 Now I have a very special guest, Alan Sakyan here who's we have to make him wait but hopefully this will be rewarding. Asking deep questions taps into the soul of another person and connects each other in phenomenal ways. A true physical experience. Today we have someone who we know can help you ask deeper questions in your daily life and unleash your unique gifts. Alan Sakyan is the founder and host of the simulation podcast where he interviews some of the most creative scientists entrepreneurs and educators of our time. Alan has worked with TedEd to create the TedEx Talk, the art of powerful questions and his YouTube channel simulation has over 10 million views. Alan's goal is to actualize the wildly unique gifts in each one of us and maximize human potential. Thank you so much Alan for being here with us today. Thanks for having me Abid and what fun it's been attending what you guys have been sharing. I've been learning so much from you guys, it's been great. It's really good to hear and to connect kind of to our theme of deep questions you have done an interview with Lisa Bess LeCroix on SuperpowerU and she asked you what your superpower was and you said asking deep questions. Can you remember the first moment when this gift kind of showed itself perhaps in childhood or teen years? Cool. One of my favorite quotes is from Tony Robbins. He says the quality of your life is the quality of your questions and I remember always being fascinated by understanding who we are, why we're here and just asking these questions around what the nature of reality is, what consciousness is and being able to share the wisdoms that we gain from the big questions with the rest of society and then maximize the blossoming and the full potential of what it looks like when every single one of us is actualizing our gifts and there's widespread abundance for everybody and so it really starts in your years in these youthful years of honing in on why is it so important for me to ask the biggest possible questions that I can formulate and not only for myself individually and actualize my own fullest potential but for the potential of my family and for the community and for the world at large. Oh it's yeah really interesting that it started at a young age asking the biggest questions and when you do have a deep conversation with somebody on your podcast that connection you have like the physical, the feeling, why do you think that's more important and why do you think we most of us just stick to the surface level boring ones in our day-to-day lives? So it's like a gym repetition so you might start off with five pounds and then work your way up to 10 and then 15 and so you build strength. Another analogy for it is a submarine which I referenced in the TEDx talk and so staying at the surface level is going to yield you very surface level rewards but diving into the depths of the most difficult questions to formulate and ask and then also to be able to maintain the relationship with the person that you're asking the question to while you ask those big questions is more difficult but it yields you greater fruits so when you are typically in the phase of being in surface level questions your gym repetition or you're diving the submarine deeper than surface level typically has to do with rather than asking a question about something around the weather or around sports or around entertainment or around the news instead ask a question that is about that is about the person's goals or the person's ambitions or about one of the most powerful lessons that they've experienced in their life or about their familial history or about why why they think they're even in this world and in doing so those questions are harder to ask they're harder to engage with the other person but over time you build up the muscle with these gym repetitions and your submarine ends up diving deeper and deeper into the more difficult essence of what it means to be human so I highly encourage that. Think analogy of repetitions and I think you started lifting these questions asking weights when you're doing those street interviews with your mic and camera and you went up the strangers and asked them questions and so when I see that Alan back then or even episode one of simulation and now episode 762 how are those two Alans different? Yeah such a good question six years so yeah in 2015 it was practice happy taking a camera and a mic on the streets and just asking people what makes you happy or what impact you want to make in the universe what was the last thing you did that scared you if you could tell your younger self one thing what would it be which is also something that you guys mentioned and the fearlessness is another big thing like you guys mentioned being unafraid is such a big big part of it so there will be times when it's more difficult because the other person is feeling like a contraction and that they want to reject the question that's being asked and so you deal with all different types of energetic responses to your questions and so over the period of six years it's the process of dealing with all of these different thousands of interactions with humans and sensing that spectrum of energetic difference between something that's very contracted and closed off versus something that's very open and willing to share and a lot of what my questions were about six years ago were and even when we were first starting simulation were questions around the most cutting-edge sciences the most unique insights around entrepreneurship and business the biggest political questions and then slowly they became more metaphysical so the questions became more around consciousness and more around the nature of reality who are we why are we even here and so that was really fruitful because as you dive into the questions that are around those essences you gain deeper and deeper insight into who you truly are and who we are as a collective and why we're even here and then that empowers everything that you do it empowers you it empowers your relationship with your family your relationship with your loved ones with your friends with your classmates with the world and with your unique gift that you're bringing forth because you start feeling a greater sense of unity you start feeling a greater sense of oneness you start feeling not only the oneness with the environment and the planet but you start feeling the oneness with each other at a deeper level so the same unity that you feel with your family members you start expressing that same unconditional love unity to your friends and to the world at large and then that is infused into everything you create from then on and so that's really the big shift that's happened in the last six years for me is now being able to really infuse the essence of unity and oneness into everything that I do and because of asking those big questions and getting to the bottom of the truth it was started from questions to now really like a life purpose and something you brought up our oneness and unity was said exactly by Dean Nelson a journalist we had interviewed who had 40 years of experience and he said it's to explore our shared humanity and when those things I heard they really did click and I wanted to ask you this what if everyone had deep conversations like the janitors at school or a bus driver or a family at the dinner table all around the world everybody having deep conversations only that world looked like I love it so in order for us to have that world the core component that I've noticed is that we have to be willing to drop the wall that we put up between one another so I mentioned this earlier as well where sometimes when you ask someone a deeper question there will be resistance to answering because there won't be so much of that open-hearted vulnerability and not only around if you ask someone a question around hey what do you think the purpose of the universe is and they're like oh I don't know and sometimes people you know feel that closed-offness but also around you know what is the deepest trauma or the deepest wound that you've experienced or that your family has experienced you know some questions like that as well people put up the wall oh I don't know you I'm not going to answer that question and so this is this is the one thing the most core component is learning how to drop the wall because of that unity in that oneness is that a bead is not asking me this question in order to create some sort of harm for me or my family but instead a bead is asking this question out of that shared unity out of that shared oneness out of the exploration and out of a more playful a more childlike essence and when we recognize that that this wall of separation begins to dissolve more and more and I begin feeling more of that open-hearted vulnerability and unconditional love and that enables us to have these deeper conversations and then we practice these more thought-provoking questions and we get to deeper and deeper levels of our essence the deeper part of our essence that's spectacular words and you really did say once interconnecting this is the root of all our problems and really if the world had just done deep conversations with everyone and every time that would be one check off the list and asking deep questions is one of your gifts and you pursued them furiously for over six years to actualize them with such passion and hard work yet this gifts is kind of like an uncommon concept for us how do you think as high schoolers is this a period of time where we can start to see them surface or how can we recognize a bead one more time with the question for high schoolers how can you yeah how can you go ahead how can we recognize the gifts we're uniquely printed for oh oh what a great question okay okay so the number one thing that I've learned around this is the the feeling it's like an energetic attraction so if you have a big buffet of options let's say that you have a little bit of biology and you have a little bit of track and field and then you have a little bit of computer science and you have a little bit of art and music right you're starting to sample several different items on the buffet now maybe you begin feeling a stronger gravitational attraction to art and music and maybe specifically in that you like especially the guitar let's say and then in biology what really interests you is the the biotech aspect maybe you like the idea of engineering and biology so to figure out the subtle nuances of cells and how to reprogram them for longevity right so now you're now you're more sensitive to the specific aspects of the full buffet of options that you're gravitated towards and then I would double down on those specific areas does that make sense guys cool and and feel free to continue also exploring while you do that so even if you get into biotech and guitar because you're going to get older in three years what you might do is you might you know carolin might meet up with justin and justin might be like hey i've been studying this new aspect of of figuring out how to maximize the potential of of india and their one point almost five billion person population and we could potentially accelerate the nonprofit work there or what have you and so carolin might become interested in that because justin opened up the option on the buffet so always remember that there will be new options on the buffet that are opened and for you to kind of keep feeling into that as well cool i feel like that analogy was resonant good good as and you talked about this just this feeling a phenomenal feeling you get when you gravitate towards something why is it important to double down on these things is it for a future reward or yeah yeah good question so one of the core aspects about being human is that and i noticed that on the little boards that you guys were showcasing earlier that one of the core skills that you had learned was meditation and so you'll learn to become more and more present and you'll learn the beauty of when you're present you know a bead you were expressing the importance of active listening right you're basically meditating on the present moment non-stop so like it becomes like every moment of life becomes divine and you become you infuse your unconditional love with every moment of life and so when you gain that style of meditative infusion of unconditional love into every moment of your life you also realize that there's this future and what we've been doing for a long period of time for thousands of years is we've been figuring out how to make sacrifices in the present for the future and so if you imagine the future is like a big north star and let's say you're picking up the in our example earlier from the buffet you were picking up a little bit of the art in music with maybe the guitar and a little bit of biology with cellular engineering and now what you're doing is you're beginning to envision the star and in the star position you might be like okay well i'm interested in performing with the guitar maybe once a month at a local venue and creating an album on Spotify by the end of the year and on cellular engineering i'm interested in attending a biohacking group that is in my local area once a week and then building projects with them and so now what you're doing is you're taking what is in the north star position which are these goals within the fields that you've begun feeling that resonance with as well as how you're you're infusing unconditional love into every single divine moment of your life through all of the roller coaster ups and downs you're still infusing unconditional love and you're noticing that what you're doing is in the present you're negotiating you're sacrificing for example a bead is going to message me and a bead's going to say hey why don't you come out with me to this new movie premiere but it's it's landing on the same day that i have to go to the biohacking group and so you have to figure out how to negotiate this potential short-term gratification of things like i'm going to go out and go to a movie with some of my friends or i'm going to go out and have lunch or dinner with some of my friends versus i have this star and i have this vision for the future where i have an album that's published by the end of the year and in order for me to get that album published i actually have to attend to the music production skills that i'm learning right now and so you feel more and more of that that sacrifice of what is in the short term for what is in the north star long-term position someone who's read your high-level perception book you explained that so clearly and with such perfect examples for i think everyone to perfectly understand how important it is to really push push towards those interests and experiences that really gravitate people towards um you had interviews with public education experts like carol kovachar and astor wajiski and they have very interesting takes on um education and really how to raise successful youth and if you could go back to your high school self and you know like hold them by the shoulder and tell them a few words is there anything that you would tell them to do differently no nope that's the beauty of it is that your everything that you're going through right now each and every one of you is perfect exactly as it is exactly as it is so you're getting exactly the perfect amount of your own figuring out life at the same time that your family is maybe creating some pressures meanwhile you're meeting some new friends meanwhile your teachers are teaching you some things meanwhile we're having this conversation you're getting the exact right dose of all of the catalysts that are needed all the influences that are needed and all of you figuring out your life right now so for example if i let's say could go back right now and try and grab myself by the shoulders from 10 years ago i actually couldn't deliver something to me that would influence me because i'm exactly prepared perfectly for the trajectory that i'm going on at that exact time so if you could go back and say something it would be like keep it up keep up the good work we're all counting on you we're all proud of you we all love you you're enough exactly as you are and you're headed towards a beautiful future and just to know that you are loved exactly as you are and you're headed towards a beautiful future thank you alan sakyan what a spectacular message to end off this with and such an enriching interview love and hope for our unity and sharing in humanity and i really whenever you speak when i was researching for my interviews you are genuinely someone in the future whose name i'd like to hear more of and your stories your clear purpose and thoughts are a guide for you thanks alan it's wonderful that you say these things you guys have been such a pleasure what a cool secondary school you guys are and i'm really appreciated sitting through your presentations and your explorations of interviewing and conversations and these unique aspects that you have to practice in order to dive deep into the deeper truths of the human essence and that shared unity that shared oneness and maximizing prosperity for everybody i feel that energy in your secondary school emanating and thank you for the opportunity to come and share and to learn from you as well thank you you guys are so sweet