 Why did the universe have the Big Bang? To express itself in all the possible combinatorial, you know, kind of combinations of like, you know, this size star with one planet at this distance, okay, same size star with two planets, right? It plays out all the possible combinations. And there's probably even multiple Big Bangs that are playing out lots of other different variables of physics and quantum realities and whatnot. And perhaps, once saying I was once heard, all this is just consciousness trying to understand itself by playing out all the possible scenarios, all the edge cases. It's sort of like you could say white light is split into this prism just to map out all its component pieces. And so perhaps the reason it goes to that prism to get shouted out in all these different configurations is to dance with uncertainty. Yes. But to create a little bit of like action and uncertainty and mystery. Now we have platforms coming out of Silicon Valley that is directly affecting the behaviors, the perception of every human being on the planet. With that comes a level of responsibility that I think sometimes we shirk here. We've also been innovating nonstop on this, you know, kind of manifest destiny thing that just make it faster, cheaper, better, free returns, less shipping. Take out all the friction for the sake of more convenience, more choice, more instant gratification, more speed, more scale. The hidden price of convenience is you lose connection with the thing you made convenient. I love that you brought up the food example. When meat is a make and dug it, do you know where it came from? Do you even know if it's a chicken? Like, you have no idea and you don't care because it's been so abstracted from the source because we're now in the era where it's about AI and proprietary data. Those and the talent that work on AI as the new oil and gold, those are the new scarce resources, those are the new battlegrounds of supremacy. You could see a dystopian future where three or four mega, mega corporations run everything. Interestingly, I have Bizarro, Parallel Universe in China where they have their big three or four. If we could charge ahead with tech with the wisdom of, you know, historic humanity as well, I think that would be a nice compliment. And you know how we started the podcast was basically refine the questions, keep questioning the system and try to explore and build new models for the future. I kind of think a lot about perhaps we weave this cognition of death more and more into our everyday and knowing how to die well perhaps gives clues of how to live well. That's a really good doorway to this wow. And a lot of it really starts with self-love. You know, that's the doorway to capacity for infinite love for everybody. What if God is that capacity with us to have that same intensity and depth of compassion and empathy and love for all beings, for all nature of everything else around us? You know, that vast infinite sort of sea of all-encompassing love. Yes, yes. I know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakehan. We are on site in Menlo Park, California at Mayfield. We are now going to be talking about wow and why that's greater than why. We have Tim Chang joining us on the show. Hi, Tim. Hi. Good morning. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Thank you. I'm so honored. We're very grateful. Very pumped for our conversation. Those of you who don't know Tim's background, he's a partner at Mayfield Fund investing in next-gen commerce and marketplaces, communities, health and wellness and digital media. Has been twice named to the Forbes Midas list and the always-on-power players of top investors, as well as receiving the Special Achievement Award from the Gamification Summit for his work in leveraging game design thinking. Tim has led early-stage investments, creating more than 2.6 billion in total exit value, sits on the board of myriad companies, is a bass guitarist in two bands, and aims to bring a wow to each moment. You can find his links in the bio below to his Mayfield page as well as Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check those out, everyone. Tim, we have been so fascinated with understanding the nature of this reality. What do you think? Honestly, with each passing day, I think I have more questions than answers. And I think that's okay. I've come to a conclusion. I think the process of refining the questions, maybe, is the answer. This process, perhaps, is the real point of this whole journey. I don't know. It's funny because as I keep learning, I just keep going back to these aphorisms and sayings that have been around with us for a long time and seem really trite and almost fortune cookie-like, but they're just so right. Basic ones like, know thyself, or as above, so below, or another way I've heard it said is, as within, is expressed without. All these things, another one I heard with the group that I've been working on, we've been thinking about this value of small is all, meaning what you do in each moment is reflective of then how you express yourself in all the other moments. So it's sort of like the micro leads to the macro. I see it expressed in what I do here at work because what I'm realizing is that startups, companies, institutions we build, they're really just extensions, amplifications of the intention, the energy, the values of the founding people. And in that way, culture never really happens by accident. I mean, it can be emergent. If you don't define what you want your culture to be, it will emerge in a likely be reflection of the values, the energy, the intention or lack thereof of the people behind it. And so it's all a very fractal pattern that these seeds that come from within in terms of what our intention, what our alignment is, our energy if you will, not to sound too woo about it, but just kind of has those ripple effects that ripple outward in these concentric shells, these fractal patterns that keep magnifying at different layers of magnification, orders of magnitude. We're constantly refining the questions. Yes, we are in this process. Is the purpose of this being made for us to go through the symphonic artistic process? I love that phrase you used. Okay, so in a deep, deep meditation I once did, this image came to me and it really kind of spelled out a lot for me in terms of this framework. Imagine just beautiful, glorious, all-encompassing white light and it is made of all the different hues and colors. And if you were to split it out in a prism, you would separate out all the possible combinations, all the permutations of different hues and saturations and whatnot, and each of them is as unique and brilliant as the others, just as valid. But the assembly of all of them, the complete codex of all these colors makes up white light. And so one could argue that, let's say, why did the universe have the big bang to express itself in all the possible combinatorial kind of combinations of like, you know, this size star with one planet at this distance, okay, same size star with two planets, right? It plays out all the possible combinations. And there's probably even multiple big bangs that are playing out lots of other different variables of physics and quantum realities and whatnot. And perhaps, one saying I was once heard, all this is just consciousness trying to understand itself by playing out all the possible scenarios, all the edge cases. It's sort of like you could say, white light is split into this prism just to map out all its component pieces. Maybe, in a similar way, consciousness represents itself in all the Alan's and Tim's out there, because there's a certain Alan-ness only you can express, right? And, you know, it's playing all of these possible scenarios out to map out that possibility space. There's a wonderful short story by Jorge Luis Borges that's called The Library of Babel that also explains this in different format. A picture, an infinite repeating library of these hexagonal chambers, right, made up of identical bookshelves, identical layouts, and in it identical sized books just for eternity. And there's one book out there, and all it says is A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A. There's another book next to it that says