The Surprising & Unbelievable Dark Side Of Open Relationships: Aubrey Marcus | E242

Marcus grew up with four parental figures: a pioneering trader father, a SWAT-officer stepfather, an elite-athlete mother, and a naturopath stepmother. He absorbed ambition, physicality, intellect, and holistic health—but also anxiety and explosive rage. The turning point came when he screamed at a receptionist at Onnit, saw her crying, and recognized he was reenacting his father’s rage. He vowed, “It stops with me,” and has since viewed himself as responsible for breaking that lineage for his future son, choosing which traits to transmit and which to end.

At 18, a psychedelic ceremony dissolved Marcus’s sense of body and convinced him he had a ‘soul’ and a mission. Yet he spent his 20s partying, chasing approval, and failing at businesses, illustrating that spiritual insight doesn’t automatically reorganize behavior or success. Through repeated plant-medicine journeys, breathwork, and psychonautic practices, he developed the capacity to see his patterns—rage, people-pleasing, performance-based self-worth—and then intentionally rewire them over time.

Onnit only became a “rocket ship” when Marcus combined three assets: a genuinely effective product (Alpha Brain, rooted in his stepmother’s nutraceutical expertise), a distribution megaphone (Joe Rogan’s then-undervalued podcast), and his marketing skill. He structured a coffee meeting with Rogan by tying it to an ad deal, chose that meeting over a high-status Kentucky Derby invite, and then went all-in. He leveraged net-30 terms to fund inventory he couldn’t afford, sold out Alpha Brain in 12 hours, and kept reinvesting. His advice: see the field clearly (competition, difficulty, real differentiator), and when you truly see a winnable shot, “push all your chips in.”

Onnit suffered a serious customer-data breach and later a ‘cashpocalypse’ where they had zero cash and a CFO who quit, saying they’d be bankrupt in 30 days. In the first case, Marcus chose radical honesty: he emailed customers admitting the failure, apologizing, and offering compensation. Rather than revolt, customers trusted the brand more. In the cash crisis, he and his COO leaned on honest, long-term relationships with suppliers to renegotiate terms (net-30 to net-90/120) and survive. In both scenarios, adherence to a core ethic—treat others as if they were you, “para el bien de todos”—was the navigation system.

Marcus entered polyamory for philosophical and desire-driven reasons: he believed erotic love shouldn’t be owned, wanted to experience multiple ‘faces of the goddess,’ and refused to cheat. Initially, he had another girlfriend while his primary partner, Whitney, did not. When she took a lover, he was overwhelmed with nausea, rage, and shame, realizing he’d lacked compassion for her earlier suffering. Over eight years, every boundary they set (“not falling in love,” hierarchy of partners) was eventually violated by reality. He never fully mastered the jealousy; he could love multiple people but couldn’t tolerate his partner doing the same. He concludes that while some may make polyamory work, it’s rare in our jealousy-saturated culture and demands a level of ego-transcendence most people—and he himself—don’t yet possess.