Community Building Expert: The Antidote To The Loneliness Epidemic w/ Radha Agrawal | AMP # 456

AUBREY MARCUS: Radha, here we are. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: We are here. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Let's go. We've had some cool experiences together out cruising around Egypt. Thank you for organizing that unbelievable trip. And for anyone who wants to hear about that trip, you can listen to my podcast with Makad, which was absolutely mind blowing. But that was all because you arranged something magical that we could come on board. So, first of all, Thanks for that. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Ofcourse. I'll never forget that experience. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And also thank you for democratizing and popularizing one of my favorite technologies in the world, which is ecstatic dance. 

RADHA AGRAWAL:Yes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: It's so big. It's so important. It's such a big deal. It's like the core. It's one of the core central pillars of fit for service because it's one of the most radically transformational and medicinal experiences that we can have. It reminds us why we want to be alive. It breaks through the boundaries and constrictions that we have. It connects us, but what drew you, how did you, you know, cause you run Daybreaker and so I want you to tell us about that, but like, how did you find your way on that path? Where did it come to you? 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. So for me, it was something I was always kind of ashamed of. How do I look on the dance floor? Am I going to look silly? So for a long time actually, being from an Asian household, my mother's Japanese, my father's from India. Asians don't always sort of, it's not really part of Asian culture, Japanese culture anyway.

AUBREY MARCUS: I don't know. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Indian culture. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I've seen some Asians on Dance Dance Revolution.

RADHA AGRAWAL Yes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And they crush it

RADHA AGRAWAL: As a disciplined or as a choreographed experience, the Japanese are the best when it comes to free form dancing. Trust me, we opened Daybreaker in Tokyo and it was a wild experience going there. And just like there, it's a culture that's, I wouldn't say kind of self expressed necessarily. It's a very disciplined, very honorable, very ritualized culture and community. Anyway, 

AUBREY MARCUS: I think there's a correlation between also the language and also the way that people like psychic constructs are like Japanese has a very distinct language.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. Totally. Yeah. I think for me, dance really came from, you know, sort of several areas, but the first was going to Burning Man 2012, actually. I've always loved dancing. I owned a nightclub in New York, one of the hottest nightclubs in New York. And I was an investor in it. And so I brought all my friends every Saturday night, but it wasn't the same kind of dance. You talk about ecstatic dance, right? Dance as a technology, dance as a healing celebratory technology. I never really saw it as that. I always saw it as sort of a party place, right? It was something that you would do. You would let your hair down and just kind of go on a bender, you know, and that's really where dance was for me, even if my lineage of Indian Bharatnatyam dance or Japanese sort of that kind of very, that staccato sort of formal dance has been a part of my lineage, but being raised in America, you know, sort of you're part of the frat party scene and you go out at night and it's sort of this wild experience. And so I think for me going to Burning Man, it was the first time that I, two things happened that I understood what it meant to be in my feminine power. I had been sort of really focused on my mask. I was an investment banker at a college on Wall Street. And I really kind of wanted to be seen as a hard-hitting entrepreneur. And so I was just deeply in my masculine and just wanted to be one of the boys all the time. And going to Burning Man, for me, was this beautiful kind of rebirth and new expression for, Wow, actually look at all these badass, powerful women who are walking around in their feminine power, and I'd never seen those two words together before, so that was the first thing, was just like really understanding what it meant to be leaning into the feminine power, that was the first. And then the second was a sober dance, and I'll never forget. I didn't know a single person, now I go to Brangman and everyone, but it's like when I first went 2012, I didn't know a single person except for my RV, it was five of us. We called the RV Boom Spiral, the opposite of Doom Spiral.

AUBREY MARCUS: Mm hmm. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: And in this RV, there were just five of my friends, my twin sister included. But I'll never forget one night when everyone was sleeping. It was like 3-4 o'clock in the morning. And I was like, you know, I'm going to go out by myself for the first time, literally in my life, and I'm going to go out to deep playa and just kind of explore my bicycle by myself, sober. So I roll around alone and I'm like, wow, this is kind of weird. You know, I'm usually traveling with a crew or Posse or my twin and I get on this Robot heart bus, which obviously at this moment, it's like, okay, everyone's gone there. But for me back then I never heard of it. I didn't know what it was. I just sort of threw my bike down and got into my body for the first time and just let the massive base, coming off the bus, just enter my cellular system. And all of a sudden I had this just wild awakening in my body of just like, Whoa, I was crying, my eyes were closed and I was crying because it was like I'd finally come home to my body, to music, to the technology and the medicine of dance. And it was this beautiful moment of self discovery and this rediscovery of myself, you know? And I remember when I opened my eyes, and I blinked my eyes open, all of a sudden dawn was coming up, and the sun was rising, and I just started weeping, and it was just this like incredibly ecstatic moment where sort of obviously the circadian rhythms of our bodies begin to come alive, and you feel the surge of energy with the sun, and I just remember having this magical experience with the morning and that's what inspired Daybreakers. I came home and I was like, why are these wildly spiritual experiences only relegated to these once a year festivals? Why can't we bring them to our cities where we live every day? So that's sort of the experiment of Daybreaker. And I was like, can we actually create these transformational, spiritual, self expressed, sober experiences with the sun in major metros where we are the most lonely and the most disassociated with our bodies? So that was the experiment in 2013. And it worked. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Did you think that it was gonna work or did you think like man, maybe nobody's gonna be in it. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah Yeah,

AUBREY MARCUS: It's pretty popular now, but 2013 it was not that popular.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. Oh, no. No, nobody's ever danced in the morning before ever. It was just

AUBREY MARCUS: Or ecstatic dance, really. They might have found themself in an ecstatic dancing situation.

RADHA AGRAWAL: But it was never in the morning and it was never in the morning 

AUBREY MARCUS: or with the intention that that's what you were going 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right. And so I think for us it was a hilarious morning. I'll never forget. It was December 10th, 2013. It was the first snowfall. I remember waking up that morning. I was like, oh shit. It's snowing. No one's coming. There's absolutely no chance anyone's showing up, but we had sold 250 tickets. So I was like, okay, you know, maybe my friends like I had been throwing parties with Mickey at our apartment for years and so and then my co-founder Matt Breimer. He and I have also been just community building for fun, throwing these poetry parties and all kinds of like dinner soirees at our houses just for fun. So when we invited our friends to come to the first one, and we're like, it's $25. It's not a free event. Our friends bought tickets. And so we were able to actually see how many people could come to the event. And so that first morning of snowfall, I was like, gosh, no one's coming. And so I look at Matt, I'm like, all right, I guess we would just set up this DJ booth and set up this decor and create this event in Union Square at a coffee shop in Union Square's. RIP, it's no longer there. But yeah, we were there that morning at five o'clock and then six o'clock came around and all of a sudden, 180 people showed up and it was just like boom and because we were so intentional about the initial invitations. Matt and I spent days debating. We built an excel spreadsheet literally of like who would be the ultimate FYF like fuck yeah friend. Who would say alright I'll try a sober weekday morning dance party in the middle of winter and so. I call it FYF because it's like, you know, I think all of us are fuck yeah friends. We're like, Aubrey, we're going to this Egypt boat thing. Like, fuck yeah, I'm going, you know, and this concept of FYF to me has really been a thread for community building community architecture in general. So we put a list of 300 FYFs and invited them and 250 bought tickets and 180 showed up to the very first one. And so I really feel the energy of Daybreaker is what it is today because of the intentionality with which we kind of organized the energetics of the first event. 

AUBREY MARCUS: There's so many interesting things and lessons that can be distilled from that. I mean, I think the first is for anybody who's building a community. And really reaching out to people and going through experiences together. And some of those experiences may be partying together. And maybe doing other things, but branching out, having poetry nights together, having these adventures together, these hikes together, whatever else you're doing, like you start to cultivate your community.

RADHA AGRAWAL: That’s right.

