Podcasts about philosophically

THE SOUL 01: Introductory Issues, Defining the Soul biblically and contrast to doing so philosophically, The necessity of studying the biblical testimony about the soul by looking at all of the examples of that term in the original languages, and Why we must be both truly spiritual and technically studious in our examination of the subject of the soulSend us a textSupport the showThank you for listening to our podcast!If you have any questions, subjects you would like to hear discussed, or feedback of any kind, you can contact us at: mansfieldgac@yahoo.com or through the links below, where you can find additional information about our work as well as other materials: https://mansfieldgac.com/ (church website)https://www.facebook.com/MansfieldGAC/ (church Facebook page)

***CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT*** Welcome to a special edition of Perek Shira. In the introduction to Perek Shira , it says about David Hamelech, that when he finished sefer Tehilim , זחה דעתו עליו/ He became a little proud, and said, Hashem, is there any creature in the world that says more songs than I do? At that moment, a frog appeared, and told David, אל תזוח דעתך עליך , Don't be proud, I say more songs than you do. I'm involved in a great Mitzvah. On the edge of the river, there is a certain creature, and when he's hungry, he eats me, and that's the Mitzvah that I do. That's the basic message of Chazal. Very strange. What exactly is going on over here? The frog is greater than David Hamelech? What does that mean? The Zohar HaKadosh, in Pinchas 232B cites this story as well, but with a different response from the frog, which is, " David, don't be proud. I do more than you, because I was Moser Nefesh on the command of my Creator. When it came to the plague of frogs, I jumped into the ovens, and I was Moser Nefesh ." The frog actually does sing all day, it's croaks all day. It could be that in the merit of his Mesirut Nefesh, he's the ultimate singer. The Mabit , in his commentary, brings this down as well. The Zohar says at that moment, David Hamelech said this song in Tehilim 131,1 lה' לא גבה לבי, לא רמו עיני, My heart is not arrogant, my eyes are not lifted up . So let us understand, what is this great song of the frog? The sefer Imrei Emet on Parashat Vaera brings down from the Tanna D'veh Eliyahu , that the Hebrew word for frog צפרדע Sefardea , is a contraction of two words, ציפור, a bird , that has דעה , that has understanding . It's Bird because the frog is always flying around, but what is his דעת ? The Imrei Emet says that the ultimate level of Da'at , the highest level of intellect, is when a person is Moser Nefesh , when he jumps into the fire. Avraham Avinu was the one that recognized his Creator, and he was the first one to jump into the fire. What does that mean? The Meshech Chochma in Shemot 35,30 explains something fascinating. The chief architect of the Mishkan was Betzalel Ben Ouri, Ben Chur. And what happens to him? Hashem filled him with all knowledge in the world. Why was he zocheh to that? Says the Meshech Chochma, Mesirut Nefesh . When a person jumps into a fiery furnace, it is the ultimate shutting off of one's brain- not thinking, just trusting Hashem. Hashem says it's right, so I'm doing it. Chur was Moser Nefesh at the Chet HaEgel . He made a protest and they killed him. This is not something philosophical. Philosophically, would you say, For this one second, I'm giving up my whole life and all the things that I could do ? No . The Chasid Yaavetz says that in the times of the Spanish Inquisition, those that were tainted by philosophy did not withstand the test and became Moranos. The simpler people jumped in, because with too much philosophy, you're not going to do it. But, says the Meshech Chochma , that is the ultimate Da'at . The ultimate level of understanding is knowing, I don't understand, I'm going to dive in and do what God says . That's why Chur had a great-grandson, Betzalel , who was so full of wisdom. So, ציפור דעה, the message of the frog is, he jumps in and he is Moser Nefesh , and that's the greatest Shira . Furthermore, the sefer Shem M'Shimon quotes from a sefer Baalei Chayim by Rav Klonimus, that says that the frog did something earlier in history that caused it to merit to be the first creature in the plagues, after the blood. When Nimrod threw Avraham into the fiery furnace, the frogs jumped in and squirted water to try to cool down the fire to save Avraham. Additionally, when Chananiah, Mishael and Azariah questioned whether they should jump into the fiery furnace, they said, " If the frogs did it, surely we should do it." So the frogs are the messengers of Moser Nefesh . The chiddush here is that the song of creation is not necessarily the outward , loud song. Mesirut Nefesh, even in privacy, creates a great song. The Midrash tells us that there were two approaches (Bereshit 71,5) The approach of לאה was called פלח הודיה. She took the unit of praise, and out of her came Yehuda who praised, David Hamelech who praised, and Daniel…all of her children were praisers. Rachel, on the other hand, took the unit of being quiet. She didn't say when the signs were given over to Leah. Her child, Binyamin his stone is ישפה ,. יש פה He could have revealed the sale of Yosef, but he didn't. Esther, who comes from Shaul, and Shaul…They're quiet, undercover people. Whose Mesirut Nefesh is greater? Interestingly, when it comes to the splitting of the sea, Nachshon, who comes from Yehuda jumps in and splits the sea. But behind the scenes we know, that it says, the sea saw something and ran . What did it see? It saw the bones of Yosef. It says, the sea ran away because he ran away, and the sea split. So who split the sea? Nachshon, yes, on the outside. But behind the scenes, the quiet, self-control, Mesirut Nefesh of Yosef did it. As the Rambam in Yad Hazaka , in the laws of Yesodeh HaTorah , chapter 5, Halacha 10, says, that when a person does a sin in public, it's called Chillul Hashem B'Rabim. And he says, But קול הפורש מעבירה, someone that stays away from a sin, and does it, not out of fear, not for honor, but only because God said so, like Yosef HaSaddik, that controlled himself from the wife of his master, this is a kiddush Hashem. So there are two types of Kiddush Hashem. There's a Kiddush Hashem in public, and there's a Kiddush Hashem in private. The Mesirut Nefesh that doesn't make the big, loud noise, still does something. That's the message of the frog. Yes, there are great songs that we hear, but there are songs that we don't hear, of those people that just jump into the fiery furnace. There's a great story that is told over, of a man, Joe, who was a very successful Israeli, the son of Holocaust survivors. He rose from a childhood of poverty, in the mid-80s, and built up a huge, successful high-tech company. One day, his wife called, asking to pick up some meat on his way home from the office. He stopped at a trendy take-out place, to order what they called in, Israel Basar Lavan/white meat, which is code for חזיר, pork. As he stood in line, he began to feel uneasy. He began to remember a story he had heard from his parents. He always knew the story, but now it took on a heightened meaning. Joe's maternal grandfather was Rav Shraga Feivel of Hungary. Rav Shraga Feivel was captured by the Nazis, about a year before the war ended, and imprisoned as a slave in a slave labor camp. After a year, Rav Shraga Feivel was about to be freed. The war was over, and the Allied forces were going from camp to camp, liberating the prisoners. They could already see the smoke of the Allied forces marching their way. Freedom was mere hours away. At that moment, the head SS officer gathered the Jewish prisoners together and announced, The war has ended. In a few hours, you'll be free. All but you, he said, pointing to Rav Shraga Feivel. You must pass one more test. You must eat this piece of pig's meat. Only then will you be allowed to go free. Refuse it, and I'll shoot you in the head right here and now. The tension was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. Rav Shraga Feivel had been meticulous all through his days at the camp, not to eat unkosher meat. He didn't even eat soup, which might contain meat. Rav Shraga Feivel proclaimed, I will not eat chazir-flesh /I will not eat pork. A shot rang out, and Rav Shraga Feivel soul was returned to its creator. And now, 40 years later, Rav Shraga Feivel's grandson stood thinking to himself, I'm waiting in line to pay money to eat that which my grandfather gave his life not to consume? All he had to do was eat that one small piece of pork, and he'd be set free! He'd be allowed to return to his family, yet he wouldn't do it. I have everything. I'm free to live with my family. I have anything I want, yet I'm about to purchase this meat?Either my grandfather was crazy, or I'm crazy. And I cannot believe that he was crazy, thought Joe, as he got off the line and went to buy dinner elsewhere. When he got home, he spoke to his wife about his feelings and the emptiness he had been experiencing. They both had to acknowledge that despite all their material prosperity, a certain spiritual emptiness gnawed at him. They were missing something, but never knew exactly what. They spoke for a long time about values and what is important in life. They decided to attend an Arachim seminar. Joe was enthralled by the seminar. It penetrated the murky mysteriousness of God, Torah, and Judaism. It rocked his world and shook his soul. Who was that Joe? That Joe was well known as Yossi Wallis. He eventually became the CEO of the Arachim organization and built it to a huge movement of Baaleh Teshuva. Tens of thousands of Jews have already come back. We ask ourselves, what did this man, Rav Shraga Feivel, accomplish by dying and not living the rest of his life for that moment of Kiddush Hashem, shutting off his brain? He got a grandson full of Da'at and Chochma . And that's the Song of the Frog. *If you're interested in learning more about Yossi Wallis, there's a book written about him written by Rav Nacan Seltzer called Incredible , a bestseller by Artscroll. Have a wonderful day.

The 2025 NFL Draft is just 1 week away! We bring in the expert of everything mock draft data, Ben Robinson, to talk to us about the mock draft data he's accumulated. His website, Grinding The Mocks, shows mock draft data for the top 50 players on the board, with more being revealed after the draft is over: https://grindingthemocks.shinyapps.io/Dashboard/We begin with our 1st round pick. Philosophically, do you draft for need or best player available? Ben goes with best player available…. but with a caveat. We go through names that are likely possible with that 1st round pick, including S Malaki Starks out of Georgia, EDGE Donovan Ezeiraku out of Boston College and James Pearce out of Tennessee, amongst others.The 2nd round pick is an intriguing conversation, with Amit and KDot being interested in RB at that spot (assuming it's a guy like Ohio State RB TreVeyon Henderson), but Ben pushes back and says it's important to continue bolstering the defense or going with a more premium position like WR in this spot. It would be the 4th round where you'd like at RBs like Bhayshul Tuten out of Virginia Tech or Damien Martinez out of Miami.We also talk NFL more broadly, asking about draft risers and fallers as we're just 1 week out from the 1st round.We touch on the Commanders stadium news, with it looking more and more likely that RFK is going to be the site for the team. The Commanders will put up $2.5 billion, while the city would pay up to $850 million on their side.The Comment Mailbag features 7 comments. Thank you all for the comments! We greatly appreciate them as always.AFTER THE POD discusses growing the podcast, not editing it, and how cool it would be to one day get press passes.Please LIKE the video + Subscribe to the channel!Follow us on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/DistrictDividedTIMECODES0:00 Intro0:55 Ben Robinson2:44 1st Rd Pick Analysis15:33 Deepest Draft Position19:15 Running Backs22:28 Trade Back Thoughts26:11 2nd Rd Pick Analysis30:34 Draft Sliders Risers35:50 Player Slide To 29?43:19 Stadium Talk46:51 Comment Mailbag1:00:15 AFTER THE POD#nfldraft #commanders #commandersrfk

(We had an issue with the audio from 08:00-11:00)The 9 Reasons: 00:00 - Intro08:13 - Philosophically16:11 - Scientifically22:32 - Ethically28:35 - Existentially30:59 - Historically40:24 - Culturally43:06 - Religiously 46:42 - Experientially 48:00 - Pragmatically

(We had an issue with the audio from 08:00-11:00)The 9 Reasons: 00:00 - Intro08:13 - Philosophically16:11 - Scientifically22:32 - Ethically28:35 - Existentially30:59 - Historically40:24 - Culturally43:06 - Religiously 46:42 - Experientially 48:00 - Pragmatically

It's one of the great paradoxes of our time: individuals who claim that God does not exist often spend immense amounts of time, energy, and even money trying to refute Him. Some go so far as to write books, give lectures, and debate endlessly against a Being they insist is no more real than a myth. From a theological perspective, this aligns strikingly with Romans 1, that truth isn't merely denied; it's actively suppressed. The human heart, made in the image of God, cannot help but respond to Him, whether in worship or in rebellion. Philosophically, this obsession with disproving God betrays more than skepticism. In fact, it suggests an unease, a disquiet in the soul that perhaps, just perhaps, what they reject is actually true. After all, we do not rage against things we find truly irrelevant. The question must be asked: are these arguments born from intellectual inquiry, or are they the conscience's attempt to silence the God it cannot escape? Listen to this episode to hear more of our thoughts!

Onámuh, 22min,. Mexico Directed by Miguel Ángel Vives Ponzanelli Onámuh, a humanoid marked by past abuses, searches for resources to survive. Árret, a deity of the earth, helps him and takes him to her lair, where Onámuh finds the energy he needed. However, his need turns into an addiction, leading him to abuse Árret and make her his prisoner. As the environment rapidly deteriorates, Onámuh must make a fatal decision due to his accumulated guilt. https://www.instagram.com/pm.a.v/ Get to know the filmmaker: What motivated you to make this film? Philosophically, I've always loved the ideas Nietzsche had around nature and the way Humans perceive it in terms of an ego out of proportions. We humans tend to try and trap nature in our supposed “reason” but, in that futile attempt, we unleash a destructive force that tries to compensate the shameful fact that we understand almost nothing in the greater scheme of the natural universe. I wanted to portray that struggle with visual metaphors, symbols and allegories. This brings me to the social part of the motivation to do the film. I'm mexican and, inside my country, we have deep problems concerning the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment. So, I saw an opportunity to try and create awareness of the problem that affects Mexico but also the entire planet as well. A good film can change perspectives and put people into action. Hopefully, this short film generates a bit of that in the audiences that watch it. What were your initial reactions when watching the audience talking about your film in the feedback video? I cried. Really, I did. I felt like the film directors that inspired me to do films. My sole purpose has always been to give audiences something worth watching you know? Good quality, good script, performances and attention to detail! The feedback video gave me validation to do more without compromising. Subscribe to the podcast: https://twitter.com/wildsoundpod https://www.instagram.com/wildsoundpod/ https://www.facebook.com/wildsoundpod

Doing it Cold War style.By kittybeaver, in 5 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Explicit Novels. It was difficult for Dirk to pretend he wasn't having sex. Tina's cunt felt so good. He wanted to close his eyes, shut out the rest of the universe, and just experience it."Adjust left," Fact-Tel said. "Left, you malfunctioning flesh machine, left."Dirk made the adjustment while Tina whimpered, "I love it, I love it."Behind them the banging grew louder. There was also the sound of an occasional laugh or a "Whoa, cool." Dirk had to bring Tina to orgasm before the Doopherilians broke into the control room."Now you're drifting down," Fact-Tel said. "Pull up on the interfaces just a tiny bit."Dirk tugged on the steering sticks with all the subtle nuance of a man fucking his hot coworker."Too much!" Fact-Tel cried. "You're wildly off course. Push down and try to do it right this time."Tina's breath came in short, shallow pants. Her ass undulated against Dirk at a faster and faster rate. "Oh baby, yes!"This was harder than Dirk ever thought it would be. He dug his teeth into his lower lip and resisted the urge to thrust. Instead he gently pushed on the steering sticks, which wasn't nearly as satisfying."I'm cumming," Tina moaned, "oh God, I'm cumming."At the same moment the Doopherinians broke through the door and the chair jamming it shut. Dirk could imagine what they saw; his arms stretched across the control panel, his bare ass hanging out, and Tina beneath him writhing with an uncontrolled fury."Stop them!" a silly alien voice shouted."Yes, yes, yes, I'm cumming!" Tina screamed. And then she did.Her back arched and her cunt squeezed his cock in a quick staccato rhythm. Dirk moaned. He was so desperate to cum too. He wouldn't be able to hold it much longer."That's the stuff," a Doopherilian said.Dirk glanced over his shoulder to see the little aliens fall like bowling pins when the orgasm hit them."Earth!" Tina said.He looked back at the view screen to see a blue dot growing bigger behind the yellow dot. They were almost home. He just had to hold it,"Fact-Tel, how much longer?""Two minutes before we hit Earth's atmosphere," the AI answered.Two minutes? Dirk couldn't hold it for another two minutes."Agent Blondell," Fact-Tel continued, "press the green button in the center of the console to initiate speed dampening thrusters. We need to slow the ship down.""Don't slow down," Dirk begged. "I need to cum.""You have to slow down," Fact-Tel said, "or this ship won't land as much as crater.""Pull out before you orgasm," Tina said. "I'm serious, do not ejaculate inside me or we'll have a whole other problem.""Must, sober, up." The Doopherilians were starting to stir. "Must, stop, human.""Oh no." Tina pushed her ass against Dirk, working herself up and down the length of his cock. "I have to orgasm again, but you can't," she said. "Got it?""No." Tears gathered in the corner of Dirk's eyes. His balls felt like they were going to explode."Get back on course!" Fact-Tel shouted. "You're going to hit the moon."How Dirk managed to steer around the moon, he couldn't say. All his concentration was now focused on not cumming. His face, he was sure, had to be a deep shade of red, his balls a bright blue. Every muscle in his body was straining to hold back the inevitable."When you enter the Earth's atmosphere, I'm going to count down from five," Fact-Tel explained. "When I say 'Hit it,' you'll have to pull up on the steering interfaces as hard as you can. You'll be fighting against the planet's gravity and it'll be a rough ride.""Mmmm, yeah." Tina rocked back and forth, working her way toward another orgasm. "That's what Mama likes.""Entering the atmosphere in three, two, "Fact-Tel was cut off abruptly and the whole ship jolted."Oh Fuck Yes!!" Tina screamed as another climax consumed her. The lucky bitch."Five," Fact-Tel started counting down, "Four, "There was no way the Doopherilians would recover from Tina's last orgasm, not before they were safely on Earth. There was no reason for Dirk to hold back any longer."Three, ""I'm going to do it," Dirk growled.Two, ""I'm going to cum.""One," Fact-Tel shouted. "Pull up! Pull up!""Pull out! Pull out!" Tina added.Dirk yanked back on the steering sticks, his cock slipping from Tina. When he shot his load it went airborne, over her head and landed in an arc across the view screen. It was a different kind of Milky Way.The ship hit water and bounced, skipping two or three more times before it came to rest with an impressive splash. Fortunately it stayed afloat. They were back home. Somewhat safe and sound."Fact-Tel." Tina rolled out from underneath Dirk, stood and pulled down her skirt. "Do you have our location?""Affirmative," the AI answered. "Sending rescue team now. Are the Doopherilians still a threat?"Dirk lay collapsed on top of the control panel. His heart pounded and he couldn't catch his breath. He didn't have the energy to pleasure Tina one more time. He almost hoped the Doopherilians would shoot him with their ray gun orbs. At least then he'd have an excuse to lie prone on the ground.He turned his head slightly to see Tina bending over one of the purple aliens. It, like the others, lay on the floor and stared up at nothing."They're no threat," he said. "They're still tripping.""No, they aren't." Tina looked grave. "They aren't breathing. I think they all overdosed.""What?" The jolt from the news gave Dirk enough energy to stand up. "They're dead?""Shit," Fact-Tel muttered as the ship gently bobbed up and down with the rolling waves. "That's a lot of forms I'll have to fill out.""Do you think the Doopherilian King will take this to the Universal Council of Supreme Beings?" Tina asked. "Are we in for another biblical flood?""Probably not," Fact-Tel said. "We'll most likely do what we did when something similar happened with the Martians."Dirk tucked his cock back into his jeans and zipped up his fly. "What was that?""We'll pay the Doopherilians off with opium," the AI explained. "I mean, that is what Earth is known for, best snack foods and narcotics in the galaxy."Dirk didn't mean to laugh, but the whole situation was so absurd he couldn't help it. He expected Tina to scold him for laughing at a tragic event, so it was a surprise to hear her light chuckles mix with his low belly laughs. Their eyes met across the room and the laughter grew between them.Tina got Dirk. She understood him in a way no woman had before. She got his sense of humor, his need to improve the world, his outlook on life. She was the human connection he didn't even know he'd been searching for. And he knew this moment of connection, of shared mirth, was a moment he'd remember for the rest of his life.But eventually, they both fell silent, stared at the death surrounding them and waited for the rescue boat to come.The breeze ruffled through Dirk's hair like the fingers of a lover. He smiled, enjoying the playful caresses along his scalp. He picked up his speed and the wind reciprocated. What had been flirting before was now full on foreplay.That was probably taking the metaphor too far. He was running really fast. It was kind of fun.Not long ago he'd been ashamed of his unique talents. That was when he'd made his living as a male model. The fashion industry prized men with tall, muscular bodies and facial features too bold to be feminine yet still very, very pretty. All of which Dirk Allen had. He also had the ability to run at near the speed of sound, pick up a car with one hand and hardly ever get tired. Those were not useful skills for a man whose job it was to stand still and look good, so he'd kept them hidden.That all changed when he changed his career. Now he was a secret agent in training. Tina, his partner as well as his mentor, said speed and strength and stamina were essential. The fact that he could run faster, lift more and stamina longer meant he had the makings of a legendary secret agent.It was possible, she had told him, that one day he'd be the second best agent in the SWSO. Tina Blondell was the best agent and she planned on keeping that position.At that moment, the position she was keeping was more of a fetal position. Dirk held her in his arms and tried his hardest not to grope her ass or her breasts. It would've been easier if he didn't have to think about where he couldn't touch her and just place his hands where they needed to be so that she wouldn't fall out of his arms.Not that Tina wasn't grope worthy, because she was. Her breasts filled a hand perfectly, with soft flesh to cushion one's fingers and pert nipples to poke one's palm. Her ass was round and bouncy and oh so wholesome. Dirk couldn't look at it without thinking about working the land.But it was inappropriate to think of her that way. They were coworkers and nothing more. Yes, he'd seen enough of Tina to know she wasn't a natural blonde, but that was work related. He had pleasured her orally and she'd given him a hand-job to save lives. For secret agents, the ends justified the means. They were prepared to do whatever it took, with whoever was handy, to protect the world. That's why, nowadays, Dirk made sure he had a condom on him. He'd feel awful if the world fell into the clutches of an evil despot simply because he was afraid of catching something.The jury was still out on whether General Zero was a global despot or simply a municipal annoyance. So much about Zero was a mystery, such as background, motive and preferred pronouns. It was impossible to predict what their next move would be. Tina and Dirk with the help of Fact-Tel, SWSO's mastermind computer, had managed to foil one plot, but Zero had escaped. It looked as though the villain had dodged justice, until now.In the wee hours of the morning, long before Dirk woke up (so like, around 9:30), Fact-Tel had intercepted a series of coded tweets. It'd taken the artificial intelligence nearly an hour to break the encryption but once it had, it presented Tina with the coordinates to Zero's hideout. Soon Dirk and Tina would capture Zero. The city of Middleburg would be safe once again.There was no doubt in Dirk's mind that he and Tina would succeed. How could they not? With his strength and speed and her intelligence they were unstoppable."Stop," Fact-Tel chirped in Dirk's ear. "You're going to run right past it."Dirk was still getting used to the earpiece that connected him to the A.I. at regional headquarters, but he did manage to slow down to a jog without stumbling."Fact-Tel," Tina said as she stirred in Dirk's arms. "Where are we exactly?" She was in the habit of shielding her face against his chest when he ran. The wind tended to dry out her contact lenses."This," Fact-Tel said with a touch of dramatic flair, "is the section of Middleburg known as Old Crap Town.""Of course." She slipped out of Dirk's grasp and looked around, taking in their surroundings. "I should've known by all the abandoned manure factories.""And the smell," Dirk added. "It smells like shit.""How close are we to the coordinates?" Tina asked."Turn left," the A.I. instructed, "about 20 degrees."Dirk put a hand on Tina's arm. "Let me do it," he said. "I'm a trained model. I know how to turn."It was perhaps the most perfect turn of his career. He pivoted on his heels in a smooth yet decisive manner. When he stopped he lifted his chin and struck a pose that showed off his body and, by extension, his clothes at a favorable angle. A tight, blue T-shirt and black jeans never looked so good."So the red, abandoned, poop factory?" Tina asked."Yeah," Fact-Tel confirmed. "The red one."Dirk followed his partner across the street to the massive and dilapidated building, keeping his eyes peeled for any signs of a sniper in the windows or booby traps in the trash scattered along the sidewalk. He'd trained the past few months for just this sort of situation.When they got to the double doors of the red manure factory, Tina reached behind her and pulled her gun from her holster.She owned a lot of guns and a lot of holsters and she had a knack for coordinating them with her outfits. There was a thigh holster for skirts that fell just above the knee. Or there was the back holster for ensembles like the one she was wearing today, gray slacks and a white spaghetti strap tank top. On rare occasions, when she wore a micro mini, she'd tuck her gun into her thigh high boots. That was Dirk's favorite. There was something about that outfit that made him want to surrender to Tina and then defile her. Of course, those sorts of thoughts fell into the inappropriate category, so he never thought them."Draw your weapon, Agent Allen," Tina whispered.

