Just after arriving in Seoul on a Sunday afternoon earlier this month, I ran into an Abu Dhabi-based GPCA member on a crowded hotel elevator. Over a leisurely decaf in the hotel café, he expressed incredulity and profound disillusionment as we took inventory of the spiraling chaos and collateral damage of the war in Iran.

The conversation echoed sentiments I have heard on hours of Zooms with partners in Asia, the Gulf and Europe as they come to grips with energy shortages and supply chain disruptions while trying to decipher the impact of Trump’s latest social media post on the businesses they manage.

At the same time CEOs and decision makers everywhere are caught in the crossfire of the rivalry-driven race to dominate AI, forced to sift through various apocalyptic predictions from Musk, Altman and Amodei and take bets on which, if any, will materialize.

Our lives are in the grasp of people with enormous, concentrated power who are frenetic, impulsive and reactive.

At the personal level, we have surrendered our attention to technology so that much of the time we are not in control of our thoughts, energy or feelings. The constant pull of notifications and instinct to reach for our phones has left us unable to concentrate, think deeply or even sit with our own thoughts.

We have lost control.

I LOST IT IN TOKYO

Every day I battle for control over my attention and energy as I fight the urge to multitask on my phone while on Zoom meetings or to react instantaneously to every email, alert or message. I need yoga, breathwork and other practices to wipe myself clean, to reset my energy and regain control; if I don’t take the time to reconnect to consciousness, my brain gets stuck in a loop of acceleration.

I lost control in Tokyo this month.

At 9pm when I should have been winding down from a day of events and meetings, my email and WhatsApp lit up with time sensitive messages as the office in New York came online. Adrenaline was pumping as my brain shifted into high gear management mode. My phone was next to me all night and when jet lag inevitably woke me up, I reached for it instinctively, shooting off triggered responses to everything from co-op messages about boiler repair to budget edits for an upcoming finance committee meeting.

In my triggered state, I was trying to control everything.

Ironically, when I can’t disconnect I have already lost control. I left my computer in the backseat of a taxi, lost my sunglasses and miscounted Yen twice.

BETTING THE HOUSE

Despite the enormous complexity of reaching an agreement with Iran, US public markets have soared to new heights on every Truth Social post suggesting the Strait of Hormuz will open tomorrow.

Traders - from hedge funds to Amazon delivery drivers making bets - take any dip in the market as a signal to Buy, with automated systems trading on momentum-chasing algorithms amplifying the effect.

A hedge fund friend explained to me that the market is now so top heavy with tech that AI trades or moves in semiconductor stocks overpower any effect of the Iran war and the real consequences of a prolonged conflict. The pivot of Allbirds this month from failed sneaker maker to AI company, triggering an almost 600% market gain, offers a neat case in point of a market disconnected from reality.

Speculation over future profits to be generated by AI has moved trillions in market value; investors in chip designer ARM are pricing in decades of future AI chip dominance. In private markets, the highly anticipated IPOs of Open AI and Anthropic have provoked a frenzy as ultra-high-net-worth clients compete to get a piece of the pre-IPO action.

But wealth is not the only resource that is being urgently plowed into the high expectations for AI. Data centers and chip manufacturing require vast amounts of land, energy, water and rare earth minerals - finite physical resources that will not be available for farming, manufacturing, housing, and myriad other uses.

For their part, Altman, Amodei and Musk have all called attention to the significant risks that AI poses for human welfare, but their bitter rivalry and fear of losing drives them forward with no pause for safeguards.

GET CONTROL OF YOURSELF

Tech titan Marc Andreesen recently declared that he engages in Zero introspection. “Introspection =neuroticism x narcissism x thumb sucking.” This was a triggered reaction to an interviewer’s question, followed by a string of statements that are easily proven false in a quick fact check.

Self-awareness is not touchy feely; it is the key to real control.

To give a little personal context, by nature I am impatient and impulsive, a Doer. I am known for running into oncoming traffic. At the UN I told my boss I would leave in flames. I never take insurance on rental cars.