AUBREY MARCUS: And then once you have that network and those friends and those allies, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: You got it

AUBREY MARCUS: That's so important because then when you do switch something on like Daybreaker, they're there, like, they got you. Like we can't do this alone. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: You got it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You know, it's not just like, oh, I'm going to be in my room and I'm going to get all the algorithms, right. I'm going to get my Funnel right to get people to go to the thing. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: It's starts by breath

AUBREY MARCUS: It starts with your crew. And same with me starting on it. It was like, fuck, like my best friend Bodhi, can you give me 60 grand? And you know, my other friend Howard, can you give me 50 grand? And I got this crazy idea and, you know.

RADHA AGRAWAL: They believe in you. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Exactly

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. Because they knew you. And I think again, in this country, we are sold this lie of you must find your perfect profession. You must find the perfect wife. And that needs to be your number one priority. But I really believe that when we actually prioritize community first professional career and love and relationships will happen from your community, right? And so when we reprioritize that I really think that we'll end this loneliness epidemic that we're in. We're living in such a hugely funny society especially in American society where it's like ruggedly individualistic, toxically individualistic and pushing us to sort of find these like individualized career paths and romantic love partnerships. And really it's the opposite and that's true. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And even within the dyads or within the communities, I think there's more that we could go 

RADHA AGRAWAL: You got it

AUBREY MARCUS: Because this absolute individuality, sovereignty at all. Everybody needs to be earning money. Everybody needs to be. It's completely lost the integrity of the village.

RADHA AGRAWAL: That's right. I mean

AUBREY MARCUS: And that’s tensegrity, like what actually holds it together was that everybody was contributing different things. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: You know, there's so many threads to go down this path, but there's two pieces of it. There isn't a word for self. There wasn't a word for self in African and tribal indigenous cultures for the longest time. The word, the definition self, is a relatively recent word. And there also isn't a word for loneliness in the Ochoa and Sapara tribes of the Amazon rainforest. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. They don't even use language to endorse the method of separation. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Because they're connected to the planet. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly. So, Tyson Yunkaporta wrote an incredible book called Sand Talk, and he's an Aboriginal Australian. So First Nations Australian. And when he's referring to himself, because he's narrating the book, he says, he uses us too. So like again, he doesn't even say I. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right.

AUBREY MARCUS: Says us too. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Us too, you know, believe that blah, blah, blah. So it's always just, subtly reinforcing that we're not a separate self entity, a skin encapsulated ego split off from everybody else in rival risk conflict, counting your fame markers, status markers, money markers, comparing. That's what the ego does. It only knows itself through comparison. So the separate self retracts and cuts itself off from the connection to the field. And if it cuts it off too far, then that's when the separate self becomes the false self because it's living in the delusion that it's actually separate. And then once you're the false self, then all kinds of wickedness can come about envy and all of these different other elements come, but when you recognize like, Oh, Radha, you're me living a different life. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You know, you kick a soccer ball. I dribble a basketball, you're a girl. I'm a boy, you know, like there's differences. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: But us too. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. It's interesting. It's like, you know, there needs to be a beautiful, juicy balance between the me and the we, right? And I do believe that there is a place for our Dharmic self to show up in some areas. Right. But I think obviously we've gone too far with the kind of cowboy, American cowboy, you know, riding off in the distance by itself

AUBREY MARCUS: Self made man.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I think that's the stupid statue I've ever seen. Everybody loves it. The man chiseling him own self out of what the fuck bro? 

RADHA AGRAWAL: I don't get it.

AUBREY MARCUS: Like it's a terrible model. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: No, like do it together. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes.

AUBREY MARCUS: Get your homies to help chisel you out of that fucking eye

RADHA AGRAWAL: That’s right. But there's a beautiful, healthy, sort of healthy opportunity between the miwi, the sort of the miwi that is the collective, you know, in Indian culture, Japanese culture, every chant, you chant for yourself to be saved from desires, saved from sort of all the suffering. And then you also chant for your community, your sangha, your people, you know, and so I've been chanting with Soleil, my five year old daughter, recently. We just started. She's just at that age where she can really understand the meaning of chanting. So we've been chanting every morning together. It's a Japanese Buddhist chant. And it's this wild experience of feeling her understand the kind of herself coming alive, but how we're chanting also for all the animals and all the oceans and all the ecosystem. And she loves sort of recognizing that, you know, we're chanting not just for ourselves, but for the entire world. It's really special. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. That's so valuable. I think, you know, when you're a kid, if your parents aren't uptight and weird. A lot of kids ecstatic dance. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I remember Michael Jackson's thriller album came out when I was a kid 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Oh yeah, me too. My first one.

AUBREY MARCUS: We had a little room. So my mom's a black belt in karate. So she had a room, we called it the karate room because that's where she would train. And it was just a carpeted room that was off from the garage. And there was also the place where we'd go play because it was just carpets and open space and we'd put on thrillers. And I would just fucking dance and kids don't care until you get to school when other kids start to judge how you're dancing. And then you start to self reflect and then have become self conscious and then have shame around it. And that can compound, compound, compound. And then people laugh at you dancing. You're like, Oh, well, I'm not going to do this. I don't dance anymore. And it just shrinks the soul and the expression, the unique self song of us moving to the music of the cosmos and allowing it to express through our unique vessel like that's the matter 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah, oh yeah.

AUBREY MARCUS: But kids get it and it's like something that I think we should encourage all the way through like if I was dictator of all education 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Mandatory 

AUBREY MARCUS: Mandatory ecstatic dance. This is at least every week, you know PE. is not PE. PE is an ecstatic dance. And also there's the teachers or then the facilitators that if any kids are trying to make fun of other kids or stuff like that, they're like gently being like no, this is not how you do it. Like, cultivate that thing. Like everybody gets in and just starts to explain, like, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: I love it.

AUBREY  It’s so huge. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: So we're working on this right now, Aubrey. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yes, good.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. But basically, well, two things. One, I mean, at Daybreaker, because it's a sober dance party, you know, families come all the time. So we have little kids all the way to great grandmas coming to Daybreaker, right? Cause it's just substance free. So that's been really cool to witness and begin realizing that, Oh, right. Sober dance parties means everybody can come. So that's been a really cool byproduct of being a sober experience. And so I'm really proud of that. The second thing that we're working on right now, you'll love this, is with Dr. Dackard Keltner, who's the founder of the Greater Good Science Center out of UC Berkeley. He's a top professor at UC Berkeley on the science of happiness. And we've been working on this proposal for the last year and a half, and we just finally signed the dot, and we're launching a research project this spring that, a huge study, the first ever study on the science of collective dance. It's the first time in history that we can actually do facial recognition software to understand pre and post how your face feels and looks to understand your happiness right before and after a dance event. It's the first time we can cheek swab and understand sort of the oxytocin and the different neurochemistry. That's released from your saliva, reporting pre and post survey responses. So it's the first time with the technology available to us that we can actually measure, quite specifically, the science of collective dance. Like, what happens when the superorganism moves together in unison to music, to the beat of dance and song? And what happens to your cortisol levels? What happens to the overall sort of emotional landscape, right, of the human experience? And when we actually have that study published, our dream is for doctors to begin prescribing collective dance because right now dance is a redheaded stepchild to the science space because it's not measured and what's not 

AUBREY MARCUS: There are a couple studies showing dance improving depression.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Dance improving, but that's more in like salsa dancing or different things like that. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Is there anything just in social dance? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Sure. Sure. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: So it's very, very cool. And I really believe that the study is going to be groundbreaking because right now doctors prescribe lonely meditations. Of course I love meditation, but I'm still alone.

