hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado taking a brief break from my digital detox sunday for you guys so i was roaming around the farm and news got to me through conventional means that the markets aren't doing so well and a lot of people are pretty upset about it so i decided to come back and just talk a little bit about one of my favorite topics recently which is mindfulness and resilience you know running a a company is really hard anyone who's an entrepreneur it doesn't matter if they're ceo of a fortune 500 corporation or if they are running a mcdonald's franchise doesn't matter there's a whole spectrum there it's difficult you have hr issues you have employees you have regulations and laws and taxes and customers and customers who are karen's and all those things and what's really hard is when you have a collective event see the crypto markets are the crypto markets and the macro right now on the u.s side is that regulation is coming and on the china side there's a crackdown both of these have kind of put a needle into the balloon of the market and now things don't look so hot and unfortunately there's been a lot of people who have exceedingly unrealistic expectations about things and they've put in probably too much money into the crypto markets and now they're getting hit hard and the sky seems to be falling no matter how much you warn people and how much you talk about this stuff and how much you say hey i you know be mindful and respectful that stuff that goes up goes down people don't listen and they never will because they think that the minute that they get rich that all the problems go away i was actually more relaxed and happier when i was poor there's never been a peer in my life where i was born rich or it was privileged you know my dad's a doctor but he was the low tier of doctor as an internist and you know those who don't specialize in medicine don't do as well as the rest and when i started input output i lived off of a few thousand dollars a month i was very poor and i had a lot of obligations i had to take care of and just somehow had to find a way to make it work and those days were a lot simpler a lot happier more money more problems more assets anyway i have some links for everybody and they help me figure out how to deal with the ups and downs and deal with the the onslaught and the publicity and the notoriety and also not to care about what people say and think and to let ego it's a long journey i've been on it for almost 10 years now in cryptocurrency space i and uh i'll be on it for the foreseeable future so i have to keep doubling down so let me share my screen real quickly okay all right so that's my screen so if we click right here the first book i'd highly recommend i read it last year uh it's from ron siegel now ron's an interesting guy he's actually from harvard and he's a scientist he's a psyd at harvard medical school and he's been studying mindfulness and all kinds of things and he takes a very medical viewpoint on what meditation is actually doing and how it works in the brain and basically what it does for you for a physiological viewpoint and what's nice about this publication is there's a corpus of exercises and things there's even a series of 24 lectures on the great courses that kind of walk you through everything you need to know to to get to where you need to go and practice every day then you can take a more philosophical side and john cabot zinn is is kind of the godfather of these things and he wrote a lovely book called mindfulness for beginners and uh it really approaches it from a practitioner's viewpoint and he's he's probably one of the best if you're like me and you're always on the go and you need something to remind you i think probably the best application in the world that's ever been built for meditation is the call map and there's a lovely 30-day introduction to meditation from jeff warren and jeff has just got this really calming nice voice and the exercises are only about 10 minutes 15 minutes long and what's really nice about jeff is that he doesn't come from an academic background and he doesn't come from uh you know like a buddhist background or anything like that he's just a guy that kind of liked cracking skulls and getting in trouble in his teenage years and his twenties and he used meditation to help himself get out all of that and he feels pretty good about it now in addition to that there's a great guy and if you want to go up a level so you know at the very least you can buy a book you can subscribe to an app free or otherwise and you know you can do that if you want to go up a level cody rawls a psychiatrist and he specializes in uh brain interfaces brain computer interfaces and he has a whole bunch of videos of various devices from neo rhythm to muse to other things that he's been thinking about playing around with and in particular muse is kind of the market leader right now and i've met the muse people that actually came to the ihk summit 2019 and they've done some really cool things and basically this solves that problem in meditation of how do you know you're actually meditating how do you actually know you're in a meditative state the minute that you start detaching and not paying too much attention uh you start daydreaming and your mind starts wandering and this is a device that helps you kind of stay in that zone and that detached zone and not think too much about things and not take the thoughts you have too seriously often times i'm told one of the goals of meditation is to imagine that you're just sitting in a lawn chair with a beer on a road you know and that's not too busy and every now and then you see cars come by and you acknowledge that they're coming by but you don't pay too much attention to them you know and that's kind of what you'd like to do and those cars are thoughts you never really get rid of them and this technology this is kind of generation one generation two looks like this so there's a great company called kernel and they've developed this insane headset which is way too expensive for consumers i think with all the sensors this is about a hundred thousand dollars but it gives you a beautiful brain scan basically and that brain scan allows you to understand actually what's going on in the head and all the blood flows and so forth you get tons of samples and it's just mostly used for research but within five to ten years the cost will fall by 100x and so a device like this will be about a thousand dollars and it allow you to get a significantly better read on whether someone's in a mindful state and what's going on with the default mode network and so forth so it's really exciting to see where all of this is going so that's kind of the meditation side of things and why meditate what's the value well meditation doesn't make you superhuman it doesn't make you learn super quickly it doesn't somehow give you some special new power instead what it fundamentally changes i'd say are three things one there's the event and the reaction to the event and whatever the event is it can be you've been cheated on or you've been fired from your job or you've just been diagnosed with cancer can be very serious event