On this episode of the Lead With Purpose podcast host, Tze Ching Yeung talks to Noah Miller, CEO and head of ESG Advisory Services at Rho Impact about what ESG is and what it means for business and the world as a whole. KEY TAKEAWAYS ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) refers to a management frame work – a structured approach to managing the risks and opportunities of a changing environment and environmental conditions, changing society and stakeholder expectations, and what that requires of leadership in order to manage that from a governance perspective. Clearly with the billions of dollars of climate destruction, the governance blunders of corporate leaders, labour strikes and walk-outs that are costing economies billions of dollars, now this work has become front and centre to the finance/capital discussion. Philosophically we're all here from a similar compass that guides us; this work is important, we want to support the natural world and society. But the professional in me still says we live in a capitalist society and an economy that requires an attention to margins. From a professional context, we always focus on the commercial elements of this work because if it doesn't create commercial opportunity/financial incentive it's really hard to sustain. Carbon emissions used to be peripheral to running a business but in the past few years ESG regulations, net zero commitments, and mandates coming from capital providers means that businesses have to show their receipts now and have assurable, transparent, traceable data to show they are doing and have done what they say they have. It's gone from a ‘nice to have' to a necessity. You can't do business without showing your ESG credentials in today's market. BEST MOMENTS ‘The shifting tides of the environment, society, and the broader economy requires a company to address issues that, up until this point, were considered non-financial issues.'‘A significant shift in the past five years has been from carrying out carbon offsetting to now denouncing them and moving into legitimate emission reduction planning.'‘Rho Impact is completely focussed on the numbers first and then the narrative, to make sure we avoid any box-ticking which can lead to greenwashing.'‘People are realising that there's a massive financial opportunity in creating these solutions. We're lucky to move away from too much corporate performing and into the real work where the solutions are being made.' ABOUT THE GUEST Noah Miller is the Chief Advisory Officer and Head of ESG Advisory Services at Rho Impact. With over a decade of ESG consulting experience, Noah has held multiple leadership roles including Senior Director for Summit Strategy Group's ESG Consulting Services practice and serving as interim ESG Director for multiple public and private companies. Website ABOUT THE HOST Tze Ching started her entrepreneurial journey back in 2007 with the launch of a sustainable clothing & home furnishing ecommerce business. Next, she created a sustainable fashion brand. In 2019, she launched a social enterprise to help raise awareness about the negative impact of fashion at schools & colleges.  Through the 15-year journey, she learned so much, but easily the most meaningful lesson learned was about the importance of marketing. She now focuses on channelling those insights to help others succeed through We Disrupt Agency, a business coaching, mentoring & digital marketing company.  Tze Ching's mission is to create a community of global change makers and to contribute to positive change in both people & planet. CONTACT DETAILS Website Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mādhva tradition to intellectual and political influence in the Vijayanagara Empire.  This book is primarily a philosophical reconstruction based on original translations of relevant parts of Vyāsatīrtha's Sanskrit philosophical text, the "Nectar of Logic" (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha wrote the Nyāyāmṛta as a vindication of his tradition's theistic world view against the Advaita tradition of Vedānta. In the centuries after it was written, the Nyāyāmṛta came to dominate philosophical discussions among Vedānta traditions in India. The Advaitins argued for an anti-realist stance about the empirical world, according to which the world of our experience is simply an illusion that can be dispelled by a deep study of the Upaniṣads. This book reconstructs the parts of the Nyāyāmṛta where Vyāsatīrtha argues in favor of the reality of the world against the Advaitins. Philosophically, it focuses on the concept of existence in Vyāsatīrtha's metaphysics, and on his arguments about knowledge and the philosophy of perception. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mādhva tradition to intellectual and political influence in the Vijayanagara Empire.  This book is primarily a philosophical reconstruction based on original translations of relevant parts of Vyāsatīrtha's Sanskrit philosophical text, the "Nectar of Logic" (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha wrote the Nyāyāmṛta as a vindication of his tradition's theistic world view against the Advaita tradition of Vedānta. In the centuries after it was written, the Nyāyāmṛta came to dominate philosophical discussions among Vedānta traditions in India. The Advaitins argued for an anti-realist stance about the empirical world, according to which the world of our experience is simply an illusion that can be dispelled by a deep study of the Upaniṣads. This book reconstructs the parts of the Nyāyāmṛta where Vyāsatīrtha argues in favor of the reality of the world against the Advaitins. Philosophically, it focuses on the concept of existence in Vyāsatīrtha's metaphysics, and on his arguments about knowledge and the philosophy of perception. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mādhva tradition to intellectual and political influence in the Vijayanagara Empire.  This book is primarily a philosophical reconstruction based on original translations of relevant parts of Vyāsatīrtha's Sanskrit philosophical text, the "Nectar of Logic" (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha wrote the Nyāyāmṛta as a vindication of his tradition's theistic world view against the Advaita tradition of Vedānta. In the centuries after it was written, the Nyāyāmṛta came to dominate philosophical discussions among Vedānta traditions in India. The Advaitins argued for an anti-realist stance about the empirical world, according to which the world of our experience is simply an illusion that can be dispelled by a deep study of the Upaniṣads. This book reconstructs the parts of the Nyāyāmṛta where Vyāsatīrtha argues in favor of the reality of the world against the Advaitins. Philosophically, it focuses on the concept of existence in Vyāsatīrtha's metaphysics, and on his arguments about knowledge and the philosophy of perception. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mādhva tradition to intellectual and political influence in the Vijayanagara Empire.  This book is primarily a philosophical reconstruction based on original translations of relevant parts of Vyāsatīrtha's Sanskrit philosophical text, the "Nectar of Logic" (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha wrote the Nyāyāmṛta as a vindication of his tradition's theistic world view against the Advaita tradition of Vedānta. In the centuries after it was written, the Nyāyāmṛta came to dominate philosophical discussions among Vedānta traditions in India. The Advaitins argued for an anti-realist stance about the empirical world, according to which the world of our experience is simply an illusion that can be dispelled by a deep study of the Upaniṣads. This book reconstructs the parts of the Nyāyāmṛta where Vyāsatīrtha argues in favor of the reality of the world against the Advaitins. Philosophically, it focuses on the concept of existence in Vyāsatīrtha's metaphysics, and on his arguments about knowledge and the philosophy of perception. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mādhva tradition to intellectual and political influence in the Vijayanagara Empire.  This book is primarily a philosophical reconstruction based on original translations of relevant parts of Vyāsatīrtha's Sanskrit philosophical text, the "Nectar of Logic" (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha wrote the Nyāyāmṛta as a vindication of his tradition's theistic world view against the Advaita tradition of Vedānta. In the centuries after it was written, the Nyāyāmṛta came to dominate philosophical discussions among Vedānta traditions in India. The Advaitins argued for an anti-realist stance about the empirical world, according to which the world of our experience is simply an illusion that can be dispelled by a deep study of the Upaniṣads. This book reconstructs the parts of the Nyāyāmṛta where Vyāsatīrtha argues in favor of the reality of the world against the Advaitins. Philosophically, it focuses on the concept of existence in Vyāsatīrtha's metaphysics, and on his arguments about knowledge and the philosophy of perception. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Click To JOIN! Just Keep Learning Newsletter I WILL HELP YOU GET CLARITY, BUILD YOUR GROWTH MINDSET AND OWN YOUR BIG DREAMSIn the last episode I talked about walking in Like The KING.The fact that you should walk in as a boss because someday you will be there if you believe in it first.And how anybody that we look up to as other big creators of success stories seem like overnight successes but actually figured out their belief and then built confidence over the last 10 to 20 years and they just kept going.I want to build on that a little bit because Philosophically it's really helpful to realize that but how do we actually accomplish it?You know the next time you post something, create a landing page, go into a meeting, or walk into your gym, or sports field, how do you walk in like you are the Queen, or King?Swagger Sells, Humans Sell TooYou are a human right?I know it's a stupid question.But if it's true, then you are a salesperson.Whether you like it or not you are selling who you are to the world.You are selling what you believe in and the important messages that you need to share.To sell is human.And this idea of showing up like a king, showing up with swagger sells better than anything else. **For the full written version of the episode see the transcript. FOLLOW JustinInstagram – @JustKeepLearning.CaYouTube –@justkeeplearningpodcastTwitter – @JustinNolan_JKLTiktok – @justkeeplearning.caPinterest – JustKeepLearningcaFacebook – JustKeepLearningLinkedIn – Justin I'm so happy you found this podcast. I am here to serve you, the creative solopreneur & aspiring content creator to get clarity on how to create content, teaching, build a business and design the life of your dreams without burning out in the online learning, creator economy.Want to get every single secret, tip, or idea I learn about channelling our emotions into success in this new creator economy, be sure to subscribe to the newsletter: https://newsletter.justkeeplearning.ca/main

Screen time in schools isn't going away, how do we make it make it the best it can be? Jeff Frank, professor of education at St. Lawrence University, examines. Jeff Frank is a philosopher of education. He is a professor of education at St. Lawrence University, and the inaugural director of St. Lawrence's Center for […]

Did you know that the roots of Freemasonry stretch back to ancient Greece? The teachings of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Socrates laid the groundwork for the moral and spiritual principles of modern Masonry.Socrates, a stonemason turned philosopher, embodies the transition from operative to speculative Masonry. His life and teachings bridge the gap between practical craft and philosophical inquiry.Understanding these ancient connections reveals the deep wisdom and timeless relevance of Masonic principles in today's world.Show Notes:Read original article on SubstackWatch on YoutubeFollow the Daily Masonic Progress Podcast on SpotifySubscribe to the Daily Masonic Progress Podcast on Apple PodcastsRead and subscribe to Daily Masonic Progress on SubstackWatch and Subscribe Youtube

Brim, Kim and Mr. Greer are back at it again. Apart from all the usual shenanigans, the gang chats about everything pop culture with all the trimmings and the cast discusses space, the final frontier, and why light years away is a crazy idea to grasp. The cast chats about how scientists know more about outer space than they do about the deepest depths of the ocean, why aliens are real, and why unless Disney can find a real life alien that looks like Stitch - they should not be making a live action version of Lilo and Stitch. They discuss the rise in the rat population on Long Island, how Brim caught and released one earlier in the day , and how awful NYC rats happen to be. They chat about the Eddie Murphy vs David Spade situation, get annoyed about waiting until November to watch the Tyson vs Jake Paul fight and they discuss a couple of interesting Tyson stories. They discuss how Inside Out 2 just hit over a billion at the box office, how Brim will be signing at San Diego Comic Con 2024 and how Brim and Kim are bad gamblers. The crew chats about entertainment news, opinions and other cool stuff and things. Enjoy.Wherever you listen to podcasts & www.thegrindhouseradio.comhttps://linktr.ee/thegrindhouseradioThe Grindhouse RadioFB: @thegrindhouseradioTW: @therealghradioInstagram: @thegrindhouseradiowww.thegrindhouseradio.com

00:00:00 - Surf's Up: Season 5 Episode 19During EASL Congress 2024, US-based Roger Green, conducted interviews with Mike Betel, Louise Campbell (twice) and Sven Francque from Milano. These interviews focused on the major MASLD themes and presentations at the event. 00:04:14 - Conversation with Mike Betel beginsOn Wednesday, the first afternoon of the meeting, Mike Betel joined Roger from the convention center. The first part of the conversation centered  on the Patient Advocate session that Mike chaired with Shira Zelber-Sagi. The session's goal was to discuss barriers to addressing unmet needs in a clinical setting and explore potential solutions. Mike's key takeaway: patients around the world are having challenges getting personal attention and time from their treaters. The rest of this interview touched briefly on other sessions Mike attended. 00:15:23 - First conversation with Louise Campbell Roger's first interview with Louise took place late on Thursday. She described the "really nice vibe" of the meeting, dampened by the fact that Stephen Harrison is no longer with us.The first session Louise chose to discuss was the previous day's Patient Advocate session. To her, the key point was to learn a key question that every provider should share with every patient once a year. She briefly mentioned the one presentation from the day's General Session she was able to attend:  analysis of the predictive value of VCTE.00:19:53 - Philosophically important presentationsLouise discussed two sessions that delivered powerful, somewhat novel messages. The first was a symposium sponsored by Novo Nordisk about how SLD treatment could "manage the cardiometabolic side...rather than focusing on liver disease." The second was the "Healthy Livers, Healthy Lives" presentation which presented "very startling figures" about SLD impact on US healthcare costs and productivity and how and why India has targeted this disease aggressively. 00:26:29 - Building momentum and energy around AI Louise and Roger both observed that momentum is building in MASLD and mentioned why they believe this is happening, 00:33:05 - Second conversation with Louise beginsTwo days later, Louise and Roger conducted a second conversation, which focused on her enthusiasm for the updated Clinical Practice Guidelines and their practical implications. 00:36:12 - CPG session implicationsLouise said this session had "blown her mind" with its forward-thinking style and recommendations. Her favorite point? The guidelines mentioned resmetirom even before it was approved in Europe.   00:44:07 - Thoughts about medicationsRoger suggested that CPG aligned broadly with the drug presentations in the Late Breaker and General sessions. Collectively, those highlighted drugs with an array of modes of action and strengths across the metabolic continuum.  00:46:09 - Thoughts about devicesRoger asked whether Louise believed that, over time, the diagnostic focus would shift from liver stiffness and CAP to in-office PDFF. Louise discusses why this might be difficult.00:51:48 - Conversation with Sven beginsThis conversation, which took place 90 minutes after the final gavel, started with Sven praising the "vibrant hepatology community" evident at the meeting. From there, the discussion covered the Clinical Practice Guidelines, major drug development presentations and other categories. The conversation is fairly short, but packed with information and insight. 01:06:42 - Question of the WeekRoger asks what kinds of support and education primary care will need to step into a leading role in treating SLD.01:07:13 - Business ReportPlans for the next month, growth of the SurfingMASH Community, a special surprise instead of the Vault.

Hour 2 - How Big of a difference is there between Bruce Bochy and Bob Melvin? FP & Guru discuss the similarities and differences. Philosophically, they aren't as far a part as you might think...

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E26 5 Easter (Year B) 11:00 a.m. Eucharist Sunday 28 April 2024 | Earth Day   Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30 1 John 4:7-21 John 15:1-8   “Mysterious God we have lost our home. We are wandering. Help us to hear your call and find ourselves again in you. Amen."   1. In wild places I have heard the voice of God... From the time beyond human remembering there existed an island called by the first people Limuw. Every spring fantastic cumulous clouds raced over orange and yellow flower-covered mountain slopes. The fast moving streams, canyons, prairies, oak woodlands, cobbled beaches, tidepools and white foamy waters teamed with life. Thousands of birds nested on the cliffs among the waterfalls. But something was missing. And so Hutash, the name for the Spirit of the Earth, planted a new kind of seed. From these, the ground put forth the first people and the island was complete. Thus begins a story perhaps older than human writing told by people known today as the Chumash. You may know this place as Santa Cruz Island. It is the largest island in California and lies in the archipelago off the coast of Santa Barbara. “The Rainbow Bridge” story goes on. Hutash taught the people how to take care of themselves and their island home. For many years they thrived and multiplied until Limuw became too crowded. Then Kakanupmawa, the mystery behind the sun, conferred with Hutash and they agreed that the people needed a bigger place. So they gathered them on the mountain peak and caused a rainbow to stretch over the sea to a broader land. Some of the people easily crossed over. But others became distracted and dizzied by the waters far below them. They fell from the rainbow bridge into the ocean waters where they were transformed into dolphins. In wild places I have heard the voice of God. When dolphins join me as I surf at Ocean Beach my heart expands with ecstatic joy. It always feels like such a holy encounter. But not only does the story concern the deep kinship between dolphins and humans, some believe it might even be about sea level changes that are part of the geologic record. At the end of the last ice age when the sea level was about 400 feet lower the four channel islands were joined together. As the seas rose, the population that the four separate islands could support decreased forcing people to move to the mainland. Rosanna Xia tells this story in her book California Against the Sea because she hopes that the massive rise in the sea level could be an opportunity for human beings to mend their relationship with the ocean and the rest of the earth. During the last one hundred years the sea has risen by nine inches. Before the end of our century in the lifetime of the youngest people here, the sea will probably rise by six to seven feet. Human beings caused and continue to produce a catastrophic change in the composition of our atmosphere. Almost one third of the carbon dioxide released by human beings since the Industrial Revolution and more than 90% of the resulting heat has been absorbed by our oceans. Carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water causes a chemical reaction that increases the acidity of the seas. The oceans are absorbing the heat equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs detonating every second. We are the first generation to experience the effects of climate change and the last generation that can make a substantially different course possible. We know this but don't really comprehend it. It's hard to be continuously conscious of such a danger, and of such a grave responsibility.   2. In the face of our situation Jesus gives us very good news. During the last weeks of Easter our readings show us how to live in intimacy with God. Today's gospel comes from the last meal Jesus shares with his friends before being killed. Imagine the tangible fear in that room as he prepares them for his departure from this world. It must have been like a last meal at San Quentin Prison before a prisoner is executed. Thomas says, “How can we know the way?” Jesus responds with the last of seven “I am” statements. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I am…” “the bread of life” (6:35), “the light of the world” (8:12), “the door” (10:7), “the Good Shepherd” (10:11). And today he says, “I am the true vine and my father is the vinegrower” (Jn. 15). Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” He uses the image of the vine, organic and integrally connected, to prepare his friends for his death. “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he says. It is almost as if he is reassuring them, “Death will not separate us. I will not be leaving you. We will become even more intimately connected. Do not be afraid.” Jesus goes on. “You will see evidence of our connection. Look at your life and the lives of those who follow me and see the richness of this fruit.” I do not read this as a threat. It is not “stay with me or you will wither and perish.” It is the promise that we do not need to worry, that we are in this together. Jesus is saying our companionship will be even closer than we can imagine. We walk side by side today. In the future we will be abide in Jesus and bring good news to the world. Other examples of this persist in the Bible. In Genesis, God breathes spirit into us and sustains our life. In Galatians, Paul writes, “It is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me.” The Book of Acts describes God as the one, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” One might even say that the culmination of Jesus' teaching is about abiding in God. Our goal is not simply to follow Jesus, or to convince others to, or even primarily to obey what he taught. We live in Jesus as he lives in us. This experience of intimacy lies at the heart of my faith and of my understanding of the earth. In wild places I have heard the voice of God.   3. As a student of religion I carefully studied the connection between the spirit of God and the natural world. Many of us here have experienced a kind of transcendence in nature, a moment when everything changes, when the cosmos seems clear. These encounters show that our picture of God is too small. When we begin to glimpse how interrelated all life is, we cannot go back to pretending that one individual, or group, or nation, or species can thrive alone. Religion stops being another form of tribalism and becomes an opening in our hearts to wonder and gratitude and love. Let me talk about two people whose lives were changed in this way by meeting God in nature. As a young man Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) served as the minister of the Second Church of Boston (Unitarian). It was founded in 1650, almost exactly 200 years before Grace Cathedral. He would make pastoral visits to Revolutionary War veterans and just did not know what to say. The prospect of writing a sermon every week for the rest of his life scared him. Philosophically he was not sure what it meant to consecrate bread and wine during communion services. Then the wife who he simply adored died at the age of twenty from tuberculosis and his life fell apart. He was inconsolable. He resigned his pastorate, sold all his household furniture and departed on Christmas Day across the gray expanse of the North Atlantic with the hope that he might find himself. In 1836 Emerson published what he discovered in a short book called Nature. Feeling confined and limited by tradition and the past, Emerson stopped believing in them. He gave up faith in the promise that we could learn about what really matters from someone else. Instead he believed that we should experience God firsthand and that “Nature is a symbol of spirit. He writes, “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear… In the woods, we return to reason and faith… all mean egotism vanishes… the currents of Universal Being circulate though me; I am part or parcel of God.” Later he writes, “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present… the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.” Emerson encouraged his young friend Henry David Thoreau to begin keeping a journal and later allowed him to build a cabin on his land by the shore of Walden Pond. Generations later in 1975 a 29 year old woman after finishing her master's thesis on Thoreau won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in a book recording her own encounter of nature and spirit. Her name was Annie Dillard and the memoir about living along a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains was called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Without flinching Dillard sees the frightening vastness of the void, the uncountable number of swarming insects. She writes about the water bug injecting poison that liquifies its prey. Quoting Pascal and Einstein, Annie Dillard wonders if our modern understanding of God has spread, “as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way that we can only feel blindly of its hem.” In this theological and liturgical book (it follows the Christian year into Advent), Dillard regards the great beauty of this world as grace, as a gift from God. At the end she concludes, “Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no... You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked… You see the creatures die, and you know that you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life… I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door… Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret and holy and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.” The seas are rising. How can we know the way? God speaks to us through nature – often in ways that we do not expect, sometimes in ways that are not altogether comfortable for us. But we will not hear if we do not listen. Let us mend our relation to the earth, and build a bridge to a more humane civilization. Jesus, the true vine, reminds us that at the core of every being is the power to love. We will never be truly isolated or alone. He will always abide in us. In wild places I have heard the voice of God.

Presented with a porous board and sepsis for everyone we've ever met. Suffer not one exception. What is it about 4:10pm on a Friday? A return to herbs and bank culture. The unitard is not sweaty, it's completely soaked. The dream of Hag Serum and the chore of good TV. Planes are where you do what cannot be done on earth. Upsetting evidence against good habits when the walk doesn't take. Jacqueline massages her face, Kate sees the sunset and draws the blinds. Getting Max-ed and manicured the Russian way. Confusion at kids buying PDFs. Philosophically good, aesthetically great. The God you don't believe in... I don't believe in that God either. It's time to integrate the shadow. That's exactly the vibe! Earnestly Begging For: Hurom, Almond CowBrands Mentioned: Purity Vodka, Catbird, KitchenAid, Caraway, Erewhon Edited and mixed by Allie Graham.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on Aurobindo and Śaṅkara's analysis of the early, important, and brief Īśā Upaniṣad, also including a new English translation of the text along with a translation of Śaṅkara's commentary thereupon. Philosophically, the book investigates questions about what is metaphysically fundamental, the epistemology of mystical, meditative practices such as yoga, the limitations of human language in expressing the ineffable—and the role of poetry in these efforts, and the problem of evil facing even panentheistic monists such as Advaita Vedāntins. In many ways an introduction to Advaita Vedānta, The Metaphysics of Meditation also includes new translations of Śaṅkara's theodicy from his Brahmasūtra commentary and his discussion of the disciplines (yogas) of meditation and action in his Bhagavad Gītā commentary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on Aurobindo and Śaṅkara's analysis of the early, important, and brief Īśā Upaniṣad, also including a new English translation of the text along with a translation of Śaṅkara's commentary thereupon. Philosophically, the book investigates questions about what is metaphysically fundamental, the epistemology of mystical, meditative practices such as yoga, the limitations of human language in expressing the ineffable—and the role of poetry in these efforts, and the problem of evil facing even panentheistic monists such as Advaita Vedāntins. In many ways an introduction to Advaita Vedānta, The Metaphysics of Meditation also includes new translations of Śaṅkara's theodicy from his Brahmasūtra commentary and his discussion of the disciplines (yogas) of meditation and action in his Bhagavad Gītā commentary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy

In The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on Aurobindo and Śaṅkara's analysis of the early, important, and brief Īśā Upaniṣad, also including a new English translation of the text along with a translation of Śaṅkara's commentary thereupon. Philosophically, the book investigates questions about what is metaphysically fundamental, the epistemology of mystical, meditative practices such as yoga, the limitations of human language in expressing the ineffable—and the role of poetry in these efforts, and the problem of evil facing even panentheistic monists such as Advaita Vedāntins. In many ways an introduction to Advaita Vedānta, The Metaphysics of Meditation also includes new translations of Śaṅkara's theodicy from his Brahmasūtra commentary and his discussion of the disciplines (yogas) of meditation and action in his Bhagavad Gītā commentary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Ādi Śaṅkara on the Īśā Upaniṣad (Bloomsbury 2024), Stephen Phillips argues that the two titular Vedānta philosophers are not as opposed as commonly thought. His book is structured as a series of essays on Aurobindo and Śaṅkara's analysis of the early, important, and brief Īśā Upaniṣad, also including a new English translation of the text along with a translation of Śaṅkara's commentary thereupon. Philosophically, the book investigates questions about what is metaphysically fundamental, the epistemology of mystical, meditative practices such as yoga, the limitations of human language in expressing the ineffable—and the role of poetry in these efforts, and the problem of evil facing even panentheistic monists such as Advaita Vedāntins. In many ways an introduction to Advaita Vedānta, The Metaphysics of Meditation also includes new translations of Śaṅkara's theodicy from his Brahmasūtra commentary and his discussion of the disciplines (yogas) of meditation and action in his Bhagavad Gītā commentary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

