Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Mark Divine on Becoming Uncommon In Body, Mind, and Soul

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

How can being "uncommon" help us overcome challenges and grow personally? How can we build resilience, enhance emotional control, and lead with purpose? In this interview, I welcome back Mark Divine, a former Navy SEAL, bestselling author, and mindfulness expert, who shares his approach to cultivating mental toughness and inner strength. Mark dives into strategies to build confidence, develop emotional control, and embrace a warrior mindset for personal growth. He also discusses insights from his latest book, Uncommon, which offers readers a pathway to greater resilience and purpose. In this interview, you’ll learn . . . How to build emotional control and overcome self-doubt The power of intuition in decision-making and personal growth Practical daily habits to improve focus, clarity, and resilience Methods for breaking negative thought patterns and finding purpose Tips for blending mindfulness and discipline in daily life And more . . . So, if you're ready to unlock your warrior mindset and gain tools for navigating life’s challenges, click play and join the conversation. --- Timestamps: (07:58) Thoughts on individualism (10:23) Aligning heart & mind (19:00) Turning intuition into conviction (33:06) Using drugs for spiritual insight (40:16) Role of intuition (51:02) Managing emotions (58:53) Past life trauma's impact on present (01:00:51) Understanding metacognition --- Mentioned on the Show: Creatine Monohydrate Thinner Leaner Stronger Uncommon: Simple Principles for an Extraordinary Life

So, like one day I was at SEAL Team 3 and we were doing some shooting training and I was walking, it was five in the morning and I was walking toward the range. I felt as if, I say as if, but I felt as if someone put their hand on my shoulder and whispered stop. But it was like a forceful like stop now. And I stopped. And the moment I stopped, a teammate of mine had an accidental discharge and the bullet went like zoomed right by my right ear.

Had I taken that next step, it would have gone in the back of my head. That's intuition. Hello and welcome to a new episode of Muscle for Life. Thank you for joining me today. I'm your host, Mike Matthews. And in today's episode, I have my buddy Mark Devine back on the podcast to talk about the material

in his newest book that he released a few months ago called Uncommon. And so today's episode is going to be about what it means to be and to become uncommon in body and in mind, in soul. And that means building physical and psychological, emotional, spiritual, resilience, and awareness and capacity. And then using those things to build confidence, to improve emotional control, to overcome self-doubts, to improve decision-making, to enhance focus and

clarity, and break through negative thought patterns, to find more purpose in life and more. And all of those things are what Mark is going to be talking about in today's episode. And in case you are not familiar with Mark, he is a former Navy SEAL. He is a bestselling author. He is the founder of SEAL FIT and several other companies. And in his books and in his writings and in his speeches, he shares his approach to cultivating mental toughness, inner strength, and what he calls a warrior mindset for personal growth.

Before we get started, there are very few supplements that I would say everyone should be taking. Most supplements are very supplemental by definition. They're not essential. An exception, however, a supplement that I do think everyone should at least strongly consider taking is creatine. Now you probably know that creatine is the most studied molecule in all of sports nutrition. You probably know that hundreds of studies confirm that it can safely boost muscle and strength gains and improve muscular endurance. It can reduce muscle damage and soreness from exercise, helping you recover faster from your

training. It can help you preserve lean mass and strength while you are restricting your calories during a cut. So you can maximally improve your body composition when you're cutting, which is the goal. It's not weight loss per se, it's fat loss and muscle gain, or at least muscle retention. However, what you might not know is that there is new research suggesting that creatine also supports various aspects of brain health and cognition. And that's why experts are now starting to think of creatine as less of a

fitness supplement for meatheads and more of a must-have supplement for everyone like vitamin D or vitamin K or omega-3 fatty acids acids a few supplements that I also think everyone should strongly consider taking. And all that is why I just and finally I should have done this a long time ago. This was this was a mistake, but I just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement or my sports nutrition company Legion has just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement which you can find over at bylegion.com slash creatine that's buylegion.com slash creatine and in case you're wondering why creatine monohydrate versus another maybe more exotic form or at least exotic sounding form like creatine citrate or creatine malate. It's because creatine monohydrate is the most studied form.

It is the gold standard in the scientific literature of creatine's effectiveness. And contrary to what many marketers would have you believe, research has also shown that a number of these other more quote unquote exotic forms of creatine actually perform worse than creatine monohydrate. And in case you are wondering about the micronized part, that simply means that the creatine molecules have been broken down into very small particles, up to 20 times smaller

than regular creatine monohydrate crystals. And the primary benefit is solubility. It mixes in water better and it also can be easier on your stomach. Some people can get an upset stomach from creatine and they often don't get an upset stomach from micronized creatine. There also are some claims about enhanced absorption with micronized creatine monohydrate faster and more efficient uptake by muscle cells, but I think that is mostly speculation. So the bottom line is creatine is not going to help you pack on brain shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days. It's not going to add another plate or two to the bar, but it is going to help you train harder. It's going to help you recover better. It's going to help you gain muscle and strength faster. And contrary to the supplement fake news,

it's not bad for your kidneys, it doesn't cause men to lose their hair, and it won't make you bloated. So if you want to see for yourself, head over to by Legion comm slash creatine, by legi on.com slash creatine, B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N dot com slash creatine, pick up a bottle, take five grams a day if you are mostly after the performance and body composition benefits and take 10 grams per day if you want to also maximally benefit your brain health and cognition because that is the amount that research is suggesting is optimal for both body composition, physical performance and mental health or brain health and cognition and see how it goes. Hey, Marcus, good to see you again.

You too, Mike. Thanks for having me on your show, buddy. Yeah, absolutely. It's been a bit. We've emailed a couple of times, but haven't spoken in a while. It's true. Yeah. Life goes on. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Very true. So, we're here to talk about your new book, which is called Uncommon.

Came out a few months ago. I was excited to see, as someone who keeps writing books, even though I could find reasons not to, I'm sure you could find reasons to not write the next book, but something in you says, now you got to write the next book. Yeah, the books kind of write us, I think, right? It has to come through you. There's a principle called way-woo-way. I think even many might mention in the book. Way-woo-way means action without the actor. So, way-woo is action and woo-way is inaction. So, when you put them together,

way-woo- Wei, you've got action within action but what it really talks about is without the actor and what that means is the ego is out of the way. And so, where I'm going with that is this is the nature of what it means to be a real, you know, if you understand consciousness and spirituality, like we are being lived by spirit. And the cause of suffering, the cause of all the problems in the world is to mistake yourself to be an independent, self-organizing being with an individual consciousness,

which is the Western way of seeing things, but it's actually not the way things work. So what I mean by this is if a book wants to be written, it's being written through me and there's nothing, no way in hell I'm going to stop it. I can slow it down. I can resist it. But if I stop it, then ultimately I'm doing a huge injustice because the words need to

come out. What are your thoughts about what you just said in the context of individualism, which is also, there's a lot of emphasis on that here in the West. Yeah, well, I think individualism is a false ideology that's led to a lot of, again, a lot of suffering, a lot of pain, because we, you know, human beings are, first of all, we're not separate from each other. Secondly, we don't ever create anything of value alone, right? It is always a team effort and it's always built on the backs of countless others.

