Mark Divine 1:52
Welcome to the Mark Divine Show. I’m your host Mark Divine. Thanks for joining me. On this show I discover, dive in, and discuss what makes the world’s most inspirational, compassionate, resilient leaders so courageous. I talk in depth to people from all walks of life, from martial arts grandmasters, meditation monks, elite CEOs and entrepreneurs, military leaders, Stoic philosophers, proud survivors, and more. In each episode, I endeavor to turn the guest’s experience into actionable insights that you can learn from and use to lead a life filled with courage, compassion, and inspiration.

I’m excited for today’s episode, we’re going to talk about turning big dreams into big ideas, achieving entrepreneurial success with a moonshot mindset and the importance of challenging yourself, influencing others and all sorts of other things. Because my guest is Naveen Jain, a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist on a mission to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. First through health and longevity with VIOME life sciences company on a mission to make chronic illness optional. Also near and dear to my interest is Moon Express, a company with permission from the US government to harvest resources on the moon. Naveen is a sought after thought leader and has received various industry praise and has received numerous accolades, including Fast Company’s most creative person of the year, and the Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

Welcome to the show, Naveen. It’s really good to see you. And I hope you’re doing well after a couple of years of COVID and craziness going on in the world?

Naveen Jain 3:24
Well, first of all, life has been absolutely amazing. And I think it’s very little to do with what’s happening around you. Because at the end of the day, you and I both know that our happiness and joy comes from inside us. There is nothing from outside that can actually control how we feel. So when someone tells you how this person makes me angry, the answer is no, you make yourself angry, they may be a trigger, but the end of the day, you can’t be a slave to someone else’s control, and they can’t make you happy or make you angry. So I think from that perspective, I find myself to be you know, just in this amazing bliss. I get up at 4am every day, I jump out of the bed with joy and I feel that I’m doing God’s work and I just love every minute of my life.

Mark Divine 4:23
You know, if you could bottle that you’d be you know, probably far wealthier than you are today. That’s amazing, you know, it sounds a lot like a yogi. You’re born in India, is that right? Do you have any Yogi’s in your family who has this philosophy, or is this self learned?

Naveen Jain 4:28
This is actually not a yogic philosophy, it is a basic fundamental human philosophy in my mind, because when you keep chasing something or someone to make you happy, it may be a very transitional happiness you may get. But at the end of the day, when you don’t love yourself, and you are not happy inside you, you could be in a paradise and you’d still be unhappy. And when you just love everything, what you stand for, what you do, you could be in a dark place, and you’d still be in happiness, right?

Mark Divine 5:01
Yes, it sounds like Viktor Frankl talking also, obviously want to talk about technology and exponential change and moonshots. And all that kind of stuff. Because I’m an entrepreneur at heart, but I’m also a philosopher and spiritual seeker, and a teacher. And so I want to hear from you like, how did you develop this mindset? And how did you find bliss, because it’s not common. People struggle with that, our society is very violent and negative. And what you just espoused is not taught in school, you know, we teach how to download knowledge in school, do horizontal learning, not vertical learning. So what you are talking about is depth of character that includes peace of mind, equanimity, compassion, and care. How did you develop that? Or were you born that way?

Naveen Jain 5:48
Well, first of all, I mean, you look at the thing, you know, from the time you develop, invest in society, your thoughts about goals, what are your goals in life, as if achieving those goals is something, your purpose in life is to achieve those goals. And somehow when you get there, you’re going to be happy, and you’re always chasing those goals, to be happy. And in between, you say, Well, I am just going through this motion and I’m suffering but that’s been no pain, no gain and you keep suffering and hoping that someday you get there, and when you do, you look back and think, for what?

Mark Divine 6:23
Well, the other thing is there’s no there THERE, if you’re chasing those outer things you find, it’s kind of like you’re trying to pick up the can, but every time you get close to it, you kick it further down the road.

Naveen Jain 6:34
I think, you know, in a spiritual philosophy and there’s a word in Indian language called Maya, which is basically in English called Mirage, that when you see something, you get there, and you say, well, that is not there. But if out there there is something out there, you’re always choosing that mirage. And I think part of it, I think, if I may look from a more spiritual perspective, is that when something happens to you, we have this tendency to actually assign it a label. Is it good? Or is it bad, and just the fact we assign it a label, it changes our emotions, it is good and you feel euphoric, it was bad, and everybody’s sad for you and you are sad for yourself without realizing the event that just happened, You may not know for a decade or years, is it actually good for you? Or bad for you? Right? There is a Chinese, I think a fairy tale. Here is a guy who’s an old man. And one day he decides that, you know, he’s going to get a horse because that is what he’s going to actually build his future around, right? So he buys this horse and everybody in the village is laughing at him. You took all your life savings and bought a horse. I mean, you are a fool. And you know, next day the horse runs away. And everybody’s now saying that you are the unluckiest fellow, you lost everything you had. A week later, the horse comes back with four mares, and everybody seemed like you are the luckiest man on earth, you have now five horses, right. And then a week later, one of the horses steps on his son. And now his son cannot walk. And everybody is not saying you are the most unfortunate guy in this village, you only had one son who was going to take care of you in your old age. Now, even he can’t walk properly. A week later, the soldiers walk into the village and say every young man who can walk properly is going to the wall. And he’s the only man left with his son, and everyone saying you’re the luckiest man on earth, you still have your son. The point is these events that are happening at that time, it didn’t look good or bad. But years later, you may not know what the implication of that is. And I think you and I have probably done some anecdotal stories. Somebody had a breakup when they were a teenager and thought it was the end of their life. And then later you realize, oh, my God, what a nightmare be avoided? Yeah, absolutely, to really look for is that in life, just believe the universe is your friend. And when you believe the universe is your friend, whatever is happening to you is for your own benefit. And you embrace it, you accept it, you expect it and you just live your life, as if everything that’s happening is what your benefit,

Mark Divine 9:12
I love that and I 100% agree. And we create our reality by how we interact with what’s happening with us. And so when we collapse into polarity of right and wrong, and good bad, then that’s when we open up the suffering bucket, right that’s how we allow the suffering in because now you have the positionality. And in non duality, or when in pure presence, there is no right or wrong, or left or right or up.