But years of self-discovery exploring the mind-body-spirit connection has made me a less reactive, more stable person. And when technology sucks me into a spiral, unplugging offers a path back to control.

The world needs leaders – elected officials, CEOs, decision makers – who can think independently and act from a place of inner stability.

People in control.

Hiking with no path at Menla Retreat Center this month, lots of downed trees to navigate.

I unplugged from technology for a retreat this month and spent a week re-connecting to the “real world” - my breath and body, nature, and 60 other people with no screens in between. I rediscovered that without a device short circuiting my brain I can still remember dozens of people’s names and faces in just a few days.

Through full days of embodiment practices and socializing over meals there were only passing allusions to the broken world that we were briefly escaping. There was a sense of possibility - what can we change inside of ourselves? What can we heal among us as a group? What can we take with us back out into the world?

My day job brain kicked in in conversations with two different men who work in real estate investment and development.

The first, Daniel, had recently quit his job in Florida real estate private equity. After seeing the same pattern at multiple firms - contractors pushed to cut costs and progress delayed by layers of decision bottlenecks - he’s now building a model around a single aligned team to give contractors real ownership.

The other, from Toronto, works in residential development; we had a long conversation on managing with empathy.

Both have experienced first-hand problems in the models that underpin real estate development and are working on creative approaches to do things differently.

Conformity to entrenched systems is producing terrible outcomes. I am inspired when I meet people who, driven by circumstance or conviction, recognize what is broken and have the wherewithal to try to open new paths.

GEN Z RETHINKS HEALTH

“How would changing the diagnosis of ADHD change people?”

Tanya, who I recruited for the LAVCA research team in 2023 when she had just graduated UC Berkeley in data science, told me that this is the kind of question that she wants to solve for when she heads to grad school for an MSW this fall.

She believes that the healthcare industry’s focus on standardized data and diagnosis is at the expense of individual patient care and wants to work as a therapist to understand the complexity of human experience first-hand before pursuing a PhD in psychology.

On the retreat, I was reminded of Tanya when I met Luna, a 27-year-old who described her undergraduate studies in holistic health, chemistry and anthropology as “a Venn diagram of human experience, medicine culture and chemistry”.

She quit her job at Brystol Myers Squib to join the research team at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research and hopes to influence a responsible approach to the future commercialization of psychedelics. I was impressed to discover that she is also a US Coast Guard licensed Captain.

Bonding after a session of holotropic breathwork, Luna shared her future vision of a wellness center that leverages integrative and western medicine with a financial model that makes effective healthcare accessible to people across income levels.

So what will it take to change how health and wellness is defined and delivered?

Relentless curiosity, A deep sense of personal purpose. Learning through lived experience and risk taking. Luna and Tanya.

HEALING THE FINANCE SECTOR

I sense a swelling undercurrent of personal malaise in the US finance industry, particularly among Gen Z professionals. Perhaps this is why the boundaries are blurring between my day job and my work accessing consciousness…..

Fi and I met last fall when she approached me following a panel at a Singapore private equity conference where I openly shared concerns about the future impact of AI on jobs and economies. Her event badge identified her as a Managing Director at a large Japanese bank, but I soon learned that she is also a certified energy healer.

As we got to know each other over WhatsApp calls, Fi explained that she is called in to lead healing sessions inside some of the world’s most recognized investment firms, through meditation, breathwork and other practices.

I wasn’t surprised to know that she is in great demand.

In New York I often come across Gen Z finance and tech people at the Flatiron yoga studio where I practice, in sweaty vinyasa classes but also in contemplative sound bath sessions and sacred cacao ceremonies.

A couple of years back I co-led a workshop on Conscious Leadership there; the next day I had an email from a woman sharing that she had quit her job at Goldman Sachs because it “had stopped being meaningful” for her.

Among those who are disaffected but don’t want to throw in the towel, maybe the search for healing and purpose is the starting point for change.

I took this photo in the Grand Vestibule at the Louvre Abu Dhabi of “three objects engaged in dialogue, revealing common notions shared amongst diverse societies and across centuries.”