And so the ego that believes that it can go it alone, the lone wolf and even that kind of American exceptionalism and sense of kind of being that pioneer or rough cowboy individualist, it always leads to less optimal results and regret in the long run run because at the end of your life you're like, well, geez, you know, all of that accomplishment was meaningless without I can't share it with others or if it wasn't in service to others.

But at the same time, of course, if you swing to the opposite end of the spectrum and you are now in to the realm of collectivism and and politically, that'd be statism. That's a horror, a different type of horror. Yeah. When it comes to... I would say that, you know, the Buddha had the best kind of path, the middle path, right? You know, collectivism and having a belief that the state can and should control all the affairs of its citizens always leads to disaster in the long run. And just to let everyone be completely free would lead to anarchy, which means that then a lot of

individuals would be hurt by those who are, you know, a lower level of consciousness or, you know, are working on some extremely negative energy or negative karma. And so, they're gonna be a lot of victims. There's gonna be victims in either case. In one case, the victims are randomized at the expense of the wolves and the other, the victims are going to be at the expense of the state. The state is going to be the wolf. Adam I wanted to talk about the spiritual mountain that was on my list of things. I had it later, but let's just start with it because what I wanted to talk about and specifically relating this mountain and for people listening. So Mark, in this book, you use this metaphor of different mountains. We have to climb and the spiritual one being one of

them. And you talk about aligning your heart and aligning your mind to every action. And I was curious, what does that look like for you? What is your primary purpose that aligns your mind, that aligns your actions? And how has that changed over the years? That's a great question. My purpose is to master myself as a warrior, leader, teacher, so that I can serve humanity. Now, how that has changed is, I didn't articulate it that way. I would have said in my 20s, as I uncovered it through meditation, that my purpose was to be a warrior

and to serve my country. And then as I evolved, I recognized that warrior was just one archetype, right? It was a dominant archetype and it was very present still for me to this day. But eventually it gave way to where there was room for the leader archetype to emerge, the strategist, the alchemist, right? So, and so those other archetypes are really starting to assert themselves. And while simultaneously, archetypes are really starting to assert themselves. And while simultaneously, the expansiveness of how I'm meant to serve has really dramatically expanded. And so, it's gone well beyond, you

know, serving my country as a Navy SEAL to serving all humanity to help uplift humanity and move away from violence and negativity. Now, this mountain which I call Kokoro Mountain, Kokoro is a warrior term from the Japanese martial tradition which means to merge your heart and mind in action or a whole mind. So ultimately, it's kind of an uncanny thing to discuss because you can't really, it's hard, right? Because from the Eastern perspective, we are already whole, right? It's our natural state. We're spiritual beings, you know, having an instant of this kind of physical manifestation. But because the brain, the way it's organized and the way our training is in the Western world especially,

we are led to believe that we are an individual separate self, we call that the ego personality, which has to find spirit somehow. Or not, or we're just a brain and that's it. Or you're just a brain, yeah, exactly. A lot of people, especially from the scientists, don't even think, they just think consciousness is a manifestation of brain activity. And because there's no evidence behind spirit because it's all subjective, they just completely deny it. That's nihilism. But you and I know and most of the listeners know that, well, that's not accurate because there is a spiritual aspect and we just don't

understand it very well. And so, it's very valuable to have an approach that is a process oriented approach, which means we can work on the ego. And so this is like the Zen tradition of taming the ego. Some people talk about killing the ego. You can't really kill the ego. If you kill the ego, the body would die. The ego is necessary for survival. But emotional process, depth psychology, personal development, even physical development like you and I, our core, that you're training the body, you're training the mind. As you train the mind, you have more clarity of thought, you have more insight, you develop a little emotional awareness, emotional

control, and then you open up to your intuitive centers, right? And then you're starting to be able to be much more sensitive human being where you're now suddenly experiencing non-physical aspect and you could call that spirit. We all have this much bigger component of ourselves, which is the non-physical. And so, the Western model and even to a larger extent, what I present in uncommon is this, and those are the five bonds, physically, you know, really refining your body physically so it's an apt vessel for this further development, then mentally, not just leaving your mental development to like listening to a few podcasts or getting

another certification or doing another course, but really, really changing how your brain and how your mind works through processes of breath work, meditation, visualization, mindfulness and witnessing. And then recognizing that a lot of times we can stop there and think we're making great progress, but emotionally it's the traumas of our childhood and conditioning of our upbringing that are inhibiting our progress. So we've got to turn to the emotional mountain and begin to do that work as well or else we'll be thwarted in any further progress. And then that leads us into the intuitive mountain and then ultimately we end up at Kokoro Mountain. But Kokoro Mountain

is never not there, right? Your spirit is always there. You're just kind of like chipping away at the layers that are blocking it from being expressed in its glory. So that's where uncommon is unique. It's like this combination of this deep Eastern wisdom that says you are in your natural state, perfect, the way you're meant to be. So own it. But from the Western perspective, like it's kind of hard to own it, right? If you're clogged up, if your plumbing is all clogged up because you're not physically healthy and you're being like shit, right? And so physically you don't feel whole, you don't feel like a spiritual being because your physical vessel is corroded and corrupt. So, we got to get

that healthy. And then, we haven't learned how to think well, to be positive, to be optimistic, to separate yourself from future and past thinking, to be more present. And in that presence, we can enter that timeless state where we have that experience of witnessing, awareness, and, you know, kind of more spiritual insight. And again, that leads us to the openings in the emotional mountain and the intuitive mountain. So, it's a both-hand. We kind of attack it from both sides, so to speak. So, I've covered a lot of territory here, but ultimately, from that natural state, you are who you are and you're perfect the way you are. When you tap into that through stillness, which takes a lot of work, as I said, then you begin to experience the, you know, what the Easterners

would call karma and dharmic energies, right? Karma is the energy that propels you into this lifetime. It's the latent energy from your past lifetime of desires and fears and need to learn things that comes in and that's gonna drive you to have certain experiences, which is then gonna either add more negative karma or it's gonna bleed it off and bring you some positive benefit.