Naveen Jain 9:39
And there is no present, no future, there is no past, it’s all happening at the same time because these time spaces don’t really exist.

Mark Divine 9:46
And that’s a fascinating concept, we probably don’t have time to get into that we probably lose a few people or have them drive off the road. But I’ve been playing with that idea of the holographic universe where literally, you know, everything has already happened or is always happening, past present future. And we are literally just experiencing a small fragment of that here in this particular lifetime.

Naveen Jain 10:11
I don’t know if this is the right time and place but if you really think about it, we all feel that we are a solid person, like you can touch someone and you can feel it right. But at the end of the day, we know our body is made of atoms. Atoms are made for electrons and protons, they’re made for quarks, they’re made of energy. So literally floating energy, and our sensors, when I touch someone makes me feel that you are a solid body, stable and solid. And we all know that is just not true. We are basically floating energy. And our brain is being fooled into thinking that they are a walking talking solid body, right. And I think that’s a totally different philosophy. The other thing that I find really fascinating, I think you are a Marketer and entrepreneur, you’re gonna appreciate this, this idea of people have this ups and downs in life and I tell every entrepreneur, every entrepreneur needs to be alive and the only way you know you’re alive is you have a heartbeat. What does a heartbeat look like? It goes up and down and up and down. And when it’s smooth, you’re dead. So if you ever find yourself living a smooth life, you actually have chosen to live a life of a dead person. Right? When it is up and down, it tells you when you are down, you hunker down and you know the next beat is going to be up. And when you’re on top of that beat, never get too cocky. Just know that winter is coming.

Mark Divine 11:27
That’s right. That’s exactly right. That’s true for everything. But entrepreneurs feel that acutely. Because success follows failure follows success. And it’s just like a heartbeat. I love that metaphor. That’s very cool. How did you find your way into entrepreneurship? Like what inspired you to become a business guy?

Naveen Jain 11:44
Well, at the end of the day, people have this idea that entrepreneurship is about starting a company. And to me, that’s not what entrepreneurship is. Entrepreneurship is about being a problem solver, right? In my world, there are three types of people, the people who complain about the problems. And since every one of us has that, they just call them human beings, human beings bitch about the problems. And then there are visionaries who come up with, Oh, why can’t we do this? Why can’t we do that. And then there’s a special type of people who actually go out and do something about it. And that special group of people are entrepreneurs, they are simply the problem solvers. They don’t just think about the problem, not only to think about a solution, they actually go out and do it. You can be an entrepreneur, when you’re inside the company And when you’re at home, and you’re finding a problem solving those problems, whether interpersonal relationships, or with the inner child, whatever that happens to be, you are an entrepreneur, it is a mindset. Being an entrepreneur is not about starting a company, being an entrepreneur is a mindset of how do you take a problem, you break down the problem? And how do you solve that problem. And if you can do that, you’re an entrepreneur every single day.

Mark Divine 12:54
And love that. There is a unique breed of entrepreneurs, and I think you’re in this class. And I put Elon Musk and others in this class that are not just problem solvers, but problem seekers. Right. So let’s take Moon Express for an example. Right? There was no problem. You could say the problem was resources, or how are we going to sustain humanity in space? But you have to be seeking.

Naveen Jain 13:18
No, no, no, there is a big problem here, right? Think about it. 7.4 billion of us are living on a single spacecraft, and we call the planet Earth. Imagine if our spacecraft gets damaged, just like when a large asteroid hit the planet Earth. What happened to the dinosaurs, every single dinosaur species got wiped out. They were much bigger than us. And when we see as human beings, I am worried about our planet, I can say the planet tells you back. Don’t worry about me, worry about your humanoid species, don’t worry about me.

My point I’m trying to make is that if we don’t do something, there is going to be a time when our planet is going to be damaged because we get hit by an outside thing, right? And that all 7.4 billion are going to get completely wiped out. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go from one spacecraft into multiple spacecraft, but you’re still within your solar system? You can go to th moon you can go to Mars, but you’re still within the solar system? What if our sun one day implodes? It’s going to happen. Every star implodes. What if you go to a different solar system, into our galaxy? What if you go beyond our galaxy into a different galaxy? What if you go beyond our universe into a different universe. This is how you want to distribute the human species. So if one of the planets gets damaged, you can still survive as a species. So to me, it’s not a problem seeker. It is about problem identification, and willing to take the problems that most people will say, Why would I do that? And the answer is, anytime you can do something that can save or improve people’s lives, you can create an amazingly great company out of it, you find a product like we started, if you can help a billion people live a better life, you can create $100 billion company, but you don’t wake up in the morning and say, I want to create $100 billion dollar company, what should I do? Right? Making money is a byproduct of doing things that improve people’s lives. And that’s the fundamental thing people need to know. When you are an entrepreneur, all your job is to find something that improves people’s lives. And if you do that, you can create an amazingly great, sustainable company. But you don’t go out and say, I want to create a company, what should I do?

