[Applause] it's really a joy to be with you and Martinez such a beautiful individual and I'm very honored to say he's my friend you know it was interesting because he was talking about inner peace and wisdom but I would also like to add the rest of that which i think is critically important and which should sit with that is compassion and love it I'll tell you a little bit about myself but before I do that I would also like to thank the wonderful musicians here because I hope you felt as they were playing the deep
soulfulness of that music and this music how it can get into your heart and even open your heart and really that's what my talk is about today so people look at me and yes I'm a professor at Stanford which is a extraordinary place and I was fortunate to also be in business so when people look at this pedigree they make an assumption about who you are they make judgments and oftentimes the judgment is that I'm a white male of privilege now I am privileged because I've been allowed to go on extraordinary journey which I would
like to share with you and hopefully also shows that making those judgments isn't necessarily valid what the most important thing is not titles it's not what you've accomplished unless that accomplishment is connected to service to others you know I tell people I went on this journey and I ended up having everything but then realized I had nothing and when I had nothing and gave everything that I had left away then I had everything so my story begins as a child and I grew up in poverty my father and and neither my parents had gone to
college my father was an alcoholic my mother had sadly had a stroke when I was a child was paralyzed had a seizure disorder chronically depressed attempted suicide multiple times we were evicted from various places at times and as you can imagine that's not the ideal environment in which to succeed at least by the criteria most people use to succeed in life and in fact there's something now called adverse childhood experiences of any of you heard of that it's an area of study now where it uses these markers and they're quite accurate in terms of how
a child will progress in life and if you have poverty if you had mental illness if you have alcohol or drug abuse if you have violence all of these contribute to you not succeeding in life and in fact being unhealthy oftentimes being in prison and it's it's horribly horribly unfortunate because you know a child starts out as having this incredible potential and then these life events can change that so by the time I was 12 I had despair anger hopelessness fear and no hope so what happened to me that allowed me to be with you
today and in some ways it completely relates to the conversation that just happened before so interestingly enough what happened to me was that I walked into a magic shop and in fact there's a book that I wrote called into the magic shop a neurosurgeons quest to discover the mysteries of the brain and the secrets of the heart and it ended up being a New York Times bestseller it's now in 40 languages and do any of you have you ever heard of the kpop anybody follow kpop here come on there's got to be more than one
person you guys are denying it there's actually a band called BTS it's a boy band and they're quite deep in terms of every album and song that they write and actually they base their 3rd album on my book so it made my book a big bestseller in South Korea but at that point in time at 12 filled with such a sense of hopelessness and a feeling that I had no future I walked into a magic shop and I had this interest in magic and this shop was far away from where I lived I just happened
to be riding my bicycle by and I walked in and the owner wasn't there but his mother was there and frankly she knew absolutely nothing about magic at least the magic in the store but what she didn't know about was human beads and hopefully all of you have met a person or personality who when they look at you they have this radiant presence a smile their presence embraces you and what happens when somebody gives you that gift because what that gift is is acceptance non judgement looking at you as an equal and accepting you unconditionally
and when that happens magical things happen because what that does is it creates a sense of psychological safety and when you're safe believe it or not your physiology works at its best because then you have full control of your executive control functions you can use experience you can use knowledge to make discerning judgments because you're when you're in a fear mode which is what I grew up you are reactive you're not always making the bad right decisions you're scared and that engagement of your sympathetic nervous system is profoundly unhealthy when it's chronic so this woman
and I talked and after about 15 or 20 minutes and she asked me actually some deep questions which is that age I was already ashamed I would hide my background but she asked these questions and I answered them honestly and at the end of this period of time she looked at me and she said you know I really like you if you come here every day and I'm here for another six weeks I'll teach you something that I could think could change your life now how many of us get an opportunity or how many of
us have given someone an opportunity to share their knowledge unconditionally to help another another who was suffering so that's what she did so what I learned from this woman what I learned was that my own fear my own anxiety resulted to me and constantly being tense being afraid always looking around because I didn't feel safe and when you are not able to attend you cannot learn you cannot succeed because to learn you have to be present and the other thing she taught me was to truly connect with another you must be present and in fact
