work;
3) see the value; and
4) get support from your community/tribe/family.”

“Remember: sleep isn’t binary. It’s not an off switch. It’s a dimmer.”

“See your future. I want you to imagine yourself a year from now. You know that in a year you are going to be different, whether you do nothing or something. And the choices you make between now and then will determine that difference.”

“Small things, when compounded over time, tend to have big consequences.”

“Sugar is the biggest antinutrient of them all.”

“The best timing for bread is dinner, after your glycogen stores have been depleted by exercise, and you're about to head into the winter of your day... sleep. So if bread and butter is your thing, do it the right way, with grass-fed butter on sprouted or sourdough.”

“The first thing you do when you come home from work, or emerge from the 'productive' part of the day, is reset.”

“The general rule with any intoxicating substance, particularly alcohol, is to use the least amount necessary to achieve the desired effect. This has a couple advantages: 1) it's cost-effective, and 2) it limits any negative side effects like toxicity to the liver or lungs. In short, you want to be your own cheap date, and the best time for that is post workout.”

“The key to alcohol is only having a little. Not necessarily because I'm worried that you will become an alcoholic; it's more because the last thing you want to do is feel like your owning this day at the expense of the next one. Then you're not really owning the day at all, you're overspending and borrowing from tomorrow.”

“The training pyramid – your ideal 50 minute workout:
1. Durability (mobility + flexibility) - 15 minutes.
2. Cardio - 10 minutes.
3. Muscular endurance - 8 minutes.
4. Strength - 5 minutes.
5. Power - 3 minutes.”

“There is an old saying, attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, that to be healthy you must chew your drink, and drink your food.”

“There is no amount of work you will do that will finally make the work go away, and definitely no amount of money you can make that will solve all your problems. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can look for happiness in places where it might actually be found.”

“Time is the wrong metric to use when we evaluate work. Because it’s not just about how much time you work, it’s about how effectively you use that time.”

“To live one day well is the same as to live ten thousand days well. To master twenty-four hours is to master your life.”

“To own your life, you gotta own the day.”

“To wait for the external world to change before you alleviate your stress is a fool’s errand.”

“Visualize that you wake up with purpose and clarity. You push yourself against resistance. You take control of your diet and supplementation. You turn dead time into alive time. You work effectively and aren’t afraid to power down the engines to rest. You train your body into a durable, capable machine. You connect with yourself, your friends, and the universe. You turn sex into an adventure of pleasure. You go to sleep with a mission, and actually sleep.

Imagine what a year of living like that has done for you. Walk in the shoes of that new person. See yourself through that person’s eyes. Look in the mirror at that body. Maybe the circles under your eyes are gone, and that stubborn weight has lifted – mentally and physically. See what has happened in your career, and in your family. That person is you, on the other side of resistance. If you see it clearly enough, it will be done.”

“We are built for work. It is never going to go away, nor would most of us ever want it to. It is part of the balance of life, and however you define it, you will always have work to do. To derive as much meaning, pleasure, and value out of this inescapable part of life as possible, you need to know your mission -- whether it's related to the work itself or not. Then you need to own your workspace, and work as effectively as possible. Because what makes work feel less like labor is when you know why you are doing it, and how to do it well.”

“We have to transcend the tendency to place all of our effort on one thing at a time, instead of one day at a time.”

“We've all heard the expression 'You are what you eat.' Well that's literally true. You didn't grow from magic, or because that's just what babies do. You grew because you ate stuff. But that's only half the story, because the stuff you ate, grew because it ate (and metabolized) stuff too. You aren't just what you eat, you're also what you eat ate.”

“Well begun is half done.”

“Whether in love, or in business, or in health, if we don't feel like we deserve a positive outcome, or even worse, like we deserve to be punished, we will manifest that outcome with the subconscious choices we make.”

“With an estimated 75% of the world's food produced from only twelve plant and five animal species, the lack of biodiversity in our diet is failing to support our 'second brain'.”

“You are not rewarded for the comfortable choice.”

“You know what's over that mountain? More fucking mountains.”

“You shouldn't count how many hours of sleep you get in a night, but rather how many ninety-minute sleep cycles you get in a week. Thirty-five cycles should be your target.”

“Finding a way to get still is one of the most essential things we can do as humans.”

“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.”

“Nobody has it all figured out, but the ego wants to project this idea of perfection but it’s not true.”

“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.”

“The circadian rhythm is really this kind of night and day clock that regulates 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.”

“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 shitty 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 fucking sugar. Like that is not the fuel source that this human organism thrives on.”

“We as humans 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.”

“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.”

“A Gallup poll from 2012 polled people in 142 countries. 63% of respondents admitted to being so disengaged at work that they were sleepwalking through their work day, putting time but not passion into their work. 63% of people right!”

“According to the National Survey from published in the American Sociological Review, 25% of people reported that they didn’t have a single close friend, not one, right? That’s a crazy thing. One out of four people didn’t have a single close friend.”

“During the witch hunts in some Swiss villages, there were hardly any women left alive once the fever burned out. And it got to such a fever. So basically, everybody had this free floating anxiety, a lack of social bond, lack of purpose, all of the conditions presuming led up to this. And then all of a sudden, someone came with a narrative that, oh, you know what the problem is? It’s the witches. It’s the women who are the witches. And that’s the problem. So they became the scapegoat. They became the reason everybody became myopically focused, narrowed their field of attention on that external threat. And in that fever, they just burned women alive until in some places, there were no women left.”

