RIP Thich Nhat Hanh

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from wild and weird austin texas it's currently about one o'clock in the morning and i was just about to go to bed but unfortunately in the news feed i just noticed that non not han never pronounced these vietnamese names has perished he was 95 years old lived a very long and rich life and many of him and some of you don't know him he was a founder of an entire field of mindfulness he was a zen monk from vietnam and was born in vietnam when the french were still in charge very long time ago and lived through the arc of the history of the 20th century he was a very interesting person because he was a person who was both deeply introspective and every zen master is but at the same time he was incredibly concerned about the welfare of others thus he was a peace activist and someone who really did try throughout his life to focus on love and compassion and convince people to feel this way about others and collectively for governments to feel this way about the people they govern he as with all figures that write 130 books and lead an entire new movement of a religious practice was not without controversy but his intersection in my domain was mostly about mindfulness he was a great influence on john kavitz zen and others and many of the ideas that he had mindfulness ended up working their way into things like mindfulness-based stress reduction and just a general idea about awareness in its place and purpose in one's life we live in a world that has a big deficit in compassion empathy and love it's an undeniable thing the reason why is that the way that society is structured we're always living in the future we're always wanting something we always desire something a new car new house the big promotion love interest whatever it is we externalize our well-being and happiness and the whole point of meditative traditions like zen and what todd and others practiced and preached is this idea that if we just take a moment to take a step back and focus on the present and be aware of the world around us we'll be overwhelmed by the fact the world around us is actually pretty beautiful and pretty amazing in its own right there's a lot of value in having people who have that mindset and perspective and can teach people how to adopt that in a small way or in a big way in their lives some people devote every waking moment to the pursuit and practice and we call them monks some people just try to find five minutes or 10 minutes each day and it can be something as simple as turning off the phone and spending time eating a sandwich or meditating in the morning or watching a sunrise or sunset and just enjoying the colors trying to understand them internalize them carry them with you day after day i hope that people find a way to find the time to make the time to do these things i did and it made my life immeasurably better there really is a lot of special stuff it's a tough day today in the markets i've been through five major corrections and crashes in the cryptocurrency space many of you weren't around when we were around in the days before bitcoin we even reached the dollar the first time and we watched it go all the way up to 30 and then down to four and then from four to 250 250 to 80 80 to 1200 1200 to 250 250 to 20 000 20 000 to four thousand four thousand to sixty four thousand and now we're back down a lot of ups and a lot of downs it's tough especially if your whole mindset is your well-being your health your happiness your lifestyle is totally dependent upon it reaching some arbitrary number as an industry as a whole somehow liberation will come happiness will come it's not true no matter how much you really want it to be has to come from somewhere else and it comes from the awareness of the things around you today was a good day i spent the day talking to the colossal guys about things as crazy as resurrecting the willie mammoth and how that in interfaces with the cryptocurrency space and what we potentially could do to help them along in that mission i couldn't help but notice that we were in a room where history was being made should that venture be successful that's the first time we as a species were able to take something that died forever and make it not so much forever allowing us to dream about what else could be accomplished what else could we do with that technology that's a good day it's a good friday and as we say goodbye to people like old zen monks the whole point of their existence at least i'd like to believe was to teach all of us to take a moment to cherish the things that we have the moments that we live and the gift of time that we still have left because those moments will never come again and i hope each and every one of you can find that in your own way this is an amazing space there's a lot of beauty in it so many accomplishments i keep focusing on the science and i keep focusing on the engineering because it's so unusual never in my lifetime have i ever once seen so many brilliant people working together so quickly and so globally every topic programming language theory things like distributed systems zero knowledge cryptography law and policy game theory social choice theory you can go down the line e-voting it's so much innovation from the usual suspects and the unusual ones all together at a gigantic maelstrom of intellectualism that's being applied to reconstruction of society as a whole the people who want to deny this they want to cling to the comfort of the past but the pandora's box has already been opened and we're not going back we're not changing anything we're going to do things a bit differently and all this innovation all this progress is a truly wonderful thing it doesn't have to be this way there were eras of human history for centuries where things stayed roughly the same way the social order stayed roughly the same way during the middle ages in europe it was the three estates model those who grow those who pray and those who fight and that was the social order people were born and died into it and it had no ability to change or at least that's what people thought took a great plague to change things a bit and that's where we're at we're now in a period of great change and everything is going to be different the next 10 20 30 years and some cases completely unrecognizable so the point of these practices is to take a step back and enjoy the things we have today and love them internalize them because that then gives you the means and courage and capability to face the future tomorrow regardless of where it takes you so unfortunately we sometimes have to say goodbye to men and women of great wisdom who guide us and give us advice which we take and sometimes don't take but then we can always take solace in the fact that tomorrow someone will be born who will also one day give us great wisdom and if we live long enough to listen then we too can enjoy it with them so it's late here at night thank you guys for listening i just wanted to make a quick video to wish the great monk well and i hope you all have a wonderful day be back in the office tomorrow cheers