The Mark Divine Show

Today, Commander Divine speaks with Simon Drew, a multi-talented philosopher, poet, pianist, podcaster, and didgeridoo player. In his latest book, The Poet and the Sage, Simon digs deep into philosophy, mysticism, and metaphor. In this episode, Simon discusses his creative process, how philosophy and art are intertwined, and how to achieve enlightenment by playing the didgeridoo. Key Takeaways: Life is about asking better questions. Simon believes that life is a game with an objective, but it’s up to us to ask the right questions to know what that objective is and how to seek it out. It’s crucial to strengthen our questioning ability and face life with the degree of seriousness it deserves… and then being willing to hear the answers when we ask the questions. Not everybody is built as an artist. Simon says that inspiration typically hits him just a few minutes before he starts his writing routine, and it almost always comes to him easily and naturally. He says that the artistic experience is something that many people just don’t necessarily have access to – not because some people are superior and others are inferior, but because not everybody is built as an artist. Different art forms play different roles. Simon plays music, writes poetry, and hosts a podcast because all of these mediums allow for completely different forms of expression. One format may get across to people in different ways that aren’t possible with another medium. Practice “Po.” Simon talked about a beautiful principle called “po,” which means to sit with a question once it’s posited, rather than trying to answer it immediately. Simon hopes that when people read poetry, they will sit with the question in the poem and allow it space to seep into the mind, body, and soul… and see what happens. Between two worlds. The stoic definition of wisdom is “a knowledge of things human and divine.” Since we are strange beings stretched between the heights and the depths, Simon asks: How much could you truly contribute in life if you became highly skilled at living between those two worlds?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Commander Divine speaks with Chris Duffin, health and fitness entrepreneur, author of The Eagle & the Dragon, and founder of Kabuki Strength. In this episode, Chris shares about growing up homeless as a child, his philosophy on fitness, and how he hopes to help people build resilience across every area of their lives. Key Takeaways: Weightlifting teaches you about life. Weightlifting can teach so many applicable lessons, but we often miss the connection. For example, some high-powered businessmen may execute amazing deals and strategies in the office, but then start flailing when they get to the gym. All they have to do is apply their planning and management skills, set expectations, and follow through. The inverse applies for people who get amazing results in the gym, but lack discipline in their work and home lives. Strength training should be empowering. As a trainer, you should lead someone toward not needing you. The individual has the largest amount of power in overcoming pain and creating change in their body. The trainer’s job is to provide the right methodology, the right tools, and the right mindset. When people learn those three things, they can own everything. Focus on impact. When it comes to fitness, Chris focuses on efforts that are going to make the biggest impact. For example, the ability to manage and control spinal mechanics has the largest global impact on the body, which is why Chris decided to do a 1,000 pound squat and deadlift for 3 reps each. Chris takes the same high-impact approach in business as well. Case in point: the mechanics of the foot has the second largest global impact on the body, which is why Chris started Bearfoot, a minimalist shoe company. Chris’ Grand Goals. Chris has three main Grand Goals that he lives his life by: 1. Demonstrate. Chris walks the walk to show what you can accomplish with the principles he teaches. 2. Inspire. Go for it. Shoot for something that is just so crazy that nobody's ever done it. Chris revels in showing people that if you set your mind to it, you can pull off things that seem impossible (like 3 reps of 1,000 pounds). 3. Be charitable. Chris has done a lot of feats of strength that also tie back into charity fundraisers for causes he believes in. The future of fitness. Chris’ company Kabuki Strength makes purpose-built barbells to help athletes train more safely and efficiently. They currently produce groundbreaking equipment for 90% of the NFL and MLB teams, but they’re not stopping there. Chris hopes to create a complete ecosystem of education, training tools, and data as it relates to the technology and art of coaching. He hopes to reinvent the typical gym in the future and change the face of fitness, eventually scaling to integrate with clinical care.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Commander Divine speaks with Jay Glazer, iconic NFL sports insider, mental health advocate, and founder of MVP (Merging Vets and Players). Jay’s mission is to change the narrative on anxiety, depression and self worth. In this episode, Jay shares his relentless mindset and gives us a look into his personal mental health journey that culminated in publishing his new book, Unbreakable: How I Turned My Depression and Anxiety into Motivation and You Can Too. Key Takeaways: Find your fight team. At 52, Jay spars every day because he loves the support of his fight team. Whether he wins or loses doesn’t matter; what matters is having that team around him for support. There are so many potential teams around us that can help lift us up and walk this walk together. Jay says you can develop a fight team anytime in your life (he didn’t develop his fighting mindset until he was in his 30s). Do more than the competition. The magic bullet in life is to find out who the best is in your field, and do more