when you are present magic happens and again your physiology works its best so the first thing she taught me was a breathing technique a technique on how to relax and magically over a few weeks I was able to do that now when she first started this you can imagine as a 12 year old what I was thinking in this back room with this woman and I was going what the hell is going on here and why am I here and the initial motivation was because frankly I had nothing else to do but the other was
she was giving me chocolate chip cookies so that was a very important driver of my behavior and once I was able to do that she asked me what I thought of myself I said what do you mean she said well tell me about the conversations that go on in your head now how many people in this room have a conversation going on in their head and I would suspect that for many of you if not most it's not the one that says you're a great guy you're fantastic you're wonderful right it's the one that says
you're not good enough you're not smart enough you're an impostor people are gonna find out about you right you know I was at a given a talking type and I said this and this one says I don't have a voice government on my head and she said everything's wonderful in my life I couldn't respond to that so what was going on in my head was exactly that negative conversation and I didn't even know that that conversation was not me I thought that voice was truth and what happened was she showed me that that voice was
a collection of negative comments that I had heard and I turned it into what I thought was truth because as a species negativity sticks to us oftentimes because that engages our survival mode negative things positive things don't stick as much because it doesn't put us at risk but this is a side effect unfortunately of our evolution so I told her when she asked me all of these things and she made me realize that that narrative when you say you can't when you say it's not possible when you say it's you're not good enough what it
does is it's like you're building a prison for yourself brick by brick by brick because once you say you can't it is not possible yet what we forget is that each of us has this extraordinary power within us and unfortunately when you build these bricks it takes that flame of who we are it makes a little flicker that can barely be seen and that's what I had done brick by brick by brick I had created this isolating prison and as it gets those bricks get higher it gets darker and you continue this negative narrative to
yourself and what this woman taught me was that that narrative was false and it was not me and in fact it had nothing to do with me it was a false narrative and she taught me and now we call this self compassion because so many of us we are our own worst critic and beat ourselves up every day more than we would do to any other person and she taught me to have self affirmation to know that I deserved to be loved how many in this room when somebody gives you a compliment you can't look
them in the eye right as if you don't deserve to be acknowledged for how wonderful and special you are because that's what they're doing and you turn away from that because you do deserve that everyone in this room you know people also carry this burden of a shadow self and it's that part of you that you wish was not a part of you and somehow you think every other human doesn't have the shadow and therefore there's something bad about you and the thing is so many people spend time pushing that shadow away but until you
embrace that shadow and recognize that it in fact is you and that even in the face of that you deserve to be loved so once she allowed me to be kind to myself and learn how to do that something happened also because it was if as if a window that had been covered in Dew where I couldn't see through it suddenly got clear because when you're in constant pain like that you can't see and what I then saw was that everyone is suffering in some way or another and I realized then that everyone was in
the same situations myself and like this woman was giving a gift to me once I recognized that everyone is suffering then I could give that gift of compassion and hopefully that radiance of spirit that unconditional acceptance to another but it's hard you know it's easy to do if it's your loved one if it's a neighbor who's a friend maybe even a co-worker maybe a neutral person it gets much more challenging as you get to the person you don't like where the person you loathe etc etc but when you spend the time to look at that
it changes everything so what happened from that experience this woman lastly taught me something the power manifestation of intention and taught me how by using repetition by writing my goals and aspirations that would start cementing and within me the ability to have these things manifest and indeed they did did manifest I believe suddenly I could go to college I always believed I could go to medical school I became a neurosurgeon I became a professor at Stanford I became a successful entrepreneur of a company that went public for 1.2 billion and I had made a list
when I was this woman of 10 things that I wanted to accomplish I wanted to own a gold Rolex that's what 12-year I wanted a Porsche I wanted to live in a mansion I got all those things every one of them in spades so here I am suddenly having what so many people aspire to and what every one of my friends said wow this is amazing you're doing fantastic and I was single at the time and I was stating all these beautiful women and I would either come home or wake up miserable miserable and I