And then the Dharma is the calling. It's like how you're meant to serve. Like every one of us has a unique It's like how you're meant to serve. Like every one of us has a unique kind of imprint as to how we're meant to serve and the challenges we're supposed to overcome. And it's always, in my experience, it's not something about what you're going to do. It's not a career. It's not a job. It's this archetypal energy, right, of beingness or becomingness. This is why, you know, when I was in my 20s sitting on my meditation bench, this is before I joined the SEALs, I kept having the experience internally, both in a felt sense and also

even just really subtle imagery that I was meant to be a warrior. And yet there I was working on becoming a certified public accountant and getting my MBA, right? And I didn't feel like that was very warrior-ish. So I was doing something that was like physical, karate, and mental zen. That was a first and second mountain. And it allowed me to tap into my intuition, my fourth mountain, which is that inner whisper, the inner voice of my heart, you know, my biome. And that was saying that my inner intuition was saying, telling me in its unique way that I was off target, right? I wasn't going to be fulfilling my Dharma, my calling of being

a warrior if I stayed this track of being a CPA and going and making a lot of money on Wall Street. And so I started, you know, that was a pivotal moment in my life. I was 22, maybe 23 years old. I mean, at first it was rather jarring, almost like you would expect from midlife crisis where I'm like, holy shit, I've invested a lot, but I hadn't really invested that much time. It just appeared that, you know, here I am halfway done with my MBA, CPA, I'm barreling

down the wrong road. But what a great opportunity to suddenly just sit there on that little meditation bench and to be told, stop, right? Or just stop long enough to pay attention and ask better questions. So I started to ask, if I'm not meant to do that and I'm meant to be a warrior, then what would that look like?

And that's when I was showing the seals, you know? You speak with a lot of conviction, particularly about spirituality. And I think one of the challenges that many people have is speak of intuition. They have an intuition that something like that is probably true. Different religions have different answers.

But it can be hard to have firsthand experiences that take you from maybe an intuition to something closer to conviction. I'm curious what firsthand experiences you've had that just my sense of my interactions with you over the years is that you've probably had a number of firsthand experiences that have logically led you to conclude a lot of what you just said, that it's not simply a matter of, well, these things sound nice, and a lot of other people believe them and have believed them. And they confirm my biases and I kind of like it, so I'm just going to go with it. You know what I mean?

Yeah, most people, especially, I'm not talking about religion, by the way, as you know. I don't have a religion. I'm not a religious person. And the term spiritual and spirituality, you know, has a lot of baggage attached to it for a lot of people, but we don't have much better term to use. And you're right. Unless you have direct experience, then it's going to be faith for you or belief. And belief and faith are closely related. Faith is you don't really need to believe, you just trust. Belief is, okay, I believe this teaching or I believe this teacher and or I believe my parents because they told me this and what to believe when I was a kid and so you're going to go on that. Well, neither faith nor belief are going to lead to certainty. Only the subjective experience

can lead to certainty. And the only way to have that subjective experience is if you're looking for it. So if you're a complete denier, you won't have it. And so that's just going to reinforce your belief that, you know, we're just physical beings with the brain and the brain is creating consciousness. But if you are someone who's intrigued or interested and patient and worth investigating, then there's a possibility that you could have some direct experience. You can be that study of N equals one and actually find some proof. I was extremely fortunate to be 21 when I was introduced to meditation back in 1985. Had I not been, we certainly probably wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be on Wall Street or back

running the Divine Brothers family business in Utica, New York. But meditation, and I believe that I was successful at 21 years old with meditation because, you know, I grew up in the sixties and seventies and there was no TV, I'm very little TV, three channels. We had, of course, no internet, no iPhones, no video games. And so, and I had a lot of- Sounds like a paradise in some ways compared to- It was paradise and I was in upstate New York and my family, my father was like, it's not

easy to be under the roof, right? A lot of alcohol, a lot of stuff. And so I would spend a lot of time out in wilderness, right? So one of the most powerful ways to experience spirit is to spend a lot of time alone in nature, quiet, right? So people who will walk the Appalachian Trail, you know, for three months, you know, they're having 10 spiritual experiences. I used to go on long hikes with my brother and I had so many really strange, generally

strange things that I experienced once we were in the woods for days and with no contact except for, you know, with a few other hikers here and there. Also, incredible flow state experiences. You know, I remember I used to run the mountains in the Outer Rondics. I would get back to meditation a second, but I jumped forward earlier a little bit in my teens. And, you know, I would cruise up these mountains alone. And I remember, you know, maybe like four to five hours to like find my way to the top. These aren't like Rockies, but you know, 4,000, 5,000 feet tall. And

just from the sheer bliss of being in nature, of being alone and the exhaustion, I remember once just sitting down on the rock, pulling out my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I'm just looking at this expanse of beautiful trees and lakes and having this like radical kind of like first experience where I just shift my awareness, just shifted perspective to you know what you would call kind of an out-of-body experience where I saw myself from outside myself, right? And so that was like a really kind of foundational experience where I'm like, Oh, the mind is more than the brain. And if that's so, then, wow, that's how far does it extend? And also, are you the are you your mind or are you suffering from your mind?

Or? Yeah, yeah. And my mind exactly is this. What is this experience? I didn't know how to answer that back then. And I'm still not clear, right? And I think there's, there's, that's a long philosophical debate that's still going. Yeah, I'm very clear. I would say I don't want to tell you more than I know. That's one. Like I don't know because I think it's possible that you know, some people say well, that's pure awareness and I would say well pure awareness, but it's connected to my mind, right? And so there's a connection between pure consciousness, there's a connection between pure consciousness, which the spiritual tradition is called awareness and your mind. And the witness is the kind of the doorway. And this is Suzuki in his

book Zen Mind, Beginner Minds talks about the swinging doorway that swings on the inhale and the exhale and this swings between personality and just pure awareness, non-personal awareness. And the witness is that kind of doorway, right? The witness is connected to pure awareness, but it's also connected to your mind. And so, those experiences that allowed me to say what I just said to understand what Suzuki was saying, who was an enlightened master, didn't come until much later. But that experience of me having that kind of like shift in perspective, I believe meant I was kind of suddenly perceiving from witness, which wasn't separate from the mind, but it was more than the mind.

Anyway, so that's an example. So when I went, when I started studying Zen with Tadashi Nakamura in New York City through my karate practice, extraordinary experience, because we had the, you know, think about the five miles, we had the hardcore physical with the karate, we had the mental training with the focus, the concentration, the breath work, and now the Zen training. Emotionally, right, fighting, a fighting art is really powerful way to do some introductory emotional development work. You got emotional control. There's a lot of shit that comes up when you're getting your ass handed to you time and again.

