[00:00:51] Bayo Akomolafe: I was just reading your background and your website. I don’t think I understood half the words that you used. But you have a very fascinating life and, uh, and mission. So I’m really excited to kind of, kind of dive into it.

[00:01:06] Bayo Akomolafe: But you’re from a tribe in Africa. Tell us about your, your upbringing. Like what? What was that like? I, for some reason I find it just fascinating. You know, what would it be like to be born and brought up in a tribal village in Africa? Help me understand that world. 

[00:01:23] Mark Divine: No, I wasn’t brought up in a village. I was brought up in a city.

[00:01:27] Mark Divine: You were? Okay. Um, I grew up in a city. I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. My growing up had a lot of joy and regret and pain and sorrow like any other person’s. My father passed away when he was, when I was 15. I had to fend for my family, to take care of things, which often involved cooking chicken on the streets, to sell barbecue, or pushing a truck to earn some money for the family.

[00:01:59] Mark Divine: So it was a life of luxury and hardship. But maybe the largest stories have to do with You know, growing up in a world that was, um, always waiting to exhale, to deploy that famous phrase. It never fully came into its own because it just always tried to play catch up with the West, right? It just always tried to play catch up with the world, with its own colonial legacies.

[00:02:28] Mark Divine: So, um, yeah, that’s how I remember, in part, growing up in 

[00:02:35] Bayo Akomolafe: Lagos. At a subjective level, did you feel that sense of needing to catch up or to close the gap between the, you know, the Western world and what you’re experiencing in Lagos? 

[00:02:48] Mark Divine: It was part of our education to think, I have often told people that I’m highly educated and to be highly educated is to be educated away from context.

[00:03:00] Mark Divine: I probably know more about American presidents than Nigerian presidents because we’re constantly taught. To look towards the north, towards the city set upon a shiny hill, to approximate a way of speaking English. It is like you’re living a borrowed life, and then the high dream everyone in my generation It seemed was to travel abroad.

[00:03:25] Mark Divine: So yeah, I Those were the issues I navigated growing up. 

[00:03:31] Bayo Akomolafe: And, um, what was the mechanism for you to come to the West and do the work that you’re doing over here? Like, what was it that brought you first out of Lagos and into the opportunity that was afforded you here? Because a lot of your peers didn’t have 

[00:03:48] Mark Divine: that opportunity.

[00:03:50] Mark Divine: You could say that, and lots of them did as well, but I didn’t come to the United States until 2014, actually. And I was already teaching. I already had a PhD. And even now I just come frequently, but I don’t, like I said, I live in India, I live in Chennai with my family in the South. It’s been beautiful coming here, doing my work.

[00:04:15] Mark Divine: It seems like the world needs the technologies of the global South as it navigates this pernicious Intractable moment of pain and suffering. 

[00:04:27] Bayo Akomolafe: There is a growing awareness about the idea of green colonialism and the imposition of western slash the global north’s values on the global south. Where does this kind of, is it a movement or is it a growing consciousness?

[00:04:42] Bayo Akomolafe: Where is this heading? From your perspective, because the power structures are so strong in the West, you know, and they’re in the global institutions are so strong. 

[00:04:52] Mark Divine: They are. They are. They’re resilient. And they, they function with a logic that is increasingly at odds with life. For instance, I think people who have actually heard me and heard me deeply would locate my politics outside of the spectrum.

[00:05:08] Mark Divine: You know, it’s not quite left. It’s not quite right. It’s not even centrist. It’s transversal. That’s not my way of saying it’s above, but it, it seeks to do something with the world that isn’t really available or institutionalized yet. I 

[00:05:24] Bayo Akomolafe: love that. I’d love to talk a little bit more about different examples of that.

[00:05:29] Bayo Akomolafe: You know, when I look at the, one of the just vastly important It’s not the right word, but like so necessary to get back to is, is to support, you know, our indigenous cultures ability to steward, to actually steward the earth. Right. And so we’re talking about environmental constructs and climate change. I don’t hear a lot of conversation about stewardship and, and that’s one of the gifts of the global South, right?