Mark Divine 15:38
It’s nice to back that with a passion, something that you know, excites you so that you have that 4am kind of wake up call, like you do. You’re super excited about what you’re doing. You’re excited about space, and you’re excited about health. We’re getting back to kind of like who is Naveen? Where did those interests come from?

Naveen Jain 15:56
Actually, you can try to rewrite history to say that I was like this as a child. But the point is that all of history is related. It’s never like that. We become who we are with every single interaction we have in our life. So when people say it’s the last straw that broke the camel’s back, you and I both know it’s not the last straw. It is all the other straws that happened before that, and that’s who we are as human beings, every single thing we did changed us. And there is a catalyst that happens one day and you think that’s the one answer. That’s not the one that’s simply a catalyst for everything that happened before that, right? So my point I’m trying to say is that you become Mark Divine, not by actually one day something happened. It is, every day you change every time you talk to a guest, your mindset changes, and every time you interact with someone else, your mindset changes. And one day you find yourself to be completely different. And most people who have been with you everyday, they don’t see the change, until you meet a friend who hadn’t seen you for 10 years, and he says Mark, you’re a totally different person.

And I think, you know, in that way, and if you start looking at these audacious ideas, to me, it is easier to solve a big problem than to solve a small problem, right? It is, the reason I say that is when you have something that can change the trajectory of how humanity is going to live, you attract the best and the brightest people to work with you. Because the smartest people want to work on the toughest problem. And guess what? The people who are successful, they want to become significant, and they want to work on legacy making projects, right? And guess what happens when you get the best and the brightest together, the Money Follows. Everyone says, Oh, my God, look at him working on this moonshot. And look at the team he has assembled, you get money, and you have now resources, you have team, you can solve any problem you want. And that’s the point that you were trying to make, is that finding your true purpose in life. And you mentioned the word passion. And I’ve never been a big fan of passion and tell you why. Passion is for hobbies. Passion is for losers. The true entrepreneurs have obsession, they go to sleep thinking about it, they jump out of the bed every morning wanting to solve that problem. And when people say how do you find your true obsession, and this really simple when you wake up in the morning, and if you’re not jumping out of the bed, whatever you’re doing, you should quit because that’s not your true calling. When you find that you don’t lie in the bed, you jump out of the bed. One other thing to do that I found really interesting is ask yourself, if you had everything in your life, you had the billions of dollars, you had the best family, you could ask for your amazing children. What would you do, and if you do that, now, you will get everything that you want in life, right? It is about finding your true calling, your true purpose, your North Star. And once you do that, your work is no longer a work, it becomes your playground, it becomes your golf, it becomes your life. It is something you do because you’re retired, right? So when people say to a gardener, when you’re 62 years old, why do you do what you do? I’m retired, this is what I love.

Mark Divine 19:26
Right? You retire from a job. When you’re building a business like you’re building, it’s not a job. Yes, it’s something else altogether. That’s fascinating. So I have an obsession with upgrading humanity’s mindset, from negative to positive from egoic. To world centric, to galactic centric, from contraction to expansion, you know, you can characterize in a lot of different ways. And my passion is training or my other session is training, right? So I want to bring this mindset, but I know it through training, and I don’t know technology. So if you were my advisor, what would you tell me would be some sensible steps to take so that I could serve a billion people?

Naveen Jain 20:06
Well first of all, Mark, I mean, my hat’s off to you for what you’re already doing. There are not very many people in the world like you who’ve so selflessly been doing this for eight years, helping everyone else upgrade their mindset, because you could just be doing it and simply focused on yourself. Instead, you decided, you want to have this podcast, you’re going to actually invite everyone else to upgrade their mindset, not only with your learning, but in bringing the best, the brightest and the guests who actually will go out and educate people.

But I think more importantly, what, you know, if I were your advisor, I would simply say, biggest resource, the biggest skill or the most scarce resource on earth really is the people who have this mindset of abundance, right? The people who don’t look at the world as scarcity. And everything in our life, we assign value to it. And the only reason we assign value to something is because we think it’s scarce, right? So things are more valuable when they are scarce and we assign the value to it. And there is always this idea of we’ll lose that. If you get something someone else doesn’t have it, right. And I think you have this mindset of abundance. And I think people have this very difficult time understanding, how can you have something abundant when you’re living on a planet that’s finite? And I’m just trying to change that. So think about it for a second. You see, human beings are so greedy, that it doesn’t matter how much you have, you want more of it, right? And that’s basically the mindset. And that’s why the things will always be scarce.

And then I remind people, there are times where 60,000 100,000 of us can sit in a stadium and enjoy a game, and we never slap the person next to us and say, you took a deep breath. That was my air, why is that? Because we believe inherently the air is in abundance, we believe inherently that air and oxygen is in abundance. And we all can have as much deep breath as we want. It’s not taking away from me, guess what happened? It is democratized, it’s demonetized, it is free for everyone. Now imagine, what do we fight over, we fight over energy, we fight over water, and we fight over land. Those are the biggest three things we’ll fight over.