It was very rich environment for development, especially at a young age. We know with neuroplasticity, what now your brain isn't fully developed until you're like 26 as a guy. So a lot was happening. So when I sat down at Zen bench and I had started to have like real success pretty quickly, I could hold my attention really well. It took maybe six or nine months, but I was able to hold my attention. And then I would routinely drop off into these like non-dual states where time just like was so malleable, right? Sometimes it

felt like I was there for hours, but it was minutes. Sometimes I felt like I was there for minutes and it was hours or vice versa. And whenever I dropped off into those that non-dual kind of like ever present, fully present, radically here, but not thinking state, I would come back with something, some insight. And this is where, you know, I earlier talked about starting to get the sense and feeling and ideas and images that I was meant to be a warrior. It all happened because of my meditation. So, I was very fortunate to uncover that at 21 and practice it for four years and it led me to completely change my life. I transformed from, you know, a young common guy who was trying to be, you know, follow the common path and making a lot of money on Wall Street, right? And my

peers went on to make a lot of money on Wall Street, you know, a couple of them are running Fortune 500 companies right now. But I had transformed and I said I saw that's not my path. And if I follow that path, it's going to bring me great suffering, or at least I won't be, you know, I'll be living that life of quiet desperation that Thoreau talked about for Emerson. And so I developed the courage, I built the courage to that practice to be like, I'm going to live the life that I'm meant to live. And that's to be a warrior. And then I was shown the Navy SEALs. And that was, I said, when I saw them, when I figured out who they were,

I was like, that's it. And I didn't even learn them until I was 23. There wasn't much information back then. No TV shows, no nothing, right? There was one recruiting video that hadn't been built yet. So back to your original point, how do you go from belief or faith to certainty? Because you've got to want it, right? And then if you want it, then there's practices that will take you away from just the experience of everything's happening out here to draw your attention inward to begin to experience the inner world, the inner domain. And in that inner domain, it begins to open up for you and you begin to have some really interesting experiences. I've already described a few. You get imagery, you get sensations,

you begin to experience the vast expanse of pure awareness, pure consciousness, which is alive. You know, they use the term setcha and nanda in the Eastern traditions. It's being, it's consciousness, it's bliss, it's love, it's life. And that's what we are at a non-personal level. We are all that. And you experience that. And when you experience that, there's no turning back. There's no question, right? It's a defining moment in your life. You can also have really interesting mystical experiences along the way. And mystical experience really are just kind of pointers. You don't want to like get too hung up on them or too, you know, like thinking, wow, that's, I'm really special. I had mystical experience.

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Well, I have definitely experienced many of those on my journey as a warrior to heal others. I have a foundation for vets who are suicidal post-traumatic stress. And so, in order for me to really recommend certain things, which included psychedelics, I wanted to make sure that I could understand them. And so, I've experienced, you know, like psilocybin and ketamine and ibogaine. I was a real doozy in ayahuasca. What my insight and my experience told me was that they're very useful for healing from trauma,

but they have to be done or administered in a very, very thoughtful way with a lot of preparation, a lot of care amongst the administrator or the facilitator. The situation itself has to be very well curated. It should be small. You know, I've been to ayahuasca ceremonies with like 50 people and I know I've seen heard people have been with hundreds and I think that's that's reckless. It should be small so that the facilitators can really pay attention what's going on, especially with traumatized human beings, which is everybody.

The space has to be held to make sure that energy that doesn't belong there doesn't creep in, et cetera. And then after the experience, there needs to be some handholding and reintegration that is skillful, right? So therapeutic process. If all those exist, I think that psychedelics can be very helpful for healing from post-traumatic stress also from any type of, you know, real trauma, you know, like sexual trauma or abuse. And it is useful also for anxiety and depression and often anxiety and depression go, you know,

as a go hand in hand with that trauma. It can be useful for spiritual development as well. But, and this is a capital B, but I don't believe it is a spiritual practice. And I know some people do. I don't believe that psychedelics should be a spiritual practice. I think it'll lead to a bypassing. I think it can get people kind of stuck in this kind of like magical, mythical thinking and even stuck in kind of astral level manipulation. And so I'm very, very cautionary about that. It should be, I like it for healing, but I don't like it for spiritual development unless it's maybe one or two. You know, let's just see what I learn. And this route mostly going to show you the emotional traumas and what needs to be healed so that you can move

on in your journey. That was a long winded answer to your question. But I a lot of caution if you're just a recreational, you think it's fun, a lot of caution, a lot of caution if you think you're going to use it as your spiritual practice. Best spiritual practice is to sit down and be quiet. Yeah, I mean, I'm not speaking from personal experience, but if I were approaching this, for me, my instinct would be, well, if I'm trying to get out of doing the hard work and a lot of the stuff that you're talking about that you did for a long time to reach these heightened levels of awareness. And if someone was trying to sell me that I could

shortcut all that with drugs, I would be skeptical. That would be me. I think that's very wise. That's exactly right. I think that's kind of what I meant by the spiritual bypass, bypassing all the work, right? Go from zero to hero. And, you know, our culture wants that. A lot, you know, they were taught that we can go straight there. You know, we have chat GPT, now we don't have to think anymore, right? Just get the answer. Well, psychedelics have led to that. You know, here's a great story. So, back in the, you know, in the 70s, LSD was the big thing, right? you know, in the 70s, LSD was the big thing, right? And a lot of the people who were doing the psychedelics were also connecting with the Indian yogi tradition, which is, you know, the oldest science and mental development, spiritual development. I don't mean the stretchy

bendy just, you know, physical yoga that we have here in America. And so, a number of these individuals would go to India and like meet some of the sages and learn from them. And so even the Beatles went down and spent time with Ramana Maharshi and he was a great sage, Yana Yogi sage. And Ram Dass was a Harvard professor, you know, who had psychedelic experiences and went down to India and changed his name and and you know, now he's still very famous. Anyway, so, Timothy Leary, and maybe it was Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, brought some LSD to Ramana Maharshi when he was alive. And they said, you know, this is what we've been

doing in the West. We're having tremendous mystical experiences. We think it's a solution that may, you know, get us to where you are or where you're pointing to faster. Can you help us validate that?" And Maharshi is like, okay. And so they give him a hit, he takes it, they give him another, takes it, give him another, give like eight hits of LSD. And this guy, you know, he is an enlightened master, meaning he's completely no sense of personal self there. There's no ego. And so his mind is working in a very different way. And people who have those, that state that their mind is operating at like a theta level all the time in waking

states. It's just extremely calm, clear, you know, awakened awareness. Like, you know, if you again, if you if you think about it from the perspective of that Western spiritual, like consciousness is living, consciousness is actually what enlivens the brain, the brain is responding to consciousness. So thoughts happen, then the brain responds. So people think that the brain creates the thought, well, so he's in these states where you put all the psychedelics in and he's just like, do do do do do, do do do do do do, just breathing, meditating. And then he opens his eyes and looks at him and he goes, oh, I see. He goes, you want to feel powerful. That's what he said to Timothy Leary and Ram Dass about the LSD, you want to feel powerful.