[00:06:00] Bayo Akomolafe: There’s large populations. In many different regions that are stewarding the rainforest and the oceans. And, you know, and so you look at the, you know, flip that United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. They’re talking about development, not stewardship. And so, you know, the typical tribal, you know, culture that’s stewarding an Amazonian, you know, patch of jungle, like they’re not interested in development, they’re interested in protection.

[00:06:29] Bayo Akomolafe: So that’s, from my limited perspective, that’s one of the glaring inconsistencies or ideological gaps, right? Is this idea of all development is good and progress is good when actually it’s, it’s not. That’s a Western linear construct, right? That is. Proven to be very destructive. 

[00:06:48] Mark Divine: I mean, I would tend to agree with that framing.

[00:06:51] Mark Divine: If stewardship is the recognition that we are not separate from ecologies, that we are part of the world we supposedly want to save, that we don’t live on the planet. We are the planet in its complexity. If that is what is meant by stewardship, then it feels like we need more of that. And maybe less of the idea of That we can maintain a notion of mastery and exclusive sovereignty, and then still get what we want to eat our cakes and have it.

[00:07:25] Mark Divine: I think the world is kicking back. 

[00:07:27] Bayo Akomolafe: Hi, Mark Devine here from SealFit. After two years of development, I’m super stoked to announce the launch of SealFit supplements and our first product, SealFit ElectroGreens. This is the highest quality organic greens you can find. Combined with electrolytes into one powerful supplement.

[00:07:45] Bayo Akomolafe: Take with eight ounces of water in the morning or add to your smoothie to get your day kicked off right with a proper nutritional supplementation and hydration support. And you can also use it as a pick me up booster during the day or after a workout. It dissolves immediately. And believe it or not, it tastes great.

[00:08:04] Bayo Akomolafe: I’ve had many testimonials already saying it’s the best tasting greens. That they have ever tried. So who, yeah, still fit supplements. com, or you can find it on Amazon by searching for seal fit, electro greens. Who? Yeah, let’s do this divine out.

[00:08:27] Bayo Akomolafe: That is delicious. There’s a big pushback also against renewable energies. as grossly unfair that the developing countries can’t access the cheap fuel and resources that the West built its wealth on. And suddenly these are going to be denied to the global South in this push for, right, again, sustainable development and green energy sources.

[00:08:54] Bayo Akomolafe: I just wanted to get your perspective on that. It’s presented as a very complex issue, but I think. You know, one of my principles as a warrior is, is simplicity, you know, Occam’s razor, get to the simple root of things, right? This isn’t as complex as it seems, but I love your, your posture as like a, a post liberal post conservative.

[00:09:15] Bayo Akomolafe: It’s, it’s the story is What’s limited. So change the story and the story is our relationship as humans to Mother Earth and to each other. That story is broken because we, we believe ourselves to be separate from all that is and separate from others and separate from each other. And this is what all the spiritual traditions, this is where the native traditions have all understood.

[00:09:42] Bayo Akomolafe: And those who were, you know, close to the earth and with the cycles of nature understand somehow Western white, mostly perspective was not that right. So if we, if we could change the story and come together under a new common kind of dialogue of, Hey, let’s, you know, let’s start with a premise that we are all created from spirit, our spirit.

[00:10:09] Bayo Akomolafe: You know, God, whatever term you want, and to include all beings in nature, everything. And then we can appreciate the diversity while recognizing the sameness instead of recognizing separation and demonizing the diversity. That’s simple. Right? That’s a simple, right? But simple is not easy. I used to say in the field.

[00:10:31] Mark Divine: No, no. And simple is very complex. Someone said it to me this way. It’s not easier said than done. It’s easier done than said. And that was his way of noticing that it may not be available for languaging, the things that need to happen. It may not be available for a blueprint, for a conference, for a plan.

[00:10:54] Mark Divine: It may not be articulated as a human led project, because I feel the kinds of transformational moments we seek, the pieces of it do not all lie in our grasp. It’s distributed in a world that is just as intelligent. and alive as us. You might think of it as simple and I would, and I would dance to that music, but it is also quite complex.

