Meditation and Silence

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 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 enjoying a week-long solitude and hopefully it has some value and other such things and actually some books i wanted to show you guys so first off they said for recommended reading 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 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 it the tangled tortuous universe of fractals look at that so we'll have a chance to explore all of that too it's good to keep the mind open and in these things anyway it's a brief reminder that we work so hard in life 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 lots of professional stuff thousands and thousands of emails and such a diversity of things things related to my biotech company things related to like bringing back the woolly mammoth things the cardano launches for example gogen we hired 150 people and everything was always so busy and so busy and so distracting and i thought a lot about what i missed the most because the year is coming to an end and you always reflect what did we learn from january to december and what i missed the most was the ability to just sit and deeply focus 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 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 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 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 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 people's entire careers 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 things that silicon valley likes to try and some aren't so crazy 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 and then you click it so a lot of people actually have written books about this and and the consequences of of these constant dopamine rushes 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 as much of an experiment as it is fun activity and i can't wait to see it i will miss you guys while i'm gone for a week it's kind of sad 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 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 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 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 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 and i've started to realize how much i love that and i appreciate that i 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 so much wisdom 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're overweight and we know because we're physicians that you're not exactly treating yourself as well as you ought to and that's true when i was a lot younger i took much better care of myself and when as i got older and i became an entrepreneur i always use the excuse of well 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 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.