Look at energy. Every 90 minutes, more solar energy falls on this planet then we use in the whole year. Simply a matter of conversion, this is no different than aluminum. Remember, 200 years ago, aluminum was the most scarce material. In fact, so much. So if you look at the top of the Washington Monument is aluminum because it was the most scarce. And point is as soon as we developed the technological electrolysis, it became so cheap, we throw it away. Now, that is going to be the electrolysis of the solar energy, where we become so much energy, it is going to be free to everyone. And once you have free energy, you can be desalinated and distill the water and you’re free fresh water to everybody on the planet. Now, once you have that suddenly talk about the land, and you look and say our planet Earth is such a tiny dot in our solar system, our solar system is invisible in our galaxy, our galaxy is indivisible, in the galaxy. So where is the limitation of land. You could be anywhere, it’s in our mind, because we believe we can’t live somewhere. And that’s why we had a scarcity mindset. What I’m trying to say is that, once you expand the mindset or the possibilities, suddenly you see, I can win, and Mark can win and everyone listening can win. And guess what, the humanity can win. And we don’t have to compete with each other.

Mark Divine 23:52
We don’t have to invade our neighbors. That’s for some other day. Exactly. No, I love that. And it really is a massive mind shift. When people shift from scarcity to abundance, and they let go of their egoic grasping of the need to control their outer environment to hoard to accumulate, right? And so if you can think of money, like electricity, and just let it flow, right, it’s going to flow to the path of least resistance just like water. So just remove the resistance. You want to be wealthy, move the resistance to wealth, and that’s in your mind, right? Now, of course you have to work, right. But work is like you said play, it’s not work. And so you can even remove resistance to work to make it joyful, and absolutely a blissful experience with a simple mindset shift as well.

Naveen Jain 24:41
And those are the people who actually end up making money are the people who don’t choose money, right? It’s just unbelievable. How it happens is when you choose staying focused on solving the problem. Somehow the money just comes, making money is the byproduct of doing things that make people’s lives better, right? How do I say it, there was a time when I was younger, I could see that I think I’m too old to be saying that I used to tell young kids, you know, making money is like having an orgasm, when you focus on it, you’re never going to get there. So enjoy the process

Mark Divine 25:17
I love it. Tell us a little bit about, I want to first I want to talk about space and some of the possibilities, you know, for other aspiring entrepreneurs, you know, next generation, people who are inspired by this conversation, I am particularly fascinated with space because I’ve got some Navy SEAL friends who are astronauts. I briefly looked into that as I was a Navy SEAL. And had I been 10 years younger and had the right academic credentials, I would have pursued it. But I was in my mid 30s And I had an MBA. NASA wasn’t hiring any MBAs to go into space. Yeah, so next lifetime.

Naveen Jain 25:58
No, no, no. This lifetime because you don’t need NASA to be a space astronaut anymore. Right? You can be a private astronaut.

Mark Divine 26:05
This is true. Yeah. Yeah. And if I wait long enough, I wanted to pay a quarter million dollars for it right?

Naveen Jain 26:10
I think remember, at the end of the day, think about it. Like anything else. Today, the way the spacecraft or all these spacecraft are made where they were one use, we don’t Make a plane that just goes one time. And then we throw it away. Right now, once you have these reusable aircraft, the cost of going to space is going to be simply the cost of the fuel, right? Because that’s only the marginal cost, right? In that case, the cost will come down to no different than from you going from here to Sydney, I mean, it’s not going to be very much different, going to space is going to become a common thing, just like we go from a plane from here to the other part of the world. Right? Right. You may find this crazy, people say I want to go to space. Space is relative. If you’re living on the moon, the Earth will be space. My point is, we are in space, it’s a matter of who is who’s asking.

Mark Divine 27:04
And it’s all in our mind anyways, right?

Naveen Jain 27:07
But when somebody’s looking down from the moon to Earth, they’re gonna say, God, I want to go to space, I want to go to Earth.

Mark Divine 27:13
That’s hilarious. Yeah, but let’s just, you know, part of the drive is from the material aspect of being a human. It’s like, I wonder what it’s like off this particular rock. And we have this kind of drive to explore, which is also part of the entrepreneurial experience. So what do you think are some of the near term opportunities for entrepreneurs in space, what are the biggest problems that need to be solved?

Naveen Jain 27:34
Again, the easiest, and the biggest problems are the ones that actually make people’s life on Earth better. So look at the low Earth satellite, I mean, that’s a massive business not only to provide connectivity to the most remote areas of the world, you can also now have amazing amount of business, on demand surveillance, you can go figure out, hey, there at 2:15, there was a robbery at this place. Let’s go look at the satellite, what happened there, you can literally look at every inch of planet Earth will be measured in so deep resolution, you can see everything that’s happening. You want to predict what is going to be the revenue of Walmart, you can look at the number of cars, count the cars everyday, and you can figure out – amazing amount of applications you can see once you start to build these underlying infrastructure, right?

And then you start to say, Okay, what will be the next thing, but first of all, solve the problem of the people who have credit card, which are people on Earth, and then you start to see what is going to be nasty, is based tourism is started for rich people, and then it starts to become common. And then you start to say, Okay, so we’re going to have space hotels, and then you can see, okay, just like going to a new neighborhood, can you build an amazingly great neighborhood on a planet on the moon. The moon is the 8th continent for our planet, right, we have seven continents, here, there are eight continents, we can start to build a great resort on the moon, then you want to go to the Mars and then you want to be able to go beyond your solar system. And I think these are all step by step. And there are going to be the people who are going to say, You know what, I just had enough of pick a name you want Trump, Biden, whatever it is, I want to go to the moon, to set up my own government, you have it right. So you can go out and have you know, ultimately, we are going to be a multiplanetary society, and we’re going to not just have the internet, we’re going to have an intergalactic net, and we’re all going to be connected over this zoom or whatever.