couldn't understand it because I had done everything I had done everything that I thought would bring happiness so what happened interestingly enough in this misery where I had everything I had been involved in dot-com stuff and when the market crashed in six weeks I lost eighty million dollars and was bankrupt and three million in the hole and you know who becomes your best friend when that happens are there any bankers here that was my new best friend so my Ferraris my Porsches my penthouse and this put me into a period of deep deep reflection because
on the one hand this woman had given me this extraordinary gift but on the other what had I missed here and so I went through this reflection and I realized what I had missed and don't get me wrong I was never a mean or an evil person but I was spent my whole time trying to prove something and it was about me and that always been about me was what resulted in the sense of deep loneliness and unhappiness so I was at this bifurcation and I had actually given a significant amount of stock in this
company that had yet to go public to charity and I had no money I was three million in the hole and I was talking to my lawyers because they also get involved with your banker and my lawyer called me up he said Jim I have extraordinary news for you I said what he said well you know we were supposed to file these papers that gave all the stock away to charity and the attorney the junior attorney had not done it so actually you don't have to give anything away this is the company that went public
for 1.2 billion where I was the CEO so this put me in an incredible quandary so I surveyed my friends and actually the woman I was dating at the time and I said what should I do now what do you think 100 percent of them said no that was zero so not a single person said that so what I did was I gave everything to chair and that company then went public and I became this extraordinary philanthropist I set up health clinics all over the world blood banks built a wing of a hospital set up
research centers endowed chairs at universities and suddenly I had everything because it was no more about me it was about being of service to others because you see it is how we are designed as a species to love to care and when you do that your physiology works at its best you have this warm feeling the centers in your brain that are associated with reward and pleasure are activated and you know it's so interesting because I spend a lot of time with different groups of people and often times the privilege the wealthy you talk to
them and they're deeply suffering and because so many people look up to these people as successes these people think that by having people admire them and want to be like them that that will fill that emptiness that they have and it's there's a Tibetan mythology about the Hungry Ghost it's this ghost with this very thin throat and no matter what they stuff in into it it never can fill them yet the thing that gives us transcendence the things that make us truly human the things that give meaning and purpose are when we are of service
to the other and as as was said earlier what the problem in the world is it's not about not having enough resources it's because so often we look at someone else as the other instead of ourselves and when you look at the other as yourself and the world is your home everything changes and that's when your physiology works at its best so how the hell does this have to do with business have any of you heard of a company called Google it's a shitty company so you know you may not know this but when Google
started and Sergey and Larry they believed that the best people were those who attended about 15 universities in the world and we're in the top 5% of their class because of course that's what makes successful people and that's the people who make the best decisions right but interestingly enough as they acquired more companies they hired a lot of people who didn't fulfil those criteria at all but Google being Google and being very analytical they did something called the Aristotle project and they spent 50 million on this now instead of going over multiple years and 50
million if they'd just given me 50 million in two minutes I could have answered this question for them so what did it turn out that made a leader and a successful team and let me tell you first though because you know Google employees primarily people between the ages of 25 and 45 do you know we're their greatest expenditure and health care costs stress anxiety depression mind-body disconnect additionally when you're suffering from those what else happens you're disengaged from work we call it presenteeism how many of you have been at work and your minds elsewhere nobody
in this room of course or absenteeism of course but the other thing that happens as productivity goes down when you're scared we talked about executive control function when you're in a fierce state you're not as productive your work isn't that good you're less creative so the cost of stress anxiety depression my body disconnects huge but then look where it spills over it spills over in human resources costs right it spills over in lack of productivity and so it's hugely hugely important in businesses to recognize that oftentimes their employees are suffering and they're suffering deeply I