He cut right to the chase. It immediately makes you think of the CIA's involvement, MKUltra. There were other things. There were other things. Right. Psychedelics, it's like a trickster, right? It can at a very low dose level and a very, you know, just, okay just this, okay, I got good intention. I'm going to try it for healing. Great. But if you get married to it, then it's going to

own you and you're going to feel powerful, right? You're going to feel like you're special because you're having all these experiences and you can change your name and put robes on and call yourself Ram, whatever you want, but it's all ego. It's still ego. So psychedelics aren't going to get you beyond the ego. And I know there's certainly I know certainly people would challenge me on that. And I also know that I'm right. Let's talk about intuition, which I thought was great that you included that in your book, because maybe it's a Western thing, but certainly the culture here that we're in, I don't know if Eastern philosophy has different view of

this, but intuition is often discounted as less valuable than rationality or even something to be ignored altogether. Obviously you have different thoughts on this, but I wanted to hear some of your thoughts on intuition and the role this can play, if it's properly attuned, if that's the right way of putting it or however you might describe it. Yeah, I would say that let's look at the world around us and see how rationality has served us on the brink of World War III. I was just going to say global thermonuclear war. Cool. Yeah, yeah. That's served us really well, hasn't it? So, no, there's something beyond

linear rationality that we need to tap into. And intuition is that link. It's the bridge to the spirit. Or you could say it's the way that spirit non-physical communicates with us, that allows us to perceive things that are normally hidden from view. So, let me give you some examples. This even kind of like dovetails into kind of that conversation about certainty versus faith or belief. So, like one day I was at SEAL Team 3 and we were doing some shooting training and I was walking, it was five in the morning and I was at SEAL Team 3 and we were doing some shooting training and I was

walking, it was five in the morning and I was walking toward the range and I felt as if, I say as if, but I felt as if someone put their hand on my shoulder and whispered stop. But it was like a forceful like stop now. And I stopped. And the moment I stopped, a teammate of mine had an accidental discharge, and the bullet went zoomed right by my right ear. Had I taken that next step, it would have gone in the back of my head. That's intuition. Now, that's a powerful intuitive head and intuitive signal.

You could say, how did that happen? Well, damn if I know, but I do believe the biome was involved. We have the gut brain, and we have the right? And so we have the gut brain and we have the heart brain and we have the head brain, right? So the gut brain, literally we have neurons and neurotransmitters, neurochemicals in our gut. And they work through the enteric nervous system. And they communicate with the biome, you know, all the little bugs in your biome.

And those bugs, you know, are able to communicate what they experience from the outside world that you can't possibly know, right? And so there's some capacity for, because again, everything's connected, right, at an energetic, conscious level, you know, they have this experience of this event that is about to happening and they communicated it and I was open enough. I've been training by then in meditation for six years and I had already had a lot of other experiences where I believed in this and so I was able to receive that. I

didn't blow it off and it saved my life and And I can tell you there's countless stories like that from SEALs and other special operators where they just trusted their gut or listened to their intuition and it saved them. I had a friend, Mike Jaco, who literally tells a story in his book, Intuitive Warrior, about being able to intuit where IEDs were being placed and having his team kind of route around it and

finding out later that sure enough, there was an IED there that was, you know, put there to blow them or someone else up on that route. I don't think we'll know probably for many, many, many years like how this really works, right? When we're talking about the gut, you know, brain connection. Same thing with the heart. Like you could say the intuition of the heart is empathic. So, you say some people are highly empathic and others aren't. Well, why? It's because they're open, their heart is really open and

they're able to receive energy from other people and also able to give energy. So, healers are able to heal, right, by opening, by sending their heart and their love energy into other beings and which actually has a dimensional effect in healing. I mean, Jesus was a greatest example of that. So that you could say is an intuitive strength, right? Or a spiritual strength. This again, spirit and intuition is like the language of the spirit. Another way to experience and express intuition is the brain, the head brain, right? And the head brain intuition is experienced, as I mentioned earlier, through subtle imagery. It's not the imagery that you would expect

with like a sports visualization where you're like, you know, you're remembering an event and you're replaying like your sport or let's say, you know, in your domain, let's say you're remembering an event and you're replaying your sport, or let's say in your domain, let's say you're working on or you're coaching someone in Power Cleans and you have them visualize the perfect Power Clean, doing the weight, which is going to be their next PR, or like Michael Phelps, that type of visualization. What you get instead is really subtle, almost background imagery, right? And it just kind of emerges, it just shows itself to you without any type of effort on your part.

So that'll happen. A lot of times, like we do these extended breath trainings in our unbeatable mind training, this 45-minute, like really intense, we call it warrior breathing. And this is a pretty common experience to have this imagery to show. And some people, you know, say that like a loved one was there sitting with them and they could see and feel them, right? Or you'll see like an image in your mind and it might be a teacher, a non-physical teacher or animal that's there to be like a totem, you know, kind of thing. It can be all sorts of things.

You can even have an image of your future self, right? If you invite that in. And sure enough, like there he is or she is, like it's amazing. So imagery and also something called direct perception, right? This is trans-rational intuition. Direct perception is you suddenly have a knowingness of something, but you don't really have any idea why you know it. Like it's not something you studied, you didn't hear it in a podcast. And so that is, that's directly perceiving things and that's being able to recognize it. Information just came into you that wasn't something that you studied or knew. So the point with my writing that chapter is, you know, again, we're in a world that is barreling toward, you know, more and more distraction, more and more separation, less

health. I mean, look at our, the health in this country is insane, right? And the fact that the government's not doing anything about it is crazy. You keep on promoting disease, you know, related things to include more vaccines. But we won't go down that rabbit hole. disease-related things to include more vaccines. But we won't go down there at all. Now people have some aglutide, which, which I don't know if you saw, I saw a graph recently. Basically, the headline is that we may have reached peak obesity here in the West

because there actually is now a downtick in in obesity here in the West. And of course, it's it's driven by these GLP-1. Or Zempik. Yeah, by yeah, factually, yeah. Which is an indictment, yes. I guess though on balance, probably a net positive considering how utterly destructive it is to remain obese.

Yeah. And like any, like any pharmacological intervention, I'm fine if it gets people on the road, but if it becomes a crutch, then it's just a burden on them as well as society. Because, you know, I saw some, you know, factoids that that could be like a multi-trillion dollar product and they're bringing it into like Medicaid and Medicare. So that means us taxpayers are going to be funding an obesity pill that everyone's going to be taking. And if they come to rely on it and addicted to it. Which will be the intention, let's be clear.