Mark Divine 29:33
I have a question, because it’s going to be timely. But, you know, we can barely get along here on Earth, and our international institutions don’t do such a great job of creating unified kind of responses or visions. How the hell is that gonna play out? When we get to the moon, like, sparked my interest that you actually got the rights to mine on the moon by the US government? Well, who the hell gave the US government the rights to give you the rights? Right? And what does Russia and China say, by that and United Nations? So what is it going to look like when we actually do start to populate the moon and then Mars from an international perspective? And how do we prevent what’s happening right now between the polarization between China and Russia and United States from happening in space?

Naveen Jain 30:14
So first of all, think of a moon or any other planet as international water? Right? So if you think of from international water, no country owns it. Nobody gives any one a right. Anyone can go look for oil or gas in the international water, and what the law says, you’re not supposed to interfere with someone else. And that’s literally what it’s about, is that you go out there you find a way, somebody can come and say, Oh, now that you found it, I’m going to do it the same place and you get out, right, you’re going to say, look, I spent my resources, I’m going to go out and do this. Think of a moon as another international water. Anyone can go there. No one is giving anyone a right but nobody’s blocking anyone from doing it. And all that means that you don’t interfere with each other.

Mark Divine 30:59
Don’t you think that eventually the pioneers will plant a flag and say this is our quadrant?

Naveen Jain 31:05
In quadrant for interference, right? That means Are you actively doing something there that we are interfering with, but you can’t just come and say, Hey, this is my flag on the international water now I own all of the Pacific Ocean, right?

Mark Divine 31:18
That’s helpful. That’s an interesting and prospective because, you know, I kind of imagined it more like the settlers coming over to America of course you know, we’re not that we know of kicking out natives off the moon or to Mars, maybe we will at some future point.

Naveen Jain 31:30
Oh God, I don’t know the lunar dose might be just the right ones there.

Mark Divine 31:36
But you’re gonna have some Magellan, you know, from China who says, Okay, this 10 million acres is mine, or belongs to the People’s Republic of China, those are going to be interesting things to deal with.

Naveen Jain 31:47
And I think, you know, honestly, that is going back to this mindset of scarcity, that if Moon is the only place, my point is, you could be on Jupiter’s moon, you could be on Mars, you could be there’s so much place to be, why would you want to fight over something in one place? Like, it’s the only reason you fight? There would be somehow if you thought this was the only thing that we could have? Right? So my point is, there is so much that we could be exploring, there are 200 billion planets. Where is the scarcity that you want to go?

Mark Divine 32:19
That we know of. Do you think that human consciousness is expanding globally?

Naveen Jain 32:29
You know, the question you have to be asking yourself is, What is the human consciousness? Right? Humans are simply the manifestation of a universal consciousness, right? Because Is there a universal consciousness, and we simply are manifestation. And if you start to think about, and I’m going to see something really crazy and controversial, but I always think about, this is the first time where the religion and science is actually starting to speak the same language.

Mark Divine 32:58
They’re in agreement.

Naveen Jain 33:00
There’s an agreement, right? What the religion says, is there is a God or creator, and the Your destiny is pre written, right? And literally, if you look at the scientists, what do you see, we are living in a simulation, that means there is a programmer who created this simulation for us. And there are algorithms that he has created. And we are living that algorithm, that means our destiny is pre written, and the programmer is the creator or the God. So my point is, we’re all saying the same thing. And this concept of Listen, look, if we are made of energy, when we die, this energy, just simply as you know, this basic thermal principle, energy just goes back into the other energy. And then when we’re reborn, the same energy comes back. And we call that reincarnation. Guess what, it is part of reincarnation. We are just a manifestation of the universal energy, we are the manifestation of the same universal consciousness, we only need one consciousness, we are just simply different manifestations of the same consciousness.

Mark Divine 34:03
Or different expressions. An expression. So I guess what I mean by expansion of consciousness, so you’re right, so we’re bits of consciousness. Yeah. And some people have more bits or more expansiveness, in awareness, with their particular manifestation of consciousness. My experience over the last five years is that more and more people are having conversations like you and I are having which gives me the sense and I’ve heard other people say this, that the individual bits of consciousness are expanding in more and more humans, and that’s accelerating. So that’s what I meant. It seems like we’ve entered an age now you’re aware of the Yuga concept from the yoga sciences, right. So we’re coming out of the Kali Yuga, which is a long period of darkness, which, you know, states that we’re kind of galactically far as far away from the galactic center as we can be, as the solar system revolves around the galactic center. Yes, Galileo. Yes. Yeah, the Kali Yuga. So we’re out of the Kali Yuga. We’re into the next age, where consciousness will expand, there’s more light, so to speak. So I think that that’s really good news, right, for people, because it sure has been a dark period, the last couple 1000 years, right. It’s been very violent, very dark. And at the same time, there’s all this incredible abundance and prosperity. You know what I mean? So this, you have this kind of dichotomy going on, right? Where we have unbelievable good things going on, and abundance and opportunity, while at the same time, a large chunk of the world is fighting, and you know, and still in poverty. But we’re heading in the right direction is what I’m trying to say. And I just wanted to get your take.

Naveen Jain 35:43
I think we are and partly it is being connected. And I think it’s literally when the more minds are connected together, we start to influence each other. So when we were living locally, and there was no connection, the only people were influenced by the people in that village or in that tribe. Right. And then now as we start to expand our connections, we’re starting to get the knowledge base to expand. And that’s enlightening every one of us and guess what, the information is traveling fast enough. And you know, you could argue that’s good or bad because we now we are becoming selective information-seekers, right. That means whatever bias We see you receive. So whatever you want to hear, you will get to hear just that.