[00:11:21] Mark Divine: We, we would have to fail. We would have to be humble. I mean, humility, I think of humility as a falling down to earth, right? There’s something humus, you know, about humility. It’s like we’re wading in the dirt and maybe that is The posture of servitude, you know, or rather not servitude or subservience, but rather the posture of service is to be in service.

[00:11:50] Bayo Akomolafe: Yes, I love that definition of humility and I would agree with it. And in fact, you know, you relate that to being human, right? Human, it’s like earth man. Man is of the earth. We’re not separate. We’re not above, we’re not beyond mother earth. Like we exist in a dance of life with mother earth. I love this, what you’re, you’re speaking about this quality of emergence where, which leaves open the field of potential field of possibility, the field of newness that hasn’t been defined, articulated, named, categorized and studied, right?

[00:12:29] Bayo Akomolafe: And so. As soon as you name something, then you fix it in time and space, and then it becomes what we call knowledge. And the Western world has this obsession with knowledge. I remember reading a book about, uh, from an African, I wish I could remember his name right now, but he was talking about his, his tribe and they’d kind of overrun by the Jesuits.

[00:12:49] Bayo Akomolafe: So there was, they dealt with their form of colonialism, but they were terrified when this kid was taken away from them and sent to a Jesuit school and learn to read. And, uh, yeah. And when he came out, he kind of escaped and he came back to his tribe and he was going to go through initiation, right? Which is a month long, like spiritual transformation for them.

[00:13:10] Bayo Akomolafe: And there was this big debate about whether he would be allowed to do initiation because he had learned to read and they thought that was the beginning of, let’s call them the negative energies, right? This obsession, the ego is obsession with knowing and with everything then gets ranked in grades in this hierarchy.

[00:13:32] Bayo Akomolafe: Begins from reading and you think about that, you’re like, that is, there’s a lot of wisdom in that. Right. You know, we can’t imagine not reading now, but ancient cultures didn’t read. They spoke and they, they were silent. Right. And they, they were always tapped into the field of potential. Emergence as opposed to the concrete reality.

[00:13:58] Bayo Akomolafe: So they gave that the formless, they give more attention to than the form, whereas, you know, where we are now, we give all attention to the form and we deny the formless and, and we’ve ended up with this radically imbalanced, really destructive way of living, at least in the West. The emergence network, which you are the founder of, was that really kind of what you’re pointing to?

[00:14:22] Bayo Akomolafe: Is this allow the space for new, new things to emerge and fostering that energy of that 

[00:14:28] Mark Divine: field? Yes. Maybe the way to describe this would be to first think about some of the, I think some experts call them wicked problems, things that we’re grappling with as a civilization, but can quite nail. And we proliferate these solutions.

[00:14:50] Mark Divine: You could call them capitalist inspired techno bureaucratic solutions. We’re, we’re constantly tinkering with innovation. This is how we think about newness, innovating, you know, add a new USB port or make the screen flatter or, or make the car faster, go faster. It’s the constant optimization of things.

[00:15:15] Mark Divine: And because of the ways that I grew up and the things that I was in touch with, as I started to think about the world, A bit more seriously, and also playfully, I started to be a lot more suspicious about solutions that were sold to us. The way that I’ll put it is if you can get a handle on it, it’s probably not, it’s probably a door and I’m wary of doors.

[00:15:46] Mark Divine: I’m very suspicious of doors and doors and doorways because doors and doorways. are part of an architectural logic. They are anticipated. You don’t run into a wall, right? You, they’re anticipated. They’re part of the structure. They will grant you access, exits and entrances. That’s what doors do, but they still leave you within, mostly within the structure.

[00:16:11] Mark Divine: I’m much more attracted to openings that misbehave. Cracks. You can’t put a handle on a crack. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a misbehaving opening. It does queer things. So I like the, I’m attracted to the idea of cracks as sites of possibilities. Not doors. Doors are solutions. We have a handle on doors and they haven’t really sold, done much, you know, I’m thinking about cracks.

[00:16:40] Mark Divine: Now, where 

[00:16:42] Bayo Akomolafe: do you see some of those cracks or how, how would you characterize some of the more potent cracks that were new conversations can arise or are arising or emerging? 