About Lisa Scotto: Lisa Scotto is the founder of LMS Growth Consulting, a Business Development Strategy company, and a Co-Founder of Your Cohort, women founded fractional C-suite executive team. Lisa brings to the table 20+ years of sales and marketing acumen, working for some of the largest entertainment and media brands. Past experiences include operationalizing an alternative revenue model for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, developing custom products at Crain Communications and the World Economic Forum, and initiating the sales and sponsorship team at Superfly X. Additionally, she has spent half of her career working at the Walt Disney Company in various sales and marketing roles.Philosophically, Lisa approaches sales as a discipline and believes that good salespeople don't just sell - they add value. She is passionate about working with teams that are open to new ways of addressing growth challenges and are committed to driving results through collaborative, forward-thinking approaches.Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Lisa.In this episode, Nancy and Lisa discuss the following:The importance of focusing on the big picture in sales strategiesSales as a discipline: consistency and adding valueResearch-driven approach to identifying prospect pain pointsSales preparation as a key to success in salesLisa's journey from selling popcorn at Disney to consultingTransitioning from corporate roles to entrepreneurship during the pandemicSales as relationship-building through meaningful conversationsIntentionality in prospecting calls: planning and adaptabilityLifelong learning and ongoing training in sales effectivenessCrafting high-power questions to make sales calls more engagingKey Takeaways: I think in most organizations people do their day-to-day tasks and they're not thinking about how this connects to the larger picture.I rely on extensive research, and this is not just a quick Google search five minutes before the meeting.My strengths naturally align with sales.Whoever's asking the questions is in control. "I do believe sales is a discipline in the sense that to have results, you need to show up consistently. And I like to use a gym as a reference, right? You don't roll up to the gym one day and decide to lift 250 pounds. You must sort of show up every day or every four days a week, right, over a consistent amount of time for you to build that strength and to build that muscle, right? So that requires discipline. Just like sales, you can't roll up to a client meeting without having done your research, without understanding what the client's problem is. How can my specific service or product help with that problem? And I believe to be good at sales, you need to develop that as a discipline, right? You have to do that hard work, week in and week out to see the results because you never know which call or which prospect or which meeting is going to be fruitful, right? You must plant all the seeds, but you don't know which ones will be fruitful in the end." – LISA"I like to really try to leave no stone unturned and uncover where there might be opportunities. So, I'll give you an example. Let's say I'm pitching a Fortune 100 company, and they just had their annual meeting. I might take the time to review the video of the annual meeting and really understand what is the CEO talking about, right? What is the senior-most leadership team talking about and does that relate to my product or service, right? […] And then try to relate that to my product or service. Another tip that I've done that actually scored me a fantastic meeting with a large organization was I looked at various job openings at a company and mapped based on the roles that they were hiring that they could use my product at the time, right, and scored a meeting with the senior level leadership team.So, it's almost, again, with the lens of adding value, I think your research must go deeper than just rudimentary. It does really need to dig deeper so that you can best understand the client, where they're coming from, what's the conversation going on in their organizations." – LISA"There's this sort of idea that in the past, we went to school and then our school chapter was completed, then we went to work, right? And that was sort of the progression of adult life. You went to school, then you went to work, and then that was sort of where your learning started and ended. Nowadays, there's so much opportunity for people to learn, and not just about a function or, you know, a specific industry. There is an opportunity to learn across different industries and across functions. And I think that ultimately makes you a better salesperson, right? Like if again, if you could connect dots that other people aren't connecting for clients, that's the gold right there." – LISAConnect with Lisa Scotto:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lspommerening/LMS Growth Consulting: https://lmsgrowthconsulting.com/Sales Glow Up: YouTube LinkTry Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/  Connect with Nancy Calabrese: Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsalesFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/Website:https://oneofakindsales.comPhone: 908-879-2911 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncalabrese/Email: leads@oneofakindsales.com 

Not Recommended for Guests of a Philosophically Uncertain Disposition ep.693 Michelle Ann King is a writer of speculative, crime, and horror fiction whose work has appeared in over a hundred different venues, including Strange Horizons, Interzone, and Black Static. Her short story collections are available in ebook and paperback from Amazon and other online retailers. See www.transientcactus.co.uk for details. More TTTV stories by Michelle Ann King: https://talltaletv.com/tag/michelle-ann-king/   ---- Listen Elsewhere ---- YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/TallTaleTV Website: http://www.TallTaleTV.com   ---- Story Submission ---- Got a short story you'd like to submit? Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.TallTaleTV.com   ---- About Tall Tale TV ---- Hi there! My name is Chris Herron and I'm an audiobook narrator. In 2015, I suffered from poor Type 1 diabetes control which lead me to become legally blind for almost a year. The doctors didn't give me much hope, predicting an 80% chance that I would never see again. But I refused to give up and changed my lifestyle drastically. Through sheer willpower (and an amazing eye surgeon) I beat the odds and regained my vision. During that difficult time, I couldn't read or write, which was devastating as they had always been a source of comfort for me since childhood. However, my wife took me to the local library where she read out the titles of audiobooks to me. I selected some of my favorite books, such as the Disc World series, Name of the Wind, Harry Potter, and more, and the audiobooks brought these stories to life in a way I had never experienced before. They helped me through the darkest period of my life and I fell in love with audiobooks. Once I regained my vision, I decided to pursue a career as an audiobook narrator instead of a writer. That's why I created Tall Tale TV, to support aspiring authors in the writing communities that I had grown to love before my ordeal. My goal was to help them promote their work by providing a promotional audio short story that showcases their writing skills to readers. They say the strongest form of advertising is word of mouth, so I offer a platform for readers to share these videos and help spread the word about these talented writers. Please consider sharing these stories with your friends and family to support these amazing authors. Thank you!   ---- legal ---- All stories on Tall Tale TV have been submitted in accordance with the terms of service provided on http://www.talltaletv.com or obtained with permission by the author. All images used on Tall Tale TV are either original or Royalty and Attribution free. Most stock images used are provided by http://www.pixabay.com , https://www.canstockphoto.com/ or created using AI. Image attribution will be declared only when required by the copyright owner. Common Affiliates are: Amazon, Smashwords  

After the Ten Commandments, Exodus goes into a long list of laws. Philosophically, laws represent someone's vision of what a good society should look like. What do these laws say about God's expectation about Israel? It is significant that He leads with laws about slavery. In this He is speaking more broadly about human power relationships.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Nietzsche's Morality in Plain English, published by Arjun Panickssery on December 4, 2023 on LessWrong. In 1924, Clarence Darrow's eight-hour plea for Leopold and Loeb blamed the universities and scholars of Nietzsche (who died in 1900) for their influence on Leopold: He became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. A man of wonderful intellect; the most original philosophy of the last century. A man who had made a deeper imprint on philosophy than any other man within a hundred years, whether right or wrong. More books have been written about him than probably all the rest of the philosophers in a hundred years. Nietzsche is popularly associated with Nazism and even before this with "the superman … free from scruple" that Darrow describes, but he was also popular among the left-anarchists and the Left generally. Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen reports that "if you meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean" (whatever that means). Common sense demands that some of these people are misreading him. Pinning down a moral theory that we can engage faces some initial hurdles: Nietzsche's views changed over time. His works appear to make contradictory claims. His writing is notoriously poetic and obscure. Huge volumes of notes left behind after his 1889 mental collapse were compiled into The Will to Power and the Nachlass notes. It's unclear how to consider these since he wanted his notes destroyed after his death. I favor Brian Leiter's approach and conclusions in Nietzsche on Morality. He offers practical solutions: identifying his works starting from Daybreak (1881) as "mature work," working to extract philosophical content from even his esoteric output, and avoiding claims that depend on unpublished notes, in part just because they're low-quality. Nietzsche's overarching project is the "revaluation of all values": a critique of herd morality (which he typically just refers to as "morality") on the grounds that it's hostile to the flourishing of the best type of person. First his broad outlook. Philosophically, he supports a methodological naturalism where philosophy aspires to be continuous with natural or social scientific inquiry. Metaethically he's an anti-realist about value and would ultimately admit to defending his evaluative taste. His psychological views can be strikingly modern. He argues that our beliefs are formed from the struggle of unconscious drives which compete in our mind so that our conscious life is merely epiphenomenal. He advances what Leiter calls a "doctrine of types" where everyone is some type of guy and the type of guy you are determines the kind of life you can lead, and that you'll hold whatever philosophical or moral beliefs will favor your interests. He doesn't hold any extreme "determinist" position but is broadly fatalistic about how your type-facts circumscribe and set limits on the kind of person you'll be and the beliefs you'll hold, within which you can be influenced by your environment and values. From here we can proceed to herd morality, the general class of theories associated with normal morality. Nietzsche criticizes three of its descriptive claims (quoting exactly from Leiter): Free will: Human agents possess a will capable of free and autonomous choice. Transparency of the self: The self is sufficiently transparent that agents' actions can be distinguished on the basis of their respective motives. Similarity: Human agents are sufficiently similar that one moral code is appropriate for all. In line with Nietzsche's theory of psychology, these empirical beliefs are held in support of herd morality's normative beliefs: free will is needed to hold people accountable for their actions and transparency of the self is needed to hold people accoun...

This special episode of the Empowered Homes Podcast is a recorded session from The Empowered Homes Conference 2023: Sexuality, Gender, Identity and the Gospel. About this Session:Christians need to understand the transgender moment culturally and theologically, but also philosophically. In this talk, Professor Andrew T. Walker, of Southern Seminary, will unpack the philosophical problems with the transgender movement and then provide Christians with a few ideas on how to lovingly challenge their culture and their neighbor with the inconsistencies residing within the worldview. About the Empowered Homes Conference 2023: Sexuality, gender & identity are gripping topics that are dominating both the secular and religious landscape across our nation and the world. Are you searching for answers to the many complex questions being asked about these topics? This full-day conference was devoted to navigating these difficult topics. Our expert speaking team is excited to provide real answers to some complex questions and better equip Christians to lead at home, at church and in their communities. About Andrew T. Walker: Andrew T. Walker, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Apologetics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is an Associate Dean in the School of Theology and the Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement at Southern Seminary. He is a Fellow in Christian Political Thought at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and serves as the Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. A sought-after conference speaker and cultural commentator, Walker researches and writes about the intersection of Christian ethics, public theology, and the common good. His academic research interests include natural law theory, human dignity, theology of law, family stability, church-state studies, and social conservatism. His analysis has been cited in such outlets as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and many others. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies from Southwest Baptist University. He received his Master of Divinity, Master of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy in Christian Ethics from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. An avid long-distance runner, Andrew resides in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife and three daughters and teaches a weekly community group in his local church. Connect with Andrew T. Walker: X: https://twitter.com/andrewtwalk Questions? Ideas for the Podcast? Contact us at podcast@empoweredhomes.org. Show us some Love! Do you appreciate The Empowered Homes Podcast? Like, subscribe, comment, share. Every bit of your engagement helps us be open-handed in sharing resources to grow strong families, leaders and ministries. Thanks for your help in Empowering Homes for the gospel! FB : https://www.facebook.com/EmpoweredHomesResources Instagram: About Empowered Homes Who we are? The primary purpose of Empowered Homes is to connect church and home by equipping families, leaders and ministries to grow in the areas of marriage, parenting, personal growth. discipleship strategy, family ministry, and leadership development. We value the family as the first institution designed by God for spiritual formation, relationships, and reflecting His image. We seek to ensure that every element of church life supports and equips that essential role. What we do? Empowered Homes Ministry provides practical, gospel-based resources to connect church and home. The majority of our resources are offered online through our website empoweredhomes.org. We also partner with churches and ministries to provide conferences, equipping events & ministry coaching.Find Free Resources empoweredhomes.org

The vishuddha or throat chakra acts as the body's communication hub. It's where you find your voice, speak your truth, and sing praises—for yourself and others. This chakra is associated with speaking up and expressing yourself, but also with hearing and being heard. Philosophically, the vishuddha chakra is associated with truth, clarity, and responsibility. Let's delve into the fifth chakra: what it is, how to identify blockages, and how to open it to ensure your throat energy is flowing freely once again. ✨Sign up for my newsletter and email list https://chiefexecutiveprime.activehosted.com/f/1 

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, Emily chats with Javiera Estrada, a Los Angeles based photographer with roots in Acapulco. She currently has an exhibit running at the Jonathan Carver Moore gallery in San Francisco entitled Back to the Future: Life in Technicolor. About Artist Javier Estrada:Multi-media artist, Javiera Estrada, was born in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1981 and emigrated to the United States in 1989. Javiera's broad scope of work, which includes photography, mixed media, photograms, film, and textiles, is influenced by her memories of growing up in Acapulco—a tropical paradise of vibrant colors, steeped in spiritual ritual and magical realism.  Estrada's mystical affinity for bridging the gap between the conscious landscape of reality and the subconscious world of the spiritual can be seen throughout her work. Philosophically, Estrada rejects Cartesian dualism and its compartmentalization of the whole, embracing a worldview of interconnectivity and unity consciousness. Artistically, she seeks to unify the mundane and the sacred.  Javiera examines the theme of interconnected consciousness in a multitude of ways. From incorporating female bodies as sculptural forms in organic communion with nature, to creating galactic primordial environments with inks—fluid and formless, structures representing the “prima materia,” original essence of existence. The juxtaposition of shadow and light play a recurring role in Estrada's explorations as well, representing the internal struggle between the spiritual and the physical.  Estrada describes her artistic process as both frenzied and laborious. The work is multi-layered and time-consuming, a technique she sees as inducing presence, while moving away from the high-speed nature of the digital age. The initial messy, chaotic stage of unknowing is essential to Estrada's process, as it allows for connection with the deeper, subconscious elements wanting to emerge through the work.     Estrada has exhibited in the United States, Europe (London, Germany, China, Switzerland) and Singapore. In 2020, her solo show in Las Vegas received a Certificate of Special Congressional Commendation for the Arts from the United States Congress. Recently, she was commissioned to create a site-specific piece for the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Estrada currently lives and works in Los Angeles.Visit Javiera's Website: JavieraEstrada.comFollow Javiera on Social Media: @JavieraEstradaArtistFor more info on her exhibit Back to the Future: Life in Technocolor visit the Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery. --About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women's Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWilFollow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast--CREDITS:Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 LicenseThe Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Locals Questions - answered!What were the most frustrating jobs you had working for someone else, and what were your experiences there that were mind boggling? Did you develop your business plan for your own venture while working with them?I'm curious what the most frustrating experiences you had were - incompetency, lack of planning, lack of communication, irrational behaviors or decisions - and how you may have used them to motivate you to build something for yourself.Seeing your gifts and intelligence, I assume it's been true for you for a long time that you knew you'd be happiest building something yourself, which is what lead to your entrepreneurship and of course Freedomain.As only when one starts something and runs it does one have full responsibility, creative freedom, etc.Hi Stef! Is there a connection between the increasing popularity of celebrating Halloween and trauma/child abuse? Many thanks.Any tips on journalling organically? How can one know when the subconscious is speaking directly without corruption?What are your thoughts on the Shroud of Turin?In your recent video, you said that women who return to childhood mannerisms when flirting are incredibly dangerous. Can you please elaborate on this? Why exactly are they dangerous and can you perhaps give us some examples? Thank you.Do you hate the Virtue of God?Why do I become a Troll? For reference, Paranoid Schizo Mother whose parents fled Hungary, Father was Metis born. Both did drugs and alcohol.What are your thoughts on a family constitution? Have you ever sat down with your family and negotiated on the guiding principles and how the family should be composed?Hi Stefan, perhaps you have some words about this problem I have since you are the description of philosophically fit human.Similar to a body builder, I know what to do. I know how to have 6 pack abs. Infact, I think most people know how to. But why don't they?Becoming "philosophically" fit in my eyes is to embody your values. Philosophically, morally, ethically i know what to do. I know what's right. and similar to eating fatty foods, I know how to really destroy my own progress.This is where the question comes in. The difference between me working out is that my body is submissive. It does not question the decision my brain makes. It follows my lead and has given up it's resistances for me gong to the gym. I don't have any problems creating scenarios around eating healthy or working out my body. How can I apply this principal with other pd arts of my life? I find a part of me can loudly resist decisions I make and i use this as my steering wheel for life. I'd like to hear your thoughts around "controlling the vessel / body" and why my decisions / body are functioning on 2 different but connected... idk, cords?TL;DR: When I know whats right, why do I sometimes find my body makes it hard to generate energy / feelings toward completing the task and other times it can find infinite energy?What is your opinion on Daniel Macklers idea that we shouldn't have children unless we are "fully healed of our trauma".Is such a thing even possible?Can you share some thoughts on the human need for transcendence? Can art replace the abstract benefits of religion?Hi Stef. My best friend's wife tried to murder him. He was in a coma for over two months after she shot him five times in the head in front of their child while he was coding at his computer. Everything indicates she did it because she didn't love him anymore and wanted money. For example they had $500,000 in savings, a paid off house, and she tried to take out a new life insurance policy without him knowing of course a week prior to the shooting. She is out on bond awaiting trial. He still loves her and sometimes says he wants to have her back in his life just so that she can be a mother to their child. How do I convince him that their relationship is over and irreparable?Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!Get access to the audiobook for my new book 'Peaceful Parenting,' StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, and the 22 Part History of Philosophers series!See you soon!https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022

Chad Lewis is a pastor, teacher, and author who holds three degrees; philosophy, literature, and a Masters in ancient Near Eastern and Jewish studies. He is an incredible resource of knowledge both theologically and Philosophically. He joins us today to go over a number of different questions that so many of us have. Enjoy! Got any questions or topics you'd like to hear about? You can email us at thingsyoudonthearinchurchpod@gmail.com Like our content? Consider helping us grow through Patreon, a follow, or subscribe! Leave a rating on whatever platform you listen on and write some nice comments YOUTUBE here PATREON  here INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/thingsyoudonthearinchurchpod --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thingsyoudonthearinchurch/support