Exactly. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Exactly. Then ultimately, they're not, just because you're a strip, you get addicted to another drug and a strip some weight off you, does not mean you're getting healthier, right, Mike? Necessarily. Anyway, so I've talked a long time about intuition. So it has these nuanced aspects to it. There's the gut intuition, which is like instinctual life-saving. I've had numerous moments that my gut saved my life. Then the heart's intuition, which is empathic, where you really feel like someone's really suffering or you feel the energy, your team is really off and then you're compelled,

okay, I got to do something about this, right? There's like, um, the intuition of direct perception and that sense of like, oh yeah, I got to pivot, you know, in my business, like something bad is going to happen or, you know, like I've had this in the last couple of years where I'm, I need to shed some mold structures and to release some energy so that I can really set the stage for the next, you know, five or 10 years, because I've changed so much since when I started, core business, which is Sealfit. It's a very powerful, where I was going with that last piece, the world's barreling down and this seems to be a dark place

and exponential technology and AI and blah, blah, blah. And I do a lot of speaking to leaders and they're all like Einstein's quote, you know, we keep doing the same thing, expecting different results, but we're not getting them. Because the same thing is all that left, Western left kind of brain linear, like cause and effect type training, horizontal training. And what I teach is to have them tap into the kind of like the nonlinear, which is the nonphysical, which is the field of intuition and spontaneity and creativity. And that that is the next frontier of leadership and personal development because, you know, computers and AR are going to do a lot of that kind of linear stuff

for us, but it's not going to lead you to massive innovation or massive creativity. Those are human skills. But to tap into those skills, you've got to teach yourself how to do it. And that means you've got to slow down and be comfortable in the being space as opposed to the doing space. We have such a massive bias toward action and doing and putting points on the board and over saturating our task list here in the West. And we have to overcome that and start to do less things, do them with more attention and intention and to become more present and to do less things, do them with more attention and intention, and to become more present and to spend every day in silence.

One of my great quotes from another Indian sage guy named Poonjeb said, sitting in silence is the most important thing to do. Don't waste time not doing it. And that's where you're going to learn to develop these skills. Let's talk about the emotional mountain, which is extremely important because ultimately, every decision we make is emotional in the end. As de Bono said in his classic book,

I'm sure you've read it. I think many people listening have ever recommended it a number of times, Six Thinking Hats. He said, quote, when we have used thinking to make the map, our choice of route is determined by values and emotions. The problem, however, of course, is that very often emotions can dominate our thinking, emotions can lead us astray. What are your thoughts on how we can develop a healthier relationship with our emotions and ultimately have them lead us more in the right direction than the wrong

direction. And then, you know, you're going to get a different answer from me from like a classical emotion, something like an academic or psychologist. What we're dealing with here is energy. Thought is energy and emotions are energy. So, emotion is really just energy that has a particular experience and meaning that you place on it. Maybe even a wavelength, so to speak.

Or yeah, it could be like exactly. It's like a resonant wavelength or energy is flowing through you. But also, if you don't allow it to flow, you know, like a healthy individual who's got, you know, high self-esteem and maybe has done some emotional awareness development, you know, will still experience the full range of emotions, but they won't block the emotion. They don't have unhealthy meaning-making associated with emotions, right? So, we might experience the same wave of energy that in one person might be experienced as rage and another person that might be experienced as exciting anticipation of a pending event,

right? Or excitement about or just a wave of energy around the event that just happened that you're not going to label, you're just going to let it flow, right? Let it flow through you. Also, so it's important when we're talking about emotions to think that there's a healthy way to deal with emotions. You know, I want to say manage because management is like controlling, right? You deal with emotions by becoming aware of them and letting them flow because if you don't let them flow and you try to manage them, then they'll like really kind of lock down and then they'll become trapped. Now, don't get me wrong, right? If I'm experiencing an emotion in the middle of a firefight and that could be a debilitating moment, you know, takes me off my gun, then I will manage that emotion, right? I will park it, say not now, but then I'll come back

and address it and release that energy, right? And so, that's like a healthy way to deal with it. So, emotions are really just a different form of thought energy that are experienced in the body and the emotion can have a meaning or a story that comes along with it, that either triggers it, preceding it, or that trails it, or both. But it doesn't necessarily have to have that because a lot of times we're talking about energy from energy that gets corrupted by trauma in our early years, especially in our first, you know, three or four years of life, where we didn't have the intellectual capacity and the ego development to deal with it effectively. And so some strategy was created for survival mechanisms, which was very useful

at the time, which then later on was not so useful. So this is a very subtle, this we call this subconscious program. It's a very subtle form of emotional work, right? There may not be some great explosive feeling attached to co-dependence, right? Or to anxiety or feeling of worthlessness. You know, this is where like NUI are very, you know, like things that don't really feel like emotions but just like angst, a general like angst, not feeling whole in your skin, just, you know, being moody or, you know, it doesn't have to have the charge of like anxiety or even depression, right? So that type of emotion or work, you know, requires some real patience and courage, especially if there's

like trauma that, life-threatening trauma like physical, mental, and emotional or sexual abuse. And you know, frankly, that's more common than most people would ever like to believe or admit based upon my research and understanding. So it's a very vast subject. It kind of bleeds into the mental mountain as well as the intuitive mountain and even the spiritual mountain. It takes a lot of spiritual strength, right? In fact, probably the quickest healing program for emotional challenging situations is, you know, like forgiveness, like the Course of Miracles. Just like go right to the spiritual truth that you are spiritual being and that, you know, ultimately you are forgiven, you know, and even to forgive whoever you think harmed you. That releases a lot

of like truth releases the darkness of the trauma, right? When you bring, you know, those truth statements in and you believe them. So, you can use healing multidimensionally to really clean up the emotional baggage and emotional traumas. There's physical, like we know that physical movement like yoga, right? So, somatic movement, exercise, helps release and move that energy. Energy, emotion is energy in motion. So, you move your body, you begin to move the energy. You know, it's why, you know, a generally fit, healthy people who do a lot of movement and somatic work like yoga, martial arts, dance are usually emotionally more mature and healthy as well. So there's the physical

mountain and then we can use the mental mountain through meditation. The whole practice of mindfulness is to develop the capacity to separate from your thoughts. And so we begin through meditation to see that we are not, our thoughts are happening, but it's not, it's not my field of awareness where it used to be merged. Like I am this thought. And through meditation, you know, you create that space where you say, I am this, but those thoughts are happening over there. So I am not those thoughts. And that's the first step we call metacognition, to be able to be aware of your thinking and to think about your thinking. But then it becomes one of constant monitoring

or witnessing. And when it kind of locks into there, the combination of metacognition and witnessing, we begin to see the nature of our thoughts and the stories that are underpinning them. And even more and more of the subconscious becomes accessible to you. And so that's the way you use the mental mountain to really get into the emotional mountain work as you start to see the stories and you then you ask better questions like that. I don't think the story is serving me because every time you know this situation happens, I respond in this way and it leads to this terrible result. So why do I keep

doing that? Well, it's just who you are. No, it's not who you are. It's the story that was conditioned into this body mind. It's not who you are because who you are is the one that's watching that, that can now ask the question. And so from that space, right, you have incredible freedom to rewrite the story. I was just gonna say, I want to get to metacognition, but a random question that coming back to spirituality momentarily, because I'm genuinely curious as to your thoughts, if it's true that we are spiritual and that the essence of us is spiritual in some way, and if it's true that we've lived before and will continue to exist as separate from our body,

