Ep11 - Creating the Unbeatable Mind of a Navy SEAL with Mark Divine

[Music] hello good afternoon folks welcome to another episode of head first with Dr Hill today's guest is Mark Divine a human performance specialist and also the author of unbeatable mind and way of the seal I think you have a few other things going on welcome Mark thanks for being here today thanks Dr Hill pleasure so um mark up from the San Diego area um for those of us who don't know uh you're rather eclectic and and long history can you give us a sense of what it is you're doing and and and how you've come to uh where you are now yeah sure again thanks for having me here yes so um I am a trainer and a performance coach okay uh generally speaking I'm also an entrepreneur I've started six different businesses and I'm a retired Navy SEAL 20 year career I retired as a commander in 2011 so I'm a leader and a trainer of of seals and special operators um and intriguingly before my Navy SEAL career I was was a CPA someone collected back when you think of that so uh really hardcore mental effort and really hardcore physical of course being being a seal isal mental yeah yeah interestingly um maybe maybe um it'd be informative to go back and and explain kind of why I got in the seals and what happened so I I kind of started my own developmental path in athletics like most of you know most listeners here are you know athletes and there is obviously a physical mental transfer in the in domain right so you're training your mind through discipline and through you know I was a competitive swimmer so there was some breath work there and and a lot of concentration work and so obviously the spillover and the neuroplastic effect of exercise is now well understood of course in the in the 70s and 80s it was just experienced subjectively sure sure yeah and um at any rate so but I um when I went down to New York to NYU to get my MBA and working with Arthur Anderson at the time oh wow yeah to and you know working full-time and getting my CPA know studying and passing that exam I also got involved in a martial art okay and it which one it was called SED karate SEO oh yeah okay I've heard of that from the East Coast so SED was founded by uh Grandmaster Tadashi Nakamura who was brought to the United States uh by masuyama who was the founder of k k Kenai K Kenai which is a pretty intense you know kind of tournament fighting and um system and Nakamura was more into the developmental aspect the you know the karate do part which was you know that karate could be used to develop you know a complete human being one who's got a strong value set who could be a leader and that it was for you know was for women he had a program for blind and disadvantaged kids he had a program for you know for free which is nonprofit for those who can afford it and then there were guys like me who were like really into the karate hardcore aspect but we didn't necessarily need to go to tournaments and fight I wasn't in it for that I was in it for the developmental you know aspect of becoming a better person that was fascinating because he understood the power of combining Zen you know concentration training concentration meditation with the movement okay so that was very formative for me okay and so through four years getting my show on I did practically as much meditation as I did fighting you know as you know the hardcore work so he he combined the yin and the Yang inner and the outer anyway so during this per I also kind of because of all a lot of time sitting on the bench I had the The Epiphany or The Awakening that the CPA path was not for me I finished it though finished CPA finished my MBA great the same month that I got those degrees and that certificate I was on the train to officer candidate school because I had decided that I wasn't meant for that career path I was meant to be a warrior and a leader you know in in an intense and you were in the Navy at the time no oh so so you you you enrolled in I I got um an offer through officer K school as one two people selected that year to go to off Canada school with a guarantee to go through SEAL training after wow wow so anyways what's why this is interesting is so I go to OCS I Blaze through that I go to buds when I show up at buds basic underwater demolition SEAL training there's 185 people there and you know there was something a little bit different by the way I was navigating myself day in and day out I couldn't quite put my finger on it right away but it started um being aware of it as people were just quitting at things that I thought were r mundane you know what I mean like yeah we're doing a you know three mile ocean swim and it's bitter cold but yeah so what it's going to be over right right and just kick stroke and glide and you know I was doing all the things I learned in Zen and all the things I learned in competitive swimming MH and you know that events over then you know what's the next thing okay gear up for that you know prepare for it just get through it then what's you know so I was able to like chunk the the process down in these really small tasks and I was able to control my mind and my emotions because of the training that I had sitting on the bench and through the martial arts and through that the N9 Monon or was six months buds in then sqt in my buzz class of those 185 19 of us graduated oh wow and I graduated as the honor man or number one grad in my class and it was because of all that formative training I had so you're bring equinity into physical training essentially yeah absolutely I every day was just treated like a um you know just another challenge and I also knew the butt structors were there try to probe and you know poke for weaknesses and and that if you let them in then you lose right and so it required a significant amount of um mental emotional control that um you know is considered unordinary today even but for those of us who had trained in the martial art with that Zen focus it was actually quite ordinary because that's what the training does it trains mental and emotional control interesting anyway so that that was a long time ago you know cuz I that was in 1990 but that stuck with me obviously such a formative event it changed you know you can imagine all the neuroplasticity effects that's going on when you go through SEAL training every day you're doing something really challenging really new you've never done it before and you got to master it really quickly y you know jumping swimming diving shooting running leading everything extremely uncomfortable and so the accelerant effect on your on your brain's capacity to to uh you know the complexity and the recognized patterns was amazing so I came out of that a different person and the one week in there that was like really amazing was the hell week right okay so hell week is 140 hours is six days straight of training non-stop Around the Clock no sleep oh my goodness right and so you're dealing with sleep deprivation you're dealing with exha