Scripture Reading: Genesis 1:1-3:24 (we won't read it again, but we will discuss it) 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.2 Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water. 3 God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light! 4 God saw that the light was good, so God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” There was evening, and there was morning, marking the first day.6 God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water.” 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. It was so. 8 God called the expanse “sky.” There was evening, and there was morning, a second day.9 God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear.” It was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” God saw that it was good.11 God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: plants yielding seeds and trees on the land bearing fruit with seed in it, according to their kinds.” It was so. 12 The land produced vegetation—plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. God saw that it was good. 13 There was evening, and there was morning, a third day.14 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate seasons and days and years, 15 and let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” It was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night. He made the stars also. 17 God placed the lights in the expanse of the sky to shine on the earth, 18 to preside over the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. 19 There was evening, and there was morning, a fourth day.20 God said, “Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” 21 God created the great sea creatures and every living and moving thing with which the water swarmed, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth.” 23 There was evening, and there was morning, a fifth day.24 God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” It was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the cattle according to their kinds, and all the creatures that creep along the ground according to their kinds. God saw that it was good.26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.”27 God created humankind in his own image,in the image of God he created them,male and female he created them.28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.” 29 Then God said, “I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the animals of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has living breath in it—I give every green plant for food.” It was so.31 God saw all that he had made—and it was very good! There was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day.1 The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. 2 By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. 3 God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased all the work that he had been doing in creation.4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created—when the Lord God made the earth and heavens.5 Now no shrub of the field had yet grown on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. 6 Springs would well up from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground. 7 The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.8 The Lord God planted an orchard in the east, in Eden; and there he placed the man he had formed. 9 The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow from the soil, every tree that was pleasing to look at and good for food. (Now the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were in the middle of the orchard.)10 Now a river flows from Eden to water the orchard, and from there it divides into four headstreams. 11 The name of the first is Pishon; it runs through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 (The gold of that land is pure; pearls and lapis lazuli are also there.) 13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it runs through the entire land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is Tigris; it runs along the east side of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates.15 The Lord God took the man and placed him in the orchard in Eden to care for it and to maintain it. 16 Then the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard, 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.”18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a companion for him who corresponds to him.” 19 The Lord God formed out of the ground every living animal of the field and every bird of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man named all the animals, the birds of the air, and the living creatures of the field, but for Adam no companion who corresponded to him was found. 21 So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was asleep, he took part of the man's side and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the part he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,“This one at last is bone of my bonesand flesh of my flesh;this one will be called ‘woman,'for she was taken out of man.”24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife, and they become one family. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.1 Now the serpent was shrewder than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Is it really true that God said, ‘You must not eat from any tree of the orchard'?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the orchard; 3 but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the orchard God said, ‘You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.'” 4 The serpent said to the woman, “Surely you will not die, 5 for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”6 When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the orchard at the breezy time of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the orchard. 9 But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 10 The man replied, “I heard you moving about in the orchard, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” 11 And the Lord God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” 12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.” 13 So the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman replied, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”14 The Lord God said to the serpent,“Because you have done this,cursed are you above all the cattleand all the living creatures of the field!On your belly you will crawland dust you will eat all the days of your life.15 And I will put hostility between you and the womanand between your offspring and her offspring;he will strike your head,and you will strike his heel.”16 To the woman he said,“I will greatly increase your labor pains;with pain you will give birth to children.You will want to control your husband,but he will dominate you.”17 But to Adam he said,“Because you obeyed your wifeand ate from the tree about which I commanded you,‘You must not eat from it,'the ground is cursed because of you;in painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,but you will eat the grain of the field.19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat fooduntil you return to the ground,for out of it you were taken;for you are dust, and to dust you will return.”20 The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all the living. 21 The Lord God made garments from skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must not be allowed to stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God expelled him from the orchard in Eden to cultivate the ground from which he had been taken. 24 When he drove the man out, he placed on the eastern side of the orchard in Eden angelic sentries who used the flame of a whirling sword to guard the way to the tree of life.Main ThemesInitial RemarksLet's Come Together (Finally!)If the last two weeks of the Bible study have been divisive, I hope that this week brings us all back together. During those two sessions, I suggested the possibility that the early chapters of Genesis are figurative. Nevertheless, I asserted repeatedly that they are true. Today, I want to focus on those truths embedded in the narrative. What is Genesis teaching us? And here's the surprising part: even if you adamantly disagree with me and believe the text is meant to be taken completely literally, or if you land somewhere in between, I think we will agree on the main lessons taught by the text. They stand mostly independently of the figurative versus literal debate.A Minimum Facts PresentationBefore we jump into the substantive portion of our discussion, I want to make one important clarification. The purpose of my dive into Genesis is to establish a Christian worldview. We are not engaging in an exhaustive exploration of every textual and theological issue. So, the discussion today will be a sort of “minimum facts” presentation. That is, I want to highlight the most basic lessons in the text with which virtually every Christian agrees. I will not delve into every possible conclusion that can be drawn from the text, although that would be very interesting. And, as always, participants are free to discuss anything I did not include in my presentation. So, again, the list below is not an exhaustive list of the points made by the first three chapters of Genesis, much less by the entire book. It is more of a “top four.”Genesis v/s Enuma ElishI think that a good way to explore the worldview presented by Genesis is to compare the biblical text to the Enuma Elish, the ancient Babylonian creation myth. (You can find it here.) The Enuma Elish is fairly representative of many Ancient Near East myths, so it provides a great backdrop against which Genesis shows its distinctive outline. (I am not necessarily embracing or rejecting the view that Genesis is a polemic against other Ancient Near Eastern myths. I simply find the comparison to be helpful.)One God—No Theomachy, No Theogony, No Deicide Listen the words of the Enuma Elish:1 When the heavens above did not exist,2 And earth beneath had not come into being —3 There was Apsû, the first in order, their begetter,4 And demiurge Tia-mat, who gave birth to them all;5 They had mingled their waters together6 Before meadow-land had coalesced and reed-bed was to be found —7 When not one of the gods had been formed8 Or had come into being, when no destinies had been decreed,9 The gods were created within them:10 Lah(mu and Lah(amu were formed and came into being.11 While they grew and increased in stature12 Anšar and Kišar, who excelled them, were created.13 They prolonged their days, they multiplied their years.14 Anu, their son, could rival his fathers.15 Anu, the son, equalled Anšar,16 And Anu begat Nudimmud, his own equal.17 Nudimmud was the champion among his fathers:18 Profoundly discerning, wise, of robust strength;19 Very much stronger than his father's begetter, Anšar20 He had no rival among the gods, his brothers.21 The divine brothers came together,22 Their clamour got loud, throwing Tia-mat into a turmoil.23 They jarred the nerves of Tia-mat,24 And by their dancing they spread alarm in Anduruna.25 Apsû did not diminish their clamour,26 And Tia-mat was silent when confronted with them.27 Their conduct was displeasing to her,28 Yet though their behaviour was not good, she wished to spare them.29 Thereupon Apsû, the begetter of the great gods,30 Called Mummu, his vizier, and addressed him,31 "Vizier Mummu, who gratifies my pleasure,32 Come, let us go to Tia-mat!"33 They went and sat, facing Tia-mat,34 As they conferred about the gods, their sons.35 Apsû opened his mouth36 And addressed Tia-mat37 "Their behaviour has become displeasing to me38 And I cannot rest in the day-time or sleep at night.39 I will destroy and break up their way of life40 That silence may reign and we may sleep."41 When Tia-mat heard this42 She raged and cried out to her spouse,43 She cried in distress, fuming within herself,44 She grieved over the (plotted) evil,45 "How can we destroy what we have given birth to?46 Though their behaviour causes distress, let us tighten discipline graciously."47 Mummu spoke up with counsel for Apsû—48 (As from) a rebellious vizier was the counsel of his Mummu—49 "Destroy, my father, that lawless way of life,50 That you may rest in the day-time and sleep by night!"51 Apsû was pleased with him, his face beamed52 Because he had plotted evil against the gods, his sons.53 Mummu put his arms around Apsû's neck,54 He sat on his knees kissing him.55 What they plotted in their gathering56 Was reported to the gods, their sons.57 The gods heard it and were frantic.58 They were overcome with silence and sat quietly.59 Ea, who excels in knowledge, the skilled and learned,60 Ea, who knows everything, perceived their tricks.61 He fashioned it and made it to be all-embracing,62 He executed it skilfully as supreme—his pure incantation.63 He recited it and set it on the waters,64 He poured sleep upon him as he was slumbering deeply.65 He put Apsû to slumber as he poured out sleep,66 And Mummu, the counsellor, was breathless with agitation.67 He split (Apsû's) sinews, ripped off his crown,68 Carried away his aura and put it on himself.69 He bound Apsû and killed him;Notice how this ancient myth sounds nothing like Genesis. It immediately greets us with multiple gods (Apsû, the first in order, and the demiurge Tia-mat). Other gods are subsequently created. A genealogy of gods is called a theogony, and it was common to ancient myths. Genesis, however, has no genealogy. At most, in Genesis, when God speaks he uses a plural form—like maybe he is addressing a crowd. This has led some scholars to posit a heavenly council. But there is no god other than God—Yahweh.The Enuma Elish tells the story not only of multiple gods but of their animosity. A conflict between the gods arises. A war between the gods is called theomachy. This is also common to ancient myths. Finally, the gods' quarrel ends in the death of a god—deicide. If we continue reading, we would learn that creation itself is the result of this rivalry between the gods and their death.What do we find in Genesis? None of that!In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1In the beginning there is no two anything. There are no two gods opposing one another. There is not even an impersonal dualism like a ying and yang. There is no good and evil. There is only good. And this good is not some mystical goodness, like a force or energy or “waters,” but a good God—a personal being.This is one of the most shocking and powerful lessons from Genesis—monotheism! And, if we are willing to take more of scripture into account, we could go as far as to say that it is “perfect being monotheism.” This means that there's not only one God, but that God is perfect. He is all powerful and morally perfect. I think that this “perfect being theology” is key to a robust conception of “good.” A theology that includes multiple gods will generally fail the Euthyphro Dilemma: “Is the good good because God approves it, or does God approve it because it's good?” A theology with no gods (atheism or some form of dualism) makes goodness accidental—it is a robust fact that could be different—and cannot account for moral duties. It is only when goodness is grounded in a necessary being that what is good could never be otherwise and goodness becomes personal such that it can give moral duties to others.God is Not Like NatureAgain, hear the words of the Enuma Elish:49 [Marduk] gathered [Tia-mat's foam] together and made it into clouds.50 The raging of the winds, violent rainstorms,51 The billowing of mist—the accumulation of her spittle—52 He appointed for himself and took them in his hand.53 He put her head in position and poured out . . [ . . ] .54 He opened the abyss and it was sated with water.55 From her two eyes he let the Euphrates and Tigris flow,57 He heaped up the distant [mountains] on her breasts,58 He bored wells to channel the springs.59 He twisted her tail and wove it into the Durmah,61 [He set up] her crotch—it wedged up the heavens—62 [(Thus) the half of her] he stretched out and made it firm as the earth.In the Babylonian story, the clouds, the wind, the rainstorms, the rivers, the mountains, and much of creation is a part of or physically connected with Tiamat's body. Notice the connection between the gods and creation—they might not be entirely the same but they are not entirely distinct either.What do we find in Genesis?God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water.” Genesis 1:6God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear.” Genesis 1:9God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: plants yielding seeds and trees on the land bearing fruit with seed in it, according to their kinds.” Genesis 1:11God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate seasons and days and years . . . .” Genesis 1:14I could quote more verses, but I think the point is clear. God is not like creation. Creation is not made of God. It is made by God. God simply speaks creation into being. God transcends it. The creator who makes things good exists even if nothing else exists and would exists if all stopped existing. He is the beginning and the end.Nature is Not SpiritualAlthough the Enuma Elish story does not contain as many spirits of nature as other Ancient Near Eastern myths, we still have a clear example. Listen to this:11 He placed the heights (of heaven) in her (Tia-mat's) belly,12 He created Nannar, entrusting to him the night.13 He appointed him as the jewel of the night to fix the days,14 And month by month without ceasing he elevated him with a crown,15 (Saying,) "Shine over the land at the beginning of the month,16 Resplendent with horns to fix six days.17 On the seventh day the crown will be half size,18 On the fifteenth day, halfway through each month, stand in opposition.19 When Šamaš [sees] you on the horizon,20 Diminish in the proper stages and shine backwards.In the Enuma Elish, night is a personal god. Night does not behave according to some natural principle. Night only comes and stays for as long as it does because the god of night is following orders. Presumably, the god of night could be enticed to disobey. Is all of nature like this? (For purposes of this discussion I am not including animals or humans in the definition of nature.) Is there a spirit of the waters? Is there a spirit of the sky? Are the flowers sprites and the trees dryads? Does everything around us behave as it does because a personal being—a spirit—is choosing to behave a certain way? The implications of these questions are staggering.Perhaps we scoff at the idea that nature is personal and spiritual, but we shouldn't. Not because I think that it is true but because it is the worldview that was held by nearly everyone in the ancient world and many (perhaps most) people still hold it today. If anything, the idea that nature is “non-spiritual” is not the rule but the exception. If to the belief in a non-spiritual natural world you you add the belief that nature was created by a mind—a mind not entirely unlike ours—then you have an entirely peculiar worldview. That is the worldview of Genesis.The Christian, non-spiritual, intelligible understanding of creation is distinctive and has shaped the modern world. For example, it is foundational and necessary for science. This is the reason that many historians (Christian and non-Christian alike) agree that science is an outgrowth of Christian theology. Here's how an article explains the connection between Genesis and science, which, if overly simplistic, gets the point across:1. Laws Up AboveThe ancient Chinese had incredible technology, but not science as we know it. Why? Because while they were intelligent, they did not believe in a Higher Intelligence—not in the Bible's sense. They didn't think there were ever-present, always-applicable laws of nature that governed the universe. They went out into the world and tamed it through technology, but they didn't seek to press into the deeper laws of the universe.That's because they didn't have Genesis 1. They didn't believe that “In the beginning, God.” They didn't believe that through his Word an ordered cosmos was created that shows all the hallmarks of dependable regularities—seasons and spheres with boundaries and signs in the sky, all going round and round, evening and morning, evening and morning. . . .2. World Out ThereThe ancient Greeks were smart cookies. All philosophy is a footnote to Plato, as they say. Philosophy, mathematics, art, and literature were all spheres of excellence for the Greeks. Science? Not so much, because science requires you to believe in a stable and predictable world out there that's open to investigation. Science occurs when you make repeatable observations and check your theories against the cold, hard facts. But Greeks didn't believe in cold, hard facts. They believed in minds and reason and laws but not in empirical investigation. For them, study entailed a journey within the mind, not a venture out into the field. So, no science.3. Minds In HereIf human minds are the product of mindless operations that only honored survival, not intelligence (the two aren't at all synonymous), then why should we trust our minds to understand the laws up above and the world out there? If we're the product of the cosmos and part of the cosmos with no higher calling than to pass on our genes, why trust a brain that whirs away according to its own survival imperative?If you really want confidence in the scientific endeavor, turn to Genesis 1, where humanity is specially created in relationship with the Orderer above and the world out there. . . .Another website summarizes the same principles as follows:Nearly all scientists today, regardless of their religious beliefs, believe a certain set of foundational principles which make it possible for them to do science. Some of these common basic beliefs include:(1) Human beings can understand the natural world at least in part.(2) Nature typically operates with regular, repeatable, universal patterns of cause and effect so things that we learn in the lab here today will also hold true half way around the world a week from now. (3) It's not enough to sit and theorize how the world ought to work, we actually have to test our theories; science is a worthwhile pursuit.These beliefs seem obvious today, but for most of human history, many people did not hold all those beliefs. For example, animists who believe that gods or spirits inhabit many aspect of the physical world might doubt that nature operates on regular, repeatable, universal patterns of cause and effect; instead they would believe that nature is controlled by gods and spirits who need to be appeased or manipulated by ritual. Or for a very different example, some of the most brilliant philosophers of the ancient world did not see the need to do experiments because they thought it was possible to derive from logic and first principles how the world ought to behave.Allow me to explain the last statement in the quotation above. The Greeks, for example, believed that the universe had to be modeled by elegant abstract principles, such as geometry, which were discoverable only through thought. So, they assumed that the orbits of planets had to be circular. The Christian worldview recognizes that the universe was made by a mind—a mind that could have created the world this way or that way. Because the creator had options, much like an artist does, we can not simply assume that the world is a certain way. We must discover what that mind decided.Man in the Image of GodThe Enuma Elish is one of the least outrageous Ancient Near Eastern myths when it comes to the creation of mankind, but it repeats a common theme:1 When Marduk heard the gods' speech2 He conceived a desire to accomplish clever things.3 He opened his mouth addressing Ea,4 He counsels that which he had pondered in his heart,5 "I will bring together blood to form bone,6 I will bring into being Lullû, whose name shall be 'man'.7 I will create Lullû—man8 On whom the toil of the gods will be laid that they may rest.In the Babylonian creation myth, why is man created? So that the “toil of the gods will be laid” on him. You might remember that last week I mentioned an Egyptian myth that answers the question similarly. Here is how scholar John Walton discusses that Egyptian myth within the broader context of Mesopotamian myths:[I]n Mesopotamian traditions people are created to serve the gods by doing the work that the gods are tired of doing. Turning again to KAR 4, "the corvée of the gods will be their corvée: They will fix the boundaries of the fields once and for all, and take in their hands hoes and baskets, to benefit the House of the great gods." The labor that had been required for the gods to meet their own needs was drudgery, so people were expected to fill that gap and work to meet those needs.In Genesis, why is man created?Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.”God created humankind in his own image,in the image of God he created them,male and female he created them.God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! (Genesis 1:26-28a)This is shocking and remarkable! Man is created to be like God (at least in some sense), to rule the earth, and to be fruitful and multiply. I will discuss each of these points in reverse order.Be Fruitful and MultiplyAccording to Genesis, to marry and have children is integral to being human. Marriage is the very reason that God has made us male and female.So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was asleep, he took part of the man's side and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the part he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. Then the man said,“This one at last is bone of my bonesand flesh of my flesh;this one will be called ‘woman,'for she was taken out of man.”That is why a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife, and they become one family. The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:21-25)To be clear, there are several New Testament verses that make clear that marriage is not a moral duty—one has not sinned for remaining single. However, sadly, this caveat has started acting like the exception that swallows the rule. The Apostle Paul, the one who spoke of marriage and singleness this way, did not suggest singleness as a mere alternative to marriage. Listen to the following verses from 1 Corinthians:I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that everyone was as I am. But each has his own gift from God, one this way, another that.To the unmarried and widows I say that it is best for them to remain as I am. But if they do not have self-control, let them get married. For it is better to marry than to burn with sexual desire. (1 Corinthians 7:6-9) And I want you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the things of the world, how to please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is concerned about the things of the Lord, to be holy both in body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the things of the world, how to please her husband. I am saying this for your benefit, not to place a limitation on you, but so that without distraction you may give notable and constant service to the Lord. (1 Corinthians 7:32-35)He who is single can focus exclusively on ministry. This is a gift. This does not override the fact, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18)! I know that much more can be said about this topic and forgive me if I am painting with too broad a stroke, but the fact that marriage and childbearing is part of God's plan for us is unmistakable in the Genesis narrative.Rule the EarthOur modern, egalitarian, environmentalist sensibilities are sure to be offended by the idea that we are to rule and subdue the earth. However, this idea is not as ominous as it sounds. As a website explains:God's command to subdue the earth and the animal life in it is a command to have the mastery over all of it. A true mastery (of anything) cannot be accomplished without an understanding of the thing mastered. In order for a musician to master the violin, he or she must truly understand the instrument. In order for mankind to attain mastery over the animal kingdom, we must understand the animals.With the authority to rule comes the responsibility to rule well. There is an inherent accountability in the command to subdue the earth. Man has a duty to exercise his dominion under the authority of the One who delegated it. All authority is of God (Romans 13:1-5), and He delegates it to whomever He will (Daniel 4:17). The word subdue doesn't have to imply violence or mistreatment. It can mean “to bring under cultivation.”Man is to be the steward of the earth; he is to bring the material world and all of its varied elements into the service of God and the good of mankind. The command to subdue the earth is actually part of God's blessing on mankind. Created in the image of God, Adam and Eve were to use the earth's vast resources in the service of both God and themselves. It would only make sense for God to decree this, since only humans were created in God's image.The Imago DeiWe are made in the “image of God”—which in theology is often referred to by the Latin phrase imago Dei. What does that mean? I could spend an entire session of our study answering this question. Different theologians give different answers. But, because this is a primer in Genesis, I think that presenting the mainstream position is sufficient. Besides, and rather ironically, it is the mainstream position that is often most misunderstood. Fair warning though, I will go a little beyond the text in Genesis to discuss this topic.What makes a person a person? Even Christians will answer with something like the ability to reason. That is not entirely wrong, but I am sure you can immediately think of examples that work as counterarguments. What about a human being that is in a comma? What about a fetus? What about someone who is asleep? Neither of these three humans can reason, so they are not persons. Taken to its logical conclusion, killing a human in their sleep is not murder. No person was killed.So, what gives? Can we give a better explanation of the imago Dei? I think so. To be a person is to be a rational soul. To explain this further, I will quote extensively from a 2003 paper by Dennis Sullivan (emphases are my own):Empirical functionalism is the view that human personhood may be defined by a set of functions or abilities. Such abilities must be present in actual, not potential form. The classical expression of this view is that of Joseph Fletcher who in 1972 outlined twenty criteria for human personhood. These included such hallmarks as minimum intelligence, self-awareness, a sense of time, and the capacity to relate to others (Fletcher, 1972). In response, Michael Tooley weighed in with the idea of self-awareness (1972), and McCormick with the concept of “relational potential,” based on the ability to interact socially with others (1974). Fletcher then decided, based on feedback from these and other writers, that the sine qua non for human personhood was neocortical functioning (Fletcher, 1974). Neocortical functions are those “higher brain” processes of the cerebral cortex necessary for active consciousness and volition. This should be contrasted with whole-brain functioning, which includes activities of the brainstem as well as the cortex.…Functionalists would extend the above argument to deny personhood to the unborn child, since she lacks rationality or self-awareness. However, by this criterion, one could argue that adults also lack self-awareness when asleep or under anesthesia, yet no one questions their personhood during such moments. One way to circumvent this objection is to use Tooley's idea that only “continuing selves” have personhood, which includes both self-awareness and a sense of the future (Tooley, 1983). This would nonetheless deny personhood to the unborn and justify abortion on that basis.Michael Tooley, and more recently, the Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer, have both advocated the next logical step: infanticide (Veith, 1998). If the fetus has no right to personhood because it is not yet self-aware, then neither does the newborn: “Infanticide before the onset of self-awareness . . . cannot threaten anyone who is in a position to worry about it” (Singer, 1985, p. 138).…Ontological personalism states that all human beings are human persons. On this view, the intrinsic quality of personhood begins at conception and is present throughout life (O'Mathuna, 1996). Such individuals are not potential persons or “becoming” persons; they are persons by their very nature. There is no such thing as a potential person or a human non-person.In order to understand this it will be helpful to reflect on the worldview assumptions that underlie both personhood views. Since the Enlightenment, society in general has been dominated by a high regard for science and the secular tradition of naturalism. Naturalism is the concept that only observable data has reality. A scientist who adheres to this view is free to have any metaphysical or philosophical opinion he would like, as long as it does not influence his practice. In other words, he need not hold to naturalism as a philosophy, but he must adhere to it in his methodology (Plantinga, 1997). However, the Christian scientific community should not be bound by the constraints of methodological naturalism. Herein lies the tension between the two ideas of personhood. The influence of naturalism has led secular science away from a reverence for life, replacing it with a reductionism that claims the human organism is no more than the sum of its chemical parts. The empirical functionalism idea of personhood is compatible with this view, which makes man simply a collection of parts and functions, or a property-thing. Put together enough chemical molecules in the right way, and you have a human being; put another set of parts together, and you have a 1957 Chrysler. Philosophically, it makes no difference.Ontological personalism, on the other hand, is based on the premise that a human being is a substance. A substance is a distinct unity of essence that exists ontologically prior to any of its parts. This traditional concept dates back to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. This view has been well summarized by the Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland (1995), and is discussed in great detail in the book Body and Soul (Moreland & Rae, 2000). For this review, I will focus on two implications of the idea of substance: the parts v. whole distinction, and continuity.To expand on my earlier illustration of a classic automobile, consider a nicely restored 1957 Chrysler. Many of the original parts have rusted away and have been replaced, so that this vintage car is a collection of old and new. Although many will refer to it as the same car as when it was new, intuition tells us that this is not the case. In fact, as stated earlier, remove the wheels, the motor, the seats, and the body, and the result is no longer a 1957 Chrysler; it is not even a car. To go still further, imagine adding other parts to the original chassis, such that the result(God forbid) is a1972Volkswagen Beetle! There was no continuity of essence between the two vehicles; each is nothing more than a collection of parts (my apologies to VW lovers).Try to do the same kind of thought experiment on a human being. Remove an arm or a leg from John Doe, and he remains a person, in fact, the same person. You can amputate all of John's extremities and even remove many internal organs; as long as he remains alive, his substance will never change. You can even “add new parts,” by transplanting organs from other persons, yet John Doe will never become James Smith; his substance is not defined by his component parts. He will always remain the same person.…Naturalism has its greatest difficulty here. To hold to a property-thing view of persons is to deny the commonsense understanding of personal continuity, with a host of attendant problems for law and morality.…I might add that this view is also compatible with biblical teaching on the image of God. It allows us to explore the way human beings resemble the Divine (rationality, volition, social nature, etc.), while helping us to avoid the dangers of a strictly functional definition. On this view, the image of God is intrinsic to the nature of persons. Thus, Scripture teaches the value of man from the womb, whereas intuition and philosophy help us to affirm that such valuation begins at conception.The philosophical idea of a human being as substance arises out of a broader philosophical principle, that of substance dualism. Substance dualism holds that there is an entity called a soul, and that the mind is a faculty of the soul. Body and soul (mind) are functionally holistic, which means that the two entities are deeply integrated and functionally interdependent. Yet they are ontologically separate, which means that the soul can exist independently of the body. This allows for a personal existence after death (Moreland & Rae, 2000). Another implication of this idea is that if personhood begins at conception, then that is when the soul originates as well.The Original Plan Was Good but then…the FallAuthor Sandra Richter in The Epic of Eden describes God's original intent by pointing out that the creation narrative is not complete in six days—there is a seventh day. On that day God rests. Creation is as intended so God may stop to rule overall. With that in mind, Richter concludes:In sum, Genesis 1 tells us of God's first, perfect plan—a flawlessly ordered world infused with balance and productivity. Here every rock, plant and animal had its own designated place within God's design, a God-ordained space in which each could thrive, reproduce and serve the good of the whole. And we see from the structure of Genesis 1 that the force that held this peaceful and productive cohabitation in balance was Yahweh's sovereignty over all. But as Day 6b makes clear, God chose to manage this creation through his representative ʾAdām. Thus humanity is given all authority to protect, maintain and develop God's great gift under God's ultimate authority. This is who Yahweh is, who humanity is and how both relate to the creation. And regardless of how you choose to harmonize science and Bible, this message is clearly part of the intent of Genesis 1. I would say it is the primary intent.Then Richter makes the connection to the repeating theme of the entire book of Genesis: covenant.You may have noticed that my description of Genesis 1 sounds a lot like the relationship between a vassal and his suzerain; a relationship in which the vassal is given full autonomy within the confines of his overlord's authority. When this reading of Genesis 1 is wedded to Genesis 2, the profile of covenant becomes even clearer. Here the suzerain (Yahweh) offers his vassals (Adam and Eve) the land grant of Eden with the stipulation that humanity care for it and protect it.Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate [ ʿābad] and keep it [šāmar]. (Gen 2:15)In addition to this perfect place, Adam and Eve are given each other (Gen 2:18-25), and as is implied by Genesis 3:8, they are given full access to their loving Creator. The only corner of the garden which was not theirs to use and enjoy was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil:From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die. (Gen 2:16-17)In essence, Adam and Eve are free to do anything except decide for themselves what is good and what is evil. Yahweh reserves the right (and the responsibility) to name those truths himself. (Emphasis added)This was Adam and Eve's perfect world. Not just fruit and fig leaves, but an entire race of people stretching their cognitive and creative powers to the limit to build a society of balance and justice and joy. Here the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve would learn life at the feet of the Father, build their city in the shadow of the Almighty, create and design and expand within the protective confines of his kingdom. The blessing of this gift? A civilization without greed, malice or envy; progress without pollution, expansion without extinction. Can you imagine it? . . . This was God's perfect plan: the people of God in the place of God dwelling in the presence of God. Yet, as with all covenants, God's perfect plan was dependent on the choice of the vassal. Humanity must willingly submit to the plan of God. The steward must choose this world; for in God's perfect plan, the steward had been given the authority to reject it.But then the fall came. And, surprisingly, then redemption came too.God's perfect plan (and humanity's perfect world) was a matter of choice. Did ʾAdām want this world? Or one of their own making? The ones made in the image of God could not be forced or coerced, but instead were called upon to choose their sovereign. And choose they did. Whenever I think of this moment, the lyrics of Don Francisco's old folk song echo in my mind: “And all their unborn children die as both of them bow down to Satan's hand.”16 God's original intent was sabotaged by humanity, stolen by the Enemy. ʾAdām rejected the covenant, and all the cosmos trembled. Genesis 2:17 makes it painfully clear what the consequences of such an insurrection would be: in that day, “you shall surely die.” But amazingly, mercifully, even though Yahweh had every right to wipe out our rebellious race, he chose another course—redemption. In a move that continues to confound me, God spared the lives of Adam and Eve (and their unborn children) by redirecting the fury of the curse toward another—the battered flesh of his own Son. This is the one the New Testament knows as “the last Adam” (Rom 5:14; 1 Cor 15:22, 45). And although the first Adam did not die, the second surely did. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.Conclusion—A Personal NoteWhen I read Genesis, I am astounded. I am not attempting to be overly dramatic or sentimental, but Genesis is so true I can hardly believe it. It paints a picture I cannot deny: Nature is just that. Yet it is curiously intelligible. But it is not divine. The divine things, like goodness, seem to transcend nature but not be less real than it. If nothing else, goodness seems more real. Whereas nature could not exist, goodness seems necessary. Man seems to be like nature but also somewhat divine. Something about man is not like the animals or anything else. Man and nature seem beautiful, yet both seem broken. Is this not truly our experience?