which it sounds like that's in line with what you're thinking. You've mentioned trauma a number of times and bad things can happen to us early in life. What about in earlier lives? If that's true, then who knows how long we've been around for and what we've experienced. We might have experienced trauma that is actually inconceivable. Forget about taking a bullet or something like that. Again, if you have a spiritual essence

that has been around for a long time, who knows what type of things we've gotten up to. You know what I mean? It's quite likely we've all experienced trauma that's inconceivable. And some of that energy can take lifetimes to kind of like heal from I think. And same if you were the perpetuator of that trauma on someone else, right? There's a good chance that you're going to be experiencing what you doled out in a future

life. You know, the yogis said and this is just like metaphor but talking about like it relates to what we're saying that it takes a thousand lifetimes to find yoga and what they mean by finding yoga is to find a path back to your spiritual center. That's all yoga is, it's a path, it's a process, it's a set of tools and processes and there's hundreds of different yogas out there. Each one has a different kind of take on, you know, what's the path and the Guru thinks is the right way because they're all kind of from that perspective, from that individual's perspective but the overarching Vedic philosophy of yoga which says there's a way to reunite

with your spiritual self, to reunite the ego or yoke the ego with the spirit. So it takes a thousand lifetimes to even be interested in that. That's interesting concept. All right, that was that question. Now quickly, I want to come back and we're coming up on time. If you have a few more minutes, I just wanted to ask about this metacognition, which I think is extremely important and underutilized. You commented quickly on what that is, but could you explain to people what that word means and why it's important? Cognition is to be aware of your thinking. Like, when you cognize something, you become

aware of it like, oh, I said, or you recognize something, you recognize it's like, oh, I'm forming an image of something I already known in the past, so I'm recognizing and recognizing. So metacognition is, and meta means more expansive view, right? Beyond the narrow, right? So metacognition is to have a broad perspective of the cognition that is what you take to be your mind, right? Your thinking. And so let's say, let's say level one thinking is just be merged with your thoughts. And most people merge with their thoughts are kind of wrecking balls, right? They're just all over the place, right? They are at the vicissitudes of their thinking. And they don't often don't do anything to

change the nature of thinking. And so they often, you know, they're just playing out the patterns. They're just acting impulsively and if they're conditioning and their consciousness level is low, because consciousness, you know, the more light and love you let through your mind and your heart, then the higher vibratory quality, higher conscious level you can say that you're carrying or you admit. And so, if you're a really low level conscious person, then you know, you're going to be in prison or you're going to be a violent criminal, right? Or you know, politician, you know, whatever.

You might, I was just going to say you might be president of the United States. I don't know. So metacognition is developing the capacity to go from that level one where, where I am my thoughts to be able to either just because the natural development that you have in your intellect or maybe your conscious level or you've turned to a practice like mindfulness where you through some discipline training you separate from the thinking and you see that oh I'm not my thinking I have a more meta cognition or cognizant. I can cognize that I'm not my thinking

from a more expansive perspective. Okay, so meta cognition, and that is still like from the mind, right? And so the mind is like a computer in one sense. So if you wanna partition your mind into hard drives, one way we talk about like the hard drives of the mind is the left hemisphere and right hemisphere. Left hemisphere is the rational decision maker, right hemisphere is the creative like contextual awareness and you know pattern recognizer. Well, it's

just like saying, you know, you have a hard drive you partition into. Well, metacognition is like creating a third partition, which is watching the patterns and how they interact of the other two and being able to begin to make some distinctions about the quality of your thinking. One of the most important distinctions is the litmus test of positive versus negative. Right? I mean, you've heard that the brain tends to be five times more negative than it is positive because it's all the conditioning. Like media times more negative than it is positive because it's all the conditioning. Like media is so negative, news is so negative, even our language

tends to be really negative and humor can be really negative. And then of course, we put a bunch of shit into our bodies that's negative and that, you know, just becomes a reinforcing loop. So metacognition leads you to see that, wow, I have a lot of negative internal dialogue and negative external dialogue. I I have a lot of negative internal dialogue and negative external dialogue. I've got a lot of negative information I'm allowing into my body and mind. And so then you can do something about that because as soon as you stop putting all that negative information in, it has a dramatic effect on your mood, your optimism, and your positive outlook and the energy that you carry and you admit to other people.

So I teach people in my community, it's like the first thing you do is get rid of your TV. I haven't had a TV, like a real TV, where I watch news or like TV shows with the commercials and like, I think it's almost 30 years. Social media too. I understand if you use it for your work but as just a private individual consumer, I just don't see the value.

I got back on Twitter slash X because I wanted to support Elon. I was curious where he's going with that. And I'm really glad he bought it. But I can't spend more than a minute on there. And I just skipped by all the crap. I'm like, oh, I don't want to let that in. Yeah. I just go straight to if replies, if people, you know, it's awesome. Sometimes people ask questions or they'll comment. So I use it to try to interact with people who care about what I'm doing,

but otherwise try to spend very little time on, on X. Although I, I like X actually, I like it more than the more visual, like, I don't, I'm not on Tik TOK, but Instagram because I like the text base because I like to read. So that is appealing. Yeah, I've seen some really interesting things where people like thread things over like to eight or 10 posts. And like they go really deep on some really interesting things, but there's so much negative crap too. Yeah, so metacognition is a very, very important skill. There's another way to look at this.

It's like for business people, you could say that like weekly planning where you kind of like look back at the week and say, oh, these were my goals. These are my results. This is what went well. This is what didn't go like the weekly debrief. That's a form of metacognition.

Yeah, yeah, it's good analogy too. Cause a lot of business people will say how they get stuck in the business and they forget to make time to work on the business. We've got to work on the business. That's a form of metacognition. Even like we promote a morning ritual and evening ritual. I'm sure you have very similar practices where, you know, morning ritual is to prepare to win the day and evening ritual is to make sure that you retain the victories and learn from them, but also clean up any kind of mess you might have made during the day, right? You have an opportunity before

you go to bed to like say sorry or to be like, oh, you know what I mean? Like that could have gone better. Let me take this action tomorrow to make sure I could, you know, fix that relationship. Yeah. What, what less can I learn here to use Jocko Willink's terminology, like the extreme ownership, like extreme personal, let me look at what I did here, regardless of whatever else. What was my role? Yeah, you always have the role. That's a form of metacognition, right? So you're, you're taking a look at

the day, and you're learning from it. Right? And you're saying, you know, that went well, and that didn't go well. So I'm going to change some behaviors, and I'm going to do better next time. Ultimately, we want to develop our minds to where this is in real time. You're able to, in real time, moderate and modify the thoughts and words and actions. Because we have such intense conditioning, and there's always going to be a pull to react based upon the conditioning. And metacognition allows you to, you know, like in the seals, we say pause, breathe,

think and then act. So pause, breathe is the preface, thinking is the metacognition. I'm looking at this thing in real time saying, oh, this is where I, this is the compulsive, impulsive thing that's about to come out of my mouth. And I see that that's not going to lead to the results I want. So I'm going to interdict that or intercept that and I'm going to shift my mind to a different, more positive thing to say or do or, you know, respond. And then you deliver that. And with training, this can become lightning fast. With it takes training, though, I was just was just gonna say and I can say personally

I in some context I'm probably good at it in other contexts I'm not so good at it when you're when you're building a house that's been going on for two years and you just want it to be over and you're sick of hearing. Yeah or you know if you have some substance you know for me you know when I used to have yeah some wine or something it it would like with my metacognition, let's just say. That's funny. Well, I know we're coming up on time here. We got to most of what was on my outline and that was great.