But overall, you know, this consciousness is not expanding, our awareness of consciousness is actually expanding. And it’s like, you know, asking people say our universe is expanding, and you ask yourself, expanding into what? Is it another universe we’re taking over? Or it’s just how does the universe expand, right? Because at the end of the day, you can expand into something what, it has to be something else, or it itself is how you get bigger. Right? So the point is that, at the end of the day, we human beings, our awareness is constantly changing, as we are interacting more and more with the people who have a different mindset, they are able to challenge and that challenge allows us to actually change our own mindset, right? And I think, you know, we can go down on this spiritual path, or this idea of what is the consciousness, right? Is consciousness really a human creation? I mean, and if you ask that, humans have consciousness, where is it? How does it get created? If you have everything in our body is physical, right? It’s biochemicals. It is electrical. That’s all it is. You can never put a test tube with a bunch of chemicals and send the electrical signal. And the test tube says, Don’t you touch me, I’m jealous. Like. My point is, where does that consciousness happen?

Mark Divine 37:53
I’m speaking the same language as you. Because, you know, I’ve interviewed a ton of neuroscientists, and it’s always a fun conversation, because they all believe in The Completionist theory that consciousness is, you know, from brain activity and neurochemical processing, and it can’t be. The mind exists independent of, you know, functions of the brain, but it needs the brains, you know, the multiple brains that we have, including the biome to make sense of reality, you know, so this is kind of brings me to the next question that’s always curious to me is like, what’s your take on implants and humans kind of connecting to like the hive mind to artificial intelligence and singularity and kind of the whole human 2.0 movement or transhumanism? Because to me, part of that is really scary. Because I think that humans have such vast potential, just by exploring the mind and the universe, they don’t need to necessarily connect to an AI, you know, to explore and to grow. But I could be wrong. And I’m open minded.

Naveen Jain 38:57
Interestingly, we are always actually becoming transhuman. It’s the matter of at what stage when you stayed you actually transformed. So remember, in olden days, you and I used to remember phone numbers, every time we had to call people, and even the facts about the history. Now, today, I don’t remember a phone number, because I go to my device that’s connected to the cloud that reminds me what the phone number is, I no longer have to remember when a particular president was born. Because I am now connected to the cloud through a device. And this device happens to be separate from my body. One day, it is going to become part of my body. Today it is the watch. Tomorrow is going to be the chip in my thing. And someday it is going to be part of my brain where it is connected. And people say well, memory is different. So you just extended your hippocampus to the cloud. But people said that’s okay, but when it comes to decision making, are never going to give that up. That’s what makes me human. So I remind them, when you’re driving, and Google maps tells you take a right turn you say what a stupid AI, I know the shortcuts, I’m going left and you get stuck in the traffic. Next time when Google says take a right turn, you’re taking it? Guess what, you just give up your decision making power to the AI. And this is literally how slowly slowly we actually become so accustomed to the AI you no longer even think is an AI and robotics. I’ve asked lots of old people. Would you like to have robotics in your house? And they say, over my dead body. And then I remind them, what is your washing machine? What is your dishwasher? It is a robotics.

Mark Divine 40:41
What are the risks associated with this though? Because, you know, just like any technology, you’ve got little positive benefits or real dystopian malevolent benefits.

Naveen Jain 40:53
One more part? Right? You remember the days when you had to dial into a modem to connect to the internet, right? Right. Those were the slow bandwidth 300 baud modem, right and now we are connected broadband and we can have all these wonderful conversations. Guess what you and I are doing? I’m communicating my part to you and everyone else using a slow baud modem called my speech. So I am speaking To convey my thought, that’s like connecting through the modem, because there’s only how fast I can speak. What if my brain could actually communicate with you, and instantly give you all the thoughts just like a broadband. Instead of spending four years in college? What if you can upload all the professor’s brain, and you can subscribe to their brain? So as they’re learning something new, you’re automatically learning it.

Mark Divine 41:43
That’s a great concept. I love that. Interesting. I’m not sure I would want to let anyone in my brain. But that’s, that’s a whole different topic.

Naveen Jain 41:52
That’s a different topic. Because at the end of the day, it is not the thoughts in your brain that matters. What matters is what you express.

Mark Divine 42:04
Yeah, I see what you’re just saying, so you’re not just giving someone unfettered access to roam around in there. You’d have some sort of mechanism to express thoughts, telepathically, digitally. That’s fascinating.

Naveen Jain 42:15
And I think, you know, coming back to the, you know, health side, it is exactly the same thing that I learned as I was doing my healthcare ventures, as you know, I’m working on VIOME lab, right. And that’s essentially understanding the human biology at a particular level, to be able to understand what is causing you to be sick, using the machine learning and AI, to be able to say, this is what’s happening, Mark, your body. And this is if you don’t change something, this is what’s going to make you sick, and then tell them, what can you do about it not to be sick. So you know, I don’t know if you know, how much do you know about my current journey that I’m doing?

Mark Divine 42:52
Well, now let’s get into that. Because last time we spoke you had just launched VIOME, and I mentioned earlier that I had become an early customer. And yeah, but boy, lots have been five years, a lot of machine learning, a lot of evolution of what you guys have learned. So let’s get into that.