than them. It’s hard, but the alternative is never seeing your dreams come true. When you look at the SEALS, great athletes, and great businessmen, they all have that common thread: they outwork everybody. No trauma equals no growth. Trauma and success are intertwined. Trauma is actually an opportunity for growth; it’s what allows us to be sensitive and whole. So our trauma actually provides extreme motivation for growth, because we can’t have growth without trauma. We just rent these bodies, but our souls live on forever. Jay had a near-death experience that gave him a profound new lease on life. He chooses to believe that the physical is not all about us and that the soul lives on forever. How can you be different? When Jay started working at Fox, he decided that he wanted to be different in two different ways: A, he was going to out-work the world, and B, he was going to be different from other reporters who used their pens as weapons. Instead, Jay pledged to start “give-give” relationships with the players and coaches he covered. As a result, many of them became his biggest donors to open up more MVP chapters. Loyalty is a lost art. Jay makes a point to always be doing for other people. Too many people have relationships where they want something in return. Jay figures that if he does a lot for others and gets even 10-15% of people in his life who would do the same for him, then he’s assembled a pretty good little fight team. We create chaos because we’re afraid of calm. Jay says that he thrives in chaos, but is terrible at being calm. We create a lot of chaos for ourselves because we're afraid of the calm. Laughter is the best antidote to panic. Jay has a lot of panic attacks on TV and has tried breathwork and other techniques to handle them. But he says that laughter is often the best medicine. “The faster I laugh, the faster it gets me out of a panic attack. So if you watch me on Fox, NFL Sunday or any TV show, and you see me jamming a quick joke, it's because I'm having a panic attack.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Commander Divine speaks with Brian Estes, CEO & CIO at Off the Chain Capital. Off the Chain is a cryptocurrency fund that finds value opportunities across the industry. In this episode, Brian discusses myths and truths about cryptocurrency, how it really works, and the future of blockchain technology. Key Takeaways: Our money experiment is no longer working. The dollar is going down, so it looks like commodities are going up in price. But in reality, what's happening is the dollar is losing all its value. For the last 51 years, the world's been an experiment. We’ve been experimenting with money that's only backed by the full faith and credit of the government that issues that money out. And that experiment is failing. Something has to give. Bitcoin is not as difficult to buy as you might think. While Coinbase is ubiquitous, it’s also really hard to use. Brian recommends buying Bitcoin on PayPal, Venmo, Square Cash App, or Robin Hood. Or, if you have a Fidelity or Schwab brokerage account, you can invest in the private Grayscale Bitcoin Trust or the Osprey Bitcoin Trust. Bitcoin can’t be outlawed. Congress decided not to outlaw Bitcoin for two reasons: 1. It would drive innovation outside the US; and 2. Back in 1996, the Supreme Court had already decided that cryptographic computer code is language and is protected by the First Amendment as speech. Therefore, you can't outlaw Bitcoin in the United States; it's technically protected speech. The Internet wasn’t supposed to be built this way. When we built the internet 30 years ago, there was a piece of software that was missing. The internet was built on top of the banking and credit card systems. The only reason it was built on these systems is because no one could figure out how to create software to allow us to do peer to peer transfer. And that's all Bitcoin and the blockchain is. It's that solution that we were looking for for 30 years. And someone figured it out and gave it to the world for free. Over the next 10 to 20 years, our internet will be a blockchain based internet. Since Bitcoin’s invention, we've been rebuilding the entire Internet. We're taking it off the banking system and putting it on blockchain technology. It's going to be very disruptive. The banks, credit card companies, and traditional finance people don't like it, but it's going to happen. Bitcoin, blockchain, and decentralized finance will replace the current financial system. It’s not going to happen overnight, but over the next 10 to 20 years, our internet will be blockchain based. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The government has been waging a massive misinformation campaign over the last 14 years. T hey’ve branded Bitcoin as something nefarious. They’ve said it’s bad for the environment, which is totally false. And then they've taxed it as property. Therefore, you can't use it as currency, which has slowed down the adoption. But you can't stop it. It's almost like religion. Once the thought is out there, you can't unlearn it. What will one Bitcoin be worth in the future? We're in a period of price discovery. We're trying to figure out what this asset is worth, and we have models that help us predict that. These models are between 91 and 99% correlated to the historical price of Bitcoin. And according to those models, Bitcoin should be worth somewhere between $10 million to $18 million per Bitcoin by 2029. Is Bitcoin really destroying the environment? If you look at how much electricity is generated in the world, Bitcoin consumes 0.1% of the world's electricity. That's about what we use for Christmas lights or electric dryers in the United States. So even if you turn it off, you gain 0.1%. Of that 0.1% of electricity, 56% of it comes from renewable energy sources. So crypto is actually the greenest industry in the world. There's no other industry in the world that...