Abortion has to be fought on every single front - Philosophically, spiritually, politically, personally… You name it.  Marjorie Dannenfelser joins Kristan Hawkins on “Explicitly Pro-Life” to discuss the political aspect of fighting to END abortion.  Marjorie is the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. At the helm of America's largest grassroots pro-life political organization, the pro-life movement succeeded in electing a pro-life president and Senate, confirming three U.S. Supreme Court justices, and overturning Roe v. Wade.  You'll learn where we stand at the federal level in the pro-life movement & how we can stay united on all fronts. Available NOW on: ExplicitlyProLife.com or wherever you get your podcasts!  ✓ YouTube: https://bit.ly/2DiGLin ✓ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2X15zlZ ✓ Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/30ZA8tw ✓ Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/30V0Kfd ✓ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/331EgvL Connect with Kristan:  ✓ Kristan's website: https://bit.ly/3zsv1os ✓ Kristan's YouTube: https://bit.ly/3IVonKg 

Signs Of Life Radio is Tonight! Hosted by Bob Ginsberg. Special Guest Dr. Piero Calvi-Parisetti, MD https://www.foreverfamilyfoundation.org/pages/signs-of-life-radio Dr. Piero Calvi-Parisetti is a medical doctor and Forever Family Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member. Dr Parisetti is a traditional medical doctor who always had a materialist perspective. After examining the evidence of an afterlife, he was blown away by what he discovered. He has written books on this topic, as well as created a workbook to help people learn about evidence of an afterlife and help cope with grief. The proceeds help benefit Forever Family Foundation. Learn more about Dr. Parisetti here: www.drparisetti.com Can't make it? You can listen to any episode anytime in Radio Show Archives. TUNE IN TONIGHT! Thursday, August 31st 8:00 PM Eastern (check your time zone) Host: Bob Ginsberg Guest: Piero Calvi-Parisetti MD Tonight on Signs of Life Radio, Host Bob Ginsberg will be speaking with guest Piero Calvi-Parisetti MD, author of 'Step Into The Light - Transform your fear of death by learning about Life After Life.' What happens when we die? Is death annihilation – the end of everything as far as we are concerned – or is there an afterlife? And if there indeed is one, what does it look like? Instead of speculating philosophically or reviewing different religious beliefs, this book looks directly at the testimony we have from witnesses with a direct experience of death: those who've had a deathbed vision, those who've had a Near-Death Experience and those who have actually died and allegedly went on living in a nonmaterial dimension we call the spirit world. Make sure you tune in as he will be announcing a new research project about grief and the afterlife, with instructions on how our listeners can participate! https://www.drparisetti.com/

This episode delves into love as explored by philosophers like Plato, Ibn I Sina, and the poet Rumi, presenting it as more than an emotion, rather a driving force towards ultimate goodness, beauty, and truth, and a universal binding force transcending time and culture. Source: https://www.thekashmirmonitor.net/the-issue-of-love-in-the-mathnavi-of-rumi/

Rants about New Age Massage Parlors, Philosophically coping with "the human tumor" & habitat destruction, acid abstinence & 40 year old virgins, black nectar in the genus Melianthus, etc.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5634537/advertisement

FlashAttention was first published by Tri Dao in May 2022 and it had a deep impact in the large language models space. Most open models you've heard of (RedPajama, MPT, LLaMA, Falcon, etc) all leverage it for faster inference. Tri came on the podcast to chat about FlashAttention, the newly released FlashAttention-2, the research process at Hazy Lab, and more. This is the first episode of our “Papers Explained” series, which will cover some of the foundational research in this space. Our Discord also hosts a weekly Paper Club, which you can signup for here. How does FlashAttention work?The paper is titled “FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness”. There are a couple keywords to call out:* “Memory Efficient”: standard attention memory usage is quadratic with sequence length (i.e. O(N^2)). FlashAttention is sub-quadratic at O(N). * “Exact”: the opposite of “exact” in this case is “sparse”, as in “sparse networks” (see our episode with Jonathan Frankle for more). This means that you're not giving up any precision.* The “IO” in “IO-Awareness” stands for “Input/Output” and hints at a write/read related bottleneck. Before we dive in, look at this simple GPU architecture diagram:The GPU has access to three memory stores at runtime:* SRAM: this is on-chip memory co-located with the actual execution core. It's limited in size (~20MB on an A100 card) but extremely fast (19TB/s total bandwidth)* HBM: this is off-chip but on-card memory, meaning it's in the GPU but not co-located with the core itself. An A100 has 40GB of HBM, but only a 1.5TB/s bandwidth. * DRAM: this is your traditional CPU RAM. You can have TBs of this, but you can only get ~12.8GB/s bandwidth, which is way too slow.Now that you know what HBM is, look at how the standard Attention algorithm is implemented:As you can see, all 3 steps include a “write X to HBM” step and a “read from HBM” step. The core idea behind FlashAttention boils down to this: instead of storing each intermediate result, why don't we use kernel fusion and run every operation in a single kernel in order to avoid memory read/write overhead? (We also talked about kernel fusion in our episode with George Hotz and how PyTorch / tinygrad take different approaches here)The result is much faster, but much harder to read:As you can see, FlashAttention is a very meaningful speed improvement on traditional Attention, and it's easy to understand why it's becoming the standard for most models.This should be enough of a primer before you dive into our episode! We talked about FlashAttention-2, how Hazy Research Group works, and some of the research being done in Transformer alternatives.Show Notes:* FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness (arXiv)* FlashAttention-2* Together AI* From Deep Learning to Long Learning* The Hardware Lottery by Sara Hooker* Hazy Research* Is Attention All You Need?* Nvidia CUTLASS 3* SRAM scaling slows* Transformer alternatives:* S4* Hyena* Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)Timestamps:* Tri's background [00:00:00]* FlashAttention's deep dive [00:02:18]* How the Hazy Research group collaborates across theory, systems, and applications [00:17:21]* Evaluating models beyond raw performance [00:25:00]* FlashAttention-2 [00:27:00]* CUDA and The Hardware Lottery [00:30:00]* Researching in a fast-changing market [00:35:00]* Promising transformer alternatives like state space models and RNNs [00:37:30]* The spectrum of openness in AI models [00:43:00]* Practical impact of models like LLAMA2 despite restrictions [00:47:12]* Incentives for releasing open training datasets [00:49:43]* Lightning Round [00:53:22]Transcript:Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO-in-Residence at Decibel Partners. Today we have no Swyx, because he's in Singapore, so it's a one-on-one discussion with Tri Dao. Welcome! [00:00:24]Tri: Hi everyone. I'm Tri Dao, excited to be here. [00:00:27]Alessio: Tri just completed his PhD at Stanford a month ago. You might not remember his name, but he's one of the main authors in the FlashAttention paper, which is one of the seminal work in the Transformers era. He's got a lot of interest from efficient transformer training and inference, long range sequence model, a lot of interesting stuff. And now you're going to be an assistant professor in CS at Princeton next year. [00:00:51]Tri: Yeah, that's right. [00:00:52]Alessio: Yeah. And in the meantime, just to get, you know, a low pressure thing, you're Chief Scientist at Together as well, which is the company behind RedPajama. [00:01:01]Tri: Yeah. So I just joined this week actually, and it's been really exciting. [00:01:04]Alessio: So what's something that is not on the internet that people should know about you? [00:01:09]Tri: Let's see. When I started college, I was going to be an economist, so I was fully on board. I was going to major in economics, but the first week I was at Stanford undergrad, I took a few math classes and I immediately decided that I was going to be a math major. And that kind of changed the course of my career. So now I'm doing math, computer science, AI research. [00:01:32]Alessio: I had a similar thing. I started with physics and then I took like a programming course and I was like, I got to do computer science. I don't want to do physics. So FlashAttention is definitely, everybody's using this. Everybody loves it. You just released FlashAttention 2 last week. [00:01:48]Tri: Yeah. Early this week on Monday. Yeah. [00:01:53]Alessio: You know, AI time. Things move fast. So maybe let's run through some of the FlashAttention highlights, some of the innovation there, and then we can dive into FlashAttention 2. So the core improvement in FlashAttention is that traditional attention is a quadratic sequence length. And to the two, FlashAttention is linear, which obviously helps with scaling some of these models. [00:02:18]Tri: There are two factors there. So of course the goal has been to make attention go faster or more memory efficient. And ever since attention became popular in 2017 with the Transformer paper, lots and lots of folks have been working on this. And a lot of approaches has been focusing on approximating attention. The goal is you want to scale to longer sequences. There are tons of applications where you want to do that. But scaling to longer sequences is difficult because attention scales quadratically in sequence length on both runtime and memory, as you mentioned. So instead of trying to approximate attention, we were trying to figure out, can we do the same computation and maybe be more memory efficient? So in the end, we ended up being the memory is linear in sequence length. In terms of computation, it's still quadratic, but we managed to make it much more hardware friendly. And as a result, we do get wall clock speed up on the order of 2 to 4x, which really helps because that just means that you'll be able to train with 2 to 4x longer sequence length for the same cost without doing any approximations. As a result, lots of folks have been using this. The thing is available in a lot of libraries that do language model training or fine tuning. [00:03:32]Alessio: And the approximation thing is important because this is an exact thing versus a sparse. So maybe explain a little bit the difference there. [00:03:40]Tri: For sure. So in addition, essentially you compute pairwise similarity between every single element in a sequence against each other. So there's been other approaches where instead of doing all that pairwise computation, you only compute similarity for some pairs of elements in the sequence. So you don't do quadratic number of comparison. And this can be seen as some form of sparsity. Essentially you're ignoring some of the elements. When you write down the matrix, you essentially say, OK, I'm going to pretend there's zero. So that has some benefits in terms of runtime and memory. But the trade-off is that it tends to do worse in terms of quality because you're essentially approximating or ignoring some elements. And I personally have worked on this as well for a few years. But when we talk to practitioners who actually train models, especially at large scale, they say, tend not to use these approximate attention methods. Because it turns out, this was surprising to me at the time, was that these approximation methods, even though they perform fewer computation, they tend to not be faster in walk-on time. So this was pretty surprising because back then, I think my background was more on the theoretical side. So I was thinking of, oh, how many flops or floating point operations are you performing? And hopefully that correlates well with walk-on time. But I realized that I was missing a bunch of ideas from the system side where flops or floating point operations don't necessarily correlate with runtime. There are other factors like memory reading and writing, parallelism, and so on. So I learned a ton from just talking to systems people because they kind of figured this stuff out a while ago. So that was really eye-opening. And then we ended up focusing a lot more on memory reading and writing because that turned out to be the majority of the time when you're doing attention is reading and writing memory. [00:05:34]Alessio: Yeah, the I.O. awareness is probably one of the biggest innovations here. And the idea behind it is, like you mentioned, the FLOPS growth of the cards have been going up, but the memory bandwidth, not as much. So I think maybe that was one of the assumptions that the original attention paper had. So talk a bit about how that came to be as an idea. It's one of those things that like in insight, it's like, obviously, why are we like rewriting to like HBM every time, you know, and like once you change it, it's clear. But what was that discovery process? [00:06:08]Tri: Yeah, in hindsight, a lot of the ideas have already been there in the literature. And I would say is it was somehow at the intersection of both machine learning and systems. And you kind of needed ideas from both sides. So on one hand, on the system side, so lots of systems folks have known that, oh, you know, kernel fusion is great. Kernel fusion just means that instead of performing, you know, loading the same element, instead of performing an operation, write it down, load it back up and perform the second operation, you just load it once, perform two operations and then write it down again. So that saves you kind of memory read and write in the middle there. So kernel fusion has been a classic. There's been other techniques from the system side, like tiling, where you perform things in the form of computations in block, again, so that you can load it into a really fast memory. Think of it as a cache. And this is, again, classical computer science ideas, right? You want to use the cache. So the system folks have been thinking about these ideas for a long time, and they apply to attention as well. But there were certain things in attention that made it difficult to do a complete kernel fusion. One of which is there is this softmax operation in the middle, which requires you to essentially sum across the row of the attention matrix. So it makes it difficult to kind of break it, because there's this dependency. So it makes it difficult to break things into a block. So on the system side, people have been thinking about these ideas, but it's been difficult to kind of do kernel fusion for the entire operation. On the machine learning side, people have been thinking more algorithmically. They say, okay, either we can approximate attention, or there's this trick called the online softmax trick, which says that because of softmax, the way it's written mathematically, you can actually break it up into smaller pieces, do some rescaling, and still get the right answer. So this online softmax trick has been around for a while. I think there was a paper from NVIDIA folks back in 2018 about this. And then there was a paper from Google. So Marcus, Rob, and Stats wrote a paper late 2021 on using this online softmax trick to break attention up into smaller pieces. So a lot of the ideas were already there. But it turns out, you kind of need to combine ideas from both sides. So you need to understand that, hey, we want to do kernel fusion to reduce memory written writes. But we also need this online softmax trick to be able to break the softmax into smaller pieces so that a lot of the systems tricks kind of carry through. We saw that, and it was kind of a natural idea that we ended up using ideas from both sides, and it ended up working pretty well. Yeah. [00:08:57]Alessio: Are there any downsides to kernel fusion? If I think about databases and the reasons why we have atomic operations, you know, it's like, you have observability and fallback in between them. How does that work with attention? Is there anything that we lose by fusing the operations? [00:09:13]Tri: Yeah, I think mostly on the practical side is that you lose a little bit of flexibility in the sense that, hey, now you have, for example, faster attention, it's just a subroutine that you would call to do attention. But as a researcher, let's say you don't want that exact thing, right? You don't want just attention, let's say you want some modification to attention. You want to do, hey, I'm going to multiply the query and key, but then I'm going to do this extra thing before I carry on. So kernel fusion just means that, okay, we have a subroutine that does the entire thing. But if you want to experiment with things, you won't be able to use that fused kernel. And the answer is, can we have a compiler that then automatically does a lot of this kernel fusion? Lots of compiler folks are thinking about this, either with a new language or you can embed it in PyTorch. PyTorch folks have been working on this as well. So if you write just your code in PyTorch and they can capture the graph, can they generate code that will fuse everything together? That's still ongoing, and it works for some cases. But for attention, because of this kind of softmax rewriting stuff, it's been a little bit more difficult. So maybe in a year or two, we'll have compilers that are able to do a lot of these optimizations for you. And you don't have to, for example, spend a couple months writing CUDA to get this stuff to work. Awesome. [00:10:41]Alessio: And just to make it clear for listeners, when we say we're not writing it to memory, we are storing it, but just in a faster memory. So instead of the HBM, we're putting it in the SRAM. Yeah. [00:10:53]Tri: Yeah. [00:10:54]Alessio: Maybe explain just a little bit the difference there. [00:10:56]Tri: Yeah, for sure. This is kind of a caricature of how you think about accelerators or GPUs in particular, is that they have a large pool of memory, usually called HBM, or high bandwidth memory. So this is what you think of as GPU memory. So if you're using A100 and you list the GPU memory, it's like 40 gigs or 80 gigs. So that's the HBM. And then when you perform any operation, you need to move data from the HBM to the compute unit. So the actual hardware unit that does the computation. And next to these compute units, there are on-chip memory or SRAM, which are much, much smaller than HBM, but much faster. So the analogy there is if you're familiar with, say, CPU and RAM and so on. So you have a large pool of RAM, and then you have the CPU performing the computation. But next to the CPU, you have L1 cache and L2 cache, which are much smaller than DRAM, but much faster. So you can think of SRAM as the small, fast cache that stays close to the compute unit. Physically, it's closer. There is some kind of asymmetry here. So HBM is much larger, and SRAM is much smaller, but much faster. One way of thinking about it is, how can we design algorithms that take advantage of this asymmetric memory hierarchy? And of course, lots of folks have been thinking about this. These ideas are pretty old. I think back in the 1980s, the primary concerns were sorting. How can we sort numbers as efficiently as possible? And the motivating example was banks were trying to sort their transactions, and that needs to happen overnight so that the next day they can be ready. And so the same idea applies, which is that they have slow memory, which was hard disk, and they have fast memory, which was DRAM. And people had to design sorting algorithms that take advantage of this asymmetry. And it turns out, these same ideas can apply today, which is different kinds of memory. [00:13:00]Alessio: In your paper, you have the pyramid of memory. Just to give people an idea, when he says smaller, it's like HBM is like 40 gig, and then SRAM is like 20 megabytes. So it's not a little smaller, it's much smaller. But the throughput on card is like 1.5 terabytes a second for HBM and like 19 terabytes a second for SRAM, which is a lot larger. How do you think that evolves? So TSMC said they hit the scaling limits for SRAM, they just cannot grow that much more. HBM keeps growing, HBM3 is going to be 2x faster than HBM2, I think the latest NVIDIA thing has HBM3. How do you think about the future of FlashAttention? Do you think HBM is going to get fast enough when maybe it's not as useful to use the SRAM? [00:13:49]Tri: That's right. I think it comes down to physics. When you design hardware, literally SRAM stays very close to compute units. And so you don't have that much area to essentially put the transistors. And you can't shrink these things too much. So just physics, in terms of area, you don't have that much area for the SRAM. HBM is off-chip, so there is some kind of bus that essentially transfers data from HBM to the compute unit. So you have more area to essentially put these memory units. And so yeah, I think in the future SRAM probably won't get that much larger, because you don't have that much area. HBM will get larger and faster. And so I think it becomes more important to design algorithms that take advantage of this memory asymmetry. It's the same thing in CPU, where the cache is really small, the DRAM is growing larger and larger. DRAM could get to, I don't know, two terabytes, six terabytes, or something, whereas the cache stays at, I don't know, 15 megabytes or something like that. I think maybe the algorithm design becomes more and more important. There's still ways to take advantage of this, I think. So in the future, I think flash attention right now is being used. I don't know if in the next couple of years, some new architecture will come in and whatnot, but attention seems to be still important. For the next couple of years, I still expect some of these ideas to be useful. Not necessarily the exact code that's out there, but I think these ideas have kind of stood the test of time. New ideas like IO awareness from back in the 1980s, ideas like kernel fusions, tiling. These are classical ideas that have stood the test of time. So I think in the future, these ideas will become more and more important as we scale models to be larger, as we have more kinds of devices, where performance and efficiency become much, much more important. [00:15:40]Alessio: Yeah, and we had Jonathan Frankle on the podcast, and if you go to issattentionallyouneed.com, he has an outstanding bet, and he does believe that attention will be the state of the art architecture still in a few years. Did you think flash attention would be this popular? I'm always curious on the research side, you publish a paper, and obviously you know it's great work, but sometimes it just kind of falls flat in the industry. Could you see everybody just starting to use this, or was that a surprise to you? [00:16:11]Tri: Certainly, I didn't anticipate the level of popularity. Of course, we were extremely happy to have people using this stuff and giving us feedback and so on, and help us improve things. I think when we were writing the paper, I remember sending an email to one of my advisors, and like, hey, I'm excited about this paper, but I think the most important thing will be the artifact, which is the code. So I knew that the code will be valuable. So we kind of focus a lot on the code and make sure that the code is usable and as fast as can be. Of course, the idea, the paper presents the ideas and explain it and have experiments that validate the idea, but I knew that the artifact or the code was also pretty important. And that turned out to be the right focus, which is, you know, we put out the paper, we release the code and continue working on the code. So it's a team effort with my co-authors as well. [00:17:07]Alessio: We mentioned Hazy Research a bunch of times on the podcast before. I would love for you to spend five minutes just talking about how does the group work? How do people get together? How do you bounce ideas off of each other? Yeah. [00:17:21]Tri: So Hazy Research is a research group at Stanford led by one of my advisors, Chris Re. I love the people there. It was one of the best experiences I had. They've made my PhD so much more enjoyable. And I think there are a couple of ways that the group has been working pretty well. So one is, I think there's a diverse pool of people who either, you know, some of them focus on algorithms and theory, some of them focus on building systems, some of them focus on applications. And as a result, there is this flow of idea. So as an example, some of us were working on like more algorithms and theory, and then we can talk to the folks building systems and say, hey, let's try it out and let's put it in the systems and see how it is. And there you will get feedback from systems folks. They will say, hey, we implemented this, or we tried this and this is where it doesn't work, something like that. And once we put it in the systems, the application folks can use the algorithm or new methods or new models. And we again get great feedback from them because the application folks, for example, some of my good friends, they focus on medical imaging or seizure detection. And that is the problem they care about. And if your method doesn't work on the task they care about, they will tell you. Whereas I think a lot of people in machine learning, they're a little bit more flexible. So they will be like, hey, it doesn't work on seizure detection. Let's try some other task, right? But having that direct feedback of like, hey, it doesn't work there, let's figure out why. I think that that feedback allows us to do better work. And I think that kind of process of exchanging ideas, validating it in a real system so that applications folks can try it out and give you feedback. That cycle has been very, very useful. And so that's one, having a diverse group of people. The other one is, and this is something I really appreciate from advice from Chris was try to understand the fundamental, right? And he's happy letting me go off and read some textbooks and playing with things because I think a lot of research ideas come from understanding the old literature and see how it fits with the new landscape. And so if you just new archive papers every day, that's great, but you also need to read textbooks. And that's one advice I got from Chris, which is understand the fundamentals. And I think that allows us to do more impactful work. [00:19:46]Alessio: How do you think about academia versus industry? I feel like AI / Machine Learning has been an area where up until three, four years ago, most of the cutting edge work was being done in academia. And now there's all these big industry research labs. You're obviously going to Princeton, so you're an academia believer. How should people think about where to go? Say I'm doing my master's, I have to decide between doing a PhD and going into OpenAI Anthropic. How should I decide? [00:20:15]Tri: I think they kind of play a complementary role, in my opinion. Of course, I also was considering different paths as well. So I think right now, scaling matters a lot, especially when you talk about language models and AI and so on. Scaling matters a lot. And that means that you need compute resources and you need infrastructure and you need engineers time. And so industry tends to have an advantage when it comes to scaling things. But a lot of the ideas actually came from academia. So let's take Attention, which got popular with the Transformer in 2017. Attention actually has been around for a while. So I think the first mention was in 2014, a paper from Bernadot and others and Yoshua Bengio, which is coming from academia. A lot of ideas did come from academia. And scaling things up, of course, I think OpenAI has been great at scaling things up. That was the bet that they made after, I think, GPT-2. So they saw that scaling these things up to back then was 1.5 billion parameter seemed to give you amazing capabilities. So they really committed to that. They really committed to scaling things. And that turned out to be, it's been a pretty successful bet. I think for academia, we're still trying to figure out exactly what we're doing in this shifting landscape. And so lots of folks have been focusing on, for example, evaluation. So I know the Stanford Center for Foundation Model led by Percy, they have this benchmark called HELM, which is this holistic benchmark. So trying to figure out, okay, characterizing the landscape of different kinds of models, what people should evaluate, what people should measure, and things like that. So evaluation is one role. The other one is understanding. So this has happened historically where there's been some development in the industry and academia can play a role in explaining, understanding. They have the luxury to slow down trying to understand stuff, right? So lots of paper on understanding what's really going on, probing these models, and so on. I think I'm not as familiar with the NLP literature, but my impression is there's a lot of that going on in the NLP conferences, which is understanding what these models are doing, what capabilities they have, and so on. And the third one I could see is that the academia can take more risky bets in the sense that we can work on stuff that is quite different from industry. I think industry, my impression is you have some objective. You're trying to say, hey, for this quarter, we want to scale the model in this particular way. Next quarter, we want the model to have these capabilities. You're trying to get objectives that maybe, I don't know, 70% that will work out because it's important for the company's direction. I think for academia, the way things work is you have many, many researchers or PhD students, and they're kind of pursuing independent directions. And they have a little bit more flexibility on, hey, I'm going to try out this seemingly crazy idea and see, let's say there's a 30% chance of success or something. And however you define success, for academia, a lot of the time, success just means like, hey, we found something interesting. That could eventually go into industry through collaboration and so on. So I do see academia and industry kind of playing complementary roles. And as for someone choosing a career, I think just more and more generally, industry would be probably better in terms of compensation, in terms of probably work-life balance. But my biased perspective is that maybe academia gives you a little bit more freedom to think and understand things. So it probably comes down to personal choice. I end up choosing to be a professor next year at Princeton. But of course, I want to maintain a relationship with industry folks. I think industry folks can provide very valuable feedback to what we're doing in academia so that we understand where the field is moving because some of the directions are very much influenced by what, for example, OpenAI or Google is doing. So we want to understand where the field is moving. What are some promising applications? And try to anticipate, okay, if the field is moving like this, these applications are going to be popular. What problems will be important in two, three years? And then we try to start thinking about those problems so that hopefully in two, three years, we have some of the answers to some of these problems in two, three years. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But as long as we do interesting things in academia, that's the goal. [00:25:03]Alessio: And you mentioned the eval side. So we did a Benchmarks 101 episode. And one of the things we were seeing is sometimes the benchmarks really influence the model development. Because obviously, if you don't score well on the benchmarks, you're not going to get published and you're not going to get funded. How do you think about that? How do you think that's going to change now that a lot of the applications of these models, again, is in more narrow industry use cases? Do you think the goal of the academia eval system is to be very broad and then industry can do their own evals? Or what's the relationship there? [00:25:40]Tri: Yeah, so I think evaluation is important and often a little bit underrated. So it's not as flashy as, oh, we have a new model that can do such and such. But I think evaluation, what you don't measure, you can't make progress on, essentially. So I think industry folks, of course, they have specific use cases that their models need to do well on. And that's what they care about. Not just academia, but other groups as well. People do understand what are some of the emerging use cases. So for example, now one of the most popular use cases is Chatbot. And then I think folks from Berkeley, some of them are from Berkeley, call them MLCs. They set up this kind of Chatbot arena to essentially benchmark different models. So people do understand what are some of the emerging use cases. People do contribute to evaluation and measurement. And as a whole, I think people try to contribute to the field and move the field forward, albeit that maybe slightly different directions. But we're making progress and definitely evaluation and measurement is one of the ways you make progress. So I think going forward, there's still going to be just more models, more evaluation. We'll just have better understanding of what these models are doing and what capabilities they have. [00:26:56]Alessio: I like that your work has been focused on not making benchmarks better, but it's like, let's just make everything faster. So it's very horizontal. So FlashAttention 2, you just released that on Monday. I read in the blog post that a lot of the work was also related to some of the NVIDIA library updates. Yeah, maybe run us through some of those changes and some of the innovations there. Yeah, for sure. [00:27:19]Tri: So FlashAttention 2 is something I've been working on for the past couple of months. So the story is the NVIDIA CUTLASS team, they released a new version of their library, which contains all these primitives to allow you to do matrix multiply or memory loading on GPU efficiently. So it's a great library and I built on that. So they released their version 3 back in January and I got really excited and I wanted to play with that library. So as an excuse, I was just like, okay, I'm going to refactor my code and use this library. So that was kind of the start of the project. By the end, I just ended up working with the code a whole lot more and I realized that, hey, there are these inefficiencies still in Flash Attention. We could change this way or that way and make it, in the end, twice as fast. But of course, building on the library that the NVIDIA folks released. So that was kind of a really fun exercise. I was starting out, it's just an excuse for myself to play with the new library. What ended up was several months of improvement, improving Flash Attention, discovering new ideas. And in the end, we managed to make it 2x faster and now it's pretty close to probably the efficiency of things like matrix multiply, which is probably the most optimized subroutine on the planet. So we're really happy about it. The NVIDIA Cutlass team has been very supportive and hopefully in the future, we're going to collaborate more. [00:28:46]Alessio: And since it's an NVIDIA library, can you only run this on CUDA runtimes? Or could you use this and then run it on an AMD GPU? [00:28:56]Tri: Yeah, so it's an NVIDIA library. So right now, the code we release runs on NVIDIA GPUs, which is what most people are using to train models. Of course, there are emerging other hardware as well. So the AMD folks did implement a version of Flash Attention, I think last year as well, and that's also available. I think there's some implementation on CPU as well. For example, there's this library, ggml, where they implemented the same idea running on Mac and CPU. So I think that kind of broadly, the idea would apply. The current implementation ended up using NVIDIA's library or primitives, but I expect these ideas to be broadly applicable to different hardware. I think the main idea is you have asymmetry in memory hierarchy, which tends to be everywhere in a lot of accelerators. [00:29:46]Alessio: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Sara Hooker's post, like the hardware lottery. There could be all these things that are much better, like architectures that are better, but they're not better on NVIDIA. So we're never going to know if they're actually improved. How does that play into some of the research that you all do too? [00:30:04]Tri: Yeah, so absolutely. Yeah, I think Sara Hooker, she wrote this piece on hardware lottery, and I think she captured really well of what a lot of people have been thinking about this. And I certainly think about hardware lottery quite a bit, given that I do some of the work that's kind of really low level at the level of, hey, we're optimizing for GPUs or NVIDIA GPUs and optimizing for attention itself. And at the same time, I also work on algorithms and methods and transformer alternatives. And we do see this effect in play, not just hardware lottery, but also kind of software framework lottery. You know, attention has been popular for six years now. And so many kind of engineer hours has been spent on making it as easy and efficient as possible to run transformer, right? And there's libraries to do all kinds of tensor parallel, pipeline parallel, if you use transformer. Let's say someone else developed alternatives, or let's just take recurrent neural nets, like LSTM, GRU. If we want to do that and run that efficiently on current hardware with current software framework, that's quite a bit harder. So in some sense, there is this feedback loop where somehow the model architectures that take advantage of hardware become popular. And the hardware will also kind of evolve to optimize a little bit for that kind of architecture and software framework will also evolve to optimize for that particular architecture. Right now, transformer is the dominant architecture. So yeah, I'm not sure if there is a good way out of this. Of course, there's a lot of development. Things like, I think compilers will play a role because compilers allow you to maybe still be much more efficient across different kinds of hardware because essentially you write the same code and compiler will be able to make it run efficiently different kinds of hardware. So for example, there's this language Mojo, they're compiler experts, right? And their bet is AI models will be running on different kinds of devices. So let's make sure that we have really good compilers with a good language that then the compiler can do a good job optimizing for all kinds of devices. So that's maybe one way that you can get out of this cycle. But yeah, I'm not sure of a good way. In my own research, I have to think about both the algorithm new model and how it maps to hardware. So there are crazy ideas that seem really good, but will be really, really difficult to run efficiently. And so as a result, for example, we can't really scale some of the architectures up simply because they're not hardware friendly. I have to think about both sides when I'm working on new models. [00:32:50]Alessio: Yeah. Have you spent any time looking at some of the new kind of like AI chips companies, so to speak, like the Cerebras of the world? Like one of their innovations is co-locating everything on the chip. So you remove some of this memory bandwidth issue. How do you think about that? [00:33:07]Tri: Yeah, I think that's an interesting bet. I think Tesla also has this Dojo supercomputer where they try to have essentially as fast on-chip memory as possible and removing some of these data transfer back and forth. I think that's a promising direction. The issues I could see, you know, I'm definitely not a hardware expert. One issue is the on-chip memory tends to be really expensive to manufacture, much more expensive per gigabyte compared to off-chip memory. So I talked to, you know, some of my friends at Cerebros and, you know, they have their own stack and compiler and so on, and they can make it work. The other kind of obstacle is, again, with compiler and software framework and so on. For example, if you can run PyTorch on this stuff, lots of people will be using it. But supporting all the operations in PyTorch will take a long time to implement. Of course, people are working on this. So I think, yeah, we kind of need these different bets on the hardware side as well. Hardware has, my understanding is, has a kind of a longer time scale. So you need to design hardware, you need to manufacture it, you know, maybe on the order of three to five years or something like that. So people are taking different bets, but the AI landscape is changing so fast that it's hard to predict, okay, what kind of models will be dominant in, let's say, three or five years. Or thinking back five years ago, would we have known that Transformer would have been the dominant architecture? Maybe, maybe not, right? And so different people will make different bets on the hardware side. [00:34:39]Alessio: Does the pace of the industry and the research also influence the PhD research itself? For example, in your case, you're working on improving attention. It probably took you quite a while to write the paper and everything, but in the meantime, you could have had a new model architecture come out and then it's like nobody cares about attention anymore. How do people balance that? [00:35:02]Tri: Yeah, so I think it's tough. It's definitely tough for PhD students, for researchers. Given that the field is moving really, really fast, I think it comes down to understanding fundamental. Because that's essentially, for example, what the PhD allows you to do. It's been a couple of years understanding the fundamentals. So for example, when I started my PhD, I was working on understanding matrix vector multiply, which has been a concept that's been around for hundreds of years. We were trying to characterize what kind of matrices would have theoretically fast multiplication algorithm. That seems to have nothing to do with AI or anything. But I think that was a time when I developed mathematical maturity and research taste and research skill. The research topic at that point didn't have to be super trendy or anything, as long as I'm developing skills as a researcher, I'm making progress. And eventually, I've gotten quite a bit better in terms of research skills. And that allows, for example, PhD students later in their career to quickly develop solutions to whatever problems they're facing. So I think that's just the natural arc of how you're being trained as a researcher. For a lot of PhD students, I think given the pace is so fast, maybe it's harder to justify spending a lot of time on the fundamental. And it's tough. What is this kind of explore, exploit kind of dilemma? And I don't think there's a universal answer. So I personally spend some time doing this kind of exploration, reading random textbooks or lecture notes. And I spend some time keeping up with the latest architecture or methods and so on. I don't know if there's a right balance. It varies from person to person. But if you only spend 100% on one, either you only do exploration or only do exploitation, I think it probably won't work in the long term. It's probably going to have to be a mix and you have to just experiment and kind of be introspective and say, hey, I tried this kind of mixture of, I don't know, one exploration paper and one exploitation paper. How did that work out for me? Should I, you know, having conversation with, for example, my advisor about like, hey, did that work out? You know, should I shift? I focus more on one or the other. I think quickly adjusting and focusing on the process. I think that's probably the right way. I don't have like a specific recommendation that, hey, you focus, I don't know, 60% on lecture notes and 40% on archive papers or anything like that. [00:37:35]Alessio: Let's talk about some Transformer alternatives. You know, say Jonathan Franco loses his bet and Transformer is not the state of the art architecture. What are some of the candidates to take over? [00:37:49]Tri: Yeah, so this bet is quite fun. So my understanding is this bet between Jonathan Franco and Sasha Rush, right? I've talked to Sasha a bunch and I think he recently gave an excellent tutorial on Transformer alternatives as well. So I would recommend that. So just to quickly recap, I think there's been quite a bit of development more recently about Transformer alternatives. So architectures that are not Transformer, right? And the question is, can they do well on, for example, language modeling, which is kind of the application that a lot of people care about these days. So there are methods based on state space methods that came out in 2021 from Albert Gu and Curran and Chris Re that presumably could do much better in terms of capturing long range information while not scaling quadratically. They scale sub-quadratically in terms of sequence length. So potentially you could have a much more efficient architecture when sequence length gets really long. The other ones have been focusing more on recurrent neural nets, which is, again, an old idea, but adapting to the new landscape. So things like RWKV, I've also personally worked in this space as well. So there's been some promising results. So there's been some results here and there that show that, hey, these alternatives, either RNN or state space methods, can match the performance of Transformer on language modeling. So that's really exciting. And we're starting to understand on the academic research side, we want to understand, do we really need attention? I think that's a valuable kind of intellectual thing to understand. And maybe we do, maybe we don't. If we want to know, we need to spend serious effort on trying the alternatives. And there's been folks pushing on this direction. I think RWKV scale up to, they have a model at 14 billion that seems pretty competitive with Transformer. So that's really exciting. That's kind of an intellectual thing. We want to figure out if attention is necessary. So that's one motivation. The other motivation is Transformer Alternative could have an advantage in practice in some of the use cases. So one use case is really long sequences. The other is really high throughput of generation. So for really long sequences, when you train with Transformer, with flash attention and so on, the computation is still quadratic in the sequence length. So if your sequence length is on the order of, I don't know, 16K, 32K, 100K or something, which some of these models have sequence length 100K, then you do get significantly slower in terms of training, also in terms of inference. So maybe these alternative architectures could scale better in terms of sequence length. I haven't seen actual validation on this. Let's say an RNN model release with context length, I don't know, 100K or something. I haven't really seen that. But the hope could be that as we scale to long sequences, these alternative architectures could be more well-suited. Not just text, but things like high resolution images, audio, video, and so on, which are emerging applications. So that's one, long sequences. Number two is a high throughput generation, where I can imagine scenarios where the application isn't like an interactive chatbot, but let's say a company wants to batch as many requests as possible on their server, or they're doing offline processing, they're generating stuff based on their internal documents, that you need to process in batch. And the issue with Transformer is that during generation, it essentially needs to keep around all the previous history. It's called the KV cache. And that could take a significant amount of memory, so you can't really batch too much because you run out of memory. I am personally bullish on RNNs. I think RNNs, they essentially summarize the past into a state vector that has fixed size, so the size doesn't grow with the history. So that means that you don't need as much memory to keep around all the previous tokens. And as a result, I think you can scale to much higher batch sizes. And as a result, you can make much more efficient use of the GPUs or the accelerator, and you could have much higher generation throughput. Now, this, I don't think, has been validated at scale. So as a researcher, I'm bullish on this stuff because I think in the next couple of years, these are use cases where these alternatives could have an advantage. We'll just kind of have to wait and see to see if these things will happen. I am personally bullish on this stuff. At the same time, I also spend a bunch of time making attention as fast as possible. So maybe hatching and playing both sides. Ultimately, we want to understand, as researchers, we want to understand what works, why do the models have these capabilities? And one way is, let's push attention to be as efficient as possible. On the other hand, let's push other alternatives to be as efficient at scale, as big as possible, and so that we can kind of compare them and understand. Yeah, awesome. [00:43:01]Alessio: And I think as long as all of this work happens and open, it's a net positive for everybody to explore all the paths. Yeah, let's talk about open-source AI. Obviously, together, when Red Pajama came out, which was an open clone of the LLAMA1 pre-training dataset, it was a big thing in the industry. LLAMA2 came out on Tuesday, I forget. And this week, there's been a lot of things going on, which they call open-source, but it's not really open-source. Actually, we wrote a post about it that was on the front page of Hacker News before this podcast, so I was frantically responding. How do you think about what open-source AI really is? In my mind, in open-source software, we have different levels of open. So there's free software, that's like the GPL license. There's open-source, which is Apache, MIT. And then there's kind of restricted open-source, which is the SSPL and some of these other licenses. In AI, you have the open models. So Red Pajama is an open model because you have the pre-training dataset, you have the training runs and everything. And then there's obviously RandomLens that doesn't make it one-to-one if you retrain it. Then you have the open-weights model that's kind of like StableLM, where the weights are open, but the dataset is not open. And then you have LLAMA2, which is the dataset is not open, the weights are restricted. It's kind of like not really open-source, but open enough. I think it's net positive because it's like $3 million of flops donated to the public. [00:44:32]Tri: How do you think about that? [00:44:34]Alessio: And also, as you work together, what is your philosophy with open-source AI? Right, right. [00:44:40]Tri: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think about it on maybe more practical terms. So of course, Meta has done an amazing job training LLAMA1, LLAMA2. And for LLAMA2, they make it much less restrictive compared to LLAMA1. Now you can use it for businesses, unless you are a monthly active user or something like that. I think just this change will have a very significant impact in the kind of landscape of open-source AI, where now lots of businesses, lots of companies will be using, I expect will be using things like LLAMA2. They will fine-tune on their own dataset. They will be serving variants or derivatives of LLAMA2. Whereas before, with LLAMA1, it was also a really good model, but your business companies weren't allowed to do that. So I think on a more practical term, it's kind of shifting the balance between a closed-source model like OpenAI and Anthropic and Google, where you're making API calls, right? And maybe you don't understand as much of what the model is doing, how the model is changing, and so on. Versus now, we have a model with open weight that is pretty competitive from what I've seen in terms of benchmarks, pretty competitive with GPT 3.5, right? And if you fine-tune it on your own data, maybe it's more well-suited for your own data. And I do see that's going to shift the balance of it. More and more folks are going to be using, let's say, derivatives of LLAMA2. More and more folks are going to fine-tune and serve their own model instead of calling an API. So that shifting of balance is important because in one way, we don't want just a concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a few companies. So I think that's a really positive development from Meta. Of course, training the model takes a couple of millions of dollars, but engineers have and I'm sure they spend tons of time trying many, many different things. So the actual cost is probably way more than that. And they make the weights available and they allow probably a lot of companies are going to be using this. So I think that's a really positive development. And we've also seen amazing progress on the open source community where they would take these models and they either fine-tune on different kinds of data sets or even make changes to the model. So as an example, I think for LLAMA1, the context lane was limited to 2K. Like a bunch of folks figured out some really simple methods to scale up to like 8K. [00:47:12]Alessio: Like the RoPE. [00:47:13]Tri: Yes. I think the open source community is very creative, right? And lots of people. LLAMA2 will, again, kind of accelerate this where more people will try it out. More people will make tweaks to it and make a contribution and then so on. So overall, I think I see that as still a very positive development for the field. And there's been lots of libraries that will allow you to host or fine-tune these models, like even with quantization and so on. Just a couple of hours after LLAMA2 was released, tons of companies announcing that, hey, it's on our API or hosting and so on and together did the same. So it's a very fast-paced development and just kind of a model with available weights that businesses are allowed to use. I think that alone is already a very positive development. At the same time, yeah, we can do much better in terms of releasing data sets. Data sets tend to be... Somehow people are not incentivized to release data sets. So philosophically, yeah, you want to be as open as possible. But on a practical term, I think it's a little bit harder for companies to release data sets. Legal issues. The data sets released tend to be not as eye-catchy as the model release. So maybe people are less incentivized to do that. We've seen quite a few companies releasing data sets together. Released a red pajama data set. I think Cerebus then worked on that and deduplicate and clean it up and release slim pajama and so on. So we're also seeing positive development on that front, kind of on the pre-training data set. So I do expect that to continue. And then on the fine-tuning data set or instruction tuning data set, I think we now have quite a few open data sets on instruction tuning and fine-tuning. But these companies do pay for human labelers to annotate these instruction tuning data set. And that is expensive. And maybe they will see that as their competitive advantage. And so it's harder to incentivize these companies to release these data sets. So I think on a practical term, we're still going to make a lot of progress on open source AI, on both the model development, on both model hosting, on pre-training data set and fine-tuning data set. Right now, maybe we don't have the perfect open source model since all the data sets are available. Maybe we don't have such a thing yet, but we've seen very fast development on the open source side. I think just maybe this time last year, there weren't as many models that are competitive with, let's say, ChatGPT. [00:49:43]Alessio: Yeah, I think the open data sets have so much more impact than open models. If you think about Elusive and the work that they've done, GPT-J was great, and the Pythia models are great, but the Pyle and the Stack, everybody uses them. So hopefully we get more people to contribute time to work on data sets instead of doing the 100th open model that performs worse than all the other ones, but they want to say they released the model. [00:50:14]Tri: Yeah, maybe the question is, how do we figure out an incentive structure so that companies are willing to release open data sets? And for example, it could be like, I think some of the organizations are now doing this where they are asking volunteers to annotate and so on. And maybe the Wikipedia model of data set, especially for instruction tuning, could be interesting where people actually volunteer their time and instead of editing Wikipedia, add annotation. And somehow they acknowledge and feel incentivized to do so. Hopefully we get to that kind of level of, in terms of data, it would be kind of like Wikipedia. And in terms of model development, it's kind of like Linux where people are contributing patches and improving the model in some way. I don't know exactly how that's going to happen, but based on history, I think there is a way to get there. [00:51:05]Alessio: Yeah, I think the Dolly-15K data set is a good example of a company saying, let's do this smaller thing, just make sure we make it open. We had Mike Conover from Databricks on the podcast, and he was like, people just bought into it and leadership was bought into it. You have companies out there with 200,000, 300,000 employees. It's like, just put some of them to label some data. It's going to be helpful. So I'm curious to see how that evolves. What made you decide to join Together? [00:51:35]Tri: For Together, the focus has been focusing a lot on open source model. And I think that aligns quite well with what I care about, of course. I also know a bunch of people there that I know and trust, and I'm excited to work with them. Philosophically, the way they've been really open with data set and model release, I like that a lot. Personally, for the stuff, for example, the research that I've developed, like we also try to make code available, free to use and modify and so on, contributing to the community. That has given us really valuable feedback from the community and improving our work. So philosophically, I like the way Together has been focusing on open source model. And the nice thing is we're also going to be at the forefront of research and the kind of research areas that I'm really excited about, things like efficient training and inference, aligns quite well with what the company is doing. We'll try our best to make things open and available to everyone. Yeah, but it's going to be fun being at the company, leading a team, doing research on the topic that I really care about, and hopefully we'll make things open to benefit the community. [00:52:45]Alessio: Awesome. Let's jump into the lightning round. Usually, I have two questions. So one is on acceleration, one on exploration, and then a takeaway. So the first one is, what's something that already happened in AI machine learning that you thought would take much longer than it has? [00:53:01]Tri: I think understanding jokes. I didn't expect that to happen, but it turns out scaling model up and training lots of data, the model can now understand jokes. Maybe it's a small thing, but that was amazing to me. [00:53:16]Alessio: What about the exploration side? What are some of the most interesting unsolved questions in the space? [00:53:22]Tri: I would say reasoning in the broad term. We don't really know how these models do. Essentially, they do something that looks like reasoning. We don't know how they're doing it. We have some ideas. And in the future, I think we will need to design architecture that explicitly has some kind of reasoning module in it if we want to have much more capable models. [00:53:43]Alessio: What's one message you want everyone to remember today? [00:53:47]Tri: I would say try to understand both the algorithm and the systems that these algorithms run on. I think at the intersection of machine learning system has been really exciting, and there's been a lot of amazing results at this intersection. And then when you scale models to large scale, both the machine learning side and the system side really matter. [00:54:06]Alessio: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on 3. [00:54:09]Tri: This was great. Yeah, this has been really fun. [00:54:11] Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

