A little more than a year ago I was asked to share my investment thoughts with the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, Temasek, which is one of the world's largest asset pools. This presentation before their senior executives was a high end event, part of their annual eco-prosperity week. Before my comments, I was approached by the moderator. When I told him I was going to talk about mindfulness and related trends around suicide, he was a bit shocked and taken aback. I think they were expecting me to talk about big ideas around climate change. He kind of tried to nudge me to mute my the mindfulness comments and present on more conventional issues. Being the irascible me, I only slightly modified my remarks. On relating my thoughts to climate change, I remarked about the slogan "Be the Change You Want to See." Temasek's CEO seemed to get my message and said they should investigate Well Being as an investment strategy.
Last month I got an email from this moderator, having had no contact with him since the presentation. This very thoughtful guy (head of sustainability at a famous non profit) wanted to basically take back his comments on his directing the talk as he had recently, it seemed, come to an epiphany that unless people develop more mindfulness, the climate change issue will stay challenged. That e-mail made my day!
My talk included observations that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has said he hopes that when people look back on Apple decades from now he hopes they will say "What a great health care company." Apple is highly involved in wearables, which are at a somewhat primitive stage right now. According to NIH, stress is the cause of most diseases, both mental and physical. I learned this as I am co-founder of ZenFlo, a Beijing based mindfulness / floatation center and I have been part of the Silicon Valley Transformative Technologies conference community (TransTech.org) which promote well being technologies, mostly neuroscience based. The FDA just approved a video game as the first prescription for children who suffer ADHD (see Akili). The really amazing stuff is still in the laboratory, my favorite being focused ultrasound, which shoots ultrasound into the brain to down regulated the default mode network, giving a very present moment experience. You can find many of the talks on youtube and I recommend one talk by scientist Jay Sanguenetti who has partnered with guru Shinzen Young (his book The Science of Enlightenment) to study what they call a techno-boost to mindfulness! There is even one youtube video which shows a guy with tremors, where he can't even hold a glass of water, undergo an ultrasound treatment and he comes out minutes later with miraculous results.
More venture funds are interested in this space. I was with one guy, a Chinese, a couple years ago at a philanthropy conference, He told me he was going to start a $100m mindfulness fund. I told him that was interesting but it could be hard to raise the money. He said that was not a problem as he would just write a personal check. Turns out he was co-founder of what is one of the largest venture funds in the world, Matrix Partners.
And just before I left for the Temasek conference, I was with Tim Chang, a partner with old line Mayfield venture fund, and who is also a TransTech groupie. He sincerely told me good luck on the talk as Mayfield takes their lead from their LPs like Temasek, and their support could mean a lot toward a neuroscience based strategy for well being.
I will be blogging more on these technologies as my ZenFlo company is looking to me to bring more of these nascent technology to our neuro-hacking spas in China.
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