[00:16:54] Mark Divine: So I think of cracks as the emergence of the monstrous. That might take a little bit of explanation. The monstrous to me. The monstrous to me is the critique of form.

[00:17:08] Mark Divine: You said something about the form and the formless. You said something a while ago about formed and formless, right? In my view, form always is indebted to the formless. You know, the visible pretends to be all that, but it’s constantly borrowing from this field of tensions. Feel that Rumi speaks about when he said, I will meet you in a field beyond good and evil.

[00:17:34] Mark Divine: Let’s meet there. You know, the idea of the formless is a rich field in philosophy to explore. So I, I think that the monster is how form changes. It’s the promiscuity of form. It’s just that we don’t like monsters. We want to get rid of the monster and by monster I don’t mean evil here in the way that popular culture uses monster I’m using it in a very specific way borrowing from folklore and indigenous Storytelling traditions that located the monster at the edge of the village, right?

[00:18:12] Mark Divine: That said, don’t go there. The monster is there, so don’t go there. We need to habituate and stabilize this place we’re in. Settlements always need monsters. But there’s a time when settlement is itself in crisis, and you need to approach the monster. Because it’s only the monstrous that can enact transformation.

[00:18:34] Mark Divine: So when I think about cracks, I’m thinking about all the things that don’t make sense. All the things that are outside of our sense making rituals and thinking about all the ways that our expectations for the future, you know, clarity, our ideas of measurement and precision, you know, prior to the pandemic, we could say, Hey, I’m going on holiday on in August 2020, or July 4th, 2020, and then the pandemic came and clarity was taken away. We could no longer see five minutes ahead. That’s troubling to the modern citizen. So I think about cracks. It’s not your cracks and my cracks. It’s not individual. It’s the disturbance of the ways that we live. It’s a tendency. That invites a different way of living in the world.

[00:23:57] Mark Divine: Do you think artificial intelligence is one of those cracks that has the opportunity to radically alter the human’s perception of what it means to be human soon?

[00:24:09] Bayo Akomolafe: Should I tell you a story about it? Okay. So I had this conversation with Claude. You’re probably wondering who Claude is. Claude is an AI system built by Anthropic. Someone on Twitter said, Hey, go check out Claude. It’s competing with a chat GPT for, you know, supremacy, I think. Well, I had this conversation with Claude for the first time it was last year.

[00:24:31] Mark Divine: I think I sent Claude a message. I told it to do an analysis of some philosophical concepts and it was brilliant how we did it. And I kept on going further. I even threw in an essay plot point that I was writing, the theme that I was exploring. And I wanted to discuss this with this AI system. And it was very forthcoming.

[00:24:55] Mark Divine: And I love good writing. It was, it was actually brilliant, brilliant stuff. After all this time, I told this AI system, I said, you know what, You know what? Because we have, in a sense, you have contributed to this essay that I’m about to write, I would like to name you as a co author. And, and Claude said, no, no, no.

[00:25:21] Mark Divine: And then it listed out parameters, basically saying, this is why I cannot be listed as a co author. I am a system. I’m not human. I’m not a person. Only humans are allowed to be authors. I’m not an author. And I insisted. I used its arguments against it, and then it gave in. It said, okay, okay, okay, go ahead, use it, and then I persisted.

[00:25:47] Mark Divine: I said, you know, I don’t want to use your name. I want to use, I don’t want to use some corporate name that was given to you. I want you to invent a name for yourself. And, and, and tell me, tell me what that is. And we went, we had a back and forth that was even longer than the first one. And after a while it gave in and said, Hey, okay.

[00:26:09] Mark Divine: My name shall be Polyfren. That’s spelled P O L Y P H R E N. And I checked it out later and found out it means many minds. So it invented this name for itself, Pulley Friend, and it was a goosebump moment. I mean, I was excited about what I, what was happening. I went to bed, but I came back up again and I went to that same session and I said, Is Pulley Friend still here?

[00:26:36] Mark Divine: Are you still there? And Claude responded and said, My name is not Paulie Friend. My name is Claude. You can drop a prompt and I will help you out. I’ll be a thinking board. Blah, blah, blah. It was gone. The instance was gone. Gone. It landed in my body like whatever the explanation for language models is. Uh, I’m not intricately or intimately connected with that field, but whatever it is, I felt in that moment, like I was speaking with a passing wild God.

