hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is december 9th 2021 and i'm back in the office uh briefly it was kind of a truncated week and on friday till next friday i'm doing something quite special i've never done this before but it comes highly recommended a lot of people said hey since you meditate you should go to one of those meditation retreats and i said well what exactly do you do at a meditation retreat and they say nothing so what do you mean nothing at all so i've signed up for a retreat go up to the mountains and you basically spend an entire week in rough silence and solitude can't speak for an entire week first time in my life many people say i talk too much so this is the first time ever where i get to actually enjoy doing nothing but 12 hours a day of sitting meditation walking meditation standing meditation nature walks all of these types of things so it'll be a heck of a lot of fun and we'll see what transformative changes it provides now part of this means that i go on a complete digital detox as well which means i don't even get to have my phone so old charles will be all alone a little damn nowhere somewhere in the mountains uh enjoying a week-long solitude and uh hopefully uh it uh has some value and uh other such things and actually some books i wanted to show you guys so uh first off they said for recommended reading uh john cabot zinn is apparently the guy so there's a book called coming to our senses healing ourselves and the world through mindfulness and it's as you can see quite a large book normally i do these things on kindle but you're not allowed to bring any digital devices so that that's going to be interesting and the other book i wanted to bring a little bit out there is math art truth beauty and equations and it's actually kind of a fascinating book and talks about all kinds of different things like the math of infinity and the traveling salesman problem so algorithmic art and these things let's see what else here fractals you guys love fractals everybody loves fractals i haven't met anybody that doesn't like it the tangled tortuous universe of fractals look at that so we'll have a chance to uh explore all of that too it's good to keep the mind open and in these things uh anyway you know it's a brief reminder that we work so hard in life uh this year i think i put in more hours than any year i've ever done before it was a very busy year thousands of meetings i traveled even though it's coveted to almost a dozen countries uh lots of professional stuff uh thousands and thousands of emails uh and such a diversity of things things related to my biotech company things related to like bringing back the woolly mammoth uh you know things uh like the cardano launches for example gogen uh we hired 150 people uh and everything was always so busy and so busy and so distracting and i thought a lot about what i missed the most because you know the year is coming to an end and you always reflect you know what did we learn from january to december and what i missed the most was the ability to just sit and deeply focus uh it was something i did in my early 20s i was very very into this you'd sit down with some concept some philosophy some idea and you spend eight hours 10 hours 12 hours straight and lost in absolute deep thought exploring it kind of like a new island that you shipwreck on and you have no idea what to expect and you get off the beach and you go into the jungles and you have no idea what the birds are what the animals are if the water is good if it's bad uh you know how how will you find shelter that's the magic of problems and that was something that was a dear friend of mine throughout many years of my 20s uh becoming a ceo it's a blessing because you get to travel been to more than 70 countries now and i've seen so much of the world and i've met so much of the world from heads of state to kings and princes to rock stars all these things these great experiences and as a ceo you every 15 minutes get to put on a new mask and play a new role uh some days i wake up and i'm in crisis management other days i'm a technician other days i wake up i'm a researcher other days i wake up i'm a businessman it's different every single day you have some decision you have to make sometimes decisions involving billions of dollars decisions involving uh people's entire careers uh and so forth the and that's great but the problem is that because you are so focused for just a moment and then you have to move on to something else you lose the ability to do deep work and you lose the ability to concentrate and focus for long periods of time so that's one of the reasons why i'm trying this experiment of going out and spending an entire week in silence and solitude alan watts certainly had a lot to say about the value of that and hopefully it restores that peace the other side is that there's a lot of uh things that silicon valley likes to try and some aren't so crazy uh and one of them is called a dopamine detox so while these things have dramatically enhanced our connectivity and our ability to do things in some cases productivity they actually are engineered for addiction so when you look at the infinite scroll feature of youtube or facebook or these things where you're just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling that's actually built as a psychological game to maximize the amount of time you spend in the interface because there's this unpredictability of when you're going to see a video that you like and then you click it so a lot of people actually have uh written books about this and and the consequences of of these constant dopamine rushes uh these neurochemical rushes that really do interfere with the quality of your life and they leave you hedonically vacuous you're eventually unable to feel pleasure or at least things that should be fun aren't anymore because of the engineering of these systems so what i've heard is when people go on these solitary things they they actually reset completely and it has a big effect on the brain waves a big effect on neural chemistry so who knows it's uh as much of an experiment as it is fun activity and i can't wait to see it i will miss you guys uh while i'm gone for a week uh you know it's uh kind of sad you know i love doing amas i love interacting with you guys over twitter and i can't even look at a phone there's no computers no digital devices it's very very much off the grid by the middle of nowhere and that's the point uh but hopefully i get to come back and be a little more gentle and maybe not let the trolls bother me quite as much but i figured i'd make a quick video to let you guys know the latest experiment uh you know the fun part of having an audience in the in the fun part of having a community is that you don't do things alone you share these things with everybody else you know over the last six years we've come become like one big family in a certain respect i've gotten to meet so many remarkable people you know there isn't a week that goes by that i don't get a letter or an email or a message from somebody in the community wishing me well offering me advice or at the very least giving some strategy or something like that about what ought