 This is a big story about honesty. Who are you? What scale of impact do you want to have in this world? Know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Allen? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two, one. Hey, everyone. Hello. Hi, hi, hello, hello. It's great to be here with all you beautiful people today. My name is Allen Sakyon. I interview the greatest minds, and I uncover the nature of reality. This talk is going to be about questioning growth. As you can see, the color wheel is going to be an essential analogy that we'll be visiting throughout the talk. The three key points that I want us to focus on during the talk are, one, know thyself. Two, know the scale of your impact. And three, as your scale increases, so does your moral burden. We're all growing individually and collectively. We're going to be talking about questioning that growth. Let's jump in. The most ancient advice, know yourself. Who are you? What is your unique gift that you're bringing into our world? What is that gem inside of you that you are expressing artistically into the world? What is your North Star? What is your highest calling? How do we uncover this information about who we are? Do we need to pass more time looking in the mirror, looking at ourselves in the eyes? You need to pass more time journaling, reflecting on who we are, and what our unique purpose is here on the planet. Another really strong analogy that I love using is trees. Humans are like trees. A tree needs nutrients to flourish. It needs soil. It needs water. It needs air. It needs sunlight in order for its leaves to flourish, for it to produce fruits. Same thing for us as humans. We need love from our parents growing up. We need air, water, food, shelter, education, electricity, health care. We need these basic nutrients in our roots in order for us to be able to fully express ourselves creatively. And for those fruits to land for ourselves, our families, our communities, our country, and the world. And sometimes there are deficiencies in the nutrients in the roots. You may not have gotten that love. You may have been malnourished growing up. But do you see those greatest traumas as your greatest treasures? Let's move in to what is the center point of the talk, the scale of your impact. All of these different colors on the color wheel are options for a gift that you can bring into the world, whatever your unique gift is. Too frequently, we forget or it slips our mind that even being a good mom or dad is a gift. Being a good family member is a gift that you can bring to the world. And that's it. It can be as simple as that. Are you helping someone with a disability, helping someone that's injured, helping someone that's sick? That can be a gift. Something as simple as that is somewhere on the color wheel of impact. Let's go to another example. Maybe you're a musician, but you're a musician that only plays at a local venue. Once a week, that's it. People come up to you, put your music on SoundCloud, on YouTube, on Spotify. And the musician says, no. I want to play once a week here at this venue. That's it. Now let's juxtapose that musician with another artist that wants to go and perform at American Idol. They want to go and be known by the whole world for their music or their art. Are we starting to see these scales of impact? Yes? Are we? Excellent. OK. So we can start seeing these scales of impact. And when we get ourselves behind the perspective of people that are trying to make this type of global style influence, how much time do we think that they have for their family? How much time do they have to raise their kids? How much time do they have to take a hike versus someone that's only playing once a week at their local venue? Let's do another example. Let's say your grandma made the best cookies. The best cookies. Your family and your friends are constantly, we have some more of the cookies. We want more of the cookies. And so you say, OK, I'm going to open up a brick and mortar location in my community to sell these cookies. I have five employees, OK? We have five employees. We, after taxes, make $50,000 a year, over $4,000 a month. Is that your color on the color wheel? Are you content with five employees and $50,000 a year? Let's juxtapose that again. Another option. Oh my gosh, these cookies. I have to get one cookie to everybody on the planet. I have to do direct to consumer and sell on my website. I have to sell on Amazon. I need a cookie warehouse, a cookie factory. I have to branch out 50 franchises. Is that you? Now, again, we see this juxtaposition in scales. And we hear so often this story. The story of the person opens their second brick and mortar cookie location. And they go, holy crap, I can't handle this. I can't do this. I can't split myself. I'm not a sell that can just divide and go into both locations at the same time. The supply chain is getting crazy. I can spend less time with my family. So what happens? They actually take a step back in order to take a step forward. So we see there's all these different types of ways to question growth and the question scale of impact. Now, there's options to try and get your song to 8 billion people, options to try and get a cookie to 8 billion people. But what about the 1 billion humans that have some sort of a disability? Whether it be a speech disability, whether it be a motor disability, visual disability, hearing disability, cognitive disability, 1 billion people with a disability. Our friends, Andreas Forslund and Cognition, are making AI augmentations to people with disabilities so that they can learn to communicate, so they can express their unique gifts into the world. So now, how quickly is it important for us to work together as a social fabric to help that style of impact get to 1 billion people as fast as possible? So we have that style of scale as well. We want to take something that ethically sits in our hearts a little bit more, and maybe we want to help that get to scale faster. OK, in this example here, a company that was founded 16 years ago in 2004, this company's Facebook, this company that starts at Harvard and then it goes to more schools in Boston and then it goes to more Ivy League universities and then it goes to universities around the country and then it goes to corporations and then it goes to universities abroad overseas and then it goes to high schools in the United States, then businesses come onto the platform, then they have advertising in their business pages. And then in 2012, they buy Instagram. In 2012, they have an IPO. In 2014, they buy WhatsApp. In 2014, they buy Oculus. In 2016, all of the issues happen with the political election and now having to deal with misinformation, having to deal with court hearings. In 2019, announcing Libra cryptocurrency. In 2019, getting involved with brain computer interfaces with control labs. Mathematical physicist and economist Eric Weinstein calls this an ego, an embedded growth obligation. There is now shareholders that want to make dividends. There is now the need for me to connect all people, people in Africa, people in Asia, people in South America. We need to keep growing. We need to keep buying the newest and newest technologies and continue growing. Questioning this style of growth and this is not just with an organization like Facebook. This is seen with the Googles of the world, the Amazons of the world, the Apples of the world, Ubers, LinkedIn's, Twitter's, let's go to Asia, let's look at Tencent, let's look at Alibaba, let's look at Baidu. It's happening all over the place. These embedded growth obligations. The question, who are we as a company and what is our purpose? And so much of our attention is focused on this. The news is focused on it. There's this new entrepreneur billionaire effect that's being cascaded around our world where it's all so much of it's just focused on that. And out of all of these options on the color wheel, Gary Vaynerchuk, who's an entrepreneur and a speaker, talks about this deep misalignment that's happening where so much of our attention is being focused on this single area of the color wheel, billionaire entrepreneurship, that we forget that even being a good parent or being a musician plays once a week in a venue that has one brick and mortar store, something to applaud that we must applaud our friends and our communities that do just that. And there's also affecting this style of zeitgeist in our culture is what we see on Instagram, what we see hot women with throwing around money, yachts, yachts with not enough, we need a pool, we need a slide from the third story, we need four jet skis, we need private jets because screw TSA, screw those two hour waits, I want the whole plane to myself. Gold plated everything, gold and diamonds on my wrist, absolutely, mansions, mansions with so many rooms, so many rooms that are so unoccupied all year long. This is actually a deep part of our evolution. Richard Dawkins, who's an evolutionary biologist calls this the extended phenotype. We portray ourselves and our status in the hierarchy so that we can get better mates, so that we can get better business contacts and better friends. So this is a very natural thing, but we also have to realize that a lot of the times this happens and as rapper and producer, Kanye West says, one of my favorite lyrics of his, $2,000 bag with no cash in your purse. Here we go and buy this purse with every last dollar I have and you can't even put any money in it, you're trying to flaunt it around, you can't even put any money in it. So this is a big story about honesty, who are you? What scale of impact do you want to have in this world? And not to just be looking at that one tiny sliver of billionaire entrepreneurship. We have to remember that as scale increases, so does the moral burden. Yes, the person in the cookie shop that has five employees has to take care of their employees and they have a moral burden, but there's also a massive moral burden on the people that we were just mentioning. Here's Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that are trying to do things like cure all diseases. This is extremely hard work. Massive teams of scientists and researchers pushing the edge of what's known in science and healthcare, also very similarly with Bill and Melinda Gates, eradicating disease, maximizing flourishing. This is what happens a lot when you gain such status and such wealth and such scale of impact is all of a sudden now the giving pledge happens. You have to be willing to give 99% of your billions of dollars that you've earned to give back to the world that you actually got that value from. These are also visionaries. There becomes a burden to become a visionary. When we talk to all these different indigenous tribes from around our planet, something that we hear over and over again is their interconnectedness with nature, their deep interconnectedness with nature. The same air that I breathe in is the same air that phytoplankton and trees breathe out. The same water that we drink today is part of the hydrological cycle that was here when dinosaurs were drinking it. It's so deeply interconnected. You take the bite of the apple, it comes from the power of the sun to nourish you, to energize you. That these principles are then communicated to people that have this burden to then build that next world, something like a seventh generation principle. Not even making a move until you think seven generations ahead, 200 years ahead about how that's gonna influence the kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids. What if every action we took was like that? Another one, inclusive stakeholder. This is something that Jun Yoon, who's a physician and hedge fund manager, is pioneering with redesigning the social contract for inclusive stakeholder. These companies and where they're located in their communities, as well as the way that they influence the environment, the way that they influence those next generations, there needs to be a style of inclusive stakeholder for redesigning the social contract. So again, there's a burden for them to be visionaries. If you want to have a higher scale of impact, you're gonna have to have a higher moral burden on yourself to be a visionary of the next world. Okay, so let's review the three key takeaways. First, know thyself. Second, your scale of impact. And third, as you increase your scale, there will be an increase of moral burden. I wanna end with a story. The story comes from physician and entrepreneur, Dr. Jordan Schlein. He's on our show, we're interviewing him. He's talking about how he took a year off before continuing to med school onto his trajectory. During that year off, he was a science teacher in Kitale in Kenya, in rural Kenya. He was a science teacher. There's no electricity, there's no running water. Women are taking earns with them to go and walk far to get water and come back. Every day, they get a tap installed while he's there. So they finally get a tap installed in their village while he's there, very close by. He in the morning, wakes up with the sun, has his cup, he walks over to the tap. He gets just enough water for brushing his teeth and for getting his coffee. And he sees the women are socializing, having a great time, waiting in line to fill up their earns with water. And he, as the science teacher gets to walk up to the front with just his little cup and ask, may I please just fill up my little cup? And him being a respected science teacher, they say, of course. So he fills up his cup. And he notices that the faucet is barely opened and the water is coming out very slowly. And he thinks to himself, well, maybe they don't understand how the faucet works that they can actually open it up more and have water come faster. And so he thinks, okay, let me show them. So he shows them and the water comes out faster. And he looks at them and they look back over, take the faucet, close it back to the same speed that it was at before. And they look and say, what's the rush? Thank you. Would like to see if we have maybe a question or two from the audience. I would love to answer. Kerry has a microphone. So if there is a question or two about questioning growth about these different colors on the color wheel, I'd love to field them if you guys have one. Huh? Yes, please. Oh, there's something that might come anyway. Yeah. Without knowing thyself and how does one get to do that? So is there a process that you believe there is or is it by introspection? What's your name? My name is Vicky Bedi from India. One more time on the name. HS Bedi, B-E-D-I, Bedi. HS Bedi, good to meet you. Thank you for the question. May I ask, are you sick? You sick? Yeah, okay. Sickism is very beautiful. I am a Sikh and I happen to be the 14th descendant of the founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Nanak. Beautiful. Thank you. Beautiful. Something that I've learned about this process is that every single one of us has their own unique way of communing with the nature of this reality. We have eight billion of us, meaning there are eight billion unique ways of communing with this nature of the reality, with a higher power or a higher purpose for you to know yourself. I gave those couple examples, looking at yourself in the mirror, journaling, introspection through meditation. You know, here we are in the Bay Area. If you want to partake in some entheogens or psychedelics, you can do that, right? There's so many of these different paths for you to take, exploring the religions or spiritualities of the world, just taking a little bit of time to look deeply in the eyes of your mother or father for even just 60 seconds and just being there and not breaking eye contact, not laughing and not talking, but just looking at them in the eyes. All these different ways are deeper ways to commune and to know yourself better. But the buffet of options is unlimited. And so every one of us gets to play around and figure out what is our unique way of knowing ourselves. Do we have another, maybe one more question before we go? That's all. Okay, just quickly, you guys are about to go to lunch, right? Oscar has been talking about this a lot, that what happens is that we participate and then we go off into the rest of our days and then we don't integrate, right? We need to integrate. And what is one of the best ways to integrate is to make things into habits, right? So if like Pascal mentioned earlier, if we're not taking time to think about what's gonna be happening in the future and what's my role in the future, if we're not taking the time to journal and reflect about who we are today to close our eyes and be still for even just a minute, then we're not gonna as easily know ourselves. We're not gonna as easily know the scale of our impact to question growth. So turn these into habits and at lunch, maybe ask each other, ask each other about who are you really deep down in your core and what scale of impact do you wanna have on the world? So begin the process of turning this into a habit. Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate you all so much. Thank you, thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Well done. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Alan.