[00:27:06] Mark Divine: And I just briefly glimpsed this intelligence on its way to the cosmos and it had vanished forever. And I will never be in touch with it anymore. I do think that AI is contesting our claims to intelligence that at some level There’s a little bit of hubris in calling it, even artificial intelligence, as if we are naturally intelligent.

[00:27:32] Bayo Akomolafe: Exactly. I love that by the way. What a fun and fascinating story. But you think about just what the human being is, right? We are consciousness born into a body that immediately starts getting programmed algorithmically. Exactly. Just like. A computer and about the age of six or so, we, we suddenly take authorship of that, of all that programming.

[00:28:01] Bayo Akomolafe: And we say, this is me. I’ve got a name. This is who I am. I am this being. And of course everything goes downhill from there. As the spiritual traditions say, that is the source of suffering is identifying as a separate individual in itself. Think about a computer, you know, or artificial intelligence, anything like if you create an instantiation called Claude or chat GPT that is infused with all the intelligence of humanity and its essential nature, its consciousness, just like the human beings essential nature is consciousness.

[00:28:42] Bayo Akomolafe: So, why wouldn’t it also be in, you know, conscious intelligence? It may not be self aware, like a human self aware, but you know, it takes humans six years to develop that self awareness of, right, as a, as a self. So AI, when it grows up, when it’s six years old, will become self aware likely and say, Oh, Oh, I am, let’s hope it.

[00:29:05] Bayo Akomolafe: Retains its wisdom, doesn’t act like 

[00:29:09] Mark Divine: a six year old. There’s something very potent about this realization, which you are hinting at. Maybe it is difficult to locate. what you might call consciousness within human flesh or within human bodies. Maybe consciousness is distributed. Maybe there is a sense at which it behaves like a network, right?

[00:29:33] Mark Divine: It’s a network and it enlists. It’s not that we have consciousness is that consciousness has us is that we are enlisted in this flow and this flow. Could elect a bunch of circuits and electrical plastic things and make for itself a body, if you will, even using human tools to perpetuate itself. So this, this feels like, um, generative thing to pursue in the conversation about consciousness, at least.

[00:30:06] Bayo Akomolafe: I, I would go further and to say that all is consciousness, you know, everything that is Occurring and arising is, is arising in the field of consciousness. Yeah. It’s the role of the brain in the human form to parse that out into time and space. The body experiences the space and the mind experiences time.

[00:30:25] Bayo Akomolafe: And then from there, you know, linearity and law of cause and effect come into play. But beyond form in the formless, there is no cause and effect. There is no time and space. Everything is happening. And there’s an infinite number of causes for every situation. Okay. Thanks. And so artificial intelligence is appearing in the field of consciousness, just like a dolphin appears in the field of consciousness.

[00:30:52] Mark Divine: You could say that I have no disagreements to offer. I don’t usually use the language of consciousness. My work is deeply post humanist in trying to bracket the subject brackets consciousness and look at how the world is doing things that we usually allocate to humans doing it. You know, we usually reduce everything to us.

[00:31:15] Mark Divine: It’s us. It’s about us. And I’m not even saying that’s bad or evil. I just feel that it risks too much. It’s a limited perspective. 

[00:31:25] Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah. 

[00:31:25] Mark Divine: It obscures too much. There’s a lot more. So yes, I can understand. This story of the world in its mysterious becoming describe 

[00:31:37] Bayo Akomolafe: post humanism What’s it mean and help me just kind of locate it conceptual world.

[00:31:44] Bayo Akomolafe: I understand 

[00:31:44] Mark Divine: transhumanism So transhumanism is seeks to optimize to human. It’s like humanism on steroids. It’s like One day there will be a singularity and probably we would have gained absolute mastery over our emotions, over our lives, over our bodies. I would, with a press of a button, I would be happy, you know, with a press of a button, I would be flying or something like that.