Naveen Jain 43:06
Absolutely. Today with you know, what we do is we are able to take your saliva, drops of blood and a touch of your stool. And we are able to now look at that analyze every gene that’s expressed in your human body, every microbial activity in your gut, everything that’s happening in your top of the tube in the saliva, and then we come back and tell you, Hey, Mark, your biological age is like for me is 52. Even though I’m 62 that means I am 10 years younger than my chronological age. My immune health is 89, that means I am well prepared to be able to defend flu or cold and God forbid COVID. My cellular health is healthy, that means I’m able to now look younger, and my skin I don’t have wrinkles on my face, or my inside my organs, right? And then it says, Hey, don’t eat broccoli and cabbage, because the cell fight production in your gut is too high and scalding inflammation. And it comes from sulfate which is coming from broccoli and cabbage. Now, your oxalic acid mechanism is not very good. So don’t eat food high in oxalate like spinach. So despite Popeye telling you that spinach is good for everyone, I’m telling you that Popeye was not a scientist, so don’t go there.

Mark Divine 44:22
He was a sailor man, not a scientist.

Naveen Jain 44:25
Same thing we can now tell you, Hey, your ammonia production is too high. Don’t eat a lot of protein or take a digestive enzyme with protein. And by the way, don’t take vitamin d3 Because your uric acid production is too high. Don’t take turmeric, everyone tells you it’s really good for you, but your bile acid is too high to actually converting into bile salts. And don’t take NAD and everyone tells you to live long take NAD and I’m telling you that your cellular senescence is too high or inflammation is too high. Don’t do that, it’s going to cause you more harm. But you do need 22 milligram of Berberine and everyday you do need 27 milligram of elderberry, you do need 79 million amylase so we tell you everything you need your vitamins, minerals, herbs, digestive enzymes, amino acids, and guess what? And then we make them for you on demand with only those ingredients with that dosage and we can ship it.

Mark Divine 45:17
Oh wow, that’s new. You didn’t have you didn’t have a link to the products back then.

Naveen Jain 45:21
And then guess what happened? We did the test in four months, people who actually took our supplements and our food recommendations. We did a clinical study where we showed in four months, your depression clinical score came down by 36%, to IBS which is a stomach ache and bloating and gas, 40%, diabetes came down by 30%. And your anxiety score measured by G87 seven came down by 32%. Imagine that. This is the drug no drug does that, this is the food as a medicine. Right? What Hippocrates said 2500 years ago. Let food be thy medicine.

Mark Divine 46:01
Let food be thy medicine. I agree with that. We are what we are and also how we are how we breathe.

Naveen Jain 46:08
This whole idea of doing a biome test is to actually understand what’s happening in your body and find out what you should be eating, what you should not be eating and we tell you why. What supplements you need. And the idea is to prevent that. And then guess what happened? As we have now analyzed, since you and I chatted, 325,000 people we have analyzed. And guess what, now we can learn what causes you to have different diseases. We went to FDA, and we got the FDA breakthrough device designation for detecting stage one. Oral cancer is stage one throat cancer with 95% specificity. That means now we’re launching a test you spit in a saliva in a tube? And we literally can tell you, do you have a cancer? You don’t have a cancer? No kidding, no kidding. And now we’re expanding that to other cancers, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, GI cancer, colorectal cancer, stomach cancer, right. And we have found what causes people to have these diseases, and we went to GSK. And now we have two vaccines that they’re developing for us. One is for colorectal cancer, and one is for autoimmune disease. Think about it. Simply by learning the human biology, we are actually curing a disease that has never been cured. Today, you have an autoimmune disease, they give you biologics for the rest of your life, no cure. Now we are finding what microbes are causing it and actually developing a vaccine against it.

Mark Divine 47:35
Now, that’s fascinating. You know, because when you started, you really were just trying to understand the biome and trying to educate people, obviously, on the role of the biome in terms of you know, overall health and mood and everything. Now you’ve expanded to the whole system, the whole body system, yes,

Naveen Jain 47:49
Yes, saliva, blood, stool, to everything.

Mark Divine 47:52
You’ve extended it to food and cancer detection. What are the other opportunities for you with this concept?

Naveen Jain 47:58
Honestly, our goal is to prevent the disease from happening, if you come to us late, we want to be able to diagnose them already. So we are now putting a diagnostic test for IBD, which is an autoimmune disease, doing the things for colorectal cancer, developing more diagnostic for all the different types of cancer, and then developing a cure for these diseases. So my goal, if you ask me in 10 years would be to not have no one ever having to buy my diagnostic test or therapeutic test. It that will be my ideal thing, because we have prevented everyone from getting sick.

Mark Divine 48:29
You want to put yourself out of business. I love that. Yes. Obviously not doing it for the money. That’s pretty fascinating. I have to get back on board with this.

Naveen Jain 48:39
I’m gonna send you one, you should absolutely try it. You’re gonna love it.

Mark Divine 48:42
I will. I know I’m looking forward to that. Because all the tools for it to be optimally healthy and to live extremely long, productive life are right in front of us, right? It’s healthy food, healthy water and sunshine and fresh air.

Naveen Jain 48:53
And you know, good sleep and having a positive mindset. Not having stress, removing anxiety and stress from your life.

Mark Divine 49:00
Right, exactly. Okay, so that’s awesome. VIOME viome.com is where people find out more about it. That’s awesome. What other exciting things are in your future that are on your Horizon?

Naveen Jain 49:12
My goal really is to honestly understand everything around the world is to get rid of these chronic diseases because 7.4 billion of us, all of us are going to suffer from a chronic disease sooner or later. So my goal in life is to be able to do something to get rid of this epidemic that we have. We have this what I call infectious disease or pandemic of COVID. And I’m not minimizing what happens here. A lot of good souls lost their lives. But every day we lose millions of people to heart disease, we lose millions of people to diabetes, we lose millions of people to depression, anxiety, Alzheimer, Parkinsons, cancer, I lost my own dad to cancer. And that’s what got drove me to say just screw it. I’m going to fix this problem.