or it could be a mild event like someone you know cop pulls you over for a traffic ticket or you know someone flips you off on the road or something like that then your reaction the problem most people have is as they get overloaded and there's a lot of stress and a lot of things going on we tend to overreact to things we tend to be overly emotional on things and what meditation does is it gives you a better control valve to not immediately react to whatever the input is instead what it does for you is it gives you the time to kind of calm down chill down and not be angry about something to to experience the emotion but not be connected to the emotion so you may experience anger or disappointment or sadness but then it fades away just like that car driving by you know on that road as you're sitting and drinking your beer that thought that emotion that reaction goes away so that's one thing the second thing is it gives you the ability to be significantly more patient about life you know uh it's a funny thing ada i went from 240 down to 120. we're still up 500 percent this year yet people are running around pretending like it's the end of the world and ultimately why is price even a metric the real metric is the social mentions the wallet quantity the fact that commercialization is coming that that we're right at the edge of smart contracts after all these years of all this hard work we should be celebrating the fact that we've made so much progress so quickly and that four years of hard work in the markets and six years of hard research and development and engineering are starting to pay dividends and fruit in that there's a beautiful platform that's coming but you have to have a longer time horizon and you have to detach yourself from the chaos and madness of the day and you have to start looking to the future and saying the things that i do today the investments i make today are good for me tomorrow next week next month five years from now 10 years from now the crypto markets and social media have destroyed our ability to do that if you look at youtube which is my generation's entertainment and tick tock which is the next generation's entertainment with tick tock the average person spends about 52 minutes i think and they watch over 300 videos distinct unique videos youtube it's about 40 some minutes and they watch about six to seven videos in that time period so that's our attention span now that's our notion of things there's an instant stimulus no matter how great something is they say what's the next big thing where are we going from here the point of meditation is to break that and give you a great degree of calm and give you the ability to be much more patient about things and then finally there's this concept of of being able to steer meditation in a particular direction and i forgot to put the book up but there's a wonderful gentleman named matthew ricard and they often call him the world's happiest man if you meditate over a long period of time years decades over time it changes the gray matter in your brain neural connections in your brain because of neural plasticity and if you follow certain forms of meditation like empathy and love then you just start feeling happy and you just start feeling a collective empathy for everybody and a collective love for everybody it's not a hippie thing it's just you understand why people are upset and you give them the space to be upset without reacting to it or taking it personally i receive an enormous amount of criticism in this space uh criticism for all kinds of things things outside of my control things in my control things that happened 10 years ago things that happened today and i often ask well why am i being criticized about these things some cases it's just commercial pressures where in some cases it's ignorant some cases it's fear some cases the critic themselves have a problem and they're not actually criticizing me they're just off gassing the emotional pain and the problems that they have and they want somebody to to point to to somehow make it better you know whether it be a mistake or a personality issue or whatever it is the superpower of meditation and doing it for a long period of time it gives you if there's any superpower it gives you the ability to have empathy for your critics and for the people who hate you and if you do it for long enough it gives you the ability to love the people who hate you even though they hate you and at some point that melts them and disarms them and the reasonable ones they throw on the towel and they give up the unreasonable ones well all you can really do is just love them kind of like a drug addict relative or something now that's the meditation side now there's a philosophical side to resilience as well and there's a lovely interview that lex friedman did with sheldon solomon who's a psychologist and a philosopher and sheldon's a big fan of ernest becker's book the denial of death and actually this is a really interesting book ernest wrote it while dying of cancer in the 1970s and really it's the core of his life philosophy this idea that everything in the world dies and everything in the world is trying to kill you in some way or another uh and human beings aren't super good at dealing with death and so what we tend to do is is to find a way to get it out of mind and then build social structures to protect ourselves from it and then finally we construct what are called immortality cults these ideas that if you do something like you live virtuously or if you believe in a certain philosophy that somehow you'll escape death when you die go to either a paradise or you'll achieve some sort of immortality of mention where people will remember you because there's monuments to you and so forth and a lot of the problems in the world come from these competing immortality cults and life philosophies and instead if you can embrace the concept of death head-on and fight that dragon early then you when you escape it you get to the other side and you have a tremendous sense of calm and peace because no matter what happens on the other end you already have a meaning in your life a corollary to that in an earlier work was victor frankel's man's search for meaning and it's actually a book i read when i was a lot younger and boy it really helped me and victor was a jewish psychiatrist during world war ii and he served in uh he's he survived auschwitz he was there for three years and horrible horrible things happened to him and his entire family was murdered and he covers this inside the book and when he left the camp everything about who he was was taken from him his credentials were destroyed his life's work was destroyed all his papers were destroyed he had no children no wife and he had to basically reconstruct everything from the ground up and this is really his his journey that he went on and uh that and how he he figured out how to put his life back together so i i think these two books in a certain respect are interconnected to each other one being the sequel to the other despite the fact that people were so far apart becker was a very different person uh than frankl but they're both connecting to the same thing which is there's