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, the best doctors prescribe lonely meditation. Most of them are just prescribing pro drug

RADHA AGRAWAL: Of course, obviously. So we're happy that we made some improvements, but it's still all the prescriptions around loneliness and depression, anxiety and isolation are still more things that you're doing alone. And so now imagine all of a sudden we have a huge study in our hand and we can say, Hey, Doctors began prescribing collective experiences in your city. Go to the YMCA, go to this, go to that. There's so many ways in which we can actually empower your patients to recognize the health benefits of collective movement experiences. It's really cool. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, absolutely. And it's undeniable. I think one of the things, because I've done some research on ecstatic dance as well, and what you're entering into is a state called superfluidity and superfluidity is flow state. And there's so much research actually, that's been done on flow state experience. You know, all of your neurotransmitters, all of your brainwave states, everything changes your hormone, like at all the cortisol, everything changes in this state of superfluidity where you collapse this, the music to your movement into your body and you just become one with the dance floor, the crowd, the music, everything. It's the same thing that a surfer becomes one with the wave and the board and the spray and the wind, or the basketball player becomes one with the court and the ball and the players moving like this super fluidity, it's one of the most healing,

RADHA AGRAWAL: Truely

AUBREY MARCUS: Healing experiences we can ever have. And it's just so right there available. And what we have to do is one, get beyond two of what I think are like the deadly sins. All right. So I've been really kind of meditating on the deadly sins. And of course this has a big Catholic connotation. So a lot of people probably, how dare Aubrey? What is Aubrey doing? But I think there are sins, like sins in a way that not that God is going to come to punish you because he's a wrathful deity. Wrath is of course, one of the sins and the God that loves us so much, but the sin is one, it's not having the courage. So like cowardice, not having the courage to express yourself.

RADHA AGRAWAL: You know where courage comes from? The word? Courage. It's French. Coeur in French means heart. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: So courage is actually derived from having passion, the heart open to sort of trying new things in service of the heart. So it's wild. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Ofcourse, lying part

RADHA AGRAWAL: Courage. Yeah. Courage is heart based. Yeah. It's wild. What are the sins?

AUBREY MARCUS: Well, there's several, but this one, first one, cowardice, I think is a sin. It's just not having the courage to go through. So a virtue would be courage in that regard. And the other, I think they got right is sloth. Like actually it takes energy and effort to get to the magic of the experience, whether it's an ecstatic dance or breath work, like you can't be lazy.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You have to just allow, you have to put in the energy to send it, even sexuality, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Totally

AUBREY MARCUS: The sin of sloth is, Oh, we're a little tired, but actually once you get started, you're making love. And once you get started ecstatic dancing in that first drop of sweat, that's the go. You're dancing. And once you breathe through that one cycle, you know, where you're really hyper oxygenated and everything is starting to open up, you're there and you're going to keep going. But it takes both. You have to fight against these deadly sins and seductions. One is cowardice. One is sloth, laziness.

RADHA AGRAWAL: I love that frame actually. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And then actually, if you push through that and become the hero to embody that, both that energy and also that courage, then so much more opens up for you. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Oh, yeah. I mean, dance is one of those things that either you sort of say, Oh, I love to dance or like, Ooh, I'm not a dancer. Oh, I'm shy. And I always say, you know what? Do you walk? Walking is dancing. Right? Every single movement that we make as a human being is a dance. And so, yeah, I love the idea of, be courageous and be energetic and just get out there and just send it. Yeah. And I also feel like, you know, if we can frame dance through the lens of a movement meditation, right. So it's like seeing the meditation of it. And how it supports you in a collective sort of that superorganism, you call that super flow, 

AUBREY MARCUS: Super fluidity. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Fluidity. Yes. So for the work that Dr. Dacher Keltner calls it superorganism, which is essentially this idea that when we are moving together in this collective clump, right, to the music, at a concert or a dance party. Your immune system, believe it or not, gets much stronger. Your creativity is actually much more inspired and your ability to move through traumatic moments or trauma through the healing mirror neurons of seeing other people enjoying themselves. You actually have a much faster rate of recovery around a traumatic experience. And so there's so much science that supports being in this clump together, moving in collective unison. I'll share one more quick anecdote from 1918 in Japan. The entire country, this is back when they only had radios. Imagine every single morning at 6 am and at 8 am on the radio there was Japanese calisthenics called the Raggio Taiso and six and a half minutes of radio calisthenics that the entire country did. So imagine you have millions of people moving in the exact same way in the entire country twice a day, how that will shift the flow state, this fluidity of that community. It means no wonder the Japanese are the best technologists, the best builders and best artists. It's like there's so much magic to Japanese culture. And I really, when I look back and realize that they were moving together in unison as a multi-million person country for the last hundred years, it's pretty remarkable.

AUBREY MARCUS: One of the things that comes to mind when you say that is, so in Muslim cultures, they have the call to prayer. And it blares, because we were in Egypt, right? And it just blares out over the speakers. And it's a reminder that this is the time to pray. And for them, their prayer is their own way. And blessings to their style of prayer and the way that they worship. To me, one of the ways I want to worship the God that I know in my heart is I want to dance, So like imagining a world where there was a collective call to prayer, but it was instead, it was a call to dance. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: I love it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You know,

RADHA AGRAWAL: I love it. We've been, yes!

AUBREY MARCUS: That was just, flaring out. Like you go into any city center that used to have bells that would go up and instead of bells, it was like, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: A moment with the whole world

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. This is like, work gets out, whatever, call it 5pm or 6pm or whenever, or maybe in the morning or whenever this is your collective dance break. It's not mandatory. No one's going to arrest you if you don't do it, but it's an invitation for everybody to tune in, broadcast universally and like, this is your fucking dance break. And then so many, I could just imagine like the best DJs in the world. If this was a nationwide thing or if fucking even a worldwide thing became like its own religion, you'd get the best of the best like today, 20 minutes set from fucking 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Exactly

AUBREY MARCUS: Tiesto, whoever, doesn't matter, Daft Punk.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. I've a dream, Aubrey. And for everyone listening, if you can make this happen, my dream is for us to do a global dance party from outer space where there's one song, basically that we choose from every single country. So let's say there's a hundred and Fifty or hundred and seventy countries. So there's one song from every country and the entire globe dances together for peace and dances together for unity and dances together for this pale blue dot and I really feel like we're right there. There's an opportunity to do this type of celebratory kind of ritualized experience where instead of just being one artist for the whole world, maybe it's one song from every single culture that we figure out which one will feel the best represents the country and and then do this like outer space global dance party where the entire world. You think we make that happen? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Imean, that vision is an important vision to hold because the world where that happens is the world we want to live in. Right? So, like, we're drawing a timeline from our world to that world, and I've talked to Emily Fletcher about this too, of having a universally erotic experience in this way. And it's like, yes. And the world that would accept that and like, understand that this is a moment to tap into your own internal eros and your own pleasure reserves in the way, which is another way to pray, you know, and then sorry, religious people, but it is, this is another way to pray. Like, these things are part of the more beautiful world, and this is the world we're trying to build, and there's obviously a lot of forces that are seemingly pushing the world in a different direction, and it's a contest, which world is going to be the outcome, or is the world going to split? And there's going to be some people that do, but I love this idea of the whole world being able to come together and dance and you could even tie it in with the Olympics are going to be in France. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: I was going to say World Cup Olympics. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, it would be like, all right, this is the world ecstatic dance to kick off the Olympics.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You know

RADHA AGRAWAL: Challenge accepted. Let's go. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I have so many thoughts about the Olympics to like, I feel like instead of all of the 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Competition

AUBREY MARCUS: Like the war, the competition is great in the Olympics. Like we're competitors, we’re athletes, and that's the beautiful part of competition. But then it can get toxic with a comparative competition or the bellicose, you know, war competition, which is obviously the most traumatic experience and crazy that it's still going on in the consciousness that we're in. It's heartbreaking, but to be able to celebrate the competition, but also dance together with all the athletes and everybody, it's just a huge dance party. I mean, I do like the opening ceremony. It's very beautiful and whatever, but if it was also a

RADHA AGRAWAL: Global world, the entire world dances together.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, you set off that thing with the dance party and then you close with the dance party where you forget which nation you're from, you forget which colors you're wearing. It's just, everybody's just dancing together. And then you divide off into your separate nations, your separate tribes, your separate athletes. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: We shake hands and all right,

AUBREY MARCUS: And now we'll see on the field. I'm coming for you. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Exactly. I love that. It feels obviously like that's what sportsmanship should look like. It's why you shake hands before and after a game, you know? No, I love that Emily is thinking about this. I love that we're all kind of in this world visioning of just like what is the world we want to live in, and where does the technology of dance belong in the future? It's the ancient future, right? And so it really is kind of bringing this ancient kind of original technology for human celebration and again, moving through trauma, moving through sort of moments of ecstasy from the past into the future. And I think it's one of the few things, the few  movement practices that we are still, we're just wiggling our bodies. That's really what it is. Like I call it, I want to write a book called wiggle. That's just about just wiggling your body and the benefits of it and all the ways in which we can wiggle our bodies to move to creativity, move to ecstasy, move to joy, move to forgiveness, move to, there's like a million ways to wiggle.