February found me in an Abu Dhabi board room leading a discussion on geopolitics with investors from the US, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, the UK, Europe, Korea, Vietnam, the UAE and Brazil.

It was exactly the kind of cross-cultural set up that I relish, where I get to learn about the world through personal interactions as a counterbalance to hard news. People expressed frustrations and fears, resilience and national pride, and a moral dilemma or two… “should we invest in defense tech?”

Years of living and working around the world have taught me, sometimes the hard way, how to meet people in their own place. Curiosity opens unscripted conversations, and nuance emerges from what I thought I knew based on facts. In Saudi Arabia, I was blown away by confident professional women, from immigration officers to doctors and CEOs.

When I embody openness, there is a response.

Last year on a Mumbai business trip, the mother of our India research analyst took me to visit her local temple. A few years before in Delhi, my Uber driver parked his car and accompanied me on a visit to a Sikh temple.

In Abu Dhabi this month, I found myself drawn to Shutian from Hangzhou China, we bonded over single parenting (been there, done that). An angel investor in Chinese AI and host of a TikTok channel, her bio stated: “She is also recognized as China’s first female off-road RV owner.”

CONNECTING INSIDE TO CONNECT OUTSIDE

Accessing a stable place of inner connection through meditation and other tools has, over years, shifted the energy that I put out into the world. That place is discovered, lost, and rediscovered continually, but I always know that it is there.

Meditation doesn’t silence my busy brain, but it allows me to get some distance as I observe my brain activity from someplace eternal – consciousness. Anxious thoughts are ocean waves, but consciousness – my true self – is the calm sky above.

How do I access consciousness?

For me it is not a passive experience (“make your mind go still”), but an energetic process of breath and visualization. In meditation, it might look something like this:

Breath in through the nose and fill the skull with breath, feel the skull illuminated with the light of your breath

Allow presence to build in the skull as you breath in

Now move your inhalation down, starting at the skull breathe down into your heart

Then on the exhale follow your breath back up into your brain

Follow this pattern of breathing down from your skull into your heart, and exhaling back upwards to the brain1

When I focus on my breath and the felt sense of my body, everything slows down. Reactions are replaced with awareness; awareness grounds me and makes it easier for me to connect with others.

YOU CAN’T FAKE IT, YOU HAVE TO FEEL IT

When we commit to a process of self-discovery, we begin to tap into our personal magnetism. In a world of deep fakes and manufactured identities, there is nothing more valuable.

“Self-awareness. The ability to build relationships. Judgement. It’s all personal.”

These were ideas shared by a former private equity CEO as he described the keys to successful deal making at a small event that I recently attended. With trillions of dollars in investable capital chasing the same opportunities, private equity professionals who can build trust with personal transparency will win the best deals.

I’ve also noticed more business leaders embracing personal vulnerability publicly. The former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment has an upcoming book where he takes responsibility for one of the worst cyberattacks in corporate history, the result of a project he greenlit because he “wanted to hang with the badass gang that made subversive movies.”

Leaders who embody emotional intelligence also have an advantage in attracting and retaining great talent. A brilliant young hedge fund analyst that I met volunteering at a NYC food pantry confided to me that the only thing that keeps him in finance is his fantastic boss.

As a manager, the differentiator is to be personally invested in others’ success. The former private equity CEO summed it up perfectly: “You can’t fake it; you’ve got to feel it. Ultimately the people that work for you will know.”

THE SUPERPOWER OF THE FUTURE

We are bombarded with headlines generated by combative public figures who wield power through fear. Precisely for this reason I am heartened when I meet influential leaders who have figured out that personal empathy is a superpower which cannot be faked.

We need more of them.

Students who will be starting careers and professionals across industries are upskilling for work which will be shaped by AI. As Chat GPT will tell you, in that world “human differentiation shifts toward judgement, creativity and empathy.”

Lived experience is the best training ground for developing those “human differentiators”, especially if we can find the courage to bring personal vulnerability to the table.

It all starts with a desire for personal connection and a willingness to look inside ourselves.