"Move a muscle change a thought, change a thought and you change your life - Tuchy Palmieri”This week, Mia and Adrienne sit down with Andrea and learn about how yoga changed her life. Andrea has been a friend of the podcast and a dear friend of both Mia and Adrienne. We discuss her journey as a Yoga Teacher and how she's learned to create space for herself.  She shares her grief story after losing her mother and how yoga helped her “be in your own energy” to process her feelings. Drea is a local San Antonio Yoga Teacher and Silversmith. Follow Love Art Style  jewelry on Instagram Andrea's website: https://www.loveartstyle.com/Check out this article from Yoga International on the Gunas: https://yogainternational.com/article/view/the-gunas-natures-three-fundamental-forces/“THE GUNAS CLOSE UPThe word guna literally means “strand” or “fiber” and implies that, like strands of a rope, the gunas are woven together to form the objective universe. Philosophically, the theory of the gunas explains what this universe is made of and how it came to manifest itself as mind and matter. But more important for yoga practitioners, awareness of the gunas tells us whether we are genuinely moving forward in life (sattva), running in place (rajas), or losing our way (tamas).”Follow us on TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@yogachangedFollow us on Instagram:https://instagram.com/yogachanged?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=For more, go to https://howyogachangedmylife.com Wanna be on the show? Click here to fill out our guest info form or drop us a email at yogachanged@gmail.com