this concept in life where you have to find meaning and you will not find meaning in people you will not find meaning in things you will not find meaning in status and merit everything that you have an r can be taken from you and probably will be taken from you at some point uh you know if you're beautiful you'll get old and wrinkly don't believe me look at all the beautiful actresses in hollywood in the 1950s and 60s look at them today if they're still around a and and if you think wealth will somehow solve all those problems okay would you trade for a billionaire who's 99 years old would you you know or what about uh having an enormous amount of wealth but being absolutely depressed and unhappy well you know things don't solve problems for you at all you have to find some sort of transcendent meaning in all things the point of mindfulness is it's a technique to help you do that it's something that when you go down this road it gives you the ability to slow things down look at the world dispassionately get away from your biases and get away from your preconceived programming and then it gives you the time that you need to start adopting a life philosophy and whether that be something that becker gives you or frankel gives you or stoicism or getting in touch with christianity or islam or whatever your particular philosophy happens to be there is truth at the bottom of those wealth enough for you to find peace so the markets go way up the markets go way down but people often ask how do you survive those cycles and all the criticism and you know the things that you deal with well this is how i do it i have the call map on my phone and when i have some spare time i meditate doesn't take too long and boy it really does help me and i follow this technology because this helps me know how to get to the next level whether it be a flow state or you know which brain wave to train and so forth and there's great companies on the horizon that are going to take that to levels that have never been seen before and i listen to lexus guys when they come on there's always cool interesting guests like sheldon and so forth and i read i try to read a book every week that's about 50 books a year give or take because you never have time to keep a schedule like that a very busy guy and i read a lot of philosophy some is foundational stuff like the nature of truth and others is about life you know and where is life going and how do we find meaning in these days uh and i try at my core just to understand people because i have very much difficulty with that it's sometimes difficult for me to parse people's emotions and read their face and understand why they do what they do or how they are i guess some people call it ashburgers or and some people just call that difficulty with people i don't know but in any event that's how i get out of it and don't let the turkeys get you down you know the markets are the markets they don't matter at the end of the day and if things are real they'll be here in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years and my life's work and the point of this industry i'd like to believe is that we are trying to change the systems of the world that's the closing thought we are going to live in 25 to 30 years in a world that is not recognizable to those who live 10 years 15 years before us we're going to live in a world where ai is the dominant intelligence every surface is a computer we're going to live in a world where everything is programmable including your genetics where virtual reality is indistinguishable from reality and people will have relationships with virtual avatars which are indistinguishable from relationships with real people we're going to live in a world where medicine has evolved to a point where neurobiology can be hacked neural trans can be hacked where you can have any mind state that you want from bliss to hate to whatever it might be and we're going to live in a world where big data and pervasive computing has robbed us of our privacy except for what we can claw out from immutable concepts like constitutions and blockchains and these types of things we're going to live in a world where globalism is the standard the problems that occur in zimbabwe or rwanda will no longer be in a newspaper they're going to be your problems and we learned that from coven something that happened and wuhan has impacted the entire world and that's now the standard not the exception to the rule so you need new systems for this you need new democracy for this new way to vote new way to think new incentive schemes new way to talk to people and communicate with people to live with people and forgive people if you can't do that well then what's going to happen is we'll descend into a world conflict and the winners of that conflict will just install a new system or regress us back to before we got all this technology all you really can do is work on yourself and be a good person and try to evangelize concepts that you feel are important in this new order for me it's about systems and it's about giving people control and power over their lives i don't believe for a moment that people are stupid i don't believe for a moment that people are intrinsically evil and bad and if you give people the ability to control their own lives that everything will come collapsing down uh there's no greater example of that in recent memory than when texas removed all the mass mandates and the volume mandates there was a lot of people who took the philosophy that by doing so it was instant calamity and catastrophe for texas and the hospitals would be massively filled and instead two months later it's as if they never did it why because people for the most part know how to stay safe they wash their hands when they are large crowds they tend to wear a mask they stay home when they're sick there's a collective understanding there and if you extend that same attitude to every other aspect from people's financial lives to their health to other things for the most part i'd like to believe and there's evidence to this that eventually we'll get to the right place it's when we feel we have to abdicate responsibility we get to a bad position and that's the ultimate philosophical core of the cryptocurrency space you're in charge there are no leaders now there's great adherents and people who have visions and they want to take the crowd in a particular direction but at the end of the day no one is in charge because everyone's in charge everyone has an equal say and there's a magic to have a social system that can run a government with such a characteristic i don't want to be the next steve jobs i want to be the guy that made steve jobs irrelevant we no longer have to look to a great leader the system will just identify a problem and the swarm within the system will find a way to solve that particular problem so that's my life's work and we target it towards africa because that's where i think it's going to get done first but in any event thank you guys so much for listening i hope this helped you a little bit and stay happy you know don't sweat it there's up days there's down days the horizon has really good days ahead we're okay until next time cheers