Mark Divine 49:56
Right? Right. That’s sure is a moonshot, get healthy in any way I can.

Naveen Jain 50:01
That’s what you just did. I mean, I think you can bring awareness to it is all we need. And I’m going to send you the kit myself, you should experiment it and you should go do it yourself, and then let people know about it.

Mark Divine 50:12
So I will definitely do that. Are you friends with Peter Diamandis, I just reconnected with him at a conference and rejoined his abundance committee.

Naveen Jain 50:20
Peter and I have known each other for 20 years. He’s a great guy. I am actually on the board of XPRIZE. I’m also on the board of Singularity University. And we’re both on both of them. So I’ve known Peter for 20 years.

Mark Divine 50:30
Yeah, he’s a neat guy, you remind me a lot of his and I’m rejoining his abundance committee. I was part of that about five years ago when I met you and yeah, right when he had launched it, and then it kind of slipped away. But uh, what a neat group of people and to be around people like you and entrepreneurs who are solving these big problems and singularity that’s also on my list. To get over to the singularity group. Next year. I think you’ve got a great entrepreneur program right there or an executive

Naveen Jain 50:54
Executive program. That’s the five to seven days program. Yes.

Mark Divine 51:07
That’s awesome. Yeah. Naveen, man, we could talk forever, but I’m sensitive to your time. We’ve been going for about 45, 50 minutes. Besides your entrepreneurial work, what is it that fires you up? And what other message might you have for the listeners, you know, to help them live a good life?

Naveen Jain 51:14
Dream big, dream so big that people think you’re crazy and what really to me, gives me the biggest amount of satisfaction is really our children. Like our daughter is started a woman’s health company and I want if you can spread the word about her what she’s doing is phenomenal. This company called Evvy. Evvy.com. And she is doing the things about a woman’s health. So she graduated from Stanford. She’s a Stanford, Stanford Stanford Mayfield fellow. And she using machine learning and vaginal microbiome to actually cure women’s health issues. And that’s all she’s focused on right now. Our oldest one is on to his third unicorn, and he is building the things around things for affordable housing, affordable apartments, affordable Senior Care, right. And that’s the three programs he has. And he went to what the youngest one went to stand for the Schwartzman scholar, and he’s doing a FinTech company, right? So all three of our children decided they’re going to go out there and actually focus on making people’s lives better. And that is what it takes to force people to be focused. And that gives me more pleasure than anything else. My daughter was actually with us this weekend. And she came for this long weekend. She left yesterday. And we were just talking and it makes me so proud that she’s decided to tackle the woman’s health issue. She said you know, women were not even allowed to be in the clinical study because they were considered too much too many issues. They got menstrual period, they got too much stuff. Women are basically small men. That’s how they treat them.

Mark Divine 52:53
Wow, that is pretty exciting. It’s really cool to see so many women entrepreneurs kind of flowering these days, you know, and I just talked to a friend of mine, Susan Sly yesterday who’s starting a, do you know, Susan? She started? Yeah, she’s starting an incubator slush fund. With the kind of the moonshot of launching 1000 Female entrepreneurial ventures.

Naveen Jain 53:13
You know, I love that idea. I mean, look, we need to support them. It’s not that because they are women. We need to support them because they’re underrepresented and it’s an underutilized resource.

Mark Divine 53:22
100%. That’s awesome. Naveen, thanks so much. Your website? Naveen jain.com. Is that correct? The VIOME is just viome.com. Yes. What else? Should I point folks to evvy.com your daughter’s company? Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, brother. Listen, Naveen. Thank you very much, sir. I really appreciate you and thank you keep marching on. I’m here to cheer you and support you any way I can.

Naveen Jain 53:54
Thanks for that. I appreciate it. Take care of yourself.

Mark Divine 53:55
Yeah. Yeah, you bet. Wow, that was an incredible episode. Naveen, what a fascinating guy, truly a spiritual leader. I loved our conversations about philosophy and yoga. And basically this world being a simulation and how science and spirituality or religion are starting to agree on these matters. We talked a ton about moonshot thinking, developing entrepreneurial endeavors based upon obsessions that can solve global problems and serve a billion people. And he’s doing this with his company VIOME and with his company, Moon Express, and we also talked about his daughter’s new company focused on female health called Evvy. What a fascinating conversation, show notes and transcripts will be up at Mark Divine.com. And video will be going on our YouTube channel. So check that out. You can find me at Twitter and Instagram and Facebook at the real Mark Divine Instagram, Facebook and Mark Divine, at Twitter, also hit me up on LinkedIn.

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Shout out to my awesome team Jason Sanderson, Geoff Haskell and Amy Jurkowitz, who help produce this podcast, bringing incredible guests like Naveen and produce an amazing show for you every week. I also really appreciate you and your support. Thanks for sharing the show. And thanks for the reviews. If you haven’t reviewed it, it’s very helpful for other people to find it for credibility, we have over 1000 5 star reviews. I’d love to get it to 5000 this year. So appreciate your help. And thank you for doing the work. By you showing up to listen to this podcast, you’re part of the solution, not the problem. The solution is to scale our consciousness, and expand our awareness of what’s possible, our awareness of our basic goodness as humans, our connectivity, our sameness as opposed to our differences and expand our care and compassion in a world centric way. So you being part of this show, and doing the work every day to grow and evolve is huge. Can’t do it without you. So hoo-yah to you. Thank you very much for listening. I’ll see you next time. This is Mark Divine.