few days in things must get weird yeah it gets really interesting and what I found during hell week was the the power of the mind to start to take over so so if you if you think of um you know just traditional wisdom would be that you know you as you get more and more over tired that your body's going to start breaking down and you're going to start you know just making really dumb mistakes and that is true you do so the seals don't understand that okay in order for this to make sense we've got to have the tasks that they're performing be fairly simple like row this boat around Coronado Island for 16 miles okay fairly simple task just do it you know what I mean stroke stroke stroke but a lot of weird things happened during those six you know 16 miles a lot of hallucinations and a lot of weird things so it's a matter can you control yourself to get through that task Y and um what I found was after day three most of my class was quitting by you know by that time so we had by the time we got to hell week which was week seven for us I think we went from 185 down to like 90 80 or 90 and then by the time we got to day three of hell week we were down to like 40 people wow really separating the wheat from the chaffs at any rate what was interesting about that one segment of training was that I started to feel myself get stronger by the third day and then I started to actually put muscle mass on my body by day four instead of decompensating mentally and physically like people were degrading and decompensating because I was able to keep energy flowing and keep breathing and stay focused and even though you know I experienced sleep deoration just like everyone else there was something going on because of the way I trained that I was able to convince my mind that this was a new normal and that hey this is all it's all good yeah and we're going to just you know we're going to get stronger we're going to make it through this and my body responded one of our sayings that sealit is where your mind leads your body will follow yeah and it's actually the flip side of that is true because if where your body leads your mind will follow when it's untrained and so if you get an injury and your and your mind starts to focus on the injury then you go weak you know kinus tells us that we'll go weak because now we're thinking about something negative we're thinking you know we're thinking um energetically uh sending signals of weakness and of degradation right so you can overcompensate or counter that by interrupting that and this you know so pain management pain science has already proved this right if you if you don't focus on the pain you focus on something else eventually the pain goes away because it's just a just a neurological signal sure sure right or a chemical signal anyways I went quite long in that but that that um that experience as being a seal combined with being a martial artist and then later on I got into yoga starting with aanga yoga great you know I'm a big fan of that I know terrific terrific practice uh and asanga was created to taught to PAB Pabi Joyce who was the guy who brought it to America four athletes and warriors oh really I didn't realize yeah it was it was taught to him by chrish machari and it was taught in a very specific way that's why aanga is very militant like even you know keeping your feet together and standing at attention y that was to teach young athletes and Young Warriors right and it's a very aggressive M you know almost martial artist like yog cly can be intense um anyway so I I enjoyed the physical aspect of yoga but then once I really understand stood the full scope uh as it was taught you know by patanjali and you know the the ancient yogis around mental development as a science of mental development integration then that that was opened me up to A Whole New World as well and so I've been able to kind of integrate um the best of best techniques for for developing developing the mind body and spirit from the martial arts and yoga combined it with my Navy SEAL experience which also you know um had a lot of like hacking tools and we're always looking for the best and you know what's the most effective way to shortcut and to get to get to learning quickly so you essentially found as you were going through this ridiculously intense training that something was different and you had other resources brought in from other training you done right I I assume you've you've you've taken those perspectives out now into training other people right so that was a natural progression for the warrior you know first you're the warrior athlete and then you're the warrior leader then the Statesman and then you know you got to be a teacher and so um I got into teaching in 2007 through sealfit and uh that was where um I started training seal candidates Special Operations Green Berets even foreign you know a lot of Brits and Canadians and acas those types helping them learn what I knew to be effective to get through their training and to become better Warriors what I call a world Centric Warrior and that's a warrior who's who's not going to get trapped in limited thinking in even in the midst of a firefight or in the midst of a a very complex you know vuka environment volatile uncertain you know chaotic and ambiguous which that term vuka means and so um I started training them and then also interestingly enough Dr Hill I had a lot of entrepreneurs start to come and say Hey you know I wasn't able to go down that route or I chose not to go down that route to be a seal but I'm extremely interested so I want to test myself I want to learn what they learn Y and it seems like you can teach us that and so I said yes I can and so opened it up to entrepreneurs and individuals so SEAL Fit serves pretty much anyone who wants to come and challenge themselves for the past decade or so is that yeah 10 years and so it's it's very physically demanding though it's like an integrated training where it's like you got to start with the physical and then you you know end even more physical but all the mental training is layered through that and it's very team oriented M MH anyway so um one thing I will say is that not everyone's um ready for that level of physical sure Fitness or physical challenge yeah I spoke at your unbeatable conference last year and and I was invited to come down early for the week and do all the workouts and I looked at the schedule I was like oh I'm busy oh oh well sorry sorry that's a pretty common thing I like I want to get ready for a year before I come to your program exactly I need to work out hardcore before I can handle the the workout vacation so I I I kind of acknowledged that and so I said well I still want to be able to serve you know folks who maybe not think that they're ready even though I might think they're ready because I know how to scale and and bring people through that process so we created I wrote unbeatable mind and created the unbe Mind program which is you know the the annual conference