gave a talk at the University of Edinburgh to the executive business school people 150 people or so I said how many people in this room have had an experience in their life that was so painful that they carried with that that experience to work it affected them profoundly do you know how many people every person right so I said okay how many people in this room when you were suffering like this felt your employee or your employer was sympathetic and there for you did you know how many people raised their hand one person and I
asked you about that said well my uncle's the CEO of the company so what does that tell you about companies and as was pointed out with our last speakers the techniques that are necessary to change that frankly or extraordinary cost effective because fundamentally they are free you know I give a talk sometimes and I say if I had a pill for you that the ingredients were readily available there's no side effects that could help with the vast majority of these problems how much would that be worth for a pharmaceutical company billions right trillions because actually
this is a problem that's now throughout modern society Western society which shows you how screwed up Western society is frankly and then if I said to them okay the thing about this pill though is that there's one requirement when you take the pill after you take it you sit in silence for 20 minutes slowly breathing in and out and then if you actually do that you don't really need the pill anymore and this is true so what did Google find out from this extraordinary experiment amazingly they found out that if a person was vulnerable and
authentic people seemed to respond to that what a shock the problem in modern society is that how many of you heard of the blue zones in the world these are these places where people routinely live to be over 100 now diet certainly has something to do with it but there's some of these places where people smoke and drink like fiends and it's the same but why is that because these are places where the entire environment is one of psychological safety you grew up there you live in an intergenerational family you have the same neighbors and
friends you've had since childhood and guess what with every bad thing you think you have what do they do they love you period that's it it is connection it is feeling safe it is being given unconditional love and acceptance that's what changes everything so in modern society what happens you have people get up on stage and they say I'm a professor here and I've done this and I've done that because they're afraid of showing their vulnerability I mean there were people who work in the next cubicle people have sat with them for years and the
person has never shared that their spouse had cancer that their child has illness that they're profoundly suffering they never opened themselves up yet is that opening themselves up showing their vulnerability you know when I stand on stage my voice cracks or I shed a tear just do people scream at me and tell me I'm an idiot well one or two may but you know what most people want to give me a hug right because when you show your hurt when you're in pain we evolved as a species to Intuit facial expressions body habitus vocal intonation
even smells to determine if somebody suffering because our species need that caring because they don't swim off when they're born or go off into the forest they have to be cared for for 10 15 in my case apparently 35 years to be loved and nurtured before they can be independent so we have to have a system where we care and embrace and you know the reward for that expense amount immense amount of energy expenditure and time it's a sense of pleasure reward and your body your parasympathetic nervous system is engaged and your physiology works at
its best when you care so by being vulnerable by being authentic people are able to intuit that and respond how many of you walked in a room or people of somebody is like this does that make you feel safe or happy of course not first if somebody says it is so great to see you you know I love you because you're just a special person I love your work I love you and I just thank you for being here of course everybody in their business and I get that every day right so but it makes
a huge huge difference huge so vulnerability authenticity guess what the other thing was being non-judgmental right you know it's so amazing because oftentimes even unconsciously we look at somebody and we make judgments about who they are what they're worthy of in terms of what we give them and so often we're profoundly wrong and I'll give you an example how many of you read Viktor Frankl man's search for meaning so there's this talk about between stimulus and response there's a pause because oftentimes when somebody comes on to us aggressively or we make a negative judgment about
them it's because we have immediately engaged our sympathetic nervous system and we're somewhat being defensive oftentimes we're making judgments about how why they're reacting or acting a certain way yet when you learn to master that reaction and take the pause that's where your freedom is and that is when you engage your parasympathetic nervous system because then you have full access to your executive control function so this friend of mine came in one days physician we're doing a project together outside of our normal jobs and we have this meeting and he's a complete jerk I mean
like he's so aggressive I mean I'm actually shocked and what do we do typically when somebody comes on to us so aggressively you either protect yourself or you get aggressive right well fortunately having the experience of learning from Viktor Frankl and seeing that this was so unusual I looked at him and I said you know this isn't you look burst into tears I asked him what was wrong he said well you know I was taking this other position that's not starting for three months we're gonna work together he says because you know he's fairly young