I wound down my energy and activity over the end of year break and relished the freedom of unscheduled days, including a hiatus from my regular news sources.

Just before disconnecting I was struck by an article in the Wall Street Journal from Kyla Scanlon on “Financial Nihilism” in which she depicted her Gen Z peers trading options and meme coins because they see it as the only path to build wealth.

Her observations on jobs, wages and markets reminded me of a conversation with my Uber driver, Ricky, on a ride home from Newark Airport in November.

Ricky explained that driving was an occasional gig for him since retiring as a licensed electrician, saying that he still took on freelance electrical projects when the right opportunity came up. Then he asked, “Do you want to know how I really make money?” Intrigued, I took the bait. “I take out three credit cards with zero interest for 18 months and invest the money in the stock market. I’ve done so well that I’m going to take another $20k out over Christmas.”

This was one of the many occasions when an insight from an Uber driver provided me with a real-world context for something that I had observed in the world of finance….

EVERYONE IS IN THE MONEY BUSINESS

I was surprised last spring when a wealthy guest at an LA cocktail party tried to convince me to look at the pitch deck for a fund he had put together with his brother. He explained that rather than investing his inherited wealth by handing it over to asset managers, he had successfully backed crypto and real estate deals on his own. Now he was eager to raise money from others who would back him based on his track record.

That aspiring finance bro belongs to a generation in which thousands of families globally are each passing on wealth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

High net worth families are increasingly important players in the private capital industry as many transition from passively delegating the management of generational wealth to proactively seeking out deals and raising money from others. For heirs that came of age in the era of financialization, winning at investing can be an important benchmark of personal success, a numerical marker rather than something real.

On the other hand, money is very real if you don’t have it.

Their wealth is another drop in the trillions of dollars around the world seeking to make money from money, untethered from the real economy and its impact on human lives.

MONEY DOESN’T LEAD, IT FOLLOWS

I have met people around the world who are motivated to create something of value with their wealth and have a personal vision. This is great. When there is a willingness to take risk, a new approach to solving a problem or real operational expertise, money is a useful tool.

And when scarcity or necessity are the starting point, it is inspiring to witness what human ingenuity and grit produce, from enterprising street vendors to medical breakthroughs.

People create value. Without human insight, creativity and problem-solving, innovation wouldn’t exist. People generate demand. They appreciate if you invest in them. People Grow.

Any parent, or anyone who has managed or mentored people, has watched real growth in action: the learning process, the emergence of understanding, confidence, skills, values. That growth is reciprocal; for me, nothing has tested me more or taught me as much as building teams and managing people.

When money leads, we get bad outcomes.

Day trading, betting apps, and meme assets extract attention and money without creating anything of value. Unprofitable delivery apps subsidize customers, underpay workers and squeeze restaurants. New ventures are built around financial extraction rather than service quality or innovation. Speculators outearn builders.

When money leads, we lose sight of reality and sabotage our future.

I am deeply concerned about growing wealth disparity and the unaffordability of housing, healthcare and education in the US, which leaves millions of people without access to the basic building blocks for human development and stable societies.

A PATH TO CHANGE

As an optimist, I am seeking out signs that there is change on the horizon. Perhaps some unforeseen shock will usher in the collapse of financialization; I am not wishing for an Armageddon that wreaks havoc.

Systems change when they are delegitimized, when there is a change in what we believe is acceptable or possible.

We can choose not to glorify extreme wealth; to acknowledge the negative impacts of wealth disparity; to recognize that humankind will be better off if a broad swath of society has an opportunity to succeed; and to respect gig workers – actually, let’s extend that to all humans – for their untapped potential.

Role models matter. I am heartened by the influence of Kyla Scanlon, who has gained a following by explaining why her generation feels that our economic system isn’t working for them. Educators and managers influence students and employees, but are struggling with unprecendented financial pressures and uncertainty.

For me, getting grounded through my inner work is the starting point for influencing change in those around me, through transparency, stability and empathy.

Join me.

