 I'm so excited to share with you perhaps one of the best kept secrets to our health. A superpower that we are all born with and that we can use to be fearless in response to stress, stay healthy, and to fix the world's toughest challenges. And in order to do that, I'm going to start by asking you, all of you, to think of something in your life that is causing you stress right now. Now, as you do that, keep in mind that what happens in the body is that you mount what's called the fight-or-flight stress response. I think most of you might be familiar with that. Your heart races up, your breathing gets quicker, you might start to sweat, and your muscles start to tighten, and they get ready basically to fight or to run. Now, this is a great response to have if you have a car coming at you or if you have a tiger coming at you in the wild, because this is a survival response, and it helps you to stay safe. However, our brain can't tell the difference between a tiger and an angry email or a conflict you might be having at work or something in your business. So what we all end up doing is that we keep mounting this fight-or-flight stress response throughout our days. And what's most important to realize is that when we are in this mindset, our vision becomes really tunneled. We literally narrow our perspective, and we become really self-focused. We forget about the people around us, and we don't have access to our best creativity and ideas. And worst of all, we make really bad decisions. We reach for the food or the drink or the social media as a coping mechanism, or, worst still, we make really bad decisions for our business. In fact, Thomas Merton said this really well. He said that in order to survive, we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends. Now let's take a look at the evidence at what this kind of mindset has done for us. Three out of four of us in this conference are going to suffer from a lifestyle-related chronic disease. That's things like heart disease and cancer and diabetes and mood disorders. Even though 80 to 90% of these diseases are completely preventable, when we pay attention to the choices that we make about what we eat, how we move, and how we manage our stress. Our mental health has never been worse. The burnout rates across professions, including entrepreneurs, are 50% or higher. Suicide rates in the US are at a 30-year high. Anxiety and depression are continuously increasing. And one in four people in the US report that they don't have a single person to talk to when something important happens in their life. In fact, social isolation and loneliness is predicted to be the next big health epidemic. More and more of us are reporting the sense of emptiness, this loneliness, this lack of purpose, and a lack of true connection with others, even though we have all of the technology and material wealth around us. And technology, well, it's only making us more and more distracted. And it's taking a huge toll on our mental health, our social health, and our political health. And when it comes to AI, I'm sure all of you know that there's so much uncertainty. And so the question is, will we have the moral and the courage to develop technology that is beneficial to most people and that doesn't just benefit a few? And all of these questions around personal health are useless if we end up destroying our planet. And so how are we, as entrepreneurs and investors and founders, going to respond to this notice that was given by climate scientists just a few weeks ago about the state of the world? My favorite biologist, E.O. Wilson, has put this very poetically. He says that we are drowning in information but starving for wisdom. So what's a fearless entrepreneur to do? Well, I have some good news for you. The good news is that fight or flight is not the only response that we have available to stress. Our brains and our bodies are wired to respond in a different way. And that response is compassion. Compassion is our ability to notice stress and suffering when they're happening in ourselves and in the people around us, along with a desire and a motivation to do something to alleviate that suffering. In other words, the next time you're feeling stressed, forget about yourself, go out and help somebody else. Now, I'm sure all of you are thinking, wait a minute, if I'm stressed and if I go out and help somebody else, how is that going to reduce my stress? And how does that make me fearless? Well, let me explain. There are very good biological and evolutionary reasons for this. So get this, when we go out and help somebody else, something fantastic happens in our body. It activates our parasympathetic nervous system. This is the complete opposite of the fight or flight. So what this means is that when we help others, our heart rate goes down, our muscles relax, our blood pressure goes down, and our stress levels start coming down immediately. The other fantastic thing that happens is that we engage the biology of courage and hope. And what this means is that we bring online three amazing hormones. The first is oxytocin. Now oxytocin is a hormone that immediately reduces our stress levels, but it also increases the levels of love and caring and connection between people and relationships. The second hormone that comes online when we help others is dopamine. And dopamine is our feel-good hormone. This is a hormone that lights up our reward centers in the brain, and it immediately reduces our fear, making us fearless and making us motivated to go out and take action. And the third hormone that comes online is serotonin. And serotonin makes us really smart. It gives us access to all of our great creativity and ideas so we can come up with the best solutions to the problem. So why did this happen? Why did our brains engineer this response to stress? Well, think about it. Back in the day when we were hunters and gatherers, we didn't have just a fight-or-flight response for survival. In order to survive, we had to stick together in tribes and look after ourselves. That was the only way that we could stay alive. And that's why we developed this response for compassion. Imagine if you were a hunter or gatherer and if you were a parent, say you were a mother or a father with a small baby in the wild, and a tiger came approaching. If you only had fight-or-flight, what would happen? You would run and save yourself, but your poor baby would die. Similarly, back in those days, if you were just a lone ranger, you would not live very long. You had to stick together in tribes and villages. You had to take care of each other in order to survive. In both these instances, the brain had to engineer a new system to respond to danger and stress, a response that would override the fight-or-flight response and a response that would make us want to connect with one another and help one another. So now that we know that we have this other response to stress available that's compassion, the question becomes, how do we get better at it? Because we're all born with this capacity, we're all born with compassion networks in the brain. And the answer is very simple, through meditation and mindfulness training. Just like you train your physical body through different kinds of physical exercises, you can train your compassion and mindfulness through meditation training. And this is exactly what we do at Wisdom Labs where we design training programs and technologies to help your brain networks get stronger. But don't take my word for it, let's quickly take a look at the evidence for whether or not this kind of training actually benefits you. So those people who practice mindfulness and compassion training, five, 10, 15 minutes a day consistently, live longer and healthier than people who don't. And this is because their stress levels are lower, their inflammation is lower, their resilience is higher, their immunity is better. Another cool thing happens when we do these practices, and that is that we are able to disrupt our habit loops in the brain. So what this means is that when we are triggered by stress, instead of reaching for our usual knee-jerk response, you know, whatever that food or that drink or social media or whatever choice you were going to make, we are actually able to interrupt that habit loop. We're able to pause, take a breath, be mindful, and then choose a wise response. A wise response, not just in our lifestyles, but a wise response for our businesses as well. In fact, what you're seeing right now are the changes that take place in the brain, different areas that get strengthened when we do these practices on a regular basis. And basically what it's saying is that when we practice mindfulness and compassion regularly, we get really good at paying attention. We become the person in the room who is focused, even if there's a lot of chaos and distraction around us. We are the person in the room who can manage our emotions powerfully. And we are the person in the room who has the ability to empathize and take the perspective of others in making decisions, to be generous and kind and compassionate. In other words, in summary, when we train these brain networks, what happens is that we develop an ethical and emotional clarity, which helps us to make better decisions. Better decisions for ourselves, better decisions for our business, and better decisions for the planet. I love this poem. It underscores the fact that no matter where we look in the world, there is a lot of pain and suffering. And so as entrepreneurs and investors and founders, we bear a huge burden of responsibility and we have a choice to make. I'll be going to go with our old mindset and fight our flight and have our personal health and our planet become just another statistic. Or I'll be going to choose differently. I'll be going to upgrade our inner mind technology to be more mindful and compassionate so that we can transform our stress into well-being. And I'll close with this quote by EO Wilson. Many years ago, he urged young scientists to go out into the world and to make choices wisely. And I'll borrow his words and encourage all of you and all of us as entrepreneurs to go as far as you can but to do it in a fearless and compassionate way because the world needs you badly. Thank you.