AUBREY MARCUS: No doubt. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right? 

AUBREY MARCUS: No doubt. You've been planning other trips to, you know, what you're doing with a wow, it's now kind of thing. You have some, not only this Egypt adventure, but you've done some other adventures. You went to Antarctica, right? 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And you've got some other different country, Africa?

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah, we did the Serengeti. We missed you.

AUBREY MARCUS: With the Serengeti. I know. 

RADHA AGRAWAL:And we're doing the Arctic this summer. You're obviously invited with Vy. June solstice, summer solstice. 

AUBREY MARCUS: So cool

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah.

AUBREY MARCUS: And what do you distill from also the medicine of traveling to these places, because this is also something that I think is underrated as, and of course, deepest compassion to those people who don't have the funds to travel. But there's so many amazing places, even in the United States, to travel. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. I feel like 

AUBREY MARCUS: This idea of traveling priority. Yeah. Again, prioritizing that, go somewhere wild and cool with your friends or go totally alone and make new friends. That's also another fucking big deal. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Totally. During COVID I had this sort of, I did this Joe Dispenza week long meditation down in Baja, Mexico. And it was the first time I gave myself seven days to meditate for 12 hours a day, you know

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, he goes hard,

RADHA AGRAWAL: He goes deep. Yeah, he goes hard, goes deep and morning and night and it was just like nonstop. And I just remember kind of being wowed by this time that I gave to myself to just meditate for seven days and just give myself the opportunity to go really deep within the spiritual realm, within my own mind, my own body, my own, the spiritual realm through my breath work and et cetera. And in that experience of just going deep, I was able to tap in, I think in this world that we're so overly busy and overly technologized, right? Everything, there's so much noise, but when you actually shut the noise down and you just allow your mind to just listen, all of a sudden, Gaia came to me and she just said, wow, it's now. And I remember being like, whoa, this is like a beautiful phrase. Wow. The magic, the celebration of the wow. And then the solemn and the depth and the gravitas of the now. And I was like, wow, there's so much juice in this rhyme scheme. It's so fun. It's so playful, so childlike, but it's also so deep, all the juice. Right. And so I wrote it down in my notebook a million times that week. And then I was like, I'm a community builder. I'm an experienced designer, I’m a new mother. What can I do with this phrase? Is it a conference on Mother Earth? Is it a festival? You know, what is it? And then all of a sudden I realized, wait, maybe this can be a way to design experiences in the most tender parts of the planet, where we bring the most influential voices, the most interesting sort of tapestry of humans to these tender parts of the planet and give them a once in a lifetime experience and change their relationship to that part of the world forever and see what comes of it. And Antarctica was our first stop and we took 150 people to Antarctica right during just at the end of COVID. We charted on a plane from Orlando and flew to Ushuaia. It was a whole thing to get to the Antarctic waters. But we figured it out. We got there. And what ensued was just like we had with DJs and we had founders and we had high net worth investors and we had philanthropists and we had environmental scientists all in the boat together. When you spend 11 days with this type of high octane, What's going to come out of it is insane magic. So we raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for climate and non profits. Then we raised millions of dollars for climate startups. One of which is my twin sister Mickey's startup, Hero Technologies, which is all about plastic eating mushrooms.

AUBREY MARCUS: And that's, by the way, we just said plastic eating mushrooms like people are going to be like,

RADHA AGRAWAL: It's a whole thing. 

AUBREY MARCUS: We're not going to go into it. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: We’re not going but it’s the whole thing.

AUBREY MARCUS: It's not our thing, but basically there's certain types of fungi that can actually start to break down all of these plastics and microplastics, which are littering the whole fucking world. So this is a big deal. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes.

AUBREY MARCUS: It's a new technology that's coming out, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Stay tuned

AUBREY MARCUS: So people worried about plastic, stay tuned. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah, and then we had 17 companies pledged to go carbon negative, which is really cool. So then we're like, all right, this is kind of working. Let's do Egypt. So then we did Egypt, which you and Vy came to, and it was amazing, and you brought your posse, and it was so much fun, and it was beautiful, and it was deep, and I had some of the most profound revelations in Egypt. I'm still processing. Anyway, that's a whole story for another day.

AUBREY MARCUS: And, you know, I got just on a personal level, I got to see you as a leader in that. And I got to see how much you cared and how much you loved everybody and really listened. And I just want to send my admiration to you, and deep respect to you because there was a moment, you know, obviously it was a pack trip, a lot of big ceremonies and activations. And at the end, people were a little frazzled and there was some tension and you just brought everybody together and you listened and you just kind of held it all together. And it was just like a beautiful moment to see how you would respond underneath that kind of pressure and the strain of everything. And just to see you shine through with your heart forward, courage, like it was just your heart. That was up there. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Thank you, Aubrey. It was hard to lead. It's intimidating to lead 150 founder type A high octane humans. But I just, again, leaned into the feminine and I just was like, all right, I'm just gonna stay open to the feedback and all that.

AUBREY MARCUS: And I loved your sister just coming in like, you don't even know. This is my sister. Blood of my blood. I love how you guys love and support each other too. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: She's the best. And, yeah, I really do feel lucky to have a twin who just you kind of like from the womb to the tomb is our adage, you know, it's like, we were born in the womb together and we're gonna go to the tomb together. And it's like a beautiful little quote that we have together. Yeah, 

AUBREY MARCUS: That’s so sweet

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's like all of this, you know, and then we went to Serengeti to really connect to the great migration and now we're going to the Arctic Circle to really commune with the indigenous. Really actually thinking about the Eagle and Condor Prophecy, which is a really special prophecy where the indigenous shamans of the South meet the indigenous shamans of the North for the first time, opening up this whole new moment for humanity, and I didn't even know about this until Josh Barber told me about this prophecy of the eagle and condor, but I just said, I want to bring the indigenous people of the Amazon to meet with the indigenous people of the Arctic and have them meet and connect. And I'm going to do all kinds of spiritual activations on the summer solstice. Matias is coming. And we really want to just bring forward the next kind of how we are going to save our planet, and having the Amazonian tribal leaders meet and connect and commune with basically the Amazon being the lungs of the planet meeting the blood of the planet, the water, the ice, and so forth. You know, the blood of the planet, to have those two indigenous tribes meeting for the very first time, not a neutral ground in Washington DC or some Hilton hotel for some environmental conference, but actually no one's ever taken the money and time and energy to just actually, I was just like, I'm going to fly him to pay for all of it for you to come to the Arctic. And these indigenous tribes. Tribal guys, you know, we're just like wait what this is amazing. And so we're taking them for the very first time to meet the ice and these are guys that walk barefoot in the Amazon. These are guys that don't wear shoes and to bring them to the Amazon rainforest to sit and actually and we're gonna have this incredible salon learning with translators. What are the ways in which they all think about the planet? How are they healing the planet? What is the medicine that we can one plus one is 11 together 

AUBREY MARCUS: At the intersection. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. And so I'm really excited to continue shifting and evolving the wild experiences. It was an expedition and now we're calling it a pilgrimage and I'm really excited to kind of evolve and continue evolving the ethos of our experiences beyond just fundraising for all these incredible nonprofits. To also make it a pilgrimage, make it a spiritual experience, and make it sort of an opening for this new moment in history. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: So I'm really excited about that. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Alright, so we got several types of medicine to recap. One, the medicine of ecstatic dance. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Super important. Two, the medicine of travel. Three. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes.

