Ep 42: Life IS What YOU Make It With Chef and Entrepreneur Mark Brand

Mark Brand calls himself an Advocate,  Agitator, and an Accomplice, he is a Social Entrepreneur, International Speaker, Chef, Humanitarian, Artist, rapper, Dj, a world traveler, and so much more! He has 11 businesses under his belt! Eight years ago, he took over Save On Meats, a Vancouver-based institution that has provided food security and access since 1957. With his partnerships with A better Life foundation, they have provided over 2.8million meals to people in need.

In this episode, he and I sit down and talk about the quest to live your life authentically, food sustainability, working for the United Nations, Cooking at the Vatican, working with the late great musician Prince, and how we can overcome challenges in our lives. We talk about falling down and getting back up and doing what you love without having to choose just ONE thing.

This is a conversation you will want to definitely dive into and listen to it more than once.

Here are a few snippets of some of our conversation:

[9:19]  I run the businesses that I run, which is a better life foundation charity on three borders, Canada, the US side, and Mexico. And what better life foundation does is focus on feeding, trading, and employing people coming out of the margins, recidivism, Street, and transmit reversibility.

[18:33] I'm an alcoholic. Four years sober under my belt. I relapsed during the pandemic. People are like oh my god, you can talk about that and be a business person and work with the United Nations. I'm like, you have to you. It's not can I, if they turn their back on me, that's fine. I know that I'm okay. But they don't they dig in deeper. They're like, we can trust this person. 

[20:30] I'm speaking directly to you at this point, you are not your mistakes, and you are not your slips. They don't define you, it really what defines you is how you're going to deal with them.

[22:00] The poison that you put in, that creates depression, and also disassociates your soul from your body to deep indigenous belief. And it's just true, you know, you become a different person when you're under the influence. And that person is less inhibited, they careless, they might be more sarcastic, aggressive.

[26:00]  I was a breakfast cook in Melbourne, at a hotel, you know, like whatever it took to stick to get by while I was traveling, cooking was always something I could fall back on. But it didn't become part of my personality, or the way that I forward face because I became a DJ for nine to 10 years. And then that was my profession.

[27:37] I'm not a religious person, just to get that out of the way, which makes the story even better. But was asked to do this dinner for 400 people for climate change at the Vatican in Rome, and base it around the methodologies and the understandings of poverty and localized etc. 

[35:48] We get it twisted, we start to box ourselves in our possibilities very, very early. I never adhered to that. Right. And I refuse to believe it. 

[39:00] Homeless doesn't mean you were the guy sitting on the corner with a tin can and a thing, a sign in the dog. That's also homeless. Homeless means sleeping in your car almost means having been in a shelter homeless means Couchsurfing with your mom, because you lost your house. That's all homeless.

[39:54] Don't ever allow anybody to extinguish any of the flames that make you passionate and it's not about a giant audience.

[44:19] I had a disagreement with the multinational supplier, massive company, trillion-dollar company. And I decided to go to war with them. And I was like, what you've done is not acceptable. And they were like, okay, cool. And they sued me. For almost $400,000 at the exact same time, I'd had a disagreement with the designer.

[51:28] I love everybody. Right. But I have to choose how to spend my time. And I won't mince words here, white dudes mentor other white dudes into success. It's, it's how the system works. It's really true. Right. And it's not even that they do it by choice. It's they're just like, just is.

[57:08] You don't come from a place of, like, I know better. As soon as you move into a superiority mindset, it's over for you because somebody is going to find a crack.

[59:17] I'll share on a high level is getting to work with Prince for, you know, almost five years. Prince was an artist that like, I can remember renting The Purple rain tape renting, sorry, taking out the purple rain tape from the Cole Harbor library, and popping that popping in my Walkman because you couldn't afford to buy it.

[105:57] Push everything that I have created or things that have been created with me and teams into the hands of the people that need the most. So we created those structures financially.

[113:00] The reason people are so angry, the reason people got firearms, the reason people hate each other are deeply entrenched on message boards and on Reddit and write and blog posts is that they can't f%cking love themselves as they could the world a different place, man.

Mark Brand Links

Danny Stone Links

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