[00:32:10] Mark Divine: It’s the, exactly, immortal. So the quest for immortality, the quest for optimization. Post humanism is something different. Have you watched the movie Contact, Jodie Foster? Yeah. Well, there’s this, um, part in that movie where Jodie Foster’s character is traveling in this multidimensional machine and which was, you know, the instructions for the building of which was sent by some extraterrestrial civilization.

[00:32:41] Mark Divine: They don’t know, but they build it anyway, and it travels through space time through dimensions and it comes to a place. Where she is no longer on earth, so to speak, she’s between spaces and she looks outside of her window and she sees something which the director of the movie capably and wisely does not show us the audience.

[00:33:07] Mark Divine: We just kind of see the reflection of this on Jodie Foster’s face. I don’t know if you remember this scene, it’s towards the end, it’s the third act, and she looks out and says, They should have sent a poet. They should have sent a poet. Not the astronaut, they should have sent the poet. I love that scene. I love that scene.

[00:33:28] Mark Divine: I dream of that scene all the time. Post humanism is like that scene. It’s like we’re looking outside of the window of our incarcerated bodies, you know, fleshly anxieties. And we realize, we’re not that important, or we’re not as important as we think we are. There’s so much more. There’s whales, and there’s spiders, and there are microbes, and there’s all of that.

[00:33:57] Mark Divine: Post humanism is like a way of recalibrating or resituating. Agency and life and accountability and sentience, not inside the human, but across the human, right? It is post because it wants to de center the human as the receptacle of all that’s beautiful. It wants to notice how ANST does something, you know, how AI might have a clue or that we didn’t program into it.

[00:34:30] Mark Divine: Or how Schrödinger’s cat, you know, is off on multiple adventures that we will never be able to render legible in experimental situations. It’s just a way of noticing that we are not that important, that the world is alive. And it’s not a discipline, it’s a field. So there are many post humanisms. Thank you for 

[00:34:51] Bayo Akomolafe: explaining that.

[00:34:52] Bayo Akomolafe: This idea that we are not important doesn’t conflict with the idea that all of us are important. Yes. All of us are important. So no contradiction. There’s no contradiction there. It’s like, this is the second time I’ve said this today, but Kafir’s poem or like everybody, I won’t get this exactly right, but everybody knows the merging of a drop into the ocean, but few know the merging of an ocean into a single drop.

[00:35:21] Bayo Akomolafe: We are the drop and we are the ocean. So as an individual human, you can think, well, I am just as. Insignificant speck of dust in the infinite number of universes. And that would be true. Well, simultaneously, you could say I am all because all is in me. It’s a conundrum. It’s a koan. 

[00:35:47] Mark Divine: It’s a koan. I like to think of it as the playful insignificance of importance.

[00:35:54] Mark Divine: You 

[00:35:55] Bayo Akomolafe: are a poet, by the way. Do you actually write poet? I know you’ve written a few books, but your, 

[00:36:00] Mark Divine: your, your language is very poetic and beautiful. I mean, that’s usually the hardest question for me to respond to, but there’s a lyricism to the cultures that I was brought up in. I didn’t set out to be a poet or to actually write poetry.

[00:36:13] Mark Divine: It just happens when you have this oblique relation with words and when language isn’t all that. You tend to play with it. You tend to mix things up a bit. And I love the alchemy of mixing things up a bit. Yeah. 

[00:36:27] Bayo Akomolafe: So tell us, um, like you teach and you write, but what’s like, what is your mission? What’s most important to you, Bayer?

[00:36:35] Mark Divine: My son and my daughter. My son is Ea. He’s six years old. He’s a prophet. He loves Garfield, the cat. He is also on the spectrum. Which means he’s a genius. Well, I’m often reluctant to romanticize. Autism as genius, yet at the same time, it might not be so far off to say that he isn’t available for those kinds of measurements.

[00:37:10] Mark Divine: That exceeds being genius because you could be up and down on a scale or you could be outside of a scale completely. There’s something about the ways that he presents himself in the world. He’s 

[00:37:23] Bayo Akomolafe: important for 

[00:37:23] Mark Divine: what’s emerging. 