AUBREY MARCUS: The medicine of what happens when different medicine lineages intersect

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yup

AUBREY MARCUS: You know, that's three, it's another one. And then four, which I want to go deeper on now is the medicine of community as the antidote to loneliness, which is the paramount epidemic of our time, you know, it is the deadliest epidemic that we've ever faced. Vivek Murthy, it's worse. Being lonely is worse for your health as far as longevity is than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. It’s crazy

RADHA AGRAWAL: I was just connected to Vivek yesterday, actually, in an email. I'm excited to meet him and connect with him, but what we're doing is, I mean, what he's doing is, on the epitome of loneliness, is obviously from that level of Surgeon General, is so big, I'm so proud that he's recognizing as a doctor, and by the way, doctors don't talk or learn about the sort of emotional, loneliness, isolation in medical school. It's not even, he learned that 

AUBREY MARCUS: Despite the fact that it's the number one predictor of all cause of mortality

RADHA AGRAWAL: Exactly, every disease. Yes. And lifespan it, you know, I mean, I'll share that having poor social connections is as harmful to your physical health as being an alcoholic and twice as harmful as smoking cigarettes, right? And when you are lonely, your productivity mutes, your cellular sort of regeneration goes down, like all of it just diminishes and your lifespan declines by an order of magnitude. So there's all kinds of physical reasons why loneliness is actually hurting our country. It's the first time actually in history that Americans, their lifespan is lower than it was in the last decade.

AUBREY MARCUS: And it's, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: And it really stems from loneliness. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And it's surprising because we're more connected than ever and it's not, and this is where the deeper understanding of loneliness has to come in. It's not actually how many people you're around, you know, like there's no doubt that someone like Robin Williams was probably surrounded by people all the time, but to make the decision to kill himself. And again, I'm not in Robin Williams' mind and I'm not going to diagnose why, but I do know that in the feeling that you're seeing truly and loved and held by the people around you like that decision just evaporates out of the way. Like you can be lonely in a crowd, you know, you can be putting on the smile of a clown or you're the avatar of your personality, but deep in the interior of your own mind and heart, you feel alone. So loneliness is not about how many people you're around. It's about how deeply you're connected.

RADHA AGRAWAL: That's right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Those fuck yeah friends. Like who do you know is really going to be there for you? You know

RADHA AGRAWAL: One in four Americans have zero friends to confide in. And this number has tripled in the last 30 years. One in four Americans have zero friends to confide in. It's a wild statistic, right? And you know, it's when I think of why. I think basically all of the institutions are actually pushing us towards isolation. Think about it. Governments are pushing us to political polarization, right? Healthcare systems are treating us as disposable, right? Health education systems are doing testing and competition, the financial systems are pushing us into a more materialistic culture so that we can buy more stuff and have that hockey stick growth. Right. News media wants us to be polarizing to sell more papers. I mean, literally every input that we're experiencing as a human species from the foundational structures are pushing us towards toxic individualism. And that's really one of the things that we have to look at is how can we actually restructure all of these systems to be in service of belonging and connection and meaningful relationships?

AUBREY MARCUS: When are the times that you still feel lonely? 

RADHA AGRAWAL: All the time, Aubrey. You know, I think it's hard in marriage, I think in marriages when you have a child, for example, my husband and I, for example, had a child five years ago, and I think for the first three years, everyone probably knows this as well. It's a game of logistics. You move from like, wanting to go for a sexy date night to like, who's getting the diapers? Like who's getting lunch? Who's packing? It all becomes a game of logistics and you're no longer in that juicy intimacy state. So there've been many moments where I'd wake up or go to sleep just feeling deeply lonely in my marriage because I just felt we had forgotten the intimacy of our relationship. We were just stuck in the logistics of parenting. So that, I would say, was the deepest, most painful experience I've had of loneliness in recent years. Because this is the person that you're the closest to. It's a person that you love the most. And yet we sort of forget, and we're so exhausted by the end of the day. So there's all, there's all this stuff. So I think it's a very natural experience for anyone who's a first time parent to feel that level of loneliness. I actually also felt that when I was, my body was changing, I was in pregnancy mode. My body was hormonal. I was growing a baby inside my body. Eli wasn't changing. So at that moment, I was like, wow, I'm so hormonal. I just need more. And he couldn't read my mind. And so I started, instead of actually complaining or being upset, I started a community on WhatsApp called Modern Mamas, and that's what I do. I'm a community builder. So it's like, all right, let me build a community of moms who are also running businesses so I can really understand how they're managing both being a mom and running a business. And so I called it Modern Mamas, and I invited, you know, 12 women that I knew I wasn't close to, but I knew that were moms and doing that type of work and at a high level and high performing women and all of a sudden now there's like a hundred some women on this WhatsApp thread and it's the most active WhatsApp thread I have. Every time a new mom comes on, they're like, I have mastitis. My daughter's this, my son is this, like they're scratching and pulling in school and literally there's 100 women that respond immediately and it's the most unbelievable group of mothers who are so there for strangers they've never met. It's basically a hundred women that sort of have met maybe like in passing or many of them have, they're all over the country now, but it's this community of moms that have come together. So I'm sharing that because these moments of loneliness that we have can be fleeting if we don't wallow in that loneliness, right? It's like, how can we be solutions based humans and citizens? And I think that's the biggest issue with loneliness. There's two pieces of loneliness. I think one is our embarrassment and humiliation to admit that we're lonely. There's a lot of shame around loneliness. I'm good, I'm a big man. I'm Aubrey Marcus. Oh, I don't need nobody, that's how we were taught as a society, like you're Big man. You don't need, you know, you're good. And I think that's why when you share, I'm lonely or I'm struggling, you're giving so many hundreds of thousands of millions of people who are listening to this, the ability to be vulnerable too. And so, I think step one is admitting your loneliness. That's the first to normalize that every single one of us feel lonely including a community builder like me who has a million friends and has spent a lot of years of my life building my friendships, so that's why I have a lot of friends and still now I'm you know friend moving away for the here and there they're still like, ah, like where my friends at, you know so there's definitely lots of moments like that too, right? And so step one is admitting your loneliness, that I am lonely, I'm not ashamed to say it, to normalize it. Step two is recognizing that meaningful relationships, building that, taking the time, the way you go to the gym, you have a beautiful body, you go to the gym, you pump iron, you eat healthy food, I know you use your arms, You really take care of yourself. I just went to your pantry just now before sitting in here, you know, and if we can actually place meaningful relationships in the same, that's my goal, in the same category as fitness and nutrition, meaningful relationships, fitness and nutrition. That is a holistic life. That is a holistic health practice. And so that's the second thing is to recognize that. So the first is admitting that you're lonely. The second is making sure that you see meaningful relationships and cultivating meaningful relationships in the same way you go to the gym and eat healthy. The third is to not wait for an invitation. I think so many of us are like, why am I going to be invited to the wedding or this or this party or this Saturday night or whatever? What I love about you and Vy is you're always creating the festival, the event, the experience, the sound bath, all the things, the podcast, the onnit, all the things that you, it's always you guys. Create. That's why you have friends for life because you're making the invitation. You are taking the effort to create experiences that invite amazing people that are attracted to the things that you're putting out and so do not wait for an invitation. Put out a thing in the world, give it a name dim sum, I'm teaching a community building master class right now. It's a six week course, and one of these girls, she calls it Dim Sum X, and I'm like, what is it? It was like, she's like launching a community called Dim Sum X, and she came to my class to figure out how to build this community. And I was like, what is Dim Sum X? And she said, Oh, it's like TEDx, but with Dim Sum. And I was like, I love it. I want to come. And so it's just like, anybody can create anything. I love dim sum. I actually really do. And I love learning. So I want to go to an event like that. That's cool. And so you can literally create anything out of anything. It doesn't matter what, but don't wait for an invitation, make an event. That's fun. That's creative. That's interesting. Give it a fun name. Go and chat GPT and Dolly. Make your little poster in 30 seconds. Dim sum X learning. I can make a beautiful dim sum poster and boom, you're off to the races. It's done. And so I just think that we're living, you talked about lethargy or one of the sins, a sloth.