“Human beings don’t develop things that are entirely unproductive. Those things typically get weeded out.”

“I don’t know what’s happening, I think it’s very likely that people are just caught in their own mass formation. But what we’re seeing is censorship of dissident voices, and we’re seeing the collaboration on the single narrative that’s being pushed out to the mainstream. And that’s the challenge that I think in all of these cases, in all of these societies you face is that the more centralized communication is and the more they’re able to silence dissident narratives, burn books, it used to be – but now it’s now censoring and deplatforming and banning – it starts to allow them to be able to be in easier control of the masses.

And I think that what we have to look at is when doctors are being censored from giving their opinion. Why? When in history has that ever happened? That’s not science. It’s not the scientific method. You come up with a theory and you have a bunch of people challenge it. You’re an academic, you propose a theory, you expect all of your colleagues to be like, Mattias, I don’t agree with you. This is why. And you say, thank you. I appreciate your critique. Now let me explain why I’m right.

But it’s not really what we’re seeing right now. So this is also leading to an opinion that, all right, this is dangerous. These conditions are appearing like they’re following a pattern, and it’s a pattern that we’ve seen. And it’s a pattern that leads to a disastrous dystopian, catastrophic result in many other cases. I’m not saying that’s where we’re going necessarily. But there’s indications that cause worry.”

“I don’t understand Soviet history that well, but I think initially the scapegoat was the wealthy, right? It was like the wealthy bourgeoisie, and they were the ones that were destroying the country. But ultimately, somehow Stalin then switched because you ran out of those – there’s not that many wealthy people right? He ran out of killing them and using them as a scapegoat. And then he switched it. He switched it to something else that gave him the reason to kill all of the 80 million people that he killed.”

“Like any warlord, like a warlord in a tribal situation, I have the most guns. I have the people on my side. And if you don’t comply, I’ll shoot you. And that’s what we see in a lot of movies, actually, like a lot of the villains in the fantasy novels or whatever. They’re just they have the biggest army. And that’s how they keep everybody in control. But we don’t see the process. And I think a lot of times we project that on someone like Stalin, like, oh, yeah, he just did this. It was all him. But no, he just took advantage of a deep psychological process that was supported. People were cheering him on all the way up to the point where he killed millions and millions of people. And then they were like, oh, shit. What did we do? But that was like, a little bit late.”

“Take a look at Sebastian Junger’s work in his book Tribe, where he talks about how in interviewing and surveying the people who survived the blitzkrieg in London, where bombs were falling from, Nazi bombs were falling and the air raid sirens were going off. They report that that was the happiest time of their life. They were happiest when the bombs were falling. Can you imagine the atrocity of bombs falling, people dying, exploding things happening. But they felt such a deep social bond. And all of their focus of attention was on the Nazis, on the bombs that brought everybody together. No one was lonely, actually, the mental hospitals, they all emptied out to a certain degree. Everybody was like, oh, we have a deep meaning. We have a clear purpose. We’re all in this together, and they felt better than they ever have. And it allowed them to make it through a very challenging situation. So in a situation like that, it’s a very healthy process that can happen.”

“The 75 million adults aged 18 to 27, comprising the millennials and generation Z, were lonelier than any other US demographic. Which is wild to think. We think of like older generations being lonely, but it’s actually the younger generations reporting even more loneliness. Some psychologists say it’s a social media paradox. People are interacting online with their avatars, which isn’t their true self, so they’re not creating the intimacy of vulnerability that comes from shared experience.”

“There's dehumanization on both sides. On one side, there’s domestic terrorists. On the other side, there’s reptilian elite and sheep. Talk about dehumanization. They’re literally making them non-human. And so we’re dealing with this on both sides.

Fundamentally, neither way is going to work. And it’s a very interesting predicament because I was looking out at the world. I was like, well, I can’t join that team because that team is following the same principles. They’re on the same mechanism as the other team, and I certainly can’t join that team.

So what’s the third team and I came up with this sentiment. I call it united polarity, which is like taking both sides with absolute reverence and reminding people that underneath all of the opinions and ideologies, there’s a human, and it’s a human that’s scared. It’s a human. It’s lonely. It’s a human that wants the best for themselves and other people at the fundamental level. Let’s remind ourselves of that.

Let’s actually, instead of dehumanizing, let’s super-humanize them. Let’s see ourselves in them. Let’s see ourselves in every single other person and unite the polarities, not by trying to change them, but saying, like, look, what is the common ground by which we all stand. And that’s really through this whole process, that’s the only thing that’s really made sense to me.

And when I speak about it, it seems like people, maybe it’s that group that 40% in the middle. But that group in the middle is like, I like that, I can stand behind that. And so I’m hoping that in some small way, in whatever way I’m able to contribute, that can help become part of this force that mitigates some of the damage of the mass formation leading to totalitarianism.”

“We’re all fallible, we’re all vulnerable, we’re all subject to unconscious processes. Any of us could walk on stage with a top hypnotist, like a world class hypnotist. We could walk on stage, and in ten minutes we could be clucking like a chicken in front of an audience. It could happen to any of us. And then would our friends later, like, two years later be like, you fucking chicken. You’re such a chicken like, no, you would have been a chicken, too. Our mind is vulnerable. And so to have that compassion for everybody, I think it’s so important.”