A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, B, onwards, onwards, onwards, until Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z. And then contained in that library is every possible story in every possible language in that alphabet. And so that's another way of framing the same thing, you know? Yes. Those are such good ways of putting it. So consciousness adventuring out to understand itself to be at play in these symphonies through this art can be viewed through this source white light breaking up through a prism with all the hues and saturations. It can be viewed as this library of just starting with just the A's all the way to just the Z's and all the different combinatorics can be viewed in the multiverses that are unfolding. Yeah. And within that is all the range of possibilities in that one universe. And then the funny thing is you could have a library of Babel that has different size shelves and books and that would be a whole different universe in itself. So you'd have a universe of universes or the so-called multiverse, right? And I like that you bring up the word play, because I think that's ultimately what this is all about. Yes. It's a giant dance because I remember, you know, some occasions tapping into that source consciousness, that white light just for a little fleeting moment and realizing how grand and wonderful and all-encompassing it was. But then also kind of cluing into, hey, this could be kind of boring too because when you're everything and all possibilities at once, there's nowhere to go. There's nothing to do. You're everything. It's all infinity contained. And so perhaps the reason it goes to that prism to get sharded out in all these different configurations is to dance with uncertainty. Yes. You know, to create a little bit of like action and uncertainty and mystery. Another great quote I once heard is just what the departed like to tell the living is that the thing they miss the most outside of ice cream is the delicious mystery of uncertainty. Yeah. You know. And you know, this is the stuff that drives humans nuts. We don't know. Our brains hate uncertainty because they are survival program machines to try to figure and predict things out, have causal narrative, you know, clearly cut A versus B, black versus white, zero versus one. We try to minimize uncertainty as a survival instinct. But really, you know, uncertainty is, you could argue, the spice, the joy, the point of life. You don't know what's going to arise. Yeah. Yeah. So to go through all of these combinatorics to be at play with the uncertainty unfolding throughout all of them. Yeah. And another good one that we liked is that this is where you can feel the illusion of separation. Yes. Have you read that short story, The Egg? By Andy Weir? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm such a fan of that story because that's another wonderful sort of short metaphor for the same kind of framework we're talking about. Yes. Yeah. Would you say that the, all that we're discussing right now, these feelings of oneness and play, interconnectedness, love, would you say that our disconnection from that is the most upstream issue that we face? Yeah. I think so. This illusion of separation. You know, at the core of it, what I keep wondering is, what does any human really, really want? You know, lack of suffering and the whole Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But the root, root thing people want is to be seen and witnessed and acknowledged in that sense of connection and community, right? I think what it is is going against that sense of separation, right? It's returning to that communal feeling. These are things church used to provide and now, you know, the modern church doesn't have that same context but we're trying to synthesize alternatives, whether it's Burning Man or Rave sort of cuddle puddles or whatever it is, things that bring us back to that sense of connection, you know? Those fleeting moments where it's like, wow, I am you. You are me. We're all sort of connected. We're different reflections of each other, you know? One of my favorite exercises to do that, too, is, you know, next time you're at a dinner party or a small gathering, when you go around for self-introductions, instead of, you know, who you are and what you do and that sort of thing, Keith Frotzi once taught me this, but go around and say, okay, your name and what is the single biggest thing that you are wrestling or struggling with in life right now? And what's interesting is by the third or fourth person, people are just spilling their guts. They're getting really raw and authentic and vulnerable and what that taught me is vulnerability is the ultimate bonding superpower. And by the time you go around the table, what's kind of marvelous is you realize, holy cow, we're all wrestling with the same five or six things just in different formats and framings. And that in a way feels very, I don't know, there's a strong sense of relief there because you're like, oh, I'm not alone in the struggle. We all dance with the same challenges. Wow. Vulnerability and feelings of community, bonding around these very similar challenges that we face. I really like that activity a lot and it does seem as though we are very much so gravitating our energies towards these examples that you listed of ways to, whether it's cuddle puddles or burning man's or even just trying to redesign cities and communities around men's circles, women's circles, these types of things. And so is that then the architectures, the designs that we hope to put into the social fabric of the future? Yes. I love the organ there. Okay, so now we can intersect where this is all heading in terms of future work, future play, future cities, future families, all these different systems and institutions we've had until now and are getting rapidly disrupted with new technologies, kind of new ways of being, more reconnection with self and each other. We have long blamed technology for this sort of disconnection with ourselves, we're living looking at our screens and that sort of thing. I like to say though, technology is not an enemy, it's just a tool. And so like with all tools, you know, it's a hammer's not bad, it's the intention you do that you want a hammer to build a birdhouse, you want a hammer to go whack someone in the head. It is all about the energy and the intention you bring to it. So tech is not the enemy per se, it's our mindless or mindful application of it, which is the difference. And so one thing I have noticed that the evolution, the history of technology, if we peel back and zoom out, you know, Silicon Valley, historically when it first started, was building a lot of widgets, literally semiconductors and parts and pieces that would go into other technologies. So it was often tech companies selling to other tech companies, fairly limited in scope of people that reached on a direct basis, then branched more into things like enterprise software and applications. And so Silicon Valley, we had startups selling tools, product services to other businesses. So you're reaching workers, employees, whatnot. Then we had, you know, through the late 80s and 90s technologies that was touching every consumer. Now we have platforms coming out of Silicon Valley that is directly affecting the behaviors, the perception of every human being on the planet. With that comes a level of responsibility that I think sometimes we shirk here. In the Valley we love to say like, I'm a platform. I don't know the content on it. Frankly, I think that's a cop out. Yes, I know why. It's because when you're at that scale, you can't manage the headache of sort of like moderating any discussion. But when as a tech platform, you do become the mass media. You do become the retail store shelf. You do become the arbiter of truth. Then you have to step up with that responsibility out there. You can't just say, I don't know, goes through my pipes. I'm just a pipe, right? And so that's something I think we need to step up for here. We've also been innovating nonstop on this, you know, kind of manifest destiny thing of just make it faster, cheaper, better, free returns, less shipping, take out all the friction for the sake of more convenience, more choice, more instant gratification, more speed, more scale. The problem with that is we have costs that we hadn't thought about with that, other externalities that we've created with that. Something I worry about now is that the price, the hidden price of convenience is you lose connection with the thing you made convenient. This is a very profound point. We don't know where the food actually comes from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a big one. The convenience is making it so that we don't care so much about the source and about the supply chain. There you go, yeah. Exactly. And with that, then once you lose connection with that source, you could lead to a lot of mindless consumption. You could lead to what I think frankly is like zombie-like behavior where you're just addicted to these dopamine drips of hits, of notifications, of retail therapy, gratification, instant get-this-on-demand. And I love that you brought up the food example. When meat is a make-a-nugget, do you know where it came from? Do you even know if it's a chicken? You have no idea and you don't care because it's been so abstracted from the source that there's I just click a button and the term delivers it to me. Right. And even with the on-demand economy, you click a button, the car shows up. Sometimes that can be dehumanizing to the workers too, right? We've built all these products and services for these top 1%ers living in urban centers like San Francisco and New York and the point is almost minimize human connection, hit a button, leave the package there, go away, don't bother me. It's almost like factoring out human connection. And so if technology 1.0 is all about this drive towards more convenience, less friction, it's created this abundance reality we have, which I think is making us very unhappy because now we have more content that you consume in a lifetime, more games than anyone person could ever play, more calories than anyone could rightfully or healthily consume in a day, you know, all this stuff that is available to us now, this abundance of choices which actually creates a lot of stress because our brains still have the neural programming of when we're running around the steps of Africa and just trying to survive in a threat-filled scarcity environment. That's why our tongues seek calorie dense foods. Our eyes are looking for novelty. Our minds are always looking for simple heuristic causal narratives. We're looking for anything that gives us an edge for procreation that almost explains any human's behavior in any one moment. Does this help me procreate? Don't get eaten, eat, and pass on my genes, right? And so we've got that scarcity mindset, but now it's living in this like huge abundance filled, you know, choice corneocopia. And the two don't mesh. That impedance mismatch is driving us literally crazy. We're literally battling our biology and our neural programming to get through each day. Hence we need things like fasting and we need tech shabbats and we need, you know, anti-tech addiction and we need more mindfulness because we're basically trying to curb our impulses in this sort of candy store of infinite choices, right? I feel like modern people, it's like you're a crack addict and you've been handed a crack pipe with infinite supply and say, okay, self-regulate, right? So maybe Tech 2.0 is about helping us manage those impulses and become better people, the people we want to be, you know, starting with more connection with ourselves and each other, but also maybe limiting some of these impulses, maybe reducing choice, maybe reducing the need for so much willpower, maybe even, you know, reducing friction and convenience, you know. People think I'm nuts when I say that, but I wonder if the next act of technology is introducing more helpful friction, more intentional, you know, inconvenience to make us more reconnected with ourselves, with supply chain, with each other, with Mother Nature, with where things come from, you know, because, you know, isn't that saying you really care about what you have to work for, right? And I was talking to Tom Chi the other day, you know, he came from Google X and he had this really great point that we're living in an age where everything is so well curated, you know, events and settings and whatnot and it's all made for Instagram ability, right? So it looks all great, but combine that with convenience, this is all about, it looks great and I didn't have to do anything for it, but I worry that that creates this sugar-coated surface that it doesn't have meaning, you know. Sometimes I go to events or festivals and everything's so well curated and I didn't have to lift a finger and it's all about, like, I got myself here, right? And I forget I've even been there after a month as opposed to when you really have to work at something, when you have to sink blood, sweat and tears into it, that investment creates this emotional, true connection with it, it creates meaning, it creates purpose. And so I'm wondering if that's what we've siphoned out of a lot of our experiences, is that investment, that work that we have to put into something to derive that meaning and purpose which flies in the face of instant gratification and convenience. Very well synthesized. So what I'm basically saying is, like, at my next birthday party, it'll probably have engineered adversity and challenge in there to make people, like, really raw and bond through shared adversity and struggle and vulnerability. I love this way of explaining modernity, having so much frictionless instant gratification, dopamine, drips, Instagram abilities where there's not so much of the indigeneity aspects of blood, sweat and tears of actually building the building that you live in or planting the food and then fostering it and then enabling it to produce you the food that you eat, that these ways of viewing a redesign of our social fabric that focuses more on the connection to each other, to earth, that seems to be a part of it. I hear that. And also, just yesterday talking with Kevin Kelly on the program, this whole idea of a technium, this whole idea of where everything's heading in several hundred or even a thousand years, we were discussing about, well, will there be, with all given all the combinatorics and permutations of technologies and artificial intelligences and all of this other type of stuff that can self-replicate, it may be that certain people never look at other people in the eyes or that they never plant a seed and grow it and eat the apple from the tree. So does it feel like those two things harmonize? Both the reconnecting, but also the further technium? This is something I think about a lot. I almost feel like it's this interesting parallel race condition between these two sort of forces. And what I always kind of come back to is it feels like there's one set of forces that drives towards convergence, centralization. There's another set of forces that drives towards divergence, decentralization. And the trick might be finding the harmony and interplay between both, but in many ways I feel like these extremities are pushing even more outwards, more vehemently. Maybe we can riff on this for a bit, but I think about is the nature of AI about the ultimate form of centralization? I hope not, because I could put the ultimate gatekeepers in power. As it stands, we've got these three or four mega-platforms that are centralizing all the proprietary data, owning all the information, controlling all the forms of business and commerce out there right now. Because we're now in the era where it's about AI and proprietary data, those and the talent that work on AI as the new oil and gold, those are the new scarce resources, those are the new battlegrounds of supremacy. And so when you have Google, Facebook, Amazon controlling wide swaths of all these businesses, you could see a dystopian future where mega-mega-corporations run everything. Interestingly, I have Bizarro Parallel Universe in China where they have their big three or four, right? So they're playing out 1984, we're playing out Brave New World out here, right? Kind of different directions. At the same time, this reconnection with nature, I feel like is more about self-sufficiency and decentralization. Just a small example, it's not a perfect example, but the one upside of all these wildfires in Marin is one, all rich privileged people finally got a taste of climate change, so we're like, oh, this is real. But what it's really made people think of is, oh my gosh, I might have to take matters in my own hands instead of just relying on the convenient centralized grid of PG&E, maybe I should get solar, maybe I should be self-reliant for my energy needs. What else should I be self-reliant in case I can't count on the central grid as climate collapse starts to kick in, right? Maybe what that creates is more mindfulness and more hands-on action to, like we talked about, not just rely on the outsourced convenience of some other centralized platform, but to be more self-reliant. I should probably get solar, I should probably get a power wall. I should probably be able to be net neutral on energy production consumption. Huh, what if I did the same for water? What if I did the same for food, right? So it could be this decentralization back to sort of self-sufficiency, which would entail more mindfulness of where your energy, your water, your utilities come from, where your food comes from, maybe heightens interest in being sort of self-producing on those aspects as well. Because, you know, in the era of DoorDash and Uber Eats and all these other things, we've abstracted and outsourced it all. And so maybe the pendulum swings the other way and it's time to reconnect with all those things we've made convenient, right? Wow, to me, it also feels like with what you're talking about regarding centralization of artificial intelligences and mega-corporations and decentralization of self-sufficiencies, those also feel like the yin and yang of modernity and indigeneity. Yeah, that's a good way to look at that lens. I'm really interested in studying indigenous wisdom again because I just feel like there's this notion of going backwards to the future. There's so much wisdom that kind of traditional people's got, right? Especially connection with nature, I think, and with each other, there's rights of passage, there's rituals, so it's cultural context that we've lost sight of that I think we're hungering to bring back in. And that applies for lots of areas, whether it's community building, spirituality, how we use plant medicines, all those sorts of things. We're charging ahead with tech, but we've got to make sure not to dehumanize it. We could charge ahead with tech with the wisdom of historic humanity as well. I think that would be a nice compliment. That's a great way to put it. Charge ahead with the way with this Dao, while also remembering and integrating some of the 99.9% of our human existence pre-enlightenment, pre-industrial revolution that actually has some of the most important codes. So that's been a lens that we've been looking at this with that we think is potentially one of the biggest keys for a prosperous future. And I'm curious what your thoughts are about this. You've talked about this before. I really like this idea of once you hear the message hang up the phone. So once you do have these feelings of oneness, we kind of run to the next peak experience. We see that phenomenon happening. We also see people that ask the question, well, Tim, if you and Alan are so one already, why even have this podcast? Why even share it with the world? So how do you balance this idea of effortless action, this desire to be a part of the Dao, effortless, inaction, you don't take action, effortless, inaction, and balance that with architecting a prosperous social fabric? Yeah, great question. I'm going to share a bit about my own personal story as a lot of these explorations began for me, self-inquiry, what not, probably 10 years ago and kind of ramped up from there. And a couple of years ago, I definitely had a peak experience, I'll call it scratching on the doorway of enlightenment for just a fraction of a second. And within that, kind of, for me, saw how, whoa, this is the matrix, right? This is a little more than a simulation. And it was beautiful tapping into source consciousness, but afterwards, a little bit terrifying. And what I mean by that is a pencil called Awakening. A lot of times what we don't realize is that there can be a nihilistic downward slope of that as well because you could also say, well, hey, if this is all a simulation, why the heck do anything at all? If it doesn't mean anything, there's no point in why do anything. There was a moment I considered like, let's go full monastic, go sit on top of the mountain and just meditate 24 hours a day because everything else is just monkey games chasing pointless things to reproduce and pass on genes. And I do wonder, maybe that's why some mystics or legendary enlightened folks didn't bother having families or children. They did go full monastic and just go disappear to the mountain tops, right? That's one way to play the game. You sort of say, oh, it's a video game. Done playing out of here. The other one is maybe it's then coming back down the mountain to just be of service. Not to be a preacher, be a guru or prescribe anything but just to maybe be a living example that's so-called be the change you want to see in the world. To your point, though, on peak experience chasing, one thing I worry about a lot with current times is that with psychedelic culture, with all these other things around consciousness hacking and whatnot, there are a lot of people that are seeking those peak experiences. And I get it, it's a kind of high or it could be from the spiritual bypass. I know of people who are going off for their 28th ayahuasca sitting within three months and it sort of makes me wonder when are you taking the time to integrate those lessons? You're on the phone all the time. You're getting the downloads, but when are you going to hang up the phone and start living those values? I get it. You get these peak experiences where you get the call, so to speak, to jump into that world or maybe you yourself want to go be a guru and help change the world. But in moments that I've wrestled with that I always caught myself that, wow, there's a lot of ego speaking there and the biggest smack in my face was like, actually, Tim, you don't have to do anything or tell anybody anything or sell or preach or evangelize anything. Just try to be it, be it, right? With your smallest micro, remember those fractal moments as within, as you express without, every footstep, every heartbeat, every thought, every moment, every word said is an opportunity to just be that and serve as kind of just a living invitation for that. And eventually somebody may come up to you and say, hey, now something's different about you. What's going on? It's a chance to free to share your story and if it opens Pandora's Box, great. And then maybe you leave some breadcrumb trails with some well curated questions as opposed to advice and that helps somebody go down their own rabbit hole, right? And so that's kind of the thing I'm thinking a lot about is how to just kind of come back down that mountain and not just sort of chase the spirits or bypass path or go full monastic, so to speak and find ways to be of service but, again, without necessarily prescribed agenda. And a lot of us also battle with I want to save the world syndrome and my good friend of all, Ravikam, once said to me he's like, you know what? All the strife in the world today, it's not super villains or evil people doing bad things, no one ever thinks of themselves that way. It's basically white knights clashing with each other on who can save the world the best, right? And so road to hell paved with good intentions. It's everybody has their good intentions or saying my journey should be your journey as opposed to, you know what? This is what happened to me, your mileage may vary. You know, I'll share my story. Hopefully it helps, right? All of us have our unique communions with that one. Yeah. So back to the white light and the color analogy. Imagine like purple number 32, trying to explain to red 18, you need to be purple number 32. This is how it works for me, this is how it's best to be for you as opposed to, you know, we've got similar hues of some, you know, red and blue in there, but your path is totally as legit as mine, but wildly different. I have no idea what your path was like, but man, it's cool, you know. Respecting the full, inner unique journey of the snowflake or of that artist or of that instrument being played in the symphony, it's full uniqueness of that full hue or saturation of the rainbow. That being a main part of this, I also really, really appreciate how you're able to both have a strong understanding of these analogies and metaphors for the oneness and the uniqueness and the perfection, but also see that there's a calling for one that immerses themselves in that feeling of oneness to not just, in a sense, go to the mountain, but immerse themselves in a sense of being in their state of being, not with the mountain, but being in the civilization where they themselves create a butterfly effect around them with their family, their friends, their community, and then catalyze further inner artists to be unleashed in the Grand Symphony. Thank you for that reflection. That's a great way to phrase it and frame it, I think. It's sort of, I'm dancing with, can you do yes and, I started to dance with a mystical, but is there something that can blend both of them? Because there's wisdoms from both, right? So with that journey, for a year after sort of that awakening moment, I had the hardest time because I was losing motivation. I'd be sitting in meetings and I'd be almost laughing to myself, you guys, you're screaming about each other at these monkey brain games sort of things. To me, it was akin to watching a 10-year-old spaz out at the video game screen and start chucking things around. And part of me was like, is all the video game, why are you getting so upset? Why are you hyper-optimizing these things? And it was tough because I was like, oh my gosh, what if I have no vision left? This is that so-called dark night of that soul period, when you're questioning everything and don't have that, you know, it's dark compass. And it took me a while to just float and sit with it until I realized, ah, okay, just because nothing means anything doesn't mean you can't have some fun with it, you can't play with it, you can't do some good with it. And so really what I've come down to now is like, okay, fine, if it's all the matrix and there's no point, then maybe the point is this is all about art. It's about expression and it's about perhaps service and helping each other. So that's what I came out to, and it sounds super tripe, but it's like, what's the point? Love. That's it, right? So love of self and finding your voice, the form of play, love in the form of self-healing, the trauma and wounds you had, then love in the form of taking that superpower of yours that makes you feel most alive, most vibrant, sharing it with the world, but love in the form of sharing that play in service to more than just you, right? And that I think could be a really beautiful life. So it's sort of like, all right, fine, that's all the video game, but I'm no longer just chasing points and badges and achievements and level ups. I think I'll just play for the fun of it and maybe help others play, right? And that makes much more sense to me. That's impacted how I've even invested here, Mayfield, because Alan, I realize I have a lot of karmic debt to repay because a lot of my initial success came in the worlds of places like gaming, social media, ad tech, other things that I don't know were net net good for humanity or for mental well-being or spiritual health or those sorts of things, right? You mentioned I had that gamification award. I grew up playing, programming, you know, computer games and really studying them inside now and then leveraging those design principles. Frankly, a lot of times to try to hack engagement, you know, I remember sitting around in board meetings, I'm not proud of saying this now, but we'd sit around talking about how to, you know, kind of addict users, right? And so I now have a new filter which is I won't look at any startups that aren't net net good for humanity and that blocks a lot of things out. And I'm looking at you, TikTok, you know, I told my partners I don't care if TikTok makes $100 billion, I think it's one of the most deadly things on the planet right now for humanity. Algorithmically generated content to maximize engagement for addiction to drive more ads, right? In real-time responsiveness. That's one of the potentially deadly forms of how AI can be leveraged. If AI is turned around to addict its creator, you know, with real-time emergent media and just create this infinite echo chamber, right? Driven by a business model that's primarily just for driving more advertising. We have to look at the systems and the business models we use for these businesses. I don't think that people at TikTok are evil. I think we just optimize for the business models that we're driving for. It's time to upgrade our playbook of what business models we use. They can't just be more about, oh, more engagement, more sessions, more ads. That's one I won't do anymore. So free and ad-based. It would be just produce more, consume more. This is sort of that classical mentality of buy-by-the-palate. And yeah, most of it ends up in your garage and not used, but you saved 20%, you know? So that sort of like endless growth-oriented, you know, consumptive capitalist model. So it's made me really think a lot about the underlying systems and models we use and why it's time for a firmware to upgrade from any of these things. And it seems like a main principle of that firmware upgrade is the style of immediate return hunter-gatherer that was symbiotic with its environment and symbiotic with one another. Which is, in its sense, it feels like a big yin to the yang that is the tiktok feed that you were just describing. Yeah, yeah. Or purchased by the palette and have it uselessly sit in the garage. That was our sort of up-and-to-the-right infinite growth model for the last few decades of capitalism. The problem is we reached, I think, an end state of that where we get a lot of unintended externalities and side effects of it. I mean, think about it, in nature, what grows infinitely forever? Only cancer until it kills the host organism. I'd argue humanity is now the cancer on planet Earth growing out of control mindlessly. I think, actually, that's why we had a fascination with zombie movies and TV shows that was basically a metaphor for ourselves on this endless consumption path. So walking dead is us, right? And so I think we're looking more towards maybe a better model for that. And I feel really grateful that actually some of our biggest hits at Mayfield have been more on that regenerative model about reuse, re-sharing, recycling, re-selling. You know, companies like Lyft, companies like Poshmark, which is about reselling, trading, bi-sell trade, your existing fashion as opposed to just go buy more new stuff. And I want to find more examples of that. I believe that you can do well by doing good. And if we have a better North Star of these newer models, it will lead to better outcomes, right? And so maybe we can prove that. Maybe we can define new, you know, key performance indicators, KPI, so we can find new definitions of growth and value and wellness beyond just units produced and sold, profitability, shareholder equity value, you know that kind of thing, right? So that's sort of what I feel my mission is these days is to use these platforms, to use these systems to try to transmute them, find maybe better, more intentional ways to do them. Mayfield, we came up with our North Star logo here, which was People First. And what that originally meant was focus on the entrepreneurs, you know, building the companies. They are the people. They are the first and foremost focus, even more than the tech, even more than, you know, the specifics of the product or service or other things there. What I'm realizing, there's another meaning to People First, does this serve the people first and foremost? Is it good for people? Not necessarily even profitability. Yeah, is this good for people first? Yes, yes. Ooh, okay, that in many ways leads to this point, which is if we look at a, the way that you were just describing the process of how we've grown the last couple of decades, in places like the U.S., we've had this phenomenon where median-mail income flatlines while GDP skyrockets, and then we see that 50% of all new wealth is going to the top 1%, and we're very curious as to what has happened in our social fabric that is creating that phenomenon, whereas in a phenomenon like nature, we see these beautiful trees behind us, and we know that the trees that sequester more carbon distribute them through their root networks and fungal networks to seedlings and to smaller trees that don't so much. So that mechanism is missing from our wealth creation, but also our idea of moral, ethical, philosophical, spiritual evolution being missing as well in the sense of the people-first mentality of it may feel, that being missing where it's just I just want to be selling something so that I can self-deal. When we look somewhere like the Bay Area here where we're at, it's almost as though we don't even think twice about when we have such wealth, we do things like purchase a 10th property because of a diversified portfolio that wants to include real estate but as we sort of look top down at this board game of monopoly and we buy these properties, all of a sudden those thousands of people that are on Craigslist looking for $1,000 a month bedrooms inside of the houses and those people are usually artists or entrepreneurs or other people that are trying to express themselves, they can't fit into the Bay Area anymore. So there's a deep level of and we're now we're talking about inequality on just like the US side, we're not even talking about 50% of people that still make less than $3 a day which is the cost of a cup of coffee out here. So there's levels to this and there's potential speciation that's already happening with people that are able to take airplanes and travel and people that are still trying to find their next source of food or water and so where does that melting pot what are our redesigns? Inclusive Stakeholding is a very interesting one. I love that you brought that up. I was going to go there because Junion has always talked about a lot about Inclusive Stakeholding and I'm really doing my best to learn about how do we implement that. Something I'd love to help redefine is who is on a capitalization table who our equity holders begin with. Right now we have a model where stakeholders are basically just investors and employees but if we really want an Inclusive Stakeholding every company touches more than just customers, investors and employees it touches mother nature it touches future generations it touches all these other stakeholders that are not represented at the table could we update who is at the table and what stakeholder is to include that if I had my way we would have mother nature represented as part of the equity cap table. Paul Stamets has done that. I think he's got companies where he's assigned part of the cap table to nature itself and maybe nature is represented by a leading nonprofit or a group like that that is a domain expert that could be a good steward and voice of that stakeholder. I also wonder too could this lead to models where corporations there are compensating these nonprofit representatives of stakeholders like nature and that's a new revenue stream for them so many nonprofits are not just in the death trap of how to raise money from donors all the time could it be symbiotic that way and other set of stakeholders would be future generations would future generations be able to be represented at the table as well I'm really interested if the Greta Thunberg so the world could have voice to kind of say hey corporation don't use up all the resources right now so that nothing exists for us to have a world in 50 years so that notion of more inclusivity and expanded kind of stakeholder there I think that could be really interesting because these corporations and companies start up so we don't exist and just a vacuum of our investors and employees there's all the other elements we touch and they should have a voice at that table. Historically many empires have been built and centralized on the backs of slave class labor right and what I was talking to Tom Chi about this and he kind of pointed out to me you know last century we began with essentially tech augmented strip mining at scale of natural resources this centuries tale that we started with so far is strip mining at mass tech enabled scale of cognitive resources and these cognitive resources the mass population is the new slave labor class building up the AI capabilities the proprietary data pools of these mega platforms like Facebook, Google and whatnot we get these sort of free addictive services in exchange for our giving up the sovereignty and ownership and rights of our data and behavior right and that's probably not a fair trade really in the long run and many of us don't even realize the cost of that trade right now so I do think at some point we're going to need a cognitive and data bill of rights for these sorts of things and that is something I've been working on with Adam Ghazali, Jack Cornfield, some others on this Mobius open compassion project kind of dreaming of what would a what would a pledge of ethical values, ethical design principles for tech companies look like how might it read, thou shalt not intentionally addict your users thou shalt make users sovereign over your own data you know things like that right because I think that's what it's time for Silicon Valley to step up to do yeah this is much of what Tristan Harris has been ringing the alarm bells on so the the designing of the social fabric for inclusive stakeholder for unleashing the inner artist in every single one of us to the symphonic potential that could unfold is seems to be what not only yet Silicon Valley but also that Hollywood or that the relationship between the US and China or that if you take like a biometric consciousness signature of someone like Jeff Bezos and try and like see that compared to like the Dalai Lama and just see you know really what is what is going on do people really care about the environment being a stakeholder at the table of their company like what would it look like to have that example where mother nature maybe represented through one of the 12 Indigenous tribes that went to the United Nations to try and speak about this maybe one of them is literally on the board at Amazon right so do they how would that work out you know couple thoughts there I still believe that for profit markets and companies are the best way to drive change if leadership at the top and the employees have that intention that mindset they can pattern model these new behaviors which I hope then creates positive peer pressure for other companies to want to do that eventually I do think we need to upgrade how Wall Street investors entrepreneurs even measure what success is and we'll need basically new metrics of economics anyway couple thoughts there later to share but the first one is that I think I'm really interested to see would we have more consciousness and awakening of leaders captains of industry because they could drive change top down as they become more in tune I think with their own connection with nature with others and the role of responsibility as a leader the second is employee activism and seeing so many employees at Amazon sign petitions to say hey we need to participate in this I think that probably drove a big part of why Bezos did sign that pledge for you know sort of being more carbon neutral as a company I'd love to see more employee activism at scale you know decentralized and automated to basically raise a megaphone in mass to their leaders say hey we want to see more corporate action more intentionality here from the top and I'm really curious have you heard of the three and a half percent effect there is a well-known set of Ted talks from a couple of speakers that showed that to get successful nonviolent sort of revolution and activism and change that you only need three and a half percent of a population to do something like a coordinated climate strike or protest or whatever it is to cause change New Zealand recently I think was one of the first countries to hit that three and a half percent with a climate strike where students would stay home from school workers would stay home from work and apparently that three and a half percent is all you need to really start to bring an economy to its knees and that's when you can really drive some change there so really keen to see would more employees start to form this kind of you know kind of in mass decentralized activism hopefully without you know kind of threat of being fired or being retaliated against right but could that drive more change in corporate leaders to step up I'm also very encouraged one of my company's growth collaborative the CEO has said we're going to be B Corp from the start to the end as much as possible and they're one of our breakout hit companies if they can succeed with that even go public as a B Corp you know they'll be one of the largest examples of a startup that scale to that size as a B Corp and I hope that would set a good example for others so we need to model these new behaviors for others create that positive peer pressure drive that top down change as well as sort of you know kind of harnessing and empowering employees from bottoms up activism as well so I really do want to see that because companies can be forces for good you know especially if they're mission based and have that pledge from the start to have this do well by doing good then start to bake in these things like inclusive stakeholder you know broader sets of growth metrics and value metrics beyond just profit or shareholder value yes I think that's the era that's going to come next to your point though how we change behaviors otherwise in the masses this is going to be a bit of a downer but I've come to conclusion that in many ways it's too late we are too late to prevent climate change in fact if anything I think I'm now a collapse meaning there are many aspects of climate collapse which are already going to come which are already inevitable we're going to start to see more of these wildfires and extreme hurricanes and whatnot and we're going to see more and more places be uninhabitable and it's going to lead to patterns of change and where fresh water is available and what types of food can be grown huge shifts of value wealth transfer in terms of real estate development you know kind of the services and investment some studies show we have 10, 11 years to start you know making those bets now and I've talked to Bruce Dahmer about this he's working on climate moon shots but picture in these next 10 years people placing their bets on what the world will look like post-climate collapse and those folks that have prepared for it with the right kinds of infrastructure or investment and reallocation of population and infrastructure will lead to a post-climate collapse bifurcation of you know haves and have-nots and picture the mass national migrations and refugee movements of those places that did not prepare for that or evacuations of cities and maybe even countries they flood to other areas and you could imagine the ensuing war of those that were the haves that invested in that infrastructure now defending themselves against the have-nots hordes coming in so this could be a really bleak dystopian future and I hate to say but I think parts of those elements will kick in and when I really zoom out there's also a part of me that kind of says from a detachment standpoint that's the way it's supposed to play out human beings were sort of herd animals by nature maybe we need the shit to really really hit the fan before we do something about it and maybe we'll need to see climate collapse really kick in before action takes place that's been the history of humanity we typically go through periods of like mass mass you know kind of like collapse before periods of prosperity maybe that's what needs to happen if you really zoom out there's probably you know technium kind of future too who's to say our job as a species maybe is just to reach the next rung of the evolutionary ladder it's maybe homo-digitas or homo-silica or whatever we want to call it maybe we're like horses maybe we're a peak humanity you know what was it peak horse was 23 million or something like that and now there's only a few million horses around maybe with climate collapsing over planet earth then eight nine billion right so it does lead to some big questions and part of me kind of thinks that nature is a pretty resilient system you know mother nature will self-balance with or without us I hope that it's with us and that we're intentionally on that boat trying to get there but you know it'll all be it'll all work out the way it's supposed to in the end a lot of our discussions we've been talking about how do we humanity thriving if we take a mother nature view one of the best ways for mother nature to thrive is maybe less humans it's a pressure cooker in many ways it's a perfect pressure cooker and there's so many different ways of viewing the pressure cooking evolution of consciousness that's happening where you have the the good and the evil that are just constantly sort of at play as it levels up where you did paint out this very at times dystopian side yet there's also this other side of piecing together the right evolved ways of of our way that we engage with each other in our environment where it can actually be around making flourishing for unleashing the inner all of us so those two things kind of like it kind of it does kind of take me to this idea that it is perfect it's been perfect it's going to continue being perfect but it also kind of takes me to this idea of being off of perfect as well meaning that yeah it can be seen as perfect to have this grand challenge of controversy where we have so many people that have so little and we have so many people that have so much and then that makes it perfect but then there's also this other view of perfect which is where people do have their basic needs being met and the symphonies being played out where some people aren't going home to sleep on piles of cash and other people are going home to sleep on concrete I agree and what I fear is that the systems the business models the the way we've set up the game today leads to centralization of wealth especially when you look at exponential effects of real time feedback loops AI optimization proprietary data sources and these sort of mega platforms what I fear is that the inescapable conclusion is the mass majority of wealth will end up in the hands of like a dozen people because with network effect type of businesses and platforms that's what you get to ultra centralization well historically though too when there's too much same thing happens when you play the board game monopoly that's right that's right and the thing is though historically though when there's that much inequality gap eventually some mass revolution occurs and you know you get wars and all that sort of thing and so that'd be the equivalent of like you know people playing monopoly over and over until like the players who keep losing like screw this game this is stupid and they flip the table up and the pieces go flying right you know so it could be very similar there as well I think this you know these these tensions will continue to rise we're seeing that America is now not one country we've got this you know bifurcated tribalism happening and you know it's gonna like you said pressure cooker that's gonna keep going but many of us will kind of keep chugging along and trying to build unicorns here in Silicon Valley but when I'm encouraged by there's more and more of us I think waking up to these issues of inequality and wanting to examine at the root fundamentals maybe these playbooks aren't the right ones maybe we should up level those and those are the discussions I'm most interested in I don't have the answers and I don't want to seem like I'm on a soapbox preaching and I'm just trying to do my research on what are the alternative models out there where can service truly that people first helping people would be baked into the mission of businesses where can non-profit or hybrid business model kind of dynamics merge with for profit could for profits do more on this B Corp form a formation of principles could they do more tithing or we're giving back and can nonprofits incorporate more best practices of for profits and how they perform and their models so they're sustainable without just begging for donations all the time are there ways to do this yes and keep kind of upgrading the the firmware keep exploring new hybrid new models be on the side of the good and be on the side of constantly trying to level up the good for all these different variables in the equation and you know how we started the podcast was basically refine the questions keep questioning the system and try to explore and build new models for the future so that even includes questioned how capitalism is implemented today question how stake holding is done today question how silicon valley works today and it's it's changing I think it is shifting and it's finding a new flow beautifully um that's a really good cover of of most of what we wanted to discuss on the program constantly being in this wow a moment to moment wow of the reality that we get to immerse ourselves in and be here sharing and when we live in our ego or our identity we we don't get to maybe experience that wow as often as when we don't and so to be a practitioners of the the drop rejoining the ocean on a moment moment basis can help us with being in the state of wow yeah my it's gonna sound more but my favorite keyhole into that is actually been death and dying so something I'm interested in is how do we reframe the perception the culture the context around dying death is such a taboo topic in society it's something nobody wants to talk about that's why it catches so many families off guard when it when it kicks in right I this last weekend I did a training to be a death doula which is someone who helps hold space for the passing of somebody it's like a birth doula actually but for the passing the exiting of a soul as opposed to the bringing in of one and the practices the intentions the rituals in that death doula process I think really could inform us of how to find that wow in each moment and it's a beautiful area I encourage people to look into it and it was something that was remarkable to me because in a lot of these things like meditation or when there are people doing psychedelic peak experiences you know that everyone talks about ego death for me I've always thought these are actually opportunities to rehearse your eventual physical death and in that moment your mind will be panicking that loss of like identity your body will be screaming and fighting to just stay alive another moment because that's what it's programmed to do and it can be sheer terror or it could be this graceful acceptance of ah I'm graduating and so I kind of think a lot about perhaps we weave this cognition of death more and more into our everyday and knowing how to die well perhaps gives clues of how to live well that's a really good doorway to this wow you know the practices you you help foster as a death doula there's a lot about weaving meaning finding a through line of your life creating rituals and legacy projects and these sorts of things which really I realize we should be doing this all the time even while we're healthy and living those are how you spot the wow in every moment you know and so there's so much good stuff if you just pay attention just like you know the pattern on your shirt the beauty of the rose petals how deeply you can go down the rabbit hole just focusing on one breath you know like there is so much to notice and be present with sleep is a brief exercise in death and I like how you talked about death and birth doulas I think that's very interesting and dying preferences is interesting it's so taboo that I can't tell an urban metropolis that I don't want to go into your hospitals upon upon my time of of passing I want to go out to the beaches or to the forests and I want to be out there with some people and that's how I want to pass and I want to be buried there it's just like no you can't you must be in this hospital extensionary system plus cemetery afterward or it's just it's very important to talk about dying preferences and also just it's gorgeous seeing when the child comes into the world and when the person is leaving the world and these states are in between that we're in now to have our perspective augmented it's all about perspective so if we can augment the lenses at which people see reality with a deeper drive towards the nature of it the beauty I think so there's that saying like oh you can see glass is half empty or half full but there's another perspective, holy shit there's a glass and it can even be filled my favorite exercise tap into this is just picture yourself on your deathbed and in your imagination that moment that you could be granted a wish to just go back to relive one day of when you're thriving and healthy now is that remembrance actually that wish granted while you're actually on your deathbed kind of can shift your focus quite a bit too right? for me right now it took me to wondering what day of my life has been my best day and why is it that we don't try and make it so that every day is like that yeah rather than yeah the journey itself rather than the trophy I want to ask could we be a a biological bootloader for digital super intelligence very possibly so who's to say homo sapien is supposed to be the ultimate wrong on the evolutionary ladder that's pretty egocentric that could be pretty myopic as well right? again perhaps we are a bootloader to the next of the evolutionary ladder would kind of seem to make sense it's the same supposition that makes me kind of laugh why would we assume reality is bound to three dimensions in time in one direction yeah remember that story flatland or flatworld to a one dimensional being two dimensional line space will always kind of look like that line right and then to a three dimensional being things look like 3D objects so I think back to simulation I think we are a simulation of 4D beings trying to figure themselves out by modeling things in 3D because what do we do we try to figure ourselves out by modeling ourselves in these 2D types of surfaces and then four dimensional beings ourselves simulations of five dimensional beings trying to figure themselves out and on and on and on up and down the ladder turtles all the way up and down yes yes yes um and then how about what do you think is most beautiful wow um this is going to be so trite but it's love it's love the kind of love where you want everything for somebody and nothing from them you know the first time I tasted that really was being a parent you know the love a parent can have for a child or man those moments when you know you're really in love with a fellow human being and just for all their flaws and their quirks and everything and you love them not just in spite of that but even for that right and man that's probably the core of beauty and a lot of it really starts with self love you know that's the door way to have capacity for infinite love for everybody um what I kind of think of is what if God is that part of ourselves that has that capacity to have this perfect love for another being we often experience it as parents that I would give my life for this other being but what if God is that capacity within us to have that same intensity and depth of compassion empathy and love for all beings for all nature for everything else around us you know that vast infinite sort of sea of all encompassing love yes, yes thanks Tim thanks for coming out of the program I'm sure we could riff for another couple of hours there's so many cool rabbit holes to go down but thank you for the work you're doing on this these are wonderful questions wonderful things to ponder wonderful things to take with us as we move through the world thank you thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear your thoughts and comments below on the episode let us know what you're thinking across all the different things that Tim was teaching us we'd love to hear from you check out the links in the bio below his Mayfield profile also twitter instagram linkedin go follow him go check out those pages also do have more conversations with people online your friends families coworkers about all these different subjects support the artists the entrepreneurs the leaders around the world that you believe and support them and help them grow show below paypal patreon cryptocurrency join 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