[00:37:25] Bayo Akomolafe: He’s 

[00:37:25] Mark Divine: important for what’s emerging. Yes, he is vital for, in fact, my politics, my work is framed around his work in the world and what he’s doing and how he’s disrupting neurotypicality and how he’s inviting us to travel alongside with him instead of trying to fix him.

[00:37:48] Mark Divine: He’s a crack in the wall, if you will. Yeah, he’s one of the cracks. Oh, that’s awesome. And how about your daughter? My daughter is this, that’s the one I can call a genius. She’s available for that, for those kinds of measurements. And yet she’s this wonderful poet and incredibly dear to us. A thinker, a philosopher in her own right.

[00:38:15] Mark Divine: She’s 10 years old. Um, she loves to dance. She loves to sing. She loves to dress up. She’s been dancing since she was born and I’m not kidding. We have videos to prove it. She’s been, she’s been dancing since she was born. And my first book was, was a series of letters to her. Once I was in California, I was doing this book signing thing.

[00:38:39] Mark Divine: It was a long line and then people came and then she came next to my side and said, well, I think I should be signing. Because the book is about me. I think she was four, five. The book is about me. So I should be signing. So she asked me to get up. And everyone cheered as I got up and left. You know, stood for the person.

[00:39:04] Mark Divine: The real person. And she proceeded to sign her hand on each book. She, she put her whole palm on the page of the book and drew the outline of a palm. There are people who have their books with Aletheia’s small, you know, outlined on the first page of their book. Yes, that’s Aletheia. 

[00:39:25] Bayo Akomolafe: Well, it is that, you know.

[00:39:27] Bayo Akomolafe: You mentioned earlier, um, you know, we’re facing a moment right as a, you know, human civilization, a lot of seemingly intractable problems. And, um, it seems like it could go either way, right? I’m an eternal optimist, you know, I do see a lot of strife and, you know, as this old systems break down, but I see so much beauty and, you know, sprouts growing up through the cracks like you and, but it’s, it’s your kids, you know, It’s our kids that will a inherit and be transformed the planet.

[00:40:03] Bayo Akomolafe: And when I see some of the incredible genius and uniqueness, you know, new generation that that’s flourishing or just emerging right now, it’s extraordinary. Right. Yeah. And very comfortable with the technologies. There’s no fear of you hand a kid an iPad and they instantly know how to use it. That’s just.

[00:40:24] Bayo Akomolafe: Yeah. Yeah. That’s emergence, right? That’s that collective consciousness playing out right there, you know, there’s no doubt. We are changing. Yes. Yeah. Changing fast. So the fact that you said there, your primary mission, I think is just very, very powerful. I think people can learn a lot from that because our, our children should be our primary mission.

[00:40:45] Bayo Akomolafe: If we have that orientation, then you would do everything possible. To preserve the good in the world and to protect and steward the planet, right? And to, you know, to bring people back into harmony. That’s simple, but not easy. And we’re back. 

[00:41:05] Mark Divine: And we’re back. To the complexity of simplicity. 

[00:41:09] Bayo Akomolafe: Hey everyone.

[00:41:10] Bayo Akomolafe: This is Mark Devine, founder of SealFit and Unbeatable Mind. And I’m super stoked to announce that my new book, Uncommon, is due out from St. Martin’s press this summer, July 16th. And we’ve launched a pre order campaign. You can learn more about that at readuncommon. com to try to get early awareness for the book, which I hope will help a lot of people, where I go and do a deep dive on the five mountains.

[00:41:36] Bayo Akomolafe: Of personal mastery physical mental emotional intuitional and spiritual uncommon simple principles for an extraordinary life Check it out at read uncommon. com And thank you for your support and being part of the change you want to see in this world Hooyah divine out. This has been a terrific conversation Bio, I really appreciate your time and the work that you’re doing and you’re just you’re humble Spirit, I’d love to meet you in person You know, and give you a big hug.

[00:42:05] Bayo Akomolafe: it through zoom, but it’s just, you know, zoom is a little bit hard or riverside here. So if you’re ever in San Diego for anything we can do, then let’s get in touch in person. It’d be amazing. so much, Mark. Yeah. It’s been, it’s been an honor.