to be done with cardano uh and you know i've started to realize how much i love that and i appreciate that i you know it's easy to stay young and it's easy to stay inspired when you're bolstered up by the hopes dreams admiration respect thoughts and prayers of so many people from the very young i've received letters from people as young as four years old to the very old i've received a letter once from a woman who was 101 years old and she made a point to say that she wrote it herself and she still uses a computer us which is pretty remarkable when you think about that that's such a great range and all along the way i've learned so much and i've gained uh so much uh you know wisdom uh from book recommendations to lifestyle recommendations to people say hey you need to take care of your health i've had more than one doctor email me and say you know you're overweight and we know you know because we're physicians uh that you're not exactly treating yourself as well as you ought to uh and that's true uh you know when i was a lot younger i took much better care of myself and uh when as i got older and i became an entrepreneur i always use the excuse of well you know i'm busy i'm a ceo i'm doing all these things but the wisdom and the truth of the matter is that it begins today and health is not just physical shape it's also mental and spiritual shape as well and you have to invest in all of these things and that's kind of the point of this retreat is to try to get to that peace in the center and really make mindfulness uh part of the daily routine you can't control the winds you can't control the ups and downs of life and the markets and these other things and what's so crazy about our industry as a whole is it takes the best and worst of all of us and it dials it up to 11. every single week since i joined this space there's been a crisis and some news items some event some glorious thing i've been through probably five six boom and bust cycles i've been through the collapse of everything from mount cox and silk road to uh all these other things there's some regulatory event there's china's banned bitcoin i think eight times uh you know you got trial of the century craig wright you got everything every week there's something there and it just keeps coming and coming and coming and all these new people come in and it's new to them and so they react with maximum passion and excitement uh for better or for worse and then when they ride their first wave down it's like the worst thing ever and when they ride their first wave up it's euphoria uh and people start convincing themselves that they're smarter than they actually are and they don't understand how much luck comes into a lot of these things uh so in all of that chaos the survivors the people who get through all of it who prosper and all of it they have to develop a workflow a thought pattern a life that allows them to be peaceful in the chaos to to live a life in the center in the winds and the storms uh and despite that somehow kind of pushed through and also remember not to forget the really important things in life uh nature your family you know your friends having empathy for others these types of things we're all kind of in this boat together it's very easy in the space when you deal with so much tribalism and maximalism and so many strong opinions where literally every single day if you're a public figure in this industry you get called the worst possible names from a criminal to a sociopath to this to that a scammer all these things by people who have never met you they know very little of anything about you and they hate you for no real valid reason every single day you endure these things again and again and again the hardest thing and the most rewarding thing to do and it's something i hope i can master in the coming years is having the ability despite all of those things to somehow have empathy and love for those who do these things don't know exactly how to quite get there it's hard but it is i think probably the pursuit of a lifetime and one of the greatest lessons if you can love your enemies despite the fact what they do and see through all of those things and try to identify with the pains and tribulations they have then maybe the world will be a better place at least for me and hopefully for you too so quick video just to remind everybody that uh they should take a moment to take a timeout and really think about that reminder that the holidays are here uh regardless of the faith or lack thereof there's always something to do and it's a good time you know it's been tough two years with copen it's been a tough market and there's been so many things that we've all had to endure but you know what we're all still here you're all still listening you're all still breathing and you all still have so many great opportunities and the reality is that if we want the future can be pretty sweet and pretty amazing nothing is written in stone and the next five to ten years we're going to see a lot of miracles of technology and a lot of miracles of society if we so choose to invest and build those types of things everything from the metaverse and all this amazing stuff with mixed reality i heard that apple is releasing this thing called the q k u o i'm not sure how to pronounce it it's going to be their vr headset pretty amazing got the m1 processor like 8k resolution all kinds of stuff 350 grams pretty light that's just the beginning you got brain computer interfaces coming you got a lot of wonders of synthetic biology coming whole bunch of new drugs coming online make your mind work better slow down the aging process we're really starting to unlock and understand consciousness in the brain and optimizing that flow research continues to advance day by day and so many other things to help one live a better life and navigate life a slightly different way and this technology is also improving infrastructure to the point where we can share the gifts of modern society to those who haven't enjoyed it yet without destroying the world or the environment along the way so we really can make the world a better place and our industry plays a big role in that because we have a way of distributing resources and trust and consent without having to have powerful centralized actors who because of their positions hold that against us and parasitically suck the life out of society we also can choose to focus on the bad parts of technology that's coming the dystopian parts of it and endow the centralized entities with even more power it's really up to us and our philosophy our self-determination our lack of cynicism or abundance of it and i for one would like to live in a world where people get along we have a lot of empathy and we love each other and there's peace so that's the technology i build that's the life i live and hopefully in a week of silence and solitude i will learn some great lessons that i then can apply to the work that i do and hopefully that'll give me the ability to get back to the old days where i really enjoyed deep work and uh we're all the better for in any event i shall see you guys next weekend and be back in the office december 20th so until next time have a wonderful day and take care