A lot of great ideas. Really enjoyed the conversation. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you would like to share with the listeners? Again, the meta message here is don't fear, right? But recognize that you create your world, right? Gandhi had it right. You can be the change you wanna see in the world.

If you don't like what's going on out there with all the craziness, then work on the craziness within yourself and you will see the world begin to change around you, right? And the way to do that is to slow down, do less better. Thank you, Kil Newport, that's his thing. Do less better.

Instead of doing things right, doing the right things, that. Do last better. Do instead of doing things right, doing the right things, that concept. I mean, sure you wanna do things right, but you gotta make sure you're doing the right thing. And do fewer things, right? There's fewer right things, right? There's a lot of wrong things that you can do and a lot of people do.

But figure out what the right things, and those right things are always gonna be aligned with that purpose, that archetypal drive, which then you can create a mission around and how you're going to serve and how you're going to be and show up in the world. So, find the things that align with that and then choose wisely and then radically focus on those and then say no to pretty much everything else. And recommit or commit to a daily practice of being in silence and develop some skillful means for drawing being able to take yourself there. And so we teach box breathing. Box breathing

is a multifaceted practice. It takes people out of arousal through arousal control. Then it brings to develop, starts to develop attention control and concentration like my Zen training did. And then it opens up naturally into mindful awareness, the ability to develop that metacognition. Ultimately, it will lead to witnessing as well if you stick with it long enough. So take on a practice of box breathing and sitting in silence every morning and every evening. If it's only five minutes, that's fine, but do it every single day and report back to Mike in 60 days. And I guarantee if you do that every single day, ideally 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening, but it's the daily consistency.

Just like training in the gym, right? If you're coaching someone, Mike, and you said, yeah, we're going to get you your 400 pound deadlift, so you're going to go in and train on Saturdays, right? The chances of the guy getting to the 400 pound deadlift are 0.0. Unless he starts with the 400 pound deadlift. Yeah, unless he starts with 400. Exactly. No, no. It's, but daily, right? Daily effort, consistent effort. Same way with meditative practices. So start a daily consistent practice and the path to the stillness you're looking for is always found through the breath. So start with the practice like box breathing.

And we have a box breathing app. You can learn more. Go to unbealablemind.com is our website for our training like this. We have a 30-day challenge. Yeah, unbealstmind.com slash challenge is where I teach the box breathing and a lot of the principles we talked about, I have kind of like, it's a short,

it's just 10, 15 minutes a day, all video based with some exercises. Really it's powerful 30 day way to get, you kind of like jump started in this whole five month training. Love it, that's great. And again, the new book is uncommon. So if people wanna check that out,

they can get it wherever they want to buy a book and social media. Anything else you'd like to tell people where they can find more of you and more of your work? I'm kind of like you. I'm out there, but I don't personally interact much, even though you might get a response that looks like it's for me. So I'm just very, you know, I'm very transparent about that. It's not. It's my social media team. But we use, I have LinkedIn. That's one place I actually do respond to people. I have a LinkedIn profile. It's pretty active. I'm on Facebook and obviously Instagram and X. I got a YouTube channel and I've got my own podcast, The Mark Devine Show, which is on Apple, Spotify, et cetera. You can learn all about that at markdevine. Show, which is on Apple, Spotify, etc. You can learn all about that at markdevine.com, which is my personal website. Perfect. Thanks again, Mark. Great conversation.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Mike. There are very few supplements that I would say everyone should be taking. Most supplements are very supplemental by definition. They're not essential. An exception, however, a supplement that I do think everyone should at least strongly consider taking is creatine. Now you probably know that creatine is the most studied molecule in all of sports nutrition. You probably know that hundreds of studies confirm that it can safely boost muscle and strength gains

and improve muscular endurance. It can reduce muscle damage and soreness from exercise, helping you recover faster from your training. It can help you preserve lean mass and strength while you are restricting your calories during a cut. So you can maximally improve your body composition when you're cutting, which is the goal. It's not weight loss per se, it's fat loss and muscle gain or at least muscle retention. However, what you might not know is that there is new research suggesting that creatine also supports various aspects of brain health and cognition and that's why experts are now starting to think of creatine as less of a fitness supplement for meatheads and more of a

must-have supplement for everyone like vitamin D or vitamin K or omega three fatty acids a few supplements that I also think everyone should strongly consider taking and all that is why I just and finally I should have done this a long time ago this was this was a mistake but I just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement or my sports nutrition company Legion has just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement or my sports nutrition company, Legion, has just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement, which you can find over at bylegion.com slash creatine.

That's B-U-Y, Legion.com slash creatine. And in case you're wondering why creatine monohydrate versus another maybe more exotic form, or at least exotic sounding form, like creatine citrate or creatine malate. It's because creatine monohydrate is the most studied form. It is the gold standard in the scientific literature

of creatine's effectiveness. And contrary to what many marketers would have you believe, research has also shown that a number of these other more quote unquote exotic forms of creatine actually perform worse than creatine monohydrate. And in case you are wondering about the micronized part, that simply means that the creatine molecules have been broken down into very small particles, up to 20 times smaller than regular creatine monohydrate crystals. And the primary benefit is solubility. It mixes in water better. And it also can be easier on your stomach. Some people can get an upset stomach from creatine

and they often don't get an upset stomach from micronized creatine. There also are some claims about enhanced absorption with micronized creatine monohydrate faster and more efficient uptake by muscle cells. But I think that is mostly speculation. So the bottom line is creatine is not going to help you pack on brain shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days.

It's not going to add another plate or two to the bar, but it is going to help you train harder. It's going to help you recover better. It's going to help you recover better, it's going to help you gain muscle and strength faster. And contrary to the supplement fake news, it's not bad for your kidneys, it doesn't cause men to lose their hair and it won't make you bloated. So if you want to see for yourself, head over to bylegion.com slash creatine, Bi le gi o n.com slash creatine, pick up a bottle, take five grams a day, if you are mostly after the performance and body composition benefits, and take 10 grams per day if you want to also maximally

benefit your brain health and cognition, because that is the amount that research is suggesting is optimal for both body composition, physical performance, and mental health or brain health and cognition and see how it goes. Well I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful and if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you.

And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email Mike at muscle for life comm muscle for life comm and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future I read everything myself I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback so thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.