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Commander Divine speaks with Naveen Jain, entrepreneur, thought leader, and Founder and CEO of VIOME Life Sciences. In this episode, Naveen discusses the nature of human consciousness, the key to entrepreneurship, and the future of disease prevention and AI technology. Key Takeaways: We’ll soon have more control of our own health than ever. With emerging innovations like Naveen’s company VIOME, we can learn what causes us to have different diseases with a simple saliva and stool sample test – and then receive precision diet and supplement recommendations based on the results. We are slowly becoming trans-human. Right now, we’re connected to the Cloud. One day, the Cloud will become part of our bodies. Today it’s the watch, tomorrow it’ll be the chip, and then one day it’ll be part of our brains. Naveen imagines a world where we bypass speech and communicate through instant thought, and where we can subscribe to people’s thoughts like we do to a Twitter feed. What is human consciousness? Are we actually humans or a manifestation of universal consciousness? Naveen says that religion and science are starting to speak the same language. Religions say there is a God or creator, and your destiny is pre-written. And scientists say we are living in an algorithm-driven simulation, which means our destiny is pre-written. We’re all saying the same thing, which is: we are a manifestation of universal energy and universal consciousness. Making money is a byproduct of doing things for others. Naveen says this is the fundamental key that people need to know about entrepreneurship. Never go out and say, ‘I want to create a company, what should I do?’ When you are an entrepreneur, your job is to find something that improves people's lives. And if you do that, you can create an amazingly great, sustainable company. We become who we are with every interaction. When people say “that was the last straw that broke the camel's back,” it's never the last straw. It’s all the other straws that happened before that. That’s who we are as human beings; every single thing we’ve done has changed us. Whenever you learn something new or talk to someone else, your mindset changes. And then suddenly, one day, you wake up to find yourself completely different. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Max Lugavere, health journalist and NYT best-selling author, debunks food myths and discusses the best diet for brain and metabolic health. Meat is the most bioavailable protein, while omega-3s from plants require a complex transformation. Prevention is key, with certain diets linked to preventing noncommunicable diseases like Alzheimer's. Meat has unique nutrients like creatine for brain energy metabolism. The chapter also discusses the impact of nutrition on brain health, metabolic illness rates, and the importance of movement. It dives into the utilization of animal versus plant proteins and debunks myths about coffee and alcohol consumption.

Today, Commander Divine does a Q&A with his producer, Amy Jurkowitz. They discuss the future of leadership, the importance of cultivating a positive mindset amidst fear, how to handle stressful situations, and more. Key Takeaways: The future of leadership is world centric. The only way we can hope for a more peaceful world is to get all leaders to move beyond merely an egocentric view (“I matter”) or an ethnocentric view (“my tribe matters”) and into a world centric view (“everyone and everything matters”). Negative thinking = negative action. The reason we have such violence on this planet is the collective negative mindset that has accrued and been projected out into the world over thousands of years. If we can change that collective mindset to one that’s positive and inclusive, then we’ll start to see the outer environment change really quickly. Try pattern interrupts for more productive conversations. The next time someone you’re working with becomes reactive instead of constructive, try a pattern interrupt. Very calmly, point out the obvious to the individual who's lost control. For example, pause, take a breath, look at the individual and say, “Well, yelling at me isn't going to help X, is it?” Turning the mirror on their behavior will likely make them stop and think about their actions. The best way to face a crisis. If you're facing a crisis, don't meet that crisis with more activity, because it might be the wrong activity. Press the “pause” button, take a retreat, spend some time on the meditation bench. Just take some time to go inward so you can ask better questions and find out where to point your arrow for the future. The next several years are about to get interesting. Between now and 2030, we’re going to see a lot of changes in global structures and culture as the Industrial Age structures fall apart. It’s up to us to not contribute to the negativity through fear, but to maintain a positive mindset that we can move to a better place.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Commander Divine speaks with Dylan Beynon, founder and CEO of Mindbloom, a new telemedicine company for clinician-prescribed psychedelic therapy. Dylan has been named a Top 25 Consumer Health Tech Executive, and is one of the top 100 Most Influential People in Psychedelics. Dylan shares his thoughts on the future of psychedelics, how his upbringing inspired him to found Mindbloom, the benefits of ketamine therapy vs. mainstream therapies, and more. Key Takeaways: Why psychedelic therapy? Mental healthcare is the #1 public health crisis in the United States. Yet when you dig into the clinical research around existing treatment options, they just aren’t good enough. SSRIs only work 40-47% of the time, and over 50% of people have severe side effects. Plus, it takes 6-8 weeks to work, if it works at all. At-home ketamine therapy gets immediate results 80% of the time, with less than 5% of clients having mild side effects like nausea. How does