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Welcome to another riveting episode of The Adams Archive with your host, Austin Adams! In today's episode, we'll be delving deep into the recent controversy surrounding Anheuser-Busch's VP of Marketing, who openly admitted to hiring employees based on sex and political ideology. We'll examine the implications of these hiring practices and discuss whether they align with the company's values. Furthermore, we'll engage in a thought-provoking debate with ChatGPT on the merits and drawbacks of affirmative action, exploring its impact on society and the workplace. We'll also discuss Alex Soros' frequent visits to the White House, drawing comparisons with Bill Clinton's connection to Jeffrey Epstein, and dive into NPR's dramatic exit from Twitter after being labeled as state-affiliated media. What does this say about the state of journalism and social media today? Lastly, we'll explore the explosive leak of top-secret documents that revealed alleged U.S. spying on allies, the implications for international relations, and the insights gained on the U.S. perspective regarding the war in Ukraine and potential support for Russia from neutral countries. Join us for an engaging and insightful episode as we dissect these controversial topics and much more. Don't miss out on this week's edition of The Adams Archive! All the links: https://linktr.ee/theaustinjadams Anti-Elite Club Apparel: https://antielite.club    Full Transcription:    Hello, you beautiful people and welcome. To the Adams Archive. My name is Austin Adams, and thank you so much for listening. Today on the agenda, we are going to be discussing all about the recent marketing misstep, to say the least, by Anheuser Bush's VP of Marketing, who we will be listening to even further digging herself in a hole, uh, by talking about what seems to be, to me at least, slightly illegal hiring practices, leaning, uh, obviously towards her woke agenda that she has since shown her hand. So we will talk about that. We will also talk about some recent photos that were released by hers after speaking out against, uh, the so-called frat culture that she was so against. There has since been photos leaked of Bud Light's, VP of Marketing, where she seemingly participated in these said frat. Type events. So we'll look at that. Now. We will also discuss George Soros. Son, Alex Soros visited the White House under Biden's administration 14 times. Now, to put that in perspective, that is only three less times than Bill Clinton having Jeffrey Epstein. So, quite astonishing. Something that we will discuss at length now.  We will also be discussing NPR, quitting Twitter after being labeled as state affiliated media. I saw an article that called it a Rage Quit, which is pretty, pretty fitting. Now the last thing, but one of the most serious things that we will discuss is the documents that were released at well leaked. There was over a hundred pages that were released, , that were leaked, and,  they were doing a highly serious, highly serious very serious investigation in Washington this week. As records were detailing alleged us spying on allies. Insights into American thinking on the war in Ukraine, in at least two neutral countries, mulling plans to support Russia as things move on in this war. So we will discuss all of that and more, but first, you know what to do. Go ahead and hit that subscribe button if it's your first time here. If it's not, or even if it is, go ahead and leave a five star review. Tell me something that you like about the show.  Subject we should talk about. Whatever it is, please from the bottom of my heart, I would appreciate it. Leave a five star review. Go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Head over to the subs Austin Adams dot.com. Uh, and we will be releasing podcast companions with all of the links, articles, all of it directly to your email, which includes the video podcast, short clips, the full podcast, all to your email every single week. And then go ahead over to anti elite.club. Anti elite.club and you can check out the apparel. I've kept it small. In the meantime, there is the Pelosi Capital Insider trading hat, which is beautifully embroidered if I do say myself, say so myself, as well as the Protector children hoodie,  and some other awesomeness like, uh, make love not viruses, hoodies or sweatshirts as well. So go check it out. And speaking of Alex Soros, we actually have a mug that is the George Soros actor, a Crisis Actor's Guild mug. , which I found to be, you know, a little catchy. So check it out.  Lemme know what you think. All right,  now that's all I got for you. Let's go ahead and jump into.     Um, but anyways, $5 billion that they have lost since doing this marketing stunt. Now I'm somewhat familiar with marketing myself. There's probably one of the biggest rules, if not the biggest rule is knowing your target audience. Their target audience for Bud Light is generally not somebody with a trans flag in front of their house. Those people are generally not drinking light American beer. Now, how far Bud Light Marketing has fallen? I remember growing up, they were always witty and funny and, uh, what was it? The, um, one of their campaigns that was great. It was like the, the gosh, I, I have to remember it was like the greatest Man who ever award or some, something like that. But always quick, witty, um, always good sarcasm, right? Always great marketing. And this woman takes over from, you know, obviously coming from Harvard to the Wharton, uh, business school and then at, I don't know what she is, maybe 35 years old, taking over the VP of marketing of one of the largest, uh, beer companies in the world. So maybe Bud Light itself when hiring this woman didn't know its target audience and, or maybe they knew exactly what they were doing, but if they did, this was a horrible, horrible misstep in. Terms of their business success, 5 billion in just like five days, and it's still going down. And I only think we're really gonna see the true implications of this because you have lost so many loyal, long-standing customers as a result of this. Not only that, people aren't going to buy them at the shelves, which means that the liquor stores and, and grocery stores that we're holding these products are not going to buy them either. If people are not buying them. There is a whole supply chain that will be affected as a result of this terrible marketing move. But let's go ahead and read this. This comes from the New York Post. It says, beer Colossus in Heiser Busch saw its value plummet more than 5 billion since the company announced his branding partnership with controversial transgender social media influencer, Dylan Mul. Since March 31st, shares of Bud Light Parent Company have nearly fallen 4%. And as I checked earlier, I believe it was 5%, like 5.2%, knocking down the company's market capitalization from 132 billion to $127 billion. On Wednesday, the stock fizzled more than 1.5%. Uh, on Wednesday, the company is dealing with the fallout from conservatives over its deal with Mulvaney, the 26 year old Wow sh he looks super rough for 26. Transgender influencer with more than 10 million followers on social media. Mulvaney fired back at critics Tuesday accusing them of bullying her because she's an easy target. Oh, are you? She as a guest on the OR Word onward. And Rosie O'Donnell podcast Mulvaney said her Tolles and trolls intentionally twist her words and actions in an effort to blast the transgender community. The reason that I think I am so I'm an easy target is because I'm so new to this. Mulvaney said, I think going after a trans person, it says woman, but I refuse to call this person. A woman that's been doing this for like 20 years is a lot more difficult. I think maybe they think that there's some sort of chance with me, but what's their goal now? It is down 4.9% as of the closing bell today. Um, so almost 5% more than the original 5 billion that they even just talked about there. That's an incredible loss for any company, $5 billion in market cap. Um, these people, they don't understand anything about me that I do or say. I don't really care about her opinion on this. Mulvaney had posted videos and photos on social media promoting her sponsorship deal with Bud Light, which pro produced specifically made cans with Mulvey's likeness to commemorate the partnership. And, and in this video with this man, He's sitting there going, um, I guess there's some sort of March madness going on right now. Um, I don't really know what that is. I guess it has to do with sports. I don't know about sports. I'm just a dumb woman. Like really? Cuz women don't know what March Madness is. Like. What? What a horrific, the, the, the biggest problem besides the fact, like, and again, I've talked about this before. I don't care what you do as an individual, you can identify as a fricking fork if you want to. And I you do you, now, I'm not gonna call you a fork if you think you're a fork, but you're actually a human. Okay? I'm not participating in your mental illness, but you can identify as whatever you want. I don't care. I'm not gonna rip you apart for your, uh, mental anguish and your self-consciousness and your difficulty. I, you know, and disassociation from your own body. I'm not gonna do that for you. I don't think that you deserve that. I think that in this case, This man is doing this for clout, so maybe deserves it more than most who are dealing with this. I don't think it's actually a real case of gender dysphoria that's being manifested through surgical, uh, attempts at correcting it, which never seems to help in any which way. Um, but I, I do think that there's a better way of going about that, which to me, the most insulting thing that this man does is pretending like every woman is a fricking caricature, a caricature of what it means to be a woman, right? Frolicking in high heels. Um, you know, like all of the videos that this man does are like the most insulting, caricature depiction of what a woman actually acts like, like Valley Girl, 2004, mean girl's, high school woman in a sitcom. Like just the most silly depiction of a woman that there can possibly be. And so that to me is insulting. I'm not even a woman and I'm insulted by it. So it says, um, it goes on to say that the backlash even prompted a local Missouri distributor to cancel an appearance by the famous Budweiser Clyde's Dale Horse due to fears for the safety of staffers. Industry experts told the post on Tuesday that the controversy appears to have staying power and could lead to a full-blown boycott of Anheuser-Busch products. I believe so. I don't think there's any coming back from this. I think their general target market is going to absolutely, there's the only reason that you were drinking Bud Light for any reason at all, was just out of f sheer habit. It wasn't because it tasted good. We know that for sure. There's so many other beers out there that you can go drink that still taste like shit and are still cheap that don't promote this type of ideology. So yes, this is absolutely going to have staying power Anheuser bushes. If you are in the stock market, you should absolutely be shorting. Budweisers, uh, it's, it's, uh, the, the dollar symbol and then bud is the symbol for them on the stock exchange. So you should absolutely short Anheuser-Busch. I am not a financial advisor, so don't listen to anything that I say, but it seems like a pretty good bet that this is just gonna continue to keep going down. Um, now let's go ahead and watch this video. Let's talk about the actual VP of marketing, because, you know, actually let's, let's touch on this. There it bring, it comes up here with, um, you know, let's, let's talk about this Kid Rock, who I love for this. Um, went on and did a video where he actually shot his, uh, full auto rifle, um, at a bunch of Bud Light, uh, uh, boxes of beer. And there's this awesome picture in front of me of them just all exploding, uh, with a MAGA hat on, which is just amazing. So love that for Kid Rock. Uh, now the reason that I don't think Nike is having such backlash because they did the same exact thing. Nike did the same thing as Bud Light did. Same exact thing, but Nike's target market is not the same target market as Bud Lights. That's what you have to understand. And that's the reason that Bud Light is going to have a tremendous loss of market cap, a tremendous loss of its stock value. And Nike has improved its stock value over the last couple days. There has not been any calls for boycotts. It has not been in the news. There's been no, you know, burn your Nike's campaign that's going on. Although maybe there should be, and I won't be buying Nike from here on out. But, um, but this comes back to how, how do we change culture, right? Because right now, the, the theistic corporations that are out there, even not, maybe not even capitalistic because they're all owned by generally the same. BlackRock. Um, but these corporatism type corporations that are out there, that are promoting these things, are doing so because they think it's going to win them favor, not even win them favor from the people that they are having as their target market. They think it's going to win them favor in the eyes of the elitist who own them from the World Economic Forums, from the Black Rocks and the Vanguards and the, the, the elites who own those companies who are pushing those ideologies like Alex Soros and George Soros, who were gonna talk about a little bit later. That's who they're gaining the favor of. Here. I did see something that there was some sort of talk about a, I think it was a c e I score, which is like your woke score basically for companies that they're getting favor over, where they'll like pull some sort of association if these companies don't have a high enough score of wokeness. And so maybe that's what's going on here, but here's how you fight back. 5 billion of market loss is a huge loss for Ann Heiser Busch. Huge loss you. That's, that's so much money. 5% of your value in five days, 1% per day. If that keeps up for 50 days, and I don't, I 100% think that that's just the beginning. I, I think it's gonna be 20%, 25%. Again, I'm just shooting from the hip here. Don't listen to me. But, but I absolutely think that there is going to be a tremendous loss. And this is just the beginning because we're not even seeing, seeing the outcomes. We're seeing the people who are pulling their stocks out of this. We're seeing people who are starting to short the stock as a result, but we're not seeing quarterly earnings statements. We're not seeing that yet. And when we see that it will be a blood bath, when we see the quarterly earnings for h Anheuser-Busch, a blood bath, bath, when we see it, and this is just the beginning, 5% is nothing compared to what it's gonna turn out to once we actually see the numbers. Right. What we're seeing right now is a vanity reaction, but there will be a corporate there, there, there will be figures that come out. There will be, uh, quarterly earning statements that show when 50 40% of people who drink Bud Light, stop drinking it, stop buying it, which means the liquor stores who are sourcing it and the grocery stores that have it will stop purchasing it as well. This is how you fight back from woke. This is how you fight back against the corporations who are shoving this ideology down you and your child's throat. 100% how we we fight back against this us. All right, so let's go ahead and listen to this. This is the interview with the VP of Marketing from Busch. Her name is Alyssa Heiner Scheid, uh, she's a Harvard graduate. Imagine that, who then went to the Wharton School of Business? Um, I believe she had like some sort of like, Language and English degree from Harvard, which I don't know why the hell you go to Harvard. Harvard for an English degree to go into marketing. All right. By the way, I'm drinking a real beer. This is a founder's, uh, Centennial ipa, which is quite delicious and doesn't taste like shit. And they have yet to shove their trans ideology down my throat if they have any belief in it, which I doubt they do. Okay, so drink real beer folks. All right. Um, maybe I'll start doing a, a beer review like, uh, you know, uh, bar stool, uh, Dave Portnoy does for pizzas. If I, if I had to do a beer review on this founder's Centennial ipa. Let's see, how well does this go? It's an, an IPA featuring Centennial Hops. Huh, let's read it. Get ready to bask in the glory of this frothy heads floral bouquet relish the citrus accents from the abundance of dry hops. This one's sweet, yet balanced multi undertones. Shake hands with the hop character for a finish that never turns too bitter delicious. All right, one sip. Everybody knows rules. Centennial IPA By Founders Initial reaction, I would give it a 7.3. I've had better IPAs, but it's pretty good. All right. And again, no, no woke trans ideology being shoved in my throat, which gives it multiple, multiple brownie points. All right, so here's the vp, Alicia Alyssa Heiner Scheid, and she is going to speak on here, right? One thing that she talks about initially is evolving the Bud Light Brand. Now this is the clip that everybody was talking about, right? She talks about why she did this and why she's trying to shove this ideology down their throats and, and all of this stuff. So let's listen to that first, and then we will listen to her talking about her hiring practices, which I think is a little bit even more egregious and probably downright illegal if you really dive into it. Um, so let's go ahead and listen to her. We do not attract. Young drinkers to come and drink this brand. There will be no future for Bud Light. So I had around, in your own perspective and your own values, you know the person you are at Home Impacts and has a ripple effect on the Bud Light brand. Tell me about that a little bit. Yeah, I, I think number one, you know, I'm a businesswoman. Mm-hmm. I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light and it was, this brand is in decline. It's been in decline for a really long time. And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light. So I had this, the brand was in decline only once you decided to promote trans ideology to your generally conservative target market. Let's be clear about this here. If we go back and look at the last, I don't know, let's, let's look at the last five years of Bud Light. Let's see if there's been a single decline. Five years. A single decline. That was 5% in five days. Oh, this is a screenshot. So it's not gonna give me exactly what I'm looking for here, but I highly doubt it. The brand started to be in decline once you started to make these types of decisions, right? Super clear mandate. It's, we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. And my, what I brought to that was a belief in I was looking for real men of genius. You remember that ad? That's good marketing, right? Real men of genius. Let's watch that shit once this is over. But real men of genius is what I was thinking of earlier. I don't know what I said. Like great men or whatever the hell. No real men of genius, great marketing, Dylan Mulvaney, horrible marketing. Okay. What is, what do, what does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that's truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different, and appeals to women and to men. Mm-hmm. And representation. Is it sort of the heart of evolution? You've gotta see people who reflect you in the work. And we had this hangover. I mean, bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out of touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach. So, long story short, super Bowl spot. Fast forward, I cast an incredible female choreographer who just brought incredibly positive, amazing energy to the spot. We cast Miles Teller and his wife Kelly Teller. But it was really crucial to me that if you see that spot, Kelly is. Kelly is the heartbeat of that spot. You're seeing this whole experience through Kelly. She's the beating heart. She, I would sort of argue with sort of what propels you through that experience and, and that was intentional. Um, and then we had another really fun spot. First spot out of the gate was the first time ever we'd had a female protagonist in this. Really cool, she was sort of cool as hell, bobbin and weaving through a bar. But anyway, listen, I'm not gonna pretend that there isn't so much more work to do from a business results perspective and of course from a representation perspective, but I feel like you, you have to put your money where your mouth is when you're trying to evolve a brand and elevate it and bring in new consumers. So that's been incredibly important to me. Mm-hmm. Bet she didn't expect a 5% stock loss in five days. Now you hear her talking about that, uh, the frat brand. Right. Let's, let's, we'll take a little dive back in time. A little dive back in time for the VP of Marketing at Anheuser-Busch when she's calling out her own target market. The people who purchased her products for being out of touch frat boys. Little did she know somebody was gonna go to her Facebook profile, scroll a few years back and see photos of her Dr. Like filling up condom balloons, shotgunning beers, and doing everything that appears to. And looks to be her fraty passed. This says leaked photos have revealed that Bud Light's, vice President of Marketing, Alyssa Heiner, pardoned it up while attending Harvard University exhibiting behavior that one might expect to see at a frat house. The images which are nearly 20 years old, would have remained buried in Hein, Hershey's Facebook albums. Had the beer executive not recently suggested that the brand she now represents should distance itself from its Friday past. The images, which are now attained from the daily caller from a source who discovered them on Hein Che's now protected Facebook page were from a 2006 event called the ISIS Senior Reversed Initiation Scavenger Hunt, um, which was. To provide in 2000 to provide a positive environment in social network for women to flourish an article in the university's newspaper around the same time that the photos of Heide were taken. However, describe the scene of the club's gatherings as a haven for inebriated dit sea. In the photos, Heiner Scheide can be seen drinking beer, blowing up condoms, as if they were balloons and exhibiting other behaviors typically associated with intoxication. 17 years later, Heiner side is now calling on beer companies to cater to more than just the frat house crowd. I am a businesswoman. She says during a March 23rd appearance on the Make Yourself a Home Podcast, I had a really clear job to do, which is all basically just what we listened to. She went on to explain. The representation is sort of the heart of evolution, and Bud Light has for too long been a brand of Fraty kind of out of touch humor since Henesey made those comments. The brand is partnered with Trans TikTok, influencer Dylan Mulvaney, A move that has been widely criticized and in some cases even led to boycotts, in some cases, very many at this point now. What I find to be interesting is if you go a little bit even more back, because that's like, just punchy, good headlines, right? Oh, she called 'em frat boys and you know, maybe she's also fratty with her, you know, she's being a hypocrite obviously, and some of these photos are kind of funny. Um, but maybe, maybe don't make fun of your target market if you were your target market. Uh, so let's go back and see what I find to be even more egregious than the, the, what she's doing as far as the promotion of trans ideology through a brand that is primarily conservative target markets, or even being a hypocrite by calling people fraty and then blowing up condom balloons and getting extremely intoxicated on pictures of Facebook. Um, which you might be able to find, if you don't mind if I had one. Um, but, uh, let's go back and see what she talks about with hiring practices. Okay. She talks about her hiring practices and spills the tea a little bit further than she probably would've liked by talking about how she leans her hiring practices more towards hiring women and more towards hiring people who associate with her same ideology. Almost word for word says this and that, my friends is illegal. If you choose to hire somebody specifically based on their representation of their sex so that you can have more people of that sex in your business, that is sexist, discriminatory, hiring practices not that hard to do. One plus one equals two, that's discrimination, and there is anti-discrimination laws. So let's go ahead and listen to her boast about how she hires more women than men purposefully, again, discriminating as well as people who identify at the same beliefs as her. A k a woke. Here we go. Um, and I try to bring that honestly and how I wanna operate in the world. Mm-hmm. And I would say the most important thing about this job is that you, I have to prioritize bringing other people along the way, community and women. I mean, it's just, it doesn't mean anything unless I am positively impacting other people. And so that's been just incredibly important to me. My decisions with teams, I mean, I, I try to build teams of people who maybe nobody else has taken a chance on them. I try to bet on people who haven't had the opportunity, bet on people with similar values as me, who are hungry and wanna do great things. I try to bet on people. I hire people, aka I hire people who have similar values to me. I hire people who are primarily, I try to hire women. I, that, that is discriminatory, discriminatory practices. And I even tried to like argue this back and forth with G P T four, um, the other day. So I, I'll see if I can even pull that up. Um, but I, I had it kind of argue against me and, and gimme the reason that this should be acceptable and how this is not racist or sexist, right? In nature, how is this not against anti-discrimination laws? Um, because to me it seems very, very clear and evident that this should be considered absolutely considered, um, discriminatory hiring practices. Um, so here is what it had to say about that. Now, this was actually G P T 3.5. No. Did I do it with four? Let's see. So I've, I've found interesting ways to go about this with, with having G P T kind of. Converse back and forth with me. So what I said to it is, is hiring someone of a specific racer sex purposefully for the intention of growing the number of employees of that racer sex illegal. It's said, I am not a lawyer, but I can offer some general information about employment Discrim. Oh my ears. That is horrible. Speechify, what are you doing to me? We need our man. Let's go with I like Harry. I like Harry. Let's go with Harry. Harry here. I'm astute. To share a better way to read. Perfect. Harry, here. Perfect. Perfect. I'm astute. To share a better way to read. Give 'em a little bit of sped up and we're off to the races. So this is the conversation that I had with G P T yesterday when I was trying to, I was trying to work this through in my head. I was actually trying to figure out whether or not this is illegal or not. So I said, is hiring someone of a specific race or sex purposefully for the intention of growing the number of employees of that race racer sex illegal? And here's what it responded. I am not a lawyer, but I can offer some general information about employment discrimination laws in the United States Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is generally legal for employers to discriminate against individuals based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin includes hiring practices. However, there are some exceptions to this rule when employers are trying to increase diversity within their workforce or remedy past discrimination. Affirmative action programs, for example, may allow employers to consider race or sex as one factor in their hiring decisions, but only under certain circumstances. Programs must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest, such as remedying, past discrimination, or promoting diversity. They also cannot impose an undue burden on other groups or create rigid quotas. It's may differ depending on the country or jurisdiction. So it is important to consult with legal counsel or seek advice from a local expert for specific guidance. All right, so there was was a, it's initial response. So I said what allow, like what laws allow for the exception to anti discriminatory hiring practices, because to me, when you tell me that there are some exceptions for this rule, when employers are trying to increase diversity, what does increasing diversity mean? How is affirmative action not actually racist? When you are trying to increase diversity, that means you are intentionally hiring one person who would normally not be hired. Based on qualifications over somebody who is not based on their sex race or their national origin. That is R sexist, that is racist, that is discrimination. So how can you justify that? Right? Some people refer to it as reverse racism, reverse discrim discrimination, which is still discrimination if you are actively pursuing the idea that you need to have more women in your business. So let's just put it like this. I want more white men at my business. That is my goal. I hire more white conservative men at my business. If somebody came out, if the VP of marketing at a company said, I want to hire more white men who are conservative at my business, they would be ripped to shreds. The company would be folded overnight. But the VP of marketing at Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch does this and people try to celebrate it, hiring based off of sex. And political ideology is discrimination and against the law. Okay? So again, I tried to tease this out. I was legitimately curious in trying to figure out how can you actually legally do this and how is this not a lawsuit from somebody who went to, and maybe it will be now if we can get enough eyes on this, but a lawsuit from people who have gone and been interviewed for positions under this woman and not been hired because they're a man with different ideology than her. So is it not just reverse racism then if you can hire based on race, but only for races that are approved, right? Who gets to decide whether they're approved or not? So, Then I asked it here, here's what it responded to that, but then I asked it to steelman it's argument, which really an incredible, uh, epiphany for me with using G P T was trying to teach it to argue against itself. Because if I sit here and argue back and forth with chat g p t, it's going to logically be far more equipped than me because it has the infinite intelligence of the universe. Although I'm very convincing in my arguments, it might be difficult for me to do it against the, the, the God of information here. Um, so I asked it to argue against hisself, right? It's gonna be able to formulate better arguments than me logically speaking with infinite access to all of the information of the world. Although I do think I'm pretty good at creating compelling arguments, maybe not as good as the God of information. So let's go ahead and hear what it has to say about my response. So I said to it, is that just not reverse racism then if you can hire based on race, but only for races that are approved. This is what it said. And then it steel mans my argument after that. The term reverse racism is often used to describe situations in which members of historically advantaged groups feel that they're being discriminated against in favor of members of historically disadvantaged groups, such as through affirmative action programs. Important to understand that the goal of affirmative action is to address historical and systemic discrimination and underrepresentation of certain groups in areas such as education, employment, and government contracting. Brass are designed to create a level playing field for individuals from all backgrounds and promote diversity and inclusion in the United States. The Supreme Court has held that race conscious policies such as affirmative action can be legally permissible under certain circumstances, but they must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest. Like promoting diversity or remedying past discrimination has also made it clear that rigid quotas and undue burdens on other groups are not allowed. Affirmative action programs are not about giving preference to one race over another for the sake of preference, but rather aim to create opportunities for members of historically underrepresented groups who may have faced obstacles due to systemic discrimination. The intention is to work toward a more equitable and diverse society, not to create new forms of discrimination. That said, affirmative action remains a complex and often contentious issue with proponents and opponents offering different perspectives on its effectiveness and fairness. All right, so I find that to be interesting. It, it seems like a logically flawed argument, which almost happens across don't, very, very many arguments coming from the left, right? The, the left is built on emotion. The right is generally built on logic, and where logic fails, emotion must be applied to self preserve, right? So when, when I asked it to steelman my argument back, right? Steel manning an argument basically means. To give me the most compelling argument back to yourself so that you can then, you know, make, make the argument back to me of my argument so that you can then address the concerns of my argument properly from the perspective that I'm coming from. So I asked it to steal man, it's argument because what you'll find is even if, even if G P T leans more to the left, right? Just, just based on 99% of coders in Silicon Valley being liberal, it's obviously gonna have some skewing, but you can have it argue your point. Now I've found that 3.5 will not do this, four will do this. It's, it's a little bit more nuanced in the way that it, it has discussions with you. So it will steal me in arguments if it, if, if it's programming the 3.5 s programming will not allow it to. I asked, did the steelman an argument for me? It wouldn't do it because it didn't believe in the argument based on its flawed logic. So I asked, did the steelman, the argument that, um, That affirmative action is, in fact potentially racist or, or at least in, in its varied essence, not positive overall. So here, here was, here was the steelman argument by G P T against affirmative action. A steelman argument refers to the practice of restating an opposing argument in its strongest and most compelling form. In this case, the steelman argument against affirmative action would emphasize the following points and meritocracy. Proponents of affirmative action argue that policies should be based solely on merit without considering factors like race, gender, or ethnicity. Believe that giving preference to underrepresented groups can result in less qualified individuals being hired or admitted, which is unfair to other applicants who might be more qualified. First. Discrimination critics argue that affirmative action can lead to reverse discrimination. Disadvantaging individuals from historically privileged groups who may be more qualified, they say is inherently unfair and goes against the principle of equal opportunity. Perpetuation of stereotypes and divisions. Some argue that affirmative action can inadvertently reinforce stereotypes and divisions by focusing on race or gender, rather than on individual qualifications and potential. Believe that this focus can perpetuate the idea that underrepresented groups need special treatment to succeed stigmatization of beneficiaries. Another argument against affirmative action is that it can stigmatize beneficiaries, leading others to question their qualifications and accomplishments can undermine the confidence and self-esteem of individuals from underrepresented groups who may feel that their success is attributed to affirmative action rather than their abilities term effectiveness. Critics also question the long-term effectiveness of affirmative action, arguing that it may not address the root causes of systemic discrimination, and may instead create dependence on such programs. Advocate for alternative solutions such as improving access to quality education and addressing socioeconomic disparities to create more sustainable change. So there is its main points, right? I'll highlight them for you in case it's difficult to listen to our friend Harry.  But it says, basically, equality and meritocracy. Opponents of affirmative action argue that policy should be based solely on merit, right? Not your race, not your skin color. That is the Martin Luther King argument. I have a dream that one day, right? We won't look at people and judge them based on race, gender, or ethnicity. We are specifically judging people based off of race, gender, or ethnicity. Which means if you are proactively helping one group, you are actively, actively preventing another group based on gender, race, or ethnicity. There is always a ne there is always going to be a, a negative outcome to the positive outcome for that one group as a result of, of this affirmative action. I didn't have any slaves. There's no reason that I shouldn't get into a university, I shouldn't get a job that, that I should have any, anything that's judged against me for my skin color. No reason at all. It's literally reverse racism if that term holds any merit. It's what, if not just straight racism. Right? If you are, if you are not hiring me because I have white skin, if you are not having me in your university because I have white skin, because I have a penis, because I have  right-leaning ideologies compared to left-leaning ideologies, that that is discriminatory in its essence and, and simply perpetuating, um, exactly what you were trying to combat. Right? But you were just blind to it through emotion. Um, the second argument that it gave was reverse discrimination. Critics argue that affirmative action can lead to reverse discrimination, disadvantaging individuals of historically privileged groups who may be more qualified. Right? That's exactly what I just talked about, perpetuation of stereotypes and divisions. Some argue that affirmative action can inadvertently reinforce stereotypes and divisions by focusing on race and gender rather than individual qualifications. Right? A hundred percent stigmatization of beneficiaries. Um, so it's basically saying that, um, somebody who is, uh, let's say they're black and they get hired somewhere or they go to a university, but they have less qualifications, they get a lower gpa, they have a lower s a T, but they get into the university because of their skin color. That is going to further stigmatize the idea that they should get in, even though they have lower scores, that, that makes the argument that people who are black should not have high enough scores compared to Asians or white people or, you know, any other culture that, that are getting discriminated against, against in this case. Right. Which again, is absolutely the case. Um, long-term effectiveness and, and not the case obviously that they shouldn't have high enough scores. They're just as intelligent and capable. Um, and that's why it, it is absolutely a stigmatization. Um, moving on, long-term effectiveness, uh, say that affirmative action, arguing that it may not address the root causes of systemic discrimination instead of basically just putting a bandaid on it. So, so what I tried to do here is say, using only logic and not straw manning, because what I found was when I was having it argue against it, it was using emotional language. It was saying that, well, there's, there's, uh, certain people who are, you know, have histories of being discriminated against and so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was, it was straw manning the argument not using logic. So I said to G P T using only logic and not straw manning the argument by bringing up affirmative action or laws simply from a philosophical and logic based perspective. How do you argue against 0.2, 0.2 being reverse discrimination? Critics argue that affirmative action can lead to reverse discrimination, disadvantaging individuals from historically privileged groups who may be more qualified, um, this they say is inherently unfair and goes against the principle of equal opportunity. So I asked it to logically and without a strong argument, which is what it was presenting me prior, give me a logic-based philosophical perspective out outside of the bounds of what's available for rules within humanity, outside of the bounds of what's available for laws. Tell me specifically from a philosophical and logic-based perspective, how do you argue that hiring somebody based on race or sex is not racist or sexist? Tell me that. Okay. And here is what I had to say. A philosophical and logical perspective one could argue against. Point two, the reverse discrimination claim. By focusing on the concepts of fairness, context, and historical background and context, the concept of fairness can be understood differently depending on the context. In a society with a history of systemic discrimination against certain groups, equal treatment of all individuals without considering this context might not be truly fair. Affirmative action policies aim to address historical disadvantages and promote a more inclusive and diverse environment by offering opportunities to underrepresented groups. If justice philosophically, one could argue that corrective justice should be applied in cases where historical discrimination has caused disadvantages for certain groups means that measures can be taken to rectify past injustices and promote a more equitable society. From this perspective, affirmative action policies are not reversed discrimination, but rather a means of achieving corrective justice, filling the playing field. Critics of affirmative action often assume that all individuals start from the same position and have equal access to opportunities due to historical and systemic discrimination. This is not always the case. By considering factors like race or gender in hiring and admissions decisions, affirmative action policies aim to level the playing field and create a more equitable environment. Balancing competing interests. From a philosophical perspective, one could argue that promoting diversity and addressing historical disadvantages are important societal values that must be balanced against the principle of equal treatment. It is crucial to avoid undue burdens on other groups. Implementing carefully designed affirmative action policies can help achieve these competing interests without resulting in reverse discrimination greater good. The principle of utilitarianism suggests that actions should be evaluated based on their consequences, specifically by maximizing overall happiness or wellbeing. Affirmative action policies can be seen as promoting the greater good by fostering a more inclusive and diverse society, which can benefit everyone in the long run, even if it results in some perceived disadvantages for certain individuals in the short term. Okay. There is its argument back to steel manning. My argument, and I'll just give you the cliff notes on those. Again, fairness in con, in context, the concept of fairness can be understood differently depending on the context. Basically saying that if there's systemic racist or racism, uh, Or discrimination against certain groups equal treatment of the individuals without considering the context might not be truly fair. Right. So, so in my response, the back to that would be is yes, I, I've seen certain documentaries. I've, I cannot recall the name of it. , I can see the cover of it in my head. Um, but I've watched documentaries. I, I believe that there has absolutely been systemic racism in our country.  I, I am not blind to that. I, I completely agree with that point. I believe that the,  propor disproportionately black communities are affected through, drugs that were pushed literally by our government, like the crack epidemic, um, into more black communities through, through the ghettos in, in like the eighties, um, 100. 100% disproportionately affected them. I absolutely agree to the fact that, that they are, , at a much higher rate of incarceration, which causes men to be out of the households, which causes, uh, uh, children to have far more issues in their upbringings. That that's like 100% statistically factual. There is absolutely been systemic racism. There was perpetuation of racist ideologies by the same people who parents did have slaves however many years ago. Right. I I'm not blind to that. I agree with that. There is, there is systemic and, and or there or there. At least there has been systemic racism. I believe we are at a point in our culture where there, there is very little, very little that is going on that is against one minority group. Statistically, it's just not the case. Okay.  So fairness and context. I think when you're taking into consideration it's fir first point, a fairness and concept, a concept of fairness understood differently depending on the context. Um, history of systemic discrimination. Sure. But should we be dis perpetuating discrimination as an answer to that? No. We should be plugging the holes in the boat. We should stop, stop the FBI and CIA from, uh, pushing crack into primarily black neighborhoods. We should, I, we should address the issues with our police forces where they're, you know, primarily perpetuating, uh, high incarceration rates. Now, that's not to say that those incarceration rates aren't merited by actual crimes, um, but that's a separate convers. Um, it says the next point that it gave is corrective justice. Philosophically, one could argue that corrective justice should be applied in causes where historical discrimination has caused disadvantages. Same point applies, um, leveling the playing field. Critics of affirmative action can assume that all individuals start from the same position, have equal access to opportunities, however, do the historical, and it's all the same argument, balancing and competing interests, um, diversity and addressing. Okay. And then the last one was the greater good. The principle of utilitarianism suggests that action should be evaluated based on their consequences, um, specifically by maximizing overall happiness or wellbeing. Affirmative action policies can be seen as promoting the greater good by fostering and more inclusive and diverse society. Okay. Is it though, if it is specif. Perpetuating the, the very discrimination that it's setting out to solve in the first place, right? Nobody, nobody in today's world is blind to the fact that racism was not a thing, right? We all agree on that. We all agree that racism is wrong, at least a far, far greater percentage than those who disagree, right? Like very, very, very, very small percentage of people are still extremely racist. Um, at least to my knowledge. And maybe, but compared to what it was, it's so much better than it was right now. That's not to say that it doesn't exist. It obviously exists, but the percentage is just very low. Um, so the idea that perpetuating that, that. You know, through utilitarianism, the, the answer to racism is reverse racism does, does not seem to hold up well. Um, now it says, now, now what I said in response to this, so this is a really interesting way to, to, to tease out your own perspectives, right? When, when I'm not standing in front of another individual and, and in a heated argument, I can actually see some of these points that it's giving, right? When you ask it to not only argue against me, but then steelman my argument and then argue against that steelman, and then argue back to those counterpoints, you're, you're going to really see all sides of an argument. I, I am open to being wrong and I've been wrong many times before, so I plan on changing my opinion on things in the future. I, I am not held in my beliefs to the point where I, I think that I cannot be. And, and it gives some decent arguments and, and far more arguments than anybody else that you're gonna stand in front of you who is liberal or who is on the left is going to have in front of you without putting a motion in the way. So utilize G p t this way, utilize chat g p t in a way that you can further understand the opposite side of things. If we use the, this, this tool in this way, maybe we can lessen the divide right now. When you ask it to argue against those points, it makes some great points back against that, uh, case. But I think that this is a, a really, really great way of utilizing this tool to make yourself more aware of the logical arguments that are being made, um, because far more often than not emotion is being applied. And, and the people who are willing to have arguments like this, Not very common. Right? And, and, and, and even for me, right? And if I stand in front of somebody and I try to argue my points, there's going to be a point where there it, it becomes emotional. But when I'm sitting here arguing with a, a logic-based language model, it's very difficult to instill in, in, in their, inject emotion into the conversation. So I, I thoroughly enjoyed doing this. I even did a secondary conversation with it about, um, when does life begin? Had to argue when life, when people believe life begins, and how it, it, it says it. It was a really interesting philosophical conversation that I had with infinite intelligence. Um, Because I truly, it's very, very difficult to, for me to see the, some of the logics in, in some of these arguments. And, and generally it is such an emotional, uh, response and, and it's hard to even have conversations with people about this where it's not super emotionally charged. So I highly recommend that you have these, and to close this out for this conversation, I'll, I'll let you hear just what it had to say about, um, about arguing against the points that it's made, um, against the steelman argument. Okay. So give me the, so basically what happened is I said, tell me why you disagree with me. Why do you disagree that this is not racist? Because to me it seems racist. So it made its arguments Now. I said, okay, I teased that out a little bit. Tell me more further. Don't, don't do it from a scare. Uh, um, don't, don't do it from the perspective of emotion. Don't do it from the perspective of laws. Do it from a philosophical perspective without a strawman argument, cuz it was interjecting different arguments that didn't specifically speak to logic. Then I said, okay, great. Now argue against yourself as if you were me in the most compelling way. Then I had to argue against itself, back to argue against my points in its most compelling way. And then I had to argue those points back. And you could probably do this infinitely, but it really does, um, allow you to see all sides of the argument. Um, so if nothing else, take away that from this. If you, if you're not thoroughly enjoying this conversation, then do argue against the points go made in the previous response. One could emphasize the following counterpoints objective fairness. One could argue that true fairness should be based on objective criteria like qualifications and performance, regardless of historical context. Action policies by considering factors such as race or gender, may compromise the principle of objective fairness and lead to situations where less qualified individuals are chosen over more qualified ones quality before the law. Critics of affirmative action could argue that individuals should be treated equally before the law, regardless of their group membership. Considering factors like race or gender in decision making, affirmative action policies may infringe upon this principle of equality, perpetuating divisions and stereotypes by emphasizing factors like race or gender, affirmative action policies may inadvertently perpetuate divisions and stereotypes, rather than breaking them down, excite you that focusing on individual qualifications and potential rather than group identity would be a more effective way to promote a diverse and inclusive society consequences for intended beneficiaries. Affirmative action policies may have unintended negative consequences for the very individuals they aim to benefit. For example, beneficiaries of affirmative action may face doubts about their qualifications leading to a lack of confidence in their own abilities, or undermining their accomplishments. In the eyes of others, sing root causes, critics argue that affirmative action policies may not effectively address the root causes of historical and systemic discrimination. They suggest focusing on alternative solutions such as improving access to quality education, addressing socioeconomic disparities, and promoting broader cultural changes to create a more equitable and inclusive society notion of meritocracy. One could argue that affirmative action policies may erode the principle of meritocracy, which emphasizes that individuals should be rewarded based on their abilities and achievements rather than their background. Suggest that these policies may hinder the development of a truly merit-based society. So I have found that to be interesting, right? A lot of what it talks about is, um, the one that I saw to be most interesting of that is the equality before the law. Critics of affirmative action could argue that individuals should be treated equally before the law, regardless of their group membership. By considering factors like race or gender in decision making, affirmative action policies may infringe upon this principle of equality. Isn't equality what they are trying to gain in the first place, right? So if you're pursuing racist tactics to address inequality, aren't you further perpetuating inequality? How? There's no logical argument against that, that I can see, and I have yet to see it presented here. Um, besides the flawed emotional logic that based on previous history, we should now be racist and sexist towards other groups in order to help move the needle more towards equality sooner. But when do you stop doing that? Right? So, so at what point does, do, do you go from right, when do we say, all right guys, affirmative action's over now we're all equal. No, it's a, it may be a longer process to get there, but the way that you get to equality. Everybody being treated equally, not by tipping the scale with your toe for one person, because they're still where they're at, regardless of your affirmative action. So in, in this argument of infinite, of, of, uh, what, what did I call it? Uh, information God, um, against, against itself, I, I still hold true in my beliefs. And, and again, maybe I, I'm gonna have these conversations with it and, and be convinced otherwise on, on other things. And I really, truly hope so because it's hard to have a, a, a conversation with, with people on other ideologies without it getting emotional. Um, but this truly does allow it to be. It allows you to sit beside yourself and, and, and even just flex the muscle of listening. Um, so, you know, maybe next time we'll go through when does human life begin, which turned into a another interesting. Another interesting, uh, argument between me and G P T. All right, so that, that was, uh, that was that.  This episode's gonna go a little bit longer than I expected. Um, so let's move on. But first, hit that subscribe button. Leave a five star review. I, I hope you're learning something at least maybe how to leverage G P T as a tool for you to, to expand your mind, expand your consciousness, expand your worldview.  If you don't have a friend who's willing to sit at the table with you and drink an, an, a numerous amount of beers who has a, a completely different political ideology than you, then you might as well do it with, uh, information, God, because it, maybe, it may, who knows? Maybe your world worldview will change if it's in the face of something that is 100% logic based and, um, doesn't hold emotion within the argument. As long as you know how to phrase the questions properly. And I think that the, the, the concept of steel Manning allows you to further tease out your own arguments and see its flaws. And then further tease out the, a flaws of the other arguments. And, and maybe the, the end conclusion is eventually that there's humanity on both sides of it. And, and, and there there's some form of potentially logic applied to both. And, and, and in some portions, like I saw when I argued, where does life begin? I basically check made a G P T into admitting. Biological, uh, life begins even before conception. Um, so, so I found that to be interesting. So stick around for that, maybe in a, in a future episode where I'll tease that one out for you guys. So the next article that we're going to talk about here is going to be why did George, why did Alex Soros, why did Alex Soros visit the Biden White House 14 times, times 14 times? George Soros son visited the White House just since Biden took office. And this article goes on to say the son of pro crime, billionaire George Soros. And let's just point out the fact that this is gonna be a, a leaning article by that opening statement, but I don't disagree. Alex is raising eyebrows over more than a dozen White House meetings since December, 2021, where he met with multiple officials, including Then's Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, and several national security officials. There's this picture of him immediately in this article, uh, which goes back to his Instagram page with 116 likes on it with this man in a white suit like a pimp in what appears to be some sort of party with somebody in the background laying on a table like they're about to be. With some, you know, 20 year old beautiful woman next to him. Um, according to the White House visitor logs reviewed by Fox News and first reported by the New York Post, the 38 year old Alex Soros visited the White House over 14 times in his latest trips. Included visiting December 1st with then White House chief of staff Ron claims advisor Nina Sarva, who also worked on Biden's Presidential campaign, the log show. Later that evening, the younger Soros was one of 330 people to attend a lavish state dinner on the White House's South Lawn, hosted by the president and First Lady Joe Biden, honoring French President Emmanuel Mcn in Macron's wife Bridget. It says a day later, Alex Soros, whose chair, whose chairs the powerful liberal grant making network Open Society foundations, founded by his dad. Met with the both advisor to the Council of President Mariana Aam, and Deputy National Security Advisor, Jonathan Finer records show it's noticeable that almost all, with the exception of Ron Klain, who had the president's ear obviously were involved in national security. Um, Ukraine is a country where the Soros family has unfortunately boasted a lot of influence. There is tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown around there. So I think that would be something we're circling back and coming. Com circling back on in the coming months or years. Despite George Sorrow's notorious way amongst political circles, uh, Palombo said that the younger Soros could someday boast even more power. Noting Alex has been flaunting his influence on social media with pictures of himself alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, former speaker Nancy Pelosi, and former President Barack Obama, his standing on 11 million of his own money. Now, that may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to his father, and it is, but it's not going to be that way forever. The way that I would put it, George Soros over his career has spent more than 20 billion in Open Society Foundation, which is the vehicle by which he makes this spending has around 20 billion on its balance sheet. So when Alex takes over, he has a war chest that is basically able to, I would say, at a minimum, double the amount of damage that his father is going to do and probably more. Here's a little deal, take a look. Official White House records revealing the billionaires eldest son had more than a dozen different meetings with top Biden officials since 2021, including four with the office of then Chief of Staff, Ron Klain. Matt Columbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain, the Secret Network of George Soros, and Matt joins me now. Matt, walk us through how the Soros influence Machine is pulling the levers at the white. Thanks guys. Well, it's looking like Alex Soros is prime to take over the Soros Empire. Obviously his father in his nineties cannot do it forever. Um, this New York Post piece outlined 14 different White House visits, but I mean, we almost didn't even need the report. You can go on Alex's Instagram, his Twitter, any social media, and it's almost like he's bragging to us. It is a picture of him and every progressive Democrat you can imagine, and really their left to counterparts overseas. Um, now of these 14 people he met, it is I think notable that almost all, with the exception of Ron Klain, uh, who had the president's ear obviously were involved in national security.  Ukraine is a country where the Soros family has, unfortunately moted a lot of influence. There is tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown around. All right. He's just saying everything that I. That he said only my voice is hopefully more present pleasant than his. Um, so pretty wild and the only person who I know of that was at the White House more than 14 times was, as I stated earlier, bill Clinton, having Epstein to the White House is the only thing that I find to be a little bit more concerning than the 14 times that Alex Soros has been there as well. All right. So I find that to be interesting and in the face of that, I guess we will see later, um, on in time that this man takes over four. George Soros, which is, you know, sad to hear that there's going to be a succession there. All right. Next on our quick hits is going to be that N P R quit Twitter after being labeled state affiliated media. And so basically Twitter called NPR State Affiliated media, basically calling them a propaganda arm of the US government. And then NPR came out and said, NPR is stepping away from Twitter, and this includes this N P R politics feed. Please read the thread to find other ways to find our network, including our Instagram and our newsletter. How funny. So some people describe this as rage quitting, which is like the best way to describe this. NPR threw the controller and quit Twitter over being described as a propaganda arm of the United States. Um, so this article, which we will touch on real briefly,  NPR stopped tweeting last week after being labeled State Affiliated Media. And although Twitter sends tweaked the classification slightly to government funded media, the outlet has already made up. Its mine. Uh, it's a short article, so, but you kind of already get it. Um, the, the credibility of many, many of these companies is gone. And under that idea, I'm assuming it would probably be most of our news media outlet companies that would be labeled in the same exact way, but I did find that to be interesting.  And then last but not least, let's go ahead and talk about this. All right. The biggest leak. Since 2011 of US military documents, this says, and this comes from the hill. The biggest leak of classified document documents in a decade created a sprawling crisis in Washington this week. As records detailed alleged US spying on the Allies insights into American thinking on the war of Ukraine, and at least two neutral companies mulling plans to support Russia. Penta gone. Officials are still reviewing the documents for validity, and the Justice Department is overseeing a criminal investigation of the leak. At least one of the documents containing casualty estimates appear to have been altered, but it's unclear how many of the roughly 100 records were manipulated in those documents that they're saying were altered, which you gotta remember when we go back to the ghost of Kiev and how much propaganda has gone into the war going on in Ukraine. You have to remember how much propaganda has gone into this. So I don't think it's compelling to immediately write off some of these comparisons and they don't seem that far off. Um, the, the comparison said that there was, for every Ukrainian soldier or for every Russian soldier that died, four Ukrainian soldiers died, which to me just makes sense with how large Russia's, uh, military forces compared to Ukraine's, even despite the amount of help that they were getting from other NATO countries.  This goes on to say that the documents have circulated online since March and probably as early as January before, picking up attention last week after a New York Times report. There are many more documents to come, but the leak has already done a lot of damage forcin