AUBREY MARCUS: Sloth. 

RADHA AGRAWAL:You're just waiting to be invited. You don't want to go on the dance floor. You don't want to go into the bedroom, whatever. Same thing with community building. It has to be a courageous, energetic experience. It's exactly the same. And it starts with yourself. So I put together this whole new rubric I call the compass of belonging.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I'd love for you to share that. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. This is new. This is hot off the presses. You know, I spent the last six years researching and understanding. Our sense of belonging is through the lens of a community architect, right? Like I'm a community. So I'm always thinking through the lens of how can I build community? How can I scale a community in the right intentional way? But then doing all of this sort of work and meeting with the Maasai tribes, the indigenous tribes in Achuar and Sapa tribes, the Amazon rainforest, and just all these different places. I realized, wait a minute, belonging starts with yourself. Of course, and so, but not just kind of Radha, I belong to myself, but it's like, actually, how can we reconnect to these four directions? So I call it the compass of belonging, so there's four directions, the north, the south, the east, and the west. The north and the compass of belonging is through spiritual connection. It's how to reconnect to the spiritual realm. We know 10 percent decline in religiosity year over year. You know, churches are losing their members, 10 percent year over year over year. But how can we create a non religious but spiritual experience where people can go to these places to trust-fall into these beautiful realms where your brain and your body get to just trust-fall into this beautiful, juicier realm of spirit, you know? And actually there's all this study that shows that when you, right after an ecstatic experience, your parietal lobe and your brain is activated. This parietal lobe is all about the self and it disappears and it sort of allows you to sort of begin seeing yourself not as a self anymore, but as a much larger kind of universal entity. And so there's, it's this beautiful experience when you hit the spiritual realm of what it does to you, actually your brain and your chemistry of just allowing your body, your cortisol levels to reduce because, Hey, the spirits got me. I'm good.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: So that's the north. And the south is our connection to the earth and not just like our connection to the earth through the lens of what's our carbon footprint, the masculine numbers game of just how are we reducing our footprint? What are the recycling numbers? What all the numbers and arithmetic added to the conversation of regeneration and planetary conservation. But it's an energetic reconnection. How do we belong to the energy of Gaia? How do we reconnect to the sort of the energy body of her mother earth, you know? And so we can do that through forest bathing, Shinrin yoku. We can do that through connections with surfing. You talk about all the different sports that are available to us. But yeah, how do we reconnect in an energetic way to the planet is so important. And then behind us is our lineage, it's the West direction where we come from, where the Sun is setting. Didn't you know that behind you there's 2064 people in just 10 generations that it took to get to you. So if it's you, your parents, two, your grandparents, four, your grandmothers, eight, sixteen, thirty two, sixty four, you know, et cetera, et cetera, in just ten generations, it's 2064 people that it took to get to Aubrey Marcus. Is that wild? Think about that. And then imagine in twenty generations, it's thousands and thousands and thousands. So all of a sudden you realize the miracle of you and you're like, I'm not alone. I'm never, I'm not lonely. I got my peeps. I got my ancestors. I got spirit. I got a planet. I'm Gucci, you know? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah

RADHA AGRAWAL: And then in front of you, the East, right, is your service. And another wild stat, did you know that only 10 percent of Americans volunteer every year, one hour of their time to volunteerism? 90 percent of Americans do not volunteer one single hour of their time. I mean, it's a sad statistic. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Indeed. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: We're living in this toxic individualistic culture that we're just looking out for ourselves. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, well, if you don't love

RADHA AGRAWAL: And then we feel lonely because of it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, if you don't love people enough, and you don't see them in the fully realness that you see yourself, then why would you volunteer?

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right.

AUBREY MARCUS: Because you don't really care. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Exactly

AUBREY MARCUS: They're just another separate self that they're going to take care of themselves just as you're taking care of yourself and everybody's all on their own. And so, yeah, and finding your own unique way to do it, cause we all have our own unique medicine. So yeah, it's sure you can go to a soup kitchen or do something like that, but that is ultimately something. It's a function that a lot of people could do. And maybe that's not your unique medicine, but maybe it is. Maybe as you serve the soup, just the way you smile, it could be the unique transmission or it could be something radically different.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Mentorship. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Or even how the attention that you put into the art that you create. I mean, art is a form of 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Ofcourse

AUBREY MARCUS: Form of service. And this is another thing, like I really appreciate the cities that paid attention to the art installations and the ways that things are beautiful and it means so much, you know, you go buy something beautiful and you're like, Whoa, that's fucking cool. And it makes a difference. Somebody like Daniel Popper, who makes this unbelievable statues. We have one on our farm. That's just like, it's wild. Megalithic statues there in Tulum. It's the woman in Tulum pulling her heart open, right? Like him working on that, knowing that that's going to be an installation somewhere. That's an act of service. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Exactly

AUBREY MARCUS: That's like another way to do it. So we don't have to say things like, Oh, community service. Oh, well, first of all, there's incredible bliss, the bliss of really being of service, but being in your unique service with your unique gifts, your unique voice, your unique medicine that you're able to share, that's where you really start to get this infinite loop of giving and receiving what the Quechua people would call Aini, the reciprocity starts to flow in just unbelievable ways. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: You got it. I mean, it could be as simple as like my family for the last seven years, and this is one of the things that we do, but like every year for the last seven years, we go Christmas caroling at my parents' older kind of golf course community in Florida. It's like kind of a retirement community and we just go door to door and we knock on the door and we do this for two hours and it's like my Indian dad and my Japanese mom and my Jewish family members and my sisters and I was singing Christmas carols and we knock on the door and we wish you a Merry Christmas and we're singing all these songs and it's joyful way to serve and volunteer just kind of joy and in the time of the month when so many of these retirement women have lost their husbands or they're alone on the holidays. And so it could be as simple as that, you know, doesn't have to be something that feels exhausting to you. Although there's just joy and all of it, garbage pickups, the soup kitchens, all of that too. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And just also being aware when somebody crosses your path. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes

AUBREY MARCUS: That you can just take a little bit more time and be of service to them in a way. I'm always listening. That was really my mom's philosophy, you're not gonna be able to help every animal and you're not gonna be able to help every person. But there's going to be some that cross your path and if they cross your path then it's your invitation to help them out whether it was a story of a wounded hawk that we had to go help and rehabilitate or wounded deer or a person who's just hurting in some way or a person who maybe is not even hurting, but just a little bit of your time is like just taking that attention. I was in the airport recently and this woman came up to me and she'd obviously listened to some podcasts and she was really excited to, and I wasn't hurrying to my flight, but it was tight. Normally I would have just gone and made sure I got all my waters and all the things sorted, but just kind of stayed and just talked to her for a little bit. And finding those, because I don't know why that moment came about, but maybe that moment had an impact and it felt like there was something cool that I was able to transmit 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Beautiful. I love it.

AUBREY MARCUS: In four minutes I spent in the airport instead of just saying, okay, yeah, thanks. You know, back on my way.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Right. No, that's exactly it. Like there's a Buddhist in mind, a Buddhist. There's something called Ichinen Sansen, it's Japanese, which literally translates to in every moment you have 3000 options to choose from, which option will you choose? Will you choose to be unkind, rude, unforgiving, which used to be loving, generous, like there's 3,000 options for every moment. And there's a beautiful kind of Buddhist saying and prayer around just sort of how you want to live your life. And I love that it's like in that moment, you could have walked by or you could have just been like, no, not now, leave me alone, or you could sit and talk to her. So you chose out of the 3, 000 options to take the time to speak to her and connect with her. And it's beautiful. Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And so expanding this vision of what your philanthropy is, right? Like, and it's also people, Oh, I give this money to charity. Well, okay. That's great. It's important. You know, it's important to do all of those acts, but what's your, well, how are you getting, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes, what are your unique gifts?