ketamine therapy work? Patients are sent a flavored ketamine tablet that absorbs directly into the bloodstream. You keep the tablet under your tongue for 7 minutes while listening to a guided meditation. Then, you spit it out and go through a guided therapy session with a provider via video chat for about an hour. How can we make psychedelic therapy mainstream? By radically increasing access to treatments and creating a product that gives people better outcomes and experiences. In order to see widespread adoption of psychedelic therapies, we need to do 3 things: 1. Educate and make it approachable for people since it’s so stigmatized; 2. Make it less expensive so more people can afford it; 3. Use telemedicine to make it accessible to people no matter where they live. What does the future of psychedelic therapy look like? Assisted psychedelic therapies are growing rapidly. Oregon recently passed a law that has started the process to enable the prescription and administration of therapeutic medical psilocybin. Therapeutic MDMA is just about a year out from FDA approval. The Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has also been working on psychedelic advocacy, legalization, and medicalization for over 50 years. It’s all happening, and Dylan believes that psychedelic therapies will eventually overtake existing treatment options as the predominant treatment.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Commander Divine speaks with Dre Baldwin, who helps entrepreneurs and athletes dominate their “game” from the inside out through his business and podcast, Work on Your Game. Dre shares his incredible journey from being benched on his high school basketball team to becoming a professional basketball player, plus his best advice on personal development, the power of discipline, and more.  Key Takeaways: Borrow your confidence. When you fake it til you make it, you allow your confidence to come and go. Think of someone whose confidence you admire, and assume their internal, emotional, energetic posture. You’ll eventually build up your own confidence based on what you’ve already done from that borrowed posture. Discipline is everything. Showing up every day can easily separate you from everyone else when skill level is equal. At the pro level, everyone has talent. It’s not a talent to show up every day; it’s a choice. Discipline gives you a leg-up. Don’t be a PIG. More and more people are becoming “PIGs” – Professional Information Gatherers. At some point, you have to take your knowledge and do something with it. And cut yourself off from all the “information” out there, because there’s more of it than you have time for. Why are you here? You need to know why you showed up in the first place. If your reason is to prove something to someone else, it’s the wrong reason. There’s going to come a point when you have to have your own answers. If you need someone else to answer for you now, it’s only going to make you weaker for the future.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, Commander Divine speaks with James Clear, the best-selling author of Atomic Habits (which has sold over 5 million copies). James discusses his process for writing and content creation, the joys and pitfalls of notoriety, how to position yourself for success, and a behind-the-scenes look of how he’s built his audience of over 1 million subscribers. Key Takeaways: When you’re struggling creatively, don’t write more – read more. Writing is like driving a car; reading is like filling your car up with gas. You need both to get anywhere on your journey. Be careful who you follow. When you choose who to follow online, you’re choosing your future thoughts – choose wisely. Consistency is the most important practice for better writing. James prefers to not be dependent on a single circumstance to be able to write. As long as you’re doing the work, you don’t have to get hung up on having a specific routine. Ask yourself: How can you give people the highest value in the easiest way possible? When you apply this philosophy to every area of your business, it’s hard not to get better results. A lot of success comes from good positioning. Take advantage of external forces that work in your favor, create work that keeps working for you after it’s done, and choose work that has a limited downside and an unlimited upside. You don’t need things to go perfectly all the time when you have a lot of really strong forces working in your favor. Quotes: “Pretty much every idea that you have is downstream from what you consume” “This is one of the huge benefits of having an email list and audience… Not only do you have an audience to launch a podcast or a product to, but it’s also live testing… I knew by the time I signed my book deal that these were the top 20 ideas that did really well” “I put all this pressure on myself to spend more time writing, but it ironically got worse.  If the writing isn’t good enough, if I feel like I’m struggling to come up with something creative, I actually don’t need to spend more time writing – I need to spend more time reading.” “Coming up with good ideas is mostly reading more and crafting good information flows.” “Writing is one of the ultimate forms of delayed gratification.” “Just keep showing up and banging the rock with the hammer, keep shipping, and you’ll eventually break through”  “Having specific calls to action to a well-designed page and backing all of that up with really exceptional work is the 80/20 of it all – that’s the stuff that drives the majority of the outcomes.”  “Strategy is mostly about positioning yourself well to benefit from external forces.”  “There’s a chance for anyone, regardless of industry or project, to position yourself in a way where your hard work is multiplied and you get more value out of each unit of effort”  Links: James Clear Instagram Twitter IP Vanish Promo Code Divine ProgressiveSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.