My workday is usually organized around interactions with some of the world’s most powerful investors, but occasionally I interrupt the flow with an in-office meditation session to quiet disruptive thoughts.

Perceived risks and threats recede, silent focus replaces noise, and I reconnect to what is Real – my breath and body, my energy, and the team of people that I lead at the Global Private Capital Association (GPCA).

GPCA sits at the intersection of high finance and economic development, putting me in the room with private equity and venture capital, sovereign wealth funds, and high net worth investors around the world.

But I have always been an outsider in the world of finance.

My career path emerged for me as I struggled to find myself professionally. Eight years of adventures in Spain were followed by roles at The Economist and a United Nations Commission before a development bank approached me to build the Latin American Venture Capital Association (LAVCA) in 2007.

I quickly discovered that running a non-profit organization representing investors with billions of dollars was an empowering position, particularly for someone who is not attracted to or influenced by wealth.

The year 2007 also marked my start down an ongoing path of personal and spiritual exploration which has grounded me as a person and a leader.

Fast forward to today, I am acutely aware of the risks ahead as I shuffle between investor meetings and meditation retreats.

DOING THE MATH

It stretches the imagination that asset managers and institutional investors represent $24 trillion dollars of private capital competing for investment opportunities.

That capital is an important resource to fund sectors or projects that require long-term investment and create real growth – infrastructure, jobs, expanded access to truly useful products and services – particularly in regions like Latin America, Africa and Asia.

But I can’t help questioning the basic math behind investing tens of trillions of dollars with target financial returns of between 10 and 30%.

Leading voices from inside the asset management industry have started to acknowledge cracks in the model and express concern about the future. They understand that the dramatic increase in the scale of investable capital is a structural problem, independent of macroeconomic or market factors. In October an important finance CEO asked publicly, “How can there be more private equity funds in the US than McDonald’s franchises?”

A lot is at stake. Public pensions rely on returns from investments to pay out benefits, and endowments and foundations use these resources to finance operations, scholarships, research and grants.

And there is the question of the impact on the real economy and the people who work in it of investing trillions of dollars at 20% returns.

THIS ISN’T WORKING

How is the advance of technology and financial markets serving us, as humans, to improve our lives and our well-being?

This fall I attended a conference where I experienced in real time the dissonance between the ideas touted by the world’s most powerful finance and tech CEOs in a keynote panel and handwringing on the sidelines by everyone else. Frustrated by the idea that participants were afraid to address the elephant in the room, I opened conversations by asking people to share their personal feelings.

A half dozen people working or investing in AI told me that they are deeply concerned about its impact; one woman told me that she was reassessing her life after bailing on a career at McKinsey; several people veered into the moral or spiritual after I referenced my inner work exploring the mind-body-spirit connection.

Those conversations and many others this year have validated and personalized for me hard data on the significant increase in anxiety and mental health disorders globally over the past decade.

Ironically, even people who in the past were on track as ‘winners’ economically – graduates from Ivy League business or law schools, technology professionals – are struggling with student loan debt, fearful that they will be downsized, working 100-hour plus weeks, or all of the above. They are operating in an environment which increasingly rewards a smaller and smaller group of ultra-high performing professionals and excludes everyone else.

In that model ultimately everyone loses - how can economies grow and societies thrive without an engaged working population? And people at the top will live in anxiety and fear.

AN OPEN DOOR

My instinctive response to the instability and disfunction reflected in headlines is to unplug and get grounded with meditation or a morning of yoga or ecstatic dance. When I plug back into the event-driven ‘real’ world, frustration has ceded to creative energy.

Now, after almost two decades of inner work, that creative energy is spurring me to ask questions and recognize truths with the intention of opening a door for people who feel that the systems they are working in are broken and want something different.

If we want something different, we need to learn how to do things differently; change usually happens when we are backed into a corner, opening possibilities that we haven’t considered before.

While meeting with an important investor in Riyadh who was accompanied by an entourage of private bankers, I shared, as I sometimes do, how a decade plus exploring consciousness and the mind-body-spirit connection influences my day job.

When the meeting concluded, a European banker hung back to chat me up. Suddenly he was confessing that Ayahuasca had changed his life and we were bonding over paths to finding inner stability in a very unstable world.

I have been compelled to talk about my inner work more frequently in response to the anxiety that I encounter around me, particularly in the US. The only thing more triggering than the flood of chaotic events streamed through our devices is to contemplate the future – what jobs will still exist in two, five or ten years? Who will be able to afford housing and healthcare? Will an extreme weather event destroy my home?

Work has accelerated to a superhuman pace as videoconferencing replaces in person meetings and communication shifts from email to apps. People in decision-making roles – investors, CEOs – are subject to a collective sense of urgency to respond, to DO something, even when they know that they are driving blind.

Driving blind leads to accidents, but we have tools for regaining control.

POWERING DOWN

Disconnecting from technology is a powerful tool for escaping anxious thoughts and accessing feelings that are not triggered or reactive.

My first ‘off the grid’ retreat in 2007 was an important turning point in my life and initiated an ongoing path of self-discovery through yoga, meditation, breathwork, study of the Yoga Sutras, ecstatic dance, sound meditation and plant medicine.

Today, even though I read hard copy newspapers, don’t use social media, and disabled alerts on my phone years ago, working across time zones and compulsive tasking on apps saps my attention and puts me on edge.

But when I power down my phone for retreats a couple of times a year, I feel an immediate release, a transcendent shift in my energy and a visceral experience of stability and freedom. Redirecting my undistracted attention gives me access to understanding, creative thinking – possibilities – that become imbedded in my consciousness long after.

As a universal resource, the physical self – body, breath, energy – offers a path back from tech-induced hyperactive mental activity. The private banker in Riyadh had a religious devotion to his early morning run before work. A good yoga flow can take me out of my brain and into consciousness, which resets me mentally and emotionally. And thanks to some extraordinary teachers, my meditation and breath practice has developed to the point where I can experience an interoceptive awareness of my organs.

ACCESSING EMPATHY

When we get out of our heads and into our bodies, eventually we can feel our hearts.

My inner work is a process of discovery, of self-knowledge and ultimately of self-acceptance, which has allowed me to develop empathy as a balance to my very active left brain. Angry or defensive reactions are replaced with an understanding of where those reactions come from, with endless testing grounds.

Despite the predominance of autocratic role models today, I am convinced that true power comes not from bullying or strong arming, but from self-realization, and that authenticity grounded in empathy is the key to leading and motivating people.

I feel my heart as I contemplate the arms race to invest trillions of dollars in AI.

There are many applications where AI can be deployed for human augmentation rather than human replacement, but the core business model is to drive efficiency by eliminating jobs. The impact on a generation of young people entering the labor market and workers in industries downsizing is already evident.

People are the raw material from which societies, economies and companies are made. In contemplating our future, there is no greater return on investment than educating, training and mentoring people, and creating new opportunities for future employment.

And empathy, trust and true creativity will stand in stark contrast to commoditized information and derivative thinking.

CHANGING OUR MINDS

Most of our thinking is repetitive, repeating the same worries, memories or internal narratives as the day before.

The calcified systems that we are hanging onto - political, ideological, economic, educational – are failing us. It is time to wake up out of our collective cognitive dissonance.

Through my inner work I have come to understand how family and societal programming influences my beliefs and actions and, over time, to think and act differently. It allows me to navigate the world without lying or pretending to myself or to others.

In private conversations, particularly with investors, I have a tendency to say things that others are thinking but seem afraid to express. I find that people often meet my transparency with openness and even a sense of relief. They recognize the same truths, are asking the same questions, but are caught in the momentum of entrenched behavior.

All it takes to start down a path of inner awakening is a willingness to power down, breathe, and feel. From a place of quiet contemplation, we might find that we want to change – our thinking, our patterns, our lives; even before we understand how or what to change, there is freedom in acknowledging what is not working.

Ultimately, through self-knowledge and empathy, we can become the role models and leaders that the world desperately needs.

STOP. BREATHE. THINK. FEEL.

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