has young children healthy in the United States to continue your health insurance you have to if you quit your job you have to do something called Cobra which is this gap-filling insurance he hadn't done that and his wife just found out she had breast cancer no insurance so the issue had nothing to do with me even yet I could have made this judgment about why he was reacting a certain way now fortunately we were able to take it back and retroactively Lee get his Cobra and everything is fine and his wife turned out fine but
it shows you what happens when you make judgments when we react to people because so much of what we do is actually not based on even now it's based on what happened some time ago like people it's mental state changes by the time they get to work if they've been in an argument with their spouse I mean I certainly can relate to that not that I've only had one argument with my spouse she's had many with me so so this idea of perspective taking looking at the other being non-judgmental and the third aspect that they
learned in this incredibly expensive study at Google was creating this environment of psychological safety and in some ways what they're trying to replicate is what this woman in the magic shop gave me right so she had this knowledge so I'm gonna tell you another story so I was ill-prepared to go to college because of my challenges in school and I had to work and when it came time to apply to medical school my grade point average out of and in the United States we have a 4.0 system which is a excellence right the average grade
point average to get into Medical School was three point seven nine my grade point average was two point five three and in fact I had wonderful friends who told me I would never get into medical school how many of you have told a friend an aspiration a dream they said no you'll never do it these are even relatives and you know I've met people who have carried that with them their whole lives where a parent or a friend told them that they weren't going to be anything yet if you tell somebody you can accomplish great
things you're special this incredible ability that is another gift that will let them sail and fly so anyway at my university to get a letter of recommendation you had to go to a pre-med committee so I go into this office test for this appointment and the Secretary's there and she pulls my application and she says I'm not giving you an appointment like a wife because it's a waste of everyone's time now could you imagine another human being telling him that you're a waste of their time I looked at this lady and I said I appreciate
what you're saying but I'm not leaving here until you give me the appointment if you want to call security fine but I'm not people so she does now what a joy it was to walk into this room with these three professors at the end of a long table and they were sitting like this and the one in the middle he took my file and he threw it on the table he said say what you have to say it let's get this over with so I looked at this guy and I said who gave you the
right to destroy people's dreams I said there's not one bit of evidence as we saw from the Google experiment that having a high GPA has any relationship with success in life I said I am NOT going to allow you to objectify me because of a number and then I proceeded to lecture them for 45 minutes but at the end of it you know what once you force somebody to look at your humanity it's impossible to look away and they were all cried so they ended up actually giving me the highest letter of recognition so as
I walk out the secretary she looks at me and she had been listening because I think you should read this and apply I said what is it she said well there's a summer program for kids who were from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds or minority students at Tulane University in New Orleans she said but I have to tell you the deadline has passed but I don't think it'll have an impact for you so I applied to this subber program and guess what they accepted me with that grade point average and I didn't even get a degree so
I had no degree in fact the president University and the Dean still remind me that I am probably the worst candidate who ever applied to medical school but let's go full circle here so after Hurricane Katrina have you guys heard that it devastated the south so it flooded New Orleans in my medical school it flooded it damaged the library severely they had to move the medical school to Houston the Dean went into a depression he resigned so they were looking for a new Dean and the Dean was the guy who they wanted was from Harvard
and he wanted an endowed chair do you guys have endowed chairs here these are these chairs that a philanthropist gives and endow and it's really the highest attainment and academia to get an endowed chair and they wanted to hire this guy but they didn't have the money so I endowed the dean's chair so the Dean is now the Doty professor of the Medical School too late I rebuilt the library and I set up a multi-million dollar scholarship in the name of that woman to show you that none of us can judge either another suffering or
what someone is capable of and all it takes to turn that flicker in someone to a flame that allows for them to thrive and be their best selves is simply compassion and love so thank you [Applause] [Music]