Rob Hamilton is a co-founder and the CEO of AnchorWatch. In this interview, we discuss ordinals and ordinal inscriptions: what they are, how they work, what risks and benefits do they present to Bitcoin, how would we mitigate negative impacts, and how the rest of the ecosystem is responding. - - - - Bitcoin's use cases grow every year. A new version of money. An international payments rail. A tool to build out stranded energy, mitigate methane emissions and stabilise energy grids. And now, a decentralized immutable repository for images, audio, video and code. Ordinal inscriptions have been popularised as Bitcoin's answer to NFTs, but that framing significantly underplays the opportunities and threats of this burgeoning functionality. Ordinal inscriptions have been made possible via a series of Bitcoin upgrades going back to SegWit, and additional software, the Ordinal protocol, developed by Bitcoiner Casey Rodarmor. Rodarmor's motivation was to make Bitcoin fun. But it has sparked a fierce debate about the nature and purpose of Bitcoin. In short, if Bitcoin is the new version of money, should all other uses that impact this primary use case be excised? Philosophically, can a decentralized anarchic system without a fixed mission statement have rules of use beyond what is technically possible? Or, does the hard-won trajectory for Bitcoin that emerged from the blocksize wars set a clear enough ideology of what Bitcoin is and isn't? Whilst technically, what can actually be done to counter the ordinal impact? Will this require another fork, or are there softer mitigations? And what will be the cost to the network of such changes? The flip side to this debate is the positive impact ordinal inscriptions are having on Bitcoin transactions. Miners are at last seeing a use case that is, at last, bringing value to transaction verification. Whilst it is leading to questions about the blockchain being bloated is this actually a good thing in that it accelerates the market determination of true transaction value on the base layer? Whatever the outcome will be, such discourse is a natural consequence of having a decentralized network without any rulers. Vigorous and healthy debates have galvanised and strengthened the Bitcoin protocol since its inception. Long may it continue.

“Bitcoin exists. Any sort of moralistic lens of perspectives of what it should be doing is a conversation, but Bitcoin works as this anarchic system where there's no one in control, and everyone gets to use it however they want; and if people can't do that the project fails.”— Rob HamiltonRob Hamilton is a co-founder and the CEO of AnchorWatch. In this interview, we discuss ordinals and ordinal inscriptions: what they are, how they work, what risks and benefits do they present to Bitcoin, how would we mitigate negative impacts, and how the rest of the ecosystem is responding. - - - - Bitcoin's use cases grow every year. A new version of money. An international payments rail. A tool to build out stranded energy, mitigate methane emissions and stabilise energy grids. And now, a decentralized immutable repository for images, audio, video and code. Ordinal inscriptions have been popularised as Bitcoin's answer to NFTs, but that framing significantly underplays the opportunities and threats of this burgeoning functionality. Ordinal inscriptions have been made possible via a series of Bitcoin upgrades going back to SegWit, and additional software, the Ordinal protocol, developed by Bitcoiner Casey Rodarmor. Rodarmor's motivation was to make Bitcoin fun. But it has sparked a fierce debate about the nature and purpose of Bitcoin. In short, if Bitcoin is the new version of money, should all other uses that impact this primary use case be excised? Philosophically, can a decentralized anarchic system without a fixed mission statement have rules of use beyond what is technically possible? Or, does the hard-won trajectory for Bitcoin that emerged from the blocksize wars set a clear enough ideology of what Bitcoin is and isn't? Whilst technically, what can actually be done to counter the ordinal impact? Will this require another fork, or are there softer mitigations? And what will be the cost to the network of such changes?The flip side to this debate is the positive impact ordinal inscriptions are having on Bitcoin transactions. Miners are at last seeing a use case that is, at last, bringing value to transaction verification. Whilst it is leading to questions about the blockchain being bloated is this actually a good thing in that it accelerates the market determination of true transaction value on the base layer? Whatever the outcome will be, such discourse is a natural consequence of having a decentralized network without any rulers. Vigorous and healthy debates have galvanised and strengthened the Bitcoin protocol since its inception. Long may it continue. - - - - This episode's sponsors:Gemini - Buy Bitcoin instantlyLedn - Financial services for Bitcoin hodlersBitcasino - The Future of Gaming is hereLedger - State of the art Bitcoin hardware walletCasa - The leading provider of Bitcoin multisig key securityWasabi Wallet - Privacy by default-----WBD624 - Show Notes-----If you enjoy The What Bitcoin Did Podcast you can help support the show by doing the following:Become a Patron and get access to shows early or help contributeMake a tip:Bitcoin: 3FiC6w7eb3dkcaNHMAnj39ANTAkv8Ufi2SQR Codes: BitcoinIf you do send a tip then please email me so that I can say thank youSubscribe on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | Deezer | TuneIn | RSS FeedLeave a review on iTunesShare the show and episodes with your friends and familySubscribe to the newsletter on my websiteFollow me on Twitter Personal | Twitter Podcast | Instagram | Medium | YouTubeIf you are interested in sponsoring the show, you can read more about that here or please feel free to drop me an email to discuss options.

earned my Bachelor's degree in Philosophy/Religion while serving in the US Navy as a sub hunter. After graduation, I worked as an art director in the newspaper business and published a syndicated cartoon strip. I am a self-taught software engineer producing solutions for Autodesk, Cisco, Cure Autism Now, EMC, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, VMWare, and The Weather Channel. Some of my code has been mentioned in Wired Magazine and I co-authored a technical manual for video streaming servers. I have launched several software products over the years while pursuing commissions in outdoor sculpture. I have had working galleries in Asheville, Black Mountain, and Boone, North Carolina. My commissioned art installations were seen at the Black Mountain Music Festival, Hulaween, Electric Forest, The Love Burn, and Envision Costa Rica. In my hometown of Beech Mountain, I served as Education Coordinator and later President of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to wildlife rehabilitation. I was later appointed to my town's planning board and ran for town council. I am the chairperson for my county libertarian party but my heart is in Bioregionalism. My first book was released in October of 2018 called the Spell of Six Dragons. My second book, Blueprints of Mind Control came out February of 2019. My third book, The Technology of Belief was released in the Fall of 2019. Quantum Rapture was published in May 2020. Best Apocalypse Ever was published in May of 2020. I have been producing a livestream and host a dojo since 2019. website: Jtrue.com https://www.youtube.com/@JamesTrue f you found this content beneficial please consider donating: buymeacoffee.com/typicalskeptic Or maybe Join the Patreon: patreon.com/typicalskeptic Check out what I'm selling: Typical skeptic podcast t shirts: https://merc.li/KmGQPE9Nb?sv=0 or use one of our affilliates: - tachyonliving.com/rob.html and use code skeptic free gift for a free gift -Book a reading with Debra Moffit Intuitive readings:Use Code TSP2023 https://www.debramoffitt.com?cc=STP2023 -Natural Shilajit and Monoatomic Gold from Healthy Nutrition LLC.use code: ROB And my affiliate link to share: https://glnk.io/77v6/3 For more typical skeptic podcast interviews go to: www.youtube.com/c/typicalskeptic www.anchor.fm/typical-skeptic www.rokfin.com/typicalskeptic www.rumble.com/typicalskeptic #philosophy #natureofreality #psychology #podcast #youtubepremiere #augmentedreality #jamestrue #typical_skeptic --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/typical-skeptic/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/typical-skeptic/support

WARNING - NOT FOR "THE MAGIC OF CHRISTMAS" AGED KIDS So this is Christmas week... its hectic, it's stressful, you're likely running behind... we get it. So rather then filling you full of Christmas Know-How, we thought we'd give you laughs instead. If you're looking for inspiration and direction, this one isn't for you. But if you're looking to sit back, turn your brain off and enjoy knowing that you're smarter than Brittany.... this is it! Enjoy! This Podcast is Brought to you by: KiwiCo : Get your first month FREE on ANY crate line (with this link) MIXSUPPS > Get 20% off your first purchase (with this link) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices