Yaakov Lehman - Technology, Mindfulness, and the Spiritual Dawning of the Digital Age

everybody thank you thank you cynthia cynthia um not chief executive officer chief executive integrator integrator we're trying to build an integrative approach to life here so doing my best to integrate um i actually had a hasidic rabbi tell me once the worst thing ever to happen to i don't know how to say this in english is that well he said the worst thing to ever happen is it turned into a religion this is a hasidic rabbi a long beard peas big furry strimal and he says religion is completely asuras perbidded prohibited in torah consciousness and he says really the model is to be a dancer true because religion is dogma you're not no joke religious dogma looking straight down and not and to be a dancer you have to be attuned to the the melody being played for each different situation so i try to be a dancer myself i oftentimes introduce myself as a dancer people have no idea what i'm talking about but i do and that's a bit of my integrative dance um i do have a company called wisdom tribe ancient wisdom optimized for the digital age and we're trying to build a bridge both through digital media as well as experiential education events retreats between ancient jewish wisdom and the global mindfulness movement which we'll get into um just setting the frame i think cynthia laid down a really great introduction that we are living in very exciting times we're in a new epic of global history i spent uh six years i did two master's degrees in the study of globalization global history studying mandarin chinese as well really focusing on east asia before i had any connection to israel or to judaism i traveled to some 50 countries spoke mandarin and i was really interested and still am very interested in the globe and in global processes and i think anybody can tell you know you'll really look around in 2015 in 57 75 76 i believe uh we are entering an exciting new time um which scholars are referring to as the digital age right this kind of an outgrowth of post-modernity we'll maybe get into that in a little bit uh but i think a really great way to start this conversation uh and it's a conversation i'm having here in tel aviv for the first time but just got back from a month-long trip in america um speaking at everywhere between conferences in hawaii to um was at jewish teen events i was teaching tai chi i'm a tai chi teacher which is a form of mindfulness to eighth graders seventh graders young professionals in toronto high schoolers in columbus ohio i was at the mindfulness leadership summit in dc last week so it's a conversation that i'm really opening up with with a lot of exciting new people but it's really really great to be here in tel aviv so as an opener for the conversation this is going to be the participatory section of the talk and i'm going to ask a few questions and really want to hear what your guys's opinion are what you guys have to say about this so first question show of hands who here first thing they did when they woke up this morning was pull out their smartphone and maybe didn't require pulling out because by the bedside and and the last the last thing you did before bed i will put my hands up as well okay we are attached yes we are so when you have a friend of mine who goes around giving best practices for life in the digital age some of us don't have smartphones some of us don't have smartphones so my friend gave a great piece of advice to people who do have smartphones which is a new piece of disruptive technology called the alarm clock right anybody heard of that right the alarm clock is a very practical way to wake up in the morning and not be dragged into a series of uh you know feeds where we're getting liked we're checking out the snapchat stories maybe this is not the snapchat generation but it's a hot topic in america so um get a smartphone first thing i did wake up in the morning is look at my smartphone we had about half the people okay who here experiences phantom vibrations on a regular basis what is a phantom vibration you think your phone is ringing it's vibrating it's not show of hands the phantom ring vibration okay now interesting research coming out looking at what technology the the impact technology is having on our neuropsychological structures and it turns out the same neuroreceptor that's released i don't know when somebody's smoking a cigarette shooting up heroin dopamine people have heard of the neuroreceptor dopamine it floods uh the synaptic cleft with this neurotransmitter and when it's released it causes a a desire a yearning an addiction so uh people you know we're more used to in in the drug and alcohol field that people are getting itches or getting cravings for their fix but for anyone experiencing a phantom vibration it's along that same wavelength it's touching on your dopamine uh feedback loop so phantom vibrations are thing here's another interesting one that i didn't even know until i started speaking to college students and high school kids how many people in the room will admit in public to checking their phone just to avoid an awkward social situation people do that yeah right maybe to pretend to shoot a text it's an obvious thing yeah right my brother works for the phoenix suns he says there's a receptionist that he just does not want to speak to and every day he comes into the office oh wow i have to shoot a text out right now right that's it boom no conversation it's interesting there's been a lot of research in this there's there's an understanding that we're really going through a major transition demographically most people i'm looking around in this room are digital immigrants okay now we speak of an immigrant right we think maybe in america right the old eastern european jew the immigrant he has a funny accent like she doesn't really know what's flying something a relic of the old country excuse me yes it's okay now now we the anglos are the immigrants it's okay now we're in israel we can flip it around right the funny anglos who never really learn hebrew and who think they can get along and hang out in their own little bubbles i am one of those we're immigrants but but we're there's there's another platform to to analyze this digital immigrants versus digital natives now it's known in immigrant communities the children seamlessly integrate and and uh you know the language of the country is their lingua franca they've grown up with that and when you guys speak to high schoolers college students millennial age digital natives you're dealing with a completely different psychological operating system because technology is their lingua franca they're digital natives right it's it's it's the substrate that they exist in for us it's oh a new piece of technology for them it's just part and parcel of life it's like the oxygen they breathe or as they say a fish you know fish looks to another fish and says what's water you know they're talking about water they don't have any concept of water it's it's their substrate so there's been a lot of research on digital natives and empathy our digital native is really being trained and developing the same empathetic skills to relate to other human beings as once was the answer apparently the jury's still out there's a lot of research to be done but early indicators say no and this facet of you know ducking out of a social situation through the sweet soothing comfort of your digital device oh where is that where is it is an interesting phenomenon to talk about okay let's go into another question here show of hands who thinks techno technology is making us as a species overall smarter smarter our cognitive faculties are strengthened by technology do you wanna you wanna share why you think so i have this discussion with my children and i i i've had it's interesting so it's just what i believe number one um but i think if you took a picture of my children's brains at the age of 13. a picture of my brain at my age at 13 i bet they would be wired differently than i was because i we didn't know we didn't have this stuff absolutely the questions in what ways it makes me number one i i i believe we become all collectively more creative and expressive and in doing so i think it it just i think we've become more intelligent and the other thing is i believe that we're all connecting in other ways be it spiritually or uh this way and i think we're finding each other in new ways it's just elevating us to a different consciousness it's what i believe i'm not saying i'm right mm-hmm i'm rationalizing is is anybody else on this side of the spectrum the technology is making a smarter yeah in the corner it gives us far greater access to knowledge at our fingertips and you can use that to build and take turns there absolutely what know but also say one with like anything i like good wine but if i drink a bottle of wine for breakfast right you'd have an awesome day yeah you do anything tomorrow morning like anything and too much in moderation okay let's tease out this because this is really interesting for me to hear people's predictions we got one right here and then we'll go again i have an opposite perspective similar i agree but i think there's another side with that as well okay but before we go to the other side we're going to explore both sides we're right now on technology is creating more cognitively capable human beings yes i think that on the other side to make the argument there's some things that because it's so rarely available and you don't figure things out because it's already there you don't like um wait wait are you saying it is not making us smarter i'm saying maybe not maybe it's making us okay we're still on technology is making us smarter guys we're going to talk about attention spans and a little bit when we go to the other side just kidding just kidding just kidding anybody else for technology is making us smarter we'll explore that aside left yes and technology became much more accessible everything you want to go deeper with your knowledge it's it's you just press one button and you receive the whole information a good example is for example you know the game speed trivia okay uh it's a it's an app that you can actually uh um play and then test yourself in a different questions and if you answer a wrong answer you can actually google right away it goes to wikipedia and you can learn more about google right away is that an asset or a crutch we're going to talk about that all the information is just successful i i think i think the key what you said right there is access now when you when you think of research right maybe some people in the room remember this not quite me when i was when i was doing my my research but there used to be these things actual called folders an actual called cabinets is that true can people in the room corroborate this right and you would have to search through academic journals actual in-paper journals that costed hundreds of dollars you couldn't just type it in it was exciting but it did not provide the level of access to information that we have at our fingertips instantaneously now anywhere in the put so much world into finding it you knew it not like oh that is going to be interesting okay i want to see if there's any few arguments for technology is making us smarter and then we're going to go explore the other side yeah on the contrary or in some ways i believe because it diminishes our ability to to concentrate for an extended time for example i i see that my my little brother is so difficult for him to sit with a book and just read because he's used to this flicking you know all the time a new message a new channel knew something new all the time okay that way i don't think it's uh i hear and i agree with you one more time if anybody has a reason to say that technology is making us smarter not the other side we're going to explore the other side i feel people are very eager to explore the other side wait somebody who has not spoken yet spoken have you spoken please i mean you're saying smarter i think there are other benefits to it like being more connected we're talking about cognitive faculties here yes all right yes thank you please where they took computers to the middle of rural villages people who had never had seen at their computer and they left the children off the computer right i saw this and within whatever time period it was again and again the kids figured it out and they made it more and more complicated and then we gave more and more difficult information and these kids kept figuring it out and i think that is perfect proof of how we're giving tools that allow people to cognitively figure things out beautiful i'll give the other side beautiful i'm one we're definitely taking taking human capacity next and i want to add i'm just just clicked right now in in my mind how about optimizing education no longer do we have to settle for a one-size-fits-all model of education with things like the khan academy we can really go into each individual person and and educate them according to their skill and where they're at that's a scalable piece of individualized technology that was never made possible and that definitely can increase the human capacity for for cognition so i i really appreciate that comment yeah just another response to that i think it's a pretty invalid ridiculous argument you're taking a computer to where they have nothing and you're giving them education yes no but that's not what i'm like it's the cognitive skill that they were able to sit on their own work with the computer and figure out how to but if you brought them legos and puzzles it could have been the exact same experience meaning but like those puzzles are technical what is technology okay that's a good question this will only be this will all this will only be settled by a rock paper scissors contest they'll be happening after the talk okay any more for technology do you have one now technology is making us smarter i did i think that um through technology because we have access to all this information we're able to better cross pollinate the different fields of study you need to help us learn better when i think about my niece or nephew who is learning with for example dora the explorer the way they're watching television is a dramatically different way than i did and that's because they're taking from different fields like neuroscience like linguistics and that is a result of technology and the information access that that technology's brought us absolutely very good one last on positive and then everyone who's waiting to say there's no way you guys are wrong yeah sure i think that the potential for this particular generation to help the future generations is really when you talk about optimal we had books we had library systems we had file cabinets the generation after us not so much in the generation of children that we will have will have even less and so if we as the people who know how to do these things and were brought up with the computer age if we would teach these children to access it so the generation that we could provide from torah learning or whatever would the base be would be incredible and in terms of your rock paper scissor argument as a teacher i once had a contest i had a diplomat like an important a well-educated man and a son and i said um in your father's generation if you wanted to know an answer you would have to go and look in your generation you could do google i have a question what's the first ingredient in cheerios go i just wanted the father to go to get the box and turn it around and tell me the the main the first ingredient and i wanted the sun to to look at google and see and neither of them had the skills to do it rather quickly it was really amusing to me i was like no but dad just look at the box and turn it around you can do it and son just like right and and neither of them did it fast and so we could have a million tools in front of us if we don't know the best way to use and access these things so we were meaningless lego pieces trying to plug them into a computer okay the floor is now open for all those waiting to say there is no way technology is making us smarter we are raising a generation of imbeciles there's no chance okay yes you had you had so there were two sides i felt is both making us smarter and making a summer and one of the examples that came to mind as you were speaking was before the advent of the cell phone you knew every phone number of every person in your life who here knows the phone number of their significant other if they have a significant other who here doesn't know but no it is i'll tell you why because technology has offered us such a crutch that we actually don't have to fundamentally understand things or even process them really because it's being done for us so if you're looking at it from a cognitive or like brain processing perspective i feel like our brain is actually being utilized less than once before when we actually had to do some of that processing ourselves now on the reverse we do have access to more information and new um you know like new ways of doing things et cetera and so we're actually getting more information and in another way becoming more diverse and and having more more knowledge but i feel like um i'm gonna do i'm gonna do a reverse to that side you've said that we're relying on technology as a crutch and we're not calculating these mental processes or internalizing the way we used to there were those who would argue that's great now we can outsource all that brain power freeing us up to do other things that are important by the way who here thinks that because of technology they're better spellers that's a very interesting question do our emails go out with less do our emails go out with less spelling mistakes than our than letters used to do yes yes if we are stranded on a desert island would we have the internal capacity to spell those letters correctly good computers so this is go this boils down to what this is technology this is window people used to open the window and have the fresh air now i'm looking at this disgustingly dirty air conditioner and everyone is using it because this is what people think it gives us a fresh error we think instead of open the window and get the natural air we'll put the air conditioning okay like many things we we substitute with technology when we can do still the natural way it doesn't it's it's fantastic that google exists and and when we need something quick we can put it but i feel still that for the purpose of studying exercising your your mind it's better to do it with books and with the folders okay i think the the orthodox people who study torah for their whole life they could google right not so much and everything is engineering right but the essence of it it's nothing they will find the answer to the assistance of looking for announcements right i think you're hitting on some deep which for my yeshiva experience i spent eight years in yeshiva and i am convinced that this is true that in torah it's not about right answers it's about right methodology and torah is training you we see that from the talmud which leaves many different answers open we see there's a methodology a talmudic methodology of argument of engaging of ideas of diversity of of bringing together proofs and logic and and it's and it's that methodology some some guy comes up with this is kosher some other guy comes up this is not kosher they're both right it's okay as long as they follow the correct methodology which i think is a very deep point in in particular to our learning but not yeah clarification i'm not sure what kind of intelligence you're talking about when you ask this question i think it's made me more intelligent as in i have a lot more access to information right but i think that i avoid having a hard conversation with my friend by pretending my mother's calling me and so it makes me less so so so we're talking about cognitive intelligence that that's what time we're going to talk about we're talking about relationships now i just want to follow does anybody else have anything to say on cognitive intelligence yes sir all right i would say to sum up what we spoke about no one said anything specifically positive or negative but in the end with cell phones we have a lot more access to uh computers and everything we have a lot more access but the thing is that a lot of conversations that i have i'm a very big googler it just kind of kills the conversation immediately i just tell them this is what the answer is there's no discussion right no they don't have a discussion anymore this is the answer so there's no i think that kills it depends how you describe the word intelligence intelligent like uh shira said there was an issue they couldn't they couldn't think like maybe i should google this um while other people maybe google too much we just don't discuss here this is what's going on let's move on to the next conversation people know a lot of people know very little about a lot of different things so just on that i i met a woman in england with an amazing best practice she says when she's having a conversation with somebody in a bar or wherever the college college girl and somewhere in england she said that she has a policy for two hours not to google it because there's something called memory and it's very and there's also some called asking somebody and it's very possible that these two modes of data those two these two inputs could yield results so she gives herself two hours to either try to remember it or ask somebody or it comes up and then she googles it because it's a tool that we should use one final thing i'll say we're gonna move on to to our relationships this is a very interesting nuanced conversation but if we take cognitive intelligence as a benchmark of attention spans in the year 2000 they measured the average human attention span on a given day a given moment and they found that humans could focus on a particular idea for 12 seconds 12 whole seconds they 2 000 they did that again and they did that again in 2012 and the number was 8 seconds the same research report says that a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds okay now this is a critical metric when we're talking about methodology how we measure cognitive intelligence the ability to focus on an idea is really at the crux of our capacity as humans to think we think about deep critical thought it requires focus it requires attention i remember i saw eddie yeshiva some sort of sign that imagine if einstein was cultivating the general theory of relativity for 20 years right if he was getting buzzed every time somebody tagged him on instagram or on facebook or like like there's no capacity to think when there's so much static and noise pulling us out of our thought process so the fact that humans we look at how the humans are the brain is wired in this generation the capacity to focus has gone down and that is an objective metric of cognitive intelligence one but again it's a nuanced conversation moving on to relationships show of hands just off the cuff yes there's many ways you could ask this question who here thinks that humans are more capable of maintaining strong positive relationships as a result of technology show of hands technology facilitating relationships 30 and a half percent and who says definitively no way interesting when i i just did i just spoke to a group of 100 uh four different sessions of 100 seminary girls 18 year old girls they definitively and everywhere i go i travel ask this question teenagers are unanimous almost unanimous that technology is not facilitating positive relationships teenagers think that there's breakups on facebook walls there's cyber bowling there's ghosting people who read the new york times art ghosting ghost thing is oh a ghost thing it's very juicy when you're dating somebody and their social media friends and then all sudden you just disappear oh like every guy in israel i see that ghosting is more prevalent than initially thought um how about this you're pouring out your heart to your friend oh you know you're having a tough situation then all of a sudden oh no they're gonna do it up that phone comes out pulling that person completely out of the moment or maybe we're on the other end maybe for the guys maybe more relevant than the girls who have phones in their pocket pockets but you're trying to have a deep conversation with somebody and you get that little nice sweet hit of dopamine right that completely pulls you out of the present moment how are you supposed to empathize with the with the depth that's being conveyed right now when nelson the mind is racing who is it who's it going to be wow i'm important look at me it's very challenging and teenagers particularly are aware of this challenge i'll just give you one other piece of research and then we'll hear from the floor at the university's essex in 2012 they did a very fascinating research experiment they took two groups of people in the sample control group they did they paired people off two people at a time and they put him in a room to go have a conversation two strangers having a conversation there was just a chair a chair a table and on the table was a notebook okay the other group the variable group on that same chair table setup they put an iphone face down not on distracting people but face down and they measured three things they measured how well the people how close the person felt with the person they were communicating with they measured the level of trust they felt and they measured the conversation quality in subjective terms how did you feel the depth of that conversation was and they conclusively found that the control group had much stronger levels of trust must have much higher levels of conversation and a much deeper connection to their partner than the group that just merely had an iphone this isn't somebody looking on their iphone this is just the subconscious presence of the technology on the table but there were different people different chemistry how they can actually measure they take they're taking a large sample size of complete strangers and they're objectively measuring i felt this went a seven i felt this one a nine we talked about something that was as deep you know a kid's soccer practice is maybe a four it's a breakup that i just went through was maybe an eight so subjective measurements this was their methodology you can check it out essex you researched it at the university of essex 2012. anyway i'm just putting this out there on the table this is the research who here let's hear the for the technology so you know i think there's a lot to be said for connect connection and uh connectivity and technology this kind of came up in the discussion about cognitive intelligence who here strongly feels that technology is making us more more capable of maintaining relationships somebody who hasn't spoken want to share want to share everybody's spoken somebody who hasn't spoken let's see we got something to share here all right alan shoot i think over the weekend uh what happened were transpired there's evil everywhere but i think a lot of goodness came out and you know i really believe you can you can get the answer i don't think there's any universal truth to any of this you can it's part of our life it's how you manage it it's what you decide so you want to be mindful about it you can and you can also shut your phone off that's a very mindful practice yeah and talk to a human but also you can what she's doing right now for whatever reason i work 80 hours a week we're everywhere wherever okay i i want to hear arguments i want to hear i want to hear arguments and i can make very powerful i think there's a universal truth we're not asking for we're asking for different different takes of the right they have the blind men and the elephant this is amazing and i feel there's a very depth toward truth i just have to tell this parable there is an elephant there are five blind wise men one goes up and feels the tail and they're trying to have a deep existential conversation of the nature of the elephant one feels the tail and says you know what this elephant the nature of the element is bristly and it flaps around everyone and then another another guy is grabbing the tusk no no no the elephant is smooth and shiny the guy's grabbing the foot no it's coarse and scaly they're all right but what they've done is brought nuanced truth of different parts of this elephant and i feel very strongly i'm very connected to this idea that technology it's amorphous there's a lot of nuance to it and this conversation brings out the beautiful the beautiful potential and optimism of a digital age as well as some of the dystopia and some of the the really challenging scary negative effects of it so i would just like to write here the side of the elephant that people say technology is boom awesome making relationships fantastic who's got a case study an experience yes okay so for example my best friend from middle school good so um i really love her and adore her still to this day but you know she lives in germany right now so i don't really have a connection with her i'm not really thinking about her on a day-to-day basis but then she'll pop over my news feed and i'll like remember how much i love jade and how cool she is and all our adventures you know and troubles that we get ourselves into totally and so so i'm thinking about her in a positive sense and um you know reminiscing about our relationship and also you know seeing people online on facebook you know even though i'm not interacting with them i feel still i still feel like that's part of our relationship i absolutely agree with you i'm a big fan of facebook or an article called the this i why i love facebook a spiritual perspective for a cable's perspective but these certain nuances right everybody knows yes a facebook feed wall it's not substituting an in-person relationship but you know what it's buttressing that i'm special i'm somebody who's lived in four countries and i have many different social networks of friends and i love the fact that i can stay in touch peripherally with their lives and they can mine thank you for sharing that yeah in the back i don't think something's like white so i i'm not like saying something like this or like that i'm definitely facebook dependent uh i cannot say no but and on one hand i'm very happy i'm in fact with my friends from all over the world and with people who i haven't seen for a long time and it feels and it keeps illusion gives illusion in many cases that we're not so close and on one hand it's very nice to be in that with friends and and i also experienced that friends who are not on facebook it's much harder to be in touch because we have to write like a long email or call write a short message each day okay it's also an illusion for people who we barely know but we connected on things cool and for example today while working but i also spent a day discussing about the israeli-palestinian conflict with someone who i know he's not my very good friend but i know him he reacted to my post i don't oblige to react to him the discussion is basically pointless okay right okay there's a lot of facebook politics i just want to maybe hear just a few more before i say that on one hand i feel obliged because i know the person but basically i think like why do i see my time on someone who i barely know mm-hmm somebody who hasn't spoken yet yes so i think a little bit different i think that the people that the technology today make the people that's far from you closer but the people wow that was one of the most intelligent things i heard in the past year thank you that's a deep insight i'm going to reflect on thank you very much yeah i i have a l not phrasing those words but you know i facetime my parents i've got two little kids it's bath time in israel in tucson arizona 10 hours away 10 000 miles and we can instantaneously bridge that gap right that's a yikhud that's a bringing together of time and space right it's collapsed and i try to think what that would have been a hundred years ago right to hire an artist and ours paints a rendition of bath time send it by donkey to the to the port you know gets on a ship ends up in spain another ship to america covered wagon to arizona is it ever gonna get there that's the distance that we've bridged but as you said we can all picture ourselves sitting at the dinner table or at a lunch table or out at a restaurant and four people sitting around there and we can't even bridge two feet between us right very interesting okay let's hear technology is not improving relationships we're gonna move forward out of this section of the talk you're um obsessing anxiety i don't know like the anxiety nation has come across are you first because you're always anxious to the next why your friends aren't texting you and why he's not talking to you always thinking about the what it's an expectation right people talk in in work life right did it ever exist that you had to sit at 11 p.m in bed with your spouse did it ever exist and then you're expected right the markets are open in tokyo and if you don't get on that contract that's what people are dealing with no but you used to speak on a telephone for two hours with a friend but at that time you will speak only to this friend and now you can chat to many people in the same time which kind of takes away the quality okay okay but we're talking about the cons constant availability here i think that is one facet um very nice anybody else have something to share she-ra as people who are shown more observant i think that we can see the balance and i think in this age chavez becomes even more important because without chabas many of us wouldn't put down that or or take the time to have those conversations so i think um in the same way that the world was created with this sort of um putting in and then taking away the idea that we can use technology to teach the concept of take you know using and taking away is something that um is is again our generation has the potential to do unbelievable creation um and when you talk about the the absence of distance in time and space i mean that's that's from the days of frankenstein man has always just wanted to create and now we're able to create as you know relationships that exist only in time and space and so it's just a question of us looking i guess you know at the torah to see the model of what does that mean to to not be um not be restrained by time space the way that hashem is not restrained so also at this point we aren't and if we use them correctly or if we use it to strengthen our relationships to build those so we can be unbelievable creators of information and relationships thank you and i appreciate it whenever you give each other a round of applause this is nice he did okay listen i have to say i'm gonna reiterate again it's a complex subject i'm not against technology i'm not a luddite right this is a reference in england during the industrial revolution people went around smashing machines that is not my understanding of what the tour expects of me um being a religious jew and not my understanding just in general of a practical pragmatic life approach uh i've actually formed two tech companies um one is the israel app it's a free app up in the app store um built an app i believe in apps it's a good thing my second company wisdom tribe is also um using technology using social media to to spread ideas from ancient jewish wisdom out to a global universal audience so i'm a big believer in technology but i'm also a big believer in experience and i think this is a very interesting way to approach this that there's digital education we talked about you know the way we can we can access knowledge through through scalable digital technologies and even optimize to certain people and where they are in their skills and that's great and and there's so much information coming in but i do believe that we should balance that out with an understanding of experiential education right experiential education would be like you know going and and being an apprentice somewhere getting the feel for it right being immersed in in an experience not just looking at a screen or trying to consume text rapidly right so um you know i'll share with you back 10 years ago i formed a music festival okay it's still going it's ten years running in santa barbara called chila vista okay an interactive celebration of community it was awesome uh one stage was around solar one stage was run on biodiesel 100 students got credit for this music festival it was done through the university eventually the university institutionalized it we had a community currency called chillaskrilla we had an organic farmers market it was awesome so i really got my taste for experiential education in forming that music festival and i want to tell you about my best friend who i formed that festival with a guy named levi felix okay my buddy levi and i were called into the chancellor's office after we threw this festival and the chancellor said you know what santa barbara doesn't always get the best press if anybody knows american universities uc santa barbara is like the top party school you can walk in with your wetsuit and your surfboard into class that's a common occurrence we did this festival got great press and he said listen you guys can have full-time jobs to do this now i wasn't able to take the job i was going out to london to do a master's there and my buddy levi had gotten a job first working for the moishe house people know moisha house also came out of santa barbara at the time then you ended up working for a tech company called cause cast in santa monica okay i visited my buddy levi 23 years old he was the vice president of a tech company managing a room of about 45 programmers and you know producers editors it was it was a big operation and what they were doing is networking with uh celebrities in la and getting to promote causes on a social network fine one day levi was at the south by southwest conference in austin texas and he was walking through the hallways and lo and behold he collapsed on the floor as a 23 year old kid he was hospitalized in austin and he ruptured some sort of internal organ and the doctor said dude you're killing yourself you're working too hard you've stressed yourself out or your body's like bursting at the seams says i recommend you take a vacation buddy levi's a smart guy he got his employer to pay him two thousand dollars a month to travel the world on sabbatical blogging about his experience okay he was in israel for a little bit but eventually he settled on a small island off of cambodia okay with zero technology he went from being vp of a tech company in santa monica to no tech right spear fishing in the coral reefs all day hanging out doing yoga meditating to shoot an email out he'd have to take a boat to the mainland walk to the chai shop and email and then he'd go back to his no tech refuge levi felix levi shows up back in the bay in san francisco in 2010 right after the iphone was born and he looked around it was like a twilight zone he saw a completely different humanity than before he'd left right everybody is staring into their screens people are walking and texting and talking and flicking their fingers all over the place he couldn't figure out what was going on but he's a smart guy and he founded a company called the digital detox started out with about 15 people at a time taken out for a retreat from friday to sunday people pay 750 bucks a pop and they experience right he confiscates all technology at the door three rules at the digital detox camp you can't use your uh real name you have to have a camp name to prevent networking and whoever's going to show up there a lot of people from from from the valley who are coming to this you can't talk about work you can't talk about your you can't use your real name and no technology he allows he allows like a film cameras but no digital cameras the digital detox started picking up speed this thing started to start getting hot i remember he did an event in san francisco called device free drinks okay and in the picture of the new york times article that covered it you had this huge burlap wall with little cubbies and people came it was sold out 300 people and all the smartphones are like lined up on the wall and no more retreating into your phone in an awkward social circumstance guys this is real face-to-face mano imano communication right so levi's levi's brand started picking up big he founded a camp called camp grounded okay people heard of camp grounded alana's he's he just did one in austin texas in new york in san francisco what does he do a summer camp for adults 300 people the time they come from friday to sunday no technology bring your camp name levi's camp name is fidget bigglesworth mine is professor goji berry it's a lot of fun and and this thing started picking up the new yorker did a six page spread on him levi's been in forbes in business week all the major media outlets digital detox is huge and campground is huge and it's really ushering in a new mode of business a new mode of life practice the word mindfulness does not encompass that we're going to talk about the definition of mindfulness but i want to before we go into this this part of the talk say that something is changing we're entering a new epoch we really are um of social innovation of ethical business practice um of entrepreneurship we see and and people seeking meaning people seeking a work-life balance and people wanting to make their day jobs meaningful okay the the most encompassing word perhaps i found for this is the mindfulness movement show of hands who was familiar with that word mindfulness and not just from this facebook flyer on okay so mindfulness mindfulness was at least in its contemporary conception founded by a guy named john cabot zinn um a jewish jewish guy raised in new york went to mit and founded something called mindfulness-based stress reduction which is a clinical approach at kind of stilling your mind into the present moment the the thesis is that so many times we're being distracted we're being pulled away and we just need to collect all that energy and and be present or as baba ramdas put it be here now that's one school also the the second school came up which was a much more buddhist emphasis was founded by jack jack hornfield sharon salzberg and joseph goldstein who are also three jews living in boston so this is the origins of the mindfulness movement and really again the word itself is is much too small to contain all the changes that we're seeing right now in um but a few facets of the mind from this movement um mindfulness is big uh the world's biggest companies um not just in the tech world like twitter's the googles the facebooks but uh more traditional companies bill ford the ceo of ford motors has worked uh for the past two years to bring mindfulness into ford and scalable to their entire company as well as um starbucks is doing that general mills is practicing target aetna insurance did a mindfulness program um basically training their their employees in in stealing the mind developing a level of emotional intelligence awareness of what's happening in our in our emotions uh and their internal survey found which they published they found that they saved two thousand dollars per employee that went through the program because employees were more focused right there's been incredible academic research that shows that this mindfulness practice increases the increases the gray matter of our brain you're able to stay on task it increases executive function in the neocortex so leaders can make more effective decisions in points of stress that's why the us military as well the marines are experimenting with mindfulness they found that mindfulness enhances both soldiers performance in the field under high stress situations but maybe even more importantly is mitigating the alarming alarming rates of suicide you know it's a huge thing where you know veterans are killing themselves and deep states of depression and mindfulness has been clinically shown to to mitigate that depression um mindfulness is in sports right phil jackson who was the coach of the bulls and the lakers it was was an early adopter of zen and mindfulness but more recently the seattle seahawks super bowl champs the mindfulness program it's something that that's happening very big and again the word itself and its meaning of restoring your mind to the present moment is not fully enough to capture what this is uh there's a component of of of mindfulness also called emotional intelligence right this came up when we were talking about cognitive intelligence just want to ask throughout the throughout to the crowd i want you to think of a leader somebody that you've that's been in your life that's been demonstrating solid leadership traits somebody that you would follow someone you look up to can can people share like what come what is that person what represents that person a few traits what is not not who not who what what what is a what are the traits of a leader come on let's hear a few popcorn quick charismatic smart inspiring strong humble reliable reliable able to execute able to execute listening if you look aside from the word smart if you look at all of those traits those are not cognitive traits smart is meaning people very really say this guy's a leader because he can crunch math problems really quickly no she's a leader why because she's a listener because she's humble because she can follow through because she's sensitive to what's around she can catalyze a group of people these are emotional traits and there's been incredible literature recently about the power of emotional intelligence you know even in companies where like google hires the smartest people but smart people just like on a basketball team talented basketball players are nothing on their own it's the same with emotional intelligence they're a bunch of smart people in the room who aren't sensitive to to listening to compassion to where they're overstepping their boundaries doesn't do anything and and people don't leave jobs people leave bad managers managers who don't have the emotional intelligence to to to manage and and guide an organization so i just got back from a seminar google gives called search inside yourself right it's a play on google search right so instead of searching the web you search inside yourself and they do a two-day emotional uh intelligence uh training uh i was in manhattan last week is uh 1250 dollars to attend it's an expensive seminar attended by about 100 people um and excitingly uh wisdom tribe will be producing and hosting google search inside yourself seminar here in tel aviv for the first time may 19th and 20th more on that to come you guys are all invited for 3875 okay we'll talk about discount codes for white's hashtag white city shabbat right so emotional intelligence is part of this mindfulness movement maybe one other way to characterize this i can give you guys from from my experience i'm really into social movements like i was born in 1985 and i was raised in 90s and i always felt like i should be raised in the 60s i was i was a big hussein right a big adherent of abby hoffman allen ginsberg right bob dylan i felt there was a huge wave of social consciousness you look at the 1960s it was an era of incredible social change incredible meaning incredible optimism people were purpose driven but it didn't really have a footing and as we know the 1960s burned out if you want if you want proof just go to haiti ashbury today san francisco where you say the genesis of the the hippie movement it's a bit burned out unfortunately i want to contrast the epa the decade of the 1960s with the 1980s the 1980s again these are sweeping generalizations but they do mean something the 80s was an era of reaganomics of margaret thatcherism it was uh mergers and acquisitions not a very socially like passionately inspired time a time of hardcore business values and principles and generating lots of profit the 80s right what i believe you're seeing today is a hybrid of those two from kabbalistic perspective you have a dichotomy in the world of light and vessel what does that mean this cup right here is a vessel it's very good at transporting whatever i want to transport if i want to give you some water and i just throw water at you there's just a bunch of water everywhere there's no relationship what a cup does it enables a relationship to be formed so i believe and this way i conceive of it the 1960s was an incredible degree of light light is water light is the inner essence of what we're trying to get at what are we purpose purpose driven what are we motivated by are we inspired that was the era of the 1960s 1980s all that water was gone and we built very very strong vessels we built big companies we built conglomerates we've been multinationals but it was an era not of the most ethically conscious you know business we could we could think about the rivers you know lighting on fire in cleveland and you know a lot of the practice of the 1980s for me the 1960s were a time of light without vessel that's why the 1960s didn't stick they didn't have a strong foundation they didn't have the kaling they didn't have the structure 1980s was a lot of structure but not a lot of inspiration if you look at today the world's biggest companies we've cracked a business right we we have incredible tools we have incredible management principles we the the vessel of business and of startups is and particularly here in tel aviv is pulsing is lively but so is the purpose purpose-driven business social entrepreneurship social innovation it's business that the people are serious they're not flaky they're not drop they're real serious people with with serious skills but they're motivated by something more than the bottom line the financial bottom line right a lot of progressive economists talk about the triple bottom line also taking into account not just financial but social and ecological um externalities so one other way to conceive of this again mindfulness being the the inappropriate word to to describe something much larger is we're coming to an era that's a bit of the the inspiration of the 1960s inside the vessel of you know hardcore business management structure 1980s okay so what does any of this have to do with judaism i'm sure that was on all your guys's mind no um being somebody who's a religious jew i'm constantly looking for for sparks that are in the world for for areas of connection and when i heard about the mindfulness movement when i heard that there's a gathering in silicon valley which draws together the world's top mindfulness teachers meditation teachers neuroscientists studying emotional intelligence and puts them together with the ceo of linkedin with the ceo of facebook with ceo of zappos i'm very excited that's an exciting gathering and the name of that gathering is called wisdom 2.0 and i heard about from my buddy levi levi actually was a speaker at wisdom 2.0 2 500 people at this conference paying a thousand dollars a ticket in san francisco and i decided that's it i'm going to wisdom 2.0 i have to do this was about two years ago so i went i went on shabbat it was a shabbat conference so i came on shabbat i dress in a full hasidic garb black top hat my paius no longer tucked but hanging down let it all hang loose on shabbat get into that and i showed up in a full hasidic garb in san francisco friday afternoon in 2014. i was very intimidated i'd spent eight years in yeshiva i wasn't in the tech world this was kind of over my element and i took a seat in the very very back and the founder of the conference soren gordhammer gets up and he says you know this conference is growing each year more and more people we've got some of the biggest names in business and technology and research and mindfulness here he says let's just see take a look at some of the people in the room you know he goes we've got yaakov lehman and before i know it here's my face plastered on the giant like double jumbotron screens in the marriott hotel and they've got a google map there yaakov traveled 7 800 miles to come to wisdom 2.0 because he says he wants to spend time with good people that was the quote i wrote when i filled out the ticket form like i don't know six months earlier it's just good people he said i think we can all appreciate that and the whole audience busts into a round of applause and i'm just like like not expecting it but at the same time i wasn't expecting it but i was ready um we did an event there called wisdom shabbos we had a yoga studio rented out called zazen they do floatation tanks and uh and yoga we had a sushi catered meals kosher sustainable sushi from my buddy who's got a an outlet called lahayan sushi in the bay and we had wisdom shabbos um some very interesting people showed up the head consultant who greened walmart walmart went through a whole greening process showed up there um one of the the third largest digital design agencies in australia bianca rothschild showed up there we did it again this year the head of the ceo of mindful investor showed up the head of burning man's the burning man's global ambassador was also there a friend of mine bear kitty it's a really really really fun experience i did it in singapore this past summer and the truth is i i just gotten a just come back i said from america i started my trip in hawaii and i was uh invited to an invite-only retreat of 45 leaders of this mindfulness movement including the head of leadership at facebook bill mclaughton melissa daimler the head of learning at twitter the head of people development in linkedin kelly palmer major vcs from hong kong it was a very interesting group of people it was a retreat in hawaii and it was an unconference the concept was just bring a bunch of powerful people and let them figure out what to do you have to pay three thousand dollars as well so um i showed up there again in my garb and i decided i wrote on a little sticky note shabbat one word right you can see i got a picture i'm not gonna show it but next to you know another person wrote seeding the next myth and narrative to the populace like this was this was a woman what was her she was ceo of warcraft for eight years and she just founded a company called um transformative technology looks at which looks at technology design and how we can design technologies to make us more mindful to make us more compassionate as opposed to just throwing you know throwing out our attention span she's actually coming out to a conference we'll be throwing in february which i'll get into a little bit but shabbat so around my shabbat i had eight people come to my breakout session it was about five to eight people in each group and i spoke about shabbat and its connection to mindfulness i prefaced my talk by saying that judaism is the most incredibly non-mindful religion out there yes full of neuroses full full of going out but you know what i i said there's never been a monastic ideal in judaism if you look at a lot of the wisdom that mindfulness is drawn from there's a monastic ideal of disassociating yourself from pleasure right anything you're attached to you know according to the the the buddhist scriptures is something that will bring you suffering including your parents very often so people in a in a monastery you have to disassociate yourself from your passion from things you love including food including sex i said judaism is not that six days a week what does our wisdom tell us go build the world go make money go own the stock market go build a startup go be a ballerina go improve your jump shot do whatever you got to do yeah listen a guy's got to improve his jump shot you know what i'm saying six days a week do not be in a state of just pleasant bliss moment there has never been a monastic ideal in judaism six days a week hustle build make do get the cash get the money get the jump shot whatever you got to do but one day a week one day a week the idea is to not build to not create to not be the boss of your world but to incubate a state of gratitude of deep appreciation for what we have this is for those who understand that the the feminist when we say lee cross cala we say le hado de li cross cala come welcome the shabbos bride why is it called the bride because because this shabbat which is what everything is about sofma say makshavati the last thing hashem created but is first in thought is all about completely being in the now and when i explained to these executives sitting around my shabbat breakout was that on shabbat there is no there's no networking there's no building there's no doing business there's no technology there's nothing to bring you outside of the present moment all there is is just a deep warming gratitude and appreciation for what we have this is the wisdom of shabbat and then we go into the week and we do we build we create we get that egotistical i will say as well masculine type energy but we come back every week it's the axis of our consciousness back to shabbat so i shared with them this was i was on shabbat in hawaii and i shared with them this is a jewish wisdom practice and i got some really really incredible feedback from from the crowd and it was really a big pleasure to share with them so i want to give you with that idea um there's another concept i have and then maybe we'll take a few questions and stop but uh you know there's a line there's a line that uh you know i formulated that where mindfulness stops is where we're avoda where the jewish wisdom understanding of how we're meant to act in the world begins mindfulness and stilling your mind we don't have time tonight to do practice you know i'm a tai chi qigong teacher so in a different format if you're outside maybe we'll go up to the roof for an after session we'll do a little bit of mindfulness to bring our present in the moment yeah the after party but listen listen it's it's amazing and if you've read any of the red eckhart totally or john kabadzin restore the mind to the president restore the mind to the present but now what what do we do now for me mindfulness is clearing the cache of our cognitive computer you ever ever like have a bunch of windows open on your computer you're running a bunch of programs and it's just slow it's occupying a lot of ram a lot it's just it's just bulky mindfulness says you know what move all that static away clear out some space for your mind to operate but the question begs and then what what do you do once you're there once you're present and i believe this this is the operating system upon which jewish conscience says because jewish consciousness is a a model of elevating the physical world from going and taking the caloric energy latent in a delicious baraka oh yeah making a blessing eating the baraka and then turning that into a mitzvah schlepping somebody's refrigerator up a stair up some stairs you've now turned margarine dough and some sort of weird potato mush into a mitzvah of helping schlep a refrigerator which is an awesome mitzvah by the way always look for opportunities to help people not in their spiritual emotional things but physical stuff schlepping schlepping driving to the airport these are the best mitsubis guys so the operating system that we should do that upon that we should go into the brock and we shouldn't do it because we're hungry and because we're driving after we're being driven from our lusts and we shouldn't be driven after our fears that's what mindfulness does it makes us rise above the emotions that are constantly driving us i'm afraid i'm i'm i'm angry i'm i'm anxious or i'm hungry or um i want that or mindfulness brings us up to a higher level of consciousness which is the clear operating system upon that when then which can go back into the physical world back into meat and wine and sex and all the good things and doing it to bring it up to a higher purpose so i often tell people there that our yoga mat and judaism is our shabbat table that is our contemplative practice and it's done over good food good wine and good friends and so this is the beginning of a conversation very exciting um wisdom tribe will be uh partnering with wisdom 2.0 this main conference uh which happens in san francisco they've done an event in dublin ireland uh which i was at as well as in singapore and now their next international event is going to be tel aviv guys february 4th um the title is uh wisdom tribe building a more mindful creative and compassionate workplace we've got bill laughton the head of leadership development at facebook coming out we've got bill dwayne the head of um the superintendent of well-being and high performance at google coming out we've got nicole bradford the head of former head of warcraft coming we've got researchers from harvard we've got researchers from stanford university we've got some of the best people in israeli business in the israeli research community uh there'll be four tracks one track is going to be wellness which is you know a large category the other track science on our steering committee is the head researcher at the idc center for brain and mind dr nava bennun uh we'll have a business track the head of the tel aviv university executive business education program aura setter will be leading the business track and then we will have a track on technology and nicole bradford will be speaking about that as well as bill duane from google who was a manager of gmail for eight years global production manager of the entire gmail project the lead engineer before he left switch into hr and become the superintendent of well-being well-being and high performance so it's gonna be a very exciting conference it'll be about 300 people um hopefully we'll we do have a flyer here urine do have a flyer we can send out some more information through white city shabbat when it comes around also the google uh search inside yourself seminar we'll be producing in uh in may so stay tuned the mindfulness movement hashtag mindful middle east right we could all use a little bit of mindfulness and compassion in these eras so we'll start here healing the rifts in israeli community in israeli society and hopefully uh expanding out to to a wider audience my last blessing and idea for you guys is that we should conceive of technology the way we conceive of this water and and the cup which is also you know somebody driving a car and the car itself that we should always be in control of the technology we should always know what our inner purpose when we pick up our phone and swipe it to unlock it what are we there to do we've allocated ourselves five minutes to check email great five minutes of scroll facebook 20 minutes for facebook great that's awesome we should use technology to fill our inner intention and goal the problem is is when the cup or the car starts to take over and then the driver starts with those off and the car will it will this is the nature of kalim of vessels that without proper direction they will start steering into their own directions and that's where we get the who here you know you check your email put your phone your pocket two minutes later you you're scrolling again to check your email what is that was that a conscious decision or is that a habit born about by an addictive technology so i bless everyone that they should be in control of the technology of their lives and not the technology and control of their lives thank you very much