AUBREY MARCUS: Yes

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. What is your value? You know, it's so fun to actually do that. It's so fun to be like, oh, I get to share this or I get to, you know, one of my girlfriends, she's really great at bringing, like making lighting everywhere really nice, you know? So like, she'll bring a bag of tea candles and electric candles everywhere she goes and little lights. So if she goes somewhere and it's like overhead lighting, it's not a vibe. She'll turn everything off and just put tea candles everywhere and she doesn't have to do that. But she just does that from the bottom of her heart, just to be like someone that contributes to the kind of the juice and the energy of the space and I love that, right? I talk about that all the time. It's in my book, and it's just like that one of my friends, he's an amazing masseuse massage therapist. So at any one of our parties just literally walks around and just giving everyone a five minute massage and just a shoulder rub and you're an amazing masseuse as well I received an eight minute 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, a little mini

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah, a little mini, 

AUBREY MARCUS: Little Masseuse bush

RADHA AGRAWAL: A little masseuse, exactly. But what are your gifts and how can you contribute them to a space and instead of waiting for the host to impress you and looking for shit to be upset about? To walk into any space and ask yourself, how can I add value if this is not hitting my mark? Well, what can I do? Can I change the music? Can I change the lighting? Can I massage people? Can I offer a better conversation? There's so many ways in which you can make an event or an experience so much more inspiring just through the service of, just through wanting to serve the experience, right? Like if you show up somewhere, it's like, thank God Aubrey's here because I know whenever Aubrey's here, it's going to be epic or there's going to be a value addition here.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Like adding your ingredient to the stew, it's only going to make things better. And then there's the other way. If you're in your own bitterness and your own self loathing and your own pain, you're going to actually poison the soup to a certain extent in the collective, you'll be draining the energy and it could be something as simple as that person at a dinner who's just on their phone and not paying attention is just kind of like a vacuum that's slowly sucking the energy from the Eros of that particular moment. So it could be subtle or it could be actually pushing out negative energy. So there's the antithesis of that service and that is support to the collective as well that we have to be mindful.

RADHA AGRAWAL: That's right. And people often ask, why did I get invited back? You know, why don't people, why don't I have any friends? And it's because you complained or there's this consistent sort of judginess about the way you show up at an event. And. It's either you show up in service or you show up in criticism. Like what's it going to be? And I think, you know, those who are in service will never feel lonely, right? There's actually a lot of science around this too, of just those in service are happier and more grateful. Your energy is actually more expansive, you attract more positive energy around you when you're in service and the opposite is true for those who are again looking to criticize and experience or just wait for the host to impress you, you know, right? You know those people, 

AUBREY MARCUS: Of course, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah, 

AUBREY MARCUS: There's and this is one of, again, I love that idea that there's 3000 choices that we can make. And I really believe that, I'm a firm proponent. I believe the truth of this in my body that we do have free will 

RADHA AGRAWAL: That’s right

AUBREY MARCUS: We can make a choice and there are contesting forces, but there's always a choice that, may not be an easy choice and you may need help, but there's always a choice 

RADHA AGRAWAL: That's right.

AUBREY MARCUS: You can make and there's the better of the options. Sometimes all the options aren't that great, but you could choose the best and choose to move through it in the best way possible. And just to remind people of that agency and the power that we have to be in some way, like people place shamans in this category of like, Oh, okay, that's a shaman. What does a shaman do? Shaman affects collective energy. They affect the collective and can anybody not collect, affect collective energy when you make a group laugh? Are you not being a shaman that's actually changing the collective energy of space? Of course you are like we're all Energetic shamans in this extent and that doesn't diminish like what an actual shamanic maestro can do, obviously their capabilities and their magic is astounding, but to understand that we're all able to affect the collective energy. And then once you understand that, with that you can have pride in that responsibility and be like, okay, I can make this environment either greater or I can diminish this environment and that goes for social environments too, what are you posting on people's posts? What kind of things are you offering?

RADHA AGRAWAL: I really don't understand troll culture. Do you?

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah I mean, I understand it. I think it goes back to another of the deadly sins, which is envy. It’s envy they are actually feeling pain at somebody else experiencing something that they feel is unavailable to them. So if you're expressing yourself freely, it's like, let's take dance for the example, right? So somebody is dancing just freely and wildly and moving their body and somebody else feels locked and constricted and like that's not available for them. And so, they have a choice. One, they could have the courage to actually move beyond their constriction and move forward and experience the same thing, or they could try to tear that thing down. And it's the envy, you know, that is the deadliest of the seven deadly, I would say the envy that causes people to want to reduce. Somebody to the position that they're in the old saying misery loves company. It's like if I'm miserable, I want everybody to be miserable with me and there's an interesting flip between envy and sadism. And I just wrote a newsletter about this actually as well. So envy is pain experienced from someone else's pleasure, right? Let's envy. Like I'm somehow feeling worse because this person is feeling better in some way. So pain from someone else's pleasure. The inverse of that is

RADHA AGRAWAL: Pleasure someone's pain. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Pleasure of someone’s pain. And so those two things are two sides of the same, very dark coin. And you can see how easily it flips. I actually watched The Princess Bride again last night. Unbelievable. And in that, Humperdinck talks to, so in the story, Humperdinck is this tyrannical prince who's just trying to create this false flag and kill Buttercup and give cause for him to go to war with Flanders. And he's this maniacal character, right. But also is kind of in his own charming maniacal way. And he recognizes that Buttercup who has true love with Wesley, who's the hero Buttercup and Wesley are the heroes of the story. He realizes, okay, you know, Buttercup has true love with Wesley. They share this thing, true love. And he feels like that is unavailable to him because he does not have love in his heart. And he does not have access to it. So as soon as he discovers that, he goes to where he's imprisoned Wesley in the pit of despair. And he says, I'm going to actually pull out my phone and read this quote because it exactly exemplifies what, okay. So he says, he goes to Wesley, who's tied up to this torture device after just talking to his bride to be who he's going to kill. And he says to Wesley, you truly love each other and so you might have been truly happy. Not one couple in a century has that chance no matter what the storybooks say. And so I think no man in a century will suffer as greatly as you will. So that was the point where this envy turns to sadism and then he turns the torture device to maximum and tortures Wesley with 50 years of pain in 10 seconds, right? Because he envied the fact that love was available for him and then he turned to sadism, the desire, you know, this feeling of getting pleasure from that person's pain. And I think all of these attacks on people's art and their expression of envy are turning into sadism. So they lash out to try and hurt them because it feels good to them. And it's all based on this envy, sadism inversion. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: And I think envy comes in many ways from loneliness, you know, I think so much of that envy is like, I don't belong in these spaces. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Somehow you're cut off from 

RADHA AGRAWAL: And cut off from, you know, oh, Aubrey gets to go to these types of amazing spaces and I don't, or I feel lonely because I am not invited into these spaces. And yet, you know, I wrote a book called Belong, and yet, you can invite everyone to everything, right? And so how can you create belonging and boundaries at the same time? So that's like the real dance, right? So when you, you know, I've been told by a few people, you know, former friends, who would say, you wrote a book called Belong, but I don't feel belonging with you, you know? And to that I'm like, I'm so sorry I haven't spent enough time with you. How can I make it up to you? You know? And so I found that so much of that pain comes from either feeling unworthy, ignored, uninvited, and ultimately lonely. Right? And so, I wonder, you know, envy and loneliness, are they connected?

AUBREY MARCUS: I think in many ways because, and in some ways, it is the thing that you feel like you can't have, you know, so anything that you feel like you can't have that somebody else can have. So if you're lonely, there's a lot of things that you feel like you can't have any connective experience that somebody else has, you want to kind of tear that down. So we, I experienced that and the community that I've built fit for service. Right? It's like, it's such a powerful engine that creates community and longing and is like the hell banishing, you know, antidote to loneliness. People really feel seen. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes, exactly.