is the one you came to sure and so that takes a different approach so that approach so where a SEAL Fit appro starts with the physical and then ramps it up from there and layers the rest of the work in unbeatable mind starts with the mental okay and then you're it's up to you how you add the physical or or maybe you know you already have some physical for some people it's yoga for some people it's taichi for some people they they're inspired to get off their butt and start you know a CrossFit program or or you know boot camp of some sort but that's really on you sure I'll give you some guidance on how to fuel and how to move and stuff like that but um I really focus on the mental development and then the emot and then intuitive and then what I call the kakuro which is the spiritual side which is really about grounding yourself in a powerful personal ethos you know defining once and for all what your spirit Soul what your you know what your unique offer to the world is yeah so so what sort of things do people do when they come you know become an unbeatable mind or start engaging with that with you well we um it's Prim primarily delivered through an online course which is self-directed and then what we do is and we also have a coaching program so now we've laided on top of that a coaching program where um everyone will come meet with us once a month and work with a coach one of my certified coaches during the um you know the months in between those four periods and what we do is um we we layer what we call the five mountains and we have them develop a five Mountain training plan MH and the five Mountain training plan is to to make some movement or improve M on their physical mental emotional intuitional and spiritual selves or lines of development or capacities and and there's things that we ask them to do weekly um monthly quarterly and then you know annually or every 12 to 18 months and so we we kind of develop this whole Matrix of what you know what you're going to be able to do what you're going to do in those five mountains physically mentally emotionally intuitionally spiritually every day MH you know once a week exact once a quarter and so the daily might be things like your your morning and evening ritual we have integrated training the integrated training is going to include things like breath work concentration a little bit of movement integration of movement breath and you know and sound maybe um you know reading obviously journaling a lot of the things but we bring it together in a a nice package and the morning ritual is is forward-looking so we we help people begin to take control of time m to look at time differently so the we have everyone focus on the longterm and then set the longterm aside and then just focus on the day great and I learned that from Nakamura one day one lifetime an entire lifetime of learning entire lifetime of living is exists in that day if you're present enough and intentional enough for your action intention not momentum right so the morning routine is let's connect with our five mountains let's do something to integrate them and to refine them training training and practice yep but do it in a way that's going to prepare to win the day so we visualize the day so that's one of the practices visualization we visualize yourself going through the day all the key inflection points podcast with Dr Hill boom it's already one in my mind right uh whatever is next right we see those we see yourself Victorious you see it happening you've already you know as you know from visualization training you've already experienced it so once you hit it then there's a reference point a neurological learning better incorporation yeah so we have the visualization is forward looking uh the intention is forward looking the intention is what is the you know one thing I need to do today to get me closer to fulfilling my ethos which is in align with my vision and my purpose in life if I can accomplish that one thing then I'm a Victorious Warrior you know what I mean I may end up doing five other things but that one thing is that big thing that's going to move the dial I'm driving for that right anyway so that's one example of how we do that now another one is we you know we're very serious about physical training but we don't look at it as physical training we look at it as integrated training okay so when we go to the CrossFit gym or we do our sealfit workout or even if you just go to a spin class we're not doing it because we just want to look good in the bathing suit or we're trying to lose 5 pounds those are really really weak motivators and weak goals and um we also are doing it in a way that's very different than other people so we're layering in all the skills I call them the four big ones are breath training mhm managing your mental dialogue which is a concentration and a mindfulness practice in and of itself right uh imagery what kind of imagery are you going to use how are you going to use your Imaging faculties of your mind while you're doing your training before during and after and then task orientation how are you keeping your mind remember when I mentioned through buds you know I was just focused on one task at a time chunking these things yeah so you chunk it down so every workout you practice that okay so instead of going like oh my God I got an hour of you know spin no you're just to chunk it down however you want to break it out depending upon what you do for CrossFit it's like you know I've I'm going to do five rounds of these three different exercise with this rep scheme just focus on one rep scheme at a time don't forget you know forget about the rounds forget about everything else just one rep scheme at a time give yourself a little you know Victory lap in between that could be just setting the kle ball down and doing three deep breaths or something like that you know what I mean so chunking it down andac the state between those chunks correct and so now we're integrating you know breath okay has a a a mental emotional even spiritual training capacity right um you're managing your internal dialogue right so task you know mental focusing and concentration right focusing and concentration so that's mental training um shifting where you're using you know Shifting the region of your brain that's doing the work right so shifting from Cog you know cognitive you know analysis to Imaging and being able to go back and forth with that mhm like visualization and right like shifting so I'm I'm going to project or I'm going to reflect right and then I'm going to go back to my you know neocortex and process sure and so being able to to be able to move your attention around to different geographic regions of your brain and access very efficiently and effectively those different aspects or different ways that your brain works is very interesting and then the actual task orientation helps with your fear management and emotional control because I'm not I'm not allowing the whole totality of this challenge overwhelm me I've chunked it down to these little tiny bite-sized chunks which are easily accomplishable MH and so instead of the Gap being huge you I have these little tiny gaps to step over along the way and it really helps with uh momentum so this has been informed by your experience of being successful through these things then sort of regularizing the process for other folks that may not have right had all that Foundation going into a stream thing like this right um I imagine you're still adding in new things you're still learning you know your life it's a constantly learning of process and evolving like we want to use what works we discard what doesn't and also one size doesn't fit all so what we with our clients we say okay so I might you know offer you 25 or 30 different practices you're not going to do them all you know at the same time it's just like what I've learned actually with yoga one of the challenges I have with ranga is is you do this one right sequence until you're ready to move on to the next sequence and it's one size fits all or everyone who's willing to take the challenge but ultimately chrish macharia taught that yoga just like what I'm trying to teach with unb mind is a personalized practice yep and the tools need to be uh you know thoughtfully adapted to your lifestyle to your body type to your psychology to your stage of life to your goals and so what that's what we teach is my five Mountain training plan is going to be very different than yours it's going to be very different than someone else's so the tools have to be you know thoughtfully adapted and then how you use them for your morning to win for the day is different than how you're going to use them in the evening ritual which is going to be to seal that win in to learn from your mistakes and to prepare for the Sleep Cycle that's great so you've had active uh high level performing military and and intelligence folks you've had entrepreneurs who else engages with the unbeatable way of doing things who I'm really EXC excited to work with young adults I think there's a huge opportunity with Millennials and and actually teens and so I've got some excuse me some partners that I'm working with that um we're going to try to be you know bring this training we are going to bring this training to a younger population I already have some teachers who use the philosophy and the methods in their schools and whatnot and um through my new courage Foundation we're working with disadvantaged populations troubled population so this is something that's really mindboggling um but there are about 10 million adult age men who are fully capable of work who are out of the workforce right now and they're not even being counted in the unemployment roles because they've stopped looking right many of these are former um um former you know prisoners yeah former cons people have gone from because they can't they can't get a job right they they're not hired by hirable by any governmental agency which is a that's wrong that needs to be changed half the employers and then of course most corporate employers are not going to hire yeah there's a push in California now to remove that check box from applications that says have you been convicted have you you know it it needs to happen I'm glad California's leading the way because now we got 10 million xcon who can't find work and this is why we have this major opioid addiction and you're seeing the suicide rate going up for for both white and black males of middle age it's a huge problem so I want to um we're working with the prison fell ship to get unb mind into prisons and then to work with children and prisoners now I don't know how we'll be able to access this group that I'm talking about so this is more of a generational thing right sure but I'd love to work with also those 10 million you know what I mean yeah this reminds me of what Noah LaVine did the the Dharma punks or against the stream guy he when he discovered meditation one way that he sort of turned around and and uh brought it back was he started doing mindfulness in the prisons right to give people more control over that suffering that they're stuck in sounds like doing the same thing for for that long-term suffering we leave people in after they're discharged from prisons well that true but also you know because mindfulness is baked into unbe mind you have all the benefits that you know a meditative practice Yeah brings but also the benefits of accelerated learning and what we're trying to do is vertical development instead of horizontal just horizontal horizontal development is you know I ACW new skills and then I become more skillful let's say it's Stress Management or something like vertical development is not only do I ACR those skills at this stage of development but I also have skills to elevate myself to a whole another stage of development where I'm going to see the world in in a radically more integrative um manner sounds like um agency increased agency is one of the things that will come from that when you start discovering where your weaknesses are where you have better scaffolding for visioning you know progress more than just maintaining your life and whatever it is sounds like a degree of agency degree of of of that's one that's one way to look at it so you're going to have more control over the the decisions you make because you're going to understand how the brain works you're gonna be able to avoid all those biases and traps that you we're learning a lot about these days you know because our our mind is wired to make a lot of mistakes and to jump to conclusions and this is why a lot of these guys end up in or women too end up in prisons because of one stupid mistake right you know and those are either emotional or some sort of rded P pattern behavior and we spend a lot of time in our training at SEAL Fit and unbe mind is helping people expose those patterns and those behaviors and then to eradicate them and to override them with that unbeatable mind process of of uh you know controlling the the mind and emotion but not in a way like you know that that word doesn't you know has a potential negative connotation like I'm not doing mind control right right right I'm trying to teach people to take control of unproductive thinking patterns or even worse downright negative and and destructive patterns you know in the case of this population we were just talking about and then replacing it with a a whole new you to use your term a whole new scaffolding for how to use your thinking processes but also to expand the capacity for what you perceive as the mind right and so our our concept of of of Mind goes well beyond brain you know and now research is proving you know the heart mind the belly mind the biome we look at the whole body as part of your mind system as well as kind of or around it right there's an energy transfer when you start to tap into an integrative approach you know to use your whole brain plus your whole mind well that requires um you to start to look at your emotional life because the emotions is part of your mind system right it's the it's the felt experience of mind sure yeah okay and so emotional and mental development we use some of the same tools we use we use breath we use visualization we use internal dialogue we'll think about the feeling State dialogue right y so we use those tools to try to essentially wire you for more effective mental emotional intuitive and spiritual integration which then tends to unlock like that SCA scaffold allows a greater capacity right so that agency you said but then it also allows a deeper uh connection with other humans and connections that expand out so you you move through most believe it or not even though it's a a relatively early developmental stage most people I would shouldn't say most but many people still get stuck in uh somewhere between self centered and ethnocentric you know mindsets MH and so like my football team is the best in my country is the best my you know Y and it's a rare individual who can expand beyond that to more of a world Centric now doesn't mean you don't still love your football team and love your country but you understand that hey this other person has everybody's right to love their football team and love their country and have their views yeah and so you're able to kind of meet them where they're at and still connect and and even dare I say love them as a that's that EMP empathetic theory of Mind validation of someone else's perspective kind of stuff right so that and so the word perspective is huge so part of this training is not only are we expanding the capacity of the mind body system horizontally but we're elevating vertically where you can take greater and greater perspective more integrated perspectives it it is really incredible to see people EXP breakthrough after breakthrough in this training you know and I get testimonials practically every week um it's very cool very cool so this is the unbeatable Mind program and sounds like it's a just to recap a year-long sort of training and coaching program it has you have a book and you also have this is it a one week or is it a longer uh every year we have a coaching program and then we have this annual Summit okay which is just three three and a half days and we're you know contemplating other models um one of my favorite um trainings at sealfit was a three-day Leadership Academy and I spent hours and hours and hours and all see all unbeatable mind was born out of sealfit yeah right and so it's still in sealfit but where I'm taking sealfit is to be more a little bit more simple model to just train physical mental toughness because I find that it's really designed more for warriors and athletes and so unbal mind I'm I'm taking all the real Rich five Mountain integrated stuff out of sealit and and it rested on be mind but I might bring back you know a deep Leadership Academy sound those things are very complimentary folks could get a lot out of doing both SEAL Fit and the unbeatable mind yes climbing their five M for sure but like I said not everyone wants to do barbell work in the hardcore not everyone can I mean with disability um this is one thing that I tend to really focus on is doesn't really matter where you're where you're at you can always make change shift happens and you can exactly you can always uh uh improve capacity improve goals improve resources so yeah exactly and so also with enbal mind we'll have um the the capacity or the structure to experiment with some of the you know the cool things that are coming out of technology I was talking about the Halo earlier like I want to experience that and test that for the seal Community um just an electro stem of your movement sure area of your mind right and stuff like neuro feedback and if it fits um then I'm okay with a hack as an accelerated develop mental tool but it doesn't replace the training and the practice right uh it's such a great point so you know I'm involved with neur feedback mindfulness yoga and neut tropics and I always think neut Tropics sort of fall into that last category more paliative more shortterm and they can mask deficits but not necessarily change you over time right so when folks come in and work with me one-on-one they're always say you know they sort of know me as the Nur feedback and neut Tropic guy and I tend to tell let's let's hold off on the neut tropics for a couple of months let's see where we can sh shift your bottleneck Baseline capacity and once the Baseline is obviously different then you can sort of cosmetically go in and and tweak with neut tropics and things yeah and I look at neut tropics I I take a product called qualia oh sure yeah yeah Daniel shusen actually was here a couple days ago in the studio so it's it's probably like the the Cadillac or the yeah the mercedesbenz of of neut Tropics at any rate I just look at it more like um you know like if you got a highly functioning automobile like let's say you've got a vintage you know Mustang or something like that y you're you're going to be tweaking it practically every day right right you're going to constantly be changing oil be constantly you know making sure that it's polished up so to me the New Tropics are kind of a long-term you know maintenance program for the mine sure it's not going to it's not like it's not going to build a new engine for the mine right right and but it's going it's going to help you keep it from degrading because you're keeping all the synapses yeah and all all the true I would say true neut Tropics um are neuroprotective and have good long-term safety and tend to be anti-aging there a lot of things out there that are labeled neut Tropics that I think are not that are that are more marketing driven caffeine would be a caffine not um even mafal I'm not a big fan um I I think it's a it's marketing more than reality that's neut Tropic and I also took it for a while uh I I had ADHD and I took it for a couple of weeks and ended up in the hospital with head to toe hives uh as a systemic reaction from adap God and with very mild cognitive effects turns out looking in the literature mapel with people who have ADHD the side effect profile is several times the background uh risk no kidding so if you have some attention that's soft and you're using things that aren't really suited for you you may provoke side effects and to me that's exactly the wrong thing to get out of a neut Tropic it should only provide long-term health so right right so we're getting now into um another topic that I like which is um aging I'm a gerontologist and I tend to focus on Aging throughout the life of course you know from uh prenatal to to to grave uh so to speak um are you seeing some older adults come through your programs and get something out of it it's unreal like we I think the oldest has been 65 who've made it through our 50-hour course oh wow I'm not sure I could do that yeah and uh we had one guy um who was 63 who did it twice he made it uh 25 hours the first time and then you know simply his body just said no more yeah and then he trains some more you know these guys are training hard though you know it's not something you just jump into but right um and you know these guys are on the outer edge of capacity for that age I would say but more more you know and the 65y old guy who came through you know you look at him and you think and you think um 50 yeah yeah no right and so I think you know probably 50 is the new 65 or something like that let's new I'm 46 so let's hope 50 is the new you know I'm sure you've talked about this before long ity is you know self-management of the mindbody system yeah and yeah there will be Nanobots some day that kind of help that you know there I'm fascinated with technology and you know the prevailing wisdom right now is if you're 50 and you can hold out for 30 years you have a good chance of extending your life for buy another 30 years or to buy another 30 with at least where the technology will be but you know because of my um yoga background I also have a slightly different take on longevity because I have seen you know five year yogis and martial artists who look like they're 50 yeah and you're like how the heck yep now they've eliminated all stress from their life they meditate for six or eight hours a day they have a daily movement practice they eat extraordinary light this is something that's kind of evolved with me because we have you know we we teach some nutrition and stuff and people always ask me so what's your what are your fueling plan like and I said well I don't eat that much yeah right I think my training and all the work I've done is just like my body has gotten to this point where it just knows what it needs and doesn't crave anymore right right right so I have an ample in the morning now that's a fun new product I've seen those on on Facebook ads and things these days it's basically food Whole Food in the bottle how does it taste I it's very good actually yeah I mean it's it's it's not like you know chocolate cake or anything like that but it's it's actually really good that's great just Add Water Shake it and you got a full meal with carbohydrates protein fat all from things like macadamia nuts and really healthy kale and whatnot so that's become my go-to for like my morning SL meal and it carries me throughout the day that's great believe it or not and I I'll I might have a snack in the afternoon like an AC bowl or something like that and then super light dinner you know just some salad or something so you're trying to get to that extra 30 40 50 years of uh yeah I just don't eat that much and I I do intermittent fasting so my last meal is at 7:00 p.m. got I don't eat again until like 10:00 a.m. next day of course caloric restriction is the only documented proven life extension that seems to work right with rats and you know SEALS or Lab Rats basically for the US government you know yeah only about 10% of mouse and rat studies translate effectively to humans but right caloric restriction has been documented now in humans as one of the few things that we can show that activates aert one Gene and causes that hormetic where you stress the body and it responds with a healing sort of response is that long-term um or fast or both it's um it was long-term caloric restriction it was over a decade or more they showed some decreased age markers decreased inflammatory cyto kindes like pelir things like that you know I think the reality is that we eat more than we need to simply because of our culture and the availability of food and that's was something that that Ben talks about Ben Greenfield and my friend Rob wolf is that the bioavailab food and the tastiness of it you know we're we're wired to want that well it was it was rare you know 20,000 years ago ago that we had Rich sources of free carbohydrates that gave us energy at will we had to sort of you know exert to get carbohydrates right and now we'd walk into Whole Foods and even even a good Supermarket you can walk out with horrible not much exertion to very little fighting fighting through all the soccer moms in La maybe in whole food but beyond that it's not not done too bad yeah so caloric restriction intermittent fasting you know um making sure the sleep is really sound all these things um of course what you eat is important as well so I'm more ketogenic you know I kind of flow between ketogenesis and glycolytic avoid spiking that insulin basically right exactly and then daily training daily movement if there's I don't think there's a day go by that I don't move my body in some capacity I'm not always doing some hardcore thing you know so hardcore is four times a week and then the rest of the time is is you know yoga Marshall movements you know uh paddling you I've got an Outrigger Canoe or long walking the beach with my wife you know so and every one of these training sessions is integrative and so I'm I'm looking at like like I talked about earlier from the standpoint I'm not just getting out I'm actually doing I'm stacking I'm stacking uh benefits that's great and um and then of course the main thing is the Mind youthful mind yeah you know so I there's times where because I don't focus on it where I forget how old I am how old are you might ask I forgot 5 I'm 53 okay that's great that's great but 53 years old and I can routinely smack down the you know the the 18 or 19 year old seal candidates who come to reminded me I I did um iido for many years and um one of the teachers teachers Kanai Sensei was this little old Japanese man who was in his late 70s and he had a stroke and so he he had some spasticity his balance was off he would come in and teach for a for a um you know two-day conference or something and he'd kind of stagger up to the mat and then the moment he put his hands on somebody he's flying through the air gracefully and and all that learning that you know 50 60 70 years of his life over learning all these movement even with impairments he still had a lot of resilience and so it's not like we aren't going to get brain injuries or you know some age related cognitive decline or some some loss of muscle mass or decrease of bone density as we get old but to some extent we can offset those things it sounds like a lot of the things you're doing would Shore up and and I think so I mean some of the key things uh because this is such a fascinating subject for me as well as probably listeners um I believe that resistance training is really important mus you know if you have muscular Mass you want to maintain that absolutely right because that mass is it means blood flow y nutrients energy right so that's one is being able to you know doesn't matter whether you're doing a 400 pound deadlift but just move some weight yeah you know several times a week um another is energy management Prana Yama okay so learning to work with the breath as life force instead of as just oxygen and carbon dioxide okay say say more about that okay so the way the way that I do this and the way I was taught is to add intention and and visualization so that because you are every time we breathe you're you're drawing in life force so it's like the electricity in the air right we can breathe poorly and without awareness and that life force will still come in but it's not going to come in in a Rich you know kind of energizing manner or we can take time to like slow down and literally try to connect like a TA Chi Master with with the energy and then to imagine a visualize and to see it coming into your body and stimulating through the you know the nadis and your you know your energetic system all your chakras and uh or energy centers and moving out throughout your body so this is a visualization practice that I do and what it looks like is I'll inhale and I'll see like a white light kind of coming in through the crown of my head and then heading down my spine and then flooding my entire body right and then as I exhale it kind of collapses to like this orange isite and then it heads back up and then that that's like exhaling toxins or exhaling stress and you combine this with a mantra right okay so this a pretty strong mindfulness practice very much well it would be more of a con ation practice where I'm using um an internal dialogue you know anchor as well as the visualization kind of approach so it's an integrative approach breath Mantra visualization three things going on right and with that structured breathing you're probably getting some vagal tone activation kind of like it doing your own HRV without device as I would absolutely because you're you're breathing with diaphragmatically which is going to trigger the vus nerve and the parasynthetic nervous system so you're getting all that so it's very caling so uh five five minutes of this breath is extraordinary because you begin to feel with every breath like this tingling and this Rush of energy coming in uh and this is you know I found this for unbelievable benefit for recovering quickly from workouts or you know a long workout um and for just energizing myself you know during the day when I feeling fatigued and these are one of the things you teach in these programs on beatable mind is this in your book this this breath no it might I might put it in my my new book this is something that that I've just been toying with and playing with the last five years I think it's like a holy grail for youth you think about what were these yogis doing every day in their meditation they're not just off in the void they might be for periods of time but a lot of it is uh charging their body with energy I have a drawing energy in right I remember one one thing I'll say about this um I read recently the guy who founded um the rebreathing not rebreathing network but um rebirthing yeah yeah yeah the the over breath yeah rebirthing Network I forget the guy's name at the top of my head um he wrote like a one of these really weird little books that you know he's talking about immortality you know CU there is this notion out there that there are deathless yogis sure I'm familiar with the the concept I've read about him I've never met any but he he made it his his mission to go find some of these people and he claims that he's met like four or five of these guys and one of the guys he met with in India he went the guy wouldn't meet with him you know he literally was like 50 feet away and and so the guy um the guy who wrote the book just asked him said how do you you know what is your main practice and he goes well I avoid other humans the case in point here yeah yeah see that I like well that probably would work you you think how how negative humans are and they're all vampires and sucking your energy anyway so I guess one way to do it is to drop out of society and go be a monk in a cave but I don't recommend that for most people right I mean it's not sustainable for most folks you have to do things like pay bills and you know eat and things like that so uh unfortunately um not everyone can can be the the uh the spiritual Guru full-time right right and I don't it' be interesting to see and I think you know a lot of people think with technology that we're going to get that right I I don't know it' be interesting to see whether whether the human being I don't not sure what the heck that would mean for human culture if all of a sudden we live for 500 or a thousand years you know I I just be a bizarre experiment I I bet one thing it would do would eliminate language barriers I I'm of the opinion that if we all spoke if we're all understandable to each other right conflict would be much less I think so to I mean you referred to ear this nationalism this ingroup versus outgroup identification There's real reasons for that from an evolutionary perspective protect your genes against you know unlike your genes but now in a modern culture we don't really have to fight for survival of our genes the same way right and so I think it's time to you know put the Tower of Babble back together and and elimin and remove the communication barriers I think that'll remove a lot of the nationalism a lot of the yeah Ian over attachment Google will will create a universal translator and you just pop this thing either swallow it or you know that's right and every word that comes out of your mouth will be understood by did you hear their their translator um it's an algorith it's an AI and they told it a few months ago to come up with a new way of translating and without telling anyone it created another language it created a lingua Frank that's intermediate with all of the languages it's exposed to on the planet really so it created this almost like an es World Language yeah and it's it's the scaffolding layer between all other languages so a few months ago suddenly Google translate went from being okay accurate to amazingly accurate it's not phrase-based translation it's meaning based translation and they looked at how it did it it had created this entire other translation layer and another language a Google language that the machine created that was intermediate between all the concepts and and words it was being exposed to that is fascinating so things like that are starting to emerge I me this of course is probably curtz wild Singularity uh at least the more you know reasonable claims on that I'm not sure I believe all the you deep claims he's making these days but um things like that are happening so you and I are you know just just south just north of 50 if we can manage another you know 30 40 years we we'll we'll get a little bit longer so yeah I do I agree with you on that um I I'm reading um Kell's book right now how to make a mind MH and then there's another the next one on my is called um the emotional machine or um something something along those lines I can't remember the exact title but the idea is that um there's also an AI movement M to create an emotional yeah experience yeah and so that was always been like so so so emotions you know you know the machines seem to be devoid of emotion but if AI can you know learn to feel now we're getting somewhere interesting but my idea is that you know of course a lot of people will agree with this and then the hard scientists will poooo it is that you know the mind is not the brain and so the the AI movement to just recreate the brain or the function of the brain is missing the point sure sure mind as Consciousness is something different the brain is just the organ that that's the meaning maker scaffold zitter scaffold zitter provides the structure so that we can translate like Google translator what's going on our Consciousness isn't just hanging out but able to have a human experience that's what the brain does y but you know what Ray says is no that's not true Consciousness is just more complexity deeper pattern recognition and complexity and that there's a point where that complexity gets expansive enough and Inter you know interconnected enough that it becomes self-aware right yeah I'm I'm not sure how I feel about that I sort of believe Kurt wall in that way I am a bit of a reductionist like he is um although I do think uh the best thing that Kurt has given us is still the Curt organ you know in the 70s and ' 80s we would not have music in this you this modern world without Curts while giving us the organ so uh I I still think that's he also invented voice recognition software did he yeah interesting so he's crazy history considering that we know him as the as the exponent guy these days so that's wonderful so Mark what else are you doing what else you bringing out into the world what projects are you getting into uh that you want to tell folks about uh a couple exciting ones one is um you know I the way I talked about SEAL Fit it sounds like holy that's like you know the double PhD in in functional fitness and so um and it was very hard to scale our bus like that we can train maybe a few people a year in so we've um created something called sealfit boot camp okay which is kind of the get started here program and it will um we filmed it for the first time we actually filmed me leading and and actually a couple my coaches leading you know a small group I think three in a studio setting sort sort of like P90X right right but it's SEAL Fit and we layer all the mental training those four big skills we layer it through we're doing you know yoga at the end of it and breath control and and practicing mental you know dialogue and visualization all through the physical training and the training is very simple but hard meaning anybody can do it if you're willing to work hard so like P90X there were millions of people did it what I loved about those programs that is uh Beach Bodies kind of prove that Hard Exercise actually sells you know so kind of PVE the way for us so we're launching that April 15th great and I'm really excited about that because it's going to allow us to help a lot more people get functionally fit and mentally tough and then if they love it then they can come into the lifestyle of SEAL Fit and maybe attend one of our events like 20x and whatnot the other thing is um is I'm writing a new book now this book is kind of writing me and it's the next I hear that's the right kind of book to write yeah this the next generation of the unbal Mind philosophy and um it's going to take me probably the rest of this year to get it done and conversations like this and all the other people that I've had are starting to really have an impact and and so the book is broken into five and this will become our next a training program as well so the evolution of the training it's broken into five major sections and I title them wake up grow up clear up open up and show up okay sounds great it's going to be cool I won't go into all the details but each one of those sections is a is like a mini training program in and of itself right waking up is like exposing yourself to the capacity for your own potential MH growing up is essentially the tools that we've been talking about how do you how do you do integrative training to expand your you know capacity use your whole mind clearing up is the is the part where most people need to spend a lot of time that's the emotional work getting in touch with the emotion especially men clearing up past emotional baggage releasing all the energy of regret and shame and anger and all this stuff that you know stops developing some resiliency developing emotional resiliency through self-awareness and social awareness and that one is a doozy because most people might be you know super cognitive and get all that stuff but then they keep torpedoing yeah not most people a lot of people will agree with me even myself you know this is born on my own experience you know you know was top Navy Seal in my class and everything and still as as a leader I would torpedo myself with some emotional baggage from my youth you know so that's clearing up opening up is is learning to use the intuition I call it the the seal belly the Buddha heart and the yogi mind okay so Instinct intuition and insight how do we tap into that it's part of the whole so you see we're getting into that whole mind first cognition and then emotion and then intuition and then spirit and then and and then the last section is showing up is how do I take this new me that's upgraded me that's able to deal in this vuka world as a leader how do I build a team around that and have the team experience the same sort of accelerated development and growth and just go out and kick ass and take names but for the benefit of humanity right not just for for my own pocketbook or for my own ego that sounds great well Mark it's been a lot it's been wonderful having you here a lot of stuff to think about um I'm sure our listeners are furiously Googling the internet right now trying to figure out all the different things we've we've touched on um thanks so much for showing up and coming on the show today uh where can our listeners track you down and find out more about you and what you're doing yeah well I guess um if you type my name into Google Divine Mark Divine di v i NE then um uh sealfit will show up so and unbeatable mind.com will show up and of course Facebook we have a Facebook thing and you know all that kind of stuff um if if if what um we talked about was interesting my leadership book The Way of the seal is really you know people find that to be really useful for thinking and leading like an elite maybe seal and my philosophy of living and a lot of the training we talked about is in the book unbe mind both those are available at Amazon or great Barnes & Noble all right folks so check out Mark's books come uh be a uh a near fit seal in in Southern California um check out the online training programs and all the books Mark is pumping out uh throughout the rest of the year so again thanks so much Mark and folks uh this has been another episode of head first with Dr Hill take care of your brains and we'll see you [Music] soon