Mindfulness and Resilience

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 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 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 my dad's a doctor but he was the low tier of doctor as an internist and 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 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 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 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 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 at the very least you can buy a book you can subscribe to an app free or otherwise and you can do that if you want to go up a level cody rawls a psychiatrist and he specializes in 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'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 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 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 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 cop pulls you over for a traffic ticket or 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 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 it's a funny thing ada i went from 240 down to 120.