AUBREY MARCUS: You share your triumphs and your traumas and your challenges and you get to know and see and walk with each other. And then people from the outside who really actually would want to have that same feeling, like we're showing in the videos of people loving each other and dancing ecstatically and moving through breath.

RADHA AGRAWAL: I think I become through it

AUBREY MRCUS: I know it's going to be incredible.

RADHA AGRAWAL: I got feeling there’s so much connection

AUBREY MARCUS: We gotta cross that, but so if you can't have it, well, they're going to tear it down. Oh, this is some cult. Oh, look at Aubrey Marcus's sex cult or whatever. I'm like, okay, I understand. Like, you really want somebody, you really want to feel loved and seen and you're going to put whatever kind of projection you can imagine to try and tear this down and make it seem like it's not real, but it's really just coming from envy that you want it, that you just really want to have that hug and you want to have someone look into your eyes and say like, I see you.

RADHA AGRAWAL: I know, and in your mind, you know, I have so many antidotes for loneliness. What is your antidote for envy? 

AUBREY MARCUS: The Buddhists say that envy is the hardest emotion to actually transmute. So, from an alchemical perspective, it's the hardest emotion to transmute. And so, I remembered when I heard that, I was like, that's interesting. And their strategy, so I'm gonna take this a couple different ways to answer this. One, in the process of alchemizing this emotion, they say you have to move from envy to anger and then from anger, you can then alchemize anger into other emotions and move to a positive state. But actually envy itself is stuck. So you have to go to another place

RADHA AGRAWAL: Now that’s interesting

AUBREY MARCUS: That's still not healthy, but is actually able to be worked with because envy is so poisonous. That if you're stuck in envy, you actually have to move it to something else. So you have to allow yourself to feel the rage that's underneath all of that rage. It's universal rage at the person, whatever it is, but you have to move it that way. Now, of course, I don't think that's the ultimate solution. That's more like the transmutable, natural, like a way that we can be alchemists and wizards in a way to kind of move it. But I think fundamentally the antidote is, you have to be able to recognize that that person that you're envious of is living a different life. So how do you do that? I think you have to go through some doorway where you have an experience of the field. A true self experience when the true self being the total number of true selves in the universe is one, right? Like there's the sum total of conscious minds in the universe is one like this idea of unicity. You have to merge with the unicity to then be able to recognize 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Your win is my win 

AUBREY MARCUS: Your win is my win. And so that's a deep spiritual process. It's the old ultimate antidote to envy, but at the moment you might have to just move it around to alchemize it. But fundamentally to get to that state where you can have, go from envy to compersion, where you're celebrating another person's win, that requires like being able to see somebody as another version of you

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yourself. Yes. I love that. The seventh chakra, right? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. That unity center. No, I love it. I think it's all so connected. Yeah, when I think of envy as it relates to our sense of loneliness, I do feel like it's societal. I do feel like societies can be envious of other societies that creates this institution of loneliness. So it's really interesting, you know, I haven't thought of the concept of envy through the lens of loneliness. So I'm going to spend a lot of time thinking about this and unpacking it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I think all of these things are kind of woven and we start to understand the connections. We start to get maps, like your beautiful map using the directions, north to the spirit, south to the earth, you know, west to our ancestors, east to our service, you know, 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: It's a beautiful map and like having some of these maps to kind of guide us through, you know, there's so many different it's almost like we need new planetary software because the software we're running, like our hardware is fine, but the software we're running on our hardware is, is malware, like we got a lot of bad code and we need to debug this fucking software. We're in the rainbow wheel of death right now, and it's just like things are not really working out. And this is communal, it's also parental. I had a an experience recently in a psychedelic journey where I connected with my father who passed last year and it's not the first time I've connected to him, but it was a really beautiful experience and it's a longer story, but there was some part of it where he was saying like, I'm sorry, son. And we're just sharing love. And at the end of it, he said, son, I've given you my best and you're better than I ever was. And it makes me so proud, better than I ever was. And I think that's also like a code for parents to be like, my son, my daughter, I'm going to give you my best, but you will be better than I ever was. You'll be better than I ever was because I'm going to give you my best and you're going to take that and you're going to make it even better. And like that transmission and to just know, like, don't worry, like I'm going to give you all my best and you're going to be better than I ever was and just to celebrate that.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Wow. Yeah. That really hits home for me, Aubrey. And over New Year's, I did my first AYA ever, just a few months ago. And I've been waiting for the right invitation for 20 years, actually. I've just been like, no, until I finally got the invitation to go and sit in the Amazon with the Achuar tribes with Lynn Twist, the founder of the Pachamama Alliance. And I went and sat, and it was like the most, and I'm still of course, it takes months and months to, I mean it continues to unfold all of the lessons and all the downloads. But for me, my daughter came to me so clearly, my five year old daughter, she just was literally like in my face, and she just said mommy. You and daddy together, you and daddy really finding that loving connection and kind of your dharmic path where daddy holds the keys to your consciousness upgrade. I can't do my work. I can't do what I came here to do on this planet because I came to do some big shit and I can't do it unless you and daddy really understand the consciousness upgrade that you offer each other.

AUBREY MARCUS: Wow. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. And so that was this big aha moment for me of just like, wow, the medicine is so deep. It's so wild. Yeah. And so I've been really kind of following her instructions ever since. For the last three months. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That’s beautiful. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Isn't that wild? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. That's beautiful. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And it was beautiful to see you and Eli here 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes.

AUBREY MARCUS: Today and to continue to see you guys and it's a beautiful honor and a pleasure to know you as a friend and 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Likewise 

AUBREY MARCUS: Know you as a sister and just celebrate the amazing work that you've been doing and that you'll continue to do.

RADHA AGRAWAL: Thank you. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, these people go to the Daybreaker event and experience this and we've given all kinds of different pathways to medicine and we need all the pathways. This world is getting crazier and crazier and we got to show up and we got to send it 

RADHA AGRAWAL: We just launched our new nonprofit Belong Center, which you also helped to sponsor. So thank you. And we're doing a whole series of circular yellow benches instead of benches that just face forward and you're not talking to each other, but we're putting circular benches all over. We had multiple calls with Central Park and parks and streets and city spaces all over Denver and Austin. And so our dream is to put these yellow circular Belong Benches all over the country. And this nonprofit is really kind of building a 2.0 community center to end loneliness. Like our mission is to end loneliness. And build a culture of belonging for all. And we have so many different projects that we're working on that I'm excited to continue sharing with you. Daybreaker is sort of, you love to dance, come to the dance party. And if you're feeling lonely and you feel like where my people at Belong center are, the whole point of it is to match, make you with the right values, aligned communities. So that's our dream as well. It's to really match, make every human so that they're never lonely. Starting with yourself. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I think there's so much that could be done with that too. And I think a lot of really cool restaurants have communal tables. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: Yes.

AUBREY MARCUS: And this idea of being able to eat together and being in some, I know that's not always going to be what you're going to want to do, but in the right environment, those are some of the coolest experiences where you just get to cross paths and meet somebody and give it a chance. You know, like one of my favorite expressions is, give God a chance to weave you in contact with the right people. And it just means keeping your eyes and your heart open, just looking around, seeing what's available there, and maybe you find yourself on a circular yellow bench, and maybe you just ask a question, you know? How are you doing? 

RADHA AGRAWAL: That's right, we're going to put a QR code on this yellow bench that you can scan, and it'll have literally a hundred different questions. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That’s so cool. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: So you can sort of pull it up. And like, if you want to fall in love, if you want to rupture and repair with someone, if you want to make a new friend, you meet a random person, you can just scan it and find the list of questions based on what the type of conversation is. And I'm really excited to launch this project as our first kind of public event project all over the nation. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Can you drop the URLs for people to find or Instagram handles? I

RADHA AGRAWAL: It’s daybreaker.com and belongcenter.org. And then our community building masterclass is at belonginstitute.com

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And if you're interested in building a community, yeah, Radha is a good choice to teach that master class because you're a master at doing it. And I love you, sis. 

RADHA AGRAWAL: I love you. Thank you for having me on. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, of course. And we love you guys and we'll see you next